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OpenBSD 6.4 released

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Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#71
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the release notes: sendmsg(2), sendto(2), recvfrom(2) and recvmsg(2) are run without KERNEL_LOCK. The lock is being removed, slowly with care, piece by piece.

Also, I think FreeBSD eliminated the giant lock ~10 years ago and maintains similarly good documentation. It’s just a matter of priorities, and SMP scalability/high performance has never been on the top of the OpenBSD list.

I thinks its a greyscale and have always been. Silly things like floppy (that noone uses) on fbsd used to attach with [GIANT LOCKED] for the longest time (if not still) but it doesn't matter. You would not call fbsd still under GL just because 1.44MB floppy drivers don't get any attention. So its not a binary on-or-off on any OS, its a process of unlocking one part at a time, out of hundreds, thousands of small subsystems and drivers without causing races. OpenBSD is most certainly behind, but there is no nice line over which you can say "Ah, now its not GL anymore", since there will be some part somewhere for some arch where you don't care that still retains the lock, and there were parts from day #1 that was completely unlocked on obsd like the syscall getpid() in all its triviality and race-free-ness.

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#72
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the release notes: sendmsg(2), sendto(2), recvfrom(2) and recvmsg(2) are run without KERNEL_LOCK. The lock is being removed, slowly with care, piece by piece.

Also, I think FreeBSD eliminated the giant lock ~10 years ago and maintains similarly good documentation. It’s just a matter of priorities, and SMP scalability/high performance has never been on the top of the OpenBSD list.

> It’s just a matter of priorities

Yes, and goals. OpenBSD is much more conservative with regard to features, and focuses on security, and that results in a more secure system overall. If you need to eek out every last percent of performance, use something else. If you want to worry less about security on a system that is fairly exposed (e.g. a firewall), then it can be an extremely good fit. For example, here's a comparison of security advisories for the main OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Linux projects (that is, not separated and exported items like OpenSSH).[1][2] While I'm sure these lists have their problems, they are interesting. Specifically, the number of exploits column...

1: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/7/Freebsd-Freebsd.html?ve...

2: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/163/Openbsd-Openbsd.html?...

3: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/47/Linux-Linux-Kernel.htm...

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#73
post #48
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. All the software you mention is relatively recent (with the exception of VMware arguably) and Linux was ahead of the BSDs in adoption long before these applications were created. Now what exactly created this divide to begin with is a matter of debate but it took place mostly in the 90's and the very early 00's. By the mid 2000's it was clear that BSDs would have a really hard time ever cat…

I've always blamed the licensing. Lots of people adopted BSD and Linux in the early years. The Linux users gave back (often because they had to) and the BSD users often didn't.

Which is a consequence of BSD style licenses, yet every time a project switches from GPL to something in the BSD spirit there are jumps of joy.

So in the long run it is back to the old freeware days, with the lower lever free and everything on top closed, with zero contributions.

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#74
post #48
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. All the software you mention is relatively recent (with the exception of VMware arguably) and Linux was ahead of the BSDs in adoption long before these applications were created. Now what exactly created this divide to begin with is a matter of debate but it took place mostly in the 90's and the very early 00's. By the mid 2000's it was clear that BSDs would have a really hard time ever cat…

I've always blamed the licensing. Lots of people adopted BSD and Linux in the early years. The Linux users gave back (often because they had to) and the BSD users often didn't.

That didn't seem to work the same way for say.. mail server software?

Sendmail, postfix and qmail all had BSD-ish licenses, and those three covered quite a majority of all opensource mail serving at the time of BSD-vs-Linux "in the same early years"

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPL (distribute your code) is better than BSD permissive (do what you want)? For whom?

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…

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

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#76

I run OpenBSD as my border firewall which it handles very well. One thing I wish that OpenBSD devs would change in their philosophy is the --help messages. Many commands simply offer a list of switches, as if that's somehow helpful. Sometimes you need the detail in a man page, but a lot of times you don't and it would save so much time and energy to have a succinct list in the --help message itself. # syspatch --help…

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…

Indeed, as an example "ls --help" on Linux prints at least 3 pages of information on stdout. I would rather read top quality man page and have a succinct "-h" message.

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#77

I run OpenBSD as my border firewall which it handles very well. One thing I wish that OpenBSD devs would change in their philosophy is the --help messages. Many commands simply offer a list of switches, as if that's somehow helpful. Sometimes you need the detail in a man page, but a lot of times you don't and it would save so much time and energy to have a succinct list in the --help message itself. # syspatch --help…

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.

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#78

I run OpenBSD on my router and it's great. It was refreshing to not need Google for figuring out how to set things up, because everything is in the included manual pages, which often do a great job explaining new concepts. Want a quick intro to OSPF? man ospfd I don't think I'll run OpenBSD as a desktop OS unless performance drastically improves, but it's staying on my router for the foreseeable future.

can you elaborate on your performance concerns?

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#79
post #36
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing Linux has going for it is a bunch of popular features for developers' desktops: * Electron apps - VSCode, Atom, Slack, almost every universal desktop app that gets released today. Individual ports of apps to FreeBSD exist, but there is no way to automatically build Electron apps for any of the BSDs. * Good desktop virtualization - KVM, VirtualBox (okay FreeBSD has these in theory), VMware * First-class Dock…

Docker trends do favour to Linux, while the virtualization in FreeBSD IMO is still a hard wall for many people. Jails, ezjail, bhyve, chyve, etc. Requires amount of works to get it just right. While docker runs a container is straight forward. I don't mean which is better but definitely *BSD is less attractive than mainstream Linux.

vmm in OpenBSD is pretty easy:

    vmctl create disk1.img -s 10G

    vmctl start vm1 -d disk1.img -b /bsd.rd -L -c

Re: OpenBSD 6.4 released

#80
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...

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?
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