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Open Source Operating Systems Software Unix BSD Linux

OpenBSD 6.2 Released (openbsd.org) 114

Posted by BeauHD from the new-and-improved dept.
basscomm writes: OpenBSD 6.2 has now been released. Check out the release notes if you're into that kind of thing. Some of the new features and systems include improved hardware support, vmm(4)/ vmd(8) improvements, IEEE 802.11 wireless stack improvements, generic network stack improvements, installer improvements, routing daemons and other userland network improvements, security improvements and more. Here is the full list of changes.
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OpenBSD 6.2 Released More

OpenBSD 6.2 Released

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  • *BSDs are rendering Linux irrelevant. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09, 2017 @06:20PM (#55339237)

    The *BSDs are quickly rendering Linux irrelevant, especially now that nearly all Linux distros have started using systemd which has caused stability and reliability problems for lots of users.

    OpenBSD is proving to be an excellent server OS. Its focus on security is more important now than ever before.

    FreeBSD is proving to be an excellent general-purpose OS. It can be used very successfully on servers, as well as on workstations. It probably has the best hardware support of all of the BSDs, and its ZFS support is remarkably useful.

    NetBSD is proving to be an excellent embedded OS. It supports a huge range of systems, both new and ancient.

    DragonFly BSD is proving to be an excellent testbed for next-generation technologies. Its HAMMER filesystem is superb, and it has long had excellent support for multi-CPU systems, and its virtual kernel support is extraordinarily useful.

    It's getting to the point where Linux really doesn't offer any substantial benefits over the *BSDs. In many ways the *BSDs offer significant advantages over Linux.

    The *BSDs are becoming the go-to operating system for a wide range of computing needs, from servers to workstations to embedded systems.

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:*BSDs are rendering Linux irrelevant. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09, 2017 @06:40PM (#55339361)

      Can somebody please mod up the parent comment? It shouldn't be at -1. It's very relevant, and more importantly, it's correct. I've been involved with moving some servers from Linux to FreeBSD, and it has been an excellent experience so far. Unlike modern-day Linux distro developers, the FreeBSD developers clearly respect the UNIX philosophy, and it shows in the high quality of FreeBSD. It works very well as a web server and as an application server, and we've had great success using it to run PostgreSQL. Our developers have also started using FreeBSD as their main development OS, and they're loving it. To paraphrase one of our developers, "FreeBSD is what Linux should have been."

      We're starting to investigate using OpenBSD for some of our servers, and so far the testing has been going very well. Our only complaint with OpenBSD is that it isn't as user-friendly or convenient to use as FreeBSD is. But we can overlook that because we know it's offering us a very robust and trustworthy system. Personally, I can't wait until we've moved all of our computing systems over to FreeBSD or OpenBSD. I have far more trust in the systems running FreeBSD or OpenBSD than do in the systems running Linux.

      • FreeBSD is what Linux should have been.

        No. *BSD is what Linux was trying to be.

        • No, *BSD is what Linux couldn't be at the time, so it became linux instead.

          The BSD license was still uncertain in 1991-3 when Linux was getting it's start. If the uncertainty had not been there, people would just have used 386BSD and been done with it.

          • No, Bill Joy was the heart of BSD, when he moved on to Sun, BSD was done. No one could fire up the folks like Joy, no one had the passion like Joy. When he left, it was like walking into a bakery with the oven off and the door left open to the winter outside. Linus sticking so strongly with the project he started and guiding it the way he did in the early days is what lead to Linux rocketing upward. People like to cite how exciting it was or whatever, but it was the leadership between the two projects t

            • Under your scenario, BSD just up and disappeared. But that wasn't the history that happened. The Jolitzes, among others, kept moving along.

      • Re:*BSDs are rendering Linux irrelevant. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2017 @06:16AM (#55341749) Homepage Journal

        I've been meaning to try TrueOS for desktop out. Anyone tried it?

        Their web site doesn't inspire confidence (scrolling is broken), so I might just try FreeBSD. Been about a decade since I last used it...

        My standard distro test is to install Chromium and see if the mouse wheel works properly. I've found you can usually tell is a desktop distro is crap by how much effort they put in to making basic input devices work.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          TrueOS is PC-BSD's new name. It's just an environment that sits on top of FreeBSD. TrueOS actually contributes a lot back to FreeBSD as it is owned by ixsystems, also the maker of FreeNAS.

