Now it can die with super SMP efficiency and at double the speed!
Depending on the implementation, it could only be 1.5 times the original speed. In certain special cases, a good implementation might be able to make it die at 2.1 times the speed or greater.
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...
Uh oh, here comes SCO!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Funny
BSD could not have become so popular so quickly without IBM taking the SCO code, putting it in Linux where the BSD people took GPL code put it under BSD license and then.... and anyway, this is based on Minix, because no one person could have written BSD, and AT&T probably would sue them for this anyway. This is hurting american economic... GPL is communistic... and Alex de Tocqueville said that... BSD is dying anyway..
Oh man. I just give up.
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
thanasakis
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· Score: 3, Informative
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
jellomizer
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Well OpenBSD has a different set of priorities then Linux. OpenBSD philosophy is to do it and do it well make absolutely sure that it is secure. This strong focus on security slows down a lot of development and thus keeping OpenBSD from the leading edge of technology. Now that a lot of SMP technology has matured and proven its worth it is now time for an OpenBSD implementation. Being on the leading edge is nice. But when you have a solution that must absolutely has to be running and secure there is no shame on being a little behind the times in technology.
-- If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
life4m
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· 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?
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
Morth
·
· Score: 4, Informative
*BSD had (useful) IPv6 long before Linux thanks to kame. OpenBSD is also the last of them to get SMP support, even if it's pretty fresh in NetBSD too (a year or so).
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
Shakrai
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· Score: 4, Informative
haha nice try, 4.x DOES have smp.
I have mod points so I actually researched the AC to see if he was right or wrong. Rather then waste them on an AC though I figured I'd actually post a link to back up his claim: FreeBSD Symmetric MultiProcessor Kernel.
-- I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man. We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
mikael_j
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· Score: 3, Informative
Nice troll, FreeBSD 4.x does have SMP although it's pretty inefficient. 5.x has much better SMP but it's currently labeled "new technology release" and they recommend 4.x for production servers. 5.x is quite stable though..
/Mikael
-- Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
jmartinp
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· Score: 2, Informative
FreeBSD 4.x has SMP and if memory serves me, 3.x had SMP as well. It's true that the 5.x branch includes a reworked SMP, also known as SMPng, which includes more fine-grained locking, but saying that 4.x branch lacks SMP is misleading to say at least.
FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE #7: Fri Mar 12 15:22:05 EST 2004 xxxxxxx@xxx.xxxxxxxx.xxx:/usr/src/sys/compile/DERW OODSMP Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz CPU: Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon/Celeron (497.44-MHz 686-class CPU) Origin = "GenuineIntel" Id = 0x673 Stepping = 3 Features=0x383fbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE, CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,MMX,FXSR, SSE> real memory = 1073733632 (1048568K bytes) avail memory = 1039605760 (1015240K bytes) Changing APIC ID for IO APIC #0 from 0 to 2 on chip Programming 24 pins in IOAPIC #0 IOAPIC #0 intpin 2 -> irq 0 FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor motherboard: 2 CPUs cpu0 (BSP): apic id: 0, version: 0x00040011, at 0xfee00000 cpu1 (AP): apic id: 1, version: 0x00040011, at 0xfee00000 io0 (APIC): apic id: 2, version: 0x00170011, at 0xfec00000
Re:Time to move openbsd.org to OpenBSD then ...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4, Informative
That's actually crap. They use the university of alberta's server as it has more bandwidth available to it than their own connection.
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
Octorian
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· Score: 3, Informative
Also, I belive that NetBSD already has SMP support (not sure when it went in there, though). So does Darwin, of course.
Re:Time to move openbsd.org to OpenBSD then ...
by
zyche
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· Score: 5, Informative
RTFFAQ. http://openbsd.org/faq/faq8.html#wwwsolar is
"www.openbsd.org and the main OpenBSD ftp site are hosted at a SunSITE at the University of Alberta, Canada. These sites are hosted on a large Sun system, which has access to lots of storage space and Internet bandwidth. The presence of the SunSITE gives the OpenBSD group access to this bandwidth. This is why the main site runs here."
