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

Where to get it...

[KingSkippus]

Since the submitter didn't bother linking to their site (!!?), if you want to try out some of these amazing new features and improvements instead of just reading about them, you should head over to the OpenBSD 4.2 page and snag a copy!

Re:Where to get it...

[notamisfit]

I didn't see anything about it in the interview, but it looks like they've made install ISO's available for the various platforms (install42.iso in each directory). Might give it a spin if I can find a machine for it -- I gave 4.1 a try (and even bought a CD set) and was mostly impressed.

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

Jun-ichiro "itojun" Hagino

[eldavojohn]

It should probably be noted (as one of the articles states) that this release is dedicated to a man who passed away a few days ago. From another article on KernelTrap:

"Jun-ichiro 'itojun' Itoh Hagino passed away on October 29, 2007 at the age of 37. "To those in the BSD communities he was simply Itojun, best known in his role as IPv6 KAME project core researcher. Itojun did the vast majority of the work to get IPv6 into the BSD network stacks. He was also instrumental in moving IPv6 forward in all aspects through his participation in IETF protocol design meetings. Itojun was helpful to everyone around him, and dedicated to his work. He believed and worked toward making technology available to everyone. He will be missed, and always remembered." Truly unfortunate for the open source community, the networking community & all of Itojun's family. It's a shame to see someone so promising go at a young age.

Re:Jun-ichiro "itojun" Hagino

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Jun-ichiro "itojun" Hagino

[Anonymous Coward]

He died almost instantly in a car accident. Stupid driver wasn't looking where he was going and plowed straight into him. It could happen to any one of us.

He was a damn fine fellow and it's a real shame to see him gone. RIP.

Re:Jun-ichiro "itojun" Hagino

[nacturation]

And if you want to learn about IPv6 he has a good series of videos.

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.

Re:I need to try BSD

[ByOhTek]

One of the first things I do on FreeBSD after installing bash and portupgrade...

portupgrade -Nf sysutils/gnutools
echo "
alias ls='gls --color=always'
alias cp='gcp'
alias mv='gmv'
" >> ~/.bashrc

Something similar will probably work on OpenBSD

(oh, and for those who need their [modified] meems... OpenBSD is Undead, netcraft confirms it!)

4.2BSD

[m2943]

Ah, that brings back memories of 4.2BSD, the first BSD with real Internet support.

(OpenBSD 4.2 seems somewhat less exciting to me.)

How dissapointing- they didn't include Xen

[LukeCrawford]

Christoph Egger did a OpenBSD Xen port (based on the NetBSD xen stuff) see: http://hg.recoil.org/openbsd-xen-sys.hg It looked pretty promising. It's too bad they aren't going to support that platform. I've got lots of customers who'd really like a OpenBSD option.

Re:How dissapointing- they didn't include Xen

[e9th]

Theo has strong feelings about virtualization.

Request for information

[cdn-programmer]

I've filed a bug report on this but at this point I'm not even sure its a bug... could be a hardware issue..

If anyone is running Adaptec SCSI 2940 controllers with more than one SCSI hard drive and it works then I'd like to know... if anyone is having problems I'd like to know.

The issue is that I have one 2940 fast narrow card and it won't boot... says there is no O/S. In the same machine... swap that card out to a 2940 fast wide and it boots just fine. Perhaps this is a firmware card issue. I have so far only tested these two cards... I plan to go get a handfull more.

Next issue. With the fast wide all seems 100%. Then I start an rsync from another machine and within seconds I get a kernel panic. There is a bug report here: http://paste.lisp.org/display/49908#1

Is OpenBSD bug report # 5616

I'm not at this point asking anyone to debug this. I want to know if others have a similar setup and it works.

This machine is a Pentium I, with two fast narrow SCSI disks and in this case an AHA 2940 FW card. There is nothing else on the bus.

O/S version was 4.1 and now I can try the new version. Since OpenBSD is such a great O/S I sure would like to get to the bottom of this without wasting people's time. If we have a problem we need to know about it and potentially fix it. If its an isolated issue then I need to know this so I can shelve the hardware if in fact it is flakey hardware.

Note: With that fast wide controller... dd if=/dev/sd1 of=/dev/sd1 bs=2048 will run 100% and never glitch at all. But try that rsync on the system.. kernel panics 100% of the time within seconds.

Re:Request for information

[Antique Geekmeister]

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

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?

Re:I need to try BSD

[notamisfit]

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).

