SMP On OpenBSD, Coming Soon

Interesting... by TheHonestTruth · 2004-03-17 11:05 · Score: 4, Interesting

Given Theo's past attitude of "it's not important to me so it's not important to OpenBSD." Though his goal always seemed self-serving e.g. "I write it for myself and if others use it, fine," it's good to see that he is opening his mind to the one area OpenBSD is severly lacking. It could use some desktop polish (though I only use it for firewalls and servers since I only use it at home), SMP is the gaping hole in OpenBSD's offering. Knowing Theo's penchant for not playing nice with anyone beneath him, I'm guessing the SMP developer is pretty top-notch if he has Theo's support. Cool.

-Truth

--

I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...

Re:Interesting... by beerwolff · 2004-03-17 11:20 · Score: 3, Interesting

Well I think Theo's attitude has reflected this because everyone wanting certain features weren't going to code any of it themselves.

So yes, his attitude was "I'm not going to code that feature for you because it doens't interest me.". But I'm pretty sure if anyone coded something good enough it would be accepted -- why wouldn't it be?

Play by the OpenBSD rules (no dumb licenses, etc), and write good code, and you can get your code into the official tree. If you write crappy code, or put a dumb license on it, then of course it's not going to be included.
Re:Interesting... by kfg · 2004-03-17 12:10 · Score: 5, Interesting

Unfortunately, not all ideas are created equal, or should be treated equally. Some are better than others. Some bad ideas repeat over and over and over again, over a course of years and it's not unknown for a project head to get testy about them after awhile.

Especially since it's actually pretty rare for someone outside to come up with an idea that the people who work with the code all the time haven't actually already thought of.

Some ideas aren't bad, they just have to wait their turn in line and their priority may be low within the parameters of the project.

For instance, in Racer, a project overtly aimed at providing the best physics engine for driving sims, there is fairly constant call from the modelers, who don't contribute any code, to impliment opening doors and working horns.

While the core physics is yet incomplete.

Opening doors and working horns will come in time, and has been stipulated, when they make it to the top of the priority list. Right now nailing the tire and drive train model is far more important.

As a project head it's all too easy to become a code monkey for everyone with an idea. That isn't the role of a project head. His role is to decide what does and does not belong in the code base, and when it's important for what does belong in the code base to get implimented.

I'd don't know OBSD or Theo, but I do know some of the problems encountered in open collaborative works, or works that are essentially the project of a few, but that take place in fairly public view so the public tends to the think of them as open collaborative works when they are not.

This isn't just a problem in software projects. As a physicist I have spent many, many hours trying to explain to people why their idea for a magnetic perpetual motion machine just won't work. I have to spend these hours because these people haven't taken the trouble to gain a simple high school understanding of physics.

Now, as it happens I make part of my living tutoring basic scientific philosophy and physics. If these people wish to enroll and learn, fine, that's my "job."

But if all they want to do is argue with you, ad infinitum, in swarms, sooner or later you start to reach for the fly swatter and just bat them all away.

Not because you have anything against them, per se. Because life is short.

KFG
Re:Interesting... by kamelkev · 2004-03-17 14:38 · Score: 2, Interesting

it's good to see that he is opening his mind to the one area OpenBSD is severly lacking.

Um, are you kidding me? I've been involved in a project doing OpenBSD kernel development for the last 2 years, and I'll tell you right now there are so many shortcomings in the kernel you wouldn't believe it.

Let's start with the broken PCMCIA support (interrupt problems), or maybe the fact that it doesn't have kernel threads (user threads blow, especially when those are broken too), and don't get me started on the broken drivers (there are so many that don't work right).

We fixed lots of these issues for our projects, but honestly, who cares about contributing back to OpenBSD. We talked about sending patches, but he was such a jerk in our interactions with him (Theo) that we just decided to keep them to ourselves.

Seriously, at this point the differences in security between OpenBSD and FreeBSD are trivial... so what's the point.

