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OpenBSD Going SMP, NetBSD Getting There

Posted by Nik on from the NP:-All-mine dept.

Silmaril writes "OpenBSD started a CVS branch to add SMP to the kernel." Meanwhile, over on the NetBSD side of the fence, Bill Sommerfeld has committed his i386 MP spinup work. See both those links for more details.

17 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. SCORE!!! by Duke+of+URL · · Score: 2
    I nearly wet my plants when I saw this article. SMP!! I thought it may have been a typo. Seeing as how only like 5 of us in all of the Slashdot readership will see this, I thought I could share my excitement without being moderated or something.

    Its in progress, as the note says, so we've got to wait a little longer. Now I have a 'good' excuse to get a dual processor box!

    While your around, check out the OpenBSD T-shirts and stuff:

    Script Kittie

    Other T-shirts

    and the OpenBSD 2.6 CD-ROM


    1. Re:SCORE!!! by Jesus+Christ · · Score: 2

      Now I have a 'good' excuse to get a dual processor box!

      Two words: Abit BP6! (Is BP6 a word? :-) It's a dual socket 370 (celeron) mainboard with Ultra ATA/66 support and so much more. Check out the "explicit freebsd support for abit bp6" story from a few days ago.

      Remember Celerons are generally very overclockable, and this board is great for that. I have two 400s running [stable] at 500MHz, and I could push it to 550 if heat weren't a problem. $150 for the board plus $90 for two processors is not bad at all. ;-)

      Just beware the heat problems. Read my post in the previously mentioned FreeBSD/Abit BP6 story.

      If Celerons aren't your bag, maybe try to find an SMP Pentium Pro board. Either way, I think you'll be pleasantly suprised -- SMP BSD is a lot of fun.

      Seeing as how only like 5 of us in all of the Slashdot readership will see this . . .

      Yeah, it really is amusing... as much traffic as the stories on the main page get, you'd really expect there to be more than 30 posts in the average BSD-section story. Oh well... maybe it's for the best.

      I am the Lord.

      --

      I am the Lord.
      God Hates Moderators.

  2. The Reason... by Ice · · Score: 3

    The reason that this post doesn't appear on the main Slashdot page is that Slashdot is a little slanted. Those of you that are reading this have probably figured this out by now, but I'll say it anyways, for those still not in "the know". Slashdot readers are predominantly Linux users that have a lot in common with Mac users; they are very loyal and have extremely closed minds (especially when it comes to using different operating systems). I first found the BSDs about 9 months ago when I got extremely frustrated installing Mandrake Linux (probably one of the easiest to install) and figured, "There's got to be an easier way!!!" Well, I was right. Unfortunately, most Slashdotters (who are loyal to Linux) don't understand that there is anything better out there and us BSDers take a lot of @#$% for that. Oh well, we all know who's running the superior OS!!! =)

    1. Re:The Reason... by Oates · · Score: 2

      I discovered BSD back in 1992 in college. A cluster of seven NeXT cubes (Gluttony, Sloth, Greed, Pride, Envy, Anger, Lust) were being underutilized in one of the computer labs. They were a vast improvement from the AIX and Ultrix boxes that were the only UNIX on campus at the time. I got Linux a short while later for my 386 with 8mb of RAM. I nearly forgot about BSD until the BSD advocates started mouthing off in Slashdot and Linux Journal. I bought the Walnut Creek BSD 3.2 and 3.3, installed it, uninstalled it, reinstalled Linux, and was happy for a while. It came down to device support, and Linux supported more of my hardware at the time. In January I moved my firewall to OpenBSD and loved it. My wife, on the other hand, swears up and down that OpenBSD was killing her ICQ connections so I put RedHat 6.1 on the box and she didn't have the problems anymore. I don't know for sure if OpenBSD and ipf were breaking ICQ, but I really did love having that nice, clean BSD OS on my firewall. No guessing what a program did, and installing a second network card for the cable modem was almost painless (once I read the documentation). Now, superior OS? Hmmm...mebee, but you have to admit that more programs, more drivers, and more critical mass are being applied to Linux today. That makes it very attractive for me. Chris

    2. Re:The Reason... by Ice · · Score: 1

      You're right... there are more programs, more drivers, and arguably more support for Linux. I disagree on the support aspect because the FreeBSD Handbook is the one-stop shop for info on how to do almost anything in FreeBSD (what I primarily use). And yes, there are more programs and drivers written explicitly for Linux, but I think you'd find that with a little bit of work you can get just about anything you run under Linux to run under BSD. Plus, at least FreeBSD, runs Linux binaries so smoothly you'd never notice you were on a BSD machine. I think that Linux has a lot going for it, but is still a little bit behind BSD in a lot of places that count. Just my 2 cents. Eric

  3. Re:??? by nikc · · Score: 2

    It was my call.

    There's not a lot of detail in the story as is at the moment. SMP support isn't in OpenBSD yet, all that's happened is a CVS branch has been created in preparation for the work. Unless I'm mistaken, it's little more than a statement of intent at the moment. Similarly, the NetBSD work is very prelimenary.

    If these were first forays in to new areas in general (like, say, USB would have been a year or more back) then this would have been front page material (IMHO). As it is, however, various other OSs, commercial and open source already have SMP support, so I didn't think it was as important.

    Keep in mind that the front page has room for about 15 stories at a time, and one of the reasons for the creation of the BSD (and other sections) is so that stories that shouldn't make the front page still get an airing.

    Of course, at the end of the day it's just one person's judgement. I'm not going to get it right all the time. So I rely on feedback like this to let me know what sort of job I'm doing.

