Solaris adopting OpenBSD's pf

But, I might actually want to try it on Mac OS X. I've been working on making our installer work on Mac OS X with Mac Ports, but that's been pretty rough (though mostly not due to Mac Ports problems...Mac OS X is simply not an acceptable substitute for UNIX or Linux and the documentation for server-oriented stuff is either non-existent or woefully out of date).

The one thing nailing us to Oracle is proprietary vendorware we utterly rely upon ... and that's ramping up its Postgres support. Which we will be diving upon with great glee.

That does seem to be Oracles' go-to sales metaphor.

SmartOS, as noted in another comment, is not a general purpose OS. It seems to have the most convincing story behind it for why you might choose it over Linux (but, it hasn't convinced me to do so). And, it has perhaps the largest organization behind it (Joyent).

Honestly, though, they all seem to be niche products or projects. There just isn't the kind of large community one would need to compete with Linux or even the BSDs. If it were a community that was growing, it would be less of an issue, but everyone involved seems to be old-school Solaris geeks who just want to keep working on what they know. Which is fine, and I hope it goes well for them. But, it doesn't look like the future (once again, I think SmartOS has the most compelling story for IllumOS having some small piece of the future).

For more general purpose servers, I think the current leader is OmniOS.

The only place I've ever seem Illumos mentioned is in the ZFS community as a OS where ZFS is fully supported and fully integrated.

It seems like the majority of the ZFS crowd prefers running FreeNAS, NAS4Free or ZOL instead. So the only place I've ever seen Illumos mentioned, it still seems like a niché product.

The specific market I care about is web application service and development. And, in that market Solaris is so close to dead that it doesn't even matter if it's still breathing (unless you develop with Java against an Oracle database).

This is relevant because Sun and Solaris backed by Oracle databases owned the first generation of the web. They've lost it, and are exhibiting no effort to regain it, or even hold the last remaining bits of the market they still have.

And, I think it's relevant that so few people know Solaris. I'm reasonably comfortable with it, as I cut my teeth in the sysadmin world when Sun systems still showed up now and then. But, it's been more than a decade since I've seen a Sun in the wild. Lack of new developers and new IT folks working with Solaris systems virtually guarantees it will continue to become less popular. Nobody starting a new web or mobile app thinks, "I know, I'll buy a bunch of Sun servers!"

So, I think you're arguing that Solaris is "good", while I'm arguing that it is irrelevant. We can both be right.

Except about this:

"The pkg system is well thought out."

That's hilarious.

Given how they're treating Solaris, and the lack of resources they are devoting to it, I would wager that it is no longer the case.

Frankly, I'm surprised at the lack of care Oracle seems to exhibit toward Solaris. When the acquisition happened, I assumed the worst for most elements of Sun's business, particularly their Open Source efforts, but I didn't think they'd let Solaris just die, which seems to be what they're doing.

I have been involved UNIX system administration and development for 20+ years. It has never been this lonely in the Solaris community. All of the Open Source packaging projects are effectively dead, due to lack of volunteer. While there used to frequently be Solaris instructions for most Open Source stuff, none of it those docs have been updated in 5-10 years, and nothing new has supported Solaris in a similar time span.

It may just be that Solaris is a wasteland in the space that I care about (web service, primarily). Maybe there are niche markets where Solaris doesn't look like a completely ridiculous choice compared to Linux.

We probably live in different multiverse universes. Where I am, OSX has really become the OS of choice by people doing tech work in industry/enterprise. I see glowing apples everywhere.

The Apple in academia, media meme feels like a Rick Astley video on repeat decade after decade.

In this post, you rightly call out Reyk Floeter for being so butt-hurt about if_trunk. It's not like anyone in OpenBSD sits around crediting Garrett Wollman for writing the if_vlan driver that I ported, or that anyone credits me for various improvements before porting to NetBSD, or that anyone credits Reyk for the if_vxlan driver, and so on. Why? Because NOBODY FUCKING CARES. If someone cares, they'll look at the revision history.

So, you said something that I generally agree with. But then you also say "It clearly shows that OpenBSD’s “pf” isn’t anywhere near as fast (even on a single CPU) as the other popular firewalls." You put quotes around pf, like it's laughable, despite it being the definitive implementation!

What you miss, is that FreeBSD pf (compared to OpenBSD pf) isn't keeping up. It's missing features, and it's slow. Maybe NPF is the true winner here. FreeBSD's pf is not.

I run 10GbE Myricom cards, one of the few OpenBSD NIC drivers that isn't part of the giant lock. I do 10GbE NAT across multiple boxes for my network. Right now, OpenBSD is at a point where I won't need to upgrade hardware for some years, as performance is simply increasing, incrementally, to where I'll be doing NAT and routing across all cores as my traffic load increases. (Now that's Just-In-Time technology :)

Perhaps it's sad to people like you that OpenBSD has lagged so far behind in areas like this. For me, it's not sad at all, it is not only fun, but the overall system is so much better than FreeBSD could ever be, I have no regrets. It's very, very nice. Within two years I think we'll see huge performance gains on OpenBSD's networking code under SMP, and FreeBSD will be left behind because of arrogance like this.

Now, pfSense has a particularly bad and slow web interface. In fact, it has gotten so bad over the years, it can't even run (in any usable sense) on hardware that you used to sell for the better part of a decade. I don't understand why you don't spend your resources to fix your house, instead of criticizing people who are fixing their own.

Anyhow, I'm not referring to the OpenBSD performance improvements being a reason to port it over. You're right: it isn't an issue for FreeBSD. However, it benefits FreeBSD if the version of pf used is simply OpenBSD pf with SMP support and a few other bits because that means that means less stuff to maintain.