
OpenBSD 6.2 - laamalif
https://www.openbsd.org/62.html
======
notaplumber
> The i386 and amd64 platforms have switched to using clang(1) as the base
> system compiler.

Nice!

~~~
pgeorgi
Followed by

> Disable some optimizations in clang(1) due to incompatibility with security.

~~~
notaplumber
Some. And for good reason, IMHO.

[https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
cvs&m=150125592126437&w=2](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
cvs&m=150125592126437&w=2)

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justin66
This is a draft of the release notes for a release which has not happened yet:

 _Released October 15, 2017_

Broken links apparent in the doc as well.

~~~
tedunangst
There's no bonus karma for waiting until the release is announced.

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christophilus
Off topic a bit, but anyone here use OpenBSD? I'd be interested in hearing why
you use it, and what your experience has been like.

~~~
terminalcommand
I've used FreeBSD on my laptop (lenovo x201) for a long time, I've also
installed OpenBSD from time to time. The rumors on the internet was that
OpenBSD had better hardware support. I remember someone claiming that whereas
FreeBSD developers use VMs to develop, OpenBSD devs used native machines
(mostly laptops). I faintly remember that installing OpenBSD was harder than
FreeBSD. FreeBSD came with a terminal graphical installer, partioning etc.
happened automatically.

The problem I had with BSDs was that they were slower than Linux. Especially
when it came to boot times, Linux booted up in seconds due to parallel
starting of system services. On FreeBSD the same machine with an SSD took
nearly half a minute to boot. Some people here on HN had advised me to use a
parallel system initializer, or never completely shutdown my laptop. Always
keeping the laptop at sleep did not work for me, because I was (and am) very
paranoid when it comes to computers, I can't sleep if my computer is not
shutdown and has an ethernet cable plugged into it. Using a parallel system
initializer did not work, because I was too lazy to set one up.

Battery consumption was another issue. Although FreeBSD provided decent
battery life, utilities like powertop did not exist for BSD platforms.

What I liked about FreeBSD was that it was a pure OS. When I opened htop, I
could see only a handful of processes running, and I knew what each process
did.

On the other hand, everything required manual configuration. I basically lived
in the terminal to operate my laptop. But that is probably due to my lazyness
to automate and write scripts.

I'd also be interested in the differences in day-to-day life between FreeBSD
and OpenBSD.

~~~
dbolgheroni
I don't get why people put so much emphasis on the boot time nowadays. I have
a 5 years old laptop which takes less than 30 seconds to boot, with Xorg
already.

Even if you power cycle every day. If you ACPI sleep (and it works great), you
I'll have to boot your machine once every 6 months, when there is a new
OpenBSD release.

I would much rather "spend 30 seconds" every 6 months to boot the OS I want to
run for 12 hours/day than to "save some seconds" in months to run an OS that I
don't for the same amount of time.

I'm not sure people realize how much complexity you have to add to make a
system boot even a couple of seconds faster. If you somehow have to diagnose a
problem in a system like this, all the seconds you saved in a lifetime will be
spent on a single debugging session.

~~~
fao_
> every 6 months

Most people don't want or can't afford to have their computer running 24/7\.
Especially if they're not using it for more than 11 hours of that day. And if
you use more than one OS on one computer, fast startup can save you a _lot_ of
time switching between those.

> I'm not sure people realize how much complexity you have to add to make a
> system boot even a couple of seconds faster.

Not true. I shaved 20 seconds off my boot time recently, by digging around in
config files and disabling services that were never used, by backgrounding
non-essential services that took a long time to start up, and by reducing the
grub bootloader time. Everything I did was trivial, yet it cumulatively
brought a large reduction in startup time, it's gone from one minute to ~30ish
seconds now.

~~~
wahern

      Most people don't want or can't afford to have their
      computer running 24/7
    

I guess I shouldn't make too many assumptions. I'm sure plenty of people are
still using Windows on 10-year-old towers attached to CRTs. But my Macbook Air
goes several months without a reboot, as did my previous one, and the one
before it, going back at least 10 years. I don't even think about it. My
servers are rebooted much more often, simply because of kernel patches and
upgrades. Fortunately startup is usually quick for both OpenBSD and Linux as,
ironically, there are far fewer services and the hardware is less complex than
typical consumer machines.

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chapeupreto
Congrats OpenBSD!

No big deal, but
[https://www.openbsd.org/images/MoBSD.gif](https://www.openbsd.org/images/MoBSD.gif)
is not found. Broken images sucks, but, again, no big deal.

------
aomix
Even following the OpenBSD mailing lists I didn't realize all the anti ROP
features they put into this release. The big idea is that popular attack
surfaces are randomly relinked at boot/upgrade/run time. Now now the kernel,
libc, libcrypto, and ld are unique to each machine. So instead of a single
information leak giving away the whole game it gives away basically nothing.
An attacker would need to chain many, many information leaks together to get
anything useful so the bar is raised quite a bit.

------
edwinnathaniel
Has anyone ever installed OpenBSD for Macbook White (MB 5,2)?

I'm interested to resurrect this laptop since Apple no longer support (newer
OSX can't be installed) the hardware.

I would love to see OpenBSD + Openbox + Crunchbang theme/window-decorator.

~~~
jbronn
Yes, I successfully run it two older MacBooks for server use. I haven’t tried
WiFi or sound but everything else, including trackpad and X, worked fine for
me. There were other tweaks to make suitable for a server, but OpenBSD has
otherwise resurrected the laptops. Bonus: this hardware predates Intel ME.

