Ooh, looks like the Raspberry Pi 5 is now supported!
replies(1):
https://www.openbsd.org/images/Terraodontidae.png
Linux has become so bloated its users can't in good conscience make fun of Microsoft anymore, they are worse.
Debian refuses to install with less than 512MB RAM, the text only installer will choke with less than that, it's pathetic. That's a console-only install, no GUI.
I've used OpenBSD on laptops before and it was _fine_. I thought they primarily target servers. This feels like laptop specific improvements. Perhaps to the benefits only to those developing OpenBSD.
They maintain all these architectures in such a small, consolidated codebase with such minimal (if any) bloat.
Their built-in httpd is far and away the best experience I ever had setting up a static file server for my local network, and I can't think of many times where I would ever need anything I couldn't do with the built-in FastCGI support.
I'm also pleasantly surprised by how well Chicago95 (a Windows 95-style UI based on xfce) works on OpenBSD, even though the author never intended to run it on anything but xubuntu. I wouldn't recommend trying that unless you're willing to roll up your sleeves, but the payoff definitely justifies the elbow grease if you like that look and feel better than xenodm, XFCE, or GNOME.
I remember running windows95 overnight so that it could be a "server".
The next morning, moving the mouse was making the harddrive go nuts, it was paging just by moving the cursor!
Memory leak galore.
This makes me want to run linux as my daily driver! [1]
[1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Screensho...
Even my Steam Deck, with it's top down firmware and OS development regularly fails to suspend our freezes on resume.
It also seems that they are adding inter-core features but I don't know whether they are related to removing locks within the kernel, embedded applications, or if they are moving to micro-kernel internally.
I did a thing. :-)
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brynet_openbsd-activity-73074...
[1]: "As with the previous SEV and SEV-ES features, under SEV-SNP the AMD System-on-Chip (SOC) hardware, the AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP), and the VM itself are all treated as fully trusted." https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/epyc-busine...
[2]: https://libroot.org/posts/trusted-execution-environments/
I’m not going to say their ever degrading software quality won’t affect that one day, and I know that some updates have caused issues for some people, but I genuinely can’t remember it ever failing me and not doing its job correctly.
I tried a bunch of Linux Distributions and FreeBSD before mostly settling on MacOS, but never actually got around to running it.
Glad to see OpenBSD is still being actively developed.
It was quite a shock coming from SuSE 9.2. It was much easier to install than FreeBSD, however the installer is even more archaic than FreeBSD. Someone wrote a graphical installer years ago and but nobody bothered with it.
The BSDs really need at least something like the archinstall.
It is certainly different than Linux. You really need to read the FAQ and manuals as you won't find much out by doing a web search, unlike Linux. One of the other things that differs from Linux is that supported hardware / software will work, however Linux hardware support is obviously a lot better than in 2005 when I first started looking at OpenBSD.
When we graduated, maintenance was taken over by a local consumer PC builder and had no clue experience maintaining corporate/organization networks. They replaced all desktops and servers by Windows 9x (probably 98), as it was all they knew and the network was constantly down, desktops broken/compromised, etc.
NT 4.0 was a really good OS in those days for servers/work desktops. It was less great for games (though IIRC there was DirectX at some point).
Honestly the most underrated feature on at least this thinkpad is it has three physical mouse buttons. So nice. Now I have to check if lenovo still does that.
But honestly, despite all that it's mainly what you are used to. I tolerate linux, it is one of the good guys, fighting the good fight and all that. But I still find it a bewildering mess compared to obsd. I am sure a primary linux user feels the same way about obsd.
When I picked a linux distro to put on my system to play games on, the one I choose was void linux, why, mainly because the installer looks and feels directly ripped off from obsd.
But Windows 2000 was much better for gaming. NT4 supported DX3 and DX5 unnoficially'.
W2k had a DLL call flag to enable a Windows XP like compat mode:
http://www.activewin.com/tips/win2000/1/2000_tips_43.shtml
It only worked on desktop shortcuts, but enough to run most quirky Win95/98 games.
No not really. I recently took my friend through it and there is several places where it is pretty easy to screw something up. Whenever people say stuff like this, they are usually accustomed to the quirks.
> When I picked a linux distro to put on my system to play games on, the one I choose was void linux, why, mainly because the installer looks and feels directly ripped off from obsd.
Choosing distros based on the installer is kinda a bit silly. I've done a Linux From Scratch build and I can tell you there is very little difference between one distro an another.
Regardless, I'm grateful that everyone can still benefit from the great set of tools that were started, and most still maintained, in the OpenBSD project. OpenSSH, PF, tmux, etc. They're a beacon of light in the software world.
