OpenBSD 5.1 Released

[kraftman]

It's better to do neither on a Desktop. Windows doesn't kill anything, it enlarges the page file. Much better than OOM roulette.

I forget to add Linux can also use a swap file and enlarge it automatically:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Swap#Swap_file

[brad0]

While in Linux we have:

• GNOME 3.4
• KDE 4.8.3
• Xfce 4.10
• Mozilla Firefox 12
• LibreOffice 3.5
• Mono 2.10.8 (I'd rather not have this POS)
• Chromium 18

So in Linux we have the latest and greatest of everything, BSD as always is 10 years behind in everything they produce.

With the exception of KDE but that's not having KDE 4 at all, OpenBSD has all the same software too. What was your point again?

[LightBit]

If it kills a web server it's probably doing this to save system from crash. However, in Linux you can decide what processes can and can't be killed by the OOM killer:

I don't run any porocess I don't need.

[LightBit]

Yes, but we were talking about memory over committing and not about killing a process - you agreed above it's a good thing when the process is killed when it does something stupid.

Documentation also talks about memory overcommiting, not buffer overflows ...

Yes and I don't need 100 file systems neither and that's why I'm using just one at the same time. As far as I know Arch' vmlinuz have compiled drivers and file systems in (not all of the drivers are shipped as modules in Arch). For example my vmlinuz in Kubuntu is just 4.7MB. I don't see how OpenBSD beats Linux in this aspect.

Ok I didn't know Arch Linux doesn't have fully modular kernel. OpenBSD supports modules. OpenBSD kernel would still be smaller than Linux kernel, both without drivers ...
Biggest bloat on Linux is it's userland.


If NetBSD runs on "toaster" (stupid, but ok), why would not run on mobile phone. It would only require few drivers. Android also has patched Linux kernel and even different userland.

[kraftman]

Documentation also talks about memory overcommiting, not buffer overflows ...

It says it won't overcommit, but it also says it will kill a process under special conditions. I think this is what you meant.

Ok I didn't know Arch Linux doesn't have fully modular kernel. OpenBSD supports modules. OpenBSD kernel would still be smaller than Linux kernel, both without drivers ...
Biggest bloat on Linux is it's userland.

As far as I know Linux is fully modular when comes to drivers. What I said is Arch Linux probably has compiled some drivers in. I don't know if OpenBSD would be smaller, but while unmodified Linux can run on embedded systems it shows it's not bloated. Size of the kernel is just one thing and there are others that matters also - cost of operations. Bloated kernel can't be fast and Linux is very fast. Its package is big, because it contains a lot of drivers, features and file systems, but you normally use just few percent of this. When comes to user land I think Arch Linux is example of distribution that's not more bloated than OpenBSD. You start with a kernel and few tools. Distributions like Ubuntu seems to be bloated for some people, but they have different purpose.

If NetBSD runs on "toaster" (stupid, but ok), why would not run on mobile phone. It would only require few drivers. Android also has patched Linux kernel and even different userland.

Ok, that's good. Linux also runs on the "toasters", so it seems NetBSD and Linux are both good in this case. Yes, Android has some modifications (their going into mainline), but you can even launch Ubuntu on your Android phone. So, even "bloated" Ubuntu runs on mobiles.

[kraftman]

With the exception of KDE but that's not having KDE 4 at all, OpenBSD has all the same software too. What was your point again?

I think he meant OpenBSD ships with much older versions.

[LightBit]

It says it won't overcommit, but it also says it will kill a process under special conditions. I think this is what you meant.

Doesn't overcommit ALL or FREE memory?
They could also say it doesn't overcommit universe.

As far as I know Linux is fully modular when comes to drivers. What I said is Arch Linux probably has compiled some drivers in. I don't know if OpenBSD would be smaller, but while unmodified Linux can run on embedded systems it shows it's not bloated. Size of the kernel is just one thing and there are others that matters also - cost of operations. Bloated kernel can't be fast and Linux is very fast. Its package is big, because it contains a lot of drivers, features and file systems, but you normally use just few percent of this. When comes to user land I think Arch Linux is example of distribution that's not more bloated than OpenBSD. You start with a kernel and few tools. Distributions like Ubuntu seems to be bloated for some people, but they have different purpose.

Userland is definitely more bloated: https://gist.github.com/1091803, https://gist.github.com/665971

[darkcoder]

Ok I didn't know Arch Linux doesn't have fully modular kernel. OpenBSD supports modules. OpenBSD kernel would still be smaller than Linux kernel, both without drivers ...
Biggest bloat on Linux is it's userland.

If you use Arch, then you have no idea at all how it works (or pacman). Also you cannot rule Linux distributions by looking at how only one distribution do things.

1. Arch packages may look bigger because they include development files which are usually not included by default on other distributions.

2. Also related to #1, Arch has a policy of making things simple, and one of them is splitting packages only when needed and keeping the splitting count as low as possible (no 5-6 packages made from a single source rpm/deb package here, lol)

3. Linux userland bloated. Let me see... Only one default shell "Bash", some (not repeated) commands from coreutils, textutils, sudo, 1 boot loader (grub/grub2/syslinux), usually one desktop environment. I don't see bloatware like you said. And I hope you don't count the desktops cause they bring the same bloatware no matter which NIX system they run on.

4. If your problem is the dependency bloatware some distribution package managers have, then fix it by using Gentoo and define your own flags.

As a related note, here is a link that you can look to see what components make a basic Linux Userland and decide for yourself if there is bloat or not. The project is Linux From Scratch.

[LightBit]

If you use Arch, then you have no idea at all how it works (or pacman). Also you cannot rule Linux distributions by looking at how only one distribution do things.

1. Arch packages may look bigger because they include development files which are usually not included by default on other distributions.

2. Also related to #1, Arch has a policy of making things simple, and one of them is splitting packages only when needed and keeping the splitting count as low as possible (no 5-6 packages made from a single source rpm/deb package here, lol)

3. Linux userland bloated. Let me see... Only one default shell "Bash", some (not repeated) commands from coreutils, textutils, sudo, 1 boot loader (grub/grub2/syslinux), usually one desktop environment. I don't see bloatware like you said. And I hope you don't count the desktops cause they bring the same bloatware no matter which NIX system they run on.

4. If your problem is the dependency bloatware some distribution package managers have, then fix it by using Gentoo and define your own flags.

As a related note, here is a link that you can look to see what components make a basic Linux Userland and decide for yourself if there is bloat or not. The project is Linux From Scratch.

Most other distributions are worse.

1. I didn't look size of packages.

2. I like that.

3. Did you look at https://gist.github.com/1091803 and https://gist.github.com/665971 ?

4. I don't like Gentoo. Too much work with LFS.

[kraftman]

Doesn't overcommit ALL or FREE memory?
They could also say it doesn't overcommit universe.

It sounds obvious to me it doesn't overcommit available memory - otherwise this statement will be false, don't you think?

Userland is definitely more bloated: https://gist.github.com/1091803, https://gist.github.com/665971

It can be more feature rich which isn't equal to being bloated. There are for sure differences between GNU's cat, echo and not GNU equivalents. Here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Unix)