What's New in OpenBSD 4.2? 203
blackbearnh writes "OpenBSD 4.2 was released today, and has a host of new features. O'Reilly's ONLamp site has a pretty thorough overview of the release. 'Even though security is still there, this release comes with some amazing performance improvements: basic benchmarks showed PF being twice as fast, a rewrite of the TLB shootdown code for i386 and amd64 cut the time to do a full package build by 20 percent (mostly because all the forks in configure scripts have become much cheaper), and the improved frequency scaling on MP systems can help save nearly 20 percent of battery power. And then the new features: FFS2, support for the Advanced Host Controller Interface, IP balancing in CARP, layer 7 manipulation with hoststated, Xenocara, and more!'"
Where to get it... (Score:5, Informative)
Since the submitter didn't bother linking to their site (!!?), if you want to try out some of these amazing new features and improvements instead of just reading about them, you should head over to the OpenBSD 4.2 page [openbsd.org] and snag a copy!
Re:Where to get it... (Score:4, Interesting)
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OpenBSD installs quicker than the other OSes I've installed this past few years (FreeBSD, Windows, Various Linux distros, Plan9 from Bell Labs)
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Jun-ichiro "itojun" Hagino (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Jun-ichiro "itojun" Hagino (Score:4, Informative)
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He was a damn fine fellow and it's a real shame to see him gone. RIP.
I need to try BSD (Score:2)
The only problem I run into on OS X is some of the GNU tools aren't there, and the BSD version of stuff like ls and such are different. But you can port install that stuff, so really that issue is mute. I think I'll fire up a virtual server and try out BSD
Re:I need to try BSD (Score:5, Informative)
portupgrade -Nf sysutils/gnutools
echo "
alias ls='gls --color=always'
alias cp='gcp'
alias mv='gmv'
" >> ~/.bashrc
Something similar will probably work on OpenBSD
(oh, and for those who need their [modified] meems... OpenBSD is Undead, netcraft confirms it!)
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With 'ls', at least, you can skip a step. Replace:
with:
What GNU extensions to you use to 'cp' and 'mv' so often to alias them? In a decade of using Linux and FreeBSD interchangeably, I've never noticed a significant difference in those very basic tools.
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That said, I don't see why bash or bloated or scary. It's got quite a few nice features, but nothing that's not necessary, and it runs plenty fast. And scary? It's just a shell.
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That's called a feature
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As for GNU stuff bloatware -- You remind of "ed is the standard editor". Sheesh. bash uses a heck of a lot less memory than xterm, coming in at around 400k unshared.
Love! (Score:5, Funny)
Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
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known for LSD and BSD.
Coincidence? You decide
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What's BSD?
It stands for Bisexual Satanic Daemon. That's a service for Linux that filters packets from the internet and replaces the text from web pages with random extracts from the Satanic Bible and random occurences of '666', and replaces images with obscene pornographic depictions.
You can just ask Google if you don't believe me.
4.2BSD (Score:3, Informative)
(OpenBSD 4.2 seems somewhat less exciting to me.)
How dissapointing- they didn't include Xen (Score:2, Interesting)
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Mind you, that cleanness of code and incredible efficiency comes at the cost of having a usable interface and key features that push people away from OpenBSD into something that will actually do the job they need done, and will do it now.
Request for information (Score:3, Interesting)
If anyone is running Adaptec SCSI 2940 controllers with more than one SCSI hard drive and it works then I'd like to know... if anyone is having problems I'd like to know.
The issue is that I have one 2940 fast narrow card and it won't boot... says there is no O/S. In the same machine... swap that card out to a 2940 fast wide and it boots just fine. Perhaps this is a firmware card issue. I have so far only tested these two cards... I plan to go get a handfull more.
Next issue. With the fast wide all seems 100%. Then I start an rsync from another machine and within seconds I get a kernel panic. There is a bug report here: http://paste.lisp.org/display/49908#1 [lisp.org]
Is OpenBSD bug report # 5616
I'm not at this point asking anyone to debug this. I want to know if others have a similar setup and it works.
This machine is a Pentium I, with two fast narrow SCSI disks and in this case an AHA 2940 FW card. There is nothing else on the bus.
O/S version was 4.1 and now I can try the new version. Since OpenBSD is such a great O/S I sure would like to get to the bottom of this without wasting people's time. If we have a problem we need to know about it and potentially fix it. If its an isolated issue then I need to know this so I can shelve the hardware if in fact it is flakey hardware.
Note: With that fast wide controller... dd if=/dev/sd1 of=/dev/sd1 bs=2048 will run 100% and never glitch at all. But try that rsync on the system.. kernel panics 100% of the time within seconds.
