OpenBSD Archive

OpenBSD now has SMP support for amd64. Learn more about it here.

According to this SMP support is now in OpenBSD-current.

A recent thread on the OpenBSD project's misc@ mailing list discussed why OpenBSD has chosen to stick to a purely monolithic kernel, instead of trying to optimize performance by using kernel modules. As described in the OpenBSD FAQ, the OpenBSD team only supports the GENERIC kernel that is provided with the distribution. Numerous reasons were provided, including security, the ability to fully test, and simplicity.

Alexander Yurchenko recently added device hotplug support to the tree and will be enabled by default in GENERIC once testing is complete for all architectures which can support it.

USB 2.0 support on OpenBSD is here, you can try out the latest snapshots for the new code.

OpenBSD celebrated release 3.5 on 1 May 2004. In honor of this release, Federico Biancuzzi interviewed the developers of OpenBSD's PF, a powerful and flexible packet filtering interface. This is the second half of an interview. Elsewhere, the DaemonNews Ezine was released with new articles.

OpenBSD is a name synonymous with security, having earned the respect and adoration of security-concious sysadmins everywhere. OpenBSD is used in data centers all over the world, is the basis for several security products (from OpenBSD's site), and is even the basis for Microsoft's Services For Unix.

Ryan McBride works full time on OpenBSD development. His first contribution was adding IPv6 support to PF, OpenBSD's stateful packet filter.

"At this point, I would recommend against anyone buying a piece of hardware from the Pegasos people because their firmware is SO BUSTED that it makes Apple roms look like hot sh**"." These are the words of the infamous Theo de Raadt, the OpenBSD founder. Theo cited problems with the BIOS of the Pegasos and other difficulties during the development of the OpenBSD port to the Pegasos platform.

As with FreeBSD's ports and NetBSD's packages, OpenBSD's ports system is a compelling reason to use the system. Its designers and maintainers are, too often, unsung heroes. That's one reason Federico Biancuzzi sat down to interview OpenBSD's Marc Espie. Along the way, they discussed security, licensing, and future plans for the system.

The OpenBSD Journal reports that Michael Lucas has written a new piece about OpenBSD on the OnLamp BSD site. This article, Homemade Embedded BSD Systems, covers installing OpenBSD on the Soekris system, but this could apply to any system which uses a CF device to boot. As usual, some great tips to get you started.

OpenBSD team members, lead by Dale Rahn, have been actively porting OpenBSD to the StrongARM processor. You can see the result of their work on the "cats" platform page. This port is based on the NetBSD port to the platform.

This article is a quick example of how to add a system call to OpenBSD. The following description is based on OpenBSD 3.4-beta on i386 machine architecture. Also, it is assumed that readers are familiar with building the OpenBSD kernel.

The OpenBSD folks are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 3.4. This is their 14th release on CD-ROM (and 15th via FTP). They remain proud of OpenBSD's record of seven years with only a single remote hole in the default install. As with previous releases, 3.4 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system: