# Is it real: UE5 or Godot4, blender3D, Starcaft 2 and Quake Champions on MSI laptop?



## pr0f (Apr 6, 2022)

Hello FreeBSD community. Finally! )
I'm sorry for my English, I have not much practice.

First of all, what I have: laptop with RTX2060, i7, nvme, uefi.
What I know in linux: debian -> slackware -> arch.

We scared by videos on YouTube about FreeBSD. They say there are many really simple questions for todays PC everywhere. What I want to be able to do in FreeBSD as a common user:

Will nvidia prime or better something like bumblebee work?
Sound channels proper naming: Front port, hdma1, .. , bluetooth headphones, etc. Not just dsp1,dps2. To easily find my bluetooth headphones by name.
Can I use PS3-4-5, XBox, Logitech F710 gamepads in my work?
Is there something like not LUKS but cryptoloop analogue
Ability to crypt root through linux-initrd like image?
Element, telegram, discord? Many people work and even live there.


*Can video card be given from laptop to a virtual machine like in linux?*
Using "Bhyve" You can passthrough PCI devices, but not a video card ) Yet.
*SELinux/Apparmor system?*
Yes - Capsicum. Often people say about it's difficultness, comparing AppArmor or even SeLinux.
*What about MSI gaming laptop? I want to work and play on it. Starcraft 2, Quake Champions. What about FPS cost running it on FreeBSD?*
Yes You can. But there will be some FPS cost. You still can't play any game that runs in linux well. Situation is similar to old times with linux+wine but it is progressing.
*Cgroups, network namespace features? No it's not about chroot!*
Jails - has almost equal net-ns and cgroups functionality.
*Is it true that ZFS has some overhead unlike efficient ext4?*
Yes it has. But pretty small and profit is much more important: _unbelievable_ scalability. Simple example from linux: LVM+EXT4. Also it has some btrfs functionality.
*UFS STILL CAN be inconsistent after simple laptop discharging?*
You can't (and shouldn't!) rely on it in a common usage way as a general fs like ext4! But it has some interesting usage ways.
*For example, I want to use really stable and efficient ext4 on my root*
No You can't. But You can use it through fusefs, to store any data You want on a separate volume.
*Can I port some extra program from Linux to BSD?*
If it is not in ports already, Yes You can do it. There is a manual how to make it right.
*Can I easily install a few versions of soft? Two versions of firefox or whatever I need for my work.*
Shortly - Yes. But it will be just a workarounds, like in most linux distributives.
*Oculus and Steam VR*
Seems like it needs a little bit more code, but Yes.
*UE5, Blender3D, Vulkan, big projects. Can I work in FreeBSD with that?*
UE5 can run but there is a lack of support in porting for a serious work. Not all functionality works well.
*May be there are clever people who understands that licenses are just a bullshit for a synthetic jail for any project. And they port linux drivers, let's imagine somewhere in darknet-git? Or it is still just about Sony-money-playstation?*
No. Only some drivers ports because of license.. It tries to be a friendly desktop and it is a long way like for linux once
Can I be happy with FreeBSD or Linux is still the only choice? Actually, we are the company of game developers, so these are the questions from everyone )
Thank You!

P.S. These questions will cover common desktop usage. Because of scecifics of the FreeBSD reality on this year, the best way to check it fits Your needs is to try to scroll through the handbook and install it and try to use.


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## Crivens (Apr 6, 2022)

pr0f said:


> Sound in KDE: dps1, dps2, etc.. is it able to fix or I need to "bash" it by myself to find my bluetooth headphones by name? Or was it just a newbie on video?


To deal with that, KDE uses a sound server. The dsp devices are lower in that stack.


pr0f said:


> - Is it true that ZFS has some overhead unlike efficient ext4?


ZFS does a lot more than ext1..n, this compares your magazine rack with a library. 


pr0f said:


> UFS STILL CAN be inconsistent after simple laptop discharging?


No. Laptop discharge leads to clean shutdown by battmond. 


pr0f said:


> For example, I want to use really stable and efficient ext4 on my root. Because I can rely on it in everything. I heard about fu


Don't. Fuse for root is a dumb idea. And no, ext4 is not a silver bullet.


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## pr0f (Apr 6, 2022)

> ZFS does a lot more than ext1..n, this compares your magazine rack with a library


Just have read that ZFS is something like LVM+EXT4. It's great! But what if I don't need that "more" functionality on some laptops and looking for a simple variant like exactly ext3/4?



> clean shutdown by battmond


So.. something goes wrong with a battery or Anything else. And there is a chance to lose everything? It's not a working variant. It's not serious. At all! Ext4 - is brilliant on this background.



> dsp devices are lower in that stack


Sorry, but I'm newbie in BSD systems and don't understand how it answers the question. Is it about checkbox or a boolean value somewhere in configs? On the YouTube video people have "dps1, dps2" in KDE.



> ext4 is not a silver bullet


It is. In linux, You must have something stable (not like UFS of course) for root dev and don't need ZFS in 90% cases. Now I see there are no variants in BSD.



> Fuse for root is a dumb idea


in this situation in BSD, I imagine it would be the best variant ever. I don't know your kernel nuances so just mentioned fuse.

Thanks for answers!
Looks like *completely* sad story. But may be at least zfs can be configured to make less unneeded (for me for example) overhead.
Or remaining questions will change something.


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## SirDice (Apr 6, 2022)

pr0f said:


> Just have read that ZFS is something like LVM+EXT4. It's great!


It's much more than that.



pr0f said:


> But what if I don't need that "more" functionality on some laptops and looking for a simple variant like exactly ext3/4?


UFS.



pr0f said:


> You must have something stable (not like UFS of course) for root dev and don't need ZFS at 90% cases.


