OpenBSD 5.2 Released

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."

Re:Good News!

[Spy Handler]

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]

Re:LOL

[ArchieBunker]

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.

Re:Good News!

[mr_da3m0n]

Also, the documentation is pretty amazing. They treat inaccuracies and omissions in documentation with the same urgency as a security vulnerability. Seriously, it's pretty stellar, reading the man page for any driver usually explains how to fix the issue you are currently having. All the documentation is there, everything is covered exhaustively, yet entirely tersely. It's extremely polished, beyond its crude, bare appearance in general. It has sane defaults and very clear, simple mechanics with little ambuity -- everything is manageable, everything is transparent. It's one of the rare platforms on which when something doesn't work, I am usually safe in assuming I did something wrong, or there was something I didn't quite understand or just overlooked entirely. It is in many aspects my favorite unix flavor, it feels like it is made of simple, immutable things I can trust to behave in a consistent way, it makes for a pretty relaxed experience, when so few things are opaque.

WTF is this about Theo or OpenBSD?

[ipquickly]

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.

Re:OBSD firewalls vs others - what's the diff?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:WTF is this about Theo or OpenBSD?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:LOL

[LurkerXXX]

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.