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Hi Misc, Even though this article: http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability was many years ago and performance in OpenBSD had improved greatly since that time, I still hear people (mostly younger people) complain about OpenBSD performance. They cite poor threading, unused cores, no bigmem support, etc. Yet, when asked outright to demonstrate their issue, no one can show numbers or reproduce a performance issue. How do others defend OpenBSD in these conversations? I normally cite the things I admire most about OpenBSD: 1. Simplicty - (IMO, this is by far its greatest attribute... simple is secure) 2. OpenSSH 3. pf, carp, OpenBGPD 4. built-in security 5. ports collection But, I'd like to have hard technicaly data to demonstrate that while Linux and FreeBSD may scale to a gazillion CPUs and PetaBytes of Memory that OpenBSD makes a fine firewall or desktop or mail server, etc and point out that the old article so many people cite is indeed *old*. Thanks for any suggestions. I hate seeing such a fine OS so easily dismissed by folks (many of whom) have never even tried it!
Attempting to prove the worth of OpenBSD to folks who are not able to figure things out for themsevles is much like trying to teach butterflies Calculus. It doesn't work and wastes your time. --STeve Andre'
Ditto. Furthermore, OpenBSD is not a religion (not for me, at least). The only things OpenBSD *itself* needs is code and donations, not more devotees unless I'm severely mistaken. If someone wants to use inferior tools to for a given project's requirements I'm more than happy to let them do so (unless they're paying me for consulting). Cheers, Tico
I've heard a different version of that one: "...is like teaching a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig." Saludos, Jose.
pfsync Regards, -Lars
If you think micro benchmarks are worth anything you have a micro understanding of the problem.
You shouldn't make generalizations like that. What if his primary workload is micro benchmarks?
Then it is of micro importance.
Yeah, it is always the same crap that is cited everywhere. The performance problems his benchmarks have shown on connect, bind and accept were solved in 2003 (quickly after he published his rant). Since then OpenBSD has an approximate O(1) behaviour like all the other OSs. The biggest flaw with all those great benchmark articles is that their often flawed and the people behind them are biased to show whatever they like to prove. In the end many of fefe's test programs did not actually measure what he assumed they would.
and he was open to get patches to remedy those problems. general dislike of any benchmark in the world is also part of the openbsd culture just like some qualities of misc@ (although it's been quite quiet lately). if the numbers were better, the general sentiment would be rather different i believe. linux is faster in many respects (just look at zaurus) so what? i dont use openbsd for its speed, but on the other hand i dont downplay the importance of measuring things up and comparing it with the others once in a while. i am sure speed in the end is of councern, otherwise the os woudln't be in C but, whatchamacallit, python. some things can be measured actually quite easily: how much content a web server serves (not that much without sendfile()), how do the databases perform, etc, this is all benchmark in the end, and the programs doing the benchmarking are actually the daemons themselves. so there, everyone is benchmarking 24/7 :] -f -- dragon riders make good first impressions.
On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 01:15:27 +0200 In the end it boils down to measuring the different OS on the hardware you will use for the task they should fullfill, nothing else matters in the end. - Robert
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 01:43:27AM +0200, Robert wrote: | On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 01:15:27 +0200 | frantisek holop <minusf@obiit.org> wrote: | | > hmm, on Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 10:23:58PM +0200, Claudio Jeker said that | > > like to prove. In the end many of fefe's test programs did not | > > actually measure what he assumed they would. | > | > and he was open to get patches to remedy those problems. | > | > general dislike of any benchmark in the world is also part of the | > openbsd culture just like some qualities of misc@ (although it's been | > quite quiet lately). | > | > if the numbers were better, the general sentiment would | > be rather different i believe. | > | > linux is faster in many respects (just look at zaurus) so what? | > i dont use openbsd for its speed, but on the other hand i dont | > downplay the importance of measuring things up and comparing it | > with the others once in a while. i am sure speed in the end is | > of councern, otherwise the os woudln't be in C but, whatchamacallit, | > python. | > | > some things can be measured actually quite easily: how much content | > a web server serves (not that much without sendfile()), how do the | > databases perform, etc, this is all benchmark in the end, and the | > programs doing the benchmarking are actually the daemons themselves. | > so there, everyone is benchmarking 24/7 :] | > | > -f | | In the end it boils down to measuring the different OS on the hardware | you will use for the task they should fullfill, nothing else matters in | the end. I would say the most important thing is whether or not your solution is up to the task you hand it. Be it with MS-DOS 3.1 or with OpenBSD, I tend to want things to work and have enough scalability for (a bit more than) estimated future growth. Benchmarks are great to measure the effects of patches designed to improve performance, not to pick the tool for the job at hand. Paul 'WEiRD' de ...
<sarcasm>and always showed total non-bias.</sarcasm> however, if you look at the tree, OpenBSD developers DID look at his test programs and for the ones that pointed out real issues, made considerable improve the performance in those areas. Oh, also in a lot of areas he didn't test. However, the goal was to do it better (in the broad sense of the term), not to top out on anyone's benchmark. I think dislike of benchmarks is a general attribute of most experienced people on the technical side of things. Love of and trust in benchmarks is a general attribute of managers who want to pretend they made a good decision rather than a wild-ass guess based on who has the cuter sales rep and/or buys the better lunch (or sells products missing on their naw. Once you learn to loath benchmarks and how people use them, you can't start to cite them without your tongue ripping itself out of your mouth and beating you senseless. Even when you find one that sorta looks good, you start thinking about all the edge (or straight down the middle) cases it misses. One of my favorite benchmarks: I was approached by a network consultant who told me he was going to need an emergency DHCP server for an office and asked if I could have it done by the next day. I told him I could have it done in 30 minutes. He couldn't believe me when I told him that, so I invited him to watch me. So, I walked him through an OpenBSD install, and twenty minutes after the target machine (a very modest 400MHz Celeron) was first powered on, it was ready to be plugged in and serve DHCP. Still doesn't mean much. :) See the flaws in my "benchmark"? Of course you do. So do I. (got cocky a couple weeks later, told someone I could do a basic OpenBSD install on one of these things in "about five minutes". The machine I picked turned out to have a bad hard disk and did a massive number of disk retries before it finished loading. Ended up taking about seven minutes..and DID boot successfully. While I of course ...