Ridiculous statement.


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## jbo (Apr 6, 2022)

pr0f said:


> Just have read that ZFS is something like LVM+EXT4. It's great! But what if I don't need that "more" functionality on some laptops and looking for a simple variant like exactly ext3/4?


If you want things to be exactly like Linux I'd recommend that you'd use Linux.

ZFS is an extremely capable filesystem with great scalability. It runs very in almost all scenarios from single-drive laptops to multi exabyte cloud storage scenarios. ZFS runs great on a single-drive laptop.
In any case, ZFS is a lot more than just LVM+EXT4.


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## pr0f (Apr 6, 2022)

SirDice said:


> Ridiculous statement.


You can't tell about zfs, but can say "Ridiculous".
That what "Ridiculous" is.


> If you want things to be exactly like Linux I'd recommend that you'd use Linux


I knew somebody will say it ) Our case is common for IT and other OS. We just want to figure it out here, Is BSD a real desktop system, or only for "40%" cases. Linux? Yeah, we know where to go if BSD can't do our tasks.


> an extremely capable filesystem


Let's assume the fs question closed ) Thank You!


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## jbo (Apr 6, 2022)

pr0f said:


> Our case is common for IT and other OS. We just want to figure it out here, Is BSD a real desktop system, or only for "40%" cases.


Eventually you'll just have to try it. Stuff like Steam is certainly working as there are plenty of people playing steam games on FreeBSD (look for the corresponding topics on this forum) but eventually you'll just have to try it and evaluate it properly - especially as you seem to have a list of requirements already.

According to this poll, 58% of the people think that FreeBSD works well for them as a desktop OS. But those numbers are not usable for anything other than having a good time on the forum. Firstly, only 62 people participated in the poll. Secondly, your requirements may be very different than someone else's.

For example, I can tell you that the Linux compatibility layer works extremely well. But what does that tell you? Nothing other than that it works for me and my particular requirements & use cases. You might want to run Linux software that won't work whereas all the Linux software I'm running on FreeBSD "just works".

Linux and FreeBSD are difficult to compare. You're essentially comparing a kernel with an entire operating system. The philosophies are different and therefore also the results.

Just give it a try


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## pr0f (Apr 6, 2022)

jbodenmann said:


> But what does that tell you?
> Just give it a try


Great mood on start ))) Actually, if someone will say something critical will not work well, we will stop.



> You're essentially comparing a kernel with an entire operating system


Ow yeah! We know it. But we have to have something to compare. Let's say we compare OS and it's true.


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## kpedersen (Apr 6, 2022)

pr0f said:


> - UE5, Blender3D, Vulkan, big projects. Can I work in FreeBSD with that?


We have Blender, Vulkan and UE*4*. Do note though that UE4 is maintained by a single guy (malavon) on these forums so do understand that there may be some rough edges and you might need to chip in yourselves if something doesn't work (luckily compared to Unity, this is very possible). UE5 shares the UE4 codebase but provides a few more challenges.

At work we personally notice that a lack of Maya is a bit of an issue, do any of your guys use that? You might want to try Linux emulation and a slightly older version of Maya. Same for Perforce to be honest, a lot of the artists like that because it is graphical.


pr0f said:


> - Oculus and Steam VR?


It supports OpenHMD (which underpins the industry standard OpenXR). If you are able to roll up your sleeves, you can do many things with OpenHMD directly albeit all the different controllers pose a problem (OpenXR doesn't look to standardize this either).



pr0f said:


> - Cgroups, network namespace features?


Jails offer similar functionality.

Is this merely for build systems and/or creating "development bottles"? You might actually be better off with a standard chroot (and on Linux too).



pr0f said:


> - UFS STILL CAN be inconsistent after simple laptop discharging?


Just use Subversion / Git and you will be fine. It is so rare that you get inconsistencies and this is only for unsynced data (stuff you have written not long ago and is still in the buffer) so can't take out the entire system.

I don't believe fusefs will be a good option. It is slow (likely a pain for Unreal Engine) and not perfectly robust. If you are using high performance workstations (and you should be for a game studio!) and you are worried about lost work, just use ZFS; it is overkill (so is Ext4 in all fairness!) but eliminates any risk.


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## Crivens (Apr 6, 2022)

Well, ZFS told me a disk in my file server got funny even before the drives own SMART system was picking it up. Read up on self healing, no data loss. I had no data loss with UFS2 also, for that matter. But the snap shots, boot environments, differential backups, dedup,... I use it on a single drive laptop as well as servers.
But one warning: FreeBSD is in adult land. It does not hold your hand or set up everything like some guy decided you wanted. It does exactly what you tell it to do.


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## malavon (Apr 6, 2022)

Did someone summon me? Ok, let's start. I'm not sure if this question is serious or just looking for opportunities to try and bash FreeBSD but I will assume the former - for now. Yes, I'm blunt, I know.
For starters, if you want Linux and are just trying to prove someone else wrong, go ahead and use Linux. IF you want to know if using FreeBSD is possible, I'll try to answer as much as I can.


Crivens said:


> But one warning: FreeBSD is in adult land. It does not hold your hand or set up everything like some guy decided you wanted. It does exactly what you tell it to do.


I'm going to start by seconding this. FreeBSD is fantastic but also requires a good understanding. Don't just start using it without having _used_ it first. With that I mean to try it out on a decent system for daily usage, see how it goes, where you lack knowledge (90%) or where possibly the system lacks funtionality you're looking for (10%).

