OpenBSD 5.2 Released 141
An anonymous reader writes "OpenBSD 5.2 has been released and is available for download. One of the most significant changes in this release is the replacement of the user-level uthreads by kernel-level rthreads, allowing multithreaded programs to utilize multiple CPUs/cores."
Good News! (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, Netcraft confirms it is dying, yadda, yadda, yadda, etc... Linus said they were masturbating monkeys, the 1990s called, and they want their rthreads back, etc... etc...
Seriously, folks, if you haven't tried OpenBSD before, give it a spin, you might like it. Sure, it ain't no penguin, but that nice pointy fish is stable, solid, secure and quite a nice little beast to work with. I have had nothing but good experiences with that OS.
Just my US$ 0.02.
Re:Good News! (Score:5, Interesting)
Ponderosa Puff wouldn't take no guff
Water oughta be clean and free
So he fought the fight and he set things right
With his OpenBSD [openbsd.org]
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lol, OpenBSD is playing catchup to NetBSD in many areas. Lets just think about kernel threading, the main feature mentioned in the summary above. NetBSD has had full kernel threading support for many years..
The reason you haven't heard of NetBSD doing anything of note recently, is because the NetBSD developers are better at coding than they are at advocacy..
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NetBSD (last I checked) doesn't run on an SGI Octane. I can run OpenBSD and (old) Linux on there.
BSD portability (Score:2)
Re:BSD portability (Score:4, Informative)
BSDs have their advantages over Linux, but portability ain't one of them, given that Linux has been ported to far more platforms than NetBSD.
Linux has only been ported to more platforms because of the sheer number of people working on it, but that's no reflection of the portability of the code. NetBSD was designed with portability from the start, whereas Linux was and still is in many areas designed for an x86-centric world. Many Linux ports never reached maturity, and even some of those that did are now broken.
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Not to mention comparing the "portability" of the kernel to an entire OS is somewhat unfair. If a single Linux OS distro is available on more platforms than NetBSD, that's news to me.
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Itanium (Score:2)
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On another note, why don't they include a port for the Itanium? FBSD has had it for a while, NBSD just introduced it in 6.0, so OBSD too could add that port. They could certainly have more penetration for something like that
Probably because noone's given them an Itanium machine.
Re:Good News! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good News! (Score:5, Informative)
Think about all the complexity of GRUB. Think about all the issues that the initrd causes. Think about the loading and unloading of kernel modules, whether for different hardware support or just kernel features (eg. bonding NICs), and issues that arise from switching between kernel versions or whatnot. Think about the often cryptic syntax of modules.conf. Think about the complexity of SysV and looking through those hundreds of little scripts to find the problem you're looking for. Think of chkconfig and "services".
Now imagine it all going away.
That's right... OpenBSD doesn't use or need any of it. The whole system is super-simple and extremely clean. For those who've used FreeBSD and been impressed with how much nicer and simpler it is than Linux, you should know FreeBSD is only half-way to being as simple as OpenBSD.
I used-to LOVE the simplicity of it. Back when removable hard drives were as close to mobile computing as most of us got, I'd have my OpenBSD system all setup, and I could just up and boot it from ANY SYSTEM, with no reconfiguration, and no problems. Windows users were absolutely astonished, and Linux users were aghast at the lack of boot-time kernel panic or other system hangs.
It's absolutely the best way to start learning Unix... With init/startup scripts a child can understand, and configure, and a clean, straight-forward user-land, rather than one cluttered with 20 different shells like any Linux distro.
And I've just started scratching the surface... Think of an OS where the developers have kept the same sound systems for decades, and have kept the same file system for decades, with just a few rare updates that kept it among the all-around best-performing. Think of an OS where the scheduler doesn't keep changing and getting more tweaks, but works the same from version to version for many years in-between. Think of an OS that you can just install and really count on it being as stable as a rock, and incredibly bug-free foundation. Imagine not having to keep up with the constant changes made to better suit some random person's idea of what minor feature is worth completely upending decades of good design, legacy and stability (eg: KMS, Wayland, etc.). Think of an OS that doesn't have to go through contortions and change after change to its design to suit the design constraints of the latest mainframe IBM is developing.
