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OpenBSD Hackathon

Posted by timothy on from the missing-a-monkey dept.

A secretive reader contributes: "Once again, almost all of the OpenBSD developers got together for a full week of intensive coding. Pictures from the hackathon are available for people who want to see how the developers of this fine OS look like. Theo de Raadt announced on the mailing list: 'There is a reason why such a flurry of commits is happening. Once again, we are doing a hackathon; this time in Calgary, for a full week leading up to usenix. Thus far, 32 people have arrived, and are hacking away in a hotel conference room, working on various things, but more people are still flying in from around the world ...'"

7 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Yeah, sure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Bob Beck is cool, really.

    OpenBSD runs on all the latest G4s, iBooks and PowerBooks. If I remember correctly, only sound does not work on the latest ibooks. Support for the gigabit ethernet was just added at the hackathon (before they were supported only in 10 and 100 mode)

  2. Just give me SMP. by watchmaker1 · · Score: 2, Informative
    I had made a choice to leave linux for OpenBSD.

    It works VERY well. The cvs-update-and-compile method of system maintenance is astonishingly useful. I love everything about OpenBSD.... except one.

    There is no SMP support. There is a cvs branch for SMP development, but after a year the only thing it does is RECOGNIZE the second CPU. It doesnt actually do anything with it.

    So, I'm about to build a new server, SMP, and I have two choices. I can run OpenBSD on one CPU hoping for the day I can reboot and have the second fire up, or I can run Gentoo linux, which has all the cvs-and-compile chocolaty goodness of BSD, but will do SMP.

    FreeBSD has smp. I believe NetBSD has smp. Darwin has SMP. OpenBSD doesn't. With SMP hardware so cheap (At least on the i386 side) it's ludicrous that it's not in there.

    1. Re:Just give me SMP. by Tuzanor · · Score: 3, Informative
      NetBSD's SMP is not yet very mature. The reason for the slow SMP development is that none of the main developers are working on it. Theo said that his main priority right now is geting more crypto cards working. He has said that he would like to work more on SMP, but he isn't god and he just doesn't have time.

      All good things come to those who wait. When SMP does come to OpenBSD, it will be done right and we will get stable, secure code for it!

    2. Re:Just give me SMP. by mirabilos · · Score: 2, Informative

      You can checkout a copy of the OpenBSD
      tree for SMP with
      # cvs co -PrSMP src/sys
      (with appropiate CVSROOT)

      I think it actually compiles and probably
      works on dual Pentium Pro systems, for
      example, but don't expect much stability.

      CPU isn't such a big issue anyways, the
      RAM size _and_ speed are much more inte-
      resting with regards to unix-like OS,
      interesting enough this is valid for
      NT 5 a.k.a. Win2k, in contrast to Win9x,
      too.

      The SMP support is not in the works because
      the developers are too busy doing other things
      (such as getting UBC to work...) - but if you
      have C skills and read the style(9) man page,
      your contributions will be welcome.

      --
      My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And /. still does not get UTF-8 right in 2012. Wow.)
    3. Re:Just give me SMP. by fdisk3hs · · Score: 2, Informative

      So use FreeBSD or NetBSD. NetBSD's kernel is very similar to OpenBSD (getting less so all the time), but it's still BSD. I'm using FreeBSD, I like the way the kernel runs (different feel from Linux, big jobs don't hog the whole system). If you like OpenBSD, then I would recommend the NetBSD, since OpenBSD is fruit from NetBSD's tree (thus the number of ports to other platforms compared to FreeBSD).

      Also, if you like having utter control over the system without weeding unwanted 'stuff', you can't beat a 'BSD.

    4. Re:Just give me SMP. by friscolr · · Score: 3, Informative
      just read the mail list archives. there was talk about all this a few weeks ago.

      i think one of the threads about this started with http://www.monkey.org/openbsd/archive/misc/0205/ms g01351.html or http://www.monkey.org/openbsd/archive/misc/0205/th reads.html#01351 for the full thread of that one.

      SMP is really useful, but there are also a myriad applications where it's unnecessary.

      --

      -f
      www.blackant.net

  3. Re:Yeah, sure by Tuzanor · · Score: 3, Informative
    yup, its free that runs on only x86 and alpha, though they have ultrasparc and PPC ports in the works. Remember, Open came off NetBSD's codebase, and when theo took it after he left, he took many of the more practical archs.

    When theo was with NetBSD he was the maintainer of the sparc port! There is talk of Open abandoning some of the older archs, though. Such as the older 68K's, the older HP archs, and such. They take up space on the CDs, plus SSH doesn't work very fast on them, either ;-)