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OpenBSD 6.5

openbsd.org

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Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#2
Been running 6.5 snapshots in my travel laptop for some weeks and everything just works. The laptop is a ThinkPad X200 which is a bit slow for my needs, but upgrading it to ThinkPad X230 later this week should help.

I really enjoy how simple the system is after all these years with Linux. I will always continue using Linux in my main computers, but for surfing, some hobby programming and as a travel OS OpenBSD definitely won me over.

And I guess it runs quite nicely in the X250 and T450 tier already, maybe even newer ThinkPads. And when I say runs, I mean runs much nicer than many Linux distributions with their default installation.

Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#3
> ROP mitigations in clang(1) have been improved, resulting in a significant decrease in the number of polymorphic ROP gadgets in binaries on i386/amd64.

Does anybody know if there's a writeup somewhere? Or what are the commits to look at.

Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#4
> Xorg(1), the X window server, is no longer installed setuid. xenodm(1) should be used to start X.

That is really great!

Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#6
post #4

> Xorg(1), the X window server, is no longer installed setuid. xenodm(1) should be used to start X. That is really great!

Does this mean that I can’t startx on a machine that I rarely use X on? Is a display manager now required for running X?

From a security standpoint this makes sense, of course, but how are you supposed to deal with a half-desktop-half-server system?

Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#8
post #3

> ROP mitigations in clang(1) have been improved, resulting in a significant decrease in the number of polymorphic ROP gadgets in binaries on i386/amd64. Does anybody know if there's a writeup somewhere? Or what are the commits to look at.

I haven’t followed this work but Todd Mortimer’s slides[1] from last year stuck with me as a good introduction.

[1] https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2018-rop.pdf

Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#9
post #2

Been running 6.5 snapshots in my travel laptop for some weeks and everything just works. The laptop is a ThinkPad X200 which is a bit slow for my needs, but upgrading it to ThinkPad X230 later this week should help. I really enjoy how simple the system is after all these years with Linux. I will always continue using Linux in my main computers, but for surfing, some hobby programming and as a travel OS OpenBSD defini…

>I really enjoy how simple the system is after all these years with Linux.

I still shake my head when I think back to the 90s and how Linux managed to overtake the BSDs. Good to see they are still very much alive and moving forward.

Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#10
post #2

Been running 6.5 snapshots in my travel laptop for some weeks and everything just works. The laptop is a ThinkPad X200 which is a bit slow for my needs, but upgrading it to ThinkPad X230 later this week should help. I really enjoy how simple the system is after all these years with Linux. I will always continue using Linux in my main computers, but for surfing, some hobby programming and as a travel OS OpenBSD defini…

Odd that you put this on a the travel laptop and not the desktop, I imagine most OS polygot its the inverse for things like battery life, touchpad drivers, webcam driver. Am curious why not make the switch on desktop? Same semantics? Same dotfiles?

Do you use the same window manager across both linux and openbsd?

Also what's the "much nicer" you refer to.. Please sell me

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