beautifully specific and vague, i'd challenge anyone to sum up benchmarking better. if that's not a quote, it is now; i'm writing careful, that could be seen as an admission ;-)
Yep. Most performance-oriented thing I've done with OpenBSD was firewalling a 45Mbps T3 line. It did tax the machine a little bit, but the primary firewall was a Celeron 600, about five years old at the time it was put into service (failover was a PIII-750, which showed a lot lower load, I think it was more the cache than the MHz). Lame. :) Nick.
i have a bgp machine forwarding 800MBit/s of real world generic internet traffic. can handle at least twice that. enough of a benchmark? -- Henning Brauer, hb@bsws.de, henning@openbsd.org BS Web Services, http://bsws.de Full-Service ISP - Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services Dedicated Servers, Rootservers, Application Hosting - Hamburg & Amsterdam
Henning, If I may ask here. One thing that would be nice for the records is to get a little bit more details on your setup doing that if you have no problem providing it obviously. Specially the PF configuration tie to this bgp router as well may well be very educating to many. I always wonder what simple difference from stock install might be there in the hardware or sysctl to get there, what network card are use now, but more important is the PF configuration use in some router as well. I really do not recall have seen one email on the subject. That would be great to have. Not something to preach by, but something useful and base line if you want to start with. I for one would welcome it and would be curious as to what PF configuration tie with the bgp router are actually in use and proven to be good with decent speed. Obviously I assume there is a minimum of PF in use there, but may be not? Am I wrong? I don't know if many would appreciate this for the records, but I sure would love it. Should you find a little time to put it on misc@ know you would have an avid reader for it! (;> Best, Daniel
it's an off-the-shelf sun x4150 running GENERIC. -- Henning Brauer, hb@bsws.de, henning@openbsd.org BS Web Services, http://bsws.de Full-Service ISP - Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services Dedicated Servers, Rootservers, Application Hosting - Hamburg & Amsterdam
Interesting! I always thought that a minimum of PF was in use. So, if I may ask, how you do some minimum like: ip verify unicast source reachable-via any for announcement to you from multiple BGP sources or even: ip verify unicast source reachable-via rx for announcement from a single and uniq bgp source then? Or do you even do this? No right or wrong answer, just curious? No ban of not valid or spoof IP block then? Or may be black hole? Or do you even bother with it and just let it be? What about letting in only valid destination IP's or letting out valid originating IP's out then? No filter for it at all as no PF is there to do this? Again not any tricky question, just wonder of what best practice then some may use bgp for their network, not only for one bgp feed obviously. I obviously wrongly assume there was a minimum of PF in use as well, witch I see I was wrong to think so. I thought PF was use to validate traffic, letting only valid IP's in/out and not accepting range of not valid BGP announcement as well. Is there a way to do this that I may obviously have miss by not doing it via PF?
i dunno what that is supposed to be, i haven't touched a cisco in you know nothing about that setup and make invalid assumptions. i won't elaborate more on this setup, it's not mine, we just run some stuff for them. -- Henning Brauer, hb@bsws.de, henning@openbsd.org BS Web Services, http://bsws.de Full-Service ISP - Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services Dedicated Servers, Rootservers, Application Hosting - Hamburg & Amsterdam
I don't know how up-to-date is, but it's a good reference: If you search in misc@ archive you'll find a lot of interesting PF/NICs/BGPD/HARDWARE/NETWORK-related threads. The needed info is out here, sure. In https://calomel.org/ you have a lot of very useful and clear documents too. As usual, we also have the main source: the code. -- Thanks, Jordi Espasa Clofent
the router in question is not in that network. -- Henning Brauer, hb@bsws.de, henning@openbsd.org BS Web Services, http://bsws.de Full-Service ISP - Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services Dedicated Servers, Rootservers, Application Hosting - Hamburg & Amsterdam
what hardware (CPU, NICs, MEM) and OpenBSD release (i386, GENERIC?) are you -Florian
hardware varies. always em in my case, as little memory above 1G as possible with all channels populated, i386, GENERIC. -- Henning Brauer, hb@bsws.de, henning@openbsd.org BS Web Services, http://bsws.de Full-Service ISP - Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services Dedicated Servers, Rootservers, Application Hosting - Hamburg & Amsterdam
Any chance you could post the spec. of said machine?
I'd especially be interested in CPU/Chipset/NICs/RAM,...
Many thanks,...
--
"Opportunity is most often missed by people because it is dressed in
overalls and looks like work."
Thomas Alva Edison
Inventor of 1093 patents, including:
The light bulb, phonogram and motion pictures.
Hi Ross, Not sure that Henning will give more details on this. I understand that prefer not to, witch is fine. He did provide most of what you are asking here however. Sun 4150, you can get the spec on that box. Not to many processor choise there, so even the slowest one will be good. Ram, he said as close as 1Gb only and network cards, use em. Many Sun use that be default, not all the time but many. For the chipset, well, the DMESG would help to get that, but sadly they changed time to time, so not sure you will always get the same anyway. (;< I have the 4100, not the 4150, I can send you that if you want, but not the same hardware obviously. I was more curious about other component of the setup to do it right, but sadly I am not sure my questions were well received. I was more interested on what some users and specially Henning as he is involved in bgpd a lots as to what filtering a BGP setup would/could use to make it better. Not sure he is welling to offer more details, witch is totally fine really, I can understand not wanted to do so. I hope this gives you some anywar to some of your questions never the less. Best, Daniel
Precisely.
Hah. That's why he did not update his site since 2003. Do you realy think
Actually, I think that bad sentiment comes from the article itself:
OpenBSD 3.4 was a real stinker in these tests. The installation
routine sucks, the disk performance sucks, the kernel was unstable,
and in the network scalability department it was even outperformed
by it's father, NetBSD. OpenBSD also gets points deducted for the
sabotage they did to their IPv6 stack. If you are using OpenBSD,
you should move away now.
With this he proofed himself as non credible and uninterested in serious
and in many it is slower or plain unusable without further hacks.
And here again comes this style of uninformed dumb rant. Why do you think
a web server will not do that much without sendfile()? Honestly it is
exactly the opposide, a web server that never touches the disk for content
delivery will outperform all others and can server enough data to fill a
gigabit link. sendfile() is no magic pill, sure it saves work and helps
increasing the performance but it still needs to get the data from the
disk at one point which is very slow.
So since benchmarking is out, how do we then find out where
potential problems are.
What does OpenBSD developers do, since surely they don't benchmark :)
Maybe we should profile instead ?
