OpenBSD 5.2 Released

An anonymous reader writes "OpenBSD 5.2 has been released and is available for download. One of the most significant changes in this release is the replacement of the user-level uthreads by kernel-level rthreads, allowing multithreaded programs to utilize multiple CPUs/cores."

Comments

Re:Good News!

[Spy Handler]

Ponderosa Puff wouldn't take no guff
Water oughta be clean and free
So he fought the fight and he set things right
With his OpenBSD

Re:OBSD firewalls vs others - what's the diff?

[TheRaven64]

Aren't Juniper's OS BSD based?

Juniper was a fork of an old FreeBSD. They've recently realised quite how expensive maintaining a fork is and have started pushing most of their stuff upstream and minimising their divergence. We just granted commit access to another Juniper person (sjg@), who is going to work on bringing their improvements to the build system back into the mainline.

All BSDs, from what I understand, use PF

Yes, although OpenBSD is the only one to remove the other firewalling mechanisms. I think we now have 3 firewalls in the FreeBSD kernel and there was some talk of importing npf from NetBSD, making it 4. On of my projects for the next few years is to look at some of the packet filtering infrastructure and make ipf, pf, and friends all simple compiler front ends to the same generic packet filtering infrastructure.

how is OpenBSD better than other FreeBSD based distros

I'm on the FreeBSD Core Team, so I have some fairly obvious biases, but there are a few reasons to prefer OpenBSD. Historically, they've been a bit more proactive at enabling things like stack canaries, no execute, and address space randomisation by default. On the other hand, they don't yet have anything like capsicum, so by FreeBSD 10 you'll see a lot more privilege-separated code on FreeBSD than on OpenBSD. Performance for OpenBSD was a bit better for firewall applications than FreeBSD's import of pf, because we had an older version. I'm not sure if that's still true: Netflix has contributed a lot of performance improvements to our network stack recently (it turns out that they shift quite a lot of packets using FreeBSD) and so this may no longer be true.

I ran OpenBSD on a router for a little while because it was easy to admin via ssh. pfSense uses PHP for the web interface, which consumes 20-30MB of RAM for every action. On a router with 64MB of RAM, this is basically a deal breaker.