OpenBSD 7.8

What truly suprises me about BSDs is their simplicity and low footprint, OpenBSD being gold standard.

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.

Top on linux shows kernel threads (all the processes in square brackets), on BSD it doesn't show these afaik. A fresh debian install only lists a handfull of processes (all the expected ones, ssh, systemd, ntp, gettys etc) besides the 200+ kernel-threads.

Uh, ok then. I always thought that those were actually real kernel processes. What's the use of having top report those kernel threads? Is it possible to renice them?

>and I'm seriously thinking not doing a dual boot Linux install again

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.

>on BSD it doesn't show these afaik

Your right, you can show the system-processes in top with Shift+S, threads with Shift+H

>>I've been playing with `byve` the last two weeks

I believe you meant "bhyve".

Nah the h is needless bloat

Openbsd has been my router for a decade... I have a ansible playbook that does everything I need... I use a cheap USB drive in a fanless computer the only failure has been the $9 USB drive

Linux views them all as tasks, and yes you can (although I don't know if top does that).

>What's the use of having top report those kernel threads?

Just a different "flavor"-default-setting of top, there's not much more behind it.

Yeap, actually I haven't run directly `bhyve` but using the `vm` wrapper as is very convenient.

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?

No big fight, you just have to exclude the devices at boot so the vm can take them over [1] and if you have a AMD-System add that [2] and use the nvme virtual harddisk [3]

[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...

Nice! Thanks for sharing the links.

While at it, a good minimalistic Linux could be Void Linux, which has several BSD folks on the team. I'm running it for about 7 years, and am happy with it. Unlike BSDs though, it's a rolling release, so I get fresh packages a few days after an upstream release.

Arch Linux is the closest I've seen to BSD in the Linux-verse. I recommend trying it. I'm not sure about production though, or using more exotic things like CUDA.

This was true before they switched to systemd. Now the pstree and mounts are as polluted with noise as any other distro.

> anyone had a hard experience setting it up?

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.

If I had a nickel for every time my OpenBSD buddies told me "your ASUS router is not secure, just configure an OpenBSD machine as your router", I'd have a lot of nickels.

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.

The BSDs seem to have their own fragmentation as well. All targeting their own niches and somewhat overlapping work. For example or ZFS or virtualization technologies that aren’t cross-pollinated easily.

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.

You've got this wrong my friend. You don't use Wi-Fi on a router. You get a separate Wi-Fi Access Point device for that. I use a fanless Intel N100 2.5Gb x4 port system from AliExpress as the router with OpnSense and a Ubiquity Wi-Fi 7 access point for the wireless.

My concern with the mini pcs from china (all global brands really accept dell/hp/lenovo) is a lack of prompt bios updates (let alone any)

Every few months there’s a new cpu/bios/firmware vuln since spectre

Ruins the pun, though. ;-)

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...?

> Arch Linux is the closest I've seen to BSD in the Linux-verse.

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.

I think I get what you're implying. As long as the router itself with its firewall + DNS + NAT, is secure from attacks by actors over there internet, the access point I will connect to it only needs to be secure against people within 100 feet of it.

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.