What's New in OpenBSD 4.2?

blackbearnh writes "OpenBSD 4.2 was released today, and has a host of new features. O'Reilly's ONLamp site has a pretty thorough overview of the release. 'Even though security is still there, this release comes with some amazing performance improvements: basic benchmarks showed PF being twice as fast, a rewrite of the TLB shootdown code for i386 and amd64 cut the time to do a full package build by 20 percent (mostly because all the forks in configure scripts have become much cheaper), and the improved frequency scaling on MP systems can help save nearly 20 percent of battery power. And then the new features: FFS2, support for the Advanced Host Controller Interface, IP balancing in CARP, layer 7 manipulation with hoststated, Xenocara, and more!'"

Where to get it...

Since the submitter didn't bother linking to their site (!!?), if you want to try out some of these amazing new features and improvements instead of just reading about them, you should head over to the OpenBSD 4.2 page [openbsd.org] and snag a copy!

Re:Where to get it...

I didn't see anything about it in the interview, but it looks like they've made install ISO's available for the various platforms (install42.iso in each directory). Might give it a spin if I can find a machine for it -- I gave 4.1 a try (and even bought a CD set) and was mostly impressed.

Jun-ichiro "itojun" Hagino

It should probably be noted (as one of the articles states) that this release is dedicated to a man who passed away a few days ago. From another article [kerneltrap.org] on KernelTrap:

"Jun-ichiro 'itojun' Itoh Hagino passed away on October 29, 2007 at the age of 37. "To those in the BSD communities he was simply Itojun, best known in his role as IPv6 KAME project core researcher. Itojun did the vast majority of the work to get IPv6 into the BSD network stacks. He was also instrumental in moving IPv6 forward in all aspects through his participation in IETF protocol design meetings. Itojun was helpful to everyone around him, and dedicated to his work. He believed and worked toward making technology available to everyone. He will be missed, and always remembered."

Truly unfortunate for the open source community, the networking community & all of Itojun's family. It's a shame to see someone so promising go at a young age.

Re:Jun-ichiro "itojun" Hagino

And if you want to learn about IPv6 [youtube.com] he has a good series of videos.
 

I need to try BSD

I use OS X on my workstations, because I think it's the best *nix workstation at the moment, but I use Linux, exclusively on the server. I really need to try BSD. I really enjoy ports on OS X, so I'm sure I'd like it in BSD.

The only problem I run into on OS X is some of the GNU tools aren't there, and the BSD version of stuff like ls and such are different. But you can port install that stuff, so really that issue is mute. I think I'll fire up a virtual server and try out BSD

Re:I need to try BSD

One of the first things I do on FreeBSD after installing bash and portupgrade...

portupgrade -Nf sysutils/gnutools
echo "
alias ls='gls --color=always'
alias cp='gcp'
alias mv='gmv'
" >> ~/.bashrc

Something similar will probably work on OpenBSD

(oh, and for those who need their [modified] meems... OpenBSD is Undead, netcraft confirms it!)

Love!

Remember, Theo de Raadt loves each and every one of you, he includes love in each copy of OpenBSD! Well, love or an incredible hatred of the x86 platform and everything not OpenBSD.

Huh?

What's BSD?

4.2BSD

Ah, that brings back memories of 4.2BSD, the first BSD with real Internet support.

(OpenBSD 4.2 seems somewhat less exciting to me.)

How dissapointing- they didn't include Xen

Christoph Egger did a OpenBSD Xen port (based on the NetBSD xen stuff) see: http://hg.recoil.org/openbsd-xen-sys.hg [recoil.org] It looked pretty promising. It's too bad they aren't going to support that platform. I've got lots of customers who'd really like a OpenBSD option.

Request for information

I've filed a bug report on this but at this point I'm not even sure its a bug... could be a hardware issue..

If anyone is running Adaptec SCSI 2940 controllers with more than one SCSI hard drive and it works then I'd like to know... if anyone is having problems I'd like to know.

The issue is that I have one 2940 fast narrow card and it won't boot... says there is no O/S. In the same machine... swap that card out to a 2940 fast wide and it boots just fine. Perhaps this is a firmware card issue. I have so far only tested these two cards... I plan to go get a handfull more.

Next issue. With the fast wide all seems 100%. Then I start an rsync from another machine and within seconds I get a kernel panic. There is a bug report here: http://paste.lisp.org/display/49908#1 [lisp.org]

Is OpenBSD bug report # 5616

I'm not at this point asking anyone to debug this. I want to know if others have a similar setup and it works.

This machine is a Pentium I, with two fast narrow SCSI disks and in this case an AHA 2940 FW card. There is nothing else on the bus.

O/S version was 4.1 and now I can try the new version. Since OpenBSD is such a great O/S I sure would like to get to the bottom of this without wasting people's time. If we have a problem we need to know about it and potentially fix it. If its an isolated issue then I need to know this so I can shelve the hardware if in fact it is flakey hardware.

Note: With that fast wide controller... dd if=/dev/sd1 of=/dev/sd1 bs=2048 will run 100% and never glitch at all. But try that rsync on the system.. kernel panics 100% of the time within seconds.

Good Desktop OS

I know OpenBSD is renowned as a secure system, but it also is a good desktop OS. In fact, I bet it recognizes more devices than my Windoze Vista. I was pleasantly surprised the last time I tried out OpenBSD on my laptop. My only complaint is that the ports are not as comprehensive as FreeBSD. But then, maybe I should be a maintainer for one and stop complaining, lol.

Stable branch, still from source only?

One of the things that has put me of OpenBSD is the need to compile from source if you want to use the stable branch. I realise this is partially due to limited resources and priorities, but I would argue that this is probably one area where there is room for improvement.