I'm not very experienced with webservers, but here
how i would approach it.
1. i have a problem, i think about it where/what the problem could be
2 i check the logs - test my equipment
3. I create 1 or a few profiling tests / micro benchmarks to test my assumptions
or make certain i haven't misinterpreted my problems.
4. Step back and interpret results
5. think of other tests / micro benchmarks that could further enlighten me
and confirm/unconfirm(?) my "findings"
What i wouldnt do, is "design" a mother of a benchmark that covers
all the bases.
It's to hard to get right. It would take to much time.
How would OpenBSD dev's approach a issue.
How are issues generally searched for/ found out?
I imagine something like
OpenBSD dev works on the httpd daemon - asks for testing.
I find a problem, ex: it'd slow like heck - check configuration -
interfaces - logs
What now - i write back to dev.
dev asks me to do what?
What does the dev do behind the scenes?
regards mic
I have *never* seen a micro benchmark yield anything of value. Ever! You find me a test and I'll find you a bunch of corner cases. Does not exist. This is a bunch of malarkey. This is the same as measuring the position _AND_ momentum. If you don't get this then you Profiling under a "reasonable" load and that is where all benchmarks fall apart. My definition of a "reasonable" load is different from everyone else's.
nobody is arguing 3.4 and 4.6 is the same. or that that particular benchmark has any more than historic value.. no matter how you put it, both a well done and an incompetent "nothing" is a strong word. but be it. c and speed can you show me the magic openbsd webserver that never touches the disk? since you picked on sendfile(), let's turn it around. i dont see your numbers to prove that sendfile() doesn't help. how is your statement any better informed than mine? it's just easier to say: nah, it wouldn't help that much at all, it's overrated anyway. having said all of this, i've been here for some years now. i know speed is not the priority for this project -- and i am fine with that otherwise i wouldn't be here. i am simply sick of all this downplaying of any and all benchmarks (micro and macro), when everyone who writes programs knows that there are important benchmarks for finding bottlenecks and improving program/data structure. i would be more than happy to see a "competent" benchmark by someone who knows openbsd intimately. but exactly because of the prevailing mindset no one ever bothers. so when it comes to openbsd performance it's all just legends and hearsay, and if being low, hardware, software and user gets blamed. the devs are sitting around smug saying nothing until someone comes up with this theme again and then they send something like: i have a bgp machine forwarding 800MBit/s of real world generic internet traffic. can handle at least twice that. what can i say? i am happy for you :] -f -- i'm so broke i can't even pay attention.
so who's benchmarking install/upgrade time? lost time due to instability? lost time due to gratuitous API changes? lost time "tuning" setups? lost time searching on google instead of reading manuals? -- jakemsr@sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
i am afraid my world is not that black and white. i did not know you are familiar with the install/upgrade procedures of every system besides openbsd. a debian minimal is done as fast as openbsd, just to name one i know. (not prefer it, mind you). openbsd is really not the only system that can be installed in ~5 minutes... and upgrading is still easier on e.g. linux just because of the sheer man power they have to track all the packages. the only way to upgrade e.g. binary packages in openbsd is to a) upgrade together with the system, b) build it yourself. neither is a time saver. having said that, i always cross my fingers when doing debian upgrades/updates, because they tend to sneak in little surprises. i have no such fears doing pkg_add -ui re: instability, i used to run snapshots in production as well, but since 4.2 i switched to releases because it was as easy as running rtorrent to lock up the machine. there is instability in every single computer system.. re: tuning. it is nice to have a system that always performs the best, pitty it is often impossible. program writers have to provide sane default settings that work "everywhere". specialized workloads (or just plainly higher ones) will always need special settings, and i still prefer to tune knobs to recompiling sources... for example the default installed openbsd with its apache without "tuning" is basically useless for any site with a bit heavier traffic. re: documentation, yes openbsd's is superb, but lets be real, who has never googled anything related to openbsd? and also comes down to user base, the chances of finding even a ridiculously obscure issue on certain unnamed systems' mailing lists is way higher than elsewhere. just look at all the ignored mail on misc@ coda: there would be everywhere openbsd if it would be up to me. but it isn't. and so i need to be proficient in many more systems. and that's why your argument limps, i have very good chances of solving problems on all those ...
huh? when henning replied to the request for stupid benchmarks with an observation, you said that wasn't what you wanted. so you reply to my requests with observations and say my "argument limps"? -- jakemsr@sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
your implied arguments being: openbsd is better in the questions you lined up. all i said was, it's not that black and white every time. -f -- wedding: a funeral where you smell your own flowers.
not necessarily. I would expect OpenBSD to do well, because those things are more important to the developers than getting the highest rating for a particularly specific use case (i.e. a benchmark). but I really am curious if there are such data. -- jakemsr@sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
It had no value because he didn't test OpenBSD at all like the other And on the system level nothing really changed. We are not debating the Of course speed is of concern to this project? WTF kind of ignorance is that? There are, generally speaking, no "go faster" buttons. The code is written in a way to not suck and is enabled of course. I'll downplay all dumb benchmarks. That is why the word dumb is in that sentence. There is no doubt that other OS' are faster (as in time elapsed) on certain things. This doesn't make the underlying algorithm any worse however your fancy benchmark will tell you just that. You don't need a And again you assume this never happens. I have seen plenty profiles from other developers. What makes you think that information is valuable to you? If you don't get why benchmarks are, generally speaking, badly run and even worse interpreted why would you understand a full profile of an OS? And the person who does that has some sort of vested interest to lie to you? And he also has the worst intentions for the community? You are such a victim, I truly feel for you.
i did not mean that it could be a lie, or fabrication. i meant that this is not a replacement for benchmarks. why not describe some high profile situations like this for others to see what is openbsd capable of? no wonder everybody was asking for details. this is exactly the (perceived) problem with openbsd's performance: noone really knows what can be expected of the system. there is precious little data about this, and most of it outdated as well. the word benchmark has a lot negative connotations, mostly because it's 'hard to do it well'. but let's call then benchmarks 'load testing' and that is not hard to do at all -- push the system until it falls. everyone would be interested in the results. doesn't even have to compared to other systems, although that puts it into even more context as well. -f -- what a nice night for an evening. -- steven wright
this thread is fucking stupid. consider that the majority of machines are horribly underutilized, even in large organizations where some of the machines are under heavy load. the reason that everyone here is so dismissive of benchmarks is that they do not translate to real world results. people hyperventilate all day about how software X runs Y% faster under various OSes but i rarely if ever see a concrete expression of this e.g. i switched from openbsd to linux and was able to offer the same level of service with half the machines. part of the reason that one doesn't normally see concrete examples is that there is far more to the 'performance' of a machine than just benchmarks. - how does the cost of administration scale with machine count? - with what frequency will OS-related issues cause a catastrophic failure in a production environment? - is it easy to upgrade the machines? - if i don't regularly patch the machines will they get rooted? once you start thinking about the answers to these questions you might see how irrelevant most of this discussion has been to date. cheers, jake
I didn't need the second part... How about just saying something when the thread is NOT stupid.
