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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."
can someone enlighten me as to why its taken so long to get support?
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
I can use NetBSD, FreeBSD or Linux -- all of which have SMP capabilities to varying degrees ... so, why do I want to give Theo $ for something he could probably port --instead of hiring a programmer to putz around with reinventing the wheel?
Whoever is coding this must be *REALLY* good. I remember Theo saying that SMP had too many opportunities for race conditions....
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Of course you guys realize the mission of OBSD is not tossing in every feature you can think of trying to keep up with the Gates', its something else altogether, thankfully.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Personally, I feel safer knowing that the time that could have gone into optimization has gone into checking for bugs and other security enhancements (privsep, WorX, etc.) - OpenBSD isn't meant to be your main enterprise-level server. That's FreeBSD's job. OpenBSD is supposed to sit there at the gates and safely divide packets into sheep or goats all day long.
We haven't seen a SCO story of slashdot for a while.
I'd say no. It's generally considered harder to secure an existing system than it is to keep a system secure and add features to it. I saw a quote from Bruce Schneier recently to that effect, I think from his "Secrets and Lies" book.
Essentially, good security relies on good architecture. Once you have an architecture from existing features, it may not be reasonable to make it secure because it may be architected for different goals.
Complexity is Easy. Simplicity is Hard.
--------
Create a WAP server
Too bad de Raadt looked a gift horse in the mouth and blew it with that NSA grant.
No this isn't a troll, I used Free and OpenBSD's; but why do we need this.
I still haven't found a necessity for SMP OpenBSD yet, if I need a box to run X or anything else that would work the CPUs, i'd choose FreeBSD, just for the package system.
What's really lagging in OpenBSD is an easy to use port/package system; SMP is long down the line.
Anybody that uses OpenBSD like I do, please tell me why we need OpenBSD, I use it for security, not for dual/quad/etc processor servers.
Error 407 - No creative sig found
Yes they may.
..." but don't whine if she/he says "sure, when/if I get the time and/or resources".
But why should anyone listen?
If you want a certain feature then you either code it, or pay someone to code it. Wishing doesn't produce better software.
Sure, you can contact the developer(s) and say "wouldn't it be nice if
If you don't like that answer then either provide the resources or pay for commercial software.
Executive Pope (small) Kallisti Engineering
Yes, Darwin has SMP support that it inherited from the codebase of FreeBSD and Mach. And, to tell the truth, if you want a complete, modern *BSD system you might be better off with FreeBSD anyway (it has probably the most extensive ports collection, best SMP support, fastest scheduler, best desktop support, etc.). The reason for the "other" BSDs (OpenBSD and NetBSD) existing is to focus on goals that don't fit in with FreeBSD's general-purpose design or Apple's exclusive focus on the PowerPC desktop (i386 versions of Darwin notwithstanding). Specifically, OpenBSD is designed to be ultra-secure, while NetBSD's goal is to be portable across as many different architectures as possible. If OpenBSD gets a useful feature like SMP without sacrificing security, though, it's a *good thing* for people who deploy OpenBSD, as it gives them more hardware options in the future.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
Ever play with a cat? You swat at its head a bit, it tries to bite back or swat back, roll it around, it scratches your hand, etc, etc, the same way one cat plays with another - the nibbles and scratches don't really hurt a fellow cat. Theo plays rough with people, has thick skin, and expects others to play as rough as he does (yes rough often == flame wars, etc). He plays rough with everyone, irregardless of how much work you do, though he does really respect those who do good work (he'll talk *very* highly of them).
I don't much care for that attitude, but i also recognize that i am the same way with some people (at work, among co-workers, we hurl insults back and forth and call eachother on our fuck ups, but also respect eachother's work abilities and will say so when asked). Theo is just that much more consistent than i am.
niels moved to netbsd where he works now but i believe most of his code will be ported to openbsd when required. theo seems to have been a bit harsh over niels and niels left. well, this is a business between niels and theo and we should not dwelve into it ;)
FreeBSD is the clear technological leader in the BSD family, and it's little wonder Apple built upon it. OpenBSD's "space" is less about areas where SMP is necessary (i.e. because FreeBSD is typically enterprise class web host / etc; yet OpenBSD and NetBSD are typically more compact uses - embedded products, etc).
What this news really says is more about the overall state of the BSD family: OpenBSD finally hitting the rungs.
At least with the BSDs in general and OpenBSD specifically, I don't have to run out and add a security patch every couple days.
Some of us actually use opensource and "compile" the binaries on our systems rather than relying on vendors and strangers to give us RPMs and the like.
(okay, that's not fair. I'm using NetBSD's pkgsrc on Linux (and solaris (and OS X (and Netbsd)))).
