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OpenBSD 3.6 Released!

Posted by Hemos on from the coming-out-at-you dept.

dspisak writes "The people over at OpenBSD have released version 3.6 containing significant new features such as: SMP support for i386 and amd64 archs, the ability to optimize pf rulesets, better hotplug support, in addition to more robust encryption and vpn functionality. This is in addition to more recent hardware support, for a full list of changes take a look at the 3.6 changelog. Don't forget to use the mirrors!"

6 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. Reasons I like OpenBSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Simple (text install). Default install is small, but gives you a complete, basic Unix-like OS. Man pages are really useful. Multi-platform, so you don't have to manage a different OS on every arch you have. OpenBSD is creating technology that helps other distros, such as OpenSSH. I'm expecting to see their BGP and NTP stuff showing up elsewhere.

  2. Re:Firewall ? by homer_ca · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That and a pf ruleset actually makes sense when you read it.

  3. Re:Firewall ? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Last time I looked, iptables also didn't support prioritisation of TCP ACKs, a particularly useful feature for people on an asymmetric connection, since it prevents maxing out the upstream bandwidth from throttling the downstream.

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    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  4. Don't forget to buy a CD by Keith+McClary · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Don't forget to use the mirrors!

    I've heard there are big companies using many copies of OpenBSD but haven't even bought a CD.

    They should get their names on this list:
    http://www.openbsd.com/donations.html

  5. Re:Recent FreeBSD switcher by setagllib · · Score: 2, Insightful

    FreeBSD is a great place to start learning BSDs, since it is by far the simplest and offers the most functionality on x86 machines. The downside is that its future is bleak (lost best devs, politics too messy, CODE too messy... this isn't trolling, hell I love FreeBSD, but judging by 5.x progress it's not going to get any better).

    So use FreeBSD as a learning platform then move to the deeper end of Net and/or OpenBSD. When DragonFly has cleaned out more of the 4.x cruft and become production-class stable, that'll be a great thing to investigate too. Net and Open, however, have had so-clean-you-can-eat-off-it code for years now, and the result is a pair of portable (especially NetBSD), secure (especially OpenBSD), high performing (at least, OpenBSD say they've made it so) and generally very good systems. They certainly pose very good alternatives to Linux, and I would much rather run either on a server/gateway machine (iptables is a joke).

    --
    Sam ty sig.
  6. Re:SMP support by setagllib · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well, you saw the crap that happened to FreeBSD 5 when they tried to get 'good' SMP support. The SMP is fine-grained for the most part, but it isn't worth it, since the performance on SMP and UP is still (as demonstrated above) miles behind other systems, even Net and OpenBSD which don't claim to have fine-grained or even far matured SMP.

    SMP itself is not a killer, but when a design for SMP is overcomplicated, the rest of the system suffers.

    --
    Sam ty sig.