OpenBSD 3.8 Released

Cowards Anonymous writes "OpenBSD 3.8 is out. It comes with improved hardware support, some improvements to the OSPF daemon, some new RAID management tools, among many others. Even if you plan on installing via FTP, why not order a CD copy, tshirt, or poster as well? "

Comments

Re:T-Shirts are Dandy and All..

[LurkerXXX]

Lots of folks use it. But many use it in a place you'd never detect it. Firewalls. Your 'netcraft' numbers won't report those, because in the vast majority of cases those will be totally invisible.

Re:When you say "out"

[hey!]

Which is why F/OSS is so wonderful if you're a decision maker. There is no death, so long as somebody out there with the skills is willing to maintain it. And by the law of large numbers, any sufficiently high profile project like this is a close to immortal as any software project can be.

Re:We are dorks

[(startx)]

As a developer you should care about this release. The malloc/free implimentation has been changed to release memory immediately to the OS, causing any read-after-free bugs to immediately throw a SIGSEGV.

See theo's post to misc@.

Re:We are dorks

[RAMMS EIN]

Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, of course, but I personally think this release is a big deal. Contrary to what is usually the case with point releases, this one actually improves the state of the art - namely in security of Unix-like operating systems.

Some important security features have gone into this release (see, for example, this presentation), security that are almost certainly not found in any operating system you can mention. Besides the obvious benefit of making OpenBSD more secure, these features help catch bugs, and already some years-old bugs have already been caught. When these bugs are fixed, other systems using the software the bugs were in becomes more secure, too.

Personally, I am very impressed with how many security features the OpenBSD team manage to put in their system, without great sacrifices in standard-compliance and performance. I'm much more impressed by that than what great new features for games developers Microsoft has integrated, or how their new GUI toolkit makes their interface less ugly, or how Linux supports yet another hardware gadget, or how yet another distro promises that they will cause Linux to topple Microsoft.

In today's world that is run by computers, we need security. Worms, botnets, trojans, automated and directed break ins, website defacements, spam, and information theft demonstrate that we aren't there yet. OpenBSD seems to be the only OS project that seems to fully realize this _and_ have a production-ready system available. There is still much to be desired, but they're much further than the competition.