

Crowding out OpenBSD - iso-8859-1
https://lwn.net/Articles/524606/

======
ghshephard
I had to chuckle when I read this (near the end):

"That, needless to say, is a recipe for irrelevance and, eventually,
disappearance."

In the last eight+ years I've used OpenBSD extensively as the networking and
firewall core for smart grid networks. I can, with confidence, say that 100%
of the smart grid transactions on at least two $Billion+ utilities on at least
two continents flow through OpenBSD servers.

We evaluated the full gamut of Cisco, Fortinet, and other Firewall
technologies, but, from 2004 through 2010, only OpenBSD had the functionality
and failover that we were looking for for < $100K/appliance. (And, when you
want two for redundancy, plus another two for your DR center - Four appliances
add up). It almost pained me to see how low-end a server could handle hundreds
of thousands of IPv6 UDP states compared to what Cisco would have charged.
(Note - and, regardless, Cisco didn't, until recently, handle IPv6 in fault-
tolerant Active-Hot-Standby mode on their ASA platform)

For those that have a lot of experience with OpenBSD - the continued rock
solid stability, almost 100% complete (and useful) _systems_ documentation (as
opposed to the utility and library documentation you get on a linux system),
consistent startup/configuration for 10+ years, plus, of course, very mature
pf, makes the platform a continuing _highly relevant_ product, that will not
disappear for many years to come.

~~~
solarexplorer
The problem seems to be the desktop software...

~~~
ghshephard
I've been involved in north of 50-60 servers running OpenBSD since 2001, and
I've never seen, nor even heard, of anybody running OpenBSD on the desktop.
It's never been relevant on that platform and serves no useful function as a
Desktop Environment beyond the core developer and OpenBSD Hobbyist community.
Not to suggest that they aren't an important community - but they are fully
capable of taking care of their own needs. The rest of the world uses OpenBSD
as a firewall/routing/networking/reliable-appliance platform.

~~~
sthen
Certainly it is used on the desktop outside of the developer/hobbyist
community. See
[http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=201104200...](http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20110420080633)

~~~
ghshephard
If you read the article, you'll see they aren't deploying OpenBSD to their
users as a general desktop, but as an Appliance Environment - which makes
total sense. Call Centers, Transaction Centers, NOCs, etc... - Anywhere you
have a pre-set configuration/applications, OpenBSD is a great choice. Rock
Solid stability and super secure. This is also an area where ChromeBooks will
do well.

By "Desktop" - though, I mean users who are planning on downloading/installing
various productivity utilities, applications, etc... to do their job. Creating
Reports, Slide Decks, PDFs, Spreadsheets, charts, diagrams, IM apps, Skype -
whatever random app they want to use to do their Job.

I've never seen an OpenBSD user in 20+ years of supporting Desktops in
Engineering and Corporate environments - Windows obviously, but lots of
Macintosh OS, A nice run of NextOS, Lots of FreeBSD, umpteen distros of Linux
(for a while, that's all people seemed to be running), many versions of
Solaris, tons of Irix, a handful of HPUX users, and even a couple AIX users.

But, in that same time - I've seen OpenBSD squirreled away in all sorts of
Appliance/Network/Firewall duties.

~~~
bulibuta
``By "Desktop" - though, I mean users who are planning on
downloading/installing various productivity utilities, applications, etc... to
do their job.''

I think the average user could be satisfied with what's available on OpenBSD.
The only bummer is flash.

``Creating Reports, Slide Decks, PDFs, Spreadsheets, charts, diagrams[...]''

LibreOffice is available on OpenBSD.

``IM apps''

Pidgin and a ton of other clients are available.

``Skype''

It used to work a few releases ago, I don't know if it still does now.

`` - whatever random app they want to use to do their Job.''

Yes, if you compare it to Windows in that regard then it's at a loss. But if
you compare it to Liunx I'd say it's up to par.

The problem is that it's getting harder to keep up to date, which is what Marc
is trying to explain in his email to tech@.

------
dwc
> One could easily poke holes in this complaint; the characterization of PAM
> as "modern" is somewhat amusing; it is 1990s technology. There is an evident
> case of cognitive dissonance shown in the simultaneous desire for the
> comfortable "Posix and Unix" world of decades past and the ability to
> "innovate and do cool things." It is difficult to simultaneously innovate
> and stand still, but that is what Marc seems to be asking for here.

There's a bit of nitpicking in the above. PAM may not be a new technology, but
it's not used by every OS. The problem is the implicit assumption by many devs
that it _is_ being used. Multiply this by every choice that the Linux kernel
and various distros have made differently than other Unix-like OSs and you end
up with a ton of open source software that is effectively locked into Linux.

In my (limited) open source experience, most devs using Linux do NOT do this
on purpose. They just assume that they're writing UNIX software when they are
not. They end up using GNUisms, #defines only available in Linux, assume PAM
and other things, ad nauseam. When I've pointed such things out, I usually get
a bewildered look. Many Linux people think they're using vi when they're using
vim. They don't understand that their sed scripts are really gsed and won't
work on traditional sed. They don't know their sh scripts are really bash
scripts and break on traditional /bin/sh. And C code is a similar story. In
most cases these little things do not improve the code; they only introduce
incompatibility. So when Espie uses scare quotes on "progress" and "modern" I
get his point. When _progress_ and _modern_ mean an equivalent but
incompatible system, then they deserve scare quotes.

------
sodomizer
I love BSD, but the user community is hostile to entry and hostile to causal
users, so it's not surprising that everyone but the experts has switched to
Linux.