And even given this, ftp.openbsd.org is usually very slow around release time.
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.
Multiple Niches
by
Mark_MF-WN
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Yeah, the whole BSD vs Linux conflict is ridiculous. There are a lot of niches out there in the software world, and Linux can't fill them ALL. Linux is nice on the desktop, handheld, and cluster, but the BSDs seem well suited for firewalls, routers, and other kinds of always-on equipment. OpenBSD in particular seems useful for bastion hosts, because of its rock-solid security. And of course, we still need Windows for hardcore gaming.
The point? Niches -- there are a bunch of them. Although I'm a loyal Linux user, I love the OpenBSD project. It contributes a great deal of useful software and bugfixes that help the whole community.
SMP defined
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Informative
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
Tranzig
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The bigger news here, for me, is that Linux just jumped way up on my totem pole of respect.
I wonder where Windows NT is on your totem pole, because it had SMP support years before Linux 2.0. And ACPI support and journalizing filesystem support and modules (drivers) support and so on... I know I will be modded down for such blasphemy.
Anyways OpenBSD has (at least had last year) scalability issues, it scales pretty bad, and it needs to be solved ot get SMP really effective.
Faulty Assumption?
by
SteveM
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· Score: 4, Insightful
They really need to stop assuming everyone who reads/. knows it all.
They don't assume you know it all. They do assume you are smart enough to do some research and find info on stuff you don't understand.
How hard is it to google "SMP"?
SteveM
Re:Wave of the future
by
REBloomfield
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· Score: 2, Informative
Does windows have SMP/NUMA support yet?
Yes.
Is it economically more feasable to build a multi- (not so great)processor machine rather than a powerful single CPU?
No.
OpenBSD commands respect...
by
emil
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· Score: 5, Insightful
...quite easily. Examine Red Hat's errata list for AS3, then look at OpenBSD's errata. I assume that you will see a rather conspicuous difference in the quantity of changes?
Granted, this list is not entirely fair, as many ports and packages have bug fixes, which would push up OpenBSD's count. However, OpenBSD includes a great deal in the base distribution (SSH, Apache, Sendmail, etc.) that comprises what they assert to be audited, secure code.
To me, the ability to deploy a server and then spend minimal effort with security patches is more important than SMP. YMMV.
Re:OpenBSD commands respect...
by
lysander
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· Score: 2, Informative
They're source-only updates on purpose -- the only binaries that are available are through releases and (recently) snapshots.
Once you update your src tree, you can recompile the kernel and system binaries if you need to -- whatever the patch requires. As a bonus, since everything is backed by cvs, you could make local changes and merge in updates rather seamlessly.
The snapshot builds, I think, are taken from -current rather than -stable.
-- GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
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.
--
KMSMA (WWBD?)
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
Chreo
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Perhaps you should do your research a bit more thoroughly next time. The link you are referring to is about FreeBSD SMPng (ng = next generation, implying a previous generation). SMPng is a core tech of FreeBSD 5.x but SMP has been a feature for 4.x a long time.
From the page you linked:
FreeBSD supports Symmetric MultiProcessor kernels in the following releases:
Life is what happened when Good Intentions met Harsh Reality (the brother of the more infamous Chaos).
Get informed plix...
by
CptnHarlock
·
· Score: 5, Informative
OpenBSD is NOT premirely a webserever. It can and is used as one (I do it), but its main use is as a firewall. It even got voted as "best application for firewalling" by the MS crowd..:)
I've been aware of OpenBSDs lack of SMP since 2000 when I installed it on a double PentiumPro 180 Mhz. I Thought it was weird it didn't have SMP since Linux and FreeBSD had it but after some reading I accepted the desision.
I guess the OpenBSD guys went for SMP considering the double core desktop processors gaining more ground. Am I correct?
Cheers...
-- $HOME is where the.*shrc is -- silver_p
Re:Get informed plix...
by
jimi1283
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· Score: 4, Informative
Ok, I have mod points and I have to comment on this. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that the OpenBSD team does not do anything at the whim of the bitching masses. Did you not read the recent mailing list thread about the decision to stop updating Apache in the ports tree??? And what about when they removed ipf???
