Guest post by OpenBSD 4.9 release is ready, now with enabled NTFS by default (read-only), SMP kernels can now boot on machines with up to 64 cores, maximum allocation size for i386 bumped to 2G, added support for AES-NI instructions found in recent Intel processors, further improvements in suspend and resume and much more.
Great to see another quality release, right on schedule. The artwork for this release is also top-notch, definitely worth ordering the CD set for.
This is my first serious attempt at using OpenBSD in years, but I’m quite surprised by how well my X60s is supported. Out of the box, everything works, except for wireless which I figured out after about 10 minutes of reading manpages. Suspend/resume is instant, and faster than Windows (pretty much the standard for HW support). I’m seriously impressed. Good job, now I have to figure out how to get Opera.
There is no native version of Opera, the one that exists uses Linux emulation.
Firefox 3.5/3.6 and Chromium 9x is supported, along with a few other Gecko/Webkit based browsers.
OpenBSD -current has Firefox 4x and Chromium 10x.
I find OpenBSD the easiest of the BSDs to get along with thanks to the excellent man pages and the FAQ on their website.
I also think their ports and package management system are the best around.
Edited 2011-05-02 11:11 UTC
4.9 supports Gnash 0.8.8, which works (mostly, from what I’ve read, if poorly) with YouTube. If only Hulu would work, too!
Has anyone tried the Wine port yet? It was a WIP last time I checked. Seems like there’s a package here: http://ftp.eu.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/distfiles/
Wine is really dependent on a specific memory layout (..specifically, Windows applications are).
A proper “working” port of Wine would require some low level kernel changes.. it might never work properly, so if Wine is important to you, look elsewhere.
BTW, distfiles are not packages, just a mirror of the source distribution.
Edited 2011-05-02 04:36 UTC
Can someone please explain what they mean by “maximum allocation size for i386 bumped to 2G” Size limit for what RAM, Partition, Virtual Hard drive, or something else? Why is there a limit?
Thank you I just want to make sure I fully understand
The detailed changelog mentions MAXDSIZ. Google reveils this to be the limit of how big each process can grow its data segment, which includes among other things memory allocated by malloc().
It seems HP-UX and the BSDs all have this kernel parameter. Why? To protect the system from buggy programs, I guess.
Indeed, on i386 the virtual address space is 4GB, but it gets fragmented by various security techniques like W^X (..NX bit simulation) which had to be implemented using segmentation tricks.
This change at least allows a process to use a little more memory, although login.conf still need to be tweaked for that.