FreeBSD 4.6

An Anonymous Coward writes "FreeBSD 4.6 is out! The announcement is out, and so are the release notes. Have fun, and thanks to the FreeBSD team!" The announcement has all the mirror information, etc.

Re:*BSD is dying

[aic]

Isn't Apple's Mac OSX a BSD unix?

Re:Use a real BSD

[BasharTeg]

"Use a real BSD"

Lets see... your bootloader sucks ass, you have zero support for multi-booting, your installer is a joke (#!/bin/sh && tar xvfz OPENBSD.tar.gz), your ports tree is a sad subset of FreeBSD, your man-pages are neglected, your only SMP goal is to use a second CPU dedicated for frickin encryption (because you encrypt too much trivial shit), and your developers and most of your user base tell new users to fuck off and die if they don't understand your cryptic bullshit methods and design right from the get-go. OpenBSD is a bare ass naked version of NetBSD with an outdated security audit. Your reputation of superior security over FreeBSD is mere FUD. An actual comparison of recent FreeBSD vs OpenBSD security problems shows a very trivial difference.

But hey, what am I saying? You guys do have an ENCRYPTED FUCKING SWAP FILE. In the name of Christ almighty, when my CPU has a page fault and needs to pull a page from disk or when I malloc and it has to swap some pages to disk, I sure as shit want it working on something like the blowfish algorithm while I'm waiting for my malloc to return. Better than getting nailed by all those swap file exploits right?

What I'd really like to see in OpenBSD is encrypted memory. I mean, what if someone finds a way to 'sploit your memory and read your passwords and information? If all memory were encrypted, this would not be possible! Of course, when the memory needs to be used you're not going to have any safe place to put the decrypted values, but that's a design issue I'm sure we could work out over time. Perhaps we could have a second bank of RAM that wasn't encrypted. It could be managed by our second CPU which is going to be dedicated to encryption anyway!

A "real BSD" ? Please. FreeBSD makes OpenBSD look like a paranoid joke. OpenBSD is just a retreat for k-r4d 31337 guys who are bothered by the fact that FreeBSD is popular and easier to use. If every newb uses FreeBSD, it's obviously 31336... just not leet enough.

Re:Use a real BSD

[leereyno]

I do hope that the swapfile encryption is optional. Having dedicated encryption hardware is all fine and good, but designing a system that requires the purchase of additional proprietary hardware in order to perform well isn't usually a good idea. You could also try implementing swapfile wiping on bootup or shutdown. You may already do this for all I know. Win2k+ will do this although it is not terribly fast and it requires a registry edit to turn it on. I turned it on for grins on my computer at work, it adds about a minute to the shutdown process to clear a contiguous 2 GB swap file on a dedicated partition.

It would be nice to have SMP support in OpenBSD, but I don't know that it is terribly important in real world terms. OpenBSD is largely used on firewalls and other dedicated systems that implement security features, rather than on actual server systems. SMP benefits environments that multitask heavy duty programs and a firewall isn't doing anything like that usually.

I don't know about you, but I get really sick of the Linux vs. *BSD vs. Windows vs. Solaris vs. you name it bullshit that goes on. People act like immature children bashing one another over something that is about as important as which baseball team is better. Want to know? Watch them play and let all arguments be settled on the field. Even worse is the computers as religion nonesense, of which Mac users seem to be the worst, although there are some open source/free software zealots who just might have them beat. I have friends who are violently opposed to using Windows for any purpose. They're also underemployed but any connection between this fact and their sour attitude seems to be lost upon them. I use Linux, FreeBSD, HP-UX, Solaris, Irix, OpenBSD, and yes I use Windows too. I choose tools for the job based upon technical merit, or the hardware available to run it on, not upon some half baked ideology or hatred of Microsoft. An ideology itself is literally a system of BELIEFS. I don't know about you, but my beliefs change every day as I learn new things.

Anyway I just wanted to give you some kudo's for your long work on OpenBSD. It's shaped up to be a very good operating system, secure, stable, and lacking unnecessary bloat. I've tested out NetBSD and found that at least on x86 hardware OpenBSD has it beat in terms of stability. I truly question the wisdom of their trying to support EVERY platform under the sun. I was given a Quadra 700 about six months ago. It's a 68040-25 with 20Mb of ram and a 500 mb hard drive. I wanted to see if it was possible to install a "real" operating system on it and so I tried out NetBSD 1.5.2. It was SO SLOW that I just couldn't use it. I was flabbergasted to learn that there are actually developers out there still working on supporting NetBSD on these 68k macs. The computers haven't been produced in almost a decade and the OS is so slow on them that they're utterly useless except as an academic exercise. I think that continued development on utterly useless platforms is what accounts for NetBSD's instability compared to OpenBSD or Linux. Of course being an open source project there is no way to force developers to only work on certain things. As long as there are developers willing to support things like the Qudra's or the HP-300's then these platforms will continue to be worked on. In the long run the problem will solve itself as older hardware simply breaks down or people get fed up waiting a day and a half for a kernel recompile.

Anyway....good job and keep up the good work :)

Lee

Re:IF my ISP

[greygent]

Probably not as pissed as the FreeBSD folks would be because you're wasting their precious bandwidth by downloading successive ISO images, instead of learning how to use CVSUP [freebsd.org], or buying [freebsdmall.com] CD's.