What truly suprises me about BSDs is their simplicity and low footprint, OpenBSD being gold standard.
I've been playing with `byve` the last two weeks (I highly recommend vermaden's blog for anyone interested in BSDs and obviously the handbooks of each project) and I'm seriously thinking not doing a dual boot Linux install again. On my old x230 (which is running FreeBSD) I will be installing OpenBSD just to become more familiar with it.
I still don't get why just after installing Debian `top` shows me around 200 proceses. BSDs? Under 20. Other thing that pisses me off is for example how polluted (at least on Ubuntu) mountpoints are. Package management is also fragmented on Linux, while on BSDs is either a flavour of `pkg` or ports.
Perhaps I should still try more minimalistic Linux distributions, just don't know which are good candidates
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and still recommend it heavily to non-tech people around me but when you taste a BSD is hard to go back.
Top on linux shows kernel threads (all the processes in square brackets), on BSD it doesn't show these afaik. A fresh debian install only lists a handfull of processes (all the expected ones, ssh, systemd, ntp, gettys etc) besides the 200+ kernel-threads.
Uh, ok then. I always thought that those were actually real kernel processes. What's the use of having top report those kernel threads? Is it possible to renice them?
Yeap, actually I haven't run directly `bhyve` but using the `vm` wrapper as is very convenient.
I haven't looked at passrhrough yet, but I do feel that if I need to use it I would probably have to fight a bit with it, anyone had a hard experience setting it up?
No big fight, you just have to exclude the devices at boot so the vm can take them over [1] and if you have a AMD-System add that [2] and use the nvme virtual harddisk [3]
Arch Linux is the closest I've seen to BSD in the Linux-verse. I recommend trying it. I'm not sure about production though, or using more exotic things like CUDA.
>and I'm seriously thinking not doing a dual boot Linux install again
Same here, i had dualboot Arch/FreeBSD for some years, but i just don't need that arch install i just stayed in FreeBSD and for games i have a bhyve Win11 VM (with GPU Passthrough) and that's all i need.
Openbsd has been my router for a decade... I have a ansible playbook that does everything I need... I use a cheap USB drive in a fanless computer the only failure has been the $9 USB drive
While at it, a good minimalistic Linux could be Void Linux, which has several BSD folks on the team. I'm running it for about 7 years, and am happy with it. Unlike BSDs though, it's a rolling release, so I get fresh packages a few days after an upstream release.
I'm impressed that they still maintain PA-RISC support even though HP discontinued that architecture in 2008.
They maintain all these architectures in such a small, consolidated codebase with such minimal (if any) bloat.
Their built-in httpd is far and away the best experience I ever had setting up a static file server for my local network, and I can't think of many times where I would ever need anything I couldn't do with the built-in FastCGI support.
I'm also pleasantly surprised by how well Chicago95 (a Windows 95-style UI based on xfce) works on OpenBSD, even though the author never intended to run it on anything but xubuntu. I wouldn't recommend trying that unless you're willing to roll up your sleeves, but the payoff definitely justifies the elbow grease if you like that look and feel better than xenodm, XFCE, or GNOME.
You did a lot of cool things, mister. How do I send you pizza (from one of the good places)?
Glad to see how many high-value changes OpenBSD is receiving. You just inspired me to get Chicago95 up and running on an old MacBook I have lying around right now, and replace the battery. I run it off of an old Lenovo Thinkcentre that I use as a server on my local network, but I haven't been using it as my daily driver. The number of things I can run on macOS is a lot smaller than it used to be 15 years ago, so I might give OpenBSD another shot as my daily driver.
P.S. I didn't know there were other people interested in using Chicago95 on OpenBSD, let alone OpenBSD contributors. Good stuff, man!
Yeah. When I was a high school student, we set up the new school network (end of the 90s). We used Windows NT on all the desktops and the domain/file server and SuSE Linux as a firewall/router. The whole setup was super stable and NT ran well, even on the modest desktop hardware.
When we graduated, maintenance was taken over by a local consumer PC builder and had no clue experience maintaining corporate/organization networks. They replaced all desktops and servers by Windows 9x (probably 98), as it was all they knew and the network was constantly down, desktops broken/compromised, etc.
NT 4.0 was a really good OS in those days for servers/work desktops. It was less great for games (though IIRC there was DirectX at some point).
