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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."
It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD: it's (a)live!
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD is dying community when Slashdot confirmed that *BSD death trolls have dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all troll posts. Coming on the heels of a recent troll survey which plainly states that trolls are running out of *BSD ammo, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot trolls are trolling with new and better methods because trolling about BSD's falsely prophetic death is as obsolete and useless as GNU HURD.
You don't need to be Jesus to predict the Slashdot troll phenomena's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD trolls face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD trolls because *BSD trolls are dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD trolls. As many of us are already aware, *BSD has recently acquired several Live CDs. Red devil Live CDs multiply like fucking rabbits.
The reasons for the death of the *BSD troll are obvious. The creators of the *BSD troll post have lost 93% of their core developers due to casulties from the sudden and unpleasant battles between Trollcore and GNAA. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD trolls are dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
GNAA leader Anonymous Coward states that there are 700 active trolls on Slashdot. How many BSD death trolls are there? Let's see. The number of troll posts vs BSD death troll posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 700/5 = 140 BSD death trolls. But half of those are just cheezy karma-whore spinoffs of the original troll. Therefore there are about 70 users of the real BSD death troll. These statistics, of course, reflect Slashdot before the war between Trollcore and GNAA. So we must assume that there are less than 70 people who actually believe that *BSD is still dying!
All major surveys show that *BSD trolls have steadily declined in humor level. *BSD trolls are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD trolls are to survive at all, they will be nothing but workers toiling in Slashdot trolling phenomena obscurity. *BSD death trolls continue to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save them at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD death trolls are dead.
Fact: *BSD: it's (a)live!
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.
Let's hope IBM doesn't offer their developer time... ;0)
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
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
No, even the trolls are tired of "BSD is dying...".
-Truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
What next, SCO sues OpenBSD for having a feature that Linux has?
It's BSD-compatible, AND ALREADY HAS SMP! By the power of Jordan Hubbard, I COMPEL YOU!!
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?
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. /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.
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
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); }
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?
"*BSD is trying"
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
Interesting selection of things that need to be implemented. Most people point to UI consistency, GUI improvement, etc. Let's see Nero, Kazaa, and dvd copying.... what would you be doing =)?
Well some people do. I don't use bsd (tried to get freebsd installed, the init system segfaulted on my box) so you or I might not, but a lot of people do. And support for bsd usually means support for linux as well. Any decent application code will run on both, so why not make stuff for bsd and compile on linux or vise-versa. It doesn't make a lot of sense to just write a good operating system off, just due to lack of users. Remember Linux once had less people using it than any bsd and did for a long time. Don't ignore things because the crowd isn't using them (yet...)
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.
I sure do. So let's say they invest 50% of their ressources on security, and 50% on new features.
Now what if they just dropped it and spend 100% of their time on the security of FreeBSD. That we we could have a secure OS (imagine, 100% of their time to making the whole thing secure) and a lot of features (Imagine again, the core of the FreeBSD can now focus on new features).
Let's just not fake it. They are two different OS because their respective maintainers cannot stand working together. This is really a personnality problem, not a technical one.
Of course, when they started OpenBSD they chose the "Security" niche, because there already was so many mainstream OSes around.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
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
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:
BTW, is an 'SX' OK?
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
Or... maybe they could take NetBSD and spend 100% of their time making that secure!
Apps are pretty interchangable, but SMP is kernel stuff, and it is the kernel that makes the difference between one *nix and another.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
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.
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..."
The test was biased. Discussion was held at http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20031019083 707 and (also on slashdot, but it didnt talk much about openbsd more about the whole test in general)
Happens alot on campuses now, judging by mail lists.
Not "pour."
But apparently, not moderators...
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
Here is the OSNews link... http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2320 I knew i wasn't on crack.... today.
Precisely what are you referring to here? It seems to me that the GNU GPL (the license for the Linux kernal) is one of the most impressive licenses out there.
This takes nothing away from what the OpenBSD team is doing--I think their work is great and their license makes that work a genuine contribution to our community. That's why I bought OpenBSD 3.0 and a t-shirt and I don't regret the decision.
I doubt Microsoft can outcompete free software and I think their fight will go to exclusion by patents (which means IBM and perhaps HP are their only competitors). This is why I look forward to seeing clarified patent commons-maintenance language in GPLv3.
Digital Citizen
I guess first post or something is more important then facts.
BSD may be many things but people like this are only hurting it as anyone with a clue about operating systems knows that SMP is old stuff by now. Of course there is a good reason OpenBSD is late. SMP brings a whole lot of issues regarding security with it and OpenBSD is about security, not speed.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
While OpenBSD is rather public when it comes to dissention outside of their camp (licensing changes and so on), dissention within the OpenBSD camp is quite the opposite.
m mon/014_scarg.patch) which was a security patch. There's not much beyond that publically.
What can be seen publically is Niels' last commit (ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/patches/3.1/co
Through the grapevine you might hear a little more, but that means probably knowing someone who is a developer or friend of one. Even then, my guess is not much was posted to hackers@ (the private developer mailing list) or icb. Obviously, something about the handling of this errata caused tension. Like any argument, points of contention were not resolved adequately on either side, and there was a rift.
From my perspecitve, it's a real loss for OpenBSD. Just look at most of the technical papers presented by OpenBSD developers, and you'll see that Niels was almost always a key contributor. Encrypted swap, great help with openssh, the first privsep work which is now practically OpenBSD religion, and much more were thanks to his contributions. Efforts of his such as systrace which came close to the rift, have subsequently suffered from atrophy in the OpenBSD tree since he's not there working on them and it's a real shame given the potential there.
Someone else mentioned Niels contributing some to NetBSD afterwards. I don't follow Net much, but from what I can gather, aside from some initial contributions, Niels didn't pursue that too heavily. It almost felt like more of a way to make some changes that would then get carried over by itojun or someone else over to OpenBSD.
2002 was quite a year for OpenBSD to be sure: openssh trojaning, allusions to breakins in the el8 zine, but I think Niels and a few others losing commit in August (some of whom got it back later) is probably the most profound and underreported drama. The vacancies left by the likes of provos no longer actively committing might not draw immediate attention, but there are long term consequences to a project which rose to notoriety on the shoulders of such prominent hackers, and which has such a small repository of developers as it is. Niels certainly isn't the only widely recognized person who helped garner OpenBSD street credit at one time or another but no longer commits (e.g. dugsong, obecian, joewee), but he was probably one the most public of such people in his promotion of OpenBSD in number of commits, technical achievements, and academic/conference papers and presentations.
One would hope that just as Theo changed his mind with respect to non-exec stack protections, and now seems to be garnering interest in SMP more aggressively - that he comes around with how it comes to treating his own developers. Or, that at least in this case, if such a thing were to occur - that Niels and other slighted like him would also be receptive to making amends.
"Without mistakes, there can be no forgiving. Without forgiving, there can be no love."
Gee, maybe the movie version will have Ben Affleck and Angelina Jolie. Speaking of short term busines models...
Been dead for well over six months. No sign, hide nor hair of them.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
Although OpenBSD mainly focus on security, it should have SMP support, sooner or later.
The sooner it get started, the better it will be done.
I think OpenBSD may look at the SMP implementation in FreeBSD and try to adopt some code and find bugs during the process.
I guess he changed his mind.
I think Dillions DragonflyBSD will encourse the other BSD hackers to scale there distro's.
To bad the FreeBSD group rejected Dillions patches and SSI.
http://saveie6.com/
He had funding by darpa (US GOV) about a year ago, but due to his comments on the US Government(war on iraq bla bla us sucks bla bla) he lost it. I like Theo I really do, and maybe when he calms down and doesn't treat people like shit he'll get his funding.
Believe me, if I started murdering people, there would be none of you left.
but its gonna be secure as hell! no one is gonna break into your 386 on the freshly installed token-bus network you just hooked up to!
No one contributes any code is because the developer ACCEPTS NO CODE. There have been many people who want to help, but because the dude insists on doing it himself, progress moves at a glacial pace for Racer.
Yes, I cover that case in my post. It isn't what one might call an open and collaborative project, although it appears to be from outside, if you kinda squint at it. However, Ruud certainly takes suggestions and implements them when such suggestions fit the project.
But yes, progress is slow, fitful and not always headed in directions I'm fond of. It's Ruud's project. Not mine. I've followed the project since it was first batted around on r.a.s., and even gave up plans for my own OSS project to support it. I admit I expected more.
None of this really has anything to do with my point.
Your last point addresses my point directly and is one of the reasons I'm in no hurry to revive my own OSS project plans or join another project. I'm getting too old for petty bullshit and life is short.
KFG
P.S. Care to buy my copy of Motorsims AMA Superbike and take over my preorder for Trans Am (nee Can Am)? No, huh? Didn't think so. When was the last time their website was updated? It still says "New From Motorsims" under AMA Superbike.
At least Carroll Smith can rest in peace being no longer saddled with association with those people.
P.P.S. See ya 'round RSC, whoever you are.
..."*BSD is dead!" trolls are dying.
Enterprise Class I tell you!!!
Well, you could use patent 4,809,168 which AFAIK is in the public domain unless IBM convinced the Patent Office to allow IBM to retroactively pay the the maintenance fees. It's the patent referenced as HOS89 in this RCU performance paper. But I'd ask IBM for permission first because, one, Paul McKenney was gracious enough to cite that patent, and, two, because it doesn't hurt to ask the don for permission and show a little respect.
SMP support for i386
:D
I once saw a dual CPU 386-class motherboard but i686 might be a better target for SMP support.
But clearly the facts state otherwise:
Fact: servers running OpenBSD, which claims to focus on security, are frequently compromised. According to Jim Markham, editor of the online security forum SecurityWatch, the few OpenBSD servers that exist on the internet have become a joke among the hacker community. "They make a game out of it," he says. "(OpenBSD leader) Theo [de Raadt] will scramble to make a new patch to fix one problem, and they've already compromised a bunch of boxes with a different exploit."
Your search - "bunch of boxes with a different exploit" - did not match any documents.
What facts? Good work.
Just imagine a beowulf cluster of dying BSD trolls!
It'll go right next to my eventual copies of World Sports Cars and Skip Barber Racing!
Actually the Motorsims site moved, and then they simply faded away in some sort. That T/A game is no longer. I was really looking forward to that game, until I saw some of their rare screenshots. Absolute junk, even for the time (1999).
Let's hope GTR is as good as it's current hype. I certainly don't see RL coming out before Duke Nukem.
I have a RSC account (I think my handle is TexasFury or Randy G, don't remember), but since I don't play GPL, I don't really visit much. I'm a fan of Papyrus' NASCAR games, and my spare time is spent painting cars for an upcoming 1988 mod for NR2003.
I don't like the distinction between man and info, but the quality of the latter is astonishing. Pull open the info pages of gdb and you'll find so much information in there. Those people include every little detail but besides that, also high-level first-time user stuff like a gdb example session! So, for certain things, info absolutely beats man.
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