Theo may be a hard headed son of a bitch but he takes care of buisness and is not swayed by popular opinion. This is not a sudden development, there were articles a year ago about how the OpenBSD team was looking for a full time programmer to work on SMP.
This has been planned, and when OpenBSD executes a plan they execute it well.
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:Not so fast...
by
cubidou
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· Score: 2, Informative
Since OpenBSD SMP support is mostly NetBSD's plus code style changes, I'd say it only took 4 months to import what was started 3 or 4 years ago by Bill Studenmund for NetBSD.
Credit where it's due.
Re:Not so fast...
by
cubidou
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· Score: 4, Informative
Since OpenBSD SMP support is mostly NetBSD's plus code style changes, I'd say it only took 4 months to import what was started 3 or 4 years ago by Bill Studenmund for NetBSD.
Oh, and I forgot, removal of all ACPI code, too.
That means OpenBSD won't work with MP computers that have a broken MPBIOS or simply require MPACPI (like most, if not all, HyperThreading processors do).
Re:Not so fast...
by
Nimrangul
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· Score: 2, Informative
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?
If you see it in the 3.6 release, consider it ready. If you don't then it wasn't ready yet.
-- I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
Re:Not so fast...
by
evilviper
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· Score: 2, Insightful
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
I was using OpenBSD at the time, and never had the problems myself. I wasn't following the mailing lists, so I didn't even know there were serious problems.
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?
Yes. Their track record. If it's not stable about a month before the release, expect it to be disabled and/or removed. If it is reasonably stable, it's going to go through a couple weeks of nothing but bug testing and fixing before it's released. OpenBSD releases are nothing like Linux releases, you aren't going to have to download the new version a day later because there's a show-stopping bug in the version they just released...
That said, even though they are putting in SMP support, I wouldn't recomend switching soon. Even if it is stable and secure, don't expect performance to be mind-boggling for a while.
AC says: FreeBSD 4.0 DOES have SMP. Reply says: I wanted to post this link to back up his claim. You: I will refute you by proving your point.
Everyone from the AC down the thread was saying that FreeBSD 4.0 had SMP.;)
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
Alioth
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· Score: 4, Informative
OpenBSD's focus is vastly different from Linux's (I use both, and I use them where appropriate). OpenBSD's primary focus has been on security and correctness of the implementation. Compare OpenBSD's pf with Linux's iptables - pf is so much more powerful and useful than iptables the difference is like night and day. The OpenBSD pf has security features that cost large sums of money in the closed source world.
SMP simply is not a priority for OpenBSD. The kind of uses OpenBSD is put to hardly ever requires it, so it's not in the least surprising that they are only just implementing it now.
FreeBSD The most powerful x86 open source Unix
OpenBSD The most secure open source Unix available
NetBSD The most portable open source Unix available
Linux The most popular open source Unix
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
curator_thew
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You are an idiot: IPv6 support is a mandatory requirement to have as IPv6 rollout comes ahead in the next few years. It's a testimony to the solid reliability of the BSD protocol suite that the main experimental development for IPv6 (notably via. KAME) was undertaken on BSD. So this forward thinking will pay off.
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
LizardKing
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· Score: 2, Informative
Do any of the other BSDs lack SMP support in this day and age?
NetBSD has had SMP support for some time, and it is now working on a number of platforms (sparc, i386, etc). It's largely been the work of Bill Studenmund, and also formed the basis of OpenBSD's SMP support. This kind of sharing is quite common amongst the BSD's, especially Open and Net.
Chris
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:Wave of the future
by
TheRaven64
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Does windows have SMP/NUMA support yet?
Windows NT has always had SMP support (I think, I haven't used the 3.x series). The workstation version supports 1-2 CPUs, the server ones support more, although they are limited to 16 (I think. Maybe 32. Too lazy to check) due to a the size of the processor table (see Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems for more information)
Is it economically more feasable to build a multi- (not so great)processor machine rather than a powerful single CPU?
