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

Good News!

[Noryungi]

Yeah, Netcraft confirms it is dying, yadda, yadda, yadda, etc... Linus said they were masturbating monkeys, the 1990s called, and they want their rthreads back, etc... etc...

Seriously, folks, if you haven't tried OpenBSD before, give it a spin, you might like it. Sure, it ain't no penguin, but that nice pointy fish is stable, solid, secure and quite a nice little beast to work with. I have had nothing but good experiences with that OS.

Just my US$ 0.02.

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:Good News!

[evilviper]

Think about all the complexity of GRUB. Think about all the issues that the initrd causes. Think about the loading and unloading of kernel modules, whether for different hardware support or just kernel features (eg. bonding NICs), and issues that arise from switching between kernel versions or whatnot. Think about the often cryptic syntax of modules.conf. Think about the complexity of SysV and looking through those hundreds of little scripts to find the problem you're looking for. Think of chkconfig and "services".

Now imagine it all going away.

That's right... OpenBSD doesn't use or need any of it. The whole system is super-simple and extremely clean. For those who've used FreeBSD and been impressed with how much nicer and simpler it is than Linux, you should know FreeBSD is only half-way to being as simple as OpenBSD.

I used-to LOVE the simplicity of it. Back when removable hard drives were as close to mobile computing as most of us got, I'd have my OpenBSD system all setup, and I could just up and boot it from ANY SYSTEM, with no reconfiguration, and no problems. Windows users were absolutely astonished, and Linux users were aghast at the lack of boot-time kernel panic or other system hangs.

It's absolutely the best way to start learning Unix... With init/startup scripts a child can understand, and configure, and a clean, straight-forward user-land, rather than one cluttered with 20 different shells like any Linux distro.

And I've just started scratching the surface... Think of an OS where the developers have kept the same sound systems for decades, and have kept the same file system for decades, with just a few rare updates that kept it among the all-around best-performing. Think of an OS where the scheduler doesn't keep changing and getting more tweaks, but works the same from version to version for many years in-between. Think of an OS that you can just install and really count on it being as stable as a rock, and incredibly bug-free foundation. Imagine not having to keep up with the constant changes made to better suit some random person's idea of what minor feature is worth completely upending decades of good design, legacy and stability (eg: KMS, Wayland, etc.). Think of an OS that doesn't have to go through contortions and change after change to its design to suit the design constraints of the latest mainframe IBM is developing.

Think of an OS that is simple, elegant, solid, and just plain works.

Re:LOL

[MichaelSmith]

Users are the worst security threat around.

i miss openbsd

[resfilter]

i used to use it a lot

it doesnt' have much going for it, in the scheme of modern unix-like operating systems.. it's a bit of an underdog. it doesn't have fancy high-performance schedulers, its io layer is slow.. it's missing drivers for lots of commodity hardware, some of them because of principles.. theo is an asshole sometimes, with his constant 'im always right and you're always an idiot' thing.. but..

for one, the documentation is beautiful. whoever maintains the documentation should get a medal. there are few typos, everything has a man page, and every man page has EXAMPLES and is easy to understand. better than any other operating system out there. and that's a big plus: if you try any linux distribution and find an unfamilar file in /etc, you have a 50/50 shot of it being documented properly. with openbsd, it's garunteed

because their entire mission is based on thorough auditing, they make sure their code is very well documented and easy to understand. that's a big bonus too. modifying and developing on openbsd, as a platform, is a very nice experience

openssh is a very beautifully written piece of software. it's nice to use, and it's nice to read the source code. when is the last time it gave you any problems? openbsd is an entire operating system written with the same standards.

give it a try if you haven't, it wont hurt you.. virtual machines don't cost anything..

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.