- no sendfile implementation to accelerate web servers
- ancient userland pthread implementation
- worst SMP implementation of any mainstream OS
- no unified buffer cache
- no working TRIM support
- no 802.11n support
- video card drivers aging, ~3 years behind mainstream
- no adobe flash support / hackarounds
The only thing I really miss is PF.
Indeed, being worked on with rthreads.
> - worst SMP implementation of any mainstream OS
There's slow progress to push back the kernel biglock.
> - no unified buffer cache
Very few people have a justifyable need for a synchronous cache between read()/write() and mmap().
> - no working TRIM support
Is available in -current, not sure about this release.
> - video card drivers aging, ~3 years behind mainstream
OpenBSD is doing quite well compared to the other BSDs. Intel and Amd graphic options are supported, depending on chipset, OpenGL works out of the box. KMS is being worked on from what I hear.
Nvidia and Adobe, well... they are a cancer and in a perfect world, would go bankrupt for their behaviour.
There is support for kernel threads in the form of a flag on rfork(2). The golang port uses this. The pthreads library is still the shitty userland one though.
OpenBSD is great because the man pages aren't absolute shit like Linux and networking is so much better. Linux wifi drivers are absolute crap in comparison.
Configure WPA on OpenBSD: ifconfig <interface> nwid <ssid> wpa wpakey <wpakey> up; dhclient <interface>
The equivalent on linux is left as an exercise...
It's still a pretty usable desktop though. The new ACPI support is amazing and a completely new implementation, rather than being built on the reference implementation everyone else used.
> no 802.11n support
That's going to require some work on the 80211 layer.
The 80211 guy retired so there's little chance of that happening.
wpa_passphrase <ssid> <wpakey> > /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
wpa_supplicant -i<interface> -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -B
dhclient <inteface>
On a linux system 'man ifconfig' doesn't even mention iwconfig or wpa_supplicant.
I think that makes it a little easier to learn how to do it.
I'm willing to wager that 10 years from now - configuring an interface will still be done through ifconfig.
For example?
I like Linux in practice, but one must admit that BSDs' manuals are way better.
Linux kernel stuff is covered by the linux man project. This is run by Kerrisk, who is a good communicator - _The Linux Programming Interface_ reads like Stevens but is richer in practical advice.
But if you go to the man page for something like awk or bash or grep (the common use-case - where you need a quick reference), they're maintained by the team who write the tool, or - often enough - not maintained by the team. There are undocumented flags, often the doc only tends to make sense if you already understand the internals of the tool. GNU tool man pages are generally obtuse.
BSD and plan 9 have much better man systems. Unless a linux distribution comes along and makes a conscious effort to solve GNU/linux doc, the man system available to linux users will always suck - it's structural.
And this is where you are doing it wrong. For GNU tools, the man page is just a stub. The official documentation is maintained in the form of "info" pages.
Now, you may consider this obtuse (I sure do), but it doesn't mean there is no documentation.
Case in point: check the output of lsmod. How many of those modules have a corresponding manpage? My guess: zero.
Same question for a BSD system (with lsmod changed to kldstat or whatever): all of them.
"""FreeBSD 8.X and prior is using the same version of PF as OpenBSD 4.1. FreeBSD 9.X and later is using the same version of PF as OpenBSD 4.5.""" [1]
They all suffer from the good enough but not mainstream enough problem, i.e. official Nvidia drivers that are not officially supported.
To hell w/ NVidia. If they won't play ball, I'll spend my money on an arguably slightly lesser performing product that is more open.
Though, currently the linux emulation layer in CURRENT has a change that broke the linux Flash binary. I've been flash-free for about 2 weeks now. I can't decide if that's a curse or liberation. Otherwise, I personally think FreeBSD is a mighty fine desktop OS. ZFS is really nice.
It made for an amazing mailserver last I tried it though. I used 3.4 on an ancient P4 with maybe 256MB of RAM an 8GB hard drive. Turns out that was way more computer than it needs, and it was so stable I began to think of it the same way I think of my router.
And I don't think the users of other BSDs have much need for 3D acceleration..
Where would people find this out? Has anyone listed the BSDs and said which task each was meant for? Are there any good BSD-to-BSD comparisons being done now?
NetBSD - portability. OpenBSD - security. FreeBSD - performance and usability.
With that said, no, that definitely does not mean that each flavor can't stand out in the other two fields. Heck, I used OpenBSD as my desktop OS for 2 years on and off, so I know very well how capable it is "off field", and looking at the most popular flavor in BSD-powered server parks we see FreeBSD instead of OpenBSD contrary to what logic might try to dictate.