In any case they have done a lot of good work. Copyleft vs OSS ideology disputes aside. ; )

awk

Did they leave that segfaulting bug in awk in ? BSD users - replace awk with gawk as soon as you've installed it.

pf

One of the things I love about OpenBSD is pf. It blows away iptables. Not only in functionality, but in the syntax language as well. You don't have to have a cheat sheet for pf like iptables, which lessens the chances for mistakes IMHO. Iptables syntax is extremely painful to work with in comparison.

Package auditing?

So have they included any sort of package auditing yet? Something along the lines of portaudit in freebsd? For those of us who don't enjoy upgrading just to upgrade, and don't want to have to monitor mailing lists to see everytime a package has an issue, is there any automated package auditing?

Never got the hang of patching it

One thing I never really figured out with OpenBSD is why errata patches [openbsd.org] are handled the way they are. Why doesn't OpenBSD offer binary updates? For example, here are the instructions to fix errata entry 009 ("Fix possible heap overflow in file(1), aka CVE-2007-1536."):

Apply by doing:
cd /usr/src
patch -p0 < 009_file.patch

And then rebuild and install file:
cd usr.bin/file
make obj
make cleandir
make depend
make
make install

Given that I installed from binary packages as do most users, and I might not even have a compiler installed, the startup cost of following those steps is fairly substantial. It seems like it would be easier for someone at OpenBSD to run those commands, see which files changed, wrap them up into a tarball, and distribute those - at least for the most popular architecture or two.

Now, I'm not saying they should do this or that they owe it to us end users to do it. I just mean that it'd be amazingly convenient with a seemingly minimal amount of extra work. Am I wrong about what would be involved?

I can run it on ALL of my hardware

PPC Mac, random Intel boxes, and most importantly, my collection of VAX systems can all be running the same code.
That's why I like it and use it.

what is new? the answer is...

There is a new song, as far as I am concerned, that is one of the more exciting features in OpenBSD 4.2. :)

Oh boy!

basic benchmarks showed PF being twice as fast, a rewrite of the TLB shootdown code for i386 and amd64 cut the time to do a full package build by 20 percent (mostly because all the forks in configure scripts have become much cheaper)

And the bifflespaf WTF has more pargodoogen XRR! But what about the Garblerackin' snarkenlugey 533p?

Yeah, yeah, I know, it's /. so this is to be expected, but this is getting ridiculous.

sp1?

I am thinking some of the optimizations to pf and the network stack are pretty cool but I think I will be waiting for sp1 when they have worked out all the bugs and security holes before I upgrade my machine.

But what is the cute code name?

All the popular distros have them! How about "Demonic Deadyet"?

I'm just strollin'

The only reason I clicked on this article is 'cos I really dig the red stylesheet for BSD news here. Reminds me of strawberries.

I assume BSD has other, more useful features though.

BSD License

And since this is all BSD licensed code you are free to take the code, put it in your proprietary "net security appliance" making any improvements of course without giving one single improvement back.

There are SO many 1U security "black boxes" that obviously rip off OpenBSD for 95% of their product it's just pathetic. I don't recall many of them touting that they used OpenBSD or ever hearing some of the "cool" features they SAY they have ever being contributed back to the main code repository for OpenBSD.

Re:BSD License

And since this is all BSD licensed code you are free to take the code, put it in your proprietary "net security appliance" making any improvements of course without giving one single improvement back.

There are SO many 1U security "black boxes" that obviously rip off OpenBSD for 95% of their product it's just pathetic. I don't recall many of them touting that they used OpenBSD or ever hearing some of the "cool" features they SAY they have ever being contributed back to the main code repository for OpenBSD.

Yes, I used to work for a company that did exactly this. They had a range of VPN gateways which were basically OpenBSD with a user interface. And while I'm not saying that they never contributed anything back, it definitely wasn't a priority.

On the other hand, they also have a great deal of Linux based products. And whenever they need to fix any Linux bugs or add features, they always contribute them back. Doing otherwise would be a breach of the license and expose them to legal liabilities.

The point is that as a rule, large corporations aren't going to do anything that they aren't legally obliged to do. You would probably call RMS a political zealot and an unrealistic idealist. But at the end of the day he's not the one that expects commercial enterprises to change their nature and act altruistically just because it would be nice. If they give those "cool" features back, they're also giving them to their competitors. Which is probably not a career extending move for the person responsible.

If these realities offend you so much, I would suggest that you avoid releasing any software under the BSD license.

Yes, I am going to hell

I couldn't help noticing this line in the release announcement regarding the sad death of Jun-ichiro 'itojun' Itoh Hagino :

"Without his BSD and IETF participation, IPv6 would not be where it is today."

Jesus, Theo! The guy's just died! Surely you could have said something nice about him?

OpenBSD rustiness

The only problem I have ever had with OpenBSD was rustiness. I tend to have Linux on things that are close at hand and and I'm playing with regularly. I've used OpenBSD on boxes that are install-and-forget. I had a primary box for me at a colo running OpenBSD 2.9 until just this summer (a few days short of 6 years). I had to panic on the day of the OpenSSH vulnerability... and that was it. Just kept working. So, when I decided to replace it, I had to brush of on some of OpenBSDs uniquenesses from Linux.

Not that they're bad uniquenesses. Good ones mostly. And, I think the old saw still holds true. Linux is for people who don't like Windows. BSD is for people who actually love UNIX. I use both.

They deserve a bigger check than they gotten from me so far.

This is nice and all, but -does it run

...kqemu?

Re:*BSD is dying

trolling is a stupid sport. copy&past trolling is even more boring.

let me be the first to say: "old post! [netbsd.org]"

Re:An Added bonus

Where's the BEEF
Where's the BEEF
Where's the BEEF
IN YOUR HEAD