Think of an OS that is simple, elegant, solid, and just plain works.
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Damn! I just migrated all my stuff from a Linux server to a FreeBSD one. I've been extremely impressed, but now you make me wish I'd gone to OpenBSD.
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No, I'd generally recomend FreeBSD, once you're past the whole not being able to comprehend Unix system complexity, and other bits of the process. I was only pointing out the positives, since that's what the GP asked for.
The downsides include fewer ports, that are less customizable and often out of date, much poorer hardware support, worse performance, etc. It still has the whole "simplicity and elegance" thing in the base system, but plenty of drawbacks once you get past that.
Still great for a firewall/r
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mksh is much smaller than BASH while having almost all the bash features, and being better in several cases... The big one is commands too long to fit on a single line; bash wraps to two lines, and goes utterly ape-shit when you start editing that multi-line command. Mksh, meanwhile, maintains a single-line, and never has such problems.
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Actually I'm against stuff that is poorly architected in the first place. "Change" that doesn't improve anything, or causes as many problems as it fixes, is usually called "waste", and indeed that's the situation far too often on Linux...
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Your machine must be old as fuck then. Snow Leopard runs well on my 2008-model MBP, and Mountain Lion is blazingly fast on my 11-inch Air.
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Ext2 (Write) support was absolutely piss-poor the last time I tried it (a couple years ago), and unsuitable for writing backups to.
In generally, it's all UFS with softupdates, or tar.
i miss openbsd (Score:5, Informative)
i used to use it a lot
it doesnt' have much going for it, in the scheme of modern unix-like operating systems.. it's a bit of an underdog. it doesn't have fancy high-performance schedulers, its io layer is slow.. it's missing drivers for lots of commodity hardware, some of them because of principles.. theo is an asshole sometimes, with his constant 'im always right and you're always an idiot' thing.. but..
for one, the documentation is beautiful. whoever maintains the documentation should get a medal. there are few typos, everything has a man page, and every man page has EXAMPLES and is easy to understand. better than any other operating system out there. and that's a big plus: if you try any linux distribution and find an unfamilar file in /etc, you have a 50/50 shot of it being documented properly. with openbsd, it's garunteed
because their entire mission is based on thorough auditing, they make sure their code is very well documented and easy to understand. that's a big bonus too. modifying and developing on openbsd, as a platform, is a very nice experience
openssh is a very beautifully written piece of software. it's nice to use, and it's nice to read the source code. when is the last time it gave you any problems? openbsd is an entire operating system written with the same standards.
give it a try if you haven't, it wont hurt you.. virtual machines don't cost anything..
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there comes a point when your ideology conflicts with what you need to get done. When that happens, is it better to just dump the machine entirely and not do whatever it is you need to do? ...or, suck it up and deal with some insecurity?
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How many critical OS X flaws needing patches?
I don't know. You tell me.
WTF is this about Theo or OpenBSD? (Score:3, Interesting)
Who the hell cares about how Theo treats other people?
Did Steve Jobs piss people off? Did he not treat other people like shit on numerous occasions?
Yet people still lust after Apple products.
You buy/use the product for the sake of the product.
I can set up my OpenBSD server and forget about it for a year, with almost a guarantee that it hasn't been hacked.
That's why I use OpenBSD.
And if Theo is an asshole then Steve Jobs was a much bigger one.
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I was reading up Wiki on Theo, and it said there that Theo's opposition to the war in Iraq ultimately impacted DARPA funding all BSD projects, not just OBSD. Actually, I happen to think that DARPA yanking its funding from anything related to him was related more to his refusal to withold OBSD security software from enemy countries, which is easy to do, since Canada doesn't have the laws that the US has against dealing w/ rogue countries. So any other OS that uses his security software would be unwelcome i
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I'm just not following - how does that work? I know why people are opposed to GPL, but I'm just not getting why he is?
