SMP On OpenBSD, Coming Soon 321
Lord of the OpenBSD writes "At long last, SMP development on OpenBSD looks to be gearing up. One person is now doing full-time funded development on SMP. Project leader Theo de Raadt is now asking for funding for a second developer. Theo has announced that SMP support for i386 is planned for the OpenBSD 3.6 or 3.7 release, the first of which is due in 8 months."
Interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)
-Truth
SMP is good, but what about pkg management? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, the main thing that bugs me about obsd is that it uses the ports system. It does the job and all, but when it comes time to upgrade your OS, it's a real PITA. I remember having to manually edit files in
Re:Why buy hamburger when the steak is free? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
So yes, his attitude was "I'm not going to code that feature for you because it doens't interest me.". But I'm pretty sure if anyone coded something good enough it would be accepted -- why wouldn't it be?
Play by the OpenBSD rules (no dumb licenses, etc), and write good code, and you can get your code into the official tree. If you write crappy code, or put a dumb license on it, then of course it's not going to be included.
I Will Be Amazed If This Works (Score:5, Interesting)
OpenBSD does not have a good track record of major architecture improvements. For example, in the wake of the PR FreeBSD got for John Dyson's VM work, OpenBSD adopted Chuck Cranor's UVM system, integrating it into the last of the 2.x releases. Cranor is a very smart guy, but OpenBSD's stewardship of Cranor's code has been pretty awful --- lockups, panics, and various other problems remain in evidence, each answered with de Raadt's "UVM was just a research project from Cranor, it's not our fault" excuse.
FreeBSD has years worth of head-start on OpenBSD in SMP right now, and a much larger (and more experienced) core team. In addition, FreeBSD has corporate sponsorship (from Juniper and Apple, to name two). Despite these major advantages, FreeBSD SMP remains a work in progress.
de Raadt has had a religious perspective on SMP ("most modern applications aren't compute-bound! SMP is not the way to scale large applications, lots of individual machines are!") for almost a decade. What evidence do we have that he has seriously changed his mind? This seems like more of a desperation move, trying to ensure that OpenBSD doesn't fall behind NetBSD to become the least-used open source operating system available.
I predict years of instability and excuses.
Re:Interesting... (Score:1, Interesting)
And I can assure you that you know a few people who are idiots. While one can disagree with RMS' politics, putting him in the category of neo-nazis and other radicals shows a complete disregard for common sense.
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
Especially since it's actually pretty rare for someone outside to come up with an idea that the people who work with the code all the time haven't actually already thought of.
Some ideas aren't bad, they just have to wait their turn in line and their priority may be low within the parameters of the project.
For instance, in Racer, a project overtly aimed at providing the best physics engine for driving sims, there is fairly constant call from the modelers, who don't contribute any code, to impliment opening doors and working horns.
While the core physics is yet incomplete.
Opening doors and working horns will come in time, and has been stipulated, when they make it to the top of the priority list. Right now nailing the tire and drive train model is far more important.
As a project head it's all too easy to become a code monkey for everyone with an idea. That isn't the role of a project head. His role is to decide what does and does not belong in the code base, and when it's important for what does belong in the code base to get implimented.
I'd don't know OBSD or Theo, but I do know some of the problems encountered in open collaborative works, or works that are essentially the project of a few, but that take place in fairly public view so the public tends to the think of them as open collaborative works when they are not.
This isn't just a problem in software projects. As a physicist I have spent many, many hours trying to explain to people why their idea for a magnetic perpetual motion machine just won't work. I have to spend these hours because these people haven't taken the trouble to gain a simple high school understanding of physics.
Now, as it happens I make part of my living tutoring basic scientific philosophy and physics. If these people wish to enroll and learn, fine, that's my "job."
But if all they want to do is argue with you, ad infinitum, in swarms, sooner or later you start to reach for the fly swatter and just bat them all away.
Not because you have anything against them, per se. Because life is short.