~~~
tobiasu
Given there are at least four large and distinct BSD communities, I am
inclined to assume this is a rather unsubstantiated and cheap shot at "BSD".

------
dfc
Previously discussed here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4798791>

The previous discussion is more informative.

------
jcr
Why did the author, Jonathan Corbet, and HN submitter, "iso-8859-1", decide to
revive the slashdot troll meme of "BSD is Dying" here on HN which is running
FreeBSD?

~~~
eksith
I'm not sure about "troll meme", but it is news and hackers are involved. This
forum seems appropriate.

~~~
dfc
It _was_ news: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4798791>

------
penetrator
New song and artwork every release

I doubt those two are used to gain market share ... maybe openbsd is just pure
fun

~~~
iso-8859-1
All major distributions get new artwork every release AFAIK. I hope you are
teasing. The artwork took a fraction of the time to make.

------
comex
This is in some sense a good counterpoint to the recent comparisons of WebKit
monoculture to Linux monoculture: everyone working together on Linux is nice,
but it has downsides, too, because things do become unduly Linux-specific to
the detriment of competition.

------
papsosouid
This is exactly why I stopped using linux. It seems that in their attempt to
compete with windows, linux has forgotten about trying to be a decent unix OS.
A modern linux distro is every bit as complex, disorganized, undocumented and
buggy as windows. So now linux distros feel to me like the worst of both
worlds, a bad unix platform, and a bad desktop experience. I end up running
windows 7 for a desktop, with an openbsd virtual machine for my unix/dev
environment, and get the best of both worlds.

~~~
ciupicri
If you think that the OpenBSD has it right, why don't you use it as a desktop,
too? Why aren't you running a virtual machine of Windows 7 under OpenBSD?
Probably because there's no proper virtualization support in OpenBSD.

Linux is complex because sometimes it has too be, not just for the sake of it.
systemd (which is great in my opinion) wouldn't be possible without cgroups.
Should I also mention the better multi-processor support? Regarding the
desktop, I strongly recommend watching "27c3 - Desktop on the Linux... (and
BSD, of course) - Wolfgang Draxinger (+ Lennart Poettering)" [1].

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0>

~~~
papsosouid
>If you think that the OpenBSD has it right, why don't you use it as a
desktop, too?

Because I need to run windows applications.

>Why aren't you running a virtual machine of Windows 7 under OpenBSD?

Because my laptop already had windows 7 on it, why install two OSes when I can
install one?

>Linux is complex because sometimes it has too be

No, using complexity to justify further complexity does not mean it has to be
that way.

>Should I also mention the better multi-processor support?

That has nothing to do with simplicity though. NetBSD is also simple, and it
has SMP support as good as linux does. I am just using openbsd because fine
grained locking is un-noticable for a dev box, and openbsd comes with better
package management than netbsd.

>Regarding the desktop, I strongly recommend watching "27c3 - Desktop on the
Linux...

I'm not very far through, but I have no idea why you think I should be
watching this? Is there a particular time I can jump to where something
relevant happens?

~~~
ciupicri
I'm not familiar enough with NetBSD, but David Miller from Red Hat said "I
love NetBSD releases, because their new feature lists help remind me what I
implemented a decade ago." [1]. I've also found a benchmark done by the
DrangFlyBSD guys[2]:

 _The tests were performed using system defaults on each platform with pgbench
as the test client with a scaling factor of 800. The test system in question
was a dual-socket Intel Xeon X5650 with 24GB RAM._

 _NetBSD 6.0 was unable to complete the benchmark run._

That video shows that things aren't as simple as one might think, at least on
the desktop.

[1]
[https://plus.google.com/101384639386588513837/posts/ZD5ZhZ2F...](https://plus.google.com/101384639386588513837/posts/ZD5ZhZ2FJLk)

[2] <http://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/>

~~~
papsosouid
David Miller is better known for spewing crap than he is for writing code,
with good reason. When you feel the need to stir up shit by posting stuff like
"durr netbsd is doing stuff I did a decade ago" while ignoring the fact that
netbsd also did it a decade ago and is just updating their implementation
(just like linux does), you stop being someone worth listening to.

It is pretty unfortunate that the dragonflybsd camp still insist on pushing
deliberately misleading benchmarks, I must admit. They have a great OS and
there is simply no need for them to be doing that shit. Refusing to adjust the
default limits when you know full well netbsd and openbsd ship with
conservative limits to prevent accidentally DoSing yourself on low end
hardware is just plain stupid. "Oh look, netbsd mysteriously stops working
right when we hit the default resource limits!"

~~~
ciupicri
Nevertheless thread-local storage (TLS) and Logical Volume Manager (LVM)
functionality have been available under Linux (and probably other BSDes) for
quite some time.

So that benchmark is kind of wrong. What about the results for fewer
concurrent clients? NetBSD seems to perform worse than (Scientific) Linux. Is
it because of those resource limits?

~~~
papsosouid
TLS is not a feature, it is a problem. It was added because of the very
problems that started this thread. Modern linux software expect stupid crap
like that, so NetBSD eventually feels forced to add it. The entire point is
that BSDs try to avoid adding unnecessary complexity like that.

The dragonfly benchmark doesn't give us any real info, so it is impossible to
say what exactly the problem is. Clearly something is wrong though, given we
already know netbsd made performance and scalability a major focus of the 5.0
release, and nobody has reported any regressions in 6.0:

<http://www.netbsd.org/~ad/50/img13.html>

