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.

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

[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: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!)

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.

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?

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.

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: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.