Celebrating 20 Years of OpenBSD With Release 5.8 (openbsd.org)

badger.foo writes: 20 years to the day after the OpenBSD source tree was created for the new project, the project has released OpenBSD 5.8, the 38th release on CD-ROM (and 39th via FTP/HTTP). This release comes with four release songs instead of the usual one, and a long list of improvements over the last releases. (Probably a good time to donate to the project, too, even if you don't use it directly, because of all the security improvements that OpenBSD programmers contribute to the world.)

Comments

Re:Does it have systemd?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it doesn't have systemd.

If a Poettering-like asshole was detected anywhere near OpenBSD, they would be shot down like an aircraft flying over the White House without clearance.

Re:Does it have systemd?

[Kjella]

That is as it should be. Restarting a service (or not) is dependent on the nature of the service and that nature of its crash. You can easily end up DoS-ing your machine by automatic unconstrained restarts. Hence service restart and service management has no place in an init-system or actually in the OS. Done right, it is a part of the service. It is also not hard to do and there are several packages that can serve as a basis for this.

Crash management is probably the least interesting bit, it's the power management (sleep/suspend/resume/hibernation) and hotplug/dynamic devices (plugging in/unplugging monitors, headphones, USB devices, Bluetooth, wired and wireless networks) with dependency management that makes people want to turn the init process into a general service management system. Being able to restart a crashed process is just a spin-off and it's pretty easy to set generic constraints so it won't go in an infinite crash loop. Sure it's better to have software that doesn't crash but in the real world you often have to run the buggy software to keep availability up as downtime costs $$$ while you debug to find a solution. Maybe it was a wacky race condition that happens once a decade or a mystery bit corruption, you can't just shut down everything every time you run into a bug and keep it down until you've fixed it.

Re:I'll download and spin it up...

[spauldo]

I've been using OpenBSD and FreeBSD for years.

They're different, but not horribly so. Most basic configuration is similar, and they both have excellent documentation. FreeBSD does have a lot of features that OpenBSD lacks, but I think that's a good thing; I use OpenBSD for network services (firewall, DHCP, DNS, etc.) and it's dead simple to deal with. That simplicity can make unusual things easy - getting my firewall to run diskless and boot off the DHCP server, for instance.

My basic rule of thumb: if I need ZFS or jails, I use FreeBSD - otherwise, I use OpenBSD.

I tried to set up NetBSD as a backup server (since it can act as a ISCSI target), but the monitor I use in the server room freaks out every time I boot it. It does it with OpenBSD too, but if I boot it with the KVM somewhere else and switch after boot, it works with OpenBSD. Oh well, maybe next upgrade cycle, I'll get a better monitor for in there.

I've never tried GhostBSD, nor heard much about it.