It's amusing that commit 300,000 fixes a buffer overflow. It's a demonstration that large C programs do not converge to the state of having no buffer overflows.
You may be right or you may be wrong, but that's not how you demonstrate convergence :)
OpenBSD Passes 300,000 Commits
11–20 of 40 posts
Re: OpenBSD Passes 300,000 Commits
#12For those who have heard of OpenBSD but have not used it, I strongly recommend trying it on your next server appliance. I have been using it on my servers for some time now and I have been very happy. The entire OS seems to be of substantially higher quality than Linux.
> The entire OS seems to be of substantially higher quality than Linux.
That's a pretty bold statement. Care to elaborate?
Re: OpenBSD Passes 300,000 Commits
#13For those who have heard of OpenBSD but have not used it, I strongly recommend trying it on your next server appliance. I have been using it on my servers for some time now and I have been very happy. The entire OS seems to be of substantially higher quality than Linux.
> The entire OS seems to be of substantially higher quality than Linux. That's a pretty bold statement. Care to elaborate?
Sure.
Everything is more reliable. Not one crash yet. When I use Linux, I would have expected several by now.
Everything works perfectly out of the box and has sane and safe defaults.
Everything is more consistent. For example, the ifconfig/iwconfig/wpa_supplicant/etc. mish-mash on Linux is replaced with just ifconfig. All interactions with the OS are straightforward and standardized.
The code is substantially better. Less macrotanium, better naming, more understandable.
There is clearly more attention to (and more expertise about) security. This is, of course, what OpenBSD is (rightfully) known for.
Re: OpenBSD Passes 300,000 Commits
#14For those who have heard of OpenBSD but have not used it, I strongly recommend trying it on your next server appliance. I have been using it on my servers for some time now and I have been very happy. The entire OS seems to be of substantially higher quality than Linux.
> The entire OS seems to be of substantially higher quality than Linux. That's a pretty bold statement. Care to elaborate?
This was posted on HN a little while ago. It gives some great insight into their process : http://www.openbsd.org/papers/dev-sw-hostile-env.html
Summary: Basically, the development process for OpenBSD is the same as stomach acid. To survive this environment is an exercise in code correctness. I.E. It's designed to break things that aren't up to par. The end result is a platform that doesn't sacrifice stability and security (the two often are two sides of the same coin) for the sake of compatibility.
Re: OpenBSD Passes 300,000 Commits
#15For those who have heard of OpenBSD but have not used it, I strongly recommend trying it on your next server appliance. I have been using it on my servers for some time now and I have been very happy. The entire OS seems to be of substantially higher quality than Linux.
I'm looking to set up an OpenBSD server myself. Things are going quite well, but I'm not looking forward to the upgrade process (as an example, here's 5.4 -> 5.5 http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade55.html ). How easy has it been for you to upgrade?
Its actually very easy to upgrade OpenBSD. There is lots of information on that page and you should read it all, but the actual process of the upgrade is quick.
Re: OpenBSD Passes 300,000 Commits
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The entire OS seems to be of substantially higher quality than Linux. That's a pretty bold statement. Care to elaborate?
Sure. Everything is more reliable. Not one crash yet. When I use Linux, I would have expected several by now. Everything works perfectly out of the box and has sane and safe defaults. Everything is more consistent. For example, the ifconfig/iwconfig/wpa_supplicant/etc. mish-mash on Linux is replaced with just ifconfig. All interactions with the OS are straightforward and standardized. The code is substantially better…
I would expect to run Linux for many, many months doing pretty hard work before expecting a crash. I genuinely can't recall the last crash I had that wasn't hardware-related - probably an early ext3 issue?
Re: OpenBSD Passes 300,000 Commits
#17Might be slightly off-topic, but how would you compare it to DragonflyBSD? I've been thinking on trying out the main BSD.
Re: OpenBSD Passes 300,000 Commits
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm looking to set up an OpenBSD server myself. Things are going quite well, but I'm not looking forward to the upgrade process (as an example, here's 5.4 -> 5.5 http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade55.html ). How easy has it been for you to upgrade?
Its actually very easy to upgrade OpenBSD. There is lots of information on that page and you should read it all, but the actual process of the upgrade is quick.
Following -current and updating within a release
Would you recommend the patch by patch process or the full check out code and compile?
Re: OpenBSD Passes 300,000 Commits
#19For those who have heard of OpenBSD but have not used it, I strongly recommend trying it on your next server appliance. I have been using it on my servers for some time now and I have been very happy. The entire OS seems to be of substantially higher quality than Linux.
I appreciate the OS, but I wish it had a longer lifetime, as it is I can't really set it up on servers in a serious manner.
It might be good on firewalls though where they don't expose a lot of services to the internet.
Re: OpenBSD Passes 300,000 Commits
#20For those who have heard of OpenBSD but have not used it, I strongly recommend trying it on your next server appliance. I have been using it on my servers for some time now and I have been very happy. The entire OS seems to be of substantially higher quality than Linux.
I appreciate the OS, but I wish it had a longer lifetime, as it is I can't really set it up on servers in a serious manner. It might be good on firewalls though where they don't expose a lot of services to the internet.
That's not really a major concern if you've used it at all.
Their lifecycle is security oriented and you only get reliable security coverage if you keep something up to date. There's no point in sitting around living off backports and patches forever as all that does is create work.
It's pretty easy to upgrade as well.
With respect to application services, they can evolve independently to the base OS as well.