OpenBSD Marches Toward 5.0 Release

badger.foo writes "OpenBSD-current just turned 5.0-beta, providing us a preview of what the upcoming release (slated for November 1st) will look like. Peter Hansteen takes us through the main new features and explains the development process that has consistently turned out high-quality releases on time, every six months for more than a decade."

Comments

OpenBSD Rock Solid OS without fluf.

[jellomizer]

If it wasn't for the fact that most System Administrators are more comfortable with Linux or Windows (And many of the new ones are not too willing to expand that much on the command line). I would have all my servers running OpenBSD. You get it set it up to do the Job you want and let it work.

Re:OpenBSD Rock Solid OS without fluf.

[TheRaven64]

I used a PowerPC Mac Mini as a server for a few years, and had no problems with OpenBSD hardware support. Everything worked with the same interfaces as on x86. YellowDog Linux also kind-of supported the hardware, but things were strangely different from x86 (e.g. Linux puts CPU and power management stuff behind different interfaces on different architectures) and the admin interface was just different enough from RedHat to be irritating, while OpenBSD on PowerPC Mac worked just like OpenBSD everywhere else.

A sysadmin probably wouldn't have noticed that it wasn't x86. A developer would only have noticed if they did anything endian-specific, not if they stuck to public OS interfaces. While I had the machine, I wrote some software for showing the CPU and power status which ran on a variety of systems. It had a simple abstraction layer, where each target platform implemented a few functions for platform-specific stuff. For OpenBSD, each function was one sysctl() call. I wrote them on PowerPC, someone else tested them on SPARC, x86 and x86-64, and they worked everywhere. For Linux, I had to add a dependency on a 300KB library that abstracted the differences between the different versions of Linux on x86... and then was told by the first person that tested it on PowerPC Linux that it didn't work properly there.

So, I'd say hardware support is pretty good on OpenBSD. More importantly, the OS actually does its job and abstracts the hardware so developers don't have to pretend that they're writing DOS applications and ship a different code path for every possible combination of hardware on OpenBSD.

Re:OpenBSD Rock Solid OS without fluf.

[TheRaven64]

The other poster already pointed out that it's got documentation. The OpenBSD team will actually back out commits that don't come with updates to the relevant man pages. Try this on OpenBSD: go through /dev, and look up every device that's listed there. Then go through /etc/ and look up every file that's there. Now try it on Linux (or FreeBSD or OS X, for that matter). OpenBSD is the only system I've used where you will actually find documentation on every device and every config file that's part of the standard install.

More importantly, you only need to read the documentation once. Unlike Linux, OpenBSD does not replace admin tools with functionally equivalent ones with a new interface every six months. If you learn how to use OpenBSD, then you know how to use OpenBSD, on any architecture. If you learn how to use Linux, then you know how to use one version of one distribution of Linux, probably on one architecture.

Re:OpenBSD Rock Solid OS without fluf.

[david.given]

The OpenBSD technology is amazing; I'd recommend that any Linux user gives it a try to see how a Unix is supposed to work. Simple, flexible, consistent, robust, and superbly documented (there are man pages for everything, including the internal kernel APIs needed to write device drivers!). I just wish it had apt, that's all. (And better non-PC support. My main server's an ARM.)

It's even more amazing if you've ever interacted with the OpenBSD community, who are basically dickheads. Admittedly, it's been a while since I gave up on the -misc, but the last time I was there there was some poor guy trying to discuss virtualisation and the lead developers (including Theo) were simply hurling childish abuse at him rather than, say, actually trying to communicate. And of course all their groupies were joining in. It was incredibly unpleasant.

I suppose it's possible that they've grown up since then. I really wish they would; OpenBSD deserves a lot more attention and use. But I was so turned off by the total lack of anything resembling professionalism in the community (which is weird, because the actual docs are brilliant) that I haven't felt like going back.

Re:Not to be outdone...

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenBSD 5.0 will be released in November.
Twice a year releases mean that we knew this back in 1996.
And 5.0 will be just as much a major release as 4.9 was.

Re:BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore

[Moridineas]

Poettering:
"You're not welcome to complain if it's free"

On how the speaker got feedback from various mailing lists/communities:
Poettering: "You didn't ask the right people...next time just ask me, thank you very much."

Poettering:
"I'm sorry your mindset from the 1970s unix is not up-to-date anymore...*booos*...I see, lots of UNIX lovers here...*cheers*

Speaker:
(after talking about hald)
Poettering: "Ok, hald has been deprecated for 2 years, not my fault people still use it."
speaker: Yes, but it's got these limitations, we should get rid of it, do you agree
Poettering: No, when we designed it it was great, it did all these things that could never be done before
speaker: but it never worked
Poettering: you're doing it wrong, it worked great.

The guy interrupted the speaker for the entire talk and then got up and stage after him and took the mic. What an asshole. Completely regardless of whether or not you disagree with the speaker, it's just plain rude to interrupt a talk like that.