KFG
Re:SMP is good, but what about pkg management? (Score:3, Interesting)
roots (Score:5, Interesting)
FWIW: OpenBSD has its roots as a splice from NetBSD; both it and NetBSD very similar, but in some respects NetBSD has "modernised" itself more than OpenBSD, yet OpenBSD has focused on security (and spawned the OpenXYZ series
Compared to FreeBSD, they're different beasts: NetBSD and OpenBSD fit the niche of embedded products, AP's, firewalls, home gateways, etc - all very good nice (NetBSD's portability and OpenBSD's security). FreeBSD is enterprise class, you don't typically see it used for embedded products / etc, but more in hosting and server.
Compared to Linux: Linux strength is that does all of the above across the board (it fits everything) and has a better user/desktop experience, but it doesn't do as well as any in any of the individual niches above.
What Will Theo Use Processor 2 For? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's his plan now? Just typical SMP, I'd guess -- but I thought his other idea was cooler. On-the-fly encoding and decoding and hiding of jpegs from wives and whatnot. Very useful to... ahem... some of us. Not me of course.
Just wondering about the current prospects for something to keep my uh.. important financial documents... from, uh... the government? Yeah, the government, that's it.
Re:Felix von Leitner's "Benchmarking BSD and Linux (Score:1, Interesting)
Okay, I perused the thread... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yet another modern feature added to *BSD (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:smp? (Score:5, Interesting)
Bad SMP can be done in a couple of weeks by anyone, good SMP is a little harder and its nice to see OpenBSD joining in the game as SMP is now at the on processor level so it is becoming important.
slightly more details regarding niels & theo (Score:1, Interesting)
What can be seen publically is Niels' last commit (ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/patches/3.1/co
Through the grapevine you might hear a little more, but that means probably knowing someone who is a developer or friend of one. Even then, my guess is not much was posted to hackers@ (the private developer mailing list) or icb. Obviously, something about the handling of this errata caused tension. Like any argument, points of contention were not resolved adequately on either side, and there was a rift.
From my perspecitve, it's a real loss for OpenBSD. Just look at most of the technical papers presented by OpenBSD developers, and you'll see that Niels was almost always a key contributor. Encrypted swap, great help with openssh, the first privsep work which is now practically OpenBSD religion, and much more were thanks to his contributions. Efforts of his such as systrace which came close to the rift, have subsequently suffered from atrophy in the OpenBSD tree since he's not there working on them and it's a real shame given the potential there.
Someone else mentioned Niels contributing some to NetBSD afterwards. I don't follow Net much, but from what I can gather, aside from some initial contributions, Niels didn't pursue that too heavily. It almost felt like more of a way to make some changes that would then get carried over by itojun or someone else over to OpenBSD.
2002 was quite a year for OpenBSD to be sure: openssh trojaning, allusions to breakins in the el8 zine, but I think Niels and a few others losing commit in August (some of whom got it back later) is probably the most profound and underreported drama. The vacancies left by the likes of provos no longer actively committing might not draw immediate attention, but there are long term consequences to a project which rose to notoriety on the shoulders of such prominent hackers, and which has such a small repository of developers as it is. Niels certainly isn't the only widely recognized person who helped garner OpenBSD street credit at one time or another but no longer commits (e.g. dugsong, obecian, joewee), but he was probably one the most public of such people in his promotion of OpenBSD in number of commits, technical achievements, and academic/conference papers and presentations.
One would hope that just as Theo changed his mind with respect to non-exec stack protections, and now seems to be garnering interest in SMP more aggressively - that he comes around with how it comes to treating his own developers. Or, that at least in this case, if such a thing were to occur - that Niels and other slighted like him would also be receptive to making amends.
"Without mistakes, there can be no forgiving. Without forgiving, there can be no love."
Re:Yet another modern feature added to *BSD (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it's pretty fast, given that it's doing much more than most other systems. All that crypto and random goodness doesn't come for free. From "Practical Cryptography": "There are already enough fast, insecure systems. The world doesn't need another one."
Even on UP systems, it's still slower than almost everything else in key areas (disk performance being the big one).
Have you tested that with softupdates enabled? OpenBSD's default disk performance reminds me of FreeBSD's old performances before softupdates became a standard setting. It's another security-vs.-performance tradeoff: the BSDs mount their filesystems in synchronous mode and highly discourage using async, while most Linux systems use async by default.
