17 ms·
OpenBSD 7.4
- throw0101b 3y agoThis page/link gives a nice summary of the release. Another story points to the full release notes: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37899478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37899478
- ksec 3y agoI wonder what are the performance difference now between OpenBSD and FreeBSD.
- bityard 3y agoNo need to wonder, here are some benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/review/bsd-linux-eo2021 https://www.phoronix.com/review/bsd-linux-eo2021 OpenBSD fares far worse in performance than Linux and its BSD cousins because they actively avoid supporting CPU, memory, and other features that increase performance via some shared resource because these are often vectors for information leakage and attack. Everyone else has taken the approach of utilizing these features and getting the performance, but mitigating attacks (or class of attacks) as they are are discovered. Which is not a worse approach per se, especially if your project places a higher value on raw performance (or performance per dollar spent) and you can strengthen security at other layers.
- ksec 3y agoThanks. I am aware of that test but it is two years old and OpenBSD had quite a few optimisation in between. Hopefully we will have some update test from Phoenix again once FreeBSD 14 releases.
- accrual 3y agoIndeed. There's been a lot of work towards unlocking the kernel and network stack (removing "big locks" that force code to run serially), so it would be cool to see some iperf tests on the same hardware with different OpenBSD versions.
- toast0 3y agoLast I heard, OpenBSD does not allow for CPU pinning, which is going to make it hard to get the most throughput out of a system.
- selectodude 3y agoHow is Clear Linux so insanely fast?
- cgh 3y agoI believe it's an Intel-managed distribution and is heavily optimised for Intel hardware. Not surprising it did so well as the tests in that article were done on an i9.
- tiffanyh 3y agoMost pre-compiled binaries are for the lowest common denominator cpu. Which means most pre compiled software targets CPU’s from 10+ years ago. ClearLinux compiles for current chips, which gains the benefit of new instruction sets.
- j_not_j 3y agoDepending on your definition of "current chips". Clear Linux OS defines its minimum hardware requirements to be second-generation Intel® microarchitecture code name Westmere (released in 2010) or later. source: https://www.clearlinux.org/clear-linux-documentation/guides/clear/performance.html https://www.clearlinux.org/clear-linux-documentation/guides/...
- Hello71 3y agophoronix benchmarks are bad on average, but this one is particularly garbage. it doesn't make sense for zstd to be performing orders of magnitude slower on some OSs, because the bottleneck (at least at higher compression levels) is pure userspace code. as I recall, someone on the freebsd mailing list found that the actual speed is almost identical, but zstd used a totally wrong timing API on freebsd. phoronix also uses totally different zstd versions and only sets the compression level the same, ignoring that the achieved compression ratio may vary greatly between versions for some special data. considering these basic errors, the whole benchmark should be considered garbage in garbage out and not useful for any real purpose.
- anonymous_union 3y agoseriously the best operating system i have ever used, and i've tried ubuntu, debian, alpine, gentoo, osx, windows, solaris, freebsd, netbsd, openwrt. it's also one of the best products i have ever used, staying consistent, being well documented, extreme application of principle of least surprise. learn it once, use it forever kind of product. regularly scheduled updates, extreme focus on technology, hardly any politics. if we want software development to become engineering, this is probably what it's going to look like.
- jmclnx 3y agoI do not know why you are being down-voted, but I agree with you. Plus with 7.4 you can use ktrace(1) to find memory leaks, I have been waiting for this release since it was announced a few month ago. No more third party applications to look for leaks :) FWIW, upgrading is the easiest of any OS I have work with.
- wannacboatmovie 3y agoLet us know when you can add "journaling file system" to the list.
- anonymous_union 3y agoi have never had a problem with the filesystems.
- tiffanyh 3y agoSource: https://www.openbsd.org/74.html https://www.openbsd.org/74.html @dang, can the link be changed --- Not sure why the other HN thread was closed that used the actual source link. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37899478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37899478
- idatum 3y agoGreat to see many ARM64 (aka AArch64) improvements. This includes Apple M1/M2 and SoCs like Pine64 and RPI.
- rollcat 3y agoIt's crazy that they did an entire release with no obvious major big new features, only a hundred small improvements here, a hundred small improvements there. I wish Apple could do the same with macOS.
- jamal-kumar 3y agoLove the louis wain theme on the art this time around https://www.openbsd.org/images/ImHappyBecauseEveryoneLovesMe.jpg https://www.openbsd.org/images/ImHappyBecauseEveryoneLovesMe...
- accrual 3y agoI have one of your OpenBSD books right next to me, Peter! :)
- sgt 3y agoOn Kindle too, I see: https://www.amazon.com/Book-PF-3rd-No-Nonsense-Firewall-ebook/dp/B00O9A7E88 https://www.amazon.com/Book-PF-3rd-No-Nonsense-Firewall-eboo...
- freeplay 3y agoEvey time BSD news gets posted, I always come in the comments looking for reasons to switch from Linux. There is consistently high praise accompanied by not so minor grips that make me stick with Linux. Anyone got a strong, concise argument for or against BSD over Linux for desktop use?
