OpenBSD 4.2 released [LWN.net]

OpenBSD 4.2 released

Posted Nov 1, 2007 21:28 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)
In reply to: OpenBSD 4.2 released by gte223j
Parent article: OpenBSD 4.2 released

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.

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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.