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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!
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?
because you've been to lazy to do it?
oops. Because OpenBSD is focused on security. This means they don't compromise by spreading development effort that could be best spent on making the OS more secure.
-Truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
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
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?
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.
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.
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
BTW, is an 'SX' OK?
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
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.
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..."
However, I'd have to disagree with FreeBSD being the technological leader of the bunch. It's an excellent system, and is the most widely used/commercially supported of the three (or six, with ekko, DFly, and Darwin). However, I see NetBSD being much more advanced for a few reasons:
- It's more clean. ``It isn't done unless it's done right.'' As a result, it's much easier to extend (new drivers, new archetectures,
...)
- It is the first free unix-ish system to have many new features, like USB, IPV6, and crossbuilding support (ROCK is the only other one I can think of that has this) just to name a few.
- As a result of #1, it can serve as an excellent resource (a reference platform or nice collection of example code to stare at when you're bored).
- It's small, but generally highly scalable
...
I thought the very same way as most users at one time. I used to be a devout FreeBSD user. After buying a bit of HD space (bit=320GB), I decided to take on the multiboot challenge. I installed a total of thirteen different unixes (no windoze), telling myself to create the *exact* same environment on each. I decided to give NetBSD an OK-sized 10GB partition. The next day I swapped the 60G I gave to Slackware with it. It was faster and seemed, generally, a whole lot cooler. Within a week, I had a nice, stable NetBSD-current system up and running and found myself not being able to reboot to finish installing Solaris, OpenBSD, and Gentoo!The point is this: NetBSD is the `forgotten' unix in many ways, and I, for one, find that sad. I think all the BSDs, along with Linux, will be around for some time. NetBSD, though, is simply the bliss that I, too, nearly overlooked.