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Comment by papsosouid | Hacker News Reader

I've been out of the "paying attention to unix stuff" world for a long time now, but back in the 2.8-3.8 times I followed openbsd related news very closely. It seemed in that time period that openbsd usage was growing rather quickly, and lots of people were talking about it. Having just come back now, it seems as though all that growth has vanished. The mailing lists are very quiet, undeadly is practically dead, nobody is talking about openbsd anymore at all. Is it just that people ran out of things to say, or did everyone leave for one reason or another?

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I think it's more that OpenBSD has always been aimed at "infrastructure" tasks - it chugs away as a router or firewall with aplomb. The core is very mature, thus most development is on refinements, not entirely new features.

It might be better to follow the papers/presentations given here that detail what work is being done:

http://www.openbsd.org/papers/

Additionally, undeadly seems to be, well... more dead than usual. I wonder if this is just based on waning interest from the website maintaner than OpenBSD slowing down.

I'm a bit curious as to who uses *BSDs these days. At one point I knew of at least a few with copies of FreeBSD, but these days most of my acquaintances, social & professional, use OSX or some Linux flavor. As far as servers go, I haven't seen one in the wild in quite some time.

This is of course highly anecdotal, but even on the distrowatch page hit rankings FreeBSD ranks below distros I've never even heard of (Zorin, SolusOS) at #19. OpenBSD is down in the 70's. On a complete tangent, I was also surprised to find Mandriva well in the 40's. [1]

What is the community & ecosystem like these days?

[1] http://distrowatch.com/

I'm not sure what you mean by "these days". Most people used linux back then too. People who use BSDs are generally people who care about quality and simplicity, and who don't like having to learn a new replacement for a core component every few weeks.

I run freebsd or OSX, basically for the aesthetic. FreeBSD is the least annoying of the OS's I have run (never tried OpenBSD), and most of the stuff I want compiles on it, though not as well as Linux stacks.

Distrowatch only counts distros that Distrowatch users click on, rather than actual popularity.

I wouldn't go on there and click Ubuntu or FreeBSD, because I know what they are and have no real need to view their Distrowatch pages. But my curiosity might lead me to click on Zorin or SolusOS because, like you, I've never heard of them.

The Apache Software Foundation (you might have heard of them ;) runs their servers on FreeBSD.

NetFlix runs some (all?) of their servers on FreeBSD.

Google uses FreeBSD for their network search applicance (for corporate intranets or whatever). They also just announced their funding of the Capsicum security framework project for FreeBSD (and later, a port to Linux).

The Weather Channel uses FreeBSD to power their network appliances that render the forecasts for local cable networks.

NetApp and Juniper Networks use FreeBSD for their networking gear.

There are more examples here if you want to read them:

http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/testimonials

The FreeBSD Foundation also has a list of donors:

http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors

The FreeBSD forums are reasonably active and very friendly, you should check them out if you want to learn more (or have more questions about *BSDs in general):

http://forums.freebsd.org/

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EDIT: I forgot one; VeriSign apparently uses FreeBSD enough that they just started their own BSD-related conference:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2013-Ap...

Also, Netflix and Yahoo are pretty big users. I used to use BSD on my personal machines just because I prefer their approach to things and the documentation. I now use Linux just because my day job practically requires it.

edit: And regarding GP's surprise about Mandriva - Mageia is a community fork and is #2 - the Mandrake users I knew all switched to Mageia.

Yahoo has been moving away from FreeBSD for a long time. In 2011 they said that 75% of their servers run on Linux, the rest on FreeBSD.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/yahoo-the-linux-compan...

Oh yeah, I remembered another one:

HN runs on FreeBSD! (At least, the old server was FreeBSD. I don't know what the new server is running).

To add to that list, there's also pfsense: http://www.pfsense.org/ a FreeBSD based distribution for building routers which uses the pf firewall, originally from OpenBSD. I know a number of small companies, my own included, which use it and there's even a book written about it!

I'd hazard a guess that there are similar projects based on BSD floating around for various other uses too.

At least all the Netflix web servers run on Linux.

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/2013/...

However their Open Connect network runs on FreeBSD.

https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect

Linux popularity with IaaS and PaaS providers has a lot to do with it.

Support for the BSD crowd at AWS pretty much is non-existent (they are working on it and making progress, though, with FreeBSD). Rackspace has some support, but only for FreeBSD and with some limitations.

