Bad news from BSD land – the oldest vendor of BSD systems is changing direction away from FreeBSD and toward Linux.
NAS vendor iXsystems has been busy this year, but apart from some statements in online user communities, it hasn’t been talking about the big news. Back in 2022, we covered TrueNAS CORE 13, the new release of its FreeBSD-based turnkey OS for NAS servers, and in that article we mentioned its new product, the Debian-based TrueNAS SCALE, aimed at providing storage for Kubernetes users.
Now it seems the company is betting its future on that Linux-based product, meaning the end is in sight for the FreeBSD offering.
↫ Liam Proven at The Register
Very sad to read, as more monoculture is not exactly great, but at the same time, from a corporate perspective, it’s also not entirely unexpected to focus on the server operating system with by far the widest industry support. I hope the fork mentioned in the article gains some steam, because having competition in this space is crucially important.
I built an AM5 based NAS last year, FreeBSD 13 didn’t even boot on it unfortunately as it appears it got confused by the dual chipset PROM21 uses…
TrueNAS Scale booted though and I was able to finish the project, still… I see that as fallout of the having already abandoned Core at that point…. I hope it forks and continues on, because the FreeBSD product is rock solid.
The worst part of this is they effectively pulled off a good ole “embrace extend extinguish” play from microsoft’s playbook. Not that anybody couldn’t see that comping back with the FreeNAS / TrueNAS merger , and now it turns out all their promises were lies.
The writing was on the wall the minute the Debian based TrueNAS Scale was released. RIP FreeNAS. 🙁
What is the issue exactly, the. new product supports pretty much what the old product did plus it offers a hell of a lot more. It’s just the kernels that changed and containers instead of jails.
At the end of the day it’s pretty slick to have access to such a polished free system software to make your own NAS.
That’s the problem acutally. A NAS appliance generally should be JUST A NAS.
It’s fine to maybe run a few containers/jails on there but that isn’t main purpose.
The quality of releases did seem to go down because they were adding junk for the containers to the UI instead of making sure the basic features worked correctly.
The point is that other people have a different opinion, from yours, about what a NAS is supposed to be. The current product gives the possibility for those people to have the system they want, and you’re not forced to install any of the extra applications and thus you also get to have the system that you want.
I have used both core and scale. And they work just fine and quality has always been top notch. Given that I get to have these features for free.
There are other alternatives, so it is not like it is the end of the world.
They can pick their own hardware so I do not think that it is about hardware support. The key word here is “Kubernetes”.
Containers are the secret sauce of the Linux ecosystem. BSD fans can stamp up and down all they want about Jails being better but, just like applications, it is compatibility that wins the day for operating systems. Being able to use containers is what keeps me on Linux. It is what brings developers to Linux. It is why Linux dominates in the cloud. That cloud dominance is ultimately why TrueNAS is migrating to Linux.
Windows cannot compete with Linux in the cloud which is why even Microsoft Azure is dominated by Linux. Just like the Win32 API kept Windows at the top of the heap for so long ( and continues to do so for Desktop and Gaming ), OCI containers will cement Linux on the server for a long time to come.
It would be nice if the tooling ended up in ports rather then as a fork. “pkg install freenas”, and the web app is configured.
A bit of a correction and history lesson. This is a somewhat complex one.
The fork (XigmaNAS) has been around for several decades and is in fact the original. This is way before iXsystems acquired “FreeNAS’.
Back then “XigmaNAS” was known as FreeNAS, iXsystems acquired the name, the code, and forked the project (details of how this came to be is somewhat fuzzy). iXsystems started making all kinds of changes and ‘improvements’. At the time iXSystems also had their own closed source proprietary offering called TrueNAS, possibly derived from FreeNAS (thus the incentive to acquire the open source versions?).
The original FreeNAS developers renamed their project “NAS4Free”, a few years later they renamed it to XigmaNAS so they could trademark it. At around the same time, iXsystems began to merge (in name only) the two products FreeNAS and TrueNAS, eventually dropping the FreeNAS name and ending up with TrueNAS Core for the free version.
tldr;
XigmaNAS is the original FreeNAS, and XigmaNAS has been flourishing.
Hi. Article author here.
I find your introductory sentence patronising and offensive:
> A bit of a correction and history lesson.
You assume I don’t know the history. The thing about history is that it is open to interpretation.
FreeNAS was founded by Olivier Cochard-Labbé:
https://tracxn.com/d/companies/freenas/__vFL4LHfNZNUa1vxxYXtHFSWNnI655yqxyR12COA57T4/founders-and-board-of-directors
AFAICT Olivier is alive and well and works for Netflix these days, which is famously one of the biggest users of FreeBSD in production.
The last developer of FreeNAS was Volker Theile. He works for SUSE now, as I did for longer than any other single company in my career, and I exchanged emails with him then. He left FreeNAS to move to a Linux-based NAS distro, which became OpenMediaVault. I run an OMV server here at home among others.
When the founder and then the project lead both leave a project, that project generally dies. In this case, iXsystems stepped in and continued work, and I think that entitles them to the name.
You also appear not to notice that my article links to an interview with Olivier:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080313190212/http://sourceforge.net/potm/potm-2007-01.php
The first release of FreeNAS from iXsystems was 2011, as far as I can determine. The first release of NAS4Free was not until a year later.
They are both based on the same code.
I’m not trying to defend iXsystems here. Firstly, I just use it, I am not a customer or anything. Secondly, I personally am saddened by this move. I’d prefer a FreeBSD NAS OS myself, if not something even smaller. (The first server I built from scratch was 3Com 3+Share, based on DOS, and I’m not even faintly nostalgic for that, but the next was Novell Netware 2.1 and that was a lovely little NOS and I still miss Netware’s simplicity. I’d love a modern FOSS Netware.)
But iXsystems’ FreeNAS predates NAS4Free/XigmaNAS, and iXsystems has modernised it more than the XigmaNAS team. I don’t like PHP much and I would prefer a NAS to be free of it.
Even so, I am considering moving my home boxes from TrueNAS Core to XigmaNAS now, yes.
Agreed, some of the XigmaNAS pages I read in the past week make a big deal out of lineage when I just don’t care about that jazz.
I very much would like to see the PHP go away, I don’t like how TrueNAS does it either with lots of buggy middleware. What would be better though? Something written in Go or Rust? Not really a fan of Python these days either at least not for anything to be used long term its fine as a prototyping language.
Also at least recently Bhyve is superior to Virtualbox that XigmaNAS provides. Also XigmaNAS is not consistently active, its more like just updating with FreeBSD…
Recently, we published our latest blog talking about the future of TrueNAS CORE! Spoiler alert: TrueNAS CORE is not going anywhere!
Read more here: https://www.truenas.com/blog/truenas-core-13-3-plans/