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OpenBSD 6.4 released

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Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#121

Post by sverige »

heywire wrote: post #24
mruts wrote: post #13

Linux is a depressing mess after you've used OpenBSD. Such a high quality system, with stellar documentation. It's unfortunate that Linux has become so popular even though the BSD's are so much better. A bad historical accident. Damn you Linus...

Is OpenBSD suitable for use on a laptop? I have a Dell Latitute 7370 running KDE Neon, and it runs really well. All hardware is supported, battery life is on-par with Windows, etc. Would OpenBSD work well on this laptop?

I run OpenBSD on a Dell Latitude as a daily driver. Works great.

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#122

Post by mmt »

lmaximus1983 wrote: post #110
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For almost all of us. Companies extend the BSD OSs with proprietary additions, then abandon the work and it gets lost. With Linux, everyone is forced to play nice and release under the GPL, and the work gets to live as long as people value it. Hence the Linux kernel snowballing and taking over the world, whereas the BSDs have not, despite being at least as strong technically. The better Linux gets, the more people ta…

I actually created an account as this is one of those things that gets repeated a lot and IMO it simply isn't true. 1. The BSDs adoption was severely hurt in the 90s by the AT&T lawsuit, it basically stopped several years of development while the lawsuit legal status was clarified. Linux and the GNU tooling didn't have that problem. If the lawsuit never took place it is doubtful whether the Linux kernel would have go…

> software that is only deployed on one or two servers on a company intranet and the general public will never see it.

I thought that, in this case, it's the company itself who is the "user" of the software and isn't obligated to do anything to/for/about upstream (since there is no stream.. they're not re-distributing it). In that sense, they're not stealing anything, just using what was, explicitly, free to use.

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#123

Post by yellowapple »

toyg wrote: post #102
yellowapple wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...the same way the world has managed to survive for decades without Linux containers in general (let alone specific wrappers around that like Docker is)? With OpenBSD specifically, you can get 90% of the way there with chroots, standard process isolation, and a bit of shell scripting to handle deployment automation. Yeah, Docker's cool, but it's really not that hard to run multiple applications/services on the same…

> With OpenBSD specifically, you can get 90% of the way there with chroots, standard process isolation, and a bit of shell scripting This is a classic case of "THAT HackerNews response to Dropbox" [1]. If it's that easy, why isn't there a prepackaged wrapper with simple switches, rather than leaving developers to fight for themselves among piles of custom hacks? The problem is not just deployment, the Docker differen…

"simplification of the development pipeline"

In my experience, "simplification" and "Docker" don't really go in the same sentence. Yeah, it's (maybe) simpler if you're just plugging things together that are already Dockerized, but if you're writing your own Dockerfiles, none of the actual complexity really goes away. If anything, you're making things even more complex by containerizing things that don't actually need containerized.

"why isn't there a prepackage wrapper"

Because nobody's gotten around to writing one yet, or perhaps because nobody's felt the need to do so yet. Not much stopping anyone from doing so. That's where the "bit of shell scripting" comes in. Writing an rc.d script [1] (using rc.subr to do away with the boilerplate normally associated with the sorts of initscripts normally strawmanned by systemd advocates) ain't any harder than writing a Dockerfile (in my opinion it's actually much nicer/simpler). Neither is creating a user under which your app will run. Hardest part will probably be around deciding what needs to go in your chroot.

Hell, if you include OpenBSD packaging [2] as part of that development pipeline, then tada, you're pretty much there. Install the package, run "rcctl enable your-app-name && rcctl start your-app-name", and you're good to go.

So the trick here would then be to extend that to install and run multiple isolated copies of that package, each instance having its own configuration and chroot. Or perhaps using a single package and writing your service/app such that it does the forking/chrooting for each isolated environment (which is what quite a few OpenBSD-focused daemons already do, from what I can tell/observe).

The overall point, though, is that comparing Docker to Dropbox is erroneous. Dropbox actually was simpler/easier than the "solution" posed by that comment. Compared to the OpenBSD way of doing things, Docker is not; if anything, it's more complexity.

[1]: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/ports/specialtopics.html#RcScrip...