The issue was that there were drivers that were dual-licensed BSD and GPL. The Linux people were taking this code, modifying it but only releasing it back as GPL (which was allowed by the copyright holder who had dual-licensed it). In a more general case, you can take BSD-licensed code and use it within a work that is ultimately GPLed and make all your additions to that code GPL, too. This means that the Linux/GPL side can freely use the work of the BSD people all they want, but the reverse is not true a
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The licenses have their differences - BSDL allows people to combine BSD licensed software w/ others, whereas GPL requires combinations to be treated as GPL. But the main thing about GPL is that all the source code has to be available w/ everything - something that Theo endorses, even at the level of binary blobs (granted, they mean different things in GPL and BSDL). So the GPL license automatically contaminating a software is something Theo should welcome, given that it would force the source code to be m
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I don't completely blame DARPA here. If the Pentagon doesn't want its computer security practices to be known to it's enemies, it makes perfect sense that it not use systems designed by people who refuse to blacklist enemy countries. Now, whether that justifies DARPA defunding projects related to BSD is another matter completely.
Re:WTF is this about Theo or OpenBSD? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that Theo treats developers badly. We've had a few ex-OpenBSD developers join FreeBSD, and NetBSD has been more successful (their kernel is more similar, so it's probably an easier migration path) because Theo's rudeness has been the last straw for them. He's also prevented new developers, such as the author of mult (something like recursive jails) from joining the project. This doesn't affect users directly, but if the developers start going elsewhere then it means that the platform evolves more slowly and does affect users.
Steve Jobs was undoubtedly also an asshole to his employees, but typically only those that interacted with him directly (and were therefore the fairly senior people, not the ones doing most of the implementation work) and Apple had one advantage that OpenBSD doesn't: it was paying those developers directly.
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"Buying" an OS is not like buying a lawn chair. No matter how secure you think your OS is. You have to update systems. OpenBSD had remote holes in the default install in 1997, 2002, and 2007. We're about due for another, huh?
But more to the point, the mentality of the leader sets the mentality of the group and it affects membership. Operating systems don't spring up out of nothing. They're made by groups of people, and those people determine how the
I would use it... (Score:2)
...if only ACPI suspend/resume worked well.
Linux gets it right, why can't the BSDs? Actually, I haven't tried it with NetBSD, maybe I will.
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Yes, I had 5.1 on a USB stick. After resume, my laptop's keyboard would not work anymore. No amount of documentation reading or googling solved that (the paper you kindly linked is one of the documents I remember reading).
I even signed up to a mailing list to report the bug, but never got a reply; so I finally gave up.
News Flash: Theo is hard to deal with... (Score:4, Insightful)
...film at 11.
We all know that. But do not confuse "the man" with "the OS". Theo probably maintains less control over OpenBSD than Linus does over Linux (a lot of what he does involves maintaining the project's resources and logistics so that the developers can get on with their work rather than dealing with hardware and sysadmin stuff). Yes, he's the founder & leader of the project, but OpenBSD developers are amazing and could easily continue the project without him if required (not that that's at all likely to happen any time soon). Corporations would kill to have this consistent level of developer talent.
Which is why I've been using OpenBSD for 15 years for critical systems, and have no plans to change that.
2002 called (Score:1)
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Three of us you insensitive clod!
More seriously, I don't have a problem with how Theo treats people. In fact it's quite funny.
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Everyone can learn from that real world-class asshole... he totally dissed a friend of mine in a semi-professional environment, and I figure that a man *that* amazingly, butt-clenchingly unprofessional is just not worth the time of day. To hell with them.
Re:LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
Abusive asshole creates (copies?) a closed system, expensive, mobile phone - world wide hero
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Hey, at least Steve-o paid people to put up with his bullshit. Open source necessarily entails community; corporations do not.
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Re:LOL (Score:5, Interesting)
Well guess that makes me number four. I use an old SGI O2 as light www duty. Its a small secure OS that comes with a bare minimum of bloat. Whats not to like about that? I don't care what attitude Theo has, I've never met him. To the average person on the street RMS speaking would resemble a crazy homeless person.
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Outside of homeless I am pretty sure most people would consider RMS crazy, most zealots are.
RMS (Score:5, Insightful)
RMS is amazingly useful that way. [wikipedia.org]
Standing next to him, [xkcd.com] all sorts of people look sane. Get enough like-minded people together, Open Source might even start to seem (gasp!) normal.
I believe that the flow of digital information will shape the human landscape as powerfully and inexorably as water carves continents.
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In other words, not at all?
