6 ms·

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.

by ianai 4y ago

5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
"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.
- clort 4y ago
  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-platforms/bsd/Mono https://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/supported-platf...
- daneel_w 4y ago
  Is there a huge difference between that and what Mono offers?
  - dvzk 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      >"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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        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.
        LeFantome 4y ago
        That makes it sound like Mono has fallen behind. I would say it like this: The original .NET platform is now called .NET Framework. .NET Framework was ( and is ) only available for Windows. Mono is an Open Souce project to implement a cross-platform implementation of .NET Framework. In addition to MacOS, Windows, and Linux, Mono targets iOS, Android, and WASM. Microsoft released a second .NET platform alongside Framework and called it .NET Core. Unlike Framework, Core is cross-platform, and targets Windows, Linux and MacOS. After .NET Core 3.1, the “Core” was dropped from the name. There has been .NET 5, .NET 6, and now .NET 7 but these are all just newer versions of .NET Core. .NET Framework is still supported but there has not been a real release in several years. Framework is stuck at version 4.x and, since .NET 5, there is really one version of .NET again ( the descendent of Core ). As Mono implements, .NET Framework ( not core ), it still implements .NET 4.x, like the “real” .NET Framework does. Mono “only supports C# versions <= 9.0 (via Roslyn), also 2-3 years old” because those are true of the “real” .NET Framework as well. .NET Core ( dotnet at the CLI ) has replaced .NET Framework and ( by implication ) has replaced Mono as well. That is what I think the post above is trying to say. Except, while it is true that the “real” .NET Framework has been replaced by .NET 5+ ( by .NET Core ), Mono has not been fully replaced. Above, I said that .NET Core targeted Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It did not target iOS, Android, or WASM ( Blazor ). Well, .NET 7 targets all those platforms. How? Well, for Windows, MacOS and Linux it uses the original .NET Core runtime. For iOS, Android, and WASM it uses the runtime for Mono! So, Mono is alive and well inside every version of .NET since 5. It will still be there in .NET 8 as well. That said, when people say Mono, they mean the implementation of Framework released by the Mono Project. That version, as the post above implies, is pretty dated at this point.
- tester756 4y ago
  As far as I've been there was some effort in .NET for BSD https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/14537 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/14537 700 comments https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/workflow/requirements/freebsd-requirements.md https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/workflow/re... https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/71338 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/71338 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/workflow/building/coreclr/freebsd-instructions.md https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/workflow/bu...
  - rollcat 4y ago
    This is all for FreeBSD, the only thing it has in common with OpenBSD is the shared lineage, which diverged some 30 years ago. You can for all intents and purposes treat them as completely different operating systems (like FreeBSD and Linux).
enriquto 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  Faq says that vmm supports Linux guests? https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html
  - t-3 4y ago
    Yes, Linux guests work. A bigger issue is the lack of hardware acceleration or passthru support for virtual machines.
    - mrpippy 4y ago
      Only supporting a single CPU in the guest is a significant limitation too
toyg 4y ago
I had issues with some Rust-backed python libraries, last time I tried to use it in anger.
- Foobar8568 4y ago
  Basically anything that is not C/C++ is a pain on non linux system...
  - toyg 4y ago
    A lot of stuff works fine, but it's definitely true that C is "the" language on OpenBSD.
  - citizen_friend 4y ago
    perl, python, javascript, Common Lisp, and Lua work well.
seanw444 4y ago
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 4y ago
  The limits are set in login.conf, it's not hardcoded.
  - seanw444 4y ago
    Tried that. There's still a limit on top of that.
    - daneel_w 4y ago
      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.
      - kouteiheika 4y ago
        Depends on what you do; I routinely use double that, and for me even my 64GB starts to be limiting.
        tolciho 4y ago
        Eight gigs was the least amount of memory I could buy this laptop with, and I'm using... 237M even with a few amfora and w3m running. Compiles will take more, but I stopped compiling horrible things like Firefox or Chromium years ago.
      - smabie 4y ago
        32gb seems pretty low? pretty routine in a lot of different domains to have processes using 10s/100s of gbs
perihelions 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > (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 4y ago
    > 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.
ksec 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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__ 4y ago
    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.
    - daneel_w 4y ago
      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.
    - kjs3 4y ago
      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).
  - daydream 4y ago
    Indeed these release notes include 13 separate sub-bullets of SMP improvements. It’s being actively worked on.
- 4y ago
LeoPanthera 4y ago
Hardware-wise, OpenBSD (deliberately) has no support for Bluetooth.
- kelp 4y ago
  Because their previous Bluetooth implementation was broken in various ways, and no one volunteered to fix it. So they just removed it.

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.

by ianai 4y ago

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.