- anonymous_union 3y ago[dead]
- gabeio 3y ago> Anyone got a strong, concise argument for or against BSD over Linux for desktop use? For desktop it should mostly depend on you. Does the things you personally run on a regular basis even work on BSD? Unfortunately mine don't (terraform: too few providers support BSD and the one's I specifically work with do not). Yes, I could run terraform within a virtual machine on the system but that's heavier than I would like it to be.
- unsungNovelty 3y agoNot specific to desktop per se. But this is a post which made me dig into BSD more: https://unixsheikh.com/articles/technical-reasons-to-choose-freebsd-over-linux.html https://unixsheikh.com/articles/technical-reasons-to-choose-...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fodkodrasz 3y agoIf you eventually want some multimedia (3d, videos, etc), probably you won't like BSD. (opinion based on 4 year old experience) I have used OpenBSD and NetBSD on desktop and servers. While they have their merits, as a Windows and Mac poweruser I have always felt some void. Linux is bearable from this perspective, BSDs were really far from the limited-priviliege user dynamical reconfigurability needed for a road-warrior notebook user. Linux is almost there. If you have a mostly static setup and a sufficiently outdated Hw setup, you might be able to play high resolution youtube videos. If no other audio is holding the audio device. (though last time I used NetBSD had OSSv4 in the pipeline, and had limited success on openbsd, if all streams had the same sampling rate) Oh, and OpenBSD managed to loose my data. (I liked many aspects of the system despite the above, but after this it got on my nope list, this was not acceptable even 30 years ago)
- tiffanyh 3y agoHAMMER2 I really hope the work to port HAMMER2 to OpenBSD lands in -current (and someone will own/maintain it). https://github.com/kusumi/openbsd_hammer2 https://github.com/kusumi/openbsd_hammer2 OpenBSD lacking a modern filesystem has been an achilles heel for it. EDIT: why the downvotes?
- blodorn 3y agoThere is also gefs https://orib.dev/gefs.pdf https://orib.dev/gefs.pdf with the other thinking about porting it to OpenBSD.
- anonymous_union 3y agodid you see the notes? it is confusing. Notes This repository will be abandoned once Linux or FreeBSD is stabilized with write support. OpenBSD is not the main area of interest.
- SoftTalker 3y agoIt might be a stopper for some potential users, but gaining users/being popular is not a goal of the project. https://www.openbsd.org/goals.html https://www.openbsd.org/goals.html
- doublepg23 3y agoI agree, a modern FS is the biggest oversight in OpenBSD for me. I can overlook a lot of things, but filesystem corruption isn't one of them.
- tiffanyh 3y ago100% My concern though is this line from the readme > "This repository will be abandoned once Linux or FreeBSD is stabilized with write support. OpenBSD is not the main area of interest."
- crest 3y agoUFS/FFS is well tested code and won't corrupt itself, but it lacks the checksumming to detect data corruption from unreliable hardware/firmware/drivers.
- sillywalk 3y ago- Make the softdep mount(8) option a no-op. Softdep was a significant impediment to improving the vfs layer. "Correctly recognize umass(4) floppy disk devices as floppy disks. " :)
- monlockandkey 3y agoBeginner question: Why would someone use BSD over Linux?
- npteljes 3y agoPretty good answers here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/14489/why-would-someone-choose-freebsd-over-linux#14491 https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/14489/why-would-som... Some like the license more, some feel the cohesion is better, documentation is valued, sometimes it's more secure for the purpose.
- antod 3y agoOpenBSD or NetBSD would be better than Linux if you wanted to delve into operating system internals, or you wanted to operate the OS at a more direct explicit level. They are more straight forward in their implementation - modern Linux has more layers of abstraction (udev, dbus, systemd etc) which are useful but more complex. Other than that, it mostly would come down to licensing or subjective taste questions.
- doublepg23 3y agoMaybe someone here would have advice for upgrading ancient OpenBSD installs? I inherited some 5.x OpenBSD systems at my current job and I'm really curious how I'd go about upgrading to 7.4 - I have a feeling I'll be running into some broken links. I'd really like to meet the person who was gung-ho enough to use OpenBSD in prod but seemingly treated them like a LTS system - not a "releases are supported for ~1 year" system.
- crest 3y agoIt's possible, but you'll run into annoying breakage long the way. It's probably safer and less troublesome (unless you're deeply familiar with the changes along the way and the old upgrade procedures) to take the existing configurations as guidelines what to recreate on the latest release.
- doublepg23 3y agoProbably the best method. I believe most applications our either our own (some Golang tools, for some reason?) or basic base applications (migration to relayd instead of nginx as a proxy is probably a good idea.)
- synack 3y agoEvery release has an upgrade guide, like this: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade74.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade74.html Make backups, make sure you can restore them, then just step through it one version at a time. Things got a lot easier around 6.6 when sysupgrade was introduced.
- doublepg23 3y agoLuckily, I believe a lot of the applications are our own and the rest are in base or with a good upgrade path (nginx). My only concern is if I'll find missing packages for such old releases - I guess that's nothing a VM wouldn't show though.
- 3y ago