    • Re:*BSDs are rendering Linux irrelevant. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09, 2017 @07:06PM (#55339489)

      The various BSD forks are generally worked on by real operating system developers who care about the conceptual integrity of the system as a whole, not only the kernel itself. There are Linux distributions with a similar philosophy, but most Linux development now is done by either large commercial interests who are adopting an MS-like attitude or random incompetent people who only want to leave their mark on something, whether it's a good idea or not.

      BSD is more elitist, and that's a good thing for the quality of the system.

      • Re:*BSDs are rendering Linux irrelevant. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09, 2017 @07:13PM (#55339537)

        I don't think that "elitist" is the right word to use. I think the correct word is "professional". The *BSD communities are some of the most welcoming around, and they're always willing to help. The only caveat is that they expect you to act professionally, as well. That is, they don't put up with bullshit. If you're going to contribute code, you will be held to a high standard. If you're going to ask a question, it's expected that you've at least put in some serious effort to figure out the answer on your own. They won't necessarily hold your hand, but if you come in with good intentions they'll often go to the ends of the Earth to help you out.

        Their professionalism is also why Linux starts to seem so amateurish after you've used the *BSDs for any period of time, and especially after you've interacted with the *BSD communities. Debacles like how Debian switched to systemd, causing severe stability problems and disruption for so many Debian users, would never be allowed to happen within the *BSD communities.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Bing Tsher E ( 943915 )

          The whole structure of the OS is so vastly different. The whole base userland and kernel on a BSD OS are released as a complete source tarball on one revision tag. It all builds together. You can build an entire BSD release with two make commands, one for the kernel and one for the userland.

          With Linux, the userland of each 'disto' is whatever that 'distro maintainer' decided to pull together into the dogs breakfast of a userland that Linux OSes always have. Source code for userland binaries come from al

        • Re:*BSDs are rendering Linux irrelevant. (Score:4, Informative)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2017 @06:22AM (#55341763) Homepage Journal

          The page on how to contribute (https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/contributing/index.html) is certainly a lot more helpful than the ones for other big OS projects like KDE and Gnome.

        • And they're also very good at astroturfing and kool-aid drinking.

          That is, they don't put up with bullshit. If you're going to contribute code, you will be held to a high standard.

          If you want to contribute code, let's say a patch, expect it to be brutally rejected at first (and you to be harrassed and humiliated by non-contributing hordes of fanbois on mailing lists), and then committed with small changes by some senior developer with no credits whatsoever to its original author.

          You should be happy enough th

      • Re:*BSDs are rendering Linux irrelevant. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @09:47PM (#55340439) Journal

        The various BSD forks are generally worked on by real operating system developers who care about the conceptual integrity of the system as a whole, not only the kernel itself. There are Linux distributions with a similar philosophy, but most Linux development now is done by either large commercial interests who are adopting an MS-like attitude or random incompetent people who only want to leave their mark on something, whether it's a good idea or not.

        BSD is more elitist, and that's a good thing for the quality of the system.

        The BSD guys are interesting. Not more elitist .. hell go look at the forums of ARCLinux MY GOD but rather conservative. The BSD guys are really good at documentation and creating teams like the ones making /usr/share/docs and the FreeBSD handbook and great manpages which also include Unix history.

        The BSD guys want something done well with great input from experts rather than just throw yet a another million userspace daemon when problem solving. BSDs are also a full OS and not just a kernel, a distro, and a few user apps are thrown in and grown and linked together with a hope it will work.

        My take is read the manual is added because they trust their own manual. If a newbie say well that doc SUCKs and they will examine it and quickly email the documentation guy to fix it etc. There is a real documentation effort as the kernel guys don't want to answer noobie questions and many are at all skill levels and needs. What is cool about FreeBSD at least is they have examples you can uncomment out to do things and hacks like CVSUP. It encourages you to play.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bongo ( 13261 )

          I only recently started looking at BSD, as Mac OS X didn't fit a particular role. After a couple of books, I'm finding it a better way to learn, as it strikes me as being cleaner. I could combine a few simple and standard tools to get a particular task going, which I didn't know was possible -- this comes after trying to read a number of posts on various boards who were also scratching their heads over how to do such and such similar thing (I don't think they were BSD people). So it feels like I'm starting

    • Re:*BSDs are rendering Linux irrelevant. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @09:56PM (#55340479)

      Oh. Oh, my. I'm sorry to say that that there is almost no paying work involving any of the BSD's, except for MacOS as a descendant of FreeBSD. Even the most casual search of job sites, whether hiring or looking for work, lists Linux over any or all of the BSD's by a ratio of hundreds to one.