5e92cb50239222b 4y ago

"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.

clort 4y ago
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-platforms/bsd/Mono https://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/supported-platf...
daneel_w 4y ago
Is there a huge difference between that and what Mono offers?
- dvzk 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    >"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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      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.
      - LeFantome 4y ago
        That makes it sound like Mono has fallen behind. I would say it like this: The original .NET platform is now called .NET Framework. .NET Framework was ( and is ) only available for Windows. Mono is an Open Souce project to implement a cross-platform implementation of .NET Framework. In addition to MacOS, Windows, and Linux, Mono targets iOS, Android, and WASM. Microsoft released a second .NET platform alongside Framework and called it .NET Core. Unlike Framework, Core is cross-platform, and targets Windows, Linux and MacOS. After .NET Core 3.1, the “Core” was dropped from the name. There has been .NET 5, .NET 6, and now .NET 7 but these are all just newer versions of .NET Core. .NET Framework is still supported but there has not been a real release in several years. Framework is stuck at version 4.x and, since .NET 5, there is really one version of .NET again ( the descendent of Core ). As Mono implements, .NET Framework ( not core ), it still implements .NET 4.x, like the “real” .NET Framework does. Mono “only supports C# versions <= 9.0 (via Roslyn), also 2-3 years old” because those are true of the “real” .NET Framework as well. .NET Core ( dotnet at the CLI ) has replaced .NET Framework and ( by implication ) has replaced Mono as well. That is what I think the post above is trying to say. Except, while it is true that the “real” .NET Framework has been replaced by .NET 5+ ( by .NET Core ), Mono has not been fully replaced. Above, I said that .NET Core targeted Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It did not target iOS, Android, or WASM ( Blazor ). Well, .NET 7 targets all those platforms. How? Well, for Windows, MacOS and Linux it uses the original .NET Core runtime. For iOS, Android, and WASM it uses the runtime for Mono! So, Mono is alive and well inside every version of .NET since 5. It will still be there in .NET 8 as well. That said, when people say Mono, they mean the implementation of Framework released by the Mono Project. That version, as the post above implies, is pretty dated at this point.
tester756 4y ago
As far as I've been there was some effort in .NET for BSD https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/14537 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/14537 700 comments https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/workflow/requirements/freebsd-requirements.md https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/workflow/re... https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/71338 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/71338 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/workflow/building/coreclr/freebsd-instructions.md https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/workflow/bu...
- rollcat 4y ago
  This is all for FreeBSD, the only thing it has in common with OpenBSD is the shared lineage, which diverged some 30 years ago. You can for all intents and purposes treat them as completely different operating systems (like FreeBSD and Linux).

enriquto 4y ago

> 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 4y ago
Faq says that vmm supports Linux guests? https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html
- t-3 4y ago
  Yes, Linux guests work. A bigger issue is the lack of hardware acceleration or passthru support for virtual machines.
  - mrpippy 4y ago
    Only supporting a single CPU in the guest is a significant limitation too

toyg 4y ago

I had issues with some Rust-backed python libraries, last time I tried to use it in anger.

Foobar8568 4y ago
Basically anything that is not C/C++ is a pain on non linux system...
- toyg 4y ago
  A lot of stuff works fine, but it's definitely true that C is "the" language on OpenBSD.
- citizen_friend 4y ago
  perl, python, javascript, Common Lisp, and Lua work well.

seanw444 4y ago

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 4y ago
The limits are set in login.conf, it's not hardcoded.
- seanw444 4y ago
  Tried that. There's still a limit on top of that.
  - daneel_w 4y ago
    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.
    - kouteiheika 4y ago
      Depends on what you do; I routinely use double that, and for me even my 64GB starts to be limiting.
      - tolciho 4y ago
        Eight gigs was the least amount of memory I could buy this laptop with, and I'm using... 237M even with a few amfora and w3m running. Compiles will take more, but I stopped compiling horrible things like Firefox or Chromium years ago.
    - smabie 4y ago
      32gb seems pretty low? pretty routine in a lot of different domains to have processes using 10s/100s of gbs

perihelions 4y ago

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 4y ago
> (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 4y ago
  > 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.

ksec 4y ago

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 4y ago
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__ 4y ago
  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.
  - daneel_w 4y ago
    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.
  - kjs3 4y ago
    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).
- daydream 4y ago
  Indeed these release notes include 13 separate sub-bullets of SMP improvements. It’s being actively worked on.
4y ago

LeoPanthera 4y ago

Hardware-wise, OpenBSD (deliberately) has no support for Bluetooth.

kelp 4y ago
Because their previous Bluetooth implementation was broken in various ways, and no one volunteered to fix it. So they just removed it.