I know you wanted to park it, but let's just go filesystems first. UFS, great filesystem. Really fast, really stable. ZFS however is in a different league. You can't imagine what you can do with ZFS if you haven't used it. Talking about game development, you could build an entirely new version of Unreal Engine and then send that over to every other developer. No need for everyone to build the engine anymore, almost no downtimes etc.
Also, every filesystem risks losing data when a sudden shutdown happens. If it doesn't it's because the system cleanly shuts down before power goes down entirely. No journaling can ever help in every single case. That's true for even ZFS and yes, also for ext4.


pr0f said:


> - Sound in KDE: dps1, dps2, etc.. is it able to fix or I need to "bash" it by myself to find my bluetooth headphones by name? Or was it just a newbie on video?


Set it up correctly and it'll work. No idea what video you're referring to. But you're not on Windows, Linux or MacOS. You're on FreeBSD, meaning you'll have to set up the channel you want to output to. It's not difficult, a one-liner and very well documented.


pr0f said:


> - UE5, Blender3D, Vulkan, big projects. Can I work in FreeBSD with that?


UE5? I'd say go and ask on the Epic forums for official support even if you have no intention to use FreeBSD. I can't find anything through search engines right now, so I'll assume you haven't yet. But simply put: there's no official FreeBSD support for Unreal Engine. That's very unlikely to change too.
So, you'd be stuck with one guy porting an engine in his spare time. Of course, having a game dev company at your disposal you might be able to help with porting and maintenance. Right now it means having to wait for new releases, I'm still polishing my 4.26.2 release (which is unfashionably late due to many unforeseen real-life circumstances) and after that I'll have to see if 4.27.2 is even feasible anymore. 5.0 would theoretically follow after that, but the hurdles are a bit bigger. I've written a bit about that on my forum post about Unreal Engine 4.
Of course I might drop dead tomorrow meaning that there are no more releases and even if I didn't there would be no official support...


pr0f said:


> - Just a question. May be there are clever people who understands that licenses are just a bullshit for a synthetic jail for any project. And they port linux drivers, let's imagine somewhere in darknet-git or something like this? It will be veeery clever move. Or it is still just about Sony-money-playstation?


No idea what you meant with this question. Porting Linux drivers is perfectly OK as long as the licenses are adhered to. It's been done numerous times. I don't know where you get that Sony-money-playstation reference from. If - and that's an if - Sony pays the FreeBSD foundation just like many other companies do, the project is still free to use it as fit.


pr0f said:


> - What about MSI gaming laptop? I want to work and play on it. Starcraft 2, Quake Champions. Sometimes I need it )
> - Can I use PS3-4-5, XBox, Logitech F710 gamepads in my work?
> - Oculus and Steam VR?


No idea, but SDK's are Linux only I think. So good luck porting them. Feel free to ask upstream to support FreeBSD officially, I'd put them in the engine in a heartbeat.


pr0f said:


> - Can I easily install a few versions of soft?


Sure, depending on what you mean with soft. If it's in the FreeBSD ports collection it's easy, if it's not it's probably a bit less easy. If you want to install different versions it depends. Not everything can coexist on the same system, but generally it's possible.


pr0f said:


> - Ability to crypt root through linux-initrd like image?


I'm writing this on a laptop running ZFS on top of a GELI encrypted partition on an NVME. Works great with all the benefits of ZFS.


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## pr0f (Apr 7, 2022)

kpedersen said:


> Maya is a bit of an issue, do any of your guys use that


No. Only one 3d artist, she uses Windows anyway. But I heard a few happy stories running it on linux.



> Is this merely for build systems and/or creating "development bottles"? You might actually be better off with a standard chroot (and on Linux too).


Just for a personal use: to jail some programs from network, home directory and etc. Very useful tool.
Some friends of mine already want to try BSD, some already know it will not fit at all. A few guys with me want to close all these questions for the beginning.



> UFS.. Just use Subversion / Git and you will be fine. It is so rare that you get inconsistencies and this is only for unsynced data (stuff you have written not long ago and is still in the buffer) so can't take out the entire system


Ok. Better just not use it and forget about it. We don't even know where we have to use it. At least for now.



> ZFS


Btrfs has a huuuge number of SDD IOs. What about ZFS?



Crivens said:


> FreeBSD is in adult land. It does not hold your hand or set up everything like some guy decided you wanted


We don't afraid of it. Slackware and Arch Linux has same pattern almost everywhere. Thank You!



malavon said:


> I'm not sure if this question is serious or just looking for opportunities to try and bash FreeBSD


Serious. Even if it will not satisfy us, we believe this post will be *very* helpful to others. Just want to fire it out for ourselves.
Some friends of mine already know it not fits them. Girls don't even know what is it, only one uses linux mint ) And the rest of us are waiting for the answers on those questions.



> ... and are just trying to prove someone else wrong


For what? No. And we are really sorry if our style of presentation confuses You. English isn't our main language.
Talking about BSD, I was interested in it from school. Free license, open source, structure - that's how OS should look like. But the lack of people and common industries (valve, gamedev, etc.) support makes it super ugly for beginners.
May be today is a good day to try it..



> every filesystem risks losing data when a sudden shutdown happens.


More than 10 years with linux on laptops and no data loss because of sudden shutdowns on ext fs (often)! With ext4 I can 5 times on and off my laptop just removing battery in OS! May be some open files but everything else will be ok. We just know it already.



> Sound.. you'll have to set up the channel


We are talking about channels proper naming: Front port, hdma1, .. , bluetooth headphones, etc. Not just dsp1,dps2.



> Can I easily install a few versions of soft?


We mean, can we install 2 versions of firefox for example?

Unreal Engine and just a one guy on it.. We can support porting some simple soft like Godot for example (softly moving on it from UE). But we can only imagine how hard it is to port a big project like this. And can You give an article to read about porting linux soft?

Thank all of You very much for Your attention and answers!
I've updated the post.


