On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 10:47:17AM -0700, Cory Petkovsek wrote: > On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 10:13:52AM -0701, Jacob Meuser wrote: > > My comments: > > I wouldn't be surprised if he had problems with OpenBSD-current, since > > he used a -current from shortly after the tree unfroze for the next > > release, which is when most "new" things go in and OpenBSD-current is > > most unstable. > So these "new" additions are to the kernel and are so drastic in an > incremental release as to introduce stability problems and O(n) > algorithms as opposed to O(1) algorithms used in free bsd 5.1 and linux > 2.6?
Definitely stability issues. Some of the work being done is on threading and random address/page mapping etc. Does his Leanux kernel have PaX? OpenBSD really has only one source branch, not separate stable and devel branches, releases are meerly snapshots of the code, and -stable just has patches backported from -current. So, yes, new stuff goes in right after a release, so that if the major bugs can be fixed within a few weeks, it can stay in for 5 months of testing and fixing before the next release, otherwise it is removed. How else would one incorporate major changes? > > And he surely has a more "standard" machine for server testing than a > > laptop, no? > Indeed. However it is the same hardware for all platforms. But only OpenBSD was installed in what was a swap partition for another OS. > > (OpenBSD will try to configure any device it finds, as > > almost all drivers are built in to the GENERIC kernel ... I doubt he > > loaded all possible modules on the other OSes. Not saying this is > > necessarily a problem, but he doesn't even give the dmesg for each > > OS, or if IRQs were shared with some kernels and not others, etc, etc.) > Nevertheless, what's wrong with his suggestion of having openbsd > incorporate many of the kernel improvements found in netbsd and freebsd? None, but he doesn't need possibly unscientific data to make such a suggestion, which has been made many times before. UBC was actually incorporated in OpenBSD for a brief period of time (right after 3.2 release I believe), but it caused too many problems and was removed. > And his response to the response "openbsd's focus is security not > performance." "Hopefully security and performance are not mutually > exclusive." With Openbsd's security track record and freebsd's > performance record, what a gain it would be to incorporate freebsd's > improvements into openbsd. Maybe. Or maybe FreeBSD could incorporate OpenBSD's security improvements. There's probably a reason neither has happened yet. > It is easier to make any OS higher > performance than it is to make any more secure. Well, FreeBSD and OpenBSD are quite different. There would be a fair amount of porting involved, and then the ported parts would need to be analyzed so they don't create new security issues. Also, it's not a matter of security and performance being mutually exclusive, but that no OpenBSD developer has decided to make performance his main goal, and who is to say what a volunteer is to spend his time on? -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