More or less. Top of the line CPUs usually carry a large premium, and the mid-range ones usually have a much better price/performance ratio. On the other hand SMP motherboards are usually more expensive. In the future it will become more sensible, since the cost of increasing the speed of a CPU by n% increases over time.
OpenBSD needs SMP
by
Sloppy
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm glad they're doing this. I know OpenBSD's focus isn't performance, but the day is coming when all personal computers will be multiprocessor. Not because people will actually put two chips on all their motherboards, but because of dual-core chips. Dual-core is such a great idea that pays off with so much performance per area-of-silicon, that eventually [speculation follows] economy-of-scale is going to make single-core chips an endangered species. Maybe you'll still be able to get a single-core x86 chip from Via or Transmeta or someone, but I bet AMD and Intel will stop making them altogether.
So OpenBSD faces a situation where people are going to be running their OS on SMP-capable hardware, even when the user may not necessarily highly value SMP. The user will have SMP simply because the $100 chip he bought, is dual core. All of OpenBSD's competitors will be able to take advantage of this, so OpenBSD's performance would be so far behind, that even if performance isn't the focus, it'll look just plain wasteful and backward.
All developers who makes OSes that run on commodity hardware, need to wake up and deal with SMP, because in a few years, everyone is going to want it, rather than just the speed freaks.
-- As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Re:SMP didn't make it more secure, so not a priori
by
Alan+Hicks
·
· Score: 2, Informative
SMP is a scalability issue
SMP is also a security issue, a negative one. Implimenting secure SMP is not an easy thing to do IIUC. Making sure that processes access memory in a secure way on a multi processor machine is difficult.
-- Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
dasunt
·
· Score: 2, Informative
IPv6 is irrelevent right now outside of lab environments and isolated networks (cell phone providers, etc.).
How about this then: OpenBSD had ipsec in its core long before linux ever did. The vanilla linux kernel didn't get ipsec until the 2.6 series, everything before that was either 3rd-party kernel patches and daemons.
Hell, windows had ipsec before vanilla linux did.:(
Hmm, that may be true for Google since they generally don't have to keep state. When you have to keep track of sessions and need a substantial amount of sharing between your server instances as a result, a cluster of dual cpu machines or even quad cpu machines may turn out to perform a lot better.
At any rate, if your goal is to handle lots and lots of relatively independent queries, then yeah, large clusters of relatively small machines do a very good job.
Netcraft confirms that QNX...
by
CaptainPinko
·
· Score: 2, Funny
must suck. They seem to be hosting their site on Linux. Wow, now that word is out I doubt anyone will ever use them them again!!! QNX must be dying...
Your spoon will always make for a lousy fork.
-- Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Re:No SMP? Huh?
by
the+morgawr
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You can view the CVS repository and decide for yourself.
Right now I think most of the kernel is under big lock. SMP is currenly on target for a stable release in OpenBSD 3.6 (Nov 1, 2004). I suspect that by 3.7 (May 1, 2005) big lock will have been pushed down into at least the major subsystems.
It may happen even before then, the Calgary hack-a-thon is comming up and SMP is a major focus. Mostly they are working on bug fixes but I wouldn't be surprised to see a bunch of SMP improvments come out of that.
Also, if you read the tech@ list archives you'll notice that they are asking people to test the bsd.mp kernel and report errors. They are also looking to borrow computers that have certain types of hardware problems that are causing software issues (so that SMP will be supported in them).
-- The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
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
Now it can die with super SMP efficiency and at double the speed!
:)
Just kidding, mods don't hurt me
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
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...
BSD could not have become so popular so quickly without IBM taking the SCO code, putting it in Linux where the BSD people took GPL code put it under BSD license and then.... and anyway, this is based on Minix, because no one person could have written BSD, and AT&T probably would sue them for this anyway. This is hurting american economic... GPL is communistic... and Alex de Tocqueville said that... BSD is dying anyway..
Oh man. I just give up.
Yes: ipv6 ports for freebsd
haha nice try, 4.x DOES have smp.