      The idea that they are a "go-to" operating system ignores that actual job listings involving the non-MacOS BSD's are almost entirely migration projects, to migrate from the BSD selected by a former technology architect, to a supportable and hardware compatible operating system. The individual BSD's can, and many do, have significant feature benefits over Linux. The lack of systemd is one of them, I can agree. But the featues you list have proven insufficient to gain market share compared to the ease of development, the ease of installation, and the broad usage of Linux.

      • you might have a router, switch or printer running BSD, or today rode an elevator with BSD controller....more of it out there than most people know

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pnutjam ( 523990 )
          Yeah, but embedded OS work is a different animal then system admin or devops work. I dabble in embedded systems, but the other side pays my day wages on Linux.

          I am learning BSD although I've been pretty happy with embedded Linux. I like to learn.

          • yes that was point, won't see that realm in the normal job search a developer would do, it's in EE land.

      • MacOS is not a descendant of FreeBSD.

        MacOS is a shiny proprietary layer on top of NeXT OS, which became the Apple OS after the Apple developers had fumbled around and blown many, many millions on Taligent/Pink and some other crap, proving they were incapable of producing a moderm OS with preemptive multitasking. So they (were bought by./they bough) NeXT. Unfortunately, the NeXT OS was musty and very stale, because it was ancient and the project of a decaying failed company by this point in time. So they

        • > MacOS is by no means a descendant of FreeBSD. They grafted some stuff from FreeBSD onto NeXT Step.

          According to Apple, much of the kernel is descended from FreeBSD.

          * https://developer.apple.com/li... [apple.com]

          I worked extensively with both MacOS and NeXT at an earlier point of my career, integrating various tools into several multi-platform environments for groups that hadn't been able to standardize on operating systems or base hardwrae. There are some philosophical and design structure similarities, but the amo

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Dang that multiple inheritance...

      • I believe that iXsystems owns FreeBSD and TrueOS, and pays the people who work on it. Apple too employs a few

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Noryungi ( 70322 )

          I believe that iXsystems owns FreeBSD and TrueOS, and pays the people who work on it. Apple too employs a few

          iXsystems does not *own* FreeBSD - it hired some (former) FreeBSD people.

          FreeBSD itself is -- as far as I know -- "managed" by the FreeBSD Foundation, and, in turn, that Foundation is managed by the FreeBSD developers.

          • Re:*BSDs are rendering Linux irrelevant. (Score:5, Informative)

            by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2017 @04:59AM (#55341585) Journal

            FreeBSD itself is -- as far as I know -- "managed" by the FreeBSD Foundation, and, in turn, that Foundation is managed by the FreeBSD developers.

            Not quite. The FreeBSD Foundation is entirely separate from the FreeBSD Project. The FreeBSD Project is managed by the core team, which is a set of 9 people that are elected by 'active' contributors, defined as people who have committed something in the last year (I think - I'd have to double check the project bylaws for the exact time). The Foundation board is self-selected (i.e. board members are appointed by existing board members). There is usually at least one person who is both on the board of the Foundation and the Core team, though not always. The Foundation employs a few full time people and a lot of contractors to contribute to bits of the project that no one personally wants to work on, no single company wants to contribute, but which everyone thinks are important. This is typically guided by the Core Team. This structure protects the project's independence from the Foundation's financial weight (the Foundation's turnover is $1-2M/year). The Core Team decides who is allowed commit rights (usually in terms of granting this right, in very rare examples by taking it away), so the most the Foundation can do is pay someone to write code, they can't force the project to accept it.

            The Foundation also handles a lot of vendor relations. Often, multiple vendors want the same thing, but no one wants to pay for all of it. The Foundation helps in these situations by getting different companies to pay for part of something. For example, ARM and Cavium jointly funded to the ARMv8 bring-up (ARM likes having a BSD-licensed reference implementation, because companies like Apple and Microsoft won't touch GPL'd code, Cavium wants to sell chips to companies like Juniper that use FreeBSD), but the Foundation organised the people to do the work (and others to do code review). They also do a lot of outreach. For the last few years, they've employed the release engineer, which is an incredibly annoying and high-stress job that it's hard to find volunteers for (and hard for companies to want to do, because the big downstream consumers typically use their own internal release process).

            Disclaimer: I was on the Core Team for two terms, but this post contains personal opinions that may not reflect the opinions of the FreeBSD Project or the FreeBSD Foundation.

    • Re:*BSDs are rendering Linux irrelevant. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2017 @02:53AM (#55341333)

      It's getting to the point where Linux really doesn't offer any substantial benefits over the *BSDs. In many ways the *BSDs offer significant advantages over Linux.

