Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why OpenBSD Rocks

why-openbsd.rocks

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 107 posts

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#71

Post by johnr2 »

knorker wrote: post #31

Last time I tried the full disk encyrption [sic] it was an awful setup compared to Linux. > https://why-openbsd.rocks/fact/meltdown-spectre/ Uh, yeah. They did that, just like Linux did before them. I especially like the reply to the announcement that was "uh… I hope you didn't spend these two months coming up with that solution. We already did that for Linux, so you could have just asked".

> They did that, just like Linux did before them. I especially like the reply to the announcement that was "uh… I hope you didn't spend these two months coming up with that solution. We already did that for Linux, so you could have just asked".

Linux developers were told about meltdown/spectre right away, but OpenBSD wasn't told until the end of the embargo over two months later.

https://www.itwire.com/security/81338-handling-of-cpu-bug-di...

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#72

Post by zokula »

snazz wrote: post #30
swills wrote: post #21

How is OpenBSD performance these days?

Plenty serviceable as a desktop. That said, I run pretty lightweight software. As with most OSs, an SSD is recommended. I made sure to pick out hardware knowing it would be compatible; that might be the bigger issue.

If your operating system needs an SSD than you need a better operating system.

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#74

Post by legosteen11 »

I wanted to install and try OpenBSD on my Librebooted Thinkpad T60, but unfortunately it is not possible to use full disk encryption with a non-custom Libreboot rom (you apparently need SeaBios instead of Grub2 for this to work). I find it quite sad, because I think Libreboot + OpenBSD would be the ultimate security and privacy-focused combo.

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#75

Post by nwmcsween »

The points aren't OpenBSD specific though:

* ASLR - every modern OS has some form of this.

* FDE - there are reasons (IIRC) FDE is better at FS level than block so this is sort of a negative.

* LibreSSL - OpenSSL API is still a tire fire.

* PIE - Possible on IIRC fbsd, nbsd, linux, etc.

* UTF-8 only libc - there are issues here, such as strcasecmp.

* noexec - IIRC this has been cross OS since the dawn of time (at least early 2000's).

* pledge - pledge is cool, I'm trying to implement something similar using google kafel and a macro that turns `vow(id, kafel_string, flags)` into a compile time bpf filter.

* strlcpy - is sort of junk as it has to iterate over ALL of src so for example strlcpy(d, "superlongstring...", 2) will read all of "superlongstring..."

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#77

Post by Crontab »

JohnFen wrote: post #42

Since SystemD has become so prevalent in Linux, I've been looking longingly at BSD. The only problem is that I have a large number of machines that I'd need to move over, and it's a pretty intimidating amount of work. But I'm planning on beginning the move, one system at a time...

I installed Debian on a virtual machine the other day and, frankly, it felt a lot like using Solaris: a weird init system paired with unintuitive commands for manipulating network interfaces. All that said, it worked well in my testing, and I would use when hardware or software compatibility demanded it.

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#78

Post by Crontab »

johnr2 wrote: post #68
JohnFen wrote: post #42

Since SystemD has become so prevalent in Linux, I've been looking longingly at BSD. The only problem is that I have a large number of machines that I'd need to move over, and it's a pretty intimidating amount of work. But I'm planning on beginning the move, one system at a time...

> Since SystemD has become so prevalent in Linux, I've been looking longingly at BSD. After ~20 years of using Debian, I switched my desktop PC to OpenBSD about a year ago due to concerns about the direction Linux has taken (eg. systemd). It was easier to set up the kind of minimalist desktop I like than on Debian, where I have to change a lot of defaults (eg. switching to sysvinit). The package manager is great, and…

> There's no filesystem journal

That's one that has been sticking out to me lately. Both NetBSD and OpenBSD, as much as I like them, lack a modern filesystem..

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#79

Post by doublepg23 »

I was actually playing with OpenBSD while stuck with the flu.

The good:

* ifconfig handling everything is brilliant. Having one tool to do networking, including WiFi(!) is great.

* the documentation is good. `man -k` normally gets you what you need.

* "base builds base" is pretty cool. I managed to rebuild base on a 1GHz single core BeagleBone Black in 48hrs.

the bad:

* Performance. I didn't think this would be a huge issue, however it's much slower than Trisquel, Parabola and GuixSD running GNOME on a x200. WiFi also seemed slow.

* IPv6 seemingly didn't work, even when verifying my ifconfig setup.

* Filesystem. I don't expect them to add ZFS due to code size and license, but still using UFS is laughable. UFS seemed to have I/O deficiencies which exacerbated the performance issue.

* the other documentation. While the manpages are good, information on the internet can be contradictory depending on it's age.

* No lsblk. This is more of a nitpick, but there is seemingly no way to get the right name for a disk without parsing through `dmesg` and guessing with partition number.

* pkg_add. It's extremely slow compared to apt even and separates it's parts out for seemingly no reason. Package management in general is somewhat awful.

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#80

Post by jolmg »

JohnFen wrote: post #42

Since SystemD has become so prevalent in Linux, I've been looking longingly at BSD. The only problem is that I have a large number of machines that I'd need to move over, and it's a pretty intimidating amount of work. But I'm planning on beginning the move, one system at a time...

It impresses me that the hate for systemd persists even after so much time has passed. I thought it was just inertia.

I see systemd as a framework to define and control services that is much more robust than the old system that relied on scripting conventions. Why the hate? What's people's ideal here?

Post reply on HN