Despite Win2k and NT4 kinda having a rep for not for gaming, I found that most games actually did run on them fine. Especially Win2k, probably the most underrated OS of all time in the Windows lineup.
What is the status on FS journaling/softupdates? I used to like openBSD but it kind of disappeared of my life once they removed support for softupdates a couple of years ago. I am not so fond of those fsck and lost data we used to have on an occasional basis after an unexpected hard shutdown due to a power cut in the 90's.
> I am not so fond of those fsck and lost data we used to have on an occasional basis after an unexpected hard shutdown due to a power cut in the 90's.
Yup, still the case today.
Currently with an SSD, when there’s a power cut, there’s about a 20% chance my router will require me to walk downstairs and plug in a keyboard, type “fsck” manually and press y at all the prompts.
I haven’t actually had any issues with noticeable data loss though.
I’d settle for a default “boot anyway, press y for all fsck questions” mode on boot. I just don’t want to have to physically touch the thing.
> Currently with an SSD, when there’s a power cut, there’s about a 20% chance my router will require me to walk downstairs and plug in a keyboard, type “fsck” manually and press y at all the prompts.
> I’d settle for a default “boot anyway, press y for all fsck questions” mode on boot. I just don’t want to have to physically touch the thing.
Look up where fsck is run in /etc/rc and add the -y there.
Softupdates was never an approach towards journaling. It was removed because it caused more problems than it solved and because its complexity stood in the way of future work to improve FFS2.
AFAIK there's currently no news about plans on getting journaling into FFS2 or bringing one of the other modern file systems onboard. The most "modern" choices you have on OpenBSD is FFS2 and ext3 (supported through OpenBSD's ext2 driver but without journaling).
My own experience with FFS/FFS2 the past 20 or so years is that it's been wholly robust through the relatively few power outages and other incidents I've had. While I wouldn't mind it becoming snappier I do prefer that its fully synchronous. I've never used softupdates.
FFS/FFS2 has been reliable for me, but unfortunately don’t have reliable power. It does frequently require fsck -y on boot. It’s not the most pleasant with my headless units requiring a serial cable.
My solution has been a huge UPS so they never turn off. Softupdates prevented this issue for over a decade (?), so hoping we get HAMMER2 or something down the road.
I’ve been running OpenBSD continuously since 3.4, and no other OS beats it in simplicity IMO. The upgrades have ticked along quickly and flawlessly year over year. I wish more systems would take a page out of that book and implement something like sysupgrade.
Then again, the sentence "tcp is outside of global lock" is very generalized, there are so many parts that got out of the kernel lock in pieces, like ip input, routing lookups and device packet handling that it is hard to talk about it as one singular thing that you just flip a switch on to make it MP-performant.
You could make filesystem code mp, disk device drivers mp and then still run on an IDE-disk which forces all IO to be one at a time and serialized first-come-first-served at which point all the work was for 'nothing'.
Same goes for networking, there are many many layers and places that all need code that actually allows for MP processing to improve its performance, fine grained locks (which reduce perf at this stage), then prove that the fine grained locks are sufficient for ALL use cases, all kinds of layering violations that could possibly happen, then you can unlock this single layer, and move to the next if nothing acts up on any machine.
Network performance has gotten steadily better during the last three or so years, to the tune of most network drivers today seeing around 2x throughput compared to a few years back.
I have a retired mid-2010s Celeron platform which managed about 300 Mbit/s on OpenBSD 7.1/7.2. With OpenBSD 7.6 it reached well over 700 MBit/sec. I also have an early 2020s Atom platform which saturates its 2.5GbE interface without any problems. Not all of the network drivers perform equally but the network stack improvements have all the same made them take pretty big leaps.
Not benchmarked on my system yet but I use OpenBSD on my home router (PCEngines APU2) and even before this stuff, OpenBSD could handle 1Gbit just fine. And that's with VLANs, LACP, a good number of PF rules, etc.
It really is and not just that. WireGuard being natively supported makes configuring your peers as easy as dumping the last of these example lines into /etc/hostname.wg[0-9]:
Simple, text-file based configuration for everything in the extensive base system and no drama between upgrades is really what makes you a happy OpenBSD user.
Ditto here; upgrades are very boring under OpenBSD. You can keep the same setup for ages,
even more with cwm, xterm, mupdf, mpv and a bunch of CLI/TUI tools and games...