OpenBSD sucks at this one. The fact that base isn't packaged is a *huge* pain I've never seen any issues caused by the various linuxes we run, nor by OpenBSD Again. OpenBSD really sucks at this one. Building from source is light years more difficult than 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade, or 'yum upgrade' or the like. And you've got to track updates for ports yourself, making those even OpenBSD is at least excellent at this one. But then, it'd want to be given how much of a pain it is to patch. And, it somewhat makes up for it with the fact that you're going to end up (in lots of cases), running non-base stuff, which will leave you somewhat vunerable. Maybe less vunerable than $linux, but I don't I still wouldn't say these discussions are irrelavent. If my machines go faster, I don't have to upgrade my hardware as often, I don't have to use as many machines, and I don't have to deal with horrible database scaling issues -- --
> I still hear people (mostly younger people) complain about OpenBSD performance I still hear people telling that OpenBSD is secure. It's of course true, but e.g. vnconfig uses quite weak crypto mechanism. I preffer to say OpenBSD is bugfree. Otherwise, it's still the best OS ever. -- merlyn Aberdeen Scotland
what is weak about vnconfig crypto?
old 64-bit blowfish?
First, it uses 128-bits, and second, the practical attacks against blowfish are what exactly? Third, if you care, use softraid.
> First, it uses 128-bits Already reading man page, thanks :-)
Oh, these arguments are rich! They never cease to crack me up. "So and so crypto cipher is weak...blah blah blah..." Show me the cluster of supercomputers than can break them in any kind of meaningful time frame and I *might* start to worry. Oh wait, I forgot about those super secret NSA ones... Please, give me a break... On Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:21 +0200, "Milan BartoE!" <merlyn500@gmail.com>
_Only_ 128 bits? It clearly needs more. More bits man, more bits! It's not about the number of bits. --
Before this thread gets outta hand . . . snicker . . . I just wanna say that oBSD is fun! It's not an OS that looks for trouble. Many OS;s sacrifice their open/free source principles in order to have many sheep at the trough (sp? . . trauff) In the spirit of the OP's question, tell your "inquisitive" freinds/clients that their questions do not make sense. If they want X, then this that and the other can make X a reality. Otherwise, they and those who feel it necessary to require "b'marks" need to . . . ummm . . settle down. . . In the end . . . especially with oBSD, we should not expect a markettiing scheme that tries to draw the typical humanities business owner (if there is such a thing). The product is 'as is'. . . no apologies. Theo, I apologise for taking you and your freinds for granted earlier (in the yesr). . . I appreciate you and your friends' time very much. BRAVO! -Neal P.s. -- If I may, can I decalre this thread over? P.s.s - of course not . . . let's hear it!
Well, I've heard that it needs to be mauve,because that has more RAM, otherwise it's a fabulous OS.
OpenBSD is not for you. Please go enjoy your apt repositories instead of posting to misc@
bullshit. i run way over a hundred openbsd machines. upgrades take me less than 5 minutes. maintainance is lower than an anything else I know. usually it's some 3rd party app that requires attention and not the OS. support timeline boo hoo. just backport the one or two patches yourself or - better - just fucking upgrade. it is trivial if your procedures so don't fucking do it, use releases and packages. -- Henning Brauer, hb@bsws.de, henning@openbsd.org BS Web Services, http://bsws.de Full-Service ISP - Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services Dedicated Servers, Rootservers, Application Hosting - Hamburg & Amsterdam
*OR* learn how to use environment variables and set your PKG_PATH & create an alias for pkg_find and get equivalent functionality. Lee
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Henning Brauer <lists-openbsd@bsws.de> So how does one remedy CVE-2009-0696 like that? From the web site: 007: RELIABILITY FIX: July 29, 2009 All architectures A vulnerability has been found in BIND's named server (CVE-2009-0696). An attacker could crash a server with a specially crafted dynamic update message to a zone for which the server is master. A source code patch exists which remedies this problem. Sounds like building from source is necessary to me. As does: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq10.html#Patches If there genuinely is something as easy as "yum update bind", then great. But if so, it doesn't seem to be documented, and this is the reason I haven't rolled out more OpenBSD boxen in the real world. I run OpenBSD on my own machines. But I'm with Cian here. Keeping up to date really is its Achilles heel compared to other OSes, and is holding it back for corporate use. Tet -- b It seems intuitively obvious to me, which means that it might be wrong.b -- Chris Torek
boo hoo. run one machine somewhere and make release. done. -- Henning Brauer, hb@bsws.de, henning@openbsd.org BS Web Services, http://bsws.de Full-Service ISP - Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services Dedicated Servers, Rootservers, Application Hosting - Hamburg & Amsterdam
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 5:37 PM, Henning Brauer <lists-openbsd@bsws.de> And that attitude is why OpenBSD will never be more than a hobby OS. Sigh. Tet -- b It seems intuitively obvious to me, which means that it might be wrong.b -- Chris Torek
Correction, a professional OS that requires its users to be professionals. Not a bunch of whining windows update people that have to call "IT" to launch excel. In case you hadn't noticed we are old school UNIX users that don't mind fixing whatever problem is at hand. Including writing code or fixing a bug. This is why in the olden days your IT department was worth something and wasn't a bunch of monkeys reading a script. It is exactly your attitude that has ruined the computer industry.
+1
Well said. -- Christiano Farina HAESBAERT Do NOT send me html mail.
