[HN Gopher] OpenBSD 7.3
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OpenBSD 7.3
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 223 points
Date : 2023-04-10 14:00 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openbsd.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openbsd.org)
| ianai wrote:
| Is there much that absolutely can't be ran on OpenBSD without
| dropping into code? With its history of sane security it might
| offer some useful applications now.
| ksec wrote:
| If you do a search the number one problem or concern for
| running OpenBSD is performance. And I dont think much has
| changed. I dont doubt there are certain domain where you would
| value security over everything.
| kjs3 wrote:
| OpenBSD had pretty poor support for SMP for quite a while,
| but lots of work has gone into fixing that in the last
| decade. That plus how much smaller the OpenBSD footprint is
| than, say, Linux, and you might find these days it performs
| pretty well.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Is packet filtering still single threaded? I remember pf
| could only could only use a single core at a time which
| made filtering more than 1 Gb/s problematic.
| kjs3 wrote:
| I believe it is. I will, however, admit that while I use
| OBSD extensively for networking devices (routers, etc.),
| I haven't had much call for multigig networking on them.
| I will say that it will easily do 1G routing+PF+VLAN on
| rather modest hardware (J4105, dual i211 ports).
| daneel_w wrote:
| It's threaded as of recently. Before that the throughput
| obviously hinged on single-core performance. 1 Gbit/s
| sounds like lower tier laptop spec to me. My 2015 low-
| power Celeron test rig could do ~700 Mbit/sec through a
| medium complexity PF ruleset on OpenBSD versions where PF
| was still single-threaded.
| toyg wrote:
| I had issues with some Rust-backed python libraries, last time
| I tried to use it in anger.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| Basically anything that is not C/C++ is a pain on non linux
| system...
| perihelions wrote:
| Most of the proprietary world, things like Mathematica and fast
| WiFi (they only support up through 802.11n, I believe), and the
| entirety of Steam. Things where for-profit companies make an
| effort to support Linux, but ignore smaller OS's. So it's a
| monastic experience compared to the modern Linux desktop.
|
| (Monasteries are beautiful - still won't choose to live in
| one!)
| t-3 wrote:
| > (they only support up through 802.11n, I believe)
|
| Some newer wifi (iwx at least) work at higher speeds, but I
| believe this is mostly due to hardware functionality being
| moved to firmware. 802.11ac should be supported, but I
| haven't followed closely enough to know how well and in what
| drivers.
| t-3 wrote:
| > hardware functionality being moved to firmware
|
| Sorry for my lack of proofreading, this was not written
| correctly. Functions that were formerly handled in software
| drivers are now being handled in firmware by many wireless
| NICs.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| "Modern" .NET is not compatible with it (or as Microsoft would
| say, "OpenBSD is not compatible with .NET"), and there doesn't
| seem to be much interest in resolving that. For comparison, it
| is available from official repositories at least on Ubuntu,
| Fedora, RHEL, and Arch Linux, and I use it daily to build and
| host stuff for $DAYJOB.
| tester756 wrote:
| As far as I've been there was some effort in .NET for BSD
|
| https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/14537 700 comments
|
| https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/workflow/re.
| ..
|
| https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/71338
|
| https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/workflow/bu.
| ..
| clort wrote:
| I don't know about .NET or OpenBSD specifically but Mono
| claims to be available on all BSD platforms ->
| https://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/supported-
| platf...
| daneel_w wrote:
| Is there a huge difference between that and what Mono offers?
| dvzk wrote:
| Yes, and this is tantamount to suggesting that Python
| developers should be satisfied with Python 2.0 (arguably
| 1.0 if you do F# development). Mono is effectively dead and
| abandoned, and it only exists now for historical reasons.
| daneel_w wrote:
| _> "Yes, and this is tantamount to suggesting that Python
| developers should be satisfied with Python 2.0 (arguably
| 1.0 if you do F# development). Mono is effectively dead
| and abandoned, and it only exists now for historical
| reasons."_
|
| There's no suggestion being made here, directly or
| implied. I'm asking because I have no experience with
| .NET and am for the most part unfamiliar with both it and
| Mono, but my colleagues recently spent a fair bit of time
| to "de-dotNETify" a large chunk of our platform and move
| it towards running entirely on Mono, and I figured they
| knew what they were doing.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| The "new .NET" (which used to be called .NET Core not
| long ago -- the whole versioning scheme is a total fiasco
| on their part) is relatively cross-platform, but is not
| fully compatible with the old one (which is only
| available on Windows and hasn't been updated for many
| years). Your colleagues probably ported an old .NET
| project to Mono to move it off Windows. The usual thing
| these days is to port old projects to the "new .NET"
| instead, but it isn't always possible (because full
| compatibility between the two was a non-goal from the
| start).
|
| Anyways, as dvzk has mentioned, Mono is a completely
| separate project and is not a replacement for current
| dotnet. Last time I checked, an experimental FreeBSD port
| was available, but MS doesn't seem to care very much
| about any of the BSDs.
| dvzk wrote:
| Sorry! I shouldn't have assumed that it was a retort.