Theo once had funding, lost it (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Yet another modern feature added to *BSD (Score:1, Interesting)
If I hacked on the source tree of a BSD distribution, I'd find the build system very nice, the way it's organized. I'm a programmer too, so when I look at how the BSD systems are put together, I do appreciate that. But since I don't hack on the OS, and most of the time I'm just using it in a rather mundane fashion, the build system usually doesn't matter much to me, and I just want something that'll let me upgrade fast (binary packages), not something that will recompile the whole tree (make)
Add to that the fact that a BSD system will not automatically upgrade your
I like BSD a lot. I do. I think that pieces of it are worlds ahead of Linux. (No "make world" pun intended.
Re:Interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)
Um, are you kidding me? I've been involved in a project doing OpenBSD kernel development for the last 2 years, and I'll tell you right now there are so many shortcomings in the kernel you wouldn't believe it.
Let's start with the broken PCMCIA support (interrupt problems), or maybe the fact that it doesn't have kernel threads (user threads blow, especially when those are broken too), and don't get me started on the broken drivers (there are so many that don't work right).
We fixed lots of these issues for our projects, but honestly, who cares about contributing back to OpenBSD. We talked about sending patches, but he was such a jerk in our interactions with him (Theo) that we just decided to keep them to ourselves.
Seriously, at this point the differences in security between OpenBSD and FreeBSD are trivial... so what's the point.
Re:Yet another modern feature added to *BSD (Score:3, Interesting)
As I understand it, OpenBSD diverged from NetBSD before SMP was available for any nonproprietary BSD. The divergence in the codebases that has taken place since then makes it impossible to simply import much of another strain's implementation.
Maybe there will be some re-use of code (and ideas), but I suspect the OpenBSD team will be building this thing from the ground up.
Re:Risky to add SMP to free *nix (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What Will Theo Use Processor 2 For? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to disagree with you there. SCP'ing something over a fast network maxes out even very fast processors. 3DES is a real CPU-hog, even by today's standards.
If you don't think crypto is CPU-intensive, you must not be doing much of it.
Re:roots (Score:4, Interesting)
They get that wrap a lot, but you can find a lot of OpenBSD web/fileservers out there. OpenBSD is where OpenSSH started, because it's heavy into any kind of networking, and crypto, not just security. NetBSD isn't used as a server so much, but it's pretty popular with just about anybody running on a platform other than x86. The majority of people that don't like MacOS, seem to go to NetBSD as their desktop.
Linux doesn't do the job of a router/firewall well (no state with IPchains/IPtables).
Linux doesn't run on as many platforms as NetBSD, but worse, it doesn't work WELL on any but very few of them, whereas the BSDs are as well suited to any one platform as another.
Finally, Linux is a real hassle in enterprise situations. Standard Linux is extremely unstable (compared with what the BSD's consider stable) so to get that stability, you need to follow the Debian approach, and extensively test and debug all the programs. That means you are generations away from the new features. Meanwhile, you can just download the latest FreeBSD -stable (usually 1 minor version behind), and it's ready to go. There's a good reason you see FreeBSD in lots of serious enterprise apps.
Feel free to explain this one to me. The installer is probably the only thing anyone can cite where the BSDs are even different (to the casual users) than Linux. You have GNOME and KDE on all the BSDs, and they work just fine.
As for the installers, if you get over your addiction to always using your mouse, they are really much better installers than the GUI ones for any Linux distro.
What makes this situation worse, is that moderators on
Re:What Will Theo Use Processor 2 For? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a very valid reason, but not the only one. DES is tried and true, and 3DES is as theoretically as secure as anything can get.
The hardware thing is quite a valid issue though... If you're connecting to a server that does a lot of crypto, chances are it's using a hardware crypo accelerator, so it won't want to waste CPU power doing blowfish or AES when 3DES is even faster on it's end.
Re:roots (Score:1, Interesting)
Theo might consider attacking THAT problem before opening up the SMP can of worms.
Cheers,