Well OpenBSD has a different set of priorities then Linux. OpenBSD philosophy is to do it and do it well make absolutely sure that it is secure. This strong focus on security slows down a lot of development and thus keeping OpenBSD from the leading edge of technology. Now that a lot of SMP technology has matured and proven its worth it is now time for an OpenBSD implementation. Being on the leading edge is nice. But when you have a solution that must absolutely has to be running and secure there is no shame on being a little behind the times in technology.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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?
*BSD had (useful) IPv6 long before Linux thanks to kame. OpenBSD is also the last of them to get SMP support, even if it's pretty fresh in NetBSD too (a year or so).
haha nice try, 4.x DOES have smp.
I have mod points so I actually researched the AC to see if he was right or wrong. Rather then waste them on an AC though I figured I'd actually post a link to back up his claim: FreeBSD Symmetric MultiProcessor Kernel.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
FreeBSD 4.x has SMP and if memory serves me, 3.x had SMP as well. It's true that the 5.x branch includes a reworked SMP, also known as SMPng, which includes more fine-grained locking, but saying that 4.x branch lacks SMP is misleading to say at least.
That's actually crap. They use the university of alberta's server as it has more bandwidth available to it than their own connection.
Also, I belive that NetBSD already has SMP support (not sure when it went in there, though). So does Darwin, of course.
RTFFAQ.r is
http://openbsd.org/faq/faq8.html#wwwsola
"www.openbsd.org and the main OpenBSD ftp site are hosted at a SunSITE at the University of Alberta, Canada. These sites are hosted on a large Sun system, which has access to lots of storage space and Internet bandwidth. The presence of the SunSITE gives the OpenBSD group access to this bandwidth. This is why the main site runs here."
And even given this, ftp.openbsd.org is usually very slow around release time.
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.
The point? Niches -- there are a bunch of them. Although I'm a loyal Linux user, I love the OpenBSD project. It contributes a great deal of useful software and bugfixes that help the whole community.
Wikipedia article on Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP).
The bigger news here, for me, is that Linux just jumped way up on my totem pole of respect.
I wonder where Windows NT is on your totem pole, because it had SMP support years before Linux 2.0. And ACPI support and journalizing filesystem support and modules (drivers) support and so on...
I know I will be modded down for such blasphemy.
Anyways OpenBSD has (at least had last year) scalability issues, it scales pretty bad, and it needs to be solved ot get SMP really effective.
They really need to stop assuming everyone who reads /. knows it all.
They don't assume you know it all. They do assume you are smart enough to do some research and find info on stuff you don't understand.
How hard is it to google "SMP"?
SteveM
Yes.
Is it economically more feasable to build a multi- (not so great)processor machine rather than a powerful single CPU?
No.
...quite easily. Examine Red Hat's errata list for AS3, then look at OpenBSD's errata. I assume that you will see a rather conspicuous difference in the quantity of changes?
Granted, this list is not entirely fair, as many ports and packages have bug fixes, which would push up OpenBSD's count. However, OpenBSD includes a great deal in the base distribution (SSH, Apache, Sendmail, etc.) that comprises what they assert to be audited, secure code.
To me, the ability to deploy a server and then spend minimal effort with security patches is more important than SMP. YMMV.
(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?)
Life is what happened when Good Intentions met Harsh Reality (the brother of the more infamous Chaos).
I've been aware of OpenBSDs lack of SMP since 2000 when I installed it on a double PentiumPro 180 Mhz. I Thought it was weird it didn't have SMP since Linux and FreeBSD had it but after some reading I accepted the desision.
I guess the OpenBSD guys went for SMP considering the double core desktop processors gaining more ground. Am I correct?
Cheers...
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
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?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
AC says: FreeBSD 4.0 DOES have SMP.
Reply says: I wanted to post this link to back up his claim.
You: I will refute you by proving your point.
