Why We Run FreeBSD current at Netflix – Drew Gallatin
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as the Netflix case for staying close to -CURRENT and upstreaming changes.
What it is
Netflix engineer Drew Gallatin explains why the company runs FreeBSD-current on its CDN. He describes the team, how they track upstream, their contributions and performance milestones, and a bug causing a 20% performance regression.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2024 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends craftkiller · 2024-05 · on “Why Dell's ThinOS Runs on FreeBSD”
In addition to the vendor summit, Netflix gave a tech talk recently where they recommended both upstreaming and keeping as close to -CURRENT as possible "Why we run FreeBSD CURRENT at Netflix": [this video]
Cites miyuru · 2024-05 · on “Serving Netflix Video at 400Gb/S on FreeBSD [pdf]”
Its here, in this talk in from this year. [this video] They did 800gbps in 2022 and now seems to be focusing on low power usage with arm.
Cites voytec · 2024-09 · on “FreeBSD 13.4-Release”
Your comment suggests that FreeBSD is a thing of a past and no longer capable of "quality networking", due to poor WiFi support. I can only agree with the poor WiFi support part. But WiFi is by no means something you can judge networking stack dedicated for servers. FreeBSD was never designed for consumer hardware networking. There were a few "desktop distros" but all have more or less died, and the few FreeBSD-based "storage distros" moved to Linux after FreeBSD changed its upstream for ZFS. And I'm saying this as someone who made a lot of effort to use FreeBSD on laptop over the years, and a current user of 15.0-CURRENT on ThinkPad. But FreeBSD was and is THE choice for high-bandwidth wire
Cites throw0101d · 2026-03 · on “FreeBSD 14.4-Release Announcement”
> Or just run -current in production, like we do.[0] If you develop, it's probably best to do that against current [1], but if I'm running a web, mail, file, database, etc , server there is IMHO very little advantage to doing so. Most folks aren't trying to push >400Gbps. [0] [this video] [1] [LINK]