Most of the PaaS players use Linux under the hood because they rely on AWS under the hood.

I'd love to hear about IaaS or PaaS players who use BSD, though.

I run FreeBSD on my data center servers. Works pretty well. I think with some adaptation I could run Ubuntu Server equally well.

Not sure if this is the reason but I think OS development was just much more exciting back then and more people were into it. Now people focus a lot more on the web. Some people left OpenBSD and forked it to make Bitrig, not sure how much that affected their development speed.

Yeah, I wasn't sure how much of that is my perception vs actual reality. I don't find unix fascinating and interesting any more, so I have a hard time judging whether that is skewing my perception of how much discussion and interest there seems to be from other people.

On the other hand, openbsd has no xen support and ec2 and other xen based providers are hugely popular now. I wonder how much that has affected things. I ran everything on openbsd back then, and now that I am getting back to doing some sysadmining, it appears openbsd isn't even an option for a lot of people.

5.3 gives support for the virt- paravirtualized interfaces provided by KVM and others:

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=virtio&sekt...

In earlier releases it supported the T-series Sparc64 logical CPU partitioning.

Neither of those things address the issue. A huge portion of the "people who will be installing a unix system" market are using EC2 instead of hardware. That cuts the potential userbase for openbsd down significantly.

OpenBSD fares no worse than Windows under Xen - both work just fine under HVM.

Can you install whatever OS you want on EC2 windows instances?

Yes, but you still end up paying the additional costs for the Windows licenses (even if you're not using them).

Colin Percival (cperciva here on HN) maintains up-to-date FreeBSD AMIs for EC2, based on the Windows instances:

http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/

Now I am confused. I started looking into this, and Amazon claims they are not using HVM for windows instances, they are using a PVM driver. So in that case, running "windows" instances wouldn't help. But then, why are those freebsd amis intended for "windows" instances?

Edit: nevermind, the PVM drivers they were talking about are just to speed up IO, windows instances do have to be HVM.

The perception of OpenBSD's usage was always low. OpenBSD was always about network infrastructure and simple, super solid servers. It's never something you write blog posts about because of fancy bleeding edge setups. The chance is high that your packets travel through several OpenBSD boxes while surfing the web. Also virtualization was never a topic for OpenBSD[0] - it is not a use case for such a system.

[0] http://kerneltrap.org/OpenBSD/Virtualization_Security

"x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of this brand new pile of shit. You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes." -- Theo de Raadt

It seems like you didn't read my post. The perception of openbsd usage was not low, that's the point. OpenBSD was virtually unheard of it when it forked from netbsd, but in the days of the ipf -> pf replacement, openbgpd being developed, etc there was tons of blog posts, mailing list traffic, etc about openbsd.

Your link about virtualization is about people absurdly thinking that virtualization buys them security. He said nothing about virtualization being "not a use case for openbsd". You do know openbsd has explicitly added drivers to support running under virtualization right?

A lot of open source os caught up in the security field, making the choice of OpenBSD less interesting because it supports less hardware.

I never used openbsd because it is secure, I used it because it is the least horrible OS I've tried. Poorly supporting more hardware is not very important to me, supporting the major hardware well is far more valuable.

OpenBSD hardware is in the state where Linux was ten years ago - you buy/build a machine that contains the hardware that OpenBSD supports well.

That is still the state linux is in. The difference is with openbsd, 99% of hardware is supported, and the 1% has no driver. In linux, 99% of hardware is supported, and the 1% has a buggy broken driver that will crash your kernel. Buying dodgy hardware is a bad idea regardless of your OS.

OpenBSD will run on almost everything, just the kernel does not contain binary blobs in order to support absolutely everything. You can if you want download non free firmware and install it yourself painlessly if the installer doesn't automagically find your drivers. I have yet to find a machine where I've had to do this though, since I usually buy no-name Taiwanese hardware which is always supported by *BSD because the manufacturers give out hardware documentation to them

>OpenBSD will run on almost everything, just the kernel does not contain binary blobs in order to support absolutely everything.

Not running with 3D acceleration with nVidia video hardware is a big stopping point. Yes, it's not their fault, but that's not running on "almost everything".

I used OpenBSD a lot ten years ago but I don't anymore. Two things have changed: OpenGL and filesystems. I use Linux on GUI machines because it has good GPU support. I use FreeBSD on servers because it has ZFS.

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