SMP is good, but what about pkg management? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-17 11:15 · Score: 5, Interesting

I played around with obsd a few years ago, and I liked how small and tight the system is. At one point I even setup an obsd web server, but the thing kept crashing. Never did find out if it was softare or hardware related (it was located offshore and nobody in the vincinity could troubleshoot it effectively). Other than that, I really liked the OS. The man pages are absolutely top-notch, unlike some of the Linux man pages (in Debian, lots of man pages say stuff like: "this page is a placeholder; there is no documentation" or refer you to the GNU info docs). I also like the firewall more than iptables, which was really confusing at first.
Anyway, the main thing that bugs me about obsd is that it uses the ports system. It does the job and all, but when it comes time to upgrade your OS, it's a real PITA. I remember having to manually edit files in /etc, and having to figure out which files were added or deleted since the last version. Lots of room for error, there. Compared to Debian, which can be upgraded by only typing two commands, it's just no fun. Especially if you're trying to upgrade a server that's thousands of miles away, and can't afford to fuck up.

Re:SMP is good, but what about pkg management? by Santana · 2004-03-17 12:22 · Score: 3, Interesting

Good grief! Editing /etc/* by hand is a feature! I don't want any automatic tool touch my config files

--
The best way to predict the future is to invent it

Re:Why buy hamburger when the steak is free? by EisBar · 2004-03-17 11:17 · Score: 4, Interesting

who said they are going to reinvent the wheel?, porting kernel space stuff is not simple, and the common base between the *BSD is not that common anymore.

I Will Be Amazed If This Works by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-17 11:49 · Score: 5, Interesting

OpenBSD does not have a good track record of major architecture improvements. For example, in the wake of the PR FreeBSD got for John Dyson's VM work, OpenBSD adopted Chuck Cranor's UVM system, integrating it into the last of the 2.x releases. Cranor is a very smart guy, but OpenBSD's stewardship of Cranor's code has been pretty awful --- lockups, panics, and various other problems remain in evidence, each answered with de Raadt's "UVM was just a research project from Cranor, it's not our fault" excuse.

FreeBSD has years worth of head-start on OpenBSD in SMP right now, and a much larger (and more experienced) core team. In addition, FreeBSD has corporate sponsorship (from Juniper and Apple, to name two). Despite these major advantages, FreeBSD SMP remains a work in progress.

de Raadt has had a religious perspective on SMP ("most modern applications aren't compute-bound! SMP is not the way to scale large applications, lots of individual machines are!") for almost a decade. What evidence do we have that he has seriously changed his mind? This seems like more of a desperation move, trying to ensure that OpenBSD doesn't fall behind NetBSD to become the least-used open source operating system available.

I predict years of instability and excuses.

roots by sir_cello · 2004-03-17 12:27 · Score: 4, Interesting

FWIW: OpenBSD has its roots as a splice from NetBSD; both it and NetBSD very similar, but in some respects NetBSD has "modernised" itself more than OpenBSD, yet OpenBSD has focused on security (and spawned the OpenXYZ series ...).

Compared to FreeBSD, they're different beasts: NetBSD and OpenBSD fit the niche of embedded products, AP's, firewalls, home gateways, etc - all very good nice (NetBSD's portability and OpenBSD's security). FreeBSD is enterprise class, you don't typically see it used for embedded products / etc, but more in hosting and server.

Compared to Linux: Linux strength is that does all of the above across the board (it fits everything) and has a better user/desktop experience, but it doesn't do as well as any in any of the individual niches above.

Re:roots by evilviper · 2004-03-17 17:59 · Score: 3, Interesting

NetBSD and OpenBSD fit the niche of embedded products, AP's, firewalls, home gateways, etc

They get that wrap a lot, but you can find a lot of OpenBSD web/fileservers out there. OpenBSD is where OpenSSH started, because it's heavy into any kind of networking, and crypto, not just security. NetBSD isn't used as a server so much, but it's pretty popular with just about anybody running on a platform other than x86. The majority of people that don't like MacOS, seem to go to NetBSD as their desktop.

Linux strength is that does all of the above across the board

Linux doesn't do the job of a router/firewall well (no state with IPchains/IPtables).
Linux doesn't run on as many platforms as NetBSD, but worse, it doesn't work WELL on any but very few of them, whereas the BSDs are as well suited to any one platform as another.

Finally, Linux is a real hassle in enterprise situations. Standard Linux is extremely unstable (compared with what the BSD's consider stable) so to get that stability, you need to follow the Debian approach, and extensively test and debug all the programs. That means you are generations away from the new features. Meanwhile, you can just download the latest FreeBSD -stable (usually 1 minor version behind), and it's ready to go. There's a good reason you see FreeBSD in lots of serious enterprise apps.

and has a better user/desktop experience

Feel free to explain this one to me. The installer is probably the only thing anyone can cite where the BSDs are even different (to the casual users) than Linux. You have GNOME and KDE on all the BSDs, and they work just fine.