I'm surprised seeing improvements in Suspend/Hibernate support.
I've used OpenBSD on laptops before and it was _fine_. I thought they primarily target servers. This feels like laptop specific improvements. Perhaps to the benefits only to those developing OpenBSD.
On laptops with good support openbsd is sublime. I have a thinkpad x131 that I still use as a daily driver. Mainly because it runs obsd perfectly. never any problems suspending and resuming. I replaced the wifi when it was new to a supported model along with much cursing about lenovo card whitelist. perhaps the only black mark on it's record. It is getting quite long in the tooth by now but it still meets my needs. I shall be very sad when it dies.
Honestly the most underrated feature on at least this thinkpad is it has three physical mouse buttons. So nice. Now I have to check if lenovo still does that.
Apple generally has excellent sleep support, even on my old falling-to-pieces unibody which would KP if you looked at it funny I don’t remember résume ever being a concern.
I’m not going to say their ever degrading software quality won’t affect that one day, and I know that some updates have caused issues for some people, but I genuinely can’t remember it ever failing me and not doing its job correctly.
SEV and CC in general looks interesting seeing the slides. I hadn't heard of it yet.
Someone more knowledgeable than me will say if these encrypted VMs are also protected from bugged modules within the SoC or on the bus besides being protected from the hypervisor.
It also seems that they are adding inter-core features but I don't know whether they are related to removing locks within the kernel, embedded applications, or if they are moving to micro-kernel internally.
No, these encrypted VMs are not protected from buggy or malicious on-die components. SEV assumes that the SoC hardware is trusted.[1] And we don't even have to go that deep: both AMD SEV and Intel's equivalent, Intel SGX, have historically been vulnerable to side-channel and speculative-execution attacks, among others, that can undermine their isolation guarantees.[2]
[1]: "As with the previous SEV and SEV-ES features, under SEV-SNP the AMD System-on-Chip (SOC) hardware, the AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP), and the VM itself are all treated as fully trusted." https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/epyc-busine...
backdoors in the supply chain are always hard to avoid but if it can't even protect against third-party attackers including any of the hardware attached what's the point
Rip-packs and drill guards are designed for running system protection. Those don't protect against compromised components, though, so select your hardware with care?
I'm a long-time Linux user, but have always been drawn to OpenBSD, in large part due to the team's philosophy on software. I wish I had the willpower to switch to it as my main OS, but unfortunately, my workflow is too dependent on popular software and cutting-edge hardware, which historically don't work too well on OpenBSD. I don't blame the team for it—in fact I applaud their unwavering commitment to their values. It's what makes the system great, after all.
Regardless, I'm grateful that everyone can still benefit from the great set of tools that were started, and most still maintained, in the OpenBSD project. OpenSSH, PF, tmux, etc. They're a beacon of light in the software world.
I currently run a PC Engines APU2 as my home firewall/router. Been doing so for years and I really like it, yet I am still an OpenBSD newb. When I ran a sysupgrade from 7.5 -> 7.6, I completely ran out of space on /usr and the upgrade utterly failed. Had to reinstall full system at that point. The issue is that my hard drive is very small and the auto format utility only allocates 1.8G to /usr. Right now, I currently have 1.5G out of 1.8G in use. On the OpenBSD mailing lists, a user asked a question that is virtually identical to the situation I am in – they are worried that if they do another sysupgrade, it will fail and they will need to reinstall. A potential solution was proposed here [0] but the process seems somewhat complex for an OpenBSD newb like me. Could anyone point me in the right direction to guides that would detail the process, which the person on the mailing list describes, that basically involves deleting /usr/obj and /usr/src and allocating that ‘saved space’ back to /usr? Thanks.
Easier fix might be if you aren't using /usr/src (or /usr/opt) to move the contents of /usr/share/relink into /usr/src (make sure you move it, not copy, so that /usr/share/relink is empty), and then change the /usr/src mount point in /etc/fstab to /usr/share/relink. Reboot the machine and hopefully it works. If you ran out of space during the installation, you may have to repeat sysupgrade to reinstall the 7.8 sets to get all the object files where they belong.
If you look further down the thread you'll see more suggestions, I think this one would be an easier option than deleting partitions and creating a new partition mounted as /usr, since it's more or less just a change to fstab of what mounts towards which partition.