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Standing next to him, [xkcd.com]
Standing next to Don Quixote?
Re:LOL (Score:5, Informative)
Have you looked at the power usage of that thing recently? It's a 15 year old system that has less processing power than my cellphone & probably draws a few hundred watts with minimal power saving features. It's probably costing you $10-15/month to run that beast - how long would it take for a modern, low-power ARM or Atom box take to pay itself off?
Re:LOL (Score:4, Interesting)
Any modern car you will buy will get better milage than a '57 Chevy. I'd still love to own and drive a '57 Chevy.
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Maybe if you were still running Irix on the box or using SGI-specific multimedia software, I could follow your metaphor. Running Apache & OpenBSD on the machine is more like taking the body of a '57 Chevy and replacing the interior with that of a 1992 Honda Civic and putting a trailer hitch on it.
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The classic hardware is being useful by running a modern OS and doing work, while it sits most of the time. Since the owner can shove in a disc, click a few keys, and get it back to factory specs in about twenty minutes with almost zero work anytime he wants, I don't think your analogy is that great either.
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Capable of mid-20's, yes, if your driving style is somewhere between that of a grandma and a hypermiler.
Normal driving gets most folks in the 14 MPG area for most versions of engine/transmission.
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Re:LOL (Score:5, Informative)
I'd equate it to the difference between being a Windows Admin, and a Unix Admin... The two are worlds apart.
First off, PF syntax is heaven compared to all else. Linux's IPTables syntax is a utter nightmare. Cisco's NAT and ACL syntax is ugly, very limited, so abstracted in syntax and terminology from what it's really doing that it can be impossible to understand without a book of Cisco's own reference material, etc. Juniper's Netscreens are even worse. If anyone tells you otherwise, start asking a few questions about setting-up multi-homed internet service, multicast routing, or trying to determine whether/why a certain connection is being rejected by that 2,000-line ACL rule-set (or failing somewhere else). And this black-box isn't an issue of amateurs who just don't read enough... There really aren't any publications detailing more complex use-cases, and I've exchanged many words with Cisco support managers after multiple level-2 technicians put in explicit writing that some specific multihoming scearios were NOT POSSIBLE on their gear, only to try it out and find it does, in-fact, work exactly as it should.
This isn't something you're likely to hear network admins complain about, because using something better like OpenBSD is never an option they've had, and they know they MUST learn the insane ways of Cisco, to be able to support routers, switches, etc., anyhow.
PF's syntax for ACLs and NAT is dead simple, and as flexible as it can get. What's more, you edit it locally, with your choice of text editor, can syntax check it with a short command, and atomically apply it with all changes (no down-time at all). You've also got unlimited options for commenting it as you choose, making backups, generating it from some dynamic system, including dynamic lists of IPs in a rule that are added/removed by, say, a mail server tracking spammers, or having entire rulesets that are applied only when someone SSHes in to the box, to allow specific services or whatever you want. These are things that network admins DO bemoan on a continual basis... Some network software won't let you insert ACL rules above others (line editing), instead requiring erasing everything below where you want it, then inserting the ACL, then restorting the previous. Others may allow line-editing, but only for permit/deny rules, tossing-out the option of using remarks to properly comment your ACLs.
Network monitoring, debugging, and packet tracing is unimaginably easier. You can run tcpdump, pktstat, or any other utilities RIGHT ON YOUR FIREWALL, telling you EXACTLY what's happening, and where. Easy to filter down to what you want to see, yet can be focused to the point giving you complete packet headers and payloads if you so desire. Cisco pretty recently saw that omitting this functionality can make certain scenarios absolutely impossible to get through, and ASAs now allows generating a pcap/tcpdump/wireshark file, but it must by transferred off to a real computer for analysis in delayed, non-real time.
Anybody using a firewall "appliance" is PROBABLY also using a Unix box to support it in real-time as well... On either side of that ASA / Sonicwall / etc. is a switch configured for "port mirroring", to duplicate ALL that traffic to a Linux box, running SNORT and probably lots of other software, too. That Linux box getting copies of traffic still only provides a modicum of the monitoring, debugging, and reporting options that running your firewall on an actual, full-fledged Unix system can provide, but at least it makes a network admins' difficult job even POSSIBLE to do.
