> all hail u/cperciva

Colin Percival (FreeBSD Primary Release Engineering Team Lead) longer uses that ID in Reddit.

Instead: /u/perciva

Most recently, in /r/freebsd https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1rphd7t/freebsd_14...

All hail.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Rust for Rust seems to be stale, but not yet categorised as such – https://wiki.freebsd.org/CategoryStale

In <https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-hackers/2025-Augu...> (August 2025), Konstantin Belousov (kib@) write:

> There was a long and hot thread about 'Rust in base' recently. …

Unfortunately, the list archives are not suitably indexed by popular search engines, so, for example, https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=Rust+base+site%3A... does not find what's required. Sorry.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Q4-2025-Status-Report includes Michael Larabel's quote from the final status report of 2025:

> At some point in early 2026 the rust KPIs should be stable enough for interested developers to try writing new code with them. They will not be perfect, but I want to make sure they work roughly like existing drivers expect and also fit the expectations of rust developers before asking for testers. Hopefully the Apple drivers will be back up to parity with the initial WIP in C in the first half of 2026 as well.

>> There was a long and hot thread about 'Rust in base' recently. …

Maybe this,

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/the-case-for-rust-in-the-...

?

> FreeBsd is Systemd free.

https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/96pm7w/benno_rice_...

> Benno Rice: The Tragedy of systemd – BSDCan 2018 : r/freebsd

Don't be misled by the title. I thoroughly recommend listening to the whole thing.

> … I think I'd want to switch to pkgbase but that makes me nervous. …

There has been a disproportionate amount of negative noise from people who know too little about pkgbase.

pkgbase is a good thing. A very good thing. A huge game-changer, in terms of testing STABLE and CURRENT.

> … the kernel shrinker API which has historically been a problem. …

Is that still a problem?

A few weeks ago I noted a change in ARC-related documentation for OpenZFS on Linux. I can't remember the details (I can find them, if necessary) but I do remember that it was a significant improvement for Linux users.

Historically yes, is it still today? I am not sure.

> … Stable documentation allows time for it to be edited and revised to become better documentation,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407895

Part of the problem is, too few committers. https://cgit.freebsd.org/doc/log/access?h=refs/internal/admi...

> as well as developing quality translations. …

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=267274

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=284875#c8

For Russian, things are better: https://freshbsd.org/freebsd/doc?committer[]=Vladlen+Popolit... – see https://cgit.freebsd.org/doc/commit/access?h=refs/internal/a...

> … For those that aren't familiar, ZFS isn't part of mainline Linux because of licensing incompatibility (and general distrust of Oracle). …

It's probably fair to say that trust in Oracle is irrelevant to OpenZFS.

Where Linux does use ZFS: to the best of my knowledge, it's typically OpenZFS – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407937 is my own use case.

I was mainly referring to statements made by Linus Torvalds that got a lot of press. Canonical seems undeterred by any such arguments.

The condescending attitude of a minority of FreeBSD users is never an incentive to engage.

> … Yes, as a comment in this sub-thread stated, jails exist …

https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@grahamperrin/116168374700889783

> Would anyone like to say something? > > …

> … stable … about every 6 months.

Maybe slightly optimistic.

https://bokut.in/freebsd-patch-level-table/#stable/13

https://bokut.in/freebsd-patch-level-table/#stable/14

https://bokut.in/freebsd-patch-level-table/#stable/15

>> … stable … about every 6 months.

> Maybe slightly optimistic.

The longest without rebooting two prod FreeBSD servers I was once responsible for, including applying userland patches, was roughly 3000 days (just over 8 years).

My DigitalOcean FreeBSD droplet chugging along: 7:25AM up 1707 days, 15 hrs, 5 users, load averages: 0.30, 0.21, 0.17

Too bad they dropped support for it.

Fair, but to my point none of those security patches for 14.2 or 14.3 that required a reboot were critical for our use case. I'm more worried about people's crappy Wordpress blogs getting hacked.

My approach to IT security starts from: There is very little security. That stands regardless of OS.

I patch everything I can think of, as regularly as I can think of. It is rare that a patch is delivered along with a changelog along the lines of "meh, lol, soz" I'm old enough to remember when the notion of a patch was the only term in play, well before "service packs".

I'm jolly boring and run host based firewalls and router, switch, edge etc firewalls, mostly with point to point rules. Its a bit of a faff and so is completely random and different passwords and targeted MFA on each host. I'm fairly sure it is quite hard to pivot across my land.

The best approach to security is to start with: "Mine is a bit shite" and "I'm probably already compromised" and work from there. In the real world: start with a threat model and work on out. For most people that is avoiding scams and becoming part of a bitcoin farm.