As for the installers, if you get over your addiction to always using your mouse, they are really much better installers than the GUI ones for any Linux distro.

What makes this situation worse, is that moderators on /. think anything not pro-Linux is a flame or a troll, so you'll get modded up, I'll get modded down, and someother /. reader will see your post and not mine, and just accept your mistaken opinions as fact.

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Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant

What Will Theo Use Processor 2 For? by bfg9000 · 2004-03-17 12:29 · Score: 5, Interesting

I'm a long-time OpenBSDer (I'm even way up near the beginning on their donations page, which is as close as I'll get to being cool -- it's far more important than a low Slashdot UID, which I also have, as you can see), and I remember Theo mentioning a couple years ago that he was thinking (at the time, anyway) about having the second processor do nothing but crypto.

What's his plan now? Just typical SMP, I'd guess -- but I thought his other idea was cooler. On-the-fly encoding and decoding and hiding of jpegs from wives and whatnot. Very useful to... ahem... some of us. Not me of course.

Just wondering about the current prospects for something to keep my uh.. important financial documents... from, uh... the government? Yeah, the government, that's it.

--

I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."

Re:What Will Theo Use Processor 2 For? by evilviper · 2004-03-17 17:14 · Score: 2, Interesting

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

I have to disagree with you there. SCP'ing something over a fast network maxes out even very fast processors. 3DES is a real CPU-hog, even by today's standards.

If you don't think crypto is CPU-intensive, you must not be doing much of it.

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Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Re:What Will Theo Use Processor 2 For? by evilviper · 2004-03-17 18:34 · Score: 2, Interesting

The only reason to use 3DES is that you're stuck with DES hardware.

That's a very valid reason, but not the only one. DES is tried and true, and 3DES is as theoretically as secure as anything can get.

The hardware thing is quite a valid issue though... If you're connecting to a server that does a lot of crypto, chances are it's using a hardware crypo accelerator, so it won't want to waste CPU power doing blowfish or AES when 3DES is even faster on it's end.

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Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant

Okay, I perused the thread... by mosel-saar-ruwer · 2004-03-17 12:49 · Score: 2, Interesting

...and the comments were roughly

1) 50% fanboy sycophancy [hence ignored], and
2) 50% in agreement with Leitner's conclusion

Certainly not a thread I'd link to as a refutation of his position.

Re:Yet another modern feature added to *BSD by b17bmbr · 2004-03-17 12:50 · Score: 3, Interesting

which is something i don't understand. why haven't they been able to incorporate other BSD code for SMP? i understand the GPL limitations, but BSD code doesn't have the same burden (forced gpl'ing, etc.). isn't that the whole point of open source?

--
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.

Re:smp? by Alan+Cox · 2004-03-17 13:11 · Score: 4, Interesting

SMP is so old a technique that almost all of it is so old that any patents have expired twenty years or more ago. The one exception in the Linux case is RCU, which is a scaling technique patented by IBM for which GPL use rights were granted but not I believe BSD use rights.

Bad SMP can be done in a couple of weeks by anyone, good SMP is a little harder and its nice to see OpenBSD joining in the game as SMP is now at the on processor level so it is becoming important.

Re:Yet another modern feature added to *BSD by Just+Some+Guy · 2004-03-17 13:41 · Score: 3, Interesting

OpenBSD is hardly the leader of the pack as far as performance goes.

I think it's pretty fast, given that it's doing much more than most other systems. All that crypto and random goodness doesn't come for free. From "Practical Cryptography": "There are already enough fast, insecure systems. The world doesn't need another one."

Even on UP systems, it's still slower than almost everything else in key areas (disk performance being the big one).

Have you tested that with softupdates enabled? OpenBSD's default disk performance reminds me of FreeBSD's old performances before softupdates became a standard setting. It's another security-vs.-performance tradeoff: the BSDs mount their filesystems in synchronous mode and highly discourage using async, while most Linux systems use async by default.

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Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?

Re:Yet another modern feature added to *BSD by Mysteray · 2004-03-17 14:39 · Score: 2, Interesting

As I understand it, OpenBSD diverged from NetBSD before SMP was available for any nonproprietary BSD. The divergence in the codebases that has taken place since then makes it impossible to simply import much of another strain's implementation.

Maybe there will be some re-use of code (and ideas), but I suspect the OpenBSD team will be building this thing from the ground up.

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