OP Here. Wow. Did not mean to start this sort of discussion. I only wanted some suggestions on how to deal with critics of OpenBSD's performance that I run into on occasion who cite that old, outdated, silly article. Anyway, thanks for all the performance feedback. As to the others, in this thread, who find using or managing OpenBSD difficult, I'd say you're either using it for something it was not intended or lack the knowledge to administer it. You can fix the latter by learning more about OpenBSD (best man pages on the planet), but not the former. If you really want to run the latest version of Snort (or whatever) and you want it in binary form, then OpenBSD is not what you're looking for. Apt-get and the like are nice and convenient for less technical users who do not wish to configure and build from source, but claiming OpenBSD is deficient b/c it lacks suchs things is inappropriate IMO. Thanks OpenBSD. We've purchased a 4.6 mug and tee-shirt. Keep up the good work!
You have an odd definition of professional, and the kind of attitude that sounds like you haven't actually worked in the computer industry in a while. Generally, the computer industry is about providing services to end users. And things like easy updates, specialisation of labour and all of that kind of stuff have made us an awful lot better at taht than 'old school UNIX' ever was. But hey, if you want to pretend we all still live in the early 90s, feel free. I hope it works out well for you. OpenBSD's a wonderful OS, but it's lack of easy upgradability is a *disadvantage, not something to be proud of. And yes, there are good reasons why it doesn't exist, the linuxes do have massively more man power, and developers time *is* probably better spent on new features, rather than on packaging. Acting smug about your failings just makes you look like silly, however.
I think you're missing the point; marco was talking about the dumbing down of what's considered acceptible for being called a "professional"; in this case, mostly the fact that once you start presenting system administration as a series of buttons to push, you get button-pushing monkeys, not people who solve problems.
But come on Bret, that's what the industry WANTS.. you can PAY monkeys less! Push Butan....
...receive bacon lube
>> But come on Bret, that's what the industry WANTS.. you can PAY monkeys Keep it Sizzlin! (you can't hear it but I'm doing the little techno pelvic dance right now..)
And, thank God, I can't see it either .... -- Carson Harding - harding (at) motd (dot) ca
Just reminds me a quote: "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning." ~Author Unknown Teers, -- Daniel Bolgheroni FEI - Faculdade de Engenharia Industrial http://www.dbolgheroni.eng.br/mykey ASCII ribbon campaign ( ) against HTML e-mail X / \
No my friend. The computer industry is here to save money. Your description is about having the industry as a means to itself. Works fine. Too bad there are all those youtubers and twatters on the I update all my openbsd machines in less than 10 minutes including boot time. That is less time than it takes to download a linux kernel. Not sure what this upgradeability you are talking about. I patched in my years of openbsd use twice from source. Once for ssh and once for bind. I have no clue what you are on about. It is all perceived ease. Your argument has no practical merit.
I have been actively maintaining a firewall cluster and a VPN cluster of BSD system since 3.5. I have upgraded each system from a factory boot cd every 6 - 8 months. I have never had any problems due the to upgrade not once. I run a 4000 PC network in a 24x7 Health Care environment. There is nothing more reliable and straight forward than OBSD's upgrade procedure. Which reminds me .... time order 4.6
And increase value. And in a lot of cases to provide particular services directly to end users. Unless youtube exists merely to save money, in which case I'm obviously an idiot, and so are they, given that they could just switch Yeah. I hate it when normal people get some benefit from computing. We should Fine, you'd obviously gone to some effort to put a patching infastructure into place. I'm sure that's wonderful for you. Everyong going to the effort to put a seperate patching infastructure in place, and to manage seperate sets of packages and the like is retarded, given that we're all solving exactly the same problem. -- --
Increase value of what? I am not really sure if youtube is going to have any net value for humanity. It uses 50% of the world bandwidth to basically show america's funniest home videos. OMG did you see that, Timmy kicked himself in the balls!!!!one WITH A CAR!!!!! And if you didn't know it isn't turning a profit either. Hasn't ever and probably never will. However it has the potential to turn a profit Where benefit is defined as sharing with the world OMG I am on the pooper!! The "new" internet has spawned a whole generation of self important but not self reliant people. The TV was a fine tool for these tools. It was great that it only went Yeah my parching infrastructure it totally super duper complex. It uses complex things like "ftp" and "cvs" and the patch command. I mean it was awful to figure out. But since I am a nice guy I am going to share it with you. Download snapshot Try on throw away box Boot bsd.rd Run upgrade Reboot and run -or- On a fast machine: cvs -d path_to_cvs co src cd /usr/src make obj && make depend && make includes && make tags && make build Copy the necessary pieces to the other boxes OMG someone file a patent.
UNIX' ever was. Yes, buying shit loads of crappy solutions from any vendor without even understanding the basic concepts is not being retarded. Hey it If you had done your homework you would know that the early 90s is UNIX dark age. UNIX was never intentend to reach everyone, we despised intel and PC in the 80s mainly cause the architecture is plain lame, so stop whining and trying to change a 40 years old culture, or move to the so called "The New Hackers Culture", "The New Hackers Bullshit" if I may. Providing service to users ? what kind of world do you live, just because we expect the user to know better than the designer ? We provide mechanism not policy, policy dies, mechanism stays. Who the fuck uses a computer if not users ? Your definition of service is utterly flawed, in order to use the service UNIX provides you're Blah blah blah... -- Christiano Farina HAESBAERT Do NOT send me html mail.
Our Institute moved away from Linux servers always everwhere, just *because* of updates are unreliable. Very often we did an apt-get update or an yum bla, reboot, machine dead or fucked up otherwise. Ever upgraded from SLES10 to SP1->SP2->SP3? Good luck, on 50% of the SLES servers we had to *reinstall* or left them running unpatched. Great OS. By the way, we have >100 linux clients. Once a month, we do patching, because if we applied all patches in time, we would not do anything else anymore. We call it 'patch day'. Sounds familiar with what OS? Right. This Institute now runs >20 OpenBSD servers and I'll upgrade them all in half a day. Because I'm slow.
everyone is comparing apples and oranges here. linux is a bunch of packages. openbsd is base (and then probably some packages). when updating linux "the OS", one is still updating packages. openbsd, the system, is clearly easier and more consistent to upgrade. but updating packages on openbsd is more time consuming than on e.g. linux. so yes, when 4.6 comes out, i'll update a server in maybe 15 minutes with all its packages as well -- because 4.6 will come with packages. but if i were to update a package with a lot of dependencies in say 3 months because it has a vulnerability or reliability fixes, then i have to do the package dance myself. depending on the package this might be easy, or it might be hell. but it clearly takes more time and effort than in linux, this team just doesn't have the manpower to compete with that. and if you have a handmade inhouse solution to roll out a package like that for all your 1000 machines, great, you are earning your money as an admin. but calling people names because they are using an update infrastructure in place seems juvenile to me at best. bind was as special example because in linux it's just a package, and while it might be in openbsd as well, it is provided in base. and that brings up the theme of binary patching, and the archives are full of it. -f -- "fishing, stranger?" "no, just drowning worms."