[2]: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/ports/guide.html

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#124

Post by brynet »

brynet wrote: post #9
fosco wrote: post #5

in similar news openssh [0] released a new version recently. noticed 7.7 [1]applied to this openbsd release [0] https://www.openssh.com/txt/release-7.8 [1] https://www.openbsd.org/plus64.html

OpenSSH 7.9 should follow the OpenBSD release.

https://www.openssh.com/releasenotes.html#7.9

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#125

Post by nineteen999 »

atmosx wrote: post #77
AndyMcConachie wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the manpage. One thing I really dislike about modern UNIXes is their lack of decent manpages in place of standins like --help. I love the BSDs and especially OpenBSD for their attention to manpages. It's the main reason why I don't use Linux anymore unless I have to. Adding detailed --help messages would take time away from maintaining manpages, it also presents a duplication of information. If you want to know…

How do you live without docker containers? The fact that docker doesn’t run on BSDs is what drove me away.

Plenty of people live just fine without docker containers, even in the Linux world.

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#126

Post by camgunz »

toyg wrote: post #113
smhenderson wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenBSD should seriously look at their story in that area, because it's one of the few where they could still potentially compete (because Docker is still fundamentally a pile of hacks, and pretty insecure too). I’m pretty sure the Open BSD developers are completely comfortable with their story. They develop this software for themselves first. If you like it and it’s useful to you you are welcome to it. If not, look…

> I’m pretty sure the Open BSD developers are completely comfortable with their story. They were pretty comfortable with their patching story -- until enough people complained and lo, syspatch(8) appeared. Beyond the posturing, nobody likes to run a project that nobody else uses; and sometimes even lusers are right. > Every piece of the system is carefully thought out and organized I am not saying they should rush ou…

There is one defined set of tools. It's called learn to use your OS. Docker is basically "I don't want to learn about init scripts, so I will write thousands of lines of Go code instead".

> ...avoid reinventing the wheel every few weeks

This is pretty ironic in this context.

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#127

Post by reacharavindh »

ams6110 wrote: post #80
reacharavindh wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not fair to compare the two. I love OpenBSD for use cases where I care about correctness, stability, security even at the cost of performance or the having the latest feature set. Firewall, DNS, HTTPD and the like. However, when it comes to running scientific applications and squeezing out last bits of performance or servers where people expect stuff to "just work, and if doesn't do apt-get blah", it's Linux tha…

Do you have a preferred recipe for FreeBSD/ZFS NAS? Is it FreeNAS?

I don't use FreeNAS. I run FreeBSD and ZFS myself.

ZFS file server: https://aravindh.net/post/zfs_fileserver/

ZFS file server performance: https://aravindh.net/post/zfs_performance/

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#128

Post by pjmlp »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #109
pjmlp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence why companies are now trying to move away from Linux on embedded, e.g. ARM mbed, RTOS, Zephyr, Fuchsia, ....

Sure, Linux doesn't have a total monopoly in every domain. Sony used FreeBSD as the basis of the OSs of the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation 4, for instance, and the work they did will never be contributed back. I don't see any proprietary Unix seriously competing with Linux any time soon though.

The OSes that I have listed have all BSD style licenses, nothing proprietary about them as such.

As for competition with proprietary UNIX, probably not against Aix or HP-UX as they survive on maintenance contracts for big customers like banks and telecommunication companies, but Linux is still no match for high integrity computing OSes, many of which are micro-kernels with POSIX userspace available as possible API.

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#129

Post by JoachimS »

enriquto wrote: post #89
JoachimS wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS Office is just one of many applications that I need to use. I use loads of EDA tools that either only exists for Windows, or Linux. I have been a user of LibreOffice since it was called StarOffice. It is dog slow, still has an ugly UI, crashes etc. But for many things it has been and is good enough. (and keeps getting better). Unfortunately, customers wants to use Word-specific files, Excel-specific files with mac…

In your situation, then, you'll be happy by running openbsd in a virtual machine from your windows.

MacOS actually. In which I have Windows in a VM (and a few Linux versions), which works really well. The MacOS BSD userland is something I use extensively. But when the next laptop update cycle comes I can't see myself getting a new MBP.

So what I was hoping to do, and the reason for asking about the state of running VMs in OpenBSD is of course to use it as the main OS, and run the other OSes I need to use in VM. Basically as I do today. I would be close to home in terms if userland experience and gfet good (better) security.

BTW: I found this presentation by Mike Larkin from March 2018 about the state of vmm:

https://www.openbsd.org/papers/asiabsdcon2018-vmm-slides.pdf

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#130

Post by JoachimS »

klez wrote: post #100
JoachimS wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QEMU sounds like a rather heavy way to do it.

I've always thought of qemu as the lightweight way to virtualizea system, but maybe it's just an impression. Or did you mean that using a VM is a heavy way to try a system out?

As a heavier way of running a VM then what you get using the hardware virtualization support in the CPU the way most modern VM systems do like VMware, Virtualbox, Parallels etc.
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