I'm happily using OpenBSD as my core router, my Minecraft server, a laptop OS, and on my retro PCs. Currently updating my Raspberry Pi 4 to 7.7 as well.
* On 7.6 `bwmf0` was detected and works great, even in AP mode. However, my latest Node project core dumped when running `npm install` and nothing I tried got it working (short of recompiling Node)
* On 7.7 (today's release) `npm install` is working perfect
Not worth an entire blog post, but just goes to show improvements in OpenBSD over time on the Pi 4 :)
A note to myself for future upgrades, from the upgrade guide:
• Check available disk space in /usr. Verify that the /usr partition has a size of at least 1.1G. With less space the upgrade may fail and you should consider reinstalling the system instead.
When this says "available disk space," it means "total" disk space of the /usr partition, not "free" space. I had less than 1.1GB of unused free space on /usr and had to verify that that was fine before proceeding.
Wondering how it compares to FreeBSD in terms of performance. OpenBSD used to be slower but in the past 3-4 years there were bunch of optimisations landed.
I guess I will have to wait for another phoronix benchmarks.
I think it depends greatly on your use case. Mine has been OpenBSD on a bare-metal server, VPS, old laptop (N3540), and underpowered desktop (x7425E). For day-to-day desktop work, even the old laptop keeps up and the underpowered desktop feels snappy at most times.
You might think that OpenBSD on its own incurs a massive performance hit (at least I used to think that), but when I compared it against Alpine Linux on that underpowered desktop it was really not different enough for say video playback/encoding that I could tell much of a difference. Yes, OpenBSD is slower, but I would guess the margin is maybe 5% which is certainly not what I expected. Maybe for other workloads it is very different from my experience, but I am a user and not expert benchmarker so I can not give a better answer.
Where there is a difference is when you have multiple jobs hitting syscalls hard. Say, heavy disk access. On Linux this will not cause your cursor to freeze momentarily, delay the launch of other programs, or your audio playback to halt or distort, but on OpenBSD this happens even on something as powerful as a 3950X when I tried it. I am not enough of a kernel hacker to tell exactly what the issue is, but I suspect it is that OpenBSD's kernel has very limited preemption. This is not great, but it is not enough of an annoyance to deter me from using it on some of my desktops.
Other than the above, the experience of maintaining a server or desktop with OpenBSD is amazing. Top-notch documentation, everything is a flag in rc.conf.local or text file in /etc, and the base system is capable enough to run all the services I need and for my other uses ports has me covered. Plus, it gets better with every release. 7.7 comes with massive improvements to the USB video subsystem that has fixed every device I had that previously did not work with OpenBSD.
My annual donations will keep coming, but I wish I was rich enough to fund or good enough of a kernel hacker to work on whatever it is that the kernel needs to address the last few snags and I would happily run OpenBSD on every box I have.
Same; that would really improve the remote router scenario. I've had a router refuse to boot up after a power outage until I manually ran a disk check. I'd like to at least be able to force start-up no matter what, but journaling is the proper fix.
Agreed! I think the only other solution (at present) is to mount as much of the system read-only as possible to minimize the risk of needing to `fsck` after an unclean shutdown. That and putting it behind a UPS, but of course that only lasts so many hours.
OpenBSD 7.7 release artwork by Tomáš Rodr.
https://www.openbsd.org/images/LifeOfAFish.png
https://www.openbsd.org/images/puffy77.gif
t-shirts, hoodies, stickers on openbsdstore.com
Congrats on another release, OpenBSD team!
I'm happily using OpenBSD as my core router, my Minecraft server, a laptop OS, and on my retro PCs. Currently updating my Raspberry Pi 4 to 7.7 as well.
Anecdata regarding my RPi 4:
* On 7.5 the built-in `bwmf0` was not detected
* On 7.6 `bwmf0` was detected and works great, even in AP mode. However, my latest Node project core dumped when running `npm install` and nothing I tried got it working (short of recompiling Node)
* On 7.7 (today's release) `npm install` is working perfect
Not worth an entire blog post, but just goes to show improvements in OpenBSD over time on the Pi 4 :)
Theo did a talk back in 2009 on the OpenBSD release process[0], and how they manage to keep releasing on schedule.
