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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!'"
Hmmm, I just learned to get used to no color, no longopts, and readable man pages. Crazy, innit? (Although, IMNSHO, zsh kicks the shit out of bash for usability).
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
One of the things I love about OpenBSD is pf. It blows away iptables. Not only in functionality, but in the syntax language as well. You don't have to have a cheat sheet for pf like iptables, which lessens the chances for mistakes IMHO. Iptables syntax is extremely painful to work with in comparison.
It says a lot about the kinds of people who post here when things like this happen, a man dies, and some random jackass makes a crack about it. Fuck you, you little shit, itojun was a good man. He put a huge amount of his life's work into the KAME project, and through it provided the world with IPv6, that's a significant accomplishment. What have you done? Made a jab about a dead man.
...the OpenBSD philosophy is security through openness. When you receive a security patch as source code, you can see exactly what is being done. If the patch were to include a binary image, verification would be slightly more difficult.
There have been binary patch projects (I used to use one at openbsd.org.mx), but since I have resigned myself to installing a compiler and the whole of the OS source code into /usr/src, I find the binary patches to be superfluous.
OpenBSD does cling to some of the other BSD behaviors in lieu of POSIX. Default use of the long-deprecated C-Shell and old-style "ps" behavior ("ps aux" rather than "ps -ef") come to mind.
Having everything in /usr/src is really the UNIX way from the days of old. It's a shame that we moved away from this practice.
And the world is better for it.