I've been playing with `byve` the last two weeks (I highly recommend vermaden's blog for anyone interested in BSDs and obviously the handbooks of each project) and I'm seriously thinking not doing a dual boot Linux install again. On my old x230 (which is running FreeBSD) I will be installing OpenBSD just to become more familiar with it.
I still don't get why just after installing Debian `top` shows me around 200 proceses. BSDs? Under 20. Other thing that pisses me off is for example how polluted (at least on Ubuntu) mountpoints are. Package management is also fragmented on Linux, while on BSDs is either a flavour of `pkg` or ports.
Perhaps I should still try more minimalistic Linux distributions, just don't know which are good candidates
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and still recommend it heavily to non-tech people around me but when you taste a BSD is hard to go back.
Are they any new FS supported nowadays?
If you look at the LFS compile instructions for each package they are essentially the same as the PKGBUILDs scripts in Arch, I suspect it is similar with Gentoo, Void or any other similar Linux distro.
Same here, i had dualboot Arch/FreeBSD for some years, but i just don't need that arch install i just stayed in FreeBSD and for games i have a bhyve Win11 VM (with GPU Passthrough) and that's all i need.
I believe you meant "bhyve".
For what it's worth, I've never been able to properly install Arch or Gentoo but I can install FreeBSD in 10 minutes.
I haven't looked at passrhrough yet, but I do feel that if I need to use it I would probably have to fight a bit with it, anyone had a hard experience setting it up?
[1] https://dflund.se/~getz/Notes/2024/freebsd-gpu/#bhyve-passth...
[2] https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve/pci_passthru#Additional_Notes
[3] Creating a Windows Server 2019 VM using vm-bhyve : https://klarasystems.com/articles/from-0-to-bhyve-on-freebsd...
If you use archinstall as I said you can be up and running in 20 minutes on a fast connection. You literally just state what you want setup through a menu, make a hot drink and you have a working desktop. It is pretty hassle free in my experience.
I haven't tried the FreeBSD installer in a couple of years but I always find that I end up lost in the menus or something doesn't work correctly. Then I am kinda left faffing trying to get X working, ports or something else working. I couldn't set the desktop resolution properly and I suspect there was some magic flag I had set somewhere or install firmware.
I just can't be bothered when I can install Debian or Arch in about 15-20 minutes and everything works fine.
And that's perfectly fine, i would also never criticize people who just buy a Mac, some people are just interested in different stuff. However if you have problems getting lost in "menus" but wanna try out a BSD try GhostBSD:
https://man.openbsd.org/wg#EXAMPLES
Simple, text-file based configuration for everything in the extensive base system and no drama between upgrades is really what makes you a happy OpenBSD user.
AFAIK there's currently no news about plans on getting journaling into FFS2 or bringing one of the other modern file systems onboard. The most "modern" choices you have on OpenBSD is FFS2 and ext3 (supported through OpenBSD's ext2 driver but without journaling).
My own experience with FFS/FFS2 the past 20 or so years is that it's been wholly robust through the relatively few power outages and other incidents I've had. While I wouldn't mind it becoming snappier I do prefer that its fully synchronous. I've never used softupdates.
I have a retired mid-2010s Celeron platform which managed about 300 Mbit/s on OpenBSD 7.1/7.2. With OpenBSD 7.6 it reached well over 700 MBit/sec. I also have an early 2020s Atom platform which saturates its 2.5GbE interface without any problems. Not all of the network drivers perform equally but the network stack improvements have all the same made them take pretty big leaps.
Then again, the sentence "tcp is outside of global lock" is very generalized, there are so many parts that got out of the kernel lock in pieces, like ip input, routing lookups and device packet handling that it is hard to talk about it as one singular thing that you just flip a switch on to make it MP-performant.
You could make filesystem code mp, disk device drivers mp and then still run on an IDE-disk which forces all IO to be one at a time and serialized first-come-first-served at which point all the work was for 'nothing'.
Same goes for networking, there are many many layers and places that all need code that actually allows for MP processing to improve its performance, fine grained locks (which reduce perf at this stage), then prove that the fine grained locks are sufficient for ALL use cases, all kinds of layering violations that could possibly happen, then you can unlock this single layer, and move to the next if nothing acts up on any machine.
) https://www.youtube.com/live/wEM-E-IJ6sY?si=X3lLX9tEIO2mcEJl...
) as far as its hw goes, that is. Will not be competing in speed competitions, but cheap SBCs just never will, do they?
Yup, still the case today.
Currently with an SSD, when there’s a power cut, there’s about a 20% chance my router will require me to walk downstairs and plug in a keyboard, type “fsck” manually and press y at all the prompts.
I haven’t actually had any issues with noticeable data loss though.