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## jbo (Apr 7, 2022)

pr0f said:


> We can support porting some simple soft like Godot for example (softly moving on it from UE).


I can't tell you much about Godot as I never used it but there appears to be a port available: devel/godot.
Therefore, this should be as easy as running `pkg install godot` (similar to `apt install godot`, `pacman -S godot` or whatever you're used to).

Edit: I'm certainly not a 3D artist but I installed the blender port and it seems to work just fine


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## malavon (Apr 7, 2022)

pr0f said:


> May be today is a good day to try it..


Every day is a good day to try FreeBSD. In all seriousness, after using FreeBSD on my (full-time) desktop and servers for 20 years (this year) I'd say that FreeBSD is certainly a good choice for a day-to-day system. Especially for people who are technically-minded and don't mind reading man pages like me and presumably you I'm sure it's a great fit overall!


pr0f said:


> We mean, can we install 2 versions of firefox for example?


Yes, although the package system will forbid this initially. But there are several ways, install it in a chroot or a jail and you're all set.


pr0f said:


> Unreal Engine and just a one guy on it.. We can support porting some simple soft like Godot for example (softly moving on it from UE). But we can only imagine how hard it is to port a big project like this. And can You give an article to read about porting linux soft?


As far as porting Linux software, sure. There's an entire porters porters handbook (English version linked, but many localizations exist). Like said before be sure to take a look at the ports collection when you're looking for software, it'll tell you if it's been ported before.
And Unreal Engine? Not that difficult really. Most of the work has been done anway. Again, feel  free to push Epic for official support. Don't worry about the difficulty porting it, for  several people working on it professionally it shouldn't be an impossible task. I mean if _I_ can do it it's really not that difficult 


pr0f said:


> Actually, we are the company of game developers,


Do you mind me asking what company you're from? I'd love to check out some of your work, teasers or even just the website. Obviously any game company interested in FreeBSD is interesting to me.
If you'd rather not disclose it publicly I totally understand, feel free to PM me.


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## pr0f (Apr 8, 2022)

malavon said:


> package system will forbid this initially. But there are several ways, install it in a chroot or a jail and you're all set.


No, but it is possible. Ok )
We have the same story in linux. But in some not popular distros it's a very simple task.



> Obviously any game company interested in FreeBSD is interesting to me.


As I know, there are no companies in gamedev work with freebsd. Nintendo, sony, youtube, watsapp, juniper, cisco, etc. - but they're just using it, it's not about games at all, none of them, it's just a business. Open source for them - just an instrument. For free.
If You will run a game from PS/PSP/Nintendo on FreeBSD officialy - that will be the first game on bsd platform ever )

UFS - it's a very funny thing. Electricity problem, lightning strike, battery discharge - aaaaand Your work is done. Already know people who lost their data on UFS on hard used laptops. They've shared their stories yesterday. Not serious, so don't even want to talk about it.

ZFS - really cool! 10-in-1. But no one, NO one tells about it's overheads, now we know it has really big overheads. No one can say - yes, you can rely on it with your eyes closed: "if something goes wrong you can lose all you data like with any fs". But hey.. not with ext3 and 4 (talking about battery, I hope at least). Because ext is for end users not servers. It's the most scary moment in freebsd in 2022 and we don't know what to think. People just trying to live in server/ps/nintendo OS.. and it's ok linux has the same story. But it's only a business yet.

Youtube, Netflix. Are we kids? They use it not on laptops - electricity there is like a sun for us. ZFS there - a super stable with bunch of auto-backups located in another states.
What is the main question?
One man on youtube told that he has 4 Gb ram on old laptop so he decided to choose ufs not zfs. Stop WHAT??? So... questionable_stability_for_ram vs no_stability_at_all.
How much ram it needs? Hmmm.. how much cpu it needs? How much IO operations it does? Is it like the fattest fs ever - btrfs or less? Less like what???
These are the questions needed to be solved by professionals, not like mr "Reduculus statement" talking to (amazing start on main forum by the way) beginners. If user doesn't want to now it, ok may be he choose a car by color, but it's not about us.

Seems like freebsd goes a long way. A long time ago linux was there too: server OS tried to be desktop. But linux somehow has all drivers it needs, and much more. May be it's about time. May be license kills a thing (partly true actually) or something else I don't know. FreeBSD community is tooo small to take care about all of it. So it will be a OS for fans like us who fits it drivers. At least for some more years.

I'm not interested in a dispute, just hope you understand what I'm trying to say here. May be we're wrong, but nobody can really explain how it is in real. They just sharing their thought, in general of course. So just sharing our delitant thoughts too )


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## Crivens (Apr 8, 2022)

It looks like you need to get rid of some preconceptions.

ZFS even took the NIH hurdle to be in linux. They tried to roll their own with btrfs, but designing something like the ZFS stack is hard. Btrfs has troubles UFS has not.

Also, people on youtube saying X is not an argument. People on youtube say also that the earth is flat, that cowboys hunted dinosaurs into extinction or that there is a sure fire way to get rich fast.

Question now is, are you willing to work on your prejudice or not.


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## pr0f (Apr 8, 2022)

Crivens said:


> people on youtube saying X is not an argument


Just mentioned this 50+ y.o. man, who is a DevOp or Programmer, can't remember. And he isn't about money. But may be You are right.

I never even tried ZFS on linux. I don't know why You are telling me about it. Yes, it has stupid and complicated situation with licenses, like freebsd, and has been rewritten in a ugly way. It is almost unusable there.
Btrfs is for servers, for big guys and by their wish, nothing more nothing less. It's an IO-machinegun, but has many many super functionalities. Also, many people lost their data on btrfs. At least this is a true story! May be it is stable now, I don't know. But I prefer to use simple client side fs on laptop.

