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Open Source Operating Systems

OpenBSD Turns 25 With a New Release (openbsd.org) 28

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
ArchieBunker writes: The OpenBSD project has turned 25 years old and is celebrating this with release 6.8.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

OpenBSD Turns 25 With a New Release More

OpenBSD Turns 25 With a New Release

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  • Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Scarred Intellect ( 1648867 ) on Monday October 19, 2020 @05:31PM (#60626284) Homepage Journal

    Finally!

    THIS is news! THIS is stuff that matters!

  • Hmmm (Score:3, Funny)

    by MrNaz ( 730548 ) on Monday October 19, 2020 @05:52PM (#60626338) Homepage

    Can someone let us know what Netcraft has to say about this?

  • Only two remote holes in the default install, in 25 years. Not a bad effort.

  • Are the *BSDs relevant anymore? I know I sound like a troll, but Linux seems to be the most popular *nix system these days, and I'd like to know what keeps the *BSDs around. There's three of them I think, which makes things more confusing to me.

    • I've only just gotten into BSD with FreeNAS. I like the ideas of Jails over VMs or containers, after getting used to them, they seem much simpler with less overhead. BSD seems to put some things in different places than *nix, but that's just a matter of getting used to it.

      There's a lot less hand-holding, which I'm finding as liberating as switching from a TI-89 to an HP 35s; sure there's more work up front, but I'm better for it.

      As far as relevant? I hope so.

      • There's a lot less hand-holding, which I'm finding as liberating as switching from a TI-89 to an HP 35s; sure there's more work up front, but I'm better for it.

        I fail to see how. You could do the same stuff with Linux with less hand-holding if you simply didn't look for a hand to hold. Or you could breeze through that stuff in Linux with the hand-holding, and apply your effort to something else that isn't so well-explored. Then not only would you better yourself, but you might also better the world.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jmccue ( 834797 )

      For me yes, people like different things.

      This is like the argument of why Linux has thousands of distros. So I will ask you: "Why does Linux need thousands of distros ?" Or better yet, why do we need many models of autos when 1 would be enough

    • Re:Serious question... (Score:5, Informative)

      by curtis3389 ( 5534388 ) on Monday October 19, 2020 @06:16PM (#60626438)

      Yes, they are still relevant, but the saying goes, "if you don't know why you'd use BSD instead of Linux, it's probably not for you." The BSDs are used by some organizations to diversify their stack so that a Linux vulnerability doesn't affect every server they have. They also tend to be "cleaner" than Linux because the OS is developed and released as a whole instead of with the GNU/Linux split.

      FreeBSD is what I would call the "main" BSD. It probably has the best software support of the 3.

      IIRC correctly, NetBSD has a blazing fast network stack, and the best hardware support of the 3.

      OpenBSD is hardcore about security. They'll do anything to increase the OS's security, and some of their ideas have made their way into Linux. The OpenBSD devs are also known for speaking truth to power.

      Some of the above statements may be inaccurate, but I'll be corrected.

      • OpenBSD gets a security advantage by.. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by martynhare ( 7125343 ) on Monday October 19, 2020 @07:35PM (#60626666)
        Keeping itself simple, relative to what other systems do. This provides superior security when you follow a traditional computing model where the minimum amount of code needed to fulfil a role is used and where the hardware fulfils only one, well pre-planned role.

        However, this all falls apart the moment you want a system thatâ(TM)s rapidly extendable beyond its originally planned purpose. For that you need something built upon a highly compatible technology stack. Otherwise, if you want to add new-n-shiny to OpenBSD, it very much has to align with their ever changing codebase which is deliberately kept brutally minimal.

        Which begs the question:

        Should we have more hardware and strive to keep it all energy-efficient, simple, well maintained and repairable for a long time?

        Or, should we keep redeploying more and more powerful hardware and keep adding layers upon layers of code while using virtualisation and containers to segment things?