When I was in the college in the early 2000s, I had a friend who ran OpenBSD. He always sang its praises, mostly because it was the most secure operating system.
I tried a bunch of Linux Distributions and FreeBSD before mostly settling on MacOS, but never actually got around to running it.
Glad to see OpenBSD is still being actively developed.
I love obsd A perhaps unjustified amount, but not because it's security, I like it... well it's hard to explain, it's a small understandable system, but it's not a minimal system, there are enough built in services to put any linux distro to shame but they are all small, well built, well documented services, the OS as a whole hits well above it's punching weight. I find obsd makes for perhaps the best unix desktop system, but I don't mean desktop how mac or windows or even the linux desktop environments mean desktop. It is far simpler than that, I mean unix command line, window manager only style desktop. There is something about it, something that I find hard to put into words, but may be best described as comfortable.
But honestly, despite all that it's mainly what you are used to. I tolerate linux, it is one of the good guys, fighting the good fight and all that. But I still find it a bewildering mess compared to obsd. I am sure a primary linux user feels the same way about obsd.
I used to use it at University after one of the guys I was in labs with was using it for his daily driver. The first release I tried was 3.8.
It was quite a shock coming from SuSE 9.2. It was much easier to install than FreeBSD, however the installer is even more archaic than FreeBSD. Someone wrote a graphical installer years ago and but nobody bothered with it.
The BSDs really need at least something like the archinstall.
It is certainly different than Linux. You really need to read the FAQ and manuals as you won't find much out by doing a web search, unlike Linux. One of the other things that differs from Linux is that supported hardware / software will work, however Linux hardware support is obviously a lot better than in 2005 when I first started looking at OpenBSD.
Hard disagree, the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.
When I picked a linux distro to put on my system to play games on, the one I choose was void linux, why, mainly because the installer looks and feels directly ripped off from obsd.
> Hard disagree, the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.
No not really. I recently took my friend through it and there is several places where it is pretty easy to screw something up. Whenever people say stuff like this, they are usually accustomed to the quirks.
> When I picked a linux distro to put on my system to play games on, the one I choose was void linux, why, mainly because the installer looks and feels directly ripped off from obsd.
Choosing distros based on the installer is kinda a bit silly. I've done a Linux From Scratch build and I can tell you there is very little difference between one distro an another.
>> Hard disagree, the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.
> No not really. I recently took my friend through it and there is several places where it is pretty easy to screw something up. Whenever people say stuff like this, they are usually accustomed to the quirks.
Like what places, and how are they pretty easy to screw up on? I'm genuinely curious, as to me it's the cleanest and most straight-forward console installer I've ever experienced. I managed to get it done the very first time I, 25 years ago, with zero *nix experience, decided to try OpenBSD. Also, you can always exit the installer and restart the process. You're not "screwed" unless you reboot at the end without having reflected over your instructions.
> Like what places, and how are they pretty easy to screw up on? I'm genuinely curious, as to me it's the cleanest and most straight-forward console installer I've ever experienced.
To you it is. I installed on 3.8 and it was not straightforward. I used to go to university with a guy that used OpenBSD and he even said the installation at the time was straight forward. So it isn't just me.
I can't remember specifics as it was about 4-6 months. It was something to do with drive labelling IIRC, it was super confusing and I think I just ended up removing drives temporarily.
> you can always exit the installer and restart the process.
Nope. I tried that. It did not work.
> You're not "screwed" unless you reboot at the end without having reflected over your instructions.
> very little difference between one distro an another
These days the differences come down to systemd or no systemd. I joke that we should refer to it all as SystemD/Linux (akin to how "GNU/Linux" was used).
I did the LFS build with SysV init scripts. I think there is a systemd version of LFS. LFS was a good learning exercise to see generally how everything was put together. I wouldn't want to manually manage all of this myself.
If you look at the LFS compile instructions for each package they are essentially the same as the PKGBUILDs scripts in Arch, I suspect it is similar with Gentoo, Void or any other similar Linux distro.
It feels like Alpine tries to imitate the OpenBSD installer somewhat as well, but it is just not the same as it forces you to make choices between SSH servers, NTP daemons, etc. So, it still very much feels like the Linux "pick and mix box". What makes OpenBSD so special is that there is one choice, it tends to be a good choice, and it is the only choice they will support and therefore they will put in the hours to make it solid.