[0] https://www.openbsd.org/papers/asiabsdcon2009-release_engine...
A recording of the talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7pkyDUX5uM
A note to myself for future upgrades, from the upgrade guide:
• Check available disk space in /usr. Verify that the /usr partition has a size of at least 1.1G. With less space the upgrade may fail and you should consider reinstalling the system instead.
When this says "available disk space," it means "total" disk space of the /usr partition, not "free" space. I had less than 1.1GB of unused free space on /usr and had to verify that that was fine before proceeding.
Hmm, been a while since they had a release song.
https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html
Announcement mail: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-announce&m=174577743904716&w=2
Wondering how it compares to FreeBSD in terms of performance. OpenBSD used to be slower but in the past 3-4 years there were bunch of optimisations landed.
I guess I will have to wait for another phoronix benchmarks.
I think it depends greatly on your use case. Mine has been OpenBSD on a bare-metal server, VPS, old laptop (N3540), and underpowered desktop (x7425E). For day-to-day desktop work, even the old laptop keeps up and the underpowered desktop feels snappy at most times.
You might think that OpenBSD on its own incurs a massive performance hit (at least I used to think that), but when I compared it against Alpine Linux on that underpowered desktop it was really not different enough for say video playback/encoding that I could tell much of a difference. Yes, OpenBSD is slower, but I would guess the margin is maybe 5% which is certainly not what I expected. Maybe for other workloads it is very different from my experience, but I am a user and not expert benchmarker so I can not give a better answer.
Where there is a difference is when you have multiple jobs hitting syscalls hard. Say, heavy disk access. On Linux this will not cause your cursor to freeze momentarily, delay the launch of other programs, or your audio playback to halt or distort, but on OpenBSD this happens even on something as powerful as a 3950X when I tried it. I am not enough of a kernel hacker to tell exactly what the issue is, but I suspect it is that OpenBSD's kernel has very limited preemption. This is not great, but it is not enough of an annoyance to deter me from using it on some of my desktops.
Other than the above, the experience of maintaining a server or desktop with OpenBSD is amazing. Top-notch documentation, everything is a flag in rc.conf.local or text file in /etc, and the base system is capable enough to run all the services I need and for my other uses ports has me covered. Plus, it gets better with every release. 7.7 comes with massive improvements to the USB video subsystem that has fixed every device I had that previously did not work with OpenBSD.
My annual donations will keep coming, but I wish I was rich enough to fund or good enough of a kernel hacker to work on whatever it is that the kernel needs to address the last few snags and I would happily run OpenBSD on every box I have.
7.5 was also quite slow for desktop IME. Maybe the last two releases have sped things up.
What Id love is a journaling file system and extended attributes personally...
> What Id love is a journaling file system.
Same; that would really improve the remote router scenario. I've had a router refuse to boot up after a power outage until I manually ran a disk check. I'd like to at least be able to force start-up no matter what, but journaling is the proper fix.
Agreed! I think the only other solution (at present) is to mount as much of the system read-only as possible to minimize the risk of needing to `fsck` after an unclean shutdown. That and putting it behind a UPS, but of course that only lasts so many hours.
https://github.com/kusumi/openbsd_hammer2
https://github.com/kusumi/makefs
Maybe? As a starting point?
What’s your use case?
Congratulations, my upgrades start tomorrow or maybe the next day I am sure all will go well and easy.
I haven't used OpenBSD since the 3.x days, but I did dearly love it at the time. I'm so glad they're still working on it.
me too, it was an amazing experience that I still compare to current options and long for its simplicity.
Still use it for my “home server” and a few others, still love it!
I’m actually genuinely excited when a new version comes out, taking time to read the changelog.
I love that it still supports only 32MB of RAM.
I had 6.7 running on 32MB of RAM recently. I'll have to give 7.7 a try. ;)
DMD works on OpenBSD.