While home "routers" really aren't in the same class, there are MANY reasons you'd want something GOO
OBSD firewalls vs others - what's the diff? (Score:2)
Aren't Juniper's OS BSD based? All BSDs, from what I understand, use PF, and so even if an OS uses something like FreeBSD or NetBSD instead of OpenBSD as its base, whatever it used for the IP filtering would be based on PF, wouldn't it? Or are there IPTables versions on BSD as well?
Also, how is OpenBSD better than other FreeBSD based distros, such as pFsense and m0n0wall,which are aimed solely at being firewalls, unlike OpenBSD, which is more of a general purpose BSD - good for servers AND firewalls. A
Re:OBSD firewalls vs others - what's the diff? (Score:5, Interesting)
Aren't Juniper's OS BSD based?
Juniper was a fork of an old FreeBSD. They've recently realised quite how expensive maintaining a fork is and have started pushing most of their stuff upstream and minimising their divergence. We just granted commit access to another Juniper person (sjg@), who is going to work on bringing their improvements to the build system back into the mainline.
All BSDs, from what I understand, use PF
Yes, although OpenBSD is the only one to remove the other firewalling mechanisms. I think we now have 3 firewalls in the FreeBSD kernel and there was some talk of importing npf from NetBSD, making it 4. On of my projects for the next few years is to look at some of the packet filtering infrastructure and make ipf, pf, and friends all simple compiler front ends to the same generic packet filtering infrastructure.
how is OpenBSD better than other FreeBSD based distros
I'm on the FreeBSD Core Team, so I have some fairly obvious biases, but there are a few reasons to prefer OpenBSD. Historically, they've been a bit more proactive at enabling things like stack canaries, no execute, and address space randomisation by default. On the other hand, they don't yet have anything like capsicum, so by FreeBSD 10 you'll see a lot more privilege-separated code on FreeBSD than on OpenBSD. Performance for OpenBSD was a bit better for firewall applications than FreeBSD's import of pf, because we had an older version. I'm not sure if that's still true: Netflix has contributed a lot of performance improvements to our network stack recently (it turns out that they shift quite a lot of packets using FreeBSD) and so this may no longer be true.
I ran OpenBSD on a router for a little while because it was easy to admin via ssh. pfSense uses PHP for the web interface, which consumes 20-30MB of RAM for every action. On a router with 64MB of RAM, this is basically a deal breaker.
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RedHat built their company on making Linux expensive through support contracts, though only 1/10th as expensive as purely proprietary software alternatives... With "supported" linux, there's room for both saving the company big, big money, while still spending enough that there's room for slightly smaller kickbacks to continue flowing.
If RedHat could push into the corporate firewall space (using PF, NOT IPTABLES), at the expense of current "hardware" firewall vendors in the corporate world, I'd be eternall
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Yes, Juniper runs a FreeBSD kernel, but that's about the only similarity. You certainly don't have a full-fledged computer, or a working userland you can access. You get the kernel booting-up their proprietary CLI interface, with their own configuration and command syntax. In fact Cisco's IOS was based on BSD as well, back in the day, but it's diverged substantially at this point, as Juniper's OS probably will if they survive for as many decades as Cisco has.
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Primarily price and/or personal experience. I'm unsure what products you are buying, but with a true Cisco/iOS product your typically going to have to buy used to get anywhere near the price point of rolling your own. So if you don't have the funds or, for whatever reason, you are already familiar with *BSD/PF, rolling your own router can be a very attractive option. That being said, very few people regret buying a Cisco product.
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I use an old SGI O2 as light www duty. Its a small secure OS that comes with a bare minimum of bloat. Whats not to like about that?
So, no buttonfly then?
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Call me user #5 then.
I have an old Athlon beige box I use as whatever I need. It's my backup desktop (in case both my laptop and primary desktop fail), so it's got a light WM (WindowMaker), OpenOffice (plus Abiword for *most* word processing), and so on. It's a Samba file share, storing backups of my more important files (and my porn). It's a retrogaming system, with ZSNES and a metric fuckton of ROMs.
Most importantly, it's a disposable server for whatever I feel like messing around with. I want to learn ho
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Users are the worst security threat around.