If you use archinstall as I said you can be up and running in 20 minutes on a fast connection. You literally just state what you want setup through a menu, make a hot drink and you have a working desktop. It is pretty hassle free in my experience.
I haven't tried the FreeBSD installer in a couple of years but I always find that I end up lost in the menus or something doesn't work correctly. Then I am kinda left faffing trying to get X working, ports or something else working. I couldn't set the desktop resolution properly and I suspect there was some magic flag I had set somewhere or install firmware.
I just can't be bothered when I can install Debian or Arch in about 15-20 minutes and everything works fine.
>I just can't be bothered when I can install Debian or Arch in about 15-20 minutes and everything works fine.
And that's perfectly fine, i would also never criticize people who just buy a Mac, some people are just interested in different stuff. However if you have problems getting lost in "menus" but wanna try out a BSD try GhostBSD:
> And that's perfectly fine, i would also never criticize people who just buy a Mac, some people are just interested in different stuff.
I used to be an operating system enthusiast. I've tried them all at one time. I just have a job now (I have to use Windows at work) and I just not interested in faffing to get graphics working. The experience hasn't changed that much with FreeBSD in 20 years. Some might be okay with that, but I don't really want to have to spend 3 days getting a basic desktop environment behaving properly.
OpenBSD is better in this regard than FreeBSD, I've found.
> However if you have problems getting lost in "menus" but wanna try out a BSD try GhostBSD: https://www.ghostbsd.org/
This is kinda like distro-hopping. I don't want to run some weird fork of the OS, because you will end up with a new set problems potentially. I don't use derivative distros for this very reason and only use mainline distros.
I don't understand why (I don't care for wanky reasons that often quoted) that there isn't a mechanism for me to quickly get up an running with a desktop. The situation hasn't changed in 20+ years. Whereas Linux (for all the faults that it has) has effectively had this problem solved for over a decade now.
The most compact, minimalist general purpose OS out there by far. Tiny memory footprint and loaded with network services built-in.
Linux has become so bloated its users can't in good conscience make fun of Microsoft anymore, they are worse.
Debian refuses to install with less than 512MB RAM, the text only installer will choke with less than that, it's pathetic. That's a console-only install, no GUI.
Meanwhile OpenBSD running all the default network services like sshd and smtpd uses < 32 MB RAM and that's with full ksh and real tools. That doesn't happen by accident.
Is that fair? Busybox has fewer features than OpenBSD coreutils but those in turn have fewer features than GNU coreutils. All three implement the entire POSIX spec as far as I am aware.
Is there a cheap SBC in which it runs without hassle? I would like to give it a try. I've used Freebsd from 2000 up to 2015 or so, but never used openbsd
If you can get an Edgerouter Lite 3 it will run fine() on that, serial console, three gig ports, fanless and not-x86 and probably available for cheap if you look at used hw sites.
) as far as its hw goes, that is. Will not be competing in speed competitions, but cheap SBCs just never will, do they?
I've been playing with `byve` the last two weeks (I highly recommend vermaden's blog for anyone interested in BSDs and obviously the handbooks of each project) and I'm seriously thinking not doing a dual boot Linux install again. On my old x230 (which is running FreeBSD) I will be installing OpenBSD just to become more familiar with it.
I still don't get why just after installing Debian `top` shows me around 200 proceses. BSDs? Under 20. Other thing that pisses me off is for example how polluted (at least on Ubuntu) mountpoints are. Package management is also fragmented on Linux, while on BSDs is either a flavour of `pkg` or ports.
Perhaps I should still try more minimalistic Linux distributions, just don't know which are good candidates
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and still recommend it heavily to non-tech people around me but when you taste a BSD is hard to go back.
Your right, you can show the system-processes in top with Shift+S, threads with Shift+H
Just a different "flavor"-default-setting of top, there's not much more behind it.
I believe you meant "bhyve".
I haven't looked at passrhrough yet, but I do feel that if I need to use it I would probably have to fight a bit with it, anyone had a hard experience setting it up?
[1] https://dflund.se/~getz/Notes/2024/freebsd-gpu/#bhyve-passth...
[2] https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve/pci_passthru#Additional_Notes
[3] Creating a Windows Server 2019 VM using vm-bhyve : https://klarasystems.com/articles/from-0-to-bhyve-on-freebsd...
