Review: OpenBSD 3.4 SPARC64 Edition

'It's me' writes "Tony Bourke is reviewing OpenBSD 3.4 for SPARC-64. He discusses installation, the feel of the OS, its desktop, its performance, a MySQL problem he stumbled on, development tools and hardware support, firewalling and more."

Comments

Re:Not only a dupe...

[Homology]

..but a little late, considering that 3.5 is due to ship tomorrow.

He did try a snapshot dated 29th of March, and that snapshot is pretty much OpenBSD 3.5. It would be nice if he could at least toch upon some of the new features of OpenBSD 3.5 like Greylisting (very efficient anti-spam and anti-email-virus) or CARP (the Common Address Redundancy Protocol) for failover.

Hardware support problem in ALL BSDs

[mnmn]

Part of the reason why Linux is so popular is it supports almost all hardware out there. BSD is great and preferable for me in many places because if its simplicity and its more standard.

I tried OpenBSD in my Ultra5 a while ago, before the first of these two reviews came out, and it ran much faster than Solaris. I have a SCSI disk in there, so it was an impressive firewall, except it didnt see the ATM card.

Also needed to install OpenBSD (I'm used to OpenBSD's simplicity) on my spanking new VA Linux 1000 webserver, but I was using a Promise SATA card in there to run the SATA disk. Only Linux can read the SATA, so I had to revert back. BSD is great but (1) You have to have the hardware it supports (2) You should only need the functions your version of BSD supports.

I'd love to see FreeBSD support SATA cards (Promise TX2plus) and have facilities like Linux UML or Solaris zones, unlike chroots. In the short run, Linux is there, in the long run BSD will be used unless Linux becomes real stable, and is standardized, or the Slackware development is continued.