I’d settle for a default “boot anyway, press y for all fsck questions” mode on boot. I just don’t want to have to physically touch the thing.
> No not really. I recently took my friend through it and there is several places where it is pretty easy to screw something up. Whenever people say stuff like this, they are usually accustomed to the quirks.
Like what places, and how are they pretty easy to screw up on? I'm genuinely curious, as to me it's the cleanest and most straight-forward console installer I've ever experienced. I managed to get it done the very first time I, 25 years ago, with zero *nix experience, decided to try OpenBSD. Also, you can always exit the installer and restart the process. You're not "screwed" unless you reboot at the end without having reflected over your instructions.
https://github.com/kusumi/openbsd_hammer2
Somehow it was just never taken over the finish line though. I don't know why.
Ehmm it is a alternative approach for fs consistency then journaling:
>>The use of soft updates obviates the need for a separate log or for most synchronous writes.
https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade78.html
It is even easier then last time, no manual file removal.
Easy as pie, maybe I should bake a pie during the upgrade :)
Despite Win2k and NT4 kinda having a rep for not for gaming, I found that most games actually did run on them fine. Especially Win2k, probably the most underrated OS of all time in the Windows lineup.
To you it is. I installed on 3.8 and it was not straightforward. I used to go to university with a guy that used OpenBSD and he even said the installation at the time was straight forward. So it isn't just me.
I can't remember specifics as it was about 4-6 months. It was something to do with drive labelling IIRC, it was super confusing and I think I just ended up removing drives temporarily.
> you can always exit the installer and restart the process.
Nope. I tried that. It did not work.
> You're not "screwed" unless you reboot at the end without having reflected over your instructions.
Again it wasn't that straight forward.
> I’d settle for a default “boot anyway, press y for all fsck questions” mode on boot. I just don’t want to have to physically touch the thing.
Look up where fsck is run in /etc/rc and add the -y there.
I used to be an operating system enthusiast. I've tried them all at one time. I just have a job now (I have to use Windows at work) and I just not interested in faffing to get graphics working. The experience hasn't changed that much with FreeBSD in 20 years. Some might be okay with that, but I don't really want to have to spend 3 days getting a basic desktop environment behaving properly.
OpenBSD is better in this regard than FreeBSD, I've found.
> However if you have problems getting lost in "menus" but wanna try out a BSD try GhostBSD: https://www.ghostbsd.org/
This is kinda like distro-hopping. I don't want to run some weird fork of the OS, because you will end up with a new set problems potentially. I don't use derivative distros for this very reason and only use mainline distros.
I don't understand why (I don't care for wanky reasons that often quoted) that there isn't a mechanism for me to quickly get up an running with a desktop. The situation hasn't changed in 20+ years. Whereas Linux (for all the faults that it has) has effectively had this problem solved for over a decade now.
My solution has been a huge UPS so they never turn off. Softupdates prevented this issue for over a decade (?), so hoping we get HAMMER2 or something down the road.
I’ve been running OpenBSD continuously since 3.4, and no other OS beats it in simplicity IMO. The upgrades have ticked along quickly and flawlessly year over year. I wish more systems would take a page out of that book and implement something like sysupgrade.
Glad to see how many high-value changes OpenBSD is receiving. You just inspired me to get Chicago95 up and running on an old MacBook I have lying around right now, and replace the battery. I run it off of an old Lenovo Thinkcentre that I use as a server on my local network, but I haven't been using it as my daily driver. The number of things I can run on macOS is a lot smaller than it used to be 15 years ago, so I might give OpenBSD another shot as my daily driver.
P.S. I didn't know there were other people interested in using Chicago95 on OpenBSD, let alone OpenBSD contributors. Good stuff, man!
Nothing useful to add, just a "no". I wasn't trying to do GPU passthrough but instead passthrough a PCI card with four independent USB controllers so I could allocate those ports to VMs.
Excluded the devices at boot with pptdevs. Using vm for bhyve management so added `passthru0="10/0/0"` (device id) to the vm config. Started it up. Device was in the VM.
Not at all. I can read the man pages and docs fine. Stuff like this should work out of the box by now. It doesn't with the BSDs typically. That is the reality.
Also, it isn't just X. It is other issues once you have X working.
Once you spent a good few hours sorting things out, there is almost no benefit over running a decent Linux distribution where almost all of this working OOTB.
I don't understand why you are getting bent out of shape. I am simply stating the facts as I see them.
> You do You and that's good, just use what you like.
Well obviously I am going to use what I like.
However stating that doesn't mean you stop me (or anyone else) from making constructive criticisms of something you like.
I have used tried many of the *nix variants over the last 20 years. It is just easier to use Linux if you want a desktop OS.
Thank you to everyone who made this possible!
