Uhh, am I the only one here who was completely unaware that OpenBSD didn't have SMP support?
Nope, it caught me by suprise, too. Do any of the other BSDs lack SMP support in this day and age?
-jcr
-- The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
userland and config scripts
by
tronicum
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I wonder if these CVS changes are enough to support good SMP. At least some userland utilities should support SMP and some of the config scripts that generate make files will probably change (if not autogenerated like automake).
It would be interesting if it scales well so that it really makes sense to use it. The trend goes to some "double core" CPUs, too...
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
life4m
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
No, SMP was only absent in OpenBSD. It was just not a priority for the project. Nevertheless, it is a welcome addition.
Can anyone "in the know" shed some light about the qualities of the OpenBSD code? How does OpenBSD's SMP model compare to fine-grained locking, such as in FreeBSD-CURRENT?
When I see how much effort and trouble has gone and is going into locking down the FreeBSD kernel, I am guessing that OpenBSD's SMP support will be fairly primitive to start with. Or are there heavy ports from FreeBSD?
I was under the impression that SMP support has been in FreeBSD for a long time, since the 3.x days at least. It wasn't brilliant SMP (lots of coarse grained locks for example) but it was SMP. Fine grained SMP and new SMP code has emerged with FreeBSD 5.x however.
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
Korpo
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I welcome your focus on security, but "being a little behind the times in technology"???
OpenBSD may be the safest web server around. But without SMP it doesn't suit the servers needing the most protection, does it? Nearly every "serious" web server is SMP - at least in corporations, or am I wrong?
Having said that, it would be interesting how long it will be till SMP is considered a safe and stable feature in OpenBSD (else it would not be worthwhile, according to your comment - and I guess I agree there)?
The OpenBSD project simply has too few resources, and that's for sure! And that has nothing to do with "different set of priorities then Linux". I'm pretty sure, that Linux developers are numerous enough to aim for all three goals: reliability, safety and efficiency.
Great news
by
karmawarrior
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I know I'm not the only one who's felt that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. SMP may not be high priority for security, but a secure OS that only gives you access to half the processing power of your system is always going to be a disappointment. And SMP, while not a priority, does help security in that it makes DoS attacks much more difficult.
(Why? Because many typical DoS attacks work on the basis of a single process hogging the CPU. If you have two, a system administrator can log in and kill the process. If you have one, that system administrator will find it more difficult to do so. It's not a cure-all, but it helps.)
In all, excellent news. Thanks to everyone who made this possible, regardless of whether you just coded, or you campaigned for support for the OpenBSD project.
The initiative to ADD SMP to OpenBSD (and the announcement that "a full time developer was working on it")
occurred less than 4 months ago. It took FreeBSD years to get SMP "right", during an adolesence where stability seriously suffered.
Neither NetBSD nor OpenBSD have a significant fraction of the user base of FreeBSD (and an infinitessimal share compared to Linux), and neither NetBSD nor OpenBSD have comparably-sized development teams. FreeBSD SMP had antecedants to build on as well. So logic dictates that it should take longer for OpenBSD SMP to be "ready".
OpenBSD went through a comparable architecture change when they swapped virtual memory systems a few years ago, and several subsequent major releases of OpenBSD had serious VM stability problems (many of them synchronization issues). SMP is even harder (and more of it involves synchronization).
So, is there some mitigating factor here that would convince anyone who was paying attention to deploy a mission-critical system on SMP OpenBSD in 2004?
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
fimbulvetr
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
No, you are wrong. Google uses clusters of smaller machines. Dual CPU Webservers are generally considered bad, as they don't scale near as well as 2+ webservers serving files via nfs or other technology. With 2x cpus, when a server gets bogged, it's gonna quickly hit a ceiling if you keep adding processors. Besides, unless you're doing huge engineering apps in real time, a webserver really only needs fast I/O and more memory to grow.
I tend to think it's because of Theo, not everyone gets along with him, if ya know what I mean. It will take a while before SMP is considered secure, as smp introduces quite a few possibilities for exploits, just due to the nature of sharing procs across processors.
Re:Can't BSD people be polite in subject lines?
by
CptnHarlock
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Was I impolite? Sorry, I even re-edited my first subjet that includede "OMFG" & "FFS".. j/k..;)
For me OpenBSD has been a OS where I've been willing to give up performance for security. This is no major problem considering that todays (and even yesterdays) computers are extremely efficient if you don't shove a lot of fancy graphics down their throat. My fw at home was 486sx25 and got substituted by a P100 only because the P100 was far more silent. (oh, and it runs FreeSCO)
Speaking of performance, I did get very very happy with 2.9 wich boasted a 60x filesystem I/O boost..:)..
