"I have Linus to thank for a long career using FreeBSD" | comment on HN

Comment by drewg123 on July 25, 2019

I met Linus at the Linux BOF at the 1994 Boston USENIX. Very ironically, I have Linus to thank for a long career using FreeBSD. It sounds like a cheap shot, but please hear me out:

I was sysadmin'ing a university stats department at the time, and NFS use was very important. I had been trying to use Linux on 486's, but performance of xdvi (with NFS mounted fonts) was abysmal. A 486 would take minutes to render the same page that a wimpy DECStation could render in a second. From tcpdump, I figured out it was because Linux did not do any sort of NFS caching at the time, and xdvi wandered around font files one byte at a time.

I asked Linus at the BOF when they planned to implement NFS. He told me NFS was unimportant, nobody used it, and so on.

I then attended the FreeBSD BOF where a clean shaven guy in a collared shirt was giving a power point presentation. I asked about NFS there, and was told it should work fine. When I got home from the conference, I switched the 486 to FreeBSD, and it worked just fine.

I eventually did OS research on FreeBSD, was one of a few people to port FreeBSD to the DEC Alpha, and I now do kernel performance work for a large CDN, where we run FreeBSD.