We decided to do some hard tests in VBox this week. Will use 13.0 (because it was marked as production ready and 12 is old now), UFS and ZFS. No asteroids, just a daily situations for everyone. I will fix the post if there will be any changes.

I thought it's obvious, it's not about prejudice: the thing is "they" talk, and people here are keep top-secret silence about tech details. Not a word, not an answer )) That's all.
Once again. No one had answered! Questions are still there, but we have prejudice ) Isn't it stupid? Very simple, but we must do it by ourselves on main forum!
*That* is the *question* actually, not our stupid wish: we have a lot work to do. We're just asking questions, so we don't need to prove something, especially here. So please don't think like that.


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## Crivens (Apr 8, 2022)

Tech details are available online. You can find almost all you need in the handbook. Freebsd is not as fragmented as all the linux distros, so one handbook is enough. And it is good. 
Check out what the VMs do. Try to get them garbled and reinstall several times. Get experience. See what happens, see what you need (not neccesarily what you want). Then you are much better prepared to ask these questions. You see, when you have demonstrated to have no clue about X but claim that Y is better, what do you think people will see you as? Will they be likely to respond?


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## jbo (Apr 8, 2022)

pr0f said:


> Nintendo, sony, youtube, watsapp, juniper, cisco, etc. - but they're just using it, it's not about games at all, none of them, it's just a business. Open source for them - just an instrument. For free.


They are not "just using it". They are actively contributing in various ways such as contributing back their changes/improvements/modifications or directly funding work.
Other than that, one often overlooked major difference between (Free)BSD and Linux is the licensing. (Free)BSD is a lot more accessible for commercial use in almost all aspects. They might not only be using FreeBSD because of the good technology but also because of the much more permissive license.
Additionally, lets not get into the maintenance hell you get from supporting a Linux system in a consumer device...



pr0f said:


> hat will be the first game on bsd platform ever


There are plenty of native games available. In fact, so many that they have their own category: https://www.freshports.org/games/


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## pr0f (Apr 8, 2022)

Crivens said:


> Tech details are available online.


We already setting it up in VM, seems like it's only way to know something here.



Crivens said:


> Will they be likely to respond?


I mentioned already - English is my second language. Beside, there were the questions, but no answers, from *start*. Only "wow, it's soooo cool you must use it and forget anything else, but yeah, you can lose all". Great! Thanks a lot! But not enough.
There were no demonstrations, no answers - we start to read, watch, suppose, everything people can do in this situation. FreeBSD forum works this way? Somebody can feel hurt about it? )) Ok, no problem, we already met here some great people and have closed some questions.

So we don't care about "like/dislike", obvious it's senselessly. Some people have something to say - they say what they really know and we say "thank You", others just.. I really don't care, then can cry if they want to, or.. I don't know, they can try a dress for example. What should I say here? )) It's just a talk, if they can - they will give information, it's a forum. Sooo simple.

We will just wait a few days, that's all. No help from really heavy users in freebsd? No problem at all.


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## pr0f (Apr 8, 2022)

jbodenmann said:


> contributing


If somebody shares with You, it's not about friendship only. It can be much more complicated if You will do some useful job for him.
If someone wants You to work on some technology he shares something and You will work and call it freedom! THey invented and shared so we will help. We can do it! On other hand, he can share because it's already old and doesn't exist like intellectual treasure. And he looks like somebody who shares. Microsoft shares with linux too ))) Simplicity of capitalism.

Games. Sorry I will rephrase for clearness. AA or AAA games appropriate our times. Blizzard plan to release starcraft 3 on freebsd too. For example. I play online chess everyday. But I want something really big and beutiful like Zero Dawn too.


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## shkhln (Apr 8, 2022)

pr0f said:


> How much ram it needs? Hmmm.. how much cpu it needs? How much IO operations it does? Is it like the fattest fs ever - btrfs or less? Less like what???
> These are the questions needed to be solved by professionals, not like mr "Reduculus statement" talking to (amazing start on main forum by the way) beginners. If user doesn't want to now it, ok may be he choose a car by color, but it's not about us.


ZFS doesn't have an appreciable CPU overhead — checksum calculation is simply not that taxing for modern CPUs even at typical NVMe SSD throughput values. Nor there are any unusual RAM requirements. Now, the CoW design obviously results in more io operations when writing things, but that's not important for every workload — you should benchmark your apps if you are concerned about performance.


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## pr0f (Apr 8, 2022)

shkhln said:


> ZFS doesn't have an appreciable CPU overhead — computing checksums is simply not that taxing for modern CPUs even for typical NVMe SSD throughput values. Nor there are any unusual RAM requirements. Now, CoW design obviously results in more io operations when writing things, but that's not important for every workload — you should benchmark your apps if you are concerned about performance.


Please, can You tell something about stability in energy loss (just as an example) situations. Can we rely on it as we can do with ext fs?


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## jbo (Apr 8, 2022)

pr0f said:


> Games. Sorry I will rephrase for clearness. AA or AAA games appropriate our times.


As mentioned before playing steam games on FreeBSD is quite a thing. You will find plenty of resources on that.
Here's a non-exhaustive list maintained by shkhln: https://github.com/shkhln/linuxulator-steam-utils/wiki/Compatibility

As far as I know linuxulator-steam-utils is not even required anymore these days. But again: just test it yourself. Nobody will be able to tell you what is working for you and what isn't other than yourself. Take the physical machine you want to eventually use, add a second drive (so you don't have to deal with explicit dual-boot) and test.


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## SirDice (Apr 8, 2022)

pr0f said:


> Please, can You tell something about stability in energy loss (just as an example) situations.