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The issue is that I have one 2940 fast narrow card and it won't boot... says there is no O/S. In the same machine... swap that card out to a 2940 fast wide and it boots just fine. Perhaps this is a firmware card issue. I have so far only tested these two cards... I plan to go get a handfull more.
I use a couple of 2940 narrow and wide "in production" under NetBSD (without problems) and sadly I cannot test this issue under Open. however, I do have anecdotal evidence of the situation you are describing being true (friends with same config as yours tried and failed to boot OpenBSD on the thing -- install works fine and so do other operating systems).
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Unless there's been a huge influx of driver support, which seems unlikely with Theo in charge and insulting polite GPL developers, I see it stuck in supporting network secur
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3d graphics cards, anyone? USB->serial adapters? Wacom graphics tablets? External USB DVD burners? I've seen reports of all of them failing with OpenBSD, where they work well under Linux, even with live Linux CD's.
all these have no purpose in a server orientated OS. OpenBSD supports lots of hardware and people that check if their hardware is supported before whining are known to be running it as a workstation (not a "desktop"). OBSD is exciting because of its PF goodness, various other network magics and security, not because it supports the latest tablets.
Unless there's been a huge influx of driver support, which seems unlikely with Theo in charge and insulting polite GPL developers
judge a man by his deeds, not his attitude.
I see it stuck in supporting network security applicances, not desktop use.
I don't see that as "stuck". not everyone is trying to make the next point-click-drool Noobuntu, you know?
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So you get fascinating network purity, that runs twice as fast, on hardware that's 3-5 years old and therefore half the speed. Getting the "packetfilter" tools improved is great, but when you can't use it with the latest Broadcom drivers because key parts of the drivers were GPL licensed and Theo threw a hissy fit when the actual author noticed and tried to work it out, all that speed is wasted.
it runs twice as fast on new hardware too. Broadcom does not make all of the network adapters in existence. I'm sure they will fix that in the next hackathon as usual. how hard is it to use hardware that is supported by your operating system?
And without good GUI's, or at least more usable interfaces, for systems people who are not quite so experienced, those tools will not be broadly used. That's not a good investment of engineering time.
let me try an analogy (and forget about my sig for a minute) because this is slashdot anyway: not many people can figure out rocket engines; are they not a good investment of engineering time?
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To extend your analogy, a rocket engine that is beautiful and fuel efficient but has to be aimed by getting out and r
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There are reasons people learned to use knives and other tools to skin bears, for the same reason we use good good GUI's or tools for editing sensitive configuration files. It leaves us time to stop chipping rocks into the shape we want and get on with our lives.
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Ahh. Ogg have better tool for making bearskins. Is called flatter rock. Ogg need to upgrade tool for bearskins? Use bigger rock! Makes flatter bearskin!
if we are to properly use your analogy, a GUI is a plastic knife and vi is the swiss army knife.
you still did not answer my question. do you configure Cisco equipment with a GUI? wrangle Oracle with a GUI or sqlplus? manage your servers with VNC or good old ssh?
you have one fucked up view of progress. sure a GUI is suited for video editing, 3D modeling or browsing the WWW and such but not modifying simple configuration plain text files. the right tool for the right job, you know?
so if it doesn't have a
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VNC is unnecessary, and its password handling and user authentication is a security issue. SSH with X capability provides a superior interface. However, when you need console access to a remote server, look at how many of the remote KVM devices are actually VNC wrapped into a web access utility, so I don't discard it co
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1. Well, ASDM is not a bad tool to have around when working with the ASA's
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/security/asa/asa80/asdm60/user/guide/usrguide.html [cisco.com]
2. The Altiga VPN concentrator is 100% GUI - there is no CLI.
3. I manage a wireless network that has close to 400 APs. The WLSE (with its GUI) is much easier to use that telnet'ing to each AP. As soon as we upgrade to LWAPP, GUI administration for our wireless network will be SOP.
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What does that mean? Did you telnet to a switch, login, enter 'enable' and then 'config t'?
Everybody does that.
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Just a thought.
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I'm not a kernel guru and I've not written or even looked at drivers. It takes so much time to even get into this that for me I'd have to be granted another lifetime before I can get seriously involved.
One question that comes to mind is that I've personally never run into an issue with linux on similar h/w and with the same cards. Linux drivers are OSS so it would seem that any issues the linux and other *
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In order to track something like this down I'd have to set the machine up with a serial I/F to another machine and set it up on the net so that it can be properly debugged. I offered to do this. Theo declined. He simply said "no thanks".
