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Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

Read these claims with a pretty big asterisk. Implementation quality of HBSD features is often poor or very poor. https://www.fabiankeil.de/gehacktes/hardenedbsd/ is just one example. Specifically some of the changes made to "harden" the system are pretty dubious and introduce new bugs, possibly security relevant, that did not previously exist. No one runs or pen tests HBSD. It's even more niche than OpenBSD.

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Self promotion / advertisement should always be read with a _big_ *. What should probably not be read with a _big_ * is their roadmap end: 2021...

https://hardenedbsd.org/content/roadmap

With small projects, websites tend to be updated infrequently. On the other hand, there seem to have been 11 commits to the main project repo today: https://groups.google.com/a/hardenedbsd.org/g/src-commits-al...

These are all or mostly all just automated sync from upstream FreeBSD.

A positive scenario for forks is when the original project incorporates downstream changes that were positive.

Could FreeBSD implement some of the security features identified by HardenedBSD?

Could implement some of the features (even if off by default), but probably not by using the HBSD diffs.

I can just think of so many better things to do than to write online arguing which BSD implementations of features is better.

Write online how Linux distributions of features are better?

If anything, that's much more pointless. The biggest difference between linux distros is what package manager and init systems they use by default. BSDs develop and maintain their own kernels and userspace, so there are actual non-cosmetic differences between them.

Could you point me to some of the current changes that have made the system buggy? If HardenedBSD's features do introduce bugs, they should be fixed.

Your example is 9 years old (2015) when the project was less than 1 year old:

https://hardenedbsd.org/content/about

It also sounds like the person wants to promote his own "ElectroBSD", but just in the form of a patch-sets because of "unresolved license issues" he reallyreally wants his GPL-Code in BSD:

https://www.fabiankeil.de/gehacktes/electrobsd/

The date really doesn't matter, I promise. It's representative of the overall quality. And HBSD has been defunct/inactive for some of those 9 years, possibly the majority of them -- the 2nd developer left 5 years ago, for example.

HardenedBSD has never been defunct or inactive.

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