I forgot to ask earlier: how much "worse" is OpenBSD's SMP implementation than Linux's/everyone else's?

> SELinux was released in 1998. Linux was totally usable back then. I've been using it since 1995.

Oh, okay then. Nice...

> I've never heard anyone claim lacking SMP support being a feature.

https://www.mirbsd.org/about.htm:

> Controversial decisions are often made differently from OpenBSD; for instance, there won't be any support for SMP in MirOS.

Not really sure how to interpret that ^ but it sounds like a deliberate stand to me, like it's a feature. I totally get there's some context there, but I'm not sure what exactly it is.

> In the case of OpenBSD it was just that nobody got around to it until much later.

Mmm.

> The project never had even close to the number of developers as Linux or FreeBSD.

I see. I (genuinely) wonder why.

> Back in the 90s OpenBSD focused on code audit and fixing bugs rather than adding features. I found it most useful as a firewall and nameserver because it came with ipf and they included BIND with chroot support built in.

Interesting.

> Installation was dead simple. As long as you stuck to well supported hardware, it just worked out of the box.

Ha :P

How good was hardware support?

> Back then SMP meant you had multiple physical CPUs, and that wasn't generally necessary for systems dealing with 100mbit interfaces.

Right. That makes sense.

> If you needed to deal with a lot of traffic you had to get real routers because the PC wasn't great at handling tons of interrupts.

TIL, so that's why...

I'm curious where I can learn more about interrupts (and the latest developments there), incidentally - I have far too little knowledge about hardware than I would like.

> In 2000 or 2001 the author of ipf decided to "clarify" his license, asserting that it could not be shipped with patches. OpenBSD deleted it from the tree and pf was born.

* Shakes head *

> They also forked SSH over licensing issues in 1999, but at the time there wasn't any great benefit to using it over the original version.

How'd they manage to fork it? Was the old license fork-compatible?

> Starting in the early 2000s OpenBSD added a lot of really useful networking tools. The carp and pfsync interfaces let you run redundant firewalls very easily. Support for syncing the dhcpd state was added. For managing wireless networks hostapd. For load balancing tasks relayd. VPN setup was simplified greatly with ipsecctl.

I see, I get the impression they want to make an awesome router that's resilient to attack.

And then I look at the fact that OpenBSD is the only BSD advertising working hibernation support... and I get really confused about what, exactly, OpenBSD is trying to do/be :P

> They added privsep to OpenSSH. They created OpenNTPD in response to many ntpd vulnerabilities. They made buffer overflow protections the default. They reduced privileged programs left and right. And everything remained simple with accurate man pages.

Nice. Especially the manpages thing...

> So SMP support was lacking? Not such a big deal in exchange for a system that just worked.

Mmm.

> The problem is when you need to run a big file server, database server, web server, etc. For such uses having good SMP helps. Having ZFS helps.

Yep.

> Having packages for the boatload of dependencies your shiny new web framework requires is critical.

Yep :(

> And you want binary updates, which OpenBSD doesn't officially have.

...I can't say I like juggling source-level updates (never found Gentoo appetizing, at least), especially in a virtualized environment.