OMG. Fall off chair and roll around laughing hysterically. You have no idea how funny that is. 'You' are not better at providing service, 'you' are better at the aforementioned hookers and blow component of user satisfaction. And thank god somebody is doing that work or I'd have no place to put all the bodies of the puling whining users who are convinced that starting excel means they have a clue. Doing actual tech work is still the province of the 'old school'. Easy updates on Windows and Linux. Giggling all the way to work to see how many thousand work stations and servers blew up after the latest SMS push.
Yes, buying shit loads of crappy solutions from any vendor without even understanding the basic concepts is not being retarded. Hey it If you had done your homework you would know that the early 90s is UNIX dark age. UNIX was never intentend to reach everyone, we despised intel and PC in the 80s mainly cause the architecture is plain lame, so stop whining and trying to change a 40 years old culture, or move to the so called "The New Hackers Culture", "The New Hackers Bullshit" if I may. Providing service to users ? what kind of world do you live, just because we expect the user to know better than the designer ? We provide mechanism not policy, policy dies, mechanism stays. Who the fuck uses a computer if not users ? Your definition of service is utterly flawed, in order to use the service UNIX provides you're Blah blah blah... -- Christiano Farina HAESBAERT Do NOT send me html mail.
Ignore my double posting, my mistake. -- Christiano Farina HAESBAERT Do NOT send me html mail.
Dont worry, it adds value to the intarwebs.
OpenBSD is built by the developers for the developers. The fact that you and I get to use it is a nice side effect of the developers releasing Well said. I enjoy the fact that I can install an OpenBSD machine, setup the relevant services for that machines purpose and not have to sit and push buttons and turn knobs all day. The machine does its job without the need for me to hold its hand.
To me it sound like OpenBSD is built by the developpers for the developpers, and also the rest of the world who need it for whatever purpose one can imagine.
Soooooo . . . close! Unless you can rationalize why the part after the comma = the part before it.
I will re-iterate my original statement. OpenBSD is created by the developers for the developers and any use that the rest of us get from the OS is a nice side effect of their generosity in releasing it as a completely free and unencumbered system, nothing more nothing less. No two ways about it. No need for rationalizing, only thing needed is for all 'non-developers' and 'non-contributors' who use it to be thankful and not be questioning of those that create this wonderful operating system.
That's nonsense. You can't beg for donations and CD sales, time and time again, and then turn around and tell the same people, that you're begging to give more, that what they want does not matter. "Your contributions are pathetic." I think something like that was recently posted to misc. Well, if what end-users want matters not to OpenBSD developers and what end-users give is "pathetic", then OpenBSD developers should not complain when end-users don't buy more CDs or donate more money. Can't have it both ways. I use and like OpenBSD, but nonsensical statements such as this need to stop, this is silly and it benefits no one.
On the contrary . . . it's people/users like you who feel that simply because they use and enjoy something, that their voice is worthwhile. The silliness is coming from you, sir. If you were paying for the "service," then perhaps. In this case, you just happen to use something that others develop for themselves. That's the difference. Just because something is made available to all does not mean that it is for all. I don't understand your comment about oBSD "begging" for donations. Recent posts about $$ have come from devs (that do not get paid) and laymen (that do not get paid). We like it enough to see it continue and monatary suppliments help. DO NOT DONATE IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO. Just like pbs, it'll likely be here tomorrow for our British comedy needs (you know who you are). theo@ is not and, as far as I've seen never, running a fundraiser. He certainly understands the situation he is in, but does not force his issues upon anyone. This has been his postion and to "beg" for donations is inconsistant with that postition; somehting he's aware of. The fact that devs happen to take our suggestions/comments seriously is NOT because they owe you/me/us anything. The fact that something is posted to this list, does not make it an official position/announcemnet from oBSD. I would and could go on further, but only if requested. Tom, I hope that you continue to enjoy oBSD. I will try to make sure that it is there for you every six months. Long Live Monty Python!
Ah, so you feel that instead of having a rigid set of goals and objectives, OpenBSD should blow whatever way public opinion pushes it at any particular moment, eh? Shall we have a logo design contest? An elected core team of Most Popular Developers? Five different network filtering systems because we don't have the guts to say to anyone, "sorry, we are dropping your old, inferior product, and focusing on the new and better product", because it might upset you and you might not give? I can assure you, this would not be what you recognize and love as OpenBSD. This would not be the OS obsessed with correctness and good design, it would be Yet Anothter WinLinNetFreeBSux. We can wrap it in all kinds of flowery language, but it boils down to this: One guy is in charge, he surrounds himself with a small number of other really smart people (and me). They build what THEY want and need to build, for work and FOR FUN. They make it available to anyone who wants it for just about any use they want to use it for. Not everyone needs or wants what OpenBSD produces, that's fine. No one forces you to use OpenBSD or OpenSSH or chroot your DNS or web server. If you find your wants and needs overlap with those of the developers, we ask you to help support the project. If you don't care about OpenBSD, you probably aren't reading this (well, we know a few people follow these lists out of a desire to stir shit, some people lack the intelligence and skills to have productive hobbies). If you use OpenBSD, obviously, you appreciate what the project produces and by implication, how it produces it. I absolutely do not believe you could have a warm, fuzzy project that produces something of the quality of OpenBSD. You want something "for the users"? Ok, here it is: contribute to the OpenBSD project "for the users". It isn't for the developers. Don't worry about the developers, they are all HIGHLY skilled people, they'll have no problem finding things to do with their spare time. ...