Same here, i had dualboot Arch/FreeBSD for some years, but i just don't need that arch install i just stayed in FreeBSD and for games i have a bhyve Win11 VM (with GPU Passthrough) and that's all i need.
They maintain all these architectures in such a small, consolidated codebase with such minimal (if any) bloat.
Their built-in httpd is far and away the best experience I ever had setting up a static file server for my local network, and I can't think of many times where I would ever need anything I couldn't do with the built-in FastCGI support.
I'm also pleasantly surprised by how well Chicago95 (a Windows 95-style UI based on xfce) works on OpenBSD, even though the author never intended to run it on anything but xubuntu. I wouldn't recommend trying that unless you're willing to roll up your sleeves, but the payoff definitely justifies the elbow grease if you like that look and feel better than xenodm, XFCE, or GNOME.
I did a thing. :-)
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brynet_openbsd-activity-73074...
Glad to see how many high-value changes OpenBSD is receiving. You just inspired me to get Chicago95 up and running on an old MacBook I have lying around right now, and replace the battery. I run it off of an old Lenovo Thinkcentre that I use as a server on my local network, but I haven't been using it as my daily driver. The number of things I can run on macOS is a lot smaller than it used to be 15 years ago, so I might give OpenBSD another shot as my daily driver.
P.S. I didn't know there were other people interested in using Chicago95 on OpenBSD, let alone OpenBSD contributors. Good stuff, man!
I remember running windows95 overnight so that it could be a "server".
The next morning, moving the mouse was making the harddrive go nuts, it was paging just by moving the cursor!
Memory leak galore.
This makes me want to run linux as my daily driver! [1]
[1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Screensho...
When we graduated, maintenance was taken over by a local consumer PC builder and had no clue experience maintaining corporate/organization networks. They replaced all desktops and servers by Windows 9x (probably 98), as it was all they knew and the network was constantly down, desktops broken/compromised, etc.
NT 4.0 was a really good OS in those days for servers/work desktops. It was less great for games (though IIRC there was DirectX at some point).
What other game was needed in the 90s?
But Windows 2000 was much better for gaming. NT4 supported DX3 and DX5 unnoficially'.
W2k had a DLL call flag to enable a Windows XP like compat mode:
http://www.activewin.com/tips/win2000/1/2000_tips_43.shtml
It only worked on desktop shortcuts, but enough to run most quirky Win95/98 games.
Despite Win2k and NT4 kinda having a rep for not for gaming, I found that most games actually did run on them fine. Especially Win2k, probably the most underrated OS of all time in the Windows lineup.
Are they any new FS supported nowadays?
Yup, still the case today.
Currently with an SSD, when there’s a power cut, there’s about a 20% chance my router will require me to walk downstairs and plug in a keyboard, type “fsck” manually and press y at all the prompts.
I haven’t actually had any issues with noticeable data loss though.
I’d settle for a default “boot anyway, press y for all fsck questions” mode on boot. I just don’t want to have to physically touch the thing.
> I’d settle for a default “boot anyway, press y for all fsck questions” mode on boot. I just don’t want to have to physically touch the thing.
Look up where fsck is run in /etc/rc and add the -y there.
AFAIK there's currently no news about plans on getting journaling into FFS2 or bringing one of the other modern file systems onboard. The most "modern" choices you have on OpenBSD is FFS2 and ext3 (supported through OpenBSD's ext2 driver but without journaling).
My own experience with FFS/FFS2 the past 20 or so years is that it's been wholly robust through the relatively few power outages and other incidents I've had. While I wouldn't mind it becoming snappier I do prefer that its fully synchronous. I've never used softupdates.
Ehmm it is a alternative approach for fs consistency then journaling:
>>The use of soft updates obviates the need for a separate log or for most synchronous writes.
https://www.mckusick.com/softdep/
My solution has been a huge UPS so they never turn off. Softupdates prevented this issue for over a decade (?), so hoping we get HAMMER2 or something down the road.
I’ve been running OpenBSD continuously since 3.4, and no other OS beats it in simplicity IMO. The upgrades have ticked along quickly and flawlessly year over year. I wish more systems would take a page out of that book and implement something like sysupgrade.
https://github.com/kusumi/openbsd_hammer2
Somehow it was just never taken over the finish line though. I don't know why.
https://www.openbsd.org/images/Terraodontidae.png
https://www.openbsd.org/images/puffy78.gif
https://www.openbsd.org/78.html
I wonder how useful this will be for the modest but still multicore systems used for firewalls.
