OpenBSD's Alpha Support In Trouble

Nimrangul writes "Hours ago Theo de Raadt put out a call for an Alpha CS20, because as of last night OpenBSD no longer has one. The CS20 that died was a build machine and without it further support for the Alpha platform would be nearly impossible. If you have a C320 or other 1U Alpha machine that you would be willing to donate to the project, please respond to the discussion on the misc mailing list."

Comments

Uh-oh.

[dougmc]

... that's going to put a serious kink in the plans of both of the people using the Alpha NetBSD port!

:)

Seriously though, how many people use NetBSD on Alpha machines? I have an Alpha machine in the garage, but haven't used it in years. (Sorry, it's not 1U, and much slower than what they had.)

(Actually, are there any figures on how many systems are running NetBSD at all available? I haven't run it in a very long time, having discovered that it's just easier to use x86 boxes and run FreeBSD and Linux on them.)

Impossible

[Atlantic Wall]

It is impossible to think that a great project like openbsd is in so much dire need of money and equipment. I cant count how many friends of mine use an opebsd firewall to secure their network. i wish i could donate something to help, other than time, money or an alpha, since i have none. but i guess moral support will have to do. Wht the heck is the US govt. not using this OS anyway?????

Re:Impossible

[setagllib]

I may be mistaken, but larger institutions (e.g. a government datacenter) will be using hardcore SMP with terrifying amounts of RAM and disk space, and yet OpenBSD doesn't yet scale up that high. They're forced to use Linux just because it 1) is free AND 2) scales really well, at the same time. This is not a popular combination.

FreeBSD >=5 is meant to be able to compete, but I haven't heard many success stories personally. I imagine OpenBSD with its giant lock definitely wouldn't be able to compete in terms of SMP, and without a journalling file system, the super-reliability needs might not be met.

To be really honest though, most exploits against Linux do still happen in the userland (not that the kernel doesn't have its exploits: they're just usually fixed sooner and are harder to exploit), and there you can just port fixes from OpenBSD or find more clever ways of tightening every last bolt. So the security of a super-scalable Linux datacenter could be practically comparable to an OpenBSD machine, without losing the value of your hardware (which is easily up in the millions).

But DragonFly BSD is hoping to be suitable for super-scalable tasks without compromising security, and while it's not quite there yet (at least in that its only native port is x86), it should be soon enough. If corporations and governments don't consider BSD *then*, there's really something wrong.

Of course this is all just servers. For desktops (that still need healthy security) the BSDs are more than suitable, yet their use is mysteriously overlooked. But I suppose if there's a Linux distribution which does decent QA without remaining in the dark ages, it could be not-too-bad itself.