- Is there a significant amount of people with high security standards and an interest in SGI workstation hardware?
- What about people who have high security standards and Sharp Zaurus hardware?
If these groups aren't as important, as say, ARM and x86 users, perhaps it could be worth dropping some of these platforms?
On a regular basis, we find real and serious bugs which affect all
platforms, but they are incidentally made visible on one of the
platforms we run, following that they are fixed. It is a harsh
reality which static and dynamic analysis tools have not yet resolved.I think Theo could probably thin down the cluster and still be good but maybe I'm wrong and he'll show up with examples that require all of that hardware. That would be interesting because in our case we've sorted out the problems and rarely see things blow up on the RISC boxen.
Personally, I do wish OpenBSD could somehow regain the popularity it once had and that support for modern hardware like 10GBE and scaling PF throughput w/ multi-core CPUs would improve. I don't know what it would take to bring people back.
If it's worse for the rest of the ecosystem, there's a point.
I'd be interested to hear whether or not this is the case from people closer to such a condition, though (ie: OpenBSD, NetBSD, ???).
This is like saying "I don't care if my arcade goes out of business, I'm going to keep the power hungry cabinets alive even though they only get used once every 3 years."
If there is an argument that maintaining this will somehow improve security overall and not just on ancient hardware then I would love to see it. But if the Devs working on it could care less of what the rest of us think, then maybe those Devs should pay their electricity bills to support their toy platforms because I could care less about what they think too ...
Then again, it's possible that emulation could surface other edge case issues. That's completely orthogonal to the value of non-emulated archaic architectures for this purpose, however.
Some of the architectures also have different endianess and incredibly complicated peripherals to the cost effective host machines as well meaning that it's actually more power efficient to run native. A headless 100MHz VAXstation for example draws less power than the equivalent host that would be required to provide a full, accurate emulation with peripherals. These aren't arcade machines.
Portability issues is where real hardware benefits. It's where you have battles of unusual register sizes, endianess, host/network order differences, different memory models and memory protection, different performance characteristics, different timings and different exploits.
Unless the emulation is 100% accurate, including timing, which is a really difficult thing to do (look at the effort MAME goes to), then the benefits over real hardware is moot.
Emulators are also expensive to write due to the above, have their own bugs and don't always recreate the bugs in the real hardware (which are sometimes exploitable).
Also, using emulated hardware could cut down the usage of the real pieces, which could then be better studied and preserved. Doing less builds on vintage hardware is, actually, a good idea.
Sounds good to me. Many times (actually most times) I have no need for a "desktop" metaphor on my screen in order to get things done. I actually get more done big jobs done faster without the desktop metaphor in the way.
"... the devs working on them probably could care less what the rest of us think."
That's what makes them so special.
Perhaps in the long run the most "powerful" and sought after computers will not be the ones with the latest chips, but the ones that the user has the most knowledge of and control over.
Can you imagine the old-timer reminiscing: "Remember when computers didn't have backdoors built-in?" or "Remember when you did not have to pay for a license to write programs for hardware you bought?"
http://www.openbsd.org/sgi.html http://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html http://www.openbsd.org/loongson.html
A mips32 port would also be very desirable for all those shitty little routers with their ancient Linux kernel, but sadly nobody is working on that at the moment.
So, should the network and firewall OS that many people claim OpenBSD is, slash its support for MIPS devices?
But OpenBSD could be testing on an embedded MIPS development device at any data center they want.
Sony Bravia EX series televisions are MIPS and Linux based for example.
MIPS SoC licensing is less expensive than ARM licensing at the smaller volumes inherent in low-end routers (.vs phones and tablets).
"I really love how we keep getting advice. Anyone want to suggest we hold a bake sale?"
He clearly says things like "that's not up for discussion", "I'm not going into details", etc.
If anyone ever truly deserved the title BDFL...
What OpenBSD foundation really needs is a tactful and charismatic person to act as firewall and pf between Theo and the people with overflowing bank accounts, who are more accustomed to dealing with obsequious salesdroids than a person who is not only ten times smarter than their entire golf group put together, but also so aware of it that he cannot hide how much of a waste of time it is for him to suck up to any one of them, no matter how much he could use the cash.
Do you think Apple would have gone anywhere if Wozniak was the one talking to all the investors?
Not that I don't understand those feelings. I've spent enough time lurking on openbsd-misc to have seen Theo and friends be beastly. But never without some provocation. And one might wish better impulse control on any number of online personalities.
(And if you find this rude, note that I'm not involved with OpenBSD -- not even on the mailing list anymore -- so blame me, not 'the OpenBSD community'.)