I searched the OpenBSD archive of bug reports and found nothing related to the problem. Clearly there are problems however. Those cards work properly in other operating systems. The short of
Good Desktop OS (Score:5, Interesting)
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In fact, I bet it recognizes more devices than my Windoze Vista.
I'll take that bet. Vista's device recognition is pretty damn solid, and is, in all likelihood, going to move from "solid" to "really good" with SP1. Now, I don't know OpenBSD's device recognition rate, but, I know that Linux still isn't as good as Windows, and it would stand to reason that OpenBSD, being less popular than Linux, will have even worse support in that department.
Now to be able to afford a zillion hardware configurations to test both OSes on... ;)
Common device driver layer Re:Good Desktop OS (Score:2)
I wonder if it is possible for all OSS software driver writers to coordinate their efforts and develop a common driver model for all OSS operating systems.
Personally I have written hardware drivers... many years ago I wrote in assembler video drivers for ega/vga cards. After months of digging and gobs of work my conclusion is this is a thankless job... but it is a critically important job
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1) Theo de Raadt, historically, does not play nice with others in the free software community. That shoots down OpenBSD right there.
2) The license issues are very serious: the BSD licenses allow developers to build on other's work and proprietize it, the GPL insists that it remain available to all customers. That's a big, big deal with the proprietary information and NDA's on new hardware.
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The only iss
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http://threadgmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wireless.general/1558 [threadgmane.org]
Theo ranted at the actual copyright owner, who'd been extremely open and polite and had offered up-front to consider dual-licensing:
> No, your message offered that he can come begging, because that is the best that thieves may do.
>
> Come little dog, come beg for forgiveness.
You can't expect pe
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Very good point. I'm getting good discussion on my main post as well and I'm surprised it got mod'ed up.
So it appears the goose can fly but some of its legs are missing. Somehow we need to overcome the politics. I don't know what the solution is.
Would the issues be overcome with a different license orientated just to the driver layer? Writing drivers is thankless work. There are some who enjoy doing this of course and the work is vital. Its a pity their work can't be used because
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Except, of course, that OpenBSD is against binary blobs and NDAs [kerneltrap.org], while some (not all) Linux programmers don't mind [kerneltrap.org]. This has been very well documented in the past [oreillynet.com].
I am always amazed when people who know nothing about OpenBSD or licenses talk about t
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And that doesn't refute the difference between the BSD and GPL licenses where BSD permits those software programs to be proprietized and closed. So it's OK if a BSD developer does it, but not OK if an upstream hardware vendor does it? That's.... unfortunately common among the BSD fans I've worked with.
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I would use OpenBSD on my dual core laptop w/ nvidia 7900 gs instead of Debian Linux if there was a way to use the (non-free) official nvidia drivers.
For now, it is only used by me as a server OS though. PF rules!
Stable branch, still from source only? (Score:3, Interesting)
In any case they have done a lot of good work. Copyleft vs OSS ideology disputes aside. ; )
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I haven't played with OBSD for a couple of years, but I remember starting a build at night and having it done when I got up the next morning (on hardware that was, even then, considered old). I can't imagine that things haven't improved since then.
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One of the things that has put me of OpenBSD is the need to compile from source if you want to use the stable branch. I realise this is partially due to limited resources and priorities, but I would argue that this is probably one area where there is room for improvement.
no you do not. stop spreading FUD. there are binary sets for multiple archs [openbsd.org] in every release. this also goes for the ports. it is clearly stated in the FAQ that if you want stable you should use binary packages. the only time when you have to compile is when you make changes to the kernel (or are tracking -current system or ports).
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It's annoying that STABLE is actually less sta
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Package auditing? (Score:2)
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OpenBSD indicates all changes to its Ports/Packages on the following page [openbsd.org].
If you have configured your OpenBSD machine properly, all that is needed to upgrade an installed package is to enter sudo pkg_add -vv -i -u package_name. No fuss, no muss, and it only takes a few minutes to upgrade all the installed programs to the latest version. No need to read mailing lists or web pages.
Finally, if you can't be bothered to read mailing lists and/or web pages to make sure
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Maybe when you grow up and get a real job you'll understand that manually checking systems is not an acceptable solution. Hard to understand why openb
Never got the hang of patching it (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing I never really figured out with OpenBSD is why errata patches [openbsd.org] are handled the way they are. Why doesn't OpenBSD offer binary updates? For example, here are the instructions to fix errata entry 009 ("Fix possible heap overflow in file(1), aka CVE-2007-1536."):
Given that I installed from binary packages as do most users, and I might not even have a compiler installed, the startup cost of following those steps is fairly substantial. It seems like it would be easier for someone at OpenBSD to run those commands, see which files changed, wrap them up into a tarball, and distribute those - at least for the most popular architecture or two.