						Checksums and Self-Healing Data -  Managing ZFS File Systems in Oracle® Solaris 11.2
					

With ZFS, all data and metadata is verified using a user-selectable checksum algorithm. Traditional file systems that do provide checksum verification have performed...



					docs.oracle.com


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## hardworkingnewbie (Apr 8, 2022)

pr0f said:


> Hello FreeBSD community. Finally! )
> I'm sorry for my English, I have not much practice.


Sorry, but what is exactly your game? Why are you here?

You've been asking questions in your initial post, and have received many well rounded responses to it, yet you still do keep repeating many of the initial misconceptions, e.g. about UFS/ZFS, like a parrot as if you just don't care.

Which makes me doubt your sincerity somewhat.

ANYWAY:

UFS is a stable and trustworthy FS.
ZFS is an enterprise FS originally designed by senior software architects from SUN who knew what they were doing, and it shows still today. Probably the best COW file system designed in this century yet.
Btrfs is a bad ZFS copy cat which just eats your data and will never be good, so don't even think about using it.

And update your knowledge about the impact of a power loss on hardware. It doesn't matter which file system you are using, if you don't have an UPS what's still just in RAM and not writting to your HDD/SSD is being lost. This is simple physics.

Also: Steam on Linux does only work perfect with ext4. Some games are known to have issues when using another Linux file system, like XFS.


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## jbo (Apr 8, 2022)

hardworkingnewbie said:


> It doesn't matter which file system you are using, if you don't have an UPS what's still just in RAM and not writting to your HDD/SSD is being lost. This is simple physics.


Just to extend on this for future readers: It's not only about the primary memory of your system (eg. what's commonly referred to as "RAM"). There are other volatile memory components inbetween. Most notably, each disk (no matter whether SSD or HDD) has an on-board cache as well (which is also volatile). So even if your system wrote data through the disk interface "to the disk", it might still not be in non-volatile memory when a power loss occurs.
This is why enterprise grade storage media (notably SSDs) come with on-board energy storage capacity (usually in form of capacitors) to ensure that on a power loss event data from the disk's cache can still be written to the disk's non-volatile memory. This is something that (almost?) all consumer grade storage devices lack.
The reason why this is more prominent on SSDs than HDDs is because the energy required to keep an HDD operational without external power is orders of magnitudes higher than with SSDs. Power-loss prevention on HDDs is therefore usually economically & physically impractical.

One might argue that technically speaking hardworkingnewbie 's statement also covers this because these on-disk caches are still RAM but often/sometimes that's actually not the case. They can be volatile memory that is not RAM.
So my annoying nit-pickyness here is most because for most "computer users" or computer engineers/scientists the term "RAM" is usually used to refer to the system's primary memory and for the rest because these on-disk caches are not always RAM.

I'll shut up now.


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## kpedersen (Apr 8, 2022)

> Cgroups, network namespace features? No it's not about chroot!


Jails


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## pr0f (Apr 8, 2022)

hardworkingnewbie said:


> Sorry, but what is exactly your game? Why are you here?


It's ok. Just a game. We are trying to figure out something about OS here.
Why people come here? Read the post. May be not for You or even us at the end, but for others it can be helpful. Too many questions I hear about FreeBSD. So we came to uncover some details and share with others by giving the link.


hardworkingnewbie said:


> parrot


Try to read the thread before parroting.


hardworkingnewbie said:


> UFS is a stable and trustworthy
> if you don't have an UPS what's still just in RAM
> SUN who knew what they were doing
> Btrfs is a bad ZFS copy
> This is simple physics


It really helps! Thank You!


hardworkingnewbie said:


> Also: Steam on Linux does only work perfect with ext4


It's not "also", it's the only interesting thing you have said.



kpedersen said:


> Jails


Thank You for the info! So, it's a reduced version of cgroups and net-ns.


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## SirDice (Apr 8, 2022)

pr0f said:


> So, it's a reduced version of cgroups and net-ns.


Why do you think that?


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## pr0f (Apr 8, 2022)

SirDice said:


> Why do you think that?


Yes, you are right. Perhaps I really was overly critical. May be some patches for cpu and memory limits "Not fully working" and some minor nuances. But it's almost equal.


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## malavon (Apr 8, 2022)

I have a feeling this got a little more heated than it should be but there is some great information here as well. It's a habit on this forum to direct people to the right information rather than copying it in a post. Make sure to read up on the documentation given to you. It's part of - opinion incoming - the mindset of FreeBSD: help people understand the system that they're using. No one could ever post as much (correct) information about component X as the documentation out there contains.
Just to reiterate. ZFS is great, completely different from btrfs and so much better - truly, I too underestimated it before I got to know it (I'm a bit of a sceptic). It does however like to have a bit of RAM. But frankly, any modern system can cope with that. Anything you can run Unreal Engine on can certainly handle a bit of RAM going to the filesystem's in-memory information and cache.
And when it comes to protection of data it offers even more than ext4. It certainly won't lose data more easily. And that's just on a single disk, if you have multiples then it becomes even better.

Now, as said before there are some things that are more difficult in FreeBSD than they are in Linux. It's not because FreeBSD lacks something, it's because commercial support from companies out there isn't the same as it is for Linux. However I dare say that this has been changing a bit, at least when it comes to Desktop use.
Just yesterday I noticed how FreeBSD has appeared as one of six "major" operating systems on NVIDIA's new driver website. I don't know if it sounds insignificant to you but it certainly didn't to me. But still, I don't see Valve officially supporting FreeBSD tomorrow. I might be wrong and I'd love to be but it's just the truth.