Then again, the sentence "tcp is outside of global lock" is very generalized, there are so many parts that got out of the kernel lock in pieces, like ip input, routing lookups and device packet handling that it is hard to talk about it as one singular thing that you just flip a switch on to make it MP-performant.
You could make filesystem code mp, disk device drivers mp and then still run on an IDE-disk which forces all IO to be one at a time and serialized first-come-first-served at which point all the work was for 'nothing'.
Same goes for networking, there are many many layers and places that all need code that actually allows for MP processing to improve its performance, fine grained locks (which reduce perf at this stage), then prove that the fine grained locks are sufficient for ALL use cases, all kinds of layering violations that could possibly happen, then you can unlock this single layer, and move to the next if nothing acts up on any machine.
) https://www.youtube.com/live/wEM-E-IJ6sY?si=X3lLX9tEIO2mcEJl...
I have a retired mid-2010s Celeron platform which managed about 300 Mbit/s on OpenBSD 7.1/7.2. With OpenBSD 7.6 it reached well over 700 MBit/sec. I also have an early 2020s Atom platform which saturates its 2.5GbE interface without any problems. Not all of the network drivers perform equally but the network stack improvements have all the same made them take pretty big leaps.
since:
> o Implement support for "vmmc-supply" in sdhc(4), needed to power on the WiFi chip on the Raspberry Pi 5.
This should be a nice improvement for my firewalls, some testing on the cards today me thinks.
https://man.openbsd.org/wg#EXAMPLES
Simple, text-file based configuration for everything in the extensive base system and no drama between upgrades is really what makes you a happy OpenBSD user.
https://hackmd.io/EkYP__XaQRebEZDokSQNjA
I've used OpenBSD on laptops before and it was _fine_. I thought they primarily target servers. This feels like laptop specific improvements. Perhaps to the benefits only to those developing OpenBSD.
Honestly the most underrated feature on at least this thinkpad is it has three physical mouse buttons. So nice. Now I have to check if lenovo still does that.
Honestly I've never owned any other laptops than thinkpads and macbooks. Every other laptop I've ever touched in a computer shop left me with "eww".
Even my Steam Deck, with it's top down firmware and OS development regularly fails to suspend our freezes on resume.
I’m not going to say their ever degrading software quality won’t affect that one day, and I know that some updates have caused issues for some people, but I genuinely can’t remember it ever failing me and not doing its job correctly.
Is this OpenBSD on Apple silicon?
It also seems that they are adding inter-core features but I don't know whether they are related to removing locks within the kernel, embedded applications, or if they are moving to micro-kernel internally.
[1]: "As with the previous SEV and SEV-ES features, under SEV-SNP the AMD System-on-Chip (SOC) hardware, the AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP), and the VM itself are all treated as fully trusted." https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/epyc-busine...
[2]: https://libroot.org/posts/trusted-execution-environments/
nice overview article btw
backdoors in the supply chain are always hard to avoid but if it can't even protect against third-party attackers including any of the hardware attached what's the point
Regardless, I'm grateful that everyone can still benefit from the great set of tools that were started, and most still maintained, in the OpenBSD project. OpenSSH, PF, tmux, etc. They're a beacon of light in the software world.
[0] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=175952911527704&w=2
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=175957920514820&w=2
I tried a bunch of Linux Distributions and FreeBSD before mostly settling on MacOS, but never actually got around to running it.
Glad to see OpenBSD is still being actively developed.
But honestly, despite all that it's mainly what you are used to. I tolerate linux, it is one of the good guys, fighting the good fight and all that. But I still find it a bewildering mess compared to obsd. I am sure a primary linux user feels the same way about obsd.
It was quite a shock coming from SuSE 9.2. It was much easier to install than FreeBSD, however the installer is even more archaic than FreeBSD. Someone wrote a graphical installer years ago and but nobody bothered with it.
The BSDs really need at least something like the archinstall.
It is certainly different than Linux. You really need to read the FAQ and manuals as you won't find much out by doing a web search, unlike Linux. One of the other things that differs from Linux is that supported hardware / software will work, however Linux hardware support is obviously a lot better than in 2005 when I first started looking at OpenBSD.
When I picked a linux distro to put on my system to play games on, the one I choose was void linux, why, mainly because the installer looks and feels directly ripped off from obsd.