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If Theo hadn't systematically pissed off everyone in large corporations that he's come in contact with, they might have written some drivers.
Linus is pragmatic, manages a team of experts well and the so the corporations are happy to work with him.
Re:Daemon Penguin (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Daemon Penguin (Score:5, Insightful)
True. The difference is that if a NetBSD developer emailed me to ask about using RdRand in the kernel (A thing I would know about) I would happily enter into a technical discussion and help them out. If Theo emailed, I would have to refer the email to the lawyers.
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How would your situation be different if the emailer was a NetBSD developer? Your either divulge something your company doesn't want you to divulge or you don't. The way the information is asked have little relevance to the way it is handled once codified under the BSD license.
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The difference is that Theo has acted in a way in the past that has caused us to route all communications from him directly to the lawyers. It's not to do with divulging secrets. It's to do with past behavior.
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They tried the migrations because management has heard about this Linux thing and thinks it's cool. They failed, because they have invested a lot in customising FreeBSD
And probably because their staff has a great FreeBSD expertise, but just standard Linux expertise.
Re:Daemon Penguin (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two replies to this:
1) OpenBSD supports tons of hardware. Click on one of the supported platforms [openbsd.org]. First you'll notice is OpenBSD runs on more than x86. Second, click through. You have to work hard to find a class of hardware that doesn't have some support. Most mainstream hardware is supported with many vendors to select from. When you do find missing hardware it's due to the point 2 below.
2) There may be some truth to the claim that Theo has pissed-off some vendors but it plays a small part. A more significant reason there aren't tons of corporate drivers for OpenBSD is the OpenBSD community won't accept any undocumented code (settings that use magic numbers), binary blobs (other than micro code or firmware) and won't sign NDAs to get the info. For code to go in the base it also has to be licensed under a BSD or ISC license.[1]
Many vendors want us to buy their hardware and trust their giant binary blob won't crash our systems. That's their call. Refusing to buy their hardware is ours.
Because of Theo's and the developer's stand against binary blobs OpenBSD base is one of the freest OSs you'll find. If that means a few missing drivers then so be it. Our systems run fine without them.
[1] The only GPL licensed code in base I can think of is gcc.
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I heard they JUST got ACPI S3/SUSPEND working... only on x86 (not AMD64) and with a lot of footnotes and exceptions. Sign me up!
I used OpenBSD as my primary desktop for a good number of years, but I wouldn't recommend it. That was back when Linux was a mess, too, so OpenBSD being a bit *more broken* didn't look so bad. Unsupported hardware was a big one... Ported software being ancient as all hell and much of it broken, was a big one, too. It's still a good choice f
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"I heard they JUST got ACPI S3/SUSPEND working."
Hopefully Linux will catch up some day.
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Linux ACPI s3/suspend has worked on most of the system I've run across for several years now, including the system I'm typing on, where I use it extensively. There's bugs, which don't get the priority they should, but in any case, you should expect OpenBSD will have to labor for another decade just to reach parity with the Linux ACPI support of TODAY... Not an exciting prospect.
Missing suspend/resume was one of several major reasons I switched from several years of OpenBSD usage, to FreeBSD, and then seve
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One of the reasons I like OpenBSD is the developers are very forthright about why things can't or won't work. Reading the misc@ mail list is a great way to learn about the issues they face trying to get documentation. There are non-trivial issues with both acpi and efi. The developers reverse engineer what they can.
Instead of asking "Why doesn't OpenBSD have better support for $hardware?" we should be asking "Why don't vendors post more public information about their hardware?"
Anyone who grew up
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Thanks for the info, I did indeed mis-recall the story, perhaps because S3 was one of the things I switched to FreeBSD for, several years ago.
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If Theo hadn't systematically pissed off everyone in large corporations that he's come in contact with, they might have written some drivers.
But he doesn't even want those corporations to write those drivers, he just wants the documentations so he (and other devs) can do it themselves.
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That was not the nature of the exchange as I remember it.
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Theo and the OpenBSD developers and users don't want your crappy binary blob. They want documentation so they can write an open, secure, stable driver.
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If you look at open source operating systems which have stagnated or failed it's invariably because leadership or politics have stifled innovation.