| Mono's latest supported .NET framework (v4.8) is four
| years old, or even older if you include the general
| movement to .NET Core, and it only supports C# versions
| <= 9.0 (via Roslyn), also 2-3 years old.
|
| msbuild, the toolchain still used by Mono, has also been
| widely replaced by dotnet (CLI).
|
| It's still (decreasingly) common to use Mono for cross-
| platform development, especially for Unity, which hasn't
| yet transitioned to .NET >= 7.0.
| enriquto wrote:
| > Is there much that absolutely can't be ran on OpenBSD
|
| Virtual machines for non-openbsd guests? That's the only thing
| blocking me to fully move to openbsd.
| zokier wrote:
| Faq says that vmm supports Linux guests?
| https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html
| t-3 wrote:
| Yes, Linux guests work. A bigger issue is the lack of
| hardware acceleration or passthru support for virtual
| machines.
| mrpippy wrote:
| Only supporting a single CPU in the guest is a
| significant limitation too
| seanw444 wrote:
| There seems to be a fairly low memory limit on processes, so
| when I tried to run a Minecraft server on my OpenBSD system, it
| complained about not having enough memory to start. Turns out
| the value seems to be hardcoded and compiled into the kernel.
| So... I'm not really sure how to run high-memory processes at
| this point, without self-compiling it in its entirety, which I
| don't really feel like doing.
| t-3 wrote:
| The limits are set in login.conf, it's not hardcoded.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Tried that. There's still a limit on top of that.
| daneel_w wrote:
| That limit is 32 GiB. Hard to call it "fairly low". If
| you encountered a lower limit then it's something you can
| tune in login.conf.
| smabie wrote:
| 32gb seems pretty low? pretty routine in a lot of
| different domains to have processes using 10s/100s of gbs
| daneel_w wrote:
| It's not pretty low, or objectively low, but it can be
| considered relatively low. The average amount of RAM in
| desktops and laptops is still <32 GiB. From this
| perspective it's a very high limit.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Many servers have over 32 GiB of RAM.
| daneel_w wrote:
| Get outta here, man. No way.
| seanw444 wrote:
| I routinely work with one with 256 GiB of RAM.
| prmoustache wrote:
| And you use that one to run minecraft servers. Riiiight.
| seanw444 wrote:
| I didn't say that?
| kouteiheika wrote:
| Depends on what you do; I routinely use double that, and
| for me even my 64GB starts to be limiting.
| [deleted]
| xxpor wrote:
| It's relatively straight forward to recompile the kernel.
| Especially compared to Linux.
|
| https://man.openbsd.org/release#2._Build_and_install_a_new_k.
| ..
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Hardware-wise, OpenBSD (deliberately) has no support for
| Bluetooth.
| kelp wrote:
| Because their previous Bluetooth implementation was broken in
| various ways, and no one volunteered to fix it. So they just
| removed it.
| j_not_j wrote:
| Every six months for the last 24 or 25 years (the web pages came
| after the early releases so a bit of uncertainty there. Explore
| for yourself at https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/www/)
|
| And even vi gets fixes these days (Fixed handling of escaped
| backslashes in vi(1) ex_range).
| gladiatr72 wrote:
| Nice. I ran into an nvi bug years ago... if ":set numbers" and
| ":set noleftright" and then loaded a file of more than several
| kilobytes it would go into a malloc loop and segfault. We
| tracked it down and submitted a patch (this was to FreeBSD) and
| was told patches to src/contrib were not accepted (nvi was
| still "owned" by sleepycat). Good to know that at a certain
| point, function can overtake form!
| mattl wrote:
| Almost 28 years.
|
| 6.8 was released Oct 18, 2020. (OpenBSD's 25th anniversary)
|
| https://www.openbsd.org/68.html
| somat wrote:
| Release engineering: Verb
|
| see OpenBSD
| unethical_ban wrote:
| When I was in college I followed FreeBSD and Solaris for a bit
| just to dabble outside Ubuntu and Fedora.
|
| I remember looking for info on FreeBSD versions and wondering
| what the heck RELENG was.
| sillywalk wrote:
| Theo DeRaat (OpenBSD leader) did a talk on the OpenBSD release
| process back in 2009 [0]
|
| [0]
| https://www.openbsd.org/papers/asiabsdcon2009-release_engine...
| alberth wrote:
| I've always found building/running your app code on OpenBSD (even
| if it's not your target OS) - makes for a better app overall
| because of how strict OpenBSD is - it forces your app to run
| "correctly" more than any other OS.
|
| I've been able to find and fix way more app bugs, than when I ran
| my software on other OS'es
| darknavi wrote:
| Any specific examples? I don't daily drive Linux but that
| sounds interesting.
|
| Somewhat related, for Minecraft (Bedrock, C++) we compile with
| a ton of different tool chains and I really appreciate Clang
| versus MSVC for how strict the compiler can be (even with
| /-permissive).
| jmclnx wrote:
| About to upgrade my amd64 system.
