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OpenBSD was right to disable hyperthreading [video]

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Re: OpenBSD was right to disable hyperthreading [video]

#61

Post by hackworks »

phicoh wrote: post #4
mikece wrote: post #2

Why aren’t the *BSD operating systems more popular in the server and workstation spaces?

I'd say, release early, release often. In general, *BSDs take more time to work out technical details, make sure that the design is right. The approach in the Linux communtity is much more, release something that mostly works now and fix it later.

I think it again falls into kernel versus whole system. Releasing an update to the whole system is more work than releasing the kernel.

Little orthogonal: It sort of rhymes with the mono repository versus collection of micro repositories mindset. Does BSD have more code reuse since it is whole system?

Re: OpenBSD was right to disable hyperthreading [video]

#62

Post by mruts »

phicoh wrote: post #4
mikece wrote: post #2

Why aren’t the *BSD operating systems more popular in the server and workstation spaces?

I'd say, release early, release often. In general, *BSDs take more time to work out technical details, make sure that the design is right. The approach in the Linux communtity is much more, release something that mostly works now and fix it later.

OpenBSD has had a six month release cycle for a very long-time.

Re: OpenBSD was right to disable hyperthreading [video]

#64

Post by throwaway2048 »

rrss wrote: post #60
throwaway2048 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because unless you make hyperthreading a purely opt in thing, there is no way to know as a kernel if two things that are security sensitive relative to each other are being run on the same core as Hyperthreading neighbors. Two threads in a web browser that are assigned to different websites for instance.

> there is no way to know as a kernel if two things that are security sensitive relative to each other The kernel has a way, and it is process isolation. The kernel doesn't care if you want two threads in the same process to be isolated from one another - that's your problem, not the kernel's. Anyway, thread isolation already doesn't work even without hyperthreading-specific attacks: "we have discovered that untruste…

Chrome doesn't exclusively use process isolation, several sites will share the same chrome process. This is only one example, another might be for instance, authenticating users on one thread, and sensitive authenticated data on another, which is an extremely common pattern.

Re: OpenBSD was right to disable hyperthreading [video]

#65

Post by msla »

mikece wrote: post #2

Why aren’t the *BSD operating systems more popular in the server and workstation spaces?

A number of good replies in this thread, and I usually reach for the USL lawsuit as the go-to explanation, but another explanation I've heard probably has some merit as well: Linux came up from the PC world, whereas BSD came from academia and, later, techie companies.

Therefore, bedroom hackers would be more likely to be able to install Linux on the hardware they had, not the hardware they wished they had, so they'd reach for Linux when their employer wanted some kind of backroom system that didn't cost an arm and a leg.

Therefore, there was more Linux out there beyond the explicitly techie companies, the ones who'd have already bought Solaris or IRIX or HP-UX, and the current userbase drives both features and future userbase.

Re: OpenBSD was right to disable hyperthreading [video]

#66

Post by zdw »

marcosdumay wrote: post #40
mikece wrote: post #2

Why aren’t the *BSD operating systems more popular in the server and workstation spaces?

It has lower performance than Linux, and some compatibility problems that appear once in a while. It used to be fashionable to run BSD on security focused machines (like firewalls). I'm not sure why Linux won there too.

In using both BSD and Linux based appliances, the Linux based ones tend to have more features (VyOS, etc.) and cover more hardware (OpenWRT, etc.) but aren't as long-term stable and problem free, as well as the BSD ones.

OpenBSD has much more complete and accurate documentation, which is a plus when you're debugging a problem.

I would opine that Linux won because it was familiar but not ideal - see also people trying to shoehorn Windows into embedded systems where a unix variant would be a more ideal pick.

Re: OpenBSD was right to disable hyperthreading [video]

#67

Post by siffland »

throw0101a wrote: post #26
thefz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC Netflix is using FreeBSD. Outside the server scope, OSX is mainly BSD with a different kernel. FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD too.

NetApp, Dell-EMC Isilon, Juniper, iXsystems, pfSense, etc: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free... If you follow the commit logs, you'll regularly see "Sponsored by" messages: * https://www.freshsource.org/commits.php Not just for the core OS, but also in ports and also drivers (Intel, Chelsio, Mellonox). FreeBSD in particular has always been persnickety about acknowledging work done on beha…

I have been using FreeBSD since 1999, a great OS and i love it, at work i am a Linux system administrator.

One of the huge reasons people use FreeBSD is simply licensing. If you dont want to release any source code simply build your custom app on FreeBSD and only include BSD licensed software. Makes being proprietary simple.

Note, this does not mean any companies that do this do not give back to the project, they do in the way of code commits and sometimes donations.

Re: OpenBSD was right to disable hyperthreading [video]

#68

Post by beefhash »

technofiend wrote: post #51
dleslie wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a time when the commercial BSD companies were fighting among themselves and allowing their technology to become stale and remain expensive, Linux came along with RedHat and SuSE. Those two made an effort to meet directly with business leaders, attend all the trade shows, and gave their product away for free. Their model was at least as shocking as their license; hitherto, hardly any business software was free and…

Even prior to RedHat and SuSE for some reason System V-based systems were deemed more suitable to business, at least by Sun Microsystems. I stand corrected based on beef's comment below: they migrated from BSD to Sys V as part of Solaris aka SunOS V. I was misremembering their adding streams support to SunOS 4 as the big switch but I was wrong about that.

SunOS 4 was still BSD-based. You can find the source code for SunOS 4.1.4 on TUHS's code comparison site[1], but for some reason, you can't browse the tree.

Solaris was when Sun made the jump to System V. AFAIK part of that was because Sun had financial difficulties at the time and AT&T offered to help them -- in exchange for Sun to rebase on System V.

[1] e.g. https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SunOS-4.1.4/us...

Re: OpenBSD was right to disable hyperthreading [video]

#69

Post by ajsnigrutin »

A wee bit offtopic, but if we look at the VW/dieselgate, and the aftermath of it all, and the class-actions, returns, refunds, etc, and hyundai/kia lies about gas milage and people getting refunds for gas...

...when is something like this going to happen to intel?

We've bought CPUs with excpectations of promised performance (like people did with emission expectations and gas milage expectations), they messed up, and we get lower speed, and now no hyperthreading and still no refunds? If i bought a 60" TV and the picture was only 50" with a black border around, i'd return it immediately... why isn't there some action regarding CPUs?

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