Anyway, I have no experience of huge enviroments. I've worked at smaller schools with a maximum of around 250 desktops/servers. I used to work at a school around 2000/2001 with some 150 desktops and all of them with real IPs (no fw). Most of them had servers running since it was a webdeveloper/designer school. Some computers were Macs but most run NT4. Needless to say they got haxxored more and more. I got fed up with it and started running RedHat 6.2 at my desktop (as I did at home) but even here I got fed up with checking for patches and checking logs for intrusions so I went for OpenBSD at the desktop and we started moving all exept the.asp pages to a second OpenBSD 2.8 computer. Never had any problems with either of these comps exept an ftp patch and an ssh patch IIRC. Our fileserver was a Samba wielding Slackware Linux-box and we also set up a fw, don't remember if it was Linux or OpenBSD though.
As you see I am an not "BSD people" but rather an OS agnostic (aka OS whore) and believe that all OSes have a good place in the matrix. OpenBSD is my choice for "deploy and (almost) forget". Security issuses come so seldom that they get posted on/. which I check daily..;)
BTW.. The other day I celebrated the 777 days uptime (that's 2+ years) of a OpenBSD 3.0 machine..:')
Cheers...
-- $HOME is where the.*shrc is -- silver_p
Re:Multiple Niches
by
drinkypoo
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I beg to differ. Linux can fill them all - at least, it can go anywhere OpenBSD, netbsd, or FreeBSD can go. Whether it's a better tool for the job or not is a subject I will leave to a future flame war (and of course, many past ones.) Linux has been shown to scale down to systems with no FPU (a limited version admittedly) and up to systems with many processors thanks to the work of IBM and SGI.
OpenBSD has better code review and often employs better coding practice than linux, I will grant you, but with the addition of grsecurity and the proper use of firewalling, Linux is no security slouch either.
And, windows is not a better platform for gaming than linux in any way other than availability of games. Many games run faster on linux than on Windows. In general it's an issue of what platform it's optimized for.
Linux has many features desirable for routing packets that are missing or not as complete in other operating systems.
-- "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
ahodgson
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Dual CPU Webservers are generally considered bad, as they don't scale near as well as 2+ webservers serving files via nfs or other technology.
While that may be true in your case, I disagree for the general case.
When rack space costs you money, a dual-CPU 1 RU box cannot be beat for web-serving efficiency, especially if you serve any volume of dynamic content. For my $day_job, dual-CPU boxes can serve almost exactly 200% of the traffic of a single CPU box, and cost us no more in rack space or network ports or power provisioning than the single CPU box. Oh, and they require the same amount of sysadmin time too, not that that amounts to much in a web cluster.
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
fimbulvetr
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Though your comments are well founded, I still somewhat disagree. After seeing both comments, I can see cpu being useful especially if you are doing SSL connections and session tracking.
You might actually be one of the very few people who find that (double the cpu=double the power), but that's not very common for most web sites. Most of the time, dual cpus do not mean twice the power. I'd venture to guess that you might see 1.25 or 1.30x the power.
I intended my main point to be that web serving relies more on I/O and memory than CPUs.
My day job is an admin at an ISP and I find thousands of sites (ssl and reg) can run perfect on a 440Mhz Sun Netra t1. I have two of the $300 single proc bad boys runnning thousands of sites without a glich. When one fails, which niether have (Knock on wood), the other one is an easy failover script away.
When these finally hit 40% consistent load(current load =.21 and.7), I pop on a 3rd linux box.
And yes, they are very fast and incredibly stable.(as long as you keep solaris patched.)
Slashdot Mirror
Uhh, am I the only one here who was completely unaware that OpenBSD didn't have SMP support?
Nope, it caught me by suprise, too. Do any of the other BSDs lack SMP support in this day and age?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It would be interesting if it scales well so that it really makes sense to use it. The trend goes to some "double core" CPUs, too...
No, SMP was only absent in OpenBSD. It was just not a priority for the project. Nevertheless, it is a welcome addition.
Can anyone "in the know" shed some light about the qualities of the OpenBSD code? How does OpenBSD's SMP model compare to fine-grained locking, such as in FreeBSD-CURRENT?
When I see how much effort and trouble has gone and is going into locking down the FreeBSD kernel, I am guessing that OpenBSD's SMP support will be fairly primitive to start with. Or are there heavy ports from FreeBSD?
I was under the impression that SMP support has been in FreeBSD for a long time, since the 3.x days at least. It wasn't brilliant SMP (lots of coarse grained locks for example) but it was SMP. Fine grained SMP and new SMP code has emerged with FreeBSD 5.x however.
I welcome your focus on security, but "being a little behind the times in technology"???
OpenBSD may be the safest web server around. But without SMP it doesn't suit the servers needing the most protection, does it? Nearly every "serious" web server is SMP - at least in corporations, or am I wrong?
Having said that, it would be interesting how long it will be till SMP is considered a safe and stable feature in OpenBSD (else it would not be worthwhile, according to your comment - and I guess I agree there)?
The OpenBSD project simply has too few resources, and that's for sure! And that has nothing to do with "different set of priorities then Linux". I'm pretty sure, that Linux developers are numerous enough to aim for all three goals: reliability, safety and efficiency.
(Why? Because many typical DoS attacks work on the basis of a single process hogging the CPU. If you have two, a system administrator can log in and kill the process. If you have one, that system administrator will find it more difficult to do so. It's not a cure-all, but it helps.)