    N/p

  4. Re:??? by Duke+of+URL · · Score: 2

    Why only 15 stories in a day? Why not 20? There are a lot of good stories that must get passed up. Instead we have duplicate/disapearing stories, with some real crap getting front page, while other computer news gets shelved or not published at all.

    I know, I just critized Slashdot. I'm about to loose some karma points. Oh well. But my question still stands, why not a few more stories each day?

  5. how to make icq work on openbsd by pixel+fairy · · Score: 1
    disclaimer: have not tried this, just got it off the news group.

    pass in quick on ne3 proto tcp/udp from any port = 4000 to any port > 1024

    use your network interface instead of ne3 and put this line in /etc/ipf.rules
    then, ipf -Fa -f /etc/ipf.rules to restart the firewall.

    1. Re:how to make icq work on openbsd by Oates · · Score: 1

      This is what I ended up with for OpenBSD:

      # allow ICQ
      #pass in quick on ne3 proto udp from icq.mirabilis.com to any port 1024 >
      5000

      Not that different. I went out and retrieved the ICQ server IPs and inserted them manually (*slap* bad bad!) and limited incoming connections to 1024-5000 because of some document I had read on the ICQ site.

      When I installed RedHat, I put a forwarding rule in:

      $PORTFW -a -P tcp -L $LOCALIP 4000 -R 192.168.1.29 4000
      $PORTFW -a -P udp -L $LOCALIP 4000 -R 192.168.1.29 4000

      ...so that all ICQ traffic goes to her box. She probably would have had a better experience if my firewall had a less restrictive rule and I just sent all ICQ to her machine.

      Chris

  6. Re:yes! by Mija+Cat · · Score: 1

    (drools over AST Manhattan P60 x ??? currently acting as doorstop)

    --
    Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
  7. OpenBSD fan here by Bryan+Andersen · · Score: 2

    This will be nice for both web and ftp servers. I'd also use it for DB backend machines. Any backend machine to web servers needs to be seriously locked down too. It would be great for OpenBSD to be useable in situations requiring greater processor crunching than a single CPU can provide.

    I became an OpenBSD fan when I got tired of the breakins to my locked down RedHad based web server. I even had it properly placed behind a well setup firewall. As soon as I installed OpenBSD the breakins stopped. At this point I'm seriously considering using OpenBSD or FreeBSD on my main box, and the wearable I'm also making.

  8. fsking slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    we get articles like scream 3 and south park getting nominated for that horrible song, however real news somehow only makes it on the backside of slashdot. i realize that slashdot likes to cater to a broad audience and so these articles can be considered "news worthy," but i feel that SMP is truly a long awaited addition to openBSD and is definitely interesting for the slashdot "frontpage."

  9. Re:??? by bluGill · · Score: 1

    And a good choice was made too. This is interesting to me as a BSD fan, but it is still in the curiosity stage. If NetBSD would announce instead some break-through that allowed them to impliment SMP in 3 days that could run a single process 2x as fast on two proccessors as one, that would be front page worthy. (And most of us would wonder when the person who achived that is going to show the e!=mc^2, which should be about as easy a task)

    I just wanted to post this so that it is known that not everyone thinks a bad decision was made.

  10. Funny thing... by hubertf · · Score: 1

    It may be interresting for anyone watching eagerly that the OpenBSD branch was opened right after Bill Sommerfeld committed his initial work to the NetBSD source tree - coincidence?

    The branch still seems to be as empty as when it was created, though. For anyone wanting to find some code, see http://www.netbsd.org/Changes/#i386smp2.

    - Hubert

    1. Re:Funny thing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Coincidence? Of course not. Anyone following the BSDs knows this.

      It's no secret that OpenBSD takes from FreeBSD and NetBSD. Look at their source commit messages; they have mentions of code from NetBSD and FreeBSD all over the place. Personally, I think this is a good thing. They are not so stuck on themselves that they when they see good code that they wouldn't use it for pride reasons.

      There are different people in each of the BSD projects that have their values, their history, and their reasons for what they contribute and incorporate into the project they choose to spend time and effort with.

      Unfortunately, there are those (see comments on daily.daemonnews.org when a similar story was announced) that seem more focused on driving a wedge between the particular BSDs. To them, get a clue and wake up. NetBSD chose to release there code and under the BSD license; people using/taking/borrowing the code _is what happens_ and is inherent in the BSDs.

      And it's not like the practice of borrowing code does not go the other way. The security revisions that the FreeBSD project has been focusing on may be, if one was so focused on splitting hairs, to the increase in media coverage for OpenBSD. Any OS that uses OpenSSH is borrowing the OpenBSD, and OpenBSD from the original SSH code.

      Oh, btw, if you were so focused on the "when" and "whys" of OpenBSD and SMP, they have been looking at it for a while. Their current push was reinvigorated when a reader saw on the donations page requests for SMP equipment. That reader then sent email to the www email list/address, and soon thereafter an OpenBSD smp list was started.

      Anyone with a clue will see that when you increase interest in this manner, someone is going to look, very naturally at NetBSD and FreeBSD. NetBSD code seems more cited by OpenBSD folks (probably again given that OpenBSD split from NetBSD) and was more likely to be brought in than FreeBSD code. So when the NetBSD code came around, of course the developers are going to use it. And that's a damn good thing (tm).

  11. Re:NetBSD SMP by Bishop · · Score: 1

    If those are plural Sun 670MPs you could always lend one to Theo and gang. :-)

  12. Re:??? by niekze · · Score: 1

    Yup remember the stupid Dilberito crap? That gets main coverage, SMP for OpenBSD doesn't....go figure

    --


    Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not