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SMP On OpenBSD, Coming Soon
Lord of the OpenBSD writes "At long last, SMP development on OpenBSD looks to be gearing up. One person is now doing full-time funded development on SMP. Project leader Theo de Raadt is now asking for funding for a second developer. Theo has announced that SMP support for i386 is planned for the OpenBSD 3.6 or 3.7 release, the first of which is due in 8 months."
Yet another modern OS feature is being added to *BSD, which have many features not even found in the best of commercial operating systems. *BSD isn't dying, it's setting the standard for other operating systems to follow.
SMP is one of those technologies encumbered by various patents. As it is now, SCO claim to own most of the support for it, and it's one of the features embroiled in the SCO vs IBM case.
How they'll get around this, I don't know. It's good to see the coding and experience getting out there and used all the more however.
-Truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
While I'm a big fan of OpenBSD and Theo both - I have to admit that Theo doesn't play nice even with those NOT beneath him - the loss of Niels Provos is still a bitter, bitter blow for the project.
I fail to see how this is relevent. This whole article is just going to be eaten up by the /. trolls. SMP support has been coming along in openbsd for the last year+, mostly "borrowing" code from netbsd. Yes SMP is coming and it will bring them up to date with the rest of the world. There really isn't anything to see here...move along.
:(){
This is not just "porting" like a device driver.
SMP touches every aspect of the kernel (scheduling, VM, VFS, etc.). Each OS is different internally and so you can't just rip code out of one and put it into another. It's not simply copying over a sub-directory and changing a couple of kernel system calls.
You have to pour over a lot of the files and make all the data structures are written to and read from correctly.
There's also more than one way to do SMP so how do you know whether he's "reinventing the wheel", or coming up with a novel approach?
OBSD has both ports and packages (precompiled binaries) and the software to manage them, pkg_*. When it comes time to upgrade your OS, all your customizations can be put in a site.tgz file. Takes one command to install it.
There's a reason OpenBSD has nice man pages and FAQ - they're for learning how the OS works.
OpenBSD's top priority is security. For SMP that means two things:
1. All potential security-relevant race conditions must be handled. A single processor system can never do two things at exactly the same time. A dual processor one can. OpenBSD wouldn't be OpenBSD if that would be allowed to affect the system's integrity.
2. Given the choice of an small project, that increases security, and a big one that probably will lower it, Theo will choose the one that increases security. Dual-processors are not a major concern to OpenBSD's core users, so support can wait until other things get done.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Let's see...
Privsep: Makes sure that only the code that needs to be root is run as root.
WorX: Makes sure that data cannot be executed as code. (Memory pages are either executable or writable, not both)
There are other features like them, that add to the security of the system. OpenBSD is better at firewalling than FreeBSD because of them; it is harder to break any port or access that is allowed/found into a security lapse. And any security lapse will be as limited as possible.
FreeBSD is descent at this. The standard level of security is available. OpenBSD is positively paranoid. That's a good thing when anyone can throw anything at it...
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I wish I could refute this, but IIRC, a series of I/O benchmarks were run on the major OS players a while ago and OBSD did pretty terribly.
The money quote from the Conclusion of Felix von Leitner's Benchmarking BSD and Linux:
I am really sorry but have you even used OpenBSD recently? I installed OpenBSD 3.4 last month on a small server at home and installing third-party software was as simple as:
For a package:For a port:And... that's it!
Could you please explain to me how this is difficult?
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Here is the OSNews link... http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2320 I knew i wasn't on crack.... today.
Well SMP stands for "symmetric multi processing". That basically means the kernel can run on any processor--they're symmetric in that respect. (The advantage of being symmetric is that multiple processors can run kernel code at once, but the disadvantage is that you need locks and the like.)
If he were going to use the extra processors for nothing but crypto, (a) he'd be wasting them since crypto doesn't take that much CPU by today's standards and (b) it wouldn't be called SMP.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
> I remember having to manually edit files in /etc, and having to figure out which files were
/usr/ports/sysutils/mergemaster
>
> added or deleted since the last version.
try mergemaster. when you become better accustomed to the process and have decent tools, i think you'll prefer it to debian.
cd
sudo make install
sudo mergemaster
I really can't see the point. For $100 you can buy a PCI crypto card that would do 3DES as fast as most would ever need.
Or they can just act as an incredibly fast random-number generator (something CPUs aren't very good at) if you are doing some crypto that the card doesn't support (blowfish isn't popular in hardware, yet).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Myth. Linux does (and has for many years) run on just as many platforms as NetBSD. Most of NetBSDs "platforms" are actually just variants on a single architecture. Thus while NetBSD counts atari and amiga as separate ports, Linux just treats them as part of a single Linux/m68k port. In fact, NetBSD runs on two architectures that aren't currently supported by Linux (ns32k and vax), whereas Linux run on five that aren't supported by NetBSD (mips64, ppc64, s390, sh4 and etrax). I'm not trying to put down the worthy efforts of the NetBSD community, but I just get a bit fed up with people claiming that it's more widely ported than Linux. It was true in the past, but hasn't been for some time.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Err...wasn't that a DARPA grant?
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
It is probably true that Linux does run on more systems than NetBSD, but the support is fragmented and disparate at the best. This is the essential and important distinction.
NetBSD ensures that the one overall "package" (kernel + user space) works equivalently across a set of platforms. Your installation (executables, directories, config, etc) are largely equivalent across all platforms: take your custom scripts and system setup and find that it can be dropped onto NetBSD/other with little cost.
This is definitely not the case with Linux as each platform largely a different and somewhat incompatible distribution.
Linux strength is that you can find a large and interesting variety of distributions for all sorts of specific niches and purposes. It's weakness is that you can't find the one distribution that works across many platforms. And this is the niche that NetBSD has.