
OpenBSD Passes 300,000 Commits - adamnemecek
http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20141019130102&mode=expanded
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wyager
For those who have heard of OpenBSD but have not used it, I strongly recommend
trying it on your next server appliance. I have been using it on my servers
for some time now and I have been very happy. The entire OS seems to be of
substantially higher quality than Linux.

~~~
jmhain
> The entire OS seems to be of substantially higher quality than Linux.

That's a pretty bold statement. Care to elaborate?

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wyager
Sure.

Everything is more reliable. Not one crash yet. When I use Linux, I would have
expected several by now.

Everything works perfectly out of the box and has sane and safe defaults.

Everything is more consistent. For example, the
ifconfig/iwconfig/wpa_supplicant/etc. mish-mash on Linux is replaced with just
ifconfig. All interactions with the OS are straightforward and standardized.

The code is substantially better. Less macrotanium, better naming, more
understandable.

There is clearly more attention to (and more expertise about) security. This
is, of course, what OpenBSD is (rightfully) known for.

~~~
cbd1984
> Everything is more reliable. Not one crash yet.

Also true with Linux, of course.

> Everything works perfectly out of the box and has sane and safe defaults.

Same with Linux, at least in the distros I use.

> Everything is more consistent. For example, the
> ifconfig/iwconfig/wpa_supplicant/etc. mish-mash on Linux is replaced with
> just ifconfig. All interactions with the OS are straightforward and
> standardized.

"My way or the highway", in other words. Use the Only OpenBSD Toolkit or get
out?

> The code is substantially better. Less macrotanium, better naming, more
> understandable.

Readability is subjective. Macros aren't inherently bad.

> There is clearly more attention to (and more expertise about) security. This
> is, of course, what OpenBSD is (rightfully) known for.

At the expense of everything else, it seems, including hardware support.

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Animats
It's amusing that commit 300,000 fixes a buffer overflow. It's a demonstration
that large C programs do not converge to the state of having no buffer
overflows.

~~~
GuiA
You may be right or you may be wrong, but that's not how you demonstrate
convergence :)

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farresito
Might be slightly off-topic, but how would you compare it to DragonflyBSD?
I've been thinking on trying out the main BSD.

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truncate
Their focus is different from what I can see. OpenBSD is about rock solid
security. DFBSD original aim was to implement single system image (maybe it
still is). In past few years, I see most visible work on HAMMER filesystem
which you shThey released some benchmarks outperforms FreeBSD and NetBSD
considerably on multi-core systems.[1]

If you write kernel code, you may like, vkernel, which is full blown kernel
that runs on userspace. Speeds up kernel development process.

[1]
[http://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/](http://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/)

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farresito
Thank you for your answer. Yes, OpenBSD is definitely about security. I'm also
aware of the performance benchmarks. Pretty interesting. The thing is I'm
still not completely sure which niche it fills (and I'm pretty sure it fills
one). I guess I will have to give them a long try myself and see if I can come
with a conclusion.

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yellow_and_gray
Am I the only one who suspects a high number of commits is a sign of good
programming, and by induction good programmers?

~~~
jmnicolas
I would tend to think a high number of commits is a sign of activity and
judging by the small number of developers, it shows they are dedicated to
OpenBSD.

