OpenBSD Hackathon

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 ...'"

Comments

Yeah, sure

[Otter]

beck assembling the chair that kjell ordered directly to the hotel

I dunno -- if it weren't for the parts wrapped in plastic I'd be sure it's actually "chair collapses under weight of OpenBSD hacker".

Also, of interest "drahn" on a TiBook. Looks like Apple's really making some inroads in the Unix world. OpenBSD doesn't really run on that, does it?

Re:Yeah, sure

[Tuzanor]

It runs on it very well, check out Brad's computer. He goes to our local BSD user's group and I saw him recompiling a kernel on it. He says there were initially a few hickups but now that more and more developers are getting tibooks its getting better every day. As more and more macs are bought by people, support is only going to get better. OpenBSD has had a PPC port for quite awhile now.

Brad also said that its only a matter of time before PPC replaces sparc as the second best supported platform (after x86 of course) because so many more people have them.

Re:Yeah, sure

[Tuzanor]

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 ;-)

The amount of CVS commits is impressive...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been watching the CVS commit logs since the beginning of this event - number of bugs getting fixed and new features being added is very impressive.

I especially like that more and more daemons loose their setgid and setuid privileges - great step towards improving the security.

Just give me SMP.

[watchmaker1]

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.

Re:Just give me SMP.

[Tuzanor]

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!

Re:Just give me SMP.

[watchmaker1]

I guess it's just a matter of priorities.

I think of OpenBSD as a great secure place to run Apache and MySQL and postfix.

Theo and the core think of it as a crypto swiss army knife. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

SMP done wrong is worse than no SMP at all, I heartily agree. While I understand that it's important for some, having some freaky new crypto card implemented while I have a processor spinning idly doesnt fill me with glee.

I'm not one of those guys who bitches about what OpenBSD hasn't done for me. It's an amazing piece of work and that it was created largely for free by a group of itinerant hackers is more astounding to me than you can imagine. I am not a kernel hacker, so I don't have the ability to do it myself. But the fact that it's so ubiquitous elsewhere makes me wish it were a higher priority.

Re:Just give me SMP.

[spunkykuma]

NetBSD does not have SMP, but only as a branch in the -current kernel tree just as you see in OpenBSD. Infact, OpenBSD spawned off of NetBSD years ago and both are MOSIX based. A couple of us has gotten SMP working at the kernel-level but at userspace-level it is still useless, I personally think SMP is overrated but is useful in heavy applications such as SQL.
At the moment, FreeBSD does have SMP, but realistically I've found Linux's SMP best on an ix86, that's just my opinion (yeah flame me :) ).

Re:Just give me SMP.

[mirabilos]

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.

Re:Just give me SMP.

[fdisk3hs]

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.

Re:Just give me SMP.

[watchmaker1]

I'm with you.

I have a dual machine at home (An old beat up dual Celeron 366 Abit BP6) running FreeBSD 4.4. I had problems with it. It seems every time I tried to cvs update my ports tree to get such things as sudo, it would blow up the tree so badly I'd have to remove it and cvs get it again. That happened three times.

I never upgraded it to 4.5, as I worried it would blow the whole damn thing up and I'd lose my 30gig of mp3's. It runs decent with 4.4 as a samba server and running the streamer portion of my personal icecast server (piped through libmp3lame to downsize the mp3's to 96k/sec CBR).

I had grown tired of Linux distributions. Redhat insists on installing all sorts of useless crap, I have never gotten debian to work right for me (I just want to compile my own perl without apt continually trying to install it's own, is that too much to ask?). I installed OpenBSD 3.0 on a spare box in December and never looked back.

It works better than FreeBSD, for me, and is nicely tunable just the way I like it. I didn't need linux, this was the way to go.

Now that I'm looking at a new server, possibly to get big hits, I want SMP. Gentoo linux is linux done the BSD way. ports, cvs updates, slim. I've now got the choice between Gentoo with SMP and OpenBSD without. Since it's going to be aimed at MySQL and will have pf or iptables rules limiting access to the net at large, I'm not incredibly concerned with the security as I would be if this was a shell box. I'll have the only login. I'm torn. I love OpenBSD, but I think my needs may be better met with Gentoo at this juncture.

Re:Just give me SMP.

[wilton]

I heard an interesting rumour about OpenBSD's planned SMP support.

Apparently they were going to arrange it so that one CPU would be doing the normal OS stuff and the other CPU would just do crypto work.

This sounds simple and effective. Whilst not true SMP, it would make the machine faster, and use both CPUs.

Re:Just give me SMP.

[friscolr]

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.

The remaining few

[mirabilos]

For what it's worth, this was not much but a re-post
of a mail from Theo de Raadt, the OpenBSD leader,
to the "misc" mailing list.

The remaining few hackers were either representing
OpenBSD (and BSD in general) at the German LinuxTag
in Karlsruhe (Wim Vandeputte, the "leader" for Europe,
and (more unknown) Christian Weisgerber and me...

And one was unable to get a passport from the
French authorities - seems as they are jealous
to the German bureaucracy ;-)

Re:I'm taking bets...

[mirabilos]

hin and jsyn committed their pictures to the
CVS rep and you can get it for free ;-)

# cvs -qd anoncvs@<favourite mirrot> co -PA www

Mountain Dew

[dadragon]

I'm noticing a lot of Mountain Dew in those pictures, so that inspired me to ask:

Did somebody smuggle a shitload of the stuff from the states, or are hackers working while drinking a beverage with no caffiene or alcohol?

For thoses that don't know, Canadian laws prohibit adding caffiene to any fruit flavoured drink (ergo MD here has no caffiene).

Re:Mountain Dew

[Tuzanor]

We make it up with our beer (which has more alcohol). So stop crying.