Good Desktop OS

[LM741N]

I know OpenBSD is renowned as a secure system, but it also is a good desktop OS. In fact, I bet it recognizes more devices than my Windoze Vista. I was pleasantly surprised the last time I tried out OpenBSD on my laptop. My only complaint is that the ports are not as comprehensive as FreeBSD. But then, maybe I should be a maintainer for one and stop complaining, lol.

Stable branch, still from source only?

[BlueParrot]

One of the things that has put me of OpenBSD is the need to compile from source if you want to use the stable branch. I realise this is partially due to limited resources and priorities, but I would argue that this is probably one area where there is room for improvement.

In any case they have done a lot of good work. Copyleft vs OSS ideology disputes aside. ; )

Re:Stable branch, still from source only?

[kv9]

One of the things that has put me of OpenBSD is the need to compile from source if you want to use the stable branch. I realise this is partially due to limited resources and priorities, but I would argue that this is probably one area where there is room for improvement. no you do not. stop spreading FUD. there are binary sets for multiple archs in every release. this also goes for the ports. it is clearly stated in the FAQ that if you want stable you should use binary packages. the only time when you have to compile is when you make changes to the kernel (or are tracking -current system or ports).

Never got the hang of patching it

[Just Some Guy]

One thing I never really figured out with OpenBSD is why errata patches are handled the way they are. Why doesn't OpenBSD offer binary updates? For example, here are the instructions to fix errata entry 009 ("Fix possible heap overflow in file(1), aka CVE-2007-1536."):

Apply by doing:
cd /usr/src
patch -p0 < 009_file.patch

And then rebuild and install file:
cd usr.bin/file
make obj
make cleandir
make depend
make
make install

Given that I installed from binary packages as do most users, and I might not even have a compiler installed, the startup cost of following those steps is fairly substantial. It seems like it would be easier for someone at OpenBSD to run those commands, see which files changed, wrap them up into a tarball, and distribute those - at least for the most popular architecture or two.

Now, I'm not saying they should do this or that they owe it to us end users to do it. I just mean that it'd be amazingly convenient with a seemingly minimal amount of extra work. Am I wrong about what would be involved?

Re:I need to try BSD

[Stamen]

colorls is in ports for gnubies, Can't you just turn on color with ls -G like in OS X? No need for gnu ls. The only reason I'd want gnu stuff is to be consistent with the Linux servers, so I could have 1 set of scripts. Personally, I don't install gnu tools in OS X, I use ls - G, and curl instead of wget, etc.

what is new? the answer is...

[lordholm]

There is a new song, as far as I am concerned, that is one of the more exciting features in OpenBSD 4.2. :)

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.

Because...

[emil]

...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.

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.

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.

BSD License

[Danathar]

And since this is all BSD licensed code you are free to take the code, put it in your proprietary "net security appliance" making any improvements of course without giving one single improvement back.

There are SO many 1U security "black boxes" that obviously rip off OpenBSD for 95% of their product it's just pathetic. I don't recall many of them touting that they used OpenBSD or ever hearing some of the "cool" features they SAY they have ever being contributed back to the main code repository for OpenBSD.

Re:BSD License

[Slashcrap]

And since this is all BSD licensed code you are free to take the code, put it in your proprietary "net security appliance" making any improvements of course without giving one single improvement back.

There are SO many 1U security "black boxes" that obviously rip off OpenBSD for 95% of their product it's just pathetic. I don't recall many of them touting that they used OpenBSD or ever hearing some of the "cool" features they SAY they have ever being contributed back to the main code repository for OpenBSD. Yes, I used to work for a company that did exactly this. They had a range of VPN gateways which were basically OpenBSD with a user interface. And while I'm not saying that they never contributed anything back, it definitely wasn't a priority.

On the other hand, they also have a great deal of Linux based products. And whenever they need to fix any Linux bugs or add features, they always contribute them back. Doing otherwise would be a breach of the license and expose them to legal liabilities.

The point is that as a rule, large corporations aren't going to do anything that they aren't legally obliged to do. You would probably call RMS a political zealot and an unrealistic idealist. But at the end of the day he's not the one that expects commercial enterprises to change their nature and act altruistically just because it would be nice. If they give those "cool" features back, they're also giving them to their competitors. Which is probably not a career extending move for the person responsible.

If these realities offend you so much, I would suggest that you avoid releasing any software under the BSD license.

Re:I need to try BSD

[DrSkwid]

> some of the GNU tools aren't there

That's called a feature