|
| I already upgraded my very old i386 (R51e), no issues and very
| easy. I am getting some mystery core dumps, will look at that
| later. I suspect the new "Permissions (RWX, MAP_STACK, etc.) on
| address space regions". but only guessing :) On the i386 I am
| planning on using a new "old" disk since the old disk is getting
| tight. Then I will worry about the dumps after an install.
|
| _edit:_ Fully updated to 7.3 on amd64, no issues all working
| perfect. Again easy no no manual configs for me.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| Exciting to see some initial work to support the rk3588 soc. It
| has a lot of potential for use as a NAS or router or home server.
| neodypsis wrote:
| Could it support the PinePhone?
| Panino wrote:
| Not yet, but see this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019823
| synack wrote:
| I wish I could run OpenBSD on the arm64 EC2 instances. Last I
| checked, there's no driver for Amazon's ENA network interface.
| higherhalf wrote:
| There's something mildly charming about fixes to ed(1) in
| software released today.
|
| > Fixed ed(1) to print bytes read/written and the ? prompt to
| stdout, not stderr.
| hestefisk wrote:
| ed is still the standard editor.
| cperciva wrote:
| And there's even a book about it, in case anyone has trouble
| figuring out how to use ed:
| https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com/product/ed/
| codetrotter wrote:
| Love the books by mwl. Have physical copies of several of
| them, and the whole bunch of the ebook versions. Currently
| reading one of the physical copies. The one about Ed I have
| in ebook format only and didn't read it yet. Will get to
| that one after I finish reading the physical books that I
| have from him.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| what do you mean by standard editor
| mrweasel wrote:
| The POSIX standard defines ed as one of the editors that
| must be present for a system to be standard complaint, the
| other being vi I believe. You can always expect ed to be
| available to you on a Unix system.
| doubled112 wrote:
| This was initially why I learned enough of the vi
| keybinds to get by.
|
| You can expect it to be there.
| znpy wrote:
| You can expect that on a unix system that has applied,
| paid and received the unix certification.
|
| Most linux distros (and most BSDs afaik) are not unix
| certified.
|
| MacOS is, for that matter.
| edgyquant wrote:
| They still have ed though, do they not?
| msla wrote:
| Inspur K-UX is a Linux distribution that is officially a
| Unix.
| fdschonborn wrote:
| OpenEuler, Huawei's version of RHEL, is also UNIX-
| certified.
| krylon wrote:
| I wonder what benefit the certification has these days.
| IIUC, it used to be a requirement for contracts from
| large corporations and government agencies, but these
| days the number of commercial Unix systems is fairly
| small, and RHEL is so common in those environments, I
| wonder if it there's still places where it's required.
| zinekeller wrote:
| POSIX != Unix (the certification)
|
| It is true that all certified Unix systems follows POSIX,
| but it doesn't mean that non-certified systems are
| forbidden to follow POSIX. Most Linux distributions have
| ways to turn to 98% compliant, and BSDs have always
| strive to follow POSIX.
|
| Weird fact: POSIX was actually named by RMS.
| chungy wrote:
| OpenBSD was fairly anti-POSIX in the past. I don't know
| if that's relaxed at all, but they very much do not chase
| after it.
| krylon wrote:
| But they do have ed, vi (plus ex), and mg (which is not
| standard but nice to have) in their base system.
| zinekeller wrote:
| ed: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2018
| edition...
|
| vi: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2018
| edition...
| chasil wrote:
| You can see all of the utilities this way. The ex editor
| is also standard.
|
| https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilitie
| s/
| madars wrote:
| TIL: busybox has ed and vi but not ex.
| https://www.busybox.net/downloads/BusyBox.html (so ex
| might be nice to learn but it might be not available on
| common systems like OpenWRT)
| [deleted]
| mstevens wrote:
| Probably a reference to https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-
| msg.html
| adl wrote:
| Here: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
| nixcraft wrote:
| In the old days, Unix rescue boot floppy disk to fix
| workstations or servers only included minimal text editors such
| as ed (i think vi was added later). So if you were a Unix admin
| or power user, you need to know ed to fix the dam system. The
| 'ed' text editor was available everywhere. These days rescue
| disks boot from USB or CD/DVD-ROM and may have a full desktops
| or operating systems running. A little bit of history, I guess.
| BTW, I prefer https://www.system-rescue.org/ these days to fix
| Linux bare metals.
| awesomegoat_com wrote:
| You just reminded me a slightly related strip:
| http://www.stripcreator.com/comics/elemental/605973
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Last time I checked, OpenBSD installer didn't have any
| editors but ed.
| cylinder714 wrote:
| It comes with vi (nvi, maybe?) and mg, a small Emacs-like
| editor.
| anthk wrote:
| He means the ramdisk image, not the installed system,
| which obviously has ed, vi and mg. And xedit.
| kjs3 wrote:
| Perhaps more important, as a line editor, 'ed' would often
| work when your terminal was otherwise too borked up for vi or
| pico to work.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Though in most cases, you can just type "reset" to reset
| your terminal to a sane state. If the problem is not the
| terminal's state, but how software is trying to talk to it,
| setting TERM=vt100 (with a "reset" for good measure
| afterwards) usually works for most if not all terminals
| nowadays.
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