On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 7:54 PM, Nick Holland <nick@holland-consulting.net> wrote: <snip> Stallman *ducks*
pO DANNYM RADIOPEREHWATA OT 23-Sep-2009 21:21, Tom Smith End-user here. I would like to buy CD, t-shirt and donate the project. But, I have no enough money to do that. This is why I prefer to download ISO on dial-up with max speed 2.8 K/s for $4 per month, instead of buy CD. However, I would like to thank to developers for the most secure OS in the world, which one they allow me to use for free. This is the best donation, which I can give to. -- /Buzzer
Holy shit, you've still got monkeys in your IT department? Luxury! We're down to bathroom scum over here, since the outsourcing. .... Ken
+1 :)
So? I'm a software engineer by profession. But my OpenBSD work is a hobby. Still I have produced some of my finest work as a developer in OpenBSD. You are free to take our work and turn it into some corporate acceptable OS (whatever that means). We just won't do that for you, we concentrate on what's essential to *us*. The moment the OpenBSD turns into some coorporate thing, it probably will lose all attraction to me. I have enough coorporate things to do during my day job. -Otto
Yes? So? Not everyone has to have an ambition to take over the world. The developers do it as a hobby, for fun. Which ties into the OP. The answer to his question is "why?". //art
> boo hoo. run one machine somewhere and make release. done. Once you have a built release you can run upgrades everywhere from that release tarball. man release to figure out how to do that. Now you may ask, why don't we do that? We simply do not have the resources and time to devote racks of machines, developer time, and internet bandwidth to building stable somewhere for all architectures, and distributing it securely. Us (the developers) would rather spend our time improving the os and our resources at distributing it and making it better than expending a lot of effort because someone is too lazy to rtfm and patch something themselves. If you want push butan, get os, please go run windows 7 or OSuX.. you'll be much happier, as will we because the neediness of our user community goes down. The fact that you have to not be lazy to use OpenBSD is important to us. Unlike a commercial OS, or linux, we don't measure our success in how popular it is, or if we're going to replace the evil microsoft any time soon. we *WANT* needy lazy users to use those other OS's so we can concentrate on making something that works and is stable for people who really need it, like ourselves.
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man. -- Mark Twain Here, like so many other situations and places in this world, people are feeding for free (or nearly so) and bitching about the fare. Enough already.
I started doing this a couple years ago. But not for all architectures and I also must add that these are not 'official'. I'm not an OpenBSD developer, just some nut who thinks this might be useful for others. Sometimes I wonder why I keep doing it ;-) Maurice
[...] Well said. Recently, I introduced a friend to OpenBSD 4.5 through the CDs', and deliberately asked him to follow the install manual (he was firstly surprised to see only 4 pages) and go ahead and install. Within 30 minutes he came running out of the lab, with eyes sparkling and said -- "never ever have I seen such a small install manual, and an installation that goes through perfect as indicated in there". He manages a redhat ent linux farm, and is now trying to assess the stability of OpenBSD, so that he can cutover some of his linux boxes to OpenBSD. My personal experience tells me this -- OpenBSD is simple and elegant. Irrespective of what benchmarks tell you, they can never tell me anything about simplicity and as a result anything about elegance. So they are useless for me atleast. There is no point purchasing an Audi A6, when my 10 yr old Fiat does the same job, and does it well (reaches me in time - the additional time I buy due to Audi's speedup is not worth spending the additional $$ that it costs). Tradeoffs, tradeoffs,... -Amarendra
So when you do "yum update bind" how many people are you extending
trust to? Note that this isn't a rhetorical question, I'm actually quite curious
how people rationalize this aspect of binary updates.
When I apply a patch that I can read I'm pretty sure what I'm getting*.
-N
* If you haven't read it before you must read "Reflections on Trust":
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
Send me a fully licensed spirent and you get your network benchmarks for OpenBSD but I don't have the time nor the money to do a correct setup for benchmarks. I for myself will not publish flawed benchmarks that can't be correctly reproduced. I run tests for myself to check assumptions but not Funnily we try to make system not fall even under massive load. The best example is the dynamic RX DMA tuning and livelock prevention done with the help of MCLGETI(). On good systems packet floods exceeding the forwarding performance of the system will no longer kill or lock the system. Even the userland routing daemons will get enough CPU time to keep the sessions alive. The goals of OpenBSD do not include to be the fastest OS in the world. We try to solve performance issues quickly. The base system should be fast enough for reasonable setups. If it gets un-reasonable be prepared to invest some effort yourself and trust me you realize when you enter the un-resonable part of the scale.
Write a cgi or better apache module that outputs a static HTML hello-world page and see for your self. Sure this webserver would not be to useful but Sure, send me an implementation for sendfile() on OpenBSD and I will do I think the developers know how benchmarks work and how to interpret the results, we don't need a huge flamefest on misc@ to make us understand how In 95% of the cases that answer is correct. It sucks but it is true. Sure there are parts in OpenBSD that are far from optimal (threading and SMP for example) but I think those are known for people considering to use OpenBSD Yes, not everybody has 800Mbps of upstream traffic.
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 9:35 AM, Claudio Jeker <cjeker@diehard.n-r-g.com> Still, if it handles it well, it's a testament to the reliability of OpenBSD. I'm all for just shelving this argument - nobody's going to agree. -- Aaron Mason - Programmer, open source addict - Oh, why does everything I whip leave me?
I must disagree with that conclusion... I do agree with the shelving. *** NOTE *** Please DO NOT CC me. I <am> subscribed to the list. Mail to the sender address that does not originate at the list server is tarpitted. The reply-to: address is provided for those who feel compelled to reply off list. Thankyou. Rod/ --- This life is not the real thing. It is not even in Beta. If it was, then OpenBSD would already have a man page for it.
> performance issue. How do others defend OpenBSD in these conversations? I I don't defend. Just let everyone use what they want.
Firewall and mail server - may be. But desktop would not be so fine. 1) In X on OpenBSD 4.5 mouse cursor may freeze sometimes. On FreeBSD 4.11 (on the same PC) - never. 2) Please find and read following message: From: Hugo Villeneuve <harpagon@***> To: misc@openbsd.*** Subject: wscons don't generate keyboard sequences as defined in terminfo db for vt220 [was: Re: F1-F10, 'HOME', 'END' keys.] 3) Also try to find thread with subject '/usr/ports/audio/timidity' in ports@openbsd.*** archive. -- /4625
Doesn't happen for me... Did you ever report this? with information to reproduce it? I do not think so. -0- -- one of the people who'd be fixing it. -- The moving cursor writes, and having written, blinks on.
I'll consider about bug report. By the way, I did send a few reports to ports maintainers. Got no response for a long time. -- /4625
If they were of the quality of the bug "reports" you've made on misc@, it's no goddamn wonder they didn't respond.
