OpenBSD 4.2 released [LWN.net]

OpenBSD 4.2 released

Posted Nov 1, 2007 16:37 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
Parent article: OpenBSD 4.2 released

Nifty-looking kernel changes, and I know why they stick with ancient GCCs, but... Apache 1.3?
ncurses 5.2? That's half a decade out of date, for goodness' sake... perhaps they can't find
the time to security-audit a newer version, or something?

(Log in to post comments)

OpenBSD 4.2 released

Posted Nov 1, 2007 18:16 UTC (Thu) by terminator (guest, #2292) [Link]

Looks like that the checksum of the iso images is wrong. Something is not right.

OpenBSD 4.2 released

Posted Nov 1, 2007 20:30 UTC (Thu) by gte223j (guest, #6492) [Link]

they forked apache a while back.....as for the ancient GCC, they are quite unhappy with the
newer ones in regards to architecture support (or the lack thereof) and the increased compile
time and bloat that is gcc....so now they are looking at trying to abandon gcc altogether and
go with a bsd c compiler.........but another way to answer your question is that i don't think
they care about the apache version or ncurses version...it is simply not a priority for
them....

if you look around on undeadly and other places you will see the posts and arguments ad
nauseam......truly old old news......


"perhaps they can't find the time to security-audit a newer version, or something?"

sarcasm/retarded joke???? or are you actually serious???

--brian

OpenBSD 4.2 released

Posted Nov 1, 2007 21:28 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

It's not that unserious, I'd wager.  OpenBSD doesn't have enough programmers to keep
eevrything up to date and audited.  If you take it as an insult, maybe you need a thicker
skin.

OpenBSD 4.2 released

Posted Nov 1, 2007 21:48 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Of course it was seriously meant. That's the only reason I can conceive of 
for OpenBSD to stick with half-*decade*-unmaintained software when 
upgrading is trivial (as it is with ncurses: much less so with apache, 
which is network-exposed as well).

OpenBSD 4.2 released

Posted Nov 2, 2007 5:49 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Well it's the same thing with the entire OpenBSD operating system.
How long have they had SMP support? It took them from 2000 to 2004 to do that, and it's still
very incomplete since it only supports a i386/amd64 platforms.

No offense to the OBSD folks, but their focus is entirely on security and their version of
'correctness' (which is pretty dogmatic).

There is nothing wrong with that at all. It leads to a secure system if everything is very
correct. But the trade off is that the rest of the world, which is bent on more practical
things, is going to leave you behind. 

WPA support? 
To complicated, compactability, nightmare, everybody who uses OpenBSD prefers things like
IPsec for encryption anyways.

Virtualization?
Virtualization is worthless for security. x86 is a evil dirty platform that makes it
impossible to do it correctly anyways.

3D acceleration?
X allows access to hardware. This is on the x86 platform with dirty evil hardware, so they
restrict it as much as possible.

So on and so forth. It all makes sense, but it also results in much less functionality.

It would be interesting to see the percentage of OBSD users that actually use their computers
for much beyond routing or server duty. I doubt most of them use it for their main desktop.
Probably OS X is the favored desktop system. (not that I'd blame them much for that)

OpenBSD 4.2 released

Posted Nov 3, 2007 15:51 UTC (Sat) by TRS-80 (subscriber, #1804) [Link]

This release did add support for native SATA controllers using the SCSI system, similar to how libata works, in part because their current IDE infrastructure would require a lot of invasive improvements to support SATA features. It's interesting to see the same decisions made in different kernels. OTOH support for 1TB filesystems puts OpenBSD about 13 years behind Linux.

OpenBSD 4.2 released

Posted Nov 2, 2007 11:58 UTC (Fri) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

Curious as to your take on the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" argument.

OpenBSD 4.2 released

Posted Nov 2, 2007 12:56 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Well I'm a raging perfectionist so I disagree with that argument (`if it 
ain't perfect, fix it' would be my approach).

The OpenBSD guys would probably agree with it though.

OpenBSD 4.2 released

Posted Nov 3, 2007 16:47 UTC (Sat) by notamisfit (subscriber, #40886) [Link]

The Apache thing is a license issue. de Raadt thinks that the Apache 2.0 License isn't free
enough for inclusion into the base system. A newer version (2.2.4 I think) should be available
in ports.