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Why OpenBSD Rocks

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Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#91

Post by JdeBP »

defanor wrote: post #63
cat199 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, it's what happens if you actually install a package from source, and so is congruent with what it really means to 'install ' seems preferable to accepting arbitrary segmentation of packages into subsets based on some random package maintainers preference.. also, it's not 1993 and having 100kb of headers on my system is not really a big deal.

But at the same time there are modern general purpose systems (Alpine in particular, and Debian when it comes to GNU documentation) that wouldn't even install documentation together with software. Priorities seem to vary quite a bit.

That's a red herring. Debian's problems with such documentation were largely the licences that it comes under, often requiring doco to be separately packaged so that it could be placed in the "non-free" section. It is not omitted by default because it is doco. It is omitted by default because the Debian people do not classify it as free content.

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#92

Post by enriquto »

jolmg wrote: post #80
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?

I am a newcomer to hating systemd. At first I was indifferent, an init system cannot be so bad after all.

Fuck that. In the last two years, they have changed at least three times the way that the option to delete the /tmp dir is specified. I understood the configuration, edited it so that it did not delete the /tmp dir automatically; and then, upon an innocent update the old config is overridden and the /tmp dir is magically cleaned! This is infuriating. I have never felt actual, physical, rage against any software in 25 years of using computers. That is, until I met systemd!

I do not really care whether the init system is written in C or scripts. But please, allow me to follow a simple logic. Scripts maybe are not very elegant, but I can follow the init process end-to-end and understand where it does that. I have honestly tried to do that with systemd and it is impossible. And I am quite proficient in reading C code and bash scripts. I have a lot of patience and I am willing to spend a few hours of my free time to understand how a program is configured, by reading code if necessary. But this stuff is just batshit crazy.

I can hear in my mind the smug voices of systemd developers saying "but why do you even want to not delete the tmp files". That's not the fucking point motherfuckers! I just want to control my computer.

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#93

Post by naniwaduni »

jolmg wrote: post #80
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?

The big problem with relying on scripting conventions isn't the scripting; it's the lack of a solid foundation to build those scripts from, requiring each script to separately implement service management, probably by copy-paste. What systemd gets right on that front is that you do need a daemon, preferably rooted in init, to spawn services so that they run in a clean, consistent environment.

Beyond that, systemd's extensive scope creep makes the system less robust and more complex than it could be, compared to predecessors which some of us have been working with over a decade, such as the daemontools family (runit, s6, nosh &c.) of supervision systems.

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#94

Post by naniwaduni »

Crontab wrote: post #78
johnr2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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..

This is true if by modern filesystem you're thinking something comparable to ZFS.

On the other hand, if it's the lack of journaling that's a turn-off, seriously consider soft updates (softdep). Despite being seemingly an evolutionary dead end due to implementation complexity demands (basically, it's only feasible to implement at the level where it's possible to diagram out implied dependencies between all primitive operations), it is still in some respects superior to the journaling approach.

In any case, I find that, from reading the design, it feels more elegant and fundamentally right.

http://static.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/us...

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#95

Post by redsavagefiero »

enriquto wrote: post #92
jolmg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I am a newcomer to hating systemd. At first I was indifferent, an init system cannot be so bad after all. Fuck that. In the last two years, they have changed at least three times the way that the option to delete the /tmp dir is specified. I understood the configuration, edited it so that it did not delete the /tmp dir automatically; and then, upon an innocent update the old config is overridden and the /tmp dir is m…

A systemd conceptually is quite a good idea. However systemd is not that systemd. Much rather go with rc.conf + script approach, disable all systemd services, lock selinux against systemd socket activations and run a purpose controlled environment. Avoiding systemd does force one to not use Linux as a desktop..oh well.

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#96

Post by knorker »

admax88q wrote: post #43
knorker wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how they list W^X as an innovation. 1) It's not W^X. W^X implies read-only pages are not possible, and they are. 2) They "invented" that, what 5-10 years after Linux?

> It's not W^X. W^X implies read-only pages are not possible, and they are. What? W^X implies that Write and Execute or mutually exclusive, can't have both active at the same time. > They "invented" that, what 5-10 years after Linux? It's not so much that they "invented" it, but that they're much more diligent about making sure all the base system and ports use it. It's enforced that unless your file-system is mounte…

> What? W^X implies that Write and Execute or mutually exclusive,

The truth table for XOR also says that "neither write nor execute" is impossible.

> It's not so much that they "invented" it, but that they're much more diligent about making sure all the base system and ports use

They've definitely taken it further, and turned on by default and all that, which is great.

However they did at the time say that they both invented it, and that it couldn't be done on x86. Of course grsec had been doing it, including on x86, for many years. Theo's defense of why they've not done things Linux has done is that they're not interested in Linux, and don't look at it. Which is an interesting way to assure you're "state of the art"; don't look at what others are doing.

So both at the time and now they say they "invented" it.

Later of course they "invented" how to do it on x86, too.

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#97

Post by knorker »

asveikau wrote: post #59
knorker wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how they list W^X as an innovation. 1) It's not W^X. W^X implies read-only pages are not possible, and they are. 2) They "invented" that, what 5-10 years after Linux?

Note it says W^X since release 3.3. That was in May 2003. Nearly 16 years ago. When OpenBSD was preaching about W^X and things like -fstack-protector, they really were novel ideas and Linux hadn't yet picked them up.

That's just not true.

By default in an OS distribution, yes I do believe so. But by the time OpenBSD introduced it I'd been running it on Linux for years.

I'm not wet behind the ears, here. I've been running OpenBSD since 2.1.

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#98

Post by knorker »

jstarks wrote: post #40
knorker wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how they list W^X as an innovation. 1) It's not W^X. W^X implies read-only pages are not possible, and they are. 2) They "invented" that, what 5-10 years after Linux?

No. As far as I know, OpenBSD was the first OS with W^X enabled, followed by Windows.

That's an extremely narrow definition of the word "invent".

They adapted it to OpenBSD and I do credit them for doing great work being the first to do it by default in a vanilla OS install, sure.

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#99

Post by knorker »

vbezhenar wrote: post #46
knorker wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how they list W^X as an innovation. 1) It's not W^X. W^X implies read-only pages are not possible, and they are. 2) They "invented" that, what 5-10 years after Linux?

Which Linux distributions use W^X system-wide?

What exactly are you saying they "invented"?

Re: Why OpenBSD Rocks

#100

Post by knorker »

johnr2 wrote: post #71
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…

I think you misunderstood my whole point.

It appears that OpenBSD chose to spend months starting from scratch researching exactly what needed to be mapped in virtual memory, instead of just confirming the x86/x64 platform needs that were already researched and published by that time.

I'm not talking about the two months (or whatever it was) Linux had as head start. I'm talking about the post-publication ~two months.

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