I agree that it's a fine use case. I'm just saying it's simpler if you allow yourself a fresh start.
Won't work well for games and other stuff you can't just recompile on your own.
Going mainframe mode and virtualizing the previous generation has problems in that the older releases don't get security fixes, and may not work as well with tuning and monitoring.
I would not want to run a 10 year old OpenBSD, virtual or not.
E.g. the speculative execution patches would be nontrivial to backport.
Sure, they're recompilable. If whoever has the source recompiles them.
Well, turns out ABI stability was not enough to make gamers use Linux, but it's an example.
A better example would maybe be the Oracle database. You could maybe see them building for OpenBSD. But not if that means they'd sign up for rebuilding every six months the ABI has potentially broken in the new release.
I would not say that this is the reason OpenBSD hasn't yet been the OS of choice for the Oracle sales team, of course.
Won't work well for games and other stuff you can't just recompile on your own.
Going mainframe mode and virtualizing the previous generation has problems in that the older releases don't get security fixes, and may not work as well with tuning and monitoring.
I would not want to run a 10 year old OpenBSD, virtual or not.
E.g. the speculative execution patches would be nontrivial to backport.
But it has valid use cases.