What's New in OpenBSD 4.2?

blackbearnh writes "OpenBSD 4.2 was released today, and has a host of new features. O'Reilly's ONLamp site has a pretty thorough overview of the release. 'Even though security is still there, this release comes with some amazing performance improvements: basic benchmarks showed PF being twice as fast, a rewrite of the TLB shootdown code for i386 and amd64 cut the time to do a full package build by 20 percent (mostly because all the forks in configure scripts have become much cheaper), and the improved frequency scaling on MP systems can help save nearly 20 percent of battery power. And then the new features: FFS2, support for the Advanced Host Controller Interface, IP balancing in CARP, layer 7 manipulation with hoststated, Xenocara, and more!'"

Comments

Love!

[antifoidulus]

Remember, Theo de Raadt loves each and every one of you, he includes love in each copy of OpenBSD! Well, love or an incredible hatred of the x86 platform and everything not OpenBSD.

Huh?

[LotsOfPhil]

What's BSD?

Re:Huh?

[king-manic]

What's BSD? A LSD precursor.

Oh boy!

[rabel]

basic benchmarks showed PF being twice as fast, a rewrite of the TLB shootdown code for i386 and amd64 cut the time to do a full package build by 20 percent (mostly because all the forks in configure scripts have become much cheaper)

And the bifflespaf WTF has more pargodoogen XRR! But what about the Garblerackin' snarkenlugey 533p?

Yeah, yeah, I know, it's /. so this is to be expected, but this is getting ridiculous.

sp1?

[farkus888]

I am thinking some of the optimizations to pf and the network stack are pretty cool but I think I will be waiting for sp1 when they have worked out all the bugs and security holes before I upgrade my machine.

Re:Where to get it...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'll wait until those evil linux developers rip the BSD copyright from the headers and relicense the lot under GPLv3. /ducks

I'm just strollin'

[FoolsGold]

The only reason I clicked on this article is 'cos I really dig the red stylesheet for BSD news here. Reminds me of strawberries.

I assume BSD has other, more useful features though.

Re:Request for information

[Antique Geekmeister]

Welcome to the (lack of) driver support for OpenBSD.

Re:I need to try BSD

[DrSkwid]

> some of the GNU tools aren't there

That's called a feature

Re:Request for information

[kv9]

3d graphics cards, anyone? USB->serial adapters? Wacom graphics tablets? External USB DVD burners? I've seen reports of all of them failing with OpenBSD, where they work well under Linux, even with live Linux CD's. all these have no purpose in a server orientated OS. OpenBSD supports lots of hardware and people that check if their hardware is supported before whining are known to be running it as a workstation (not a "desktop"). OBSD is exciting because of its PF goodness, various other network magics and security, not because it supports the latest tablets.

Unless there's been a huge influx of driver support, which seems unlikely with Theo in charge and insulting polite GPL developers judge a man by his deeds, not his attitude.

I see it stuck in supporting network security applicances, not desktop use. I don't see that as "stuck". not everyone is trying to make the next point-click-drool Noobuntu, you know?