No not really. I recently took my friend through it and there is several places where it is pretty easy to screw something up. Whenever people say stuff like this, they are usually accustomed to the quirks.
> When I picked a linux distro to put on my system to play games on, the one I choose was void linux, why, mainly because the installer looks and feels directly ripped off from obsd.
Choosing distros based on the installer is kinda a bit silly. I've done a Linux From Scratch build and I can tell you there is very little difference between one distro an another.
> No not really. I recently took my friend through it and there is several places where it is pretty easy to screw something up. Whenever people say stuff like this, they are usually accustomed to the quirks.
Like what places, and how are they pretty easy to screw up on? I'm genuinely curious, as to me it's the cleanest and most straight-forward console installer I've ever experienced. I managed to get it done the very first time I, 25 years ago, with zero *nix experience, decided to try OpenBSD. Also, you can always exit the installer and restart the process. You're not "screwed" unless you reboot at the end without having reflected over your instructions.
To you it is. I installed on 3.8 and it was not straightforward. I used to go to university with a guy that used OpenBSD and he even said the installation at the time was straight forward. So it isn't just me.
I can't remember specifics as it was about 4-6 months. It was something to do with drive labelling IIRC, it was super confusing and I think I just ended up removing drives temporarily.
> you can always exit the installer and restart the process.
Nope. I tried that. It did not work.
> You're not "screwed" unless you reboot at the end without having reflected over your instructions.
Again it wasn't that straight forward.
These days the differences come down to systemd or no systemd. I joke that we should refer to it all as SystemD/Linux (akin to how "GNU/Linux" was used).
If you look at the LFS compile instructions for each package they are essentially the same as the PKGBUILDs scripts in Arch, I suspect it is similar with Gentoo, Void or any other similar Linux distro.
For what it's worth, I've never been able to properly install Arch or Gentoo but I can install FreeBSD in 10 minutes.
If you use archinstall as I said you can be up and running in 20 minutes on a fast connection. You literally just state what you want setup through a menu, make a hot drink and you have a working desktop. It is pretty hassle free in my experience.
I haven't tried the FreeBSD installer in a couple of years but I always find that I end up lost in the menus or something doesn't work correctly. Then I am kinda left faffing trying to get X working, ports or something else working. I couldn't set the desktop resolution properly and I suspect there was some magic flag I had set somewhere or install firmware.
I just can't be bothered when I can install Debian or Arch in about 15-20 minutes and everything works fine.
And that's perfectly fine, i would also never criticize people who just buy a Mac, some people are just interested in different stuff. However if you have problems getting lost in "menus" but wanna try out a BSD try GhostBSD:
https://www.ghostbsd.org/
I used to be an operating system enthusiast. I've tried them all at one time. I just have a job now (I have to use Windows at work) and I just not interested in faffing to get graphics working. The experience hasn't changed that much with FreeBSD in 20 years. Some might be okay with that, but I don't really want to have to spend 3 days getting a basic desktop environment behaving properly.
OpenBSD is better in this regard than FreeBSD, I've found.
> However if you have problems getting lost in "menus" but wanna try out a BSD try GhostBSD: https://www.ghostbsd.org/
This is kinda like distro-hopping. I don't want to run some weird fork of the OS, because you will end up with a new set problems potentially. I don't use derivative distros for this very reason and only use mainline distros.
I don't understand why (I don't care for wanky reasons that often quoted) that there isn't a mechanism for me to quickly get up an running with a desktop. The situation hasn't changed in 20+ years. Whereas Linux (for all the faults that it has) has effectively had this problem solved for over a decade now.
You do You and that's good, just use what you like.
I still have a preference for OpenBSD.
Linux has become so bloated its users can't in good conscience make fun of Microsoft anymore, they are worse.
Debian refuses to install with less than 512MB RAM, the text only installer will choke with less than that, it's pathetic. That's a console-only install, no GUI.
Meanwhile OpenBSD running all the default network services like sshd and smtpd uses < 32 MB RAM and that's with full ksh and real tools. That doesn't happen by accident.
) as far as its hw goes, that is. Will not be competing in speed competitions, but cheap SBCs just never will, do they?
* https://www.openbsd.org/78.html
https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade78.html
It is even easier then last time, no manual file removal.
Easy as pie, maybe I should bake a pie during the upgrade :)