But really, why are you guys so afraid of source?
Or am I mistaken? Is the O.P. referring to what so many of the /. folks use: Windows? In which case I'll just note that a DL380 with 2 CPUs @ 3GHz running Windows is almost as fast as my 1 CPU Athlon/1500 running a Unix.
Do you review every line of the source code you're compiling before you compile? hmm?
zealot.
Not "pour."
Theo couldn't be the boss if he switched to Linux, but what OTHER reasons are there?
Uh first of all competition. You have this small group with its own politics and motives that not Linux. This means their are probaly a few thing that they can get done better becasue they want to. For example, OpenSSH. Being OpenSSH did end up filling an important need, Linux, other unices and even Windows benifitted. Theo threw a bitch fit over the license of the packet filtering software in OpenBSD and this lead to another "more free" package being created and caused te author of the original package to rethink and clarify the license. The ports collection has some great ideas of package management. Linux imporved greatly upon them with debian. OpenBSD took telnet and rsh flat out of the source tree. Others will probally follow suit.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
The Pentium 4's hyperthreading feature already hints at this. And if you have this stuff anyway (even when you didn't ask for it) you might as well use it.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Plain FUD. Theo is not in the "contest for the OS most used", and you know that.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
You assume that it is ego that's responsible for Theo to run the OpenBSD project (which as I said really does have a number of security features that Linux hasn't got--compare http://openbsd.org/errata.html to the track record of the Linux kernel alone). You seem to forget that the BSD's are distinct projects; Theo runs Open, but not Free or Net (or Darwin, or the number of commercial OSes that borrowed BSD code--OSX and Solaris, if I remember right, among likely others).
Judging by that little misconception alone, I'm guessing you aren't a BSD user. I'm going to go out on a limb here and ask if you've ever even used a BSD (me, I'm both a Linux and a BSD person; posting from a Linux desktop, run Linux and Free and Open on servers, and my laptop is a nice new OSX powerbook). You might assume from the hype that Linux is technologically superior, but that is often not the case. The BSD's have their strengths and weeknesses, just as Linux does. Linux has momentum and publicity as a principle strength. But that doesn't mean it's always better (and truly, even if I've got PAX and SELinux or GRSec or similar on my Linux install, I still have to worry about reasonably frequent kernel vulnerabilities a bit more than I do with OpenBSD or even FreeBSD).
Bah, those are just reliability fixes. One isn't a big deal unless you use IPSec I believe and not a remote hole. The other can be a nuisance either way, but it's *not* a remote hole. Keyword being hole here. I'm more worried about vulnerabilities that allow to execute code or unauthorized access.
You are full of shit.
Hmm.. the claim of it being extremely clean is often used, but in my book an ip_input.c which is mostly a single 450+ lines long function doesn't qualify as clean. That said, that was in FreeBSD 4.2 and earlier, didn't look at that part since.
The BSD source tree itself is reasonably well organized, and things are consistent, that is the most important part when dealing with the source I think, it means you can predict where to find the stuff you are looking for.
Theo threw a bitch fit over the license of the packet filtering software in OpenBSD and this lead to another "more free" package
"threw a bitch"? Well.. he stuck to his standards; that's an admirable thing. However I can say with a clear conscience that pf is the finest L3 filter I've used. It eats ipf, ipfw, ipchains, etc etc, for breakfast. In fact the only thing the overpriced Cisco PIX has going for it is failover on some of their units.
joy == OpenBSD + pf
Trolling is a art,
To say "*BSD", you make it sound like this effort is new to BSD operating systems in general, as opposed to just OpenBSD. Of course, as others have pointed out, other BSD variants already support SMP. OS X, FreeBSD and Tru64 are good examples.
:)
While I agree that it's a little "laggy" of OpenBSD to be finally getting around to adding SMP support, I would also concur with others who suggest that the general application of OpenBSD doesn't often require multiple processors. As a result, SMP support hasn't seemed to be a really been a big priority, and the more direct concentration on security has really paid off for them. That said, SMP support will certainly make OpenBSD more attractive in places where it wouldn't have been previously considered (larger scale databases, for example), so this is obviously a good thing.
As for the concept of BSD setting the standards for other operating systems to follow, I would partially disagree - yet partially agree.
It's not that BSD isn't innovating, but it's more that all operating systems, including (*gulp* am ducking already *gulp*) Windows are pushing forwarding in different areas. The sum knowledge and progress from all operating system projects is helping to improve every other operating system in turn, and on it goes.
Despite the overall (IMO) cruddyness of Windows, Microsoft has done some things worth learning from. As has Apple, Sun, DEC (err, Compaq, err, HP) and IBM.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2