LWN: Comments on "OpenBSD 3.9 released"

OpenBSD 3.9 released

ortalo — Mon, 08 May 2006 12:17:17 +0000

That's primarily a marketing statement indeed.
But well, IMHO, it does reflect pretty well the security level of OpenBSD anyway. Something that may be less evident to the general public if stated differently.
For example, you may note that their "security" page does *not* mention the well known PF firewall among the prominent security features of OpenBSD. Do you think that the general public would read this page and understand that it really demonstrates unique maturity with respect to security issues (more than "you need a firewall")?

OpenBSD 3.9 released

man_ls — Tue, 02 May 2006 17:39:05 +0000

Easy: just release an operating system where everything is disabled by default. Recipe: take e.g. Debian, ship a version without daemons and with all ports closed; the default install is now secure.

In other words, it is a meaningless statistic IMHO.

OpenBSD 3.9 released

kornak — Mon, 01 May 2006 22:36:24 +0000

quote: "We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of eight years with only a single
remote hole in the default install."

Interesting. How many documented remote holes in other OS's. This might be
an interesting statistic. IMHO

performance analysis?

dweller — Mon, 01 May 2006 19:23:53 +0000

probably not. Although the team has fixed some serious bugs regarding crashes with many processes etc the inner workings of the system have not changed regarding SMP,scalability and threading. Once rthreads are complete and stable I would be interested in such a benchmark myself too.

performance analysis?

b7j0c — Mon, 01 May 2006 19:06:59 +0000

is there any decent analysis of the chief performance characteristics of openbsd vs the other bsds and linux? the last well-received analysis i read was quite old, featuring freebsd 5.x etc. it was not kind to openbsd re performance, i am wondering if the situation has changed.