      Welp I know this will get modded down, but hell why not play devil's advocate here? Vendor support. You have actual companies that will stand behind and certify software and hardware for Linux. Not so much for BSDs. Also, you kind of point out the problem with BSD. This BSD is good for this, this BSD is good for that. Not many businesses have the time to sit there and evaluate ten different BSDs to figure out which one provides the most bang for buck, where as much as everyone hates it, systemd homogenizes Linux. A single known Linux versus a half dozen BSDs where commercial support is iffy at best, guess which one is going to win in the mind of the non-technical person who write the check that will pay for the installation.

      The *BSDs are becoming the go-to operating system for a wide range of computing needs, from servers to workstations to embedded systems.

      I don't doubt that BSDs are getting deployed, but you are over stating the figure a bit. Newer folks in the industry are learning Linux and while the old hats like the way BSD works and feels, the newer folks don't really give a stink. Most of them will get ten seconds to have 100 servers up and running, ready for whatever software the PHB has selected. With BSD you'll be lucky to get past configuring disks in that ten seconds. With Linux you'll have an army of AWS boxes at your command ready to go before your first cup of coffee is poured.

      Now don't get me wrong, I'm not sitting here dissing the BSD folks, but there's a serious need for folks to look past systemd as the sole reason everyone and their dog is leaving Linux. That's not happening and people yelling this argument sound a lot like how people used to junk on Java for how poorly 1.2 ran all the way up to where Java EE and Spring is pretty much everywhere. It's seriously getting old and Linux's popularity hasn't gone anywhere and doesn't look like it is going anywhere anytime soon.

      All the different BSDs are great and they have their place. However, I hear arguments about systemd and the majority of them are dated as hell, just like when Java 6 was out and people would rag on it like everyone was still using Java 1.2. So all the different BSDs, they're doing great, I mean look at Yahoo, they're still running all their stuff on BSD. There's a good amount of IoT that is running some version of BSD. I'm not saying BSD isn't some hot stuff right now. What I am saying is that Linux is way more known and a lot of folks know it as the go-to-solution, systemd and all. Additionally, systemd, while contentious, has not been the death knell for Linux that everyone would like to think. It has been an evolution, to try and put the best spin on the systemd situation, but there's actual vendors with money on the line who have a vested interest in seeing systemd become stable. For the most part, it has become a stable system. That's not to say everything is rosy now, but systems with systemd on the server and a person well versed in systemd are good enough for actual production systems, Amazon among others have shown that very clearly.

      especially now that nearly all Linux distros have started using systemd which has caused stability and reliability problems for lots of users.

      At some point Slashdot users need to break the stereotype that we all beat a dead horse into jell-o. One sided shit like this and everyone who chimes in with "MOD UP!" are all echoing a view that is years old, and yes, I'm pretty sure Slashdot will be first to amp to front page any failure of systemd, because that's what the mob likes, because Slashdotter just can't stop kicking the horse. But truth be told, every flipping OS on the planet has bugs and some of them are pretty damn serious and require fixes, that's how software works. But c

      • Hopefully, one day soon Oracle will realise that if they want to sell Sparc hardware, they need to provide docs and support to the BSDs. Right now, OpenBSD supports the T series as well as it can, but some Oracle engineers on the case would make a world of difference.

        Some people like their hardware, but don't like Solaris very much. (I know I am not the only one).

        Oracle need to realise (as IBM eventually came to, after a near-death experience) that you have to be nice to the nerds, cos they are the ones p

      • Re:*BSDs are rendering Linux irrelevant. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Noryungi ( 70322 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2017 @03:32AM (#55341409) Homepage Journal

        Oh boy, so many things wrong here...

        Welp I know this will get modded down, but hell why not play devil's advocate here? Vendor support. You have actual companies that will stand behind and certify software and hardware for Linux.

        Hilarious. Try getting actual, useful support from Red Hat and SuSE, to name just two of the biggest... Go on, I'll be waiting right here.

        The level of incompetence in these companies is simply astounding. Sure, there are some very good guys in there, but not in front-line support, that's for sure.

        And, just so you know: hardware certification these days is usually Linux + FreeBSD, and it's done by the hardware vendor, not the software "supplier".

        systemd homogenizes Linux. A single known Linux versus a half dozen BSDs where commercial support is iffy at best [...]

        Yes, systemd homogenizes Linux... Down to the level of utter, absolutely unstable crap like Windows.

        And there is not "a half dozen BSDs" - there is only three: FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD.

        Compared to the situation of Linux, with not "half a dozen BSD", but litterally HUNDREDS of distributions, I am not sure you are being serious...