In all, excellent news. Thanks to everyone who made this possible, regardless of whether you just coded, or you campaigned for support for the OpenBSD project.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
The initiative to ADD SMP to OpenBSD (and the announcement that "a full time developer was working on it") occurred less than 4 months ago. It took FreeBSD years to get SMP "right", during an adolesence where stability seriously suffered.
Neither NetBSD nor OpenBSD have a significant fraction of the user base of FreeBSD (and an infinitessimal share compared to Linux), and neither NetBSD nor OpenBSD have comparably-sized development teams. FreeBSD SMP had antecedants to build on as well. So logic dictates that it should take longer for OpenBSD SMP to be "ready".
OpenBSD went through a comparable architecture change when they swapped virtual memory systems a few years ago, and several subsequent major releases of OpenBSD had serious VM stability problems (many of them synchronization issues). SMP is even harder (and more of it involves synchronization).
So, is there some mitigating factor here that would convince anyone who was paying attention to deploy a mission-critical system on SMP OpenBSD in 2004?
No, you are wrong. Google uses clusters of smaller machines. Dual CPU Webservers are generally considered bad, as they don't scale near as well as 2+ webservers serving files via nfs or other technology.
With 2x cpus, when a server gets bogged, it's gonna quickly hit a ceiling if you keep adding processors. Besides, unless you're doing huge engineering apps in real time, a webserver really only needs fast I/O and more memory to grow.
I tend to think it's because of Theo, not everyone gets along with him, if ya know what I mean. It will take a while before SMP is considered secure, as smp introduces quite a few possibilities for exploits, just due to the nature of sharing procs across processors.
For me OpenBSD has been a OS where I've been willing to give up performance for security. This is no major problem considering that todays (and even yesterdays) computers are extremely efficient if you don't shove a lot of fancy graphics down their throat. My fw at home was 486sx25 and got substituted by a P100 only because the P100 was far more silent. (oh, and it runs FreeSCO)
Speaking of performance, I did get very very happy with 2.9 wich boasted a 60x filesystem I/O boost.. :) ..
Anyway, I have no experience of huge enviroments. I've worked at smaller schools with a maximum of around 250 desktops/servers. I used to work at a school around 2000/2001 with some 150 desktops and all of them with real IPs (no fw). Most of them had servers running since it was a webdeveloper/designer school. Some computers were Macs but most run NT4. Needless to say they got haxxored more and more. I got fed up with it and started running RedHat 6.2 at my desktop (as I did at home) but even here I got fed up with checking for patches and checking logs for intrusions so I went for OpenBSD at the desktop and we started moving all exept the .asp pages to a second OpenBSD 2.8 computer. Never had any problems with either of these comps exept an ftp patch and an ssh patch IIRC. Our fileserver was a Samba wielding Slackware Linux-box and we also set up a fw, don't remember if it was Linux or OpenBSD though.
As you see I am an not "BSD people" but rather an OS agnostic (aka OS whore) and believe that all OSes have a good place in the matrix. OpenBSD is my choice for "deploy and (almost) forget". Security issuses come so seldom that they get posted on /. which I check daily.. ;)
BTW.. The other day I celebrated the 777 days uptime (that's 2+ years) of a OpenBSD 3.0 machine.. :')
Cheers...
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
OpenBSD has better code review and often employs better coding practice than linux, I will grant you, but with the addition of grsecurity and the proper use of firewalling, Linux is no security slouch either.
And, windows is not a better platform for gaming than linux in any way other than availability of games. Many games run faster on linux than on Windows. In general it's an issue of what platform it's optimized for.
Linux has many features desirable for routing packets that are missing or not as complete in other operating systems.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Dual CPU Webservers are generally considered bad, as they don't scale near as well as 2+ webservers serving files via nfs or other technology.
While that may be true in your case, I disagree for the general case.
When rack space costs you money, a dual-CPU 1 RU box cannot be beat for web-serving efficiency, especially if you serve any volume of dynamic content. For my $day_job, dual-CPU boxes can serve almost exactly 200% of the traffic of a single CPU box, and cost us no more in rack space or network ports or power provisioning than the single CPU box. Oh, and they require the same amount of sysadmin time too, not that that amounts to much in a web cluster.
Though your comments are well founded, I still somewhat disagree. After seeing both comments, I can see cpu being useful especially if you are doing SSL connections and session tracking.
.21 and .7), I pop on a 3rd linux box.
You might actually be one of the very few people who find that (double the cpu=double the power), but that's not very common for most web sites. Most of the time, dual cpus do not mean twice the power. I'd venture to guess that you might see 1.25 or 1.30x the power.
I intended my main point to be that web serving relies more on I/O and memory than CPUs.
My day job is an admin at an ISP and I find thousands of sites (ssl and reg) can run perfect on a 440Mhz Sun Netra t1. I have two of the $300 single proc bad boys runnning thousands of sites without a glich. When one fails, which niether have (Knock on wood), the other one is an easy failover script away.
When these finally hit 40% consistent load(current load =
And yes, they are very fast and incredibly stable.(as long as you keep solaris patched.)