It's important to understand that any game running through Linux emulation or through wine can be a hit or miss. There are many AA(A) games that work, but like I said before there's no official support. If gaming is important to you, keep a dual or even triple boot. I can't imagine you can play every game there is on Linux either, right?
If anything I'd like you to come away with this recommendation. Dual or triple boot. That way you can have FreeBSD, Linux and Windows (heavens forbid) to run everything you want. It's also incredibly useful to test if code runs well on every platform you intend to support. Don't try out in VM's, it'll never give you the real feel of an OS. Stay barebones for all your operating systems.

However...and I'm going to give you some advice that I think is still sane in the current gaming reality and thus also economic reality. When it comes to (PC) games you're going to have to focus on Windows first. Whether that means you also develop under Windows or not is up to you, but a lot of time will be spend on creating and testing Windows builds. A Linux or FreeBSD version of your game is more than a nice to have but these alone won't get you far financially. As much as I would love to see someone release a FreeBSD game, I also want to make sure that company thrives so that we can keep getting new games in the future 

I don't know if you still have questions regarding FreeBSD, it's been a bit difficult to read through all the posts. Feel free to ask but friendly advice, don't get worked up when someone points you to the manual or other official documentation. It's one of the great things about FreeBSD, there's a lot of good documentation available (in many languages!).


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## jbo (Apr 8, 2022)

pr0f said:


> May be some patches for cpu and memory limits "Not fully working" and some minor nuances. But it's almost equal.


Have a look at RACCT / rctl(8).

EDIT: Just saw malavon's post above: I did not mean to point to docs to be a bitch - As stated above that is just where the information lives


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## malavon (Apr 8, 2022)

jbodenmann said:


> Have a look at RACCT/RCTL: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=rctl&sektion=8


I just learned something new, never needed any limits or anything but this might actually come in handy in the not-so-distant future. Thx!


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## pr0f (Apr 8, 2022)

malavon said:


> official documentation. It's one of the great things about FreeBSD, there's a lot of good documentation available (in many languages!).


I feel comfortable reading docs. No problem. But You know.. where is my KDE or Fluxbox I just want to press the button. Sometimes it wins )



malavon said:


> Make sure to read up on the documentation given to you


Already sitting with it )
Great docs I can say. Not like a bunch of scratches in linux all over the internet.


malavon said:


> I can't imagine you can play every game there is on Linux either, right


Of course not. Many games has unsupported anticheats, but from month to moth we can play more games. May be You alredy heard about easy-antichit and battleye. Finally, they turned their faces to linux. So we play Squad sometimes. These games we can play freely. I just need sometimes to remove old to install new one, but this screen can show we have almost everything from game industry.
Funny, but Linux boom was only about games. Not developers or tech specialists, but games )








malavon said:


> I don't see Valve officially supporting FreeBSD tomorrow. I might be wrong and I'd love to be but it's just the truth.


I think they will some day. Thay will, if they will see Your community really wants it. They came in linux because of that: we started to help wine developers, we started to make games which can at least run under the wine (even working in UE4) and so on. We code and ask our director/manager/producer to add linux support )) linuxator or some "wine4bsd" (right now I don't how it works for You) - is the right way!


malavon said:


> Dual or triple boot.


Honestly it's a pain. You want to take a rest for 15-20 minutes from work and realize you need to reboot ))


malavon said:


> Don't try out in VM's, it'll never give you the real feel of an OS


Reading the handbook. Got FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso. I think we should start with full KDE install to just start for the first time. But no, I will install it in virtualbox. For me it's much easier. A long time ago I did it from windows, then I started to see all my work already there and it's time to move on )


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## pr0f (Apr 8, 2022)

jbodenmann said:


> Have a look at RACCT / rctl(8).
> 
> EDIT: Just saw malavon's post above: I did not mean to point to docs to be a bitch - As stated above that is just where the information lives


It's ok ) Trying to keep up with every link and read it carefully. Sometimes I get it.



malavon said:


> in the current gaming reality and thus also economic reality


I don't know will I stay or go back to linux. But will try to stay. And if godot will be fresh, we will try to port the game to make it native. At lest because of interest. Ow you will burn under our questions here)
And no, we still have some very important questions. But now I know FreeBSD handbook is the answer to almost all of them.
So, You have all man pages and handbook in one place? It's so.. amazing )


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## kpedersen (Apr 8, 2022)

pr0f said:


> SELinux/Apparmor system?


We have Capsicum but I have little experience with it personally. I just jail things like Web browsers instead.



pr0f said:


> And if godot will be fresh, we will try to port the game to make it native.


Godot is relatively basic. I am quite certain most developers in the area of game development could port it to FreeBSD directly from the latest upstream sources. A couple of years ago I even had an undergraduate 19 year old BSc student make a port of it.


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## jbo (Apr 8, 2022)

pr0f said:


> I feel comfortable reading docs. No problem. But You know.. where is my KDE or Fluxbox I just want to press the button. Sometimes it wins )


As far as I know FreeBSD is a first-class citizen for the KDE team. They have a separate FreeBSD team. They even have an entire sub-domain for that: https://freebsd.kde.org/
I'm not using it myself but there are plenty of FreeBSD people successfully using KDE. Everything (?) is available from ports.

I allow myself to borrow picture here (curtesy of grahamperrin - borrowed from here):




If you like fancy desktops (and there's nothing wrong with that) there are plenty more pictures where that one came from: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-screen-shots.8877/page-76
(Intentionally linking to the last page as the thread started back in 2009).

There are also plenty of other desktop environments, window managers and so on available for FreeBSD as also shown in that thread.



> And if godot will be fresh, we will try to port the game to make it native. At lest because of interest.


Please do let us know if that ever happens!