        OpenBSD fits best with the tradition of the former, where you can feasibly keep dedicated servers running for a decade or more, without replacing the CPU, RAM or the like until it breaks. This keeps the running code lean and reduces the surface area of attack greatly at the cost of more physical hardware running long-term.

        Realistically, OpenBSD security is inferior to GNU/Linux the moment one needs to run a whole bunch of stuff on one box. This is because Linux has the ability to restrict what each and every process can do in a very granular way, while OpenBSD canâ(TM)t. They used to have systrace for this (which was awesome) but then they dumped it the moment they realised theyâ(TM)d need proper in-kernel policy to go alongside in-kernel hooks to make it all secure. Pledge() is pretty cool though and is actually implemented across the codebase, unlike how Linux uses seccomp (by comparison).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rbrander ( 73222 )

          It's also "realistic" to realize that many situations do NOT change that much.

          Business is full of places that don't change their needs from year to year. I worked in Waterworks.

          There's this thing called "management" that is generally concerned with change; they don't have much to do when everything is just ticking along. (They don't like such work and push it downwards.) So "management" often comes up with bright new ideas to reorganize and pile new work onto parts of the business that are working well.

          B

      • Netflix runs FreeBSD on their OCA distributed video stream pumps.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Sin2x ( 1189089 )
        NetBSD does not have the best network stack despite the name. FreeBSD does. Also, please don't forget DragonflyBSD, it's an intergral part of the BSD family.

    • FreeBSD is still part of the foundation of OS X I assume.

      Possibly because of license differences.
      Did at least one Playstation use a BSD base too?

      • Yup. The PS4 runs a modified FreeBSD 9.0

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        FreeBSD is still part of the foundation of OS X I assume.

        Possibly because of license differences.
        Did at least one Playstation use a BSD base too?

        There's no issue with licensing with FreeBSD. FreeBSD is licensed under the modified BSD license (modified which is GPL compatible as the standard BSD license has an advertising clause that makes it against the GPL).

        OS X is not FreeBSD. It consists of a Mach based kernel, with FreeBSD providing the personality to the OS. So Mach provides the lowlevel kernel compone

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by aliquis ( 678370 )

          I meant OS X using FreeBSD because of the BSD license rather than being "infected" with GPL.

          Some don't want to be forced into open source and licenses.

  • Upgraded test sys (Score:4, Informative)

    by jmccue ( 834797 ) on Monday October 19, 2020 @06:18PM (#60626448) Homepage

    I just finished upgrading my test system. Extremely Easy, rebooting took longer than the upgrade. Rest of the systems will be over the weekend

    congratulation on another great release and happy 25th

  • First impression as a complete BSD noob (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thegreatbob ( 693104 ) on Monday October 19, 2020 @10:12PM (#60626934) Journal
    Having not touched BSD as a desktop OS (nor ever in any great depth, excluding MacOS X and pfSense) since an already stale debian-kfreebsd distribution, my first impressions are:
    • Installation was simple and straightforward
    • Grabbing packages is reasonably simple (just consult the package repository on a mirror, and pkg_add 'package')
    • Grabbing firmware for this computer's onboard Radeon device was simple (just ran "fw_update" and it took care of it)
    • Networking was fairly easy to configure (perhaps i was impatient, but DHCP was failing)
    • It appears to perform fairly well under X on an old Athlon 64 X2 5000+ with 6GB RAM
    • Audio worked out-of-box
    • Appears to have a pretty decent pre-built package selection.

    We'll see how it handles as a secondary machine.

    • A quick explanation of what I did to get online, as I really could not get DHCP to function properly (and didn't have time to patch it through something with tcpdump/wireshark); if you're allergic to 'vi', can just echo stuff into these files; 're0' was the name of my ethernet interface (realtek), yours might be e.g. em0, check ifconfig

      echo nameserver 1.1.1.1 > /etc/resolv.conf

      echo inet 192.168.1.6 255.255.255.0 > /etc/hostname.re0

      echo 192.168.1.1 > /etc/mygate

      reboot (or sh /etc/netstart

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