Now, I'm not saying they should do this or that they owe it to us end users to do it. I just mean that it'd be amazingly convenient with a seemingly minimal amount of extra work. Am I wrong about what would be involved?
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I actually think this is a good thing. This keeps development focus on improvements that benefit the whole OBSD community rather than on developer's pet projects.
Because... (Score:3, Insightful)
...the OpenBSD philosophy is security through openness. When you receive a security patch as source code, you can see exactly what is being done. If the patch were to include a binary image, verification would be slightly more difficult.
There have been binary patch projects (I used to use one at openbsd.org.mx), but since I have resigned myself to installing a compiler and the whole of the OS source code into /usr/src, I find the binary patches to be superfluous.
OpenBSD does cling to some of the other B
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My point exactly. Thank you for saying it so clearly.
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It would be a pain to devote one of each arch's build machines to -stable instead of -current.
Assuming FreeBSD's tools with a few options over OpenBSD's for simplicity:
It is also generally considered a stock response that an administrator should be doing the patches, so that they understand what's happening in their machine.
I don't know what's on the machine in the first place beyond what the OpenBSD folks said is there; I certainly haven't audited it myself.
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You're seriously underestimating the work involved. An OpenBSD release covers around a dozen machine architectures: one donated Pentium won't cut it.
I mentioned earlier that it'd be for the most popular couple of architectures. We already do this at my company for our OpenBSD machines: maintain an old beater that does nothing but track changes to -stable and package them for other local machines. It'd just be nice if there were an official parallel.
before you even start on the non-trivial amounts of time (necessarily that of a trusted developer) to prepare and test things out.
Seriously, though, why would it take more testing than rolling out just the patches? If I have foo.c and its resulting foo, and you give me foo.patch, both of us should end up with bit-identical new c
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I don't really know if Theo is the one who compiled the ISO I just downloaded and installed, either. At some point there's a leap of trust.
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but even if they didnt. Signed binaries, just like the signed source packages. The downfall of openbsd. People trust the source, because a team audited.
what is new? the answer is... (Score:2, Informative)
Oh boy! (Score:4, Funny)
And the bifflespaf WTF has more pargodoogen XRR! But what about the Garblerackin' snarkenlugey 533p?
Yeah, yeah, I know, it's
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TLB == Translation Lookaside Buffer, this is a special table of values that a cpu creates to manage memory in such a way as to cause all processes to think they are the only process that exist..
So, PF being twice as fast means that OpenBSD can do intelligent things with network packets twice as fast as before.
TLB stuff being faster means that each time a process is switched out, it takes less time to do so. Do recall that fork() creates a new process, so the TL
sp1? (Score:5, Funny)
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But what is the cute code name? (Score:2)
I'm just strollin' (Score:4, Funny)
I assume BSD has other, more useful features though.
BSD License (Score:3, Interesting)
There are SO many 1U security "black boxes" that obviously rip off OpenBSD for 95% of their product it's just pathetic. I don't recall many of them touting that they used OpenBSD or ever hearing some of the "cool" features they SAY they have ever being contributed back to the main code repository for OpenBSD.
Re:BSD License (Score:4, Interesting)
There are SO many 1U security "black boxes" that obviously rip off OpenBSD for 95% of their product it's just pathetic. I don't recall many of them touting that they used OpenBSD or ever hearing some of the "cool" features they SAY they have ever being contributed back to the main code repository for OpenBSD.
On the other hand, they also have a great deal of Linux based products. And whenever they need to fix any Linux bugs or add features, they always contribute them back. Doing otherwise would be a breach of the license and expose them to legal liabilities.
The point is that as a rule, large corporations aren't going to do anything that they aren't legally obliged to do. You would probably call RMS a political zealot and an unrealistic idealist. But at the end of the day he's not the one that expects commercial enterprises to change their nature and act altruistically just because it would be nice. If they give those "cool" features back, they're also giving them to their competitors. Which is probably not a career extending move for the person responsible.
If these realities offend you so much, I would suggest that you avoid releasing any software under the BSD license.
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They are not ripping off OpenBSD. They are using BSD licensed code within the letter and spirit of the license. Sheesh.
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it isnt ripping off if you are not only allowed, but encourage to do just that.
OpenBSD rustiness (Score:2)
This is nice and all, but -does it run (Score:2)
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trolling is a stupid sport. copy&past trolling is even more boring.
let me be the first to say: "old post! [netbsd.org]"
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