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## pr0f (Apr 8, 2022)

kpedersen said:


> most developers in the area of game development could port it to FreeBSD directly from the latest upstream sources


Sounds good! Thank You for details!



jbodenmann said:


> As far as I know FreeBSD is a first-class citizen for the KDE team. They have a separate FreeBSD team. They even have an entire sub-domain for that: https://freebsd.kde.org/


Wow. It's a real news for me! Surprisingly. I was using KDE for around a 5 years I think. Sometimes.. come on, pretty often in Arch KDE updates come broken. Then they're trying to fix it for next 2 days. Story of our life )
Now I'm using fluxbox, but I think KDE is the best choice to live really comfortably.



jbodenmann said:


> Please do let us know if that ever happens!


I hope it will happen this summer. We will save this bookmark )

Updated the post.


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## jbo (Apr 8, 2022)

pr0f said:


> Wow. It's a real news for me! Surprisingly. I was using KDE for around a 5 years I think. Sometimes.. come on, pretty often in Arch KDE updates come broken. Then they're trying to fix it for next 2 days. Story of our life )


I don´t mean to be bashing Linux at all - just a personal opinion based on my own experiences: What you're describint -> that is just the world of Linux. There are many people (also on this forum) that switched from Linux to FreeBSD exactly because of problems like that. Myself included.
Of course, that is not to say that nothing ever goes wrong in the world of FreeBSD. But the philosophy is different. It's not fragmented, it's a coherent system where you get a kernel and a complete OS which are also developed as such. But after many, many years of using Linux and many, many years of using FreeBSD (both server & desktop) I can safely say that FreeBSD is a much more stable, reliable & sustainable solution.

btw. Fluxbox is also available for FreeBSD: x11-wm/fluxbox
You can just continue using that if you like. Or use KDE. Or something else you like.



pr0f said:


> I hope it will happen this summer. We will save this bookmark


So do I


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## pr0f (Apr 8, 2022)

malavon said:


> Dual or triple boot.


May be.. it's real like for linux, ability to bring your video card and cpu into VM. It can change everything without need for support from valve/wine/etc. Ultra move with 5-10% fps loss!
And it can be done even on some types of laptops.


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## jbo (Apr 8, 2022)

pr0f said:


> May be.. it's real like for linux, ability to bring your video card and cpu into VM.


Bhyve (the "native" FreeBSD hypervisor) supports PCI pass-through. You can read about it here: https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve/pci_passthru

Technically, this allows you to create a Windows (or Linux) VM on FreeBSD and pass through your GPU. While that wiki article clearly states that GPU pass-through is currently not supported, people appear to have that working but I have never done it myself. I don´t know about the caveats there. There are certainly patches available which you can find easily.
If I understand GPU pass-through correctly, your host system will have to give up control of the device so you can´t use that GPU as your video output for the host anymore (which makes sense). So you´d need a second GPU.
Bhyve PCI pass-through with other devices such as USB controllers certainly works (out of the box).

Dual booting might be much easier to start if this is the only thing holding you back. I'm certainly doing that on my gaming machines very successfully. But I do get your previous note of hating to reboot into a different OS just to have a quick session of fun.


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## pr0f (Apr 8, 2022)

jbodenmann said:


> So you´d need a second GPU


It depends on how video cards operating inside your system, at least in linux (according to the docs it has the same technology in both OS). Laptops has variants (muxless, etc.), about PC You are right - there should be a second card. So no chance, sad. Thank You for the info!


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## malavon (Apr 8, 2022)

pr0f said:


> Wow. It's a real news for me! Surprisingly. I was using KDE for around a 5 years I think. Sometimes.. come on, pretty often in Arch KDE updates come broken. Then they're trying to fix it for next 2 days. Story of our life )
> Now I'm using fluxbox, but I think KDE is the best choice to live really comfortably.


Well, I've been using KDE 3, 4 and now Plasma almost as long as I've been using FreeBSD and I can tell you that I haven't had many breakages. Would have been a pain too since I _only_ use KDE/Plasma.
Back in the days I remember having had some breakages, sometimes my own fault because I build my own ports/packages with custom options. And I'm sure not everything works perfectly, there is bound to be something that hasn't been ported but nothing that stands out to me.


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## kpedersen (Apr 8, 2022)

pr0f said:


> May be.. it's real like for linux, ability to bring your video card and cpu into VM. It can change everything without need for support from valve/wine/etc. Ultra move with 5-10% fps loss!
> And it can be done even on some types of laptops.


Are you talking about GPU passthrough of virtualization software like VMware and VirtualBox?

We have that on FreeBSD too via our VirtualBox port. This is probably also easier for beginners than FreeBSD's Bhyve and Linux's KVM.



pr0f said:


> Sounds good! Thank You for details!


If you are completely lost and need *even more* details, you can probably just start off from the existing port here. The FreeBSD ports collection makes it easier to port software. Actually Arch Linux and Gentoo's ports collections started out by copying it.


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## grahamperrin@ (Apr 8, 2022)

malavon said:


> … Plasma … not everything works perfectly, …



True. As an example of the type of bug that I don't bother to report (someone else might have):



– you can attempt to use System Settings to use a time server, but the attempt will silently fail.

Not a Plasma issue, but it's worth mentioning since SDDM is so often used for Plasma:









						ConsoleKit, SDDM, switch user
					

Abbreviated:   …  ReuseSession=true …    I added the line to /usr/local/etc/sddm.conf.d/kde_settings.conf (you might find the file already present), however it's not effective. We're probably bitten by something like the bugs below (ignoring the systemd aspect)...




					forums.freebsd.org


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## malavon (Apr 9, 2022)

pr0f said:


> And if godot will be fresh,


Out of curiosity I just checked, Godot is at 4.2.2 while the latest is 4.2.4, just a bunch of bugfixes. The FreeBSD maintainer is keeping a nice upgrade pace but probably didn't get to updating just yet.


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