        Most of them will get ten seconds to have 100 servers up and running, ready for whatever software the PHB has selected. With BSD you'll be lucky to get past configuring disks in that ten seconds. With Linux you'll have an army of AWS boxes at your command ready to go before your first cup of coffee is poured.

        Ah yes, AWS, that marvelous field of shitty softare and even shittier infrastructure. Just FYI, it's called an "AMI", a system image in other words, and there are AMI for all of the BSDs. And the same is true for Azure and many other cloud offerings out there. You simply don't know what you are talking about, right? Either that, or you should stop blindly clicking on the Ubuntu AMI every time you create a VM in EC2.

        Now don't get me wrong, I'm not sitting here dissing the BSD folks, but there's a serious need for folks to look past systemd as the sole reason everyone and their dog is leaving Linux.

        Actually, no, systemd IS the reason serious system administrators and quite a few devops are leaving Linux behind. The crap you have to deal with gets simply unbearable after a while.

        I could go on refuting your ridiculous arguments again and again, but frankly, I have better things to do with my time. You are a very poor devil's advocate and an even worse technologist/system admin/unix admin I am afraid. Your level of ignorance is frankly stunning.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I think he means the hardware vendors, not the OS vendors. You can buy plenty of hardware that claims to work on Linux, and if it doesn't you can just return it as defective. On BSD you are largely on your own.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by slack_justyb ( 862874 )

          Yes, systemd homogenizes Linux... Down to the level of utter, absolutely unstable crap like Windows.

          Compared to the situation of Linux, with not "half a dozen BSD", but litterally HUNDREDS of distributions, I am not sure you are being serious...

          Well now I'm confused because you're talking in circles. Additionally, if you're sitting there saying there's only three BSD but hundreds of Linux distros then you might as well toss in the towel on your argument. Only three BSDs, pfft. Okay, so you're willing to say Dragonfly BSD is just FreeBSD, but that same thinking doesn't hold water with something like CentOS is just RedHat? If you seriously think there's 100s of distros, I'll give you that, but you're going to have to abandon your idea of only th

          • TL;DR : either you count all the distros among the distros or you don't. If you're counting just base kernels there are more BSD variants than Linux variants.

    • Is there abuse in BSD Kernel development like linux?

    • Gentoo is a Linux distro that was modelled after the BSDs from the start, and it doesn't use systemd by default (though it's available). To me it's the best of both worlds, since Linux provides better hardware support and in some cases better software availability too.

      On the ports/portage system, consider software you need to build yourself (bleeding edge stuff with no hope of being packaged for distros). For this, most distros want you to install ${LIBRARY}-devel or something for the headers. There's no

    • All this on a day I don't have mod points...

      There's one addition I would add to the BSD thought process - macOS. Apple's platform is a hybrid, but if you need to run commercial production apps and use a hereditary Unix/BSD, macOS should be considered part of the family too.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Yes. And the example of Apple brings up the problems of licensing.

        To be fair, I haven't seriously looked at BSD software in over a decade, but when I did I was seriously bothered by the variety of licenses I'd need to evaluate. Perhaps things have smoothed down by now, after all, when I first looked at Linux there were also a mess of licenses for non-core software. These days, not so much. But the BSD license seems to encourage the spread of alternate licenses on derived software...and that's really ann

  • year 2038 (Score:5, Informative)

    by jmccue ( 834797 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @06:44PM (#55339367) Homepage

    Congregations to the team.

    One thing to be aware of, OpenBSD no longer has year a 2038 issue, so if you have 32 bit hardware around you should give it a spin. Never mind the fact that if it was used on 32 bit IOT devices, we would have no worries about built in obsolescence in about ~20 years. And even security would be a bit better 'out of the box' :)

  • The big feature, KARL (Score:2, Insightful)

    by WayCool ( 107037 )

    Seems that the post is missing the big feature to appear in 6.2, KARL - Kernel Address Randomized Link.

  • I thought their release dates were always around November 1st? Anyhow I've been using OpenBSD forever on my personal www server that also does DVR duty for my security cameras. Upgrades are always smooth and quick.

    • Where can I read about your security setup?

      • Not much to it really. Cron runs ffmpeg once an hour and records the video stream. After so many days the old files are deleted.

        /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i rtsp://192.168.1.9:554 -timeout 45 -an -c copy -movflags frag_keyframe -t 1:00:00 "/video/$(date).mp4"
        find /video -mtime +110 -name "*.mp4" -exec rm -rf {} \;

  • One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
  • What you think about combining those two? Is it basically Open JDK vs Oracle JDK?! How well does Oracle JDK work in Linux emulaton?

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