> How do I send you pizza (from one of the good places)?
You certainly don't have to, but I appreciate it!
I am really surprised to see something seemingly so simple in the changelog at this stage of development.
The part they never tell me is what hardware they recommend for the Wi-Fi, or rather which devices have OpenBSD driver support and allow for at least 4-5 good connections over 802.11ac?
I'm all for it, I just don't know where to start on the hardware.
Like, it’d be cool to have zfs on openbsd, etc. But you can’t easily mix and match.
At least on the linux side you can usually fit something into a different distro if you wanted without an insane level of effort.
Please show me where Linux comes pre installed with ads, ai and other 3rd party adware and uses a start menu written in react that makes your CPU fans spin up when you press it a couple time
There is a enormous difference between bloat for the sake of feature or profit maximizing. If you think gnome and systemd are bloat then simply don't use them.
You can always install cwm, oksh and some nice OpenBSD software from pkgin.
Super happy for you, you found your OS and that's fine, but also super proud of myself that i can setup X on every FreeBSD machine so nonchalant ;)
Saw a splendid thread last week on how thousands of Americans didn't realise "Shaun the Sheep" is a pun. Shorn / Shaun, but apparently, only in UK English.
Bhyve == bee hive == lots of individual cells, the occupants all cooperating and working together...?
It really isn't. The BSDs are smaller and cleaner, especially OpenBSD, which is positively minimal. Arch is huge.
The closest Linux to OpenBSD is probably Alpine, of all those I've seen. Takes as much disk as most modern distros take RAM, and because of no glibc and no systemd, a tonne of familiar Linux tools aren't available or don't work... just the old fashioned Unixy stuff... which is very much how running a BSD feels.
That isn't what I said. I said that Linux is easier than BSD for a desktop and there is no real reason why that should be the case. That is an objective fact.
I would rather use neither of these systems, but the alternatives are worse. At the moment Linux is the least worst option if you want a Desktop OS.
> but also super proud of myself that i can setup X on every FreeBSD machine so nonchalant ;)
As I said it isn't just X.
The point that you don't want to engage with (bit childish tbh), is that a lot of this should completely unnecessary. There really should need to be a fork of the OS for having a desktop configuration that works reasonably well out of the box.
That is failure of both the OS and the community, which judging by your username you seem to be a member.
Very hard disagree.
It took me half a dozen installs in VMs before I dared try on hardware. I never managed to get the Arm64 version installed at all, due to the cryptic minimalist info the installer gave me, which wasn't anywhere near enough to go on.
I have it on hardware now. It took a day or 2 of work but now it runs it's totally stable. However, the Byzantine partitioning scheme it uses means that although I gave it 32GB of disk, I don't have enough disk space to install Xfce.
It is on a Thinkpad W500, on a ~250GB SSD, multibooting with WinXP64, and NetBSD 10, and both Crunchbang++ Linux and Alpine Linux.
I tend to find that people who praise the installer tell me that it's never crossed their mind to dual-boot and they find it simple because they single-boot it on a very over-specced system where space restraints don't matter much.
The installer is a plain *sh script. You simply ctrl+c to break out and return to the shell, then run "install" to start the script again. I can't see why you would end up with an installation medium containing a different installer than everyone else.
They have gotten used to stuff like this and think is normal.
Debian has similar issues with making partitions too small. It makes the /boot partition so small that if you have more than a couple kernel images, you run out space. If you use the LUKS crypt with LVM, the suggest layout would have vg-root too small.
I ended up in situation where that wasn't possible. I wasn't sure how that happened. But it did.
I have done many installations over the years on real hardware and VMs. It only happened once, but it can happen.
I could also bring up the issues with the auto partition layout that is suggest which can make impossible to install any larger of software after installation. Or how the disks can be confusingly labelled in some cases (especially in VMs).
The point being communicated is that it isn't as straightforward as many people claim.
I first started mucking about with it in like 3.8/3.9, and you had to do something which was very archaic (even for 20 years) with calculating partition size, so it has improved.
> I can't see why you would end up with an installation medium containing a different installer than everyone else.
I don't appreciate how you worded this.
I am not lying about my experience. I just can't remember the exact set of steps of what happened because it happened several months ago now.
My only concern here is configuring an access point to just be a dumb antenna that xmits/recvs and AES encrypts/decrypts ethernet packets from a handful of MAC addresses without doing NAT or any other additional processing of those packets. The concerns my OpenBSD buddies have about the software on ASUS routers is well-founded, but I don't think any of us is sufficiently versed in layer 2 security.
What's the extent of your expertise in layer 2? I would rest easy as long as my router and access point are not willy-nilly giving away my MAC addresses to fine institutions like this place.