Everyone from the AC down the thread was saying that FreeBSD 4.0 had SMP.;)
OpenBSD's focus is vastly different from Linux's (I use both, and I use them where appropriate). OpenBSD's primary focus has been on security and correctness of the implementation. Compare OpenBSD's pf with Linux's iptables - pf is so much more powerful and useful than iptables the difference is like night and day. The OpenBSD pf has security features that cost large sums of money in the closed source world.
SMP simply is not a priority for OpenBSD. The kind of uses OpenBSD is put to hardly ever requires it, so it's not in the least surprising that they are only just implementing it now.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Read the soekris website, it puts it nicely:
FreeBSD The most powerful x86 open source Unix OpenBSD The most secure open source Unix available NetBSD The most portable open source Unix available Linux The most popular open source Unix
You are an idiot: IPv6 support is a mandatory requirement to have as IPv6 rollout comes ahead in the next few years. It's a testimony to the solid reliability of the BSD protocol suite that the main experimental development for IPv6 (notably via. KAME) was undertaken on BSD. So this forward thinking will pay off.
Do any of the other BSDs lack SMP support in this day and age?
NetBSD has had SMP support for some time, and it is now working on a number of platforms (sparc, i386, etc). It's largely been the work of Bill Studenmund, and also formed the basis of OpenBSD's SMP support. This kind of sharing is quite common amongst the BSD's, especially Open and Net.
Chris
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
Windows NT has always had SMP support (I think, I haven't used the 3.x series). The workstation version supports 1-2 CPUs, the server ones support more, although they are limited to 16 (I think. Maybe 32. Too lazy to check) due to a the size of the processor table (see Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems for more information) Is it economically more feasable to build a multi- (not so great)processor machine rather than a powerful single CPU?
More or less. Top of the line CPUs usually carry a large premium, and the mid-range ones usually have a much better price/performance ratio. On the other hand SMP motherboards are usually more expensive. In the future it will become more sensible, since the cost of increasing the speed of a CPU by n% increases over time.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So OpenBSD faces a situation where people are going to be running their OS on SMP-capable hardware, even when the user may not necessarily highly value SMP. The user will have SMP simply because the $100 chip he bought, is dual core. All of OpenBSD's competitors will be able to take advantage of this, so OpenBSD's performance would be so far behind, that even if performance isn't the focus, it'll look just plain wasteful and backward.
All developers who makes OSes that run on commodity hardware, need to wake up and deal with SMP, because in a few years, everyone is going to want it, rather than just the speed freaks.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
SMP is also a security issue, a negative one. Implimenting secure SMP is not an easy thing to do IIUC. Making sure that processes access memory in a secure way on a multi processor machine is difficult.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
IPv6 is irrelevent right now outside of lab environments and isolated networks (cell phone providers, etc.).
How about this then: OpenBSD had ipsec in its core long before linux ever did. The vanilla linux kernel didn't get ipsec until the 2.6 series, everything before that was either 3rd-party kernel patches and daemons.
Hell, windows had ipsec before vanilla linux did. :(
Hmm, that may be true for Google since they generally don't have to keep state. When you have to keep track of sessions and need a substantial amount of sharing between your server instances as a result, a cluster of dual cpu machines or even quad cpu machines may turn out to perform a lot better.
At any rate, if your goal is to handle lots and lots of relatively independent queries, then yeah, large clusters of relatively small machines do a very good job.
must suck. They seem to be hosting their site on Linux. Wow, now that word is out I doubt anyone will ever use them them again!!! QNX must be dying...
Your spoon will always make for a lousy fork.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Right now I think most of the kernel is under big lock. SMP is currenly on target for a stable release in OpenBSD 3.6 (Nov 1, 2004). I suspect that by 3.7 (May 1, 2005) big lock will have been pushed down into at least the major subsystems.
It may happen even before then, the Calgary hack-a-thon is comming up and SMP is a major focus. Mostly they are working on bug fixes but I wouldn't be surprised to see a bunch of SMP improvments come out of that.
Also, if you read the tech@ list archives you'll notice that they are asking people to test the bsd.mp kernel and report errors. They are also looking to borrow computers that have certain types of hardware problems that are causing software issues (so that SMP will be supported in them).
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
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.)