alt Hacker NewsSo you don't like OpenBSD, but you do like Ubuntu?
This person seems like they know wht they are talking about and given it serious thought, but I cannot fathom how you could make such a conclusion today.
Replies
EliteGadget • yesterday at 10:30 PM
It appears they have different requirements for those machines. They state the Ubuntu machines are for non-firewall applications. Ubuntu and Debian can configured relatively easily for a number of workstation and server roles.
Also many IT professionals that have used Linux will be familiar with a Debian or a Debian derivative such as Ubuntu. That simply isn't the case with OpenBSD.
I recently installed OpenBSD on my old laptop to try it out and I found it difficult even though I used to use it at University back in the late 2000s.
If they're concerned about performance, yeah. OpenBSD doesn't do the basics that you need to get the most out of your SMP hardware; there's no way to set cpu affinity at least from userland, and it's clear that this sort of work is not a priority for OpenBSD; it's not easy work, but FreeBSD has done it. Beyond CPU affinity, you also need your network structures setup to reduce lock contention, things like fine grained locks, hashed subtables and/or "lockless" tables, configuring the NICs as close as possible to one queue per core and keeping flows on the same queue which is pinned to a single core so that the per flow locks never contend and don't bounce between cores.
Ubuntu/Linux do have reasonable performance, but I think they prefer PF firewalls, so that makes Linux a non-option for firewalls.
Personally, I don't really care for PF, but it offers pfsync, which I do care for, so I use it and ipfw... but I need to check in, I think FreeBSD PF may have added the hooks I use ipfw for (bandwidth limits/shaping/queue discipline).