I think your problem can be traced to the different default voices. btw, FreeBSD doesn't support multichannel audio. -- jakemsr@sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
I've test timidity with a different sound fonts and with the same Don't know do I really need multichannel. But I'm sure, I should boot FreeBSD-4.11 to listen midi files. -- /4625
this is the frst time you ever said anything about what patches you're using, which is why I never took your report seriously. I wonder if FreeBSD's patch-playmidi would make any difference. maybe you don't. but for me, multichannel audio is more important or you could use a less ancient midi player. -- jakemsr@sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
well, that patch sure looks like it's correcting an inopportune typo. but I'm not a timidity user. I'm not going to spend time trying to test that, because it's hard to test regressions if you don't know I like fluidsynth. -- jakemsr@sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
$ pkg_info -c fluidsynth Information for inst:fluidsynth-1.0.8p2 Comment: SoundFont2 software synthesizer $ -- jakemsr@sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
It would be nice to hope that there is exist good substitute for timidity, Well, I got it. Could you explain me how do you ran it? -- /4625
the way the manual says to. -- jakemsr@sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
You should probably stop posting about now, you're starting to make yourself look realy bad. paulm
Is it looks like joke? fluidsynth -ni Unison.sf2 beethoven_-_5th_simphony.mid fluidsynth: warning: Ignoring sample *KPianoB5: can't use ROM samples fluidsynth: error: Couldn't set libsndio audio parameters as desired Your are talking about unrelated topics, Paul. I do not care about how everything looks there and I did not ask your opinion about how I look... Good or bad - it is indifferent for me. By the way, absence of constructive reply starting to make you look really bad. -- /4625
your soundcard apparently can't do 48kHz 16-bit stereo. hmm ... all ac97(4) and azalia(4) cards can do that ... you're using FreeBSD 4.11 ... hmm I'm going to take a wild guess and suggest you try using '-r 44100' you've now complained about at least two "performance" issues, yet, with neither complaint, did you send a dmesg, despite having been pointed to instructions for reporting problems that tell you to include a dmesg. btw, I tried finding 'beethoven_-_5th_simphony.mid' to see if I could reproduce your problem or at least have some basic idea of what's going on. but I'll leave it at a "performance" issue. you're probably running a 486 with an ISA soundcard anyway. oh, wait. I found a dmesg: PR 6220. PII @ 349 MHz w/ sb@isapnp ok, now I can believe you may have a "performance" issue. PS do you really think that's the kind of system most people would use as a "desktop" in 2009? after all, this subthread started with you saying OpenBSD might not be suitable as a desktop system, because of your issue with timidity "performance". -- jakemsr@sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Jacob Meuser <jakemsr@sdf.lonestar.org> OK, that beats what I saw at work today. Someone sent me an email with a subject that said "Issue with ticket #12345" and a long thread inside (sexchange mails, what can I do?) I took a look at it, and one of my folks had already sent instructions on what to do, and closed it out. So I replied - did you do what we told you to do for issue ticket #12345? He then replies - oh, your folks already helped me solve issue #12345, I'm actually talking about ticket #98765. I went WTF? Am I a freaking mind reader? But I think this - 350Mhz general use cpu turned midi player may actually beat me out for stupidity of the day. He probably believes Microsoft and runs XP on a 486 too. -- http://www.glumbert.com/media/shift http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk "This officer's men seem to follow him merely out of idle curiosity." -- Sandhurst officer cadet evaluation. "Securing an environment of Windows platforms from abuse - external or internal - is akin to trying to install sprinklers in a fireworks factory where smoking on the job is permitted." -- Gene Spafford learn french: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30v_g83VHK4
You can get close though! http://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm ;-) -B
Thank you for advice. Now I've got sound. However, I must say, timidity on FreeBSD 4.11 produce more fluently sound. Especially when speech together I affirm that it is timidity on FreeBSD 4.11 display more performance than timidity or fluidsynth both on OpenBSD 4.5. -- /Buzzer
your device doesn't seem to support what fluidsynth requested. Try using ``-r 48000'' or whatever is appropriate for your device. Alternatively, use aucat(1) in server mode (ie ``aucat -l'' or whatever). -- Alexandre
IMHO this discussion is taking the wrong direction. I use MIDI a lot, exclusively on OpenBSD; both for playback, recording, editting and basic real-time "filtering". Feel free to ask for hints and to explain what you try to do with MIDI and -- most importantly -- with what MIDI hardware. Either privately or on the list, if you feel there's something others should know. To quickly summarize where OpenBSD is: - harware synths, keyboards, control surfaces etc... just work, and are fully usable for real-time stuff since few years. After all MIDI is a dumb serial port. - opl(4), pcppi(4) are almost useless and seem unmaintained, I have plans to work on them (or anything based on src/sys/dev/midisyn.h). - ports/audio/fluidsynth is almost usable as a real-time synth. There's a recent patch on ports@, making it look as hardware to MIDI players. It works, but is not as good as hardware synths, especially for real-time performance. I use hardware most of the time. - ports/audio/timidity: it's good for MIDI rendering. I'd love your issues to get solved, but I have much more urgent/fun things to work on. I use it sometimes to render .wav files. - midiplay(1) is in base. It works only with hardware, because it uses the (obsolete) sequencer(4) interface; this is being worked on, though. - ports/audio/midish works in all cases and does much more than midiplay(4), that's the tool i'm working on the most. HTH -- Alexandre
of course, I have absolutely _no_ plans to work on them... ...other than possibly removing them if one day they block development. sorry for the typo. -- Alexandre
I'd like nothing especially, just listen classical music in midi. sb1 at isapnp0 "Creative SB AWE64 PnP, CTL0045, , Audio" port 0x220/16,0x330/2,0 x388/4 irq 5 drq 1,5: dsp v4.16 midi1 at sb1: <SB MPU-401 UART> audio0 at sb1 "Creative SB AWE64 PnP, CTL0022, , WaveTable" at isapnp0 port 0x620/4 not configured -- /4625
On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:59:43 -0700 (PDT) I dunno. I use OBSD on desktops where stability and security are issues. Dhu
I've been using OpenBSD as my main desktop OS since 2.9 - it rocked then and it is awesome now. Fred PS YMMV - but for me it is far more stable, flexible, reliable, secure, and fun to use. PPS Thanks to the OpenBSD team I have an excellent desktop OS that I can also run servers with.
I told once - problem with timidity still exist yet. This why I should boot FreeBSD-4.11 to listen classical music. However, when this one problem and problem with Fkeys will be fixed, I will be the first person who will say - "OpenBSD - the best in the world desktop OS!" -- /4625
