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Comment by keldaris | Hacker News Reader

As I already implied in the parent post, I've no doubt we'll see more Spectre-like issues and I don't find it hard to believe that there's yet another embargo going on, that something's leaked again and that the OpenBSD people have picked up on it. I'm just curious about how many tradeoffs in performance and usability OpenBSD would be willing to make (in the form of default settings, I'm aware this one can be toggled) in the pursuit of security and how they do the cost/benefit analysis, because their process seems vastly different from that of the main OS vendors.

On the latter point, I did take "strongly suspect" at face value rather than code for "we know for sure, just can't disclose it all yet" because I'm not familiar with the development culture of OpenBSD.

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Though it doesn't answer your question directly, the project goals are here: https://www.openbsd.org/goals.html. Security is important, but not the only goal. Notice that the word "performance" does not appear on this page.

If you want performance above all else, OpenBSD is not for you.

Nice backpedaling.

There's no backpedaling, I still think their approach is crazy for any practical usecase I care about. Beyond that, I simply expressed curiosity to learn more about the extent of the tradeoffs they're willing to make.

They don't set defaults for the average use case when security is involved. This is the difference between:

"Secure by default", turn knobs if you need more speed

"Fast by default", turn knobs if you need more security

Not that the knobs will be always available for each design decision, but sometimes they are there and you can turn them at your own risk. It probably would be wise to understand the consequences. Some people will prefer the peace of mind of knowing that safe defaults are in place if they don't change anything. Those will probably align with OpenBSD here. Some people believe that security is something you bolt on afterwards. Those definitely won't like OpenBSD design decisions.

> They don't set defaults for the average use case when security is involved.

They certainly set the defaults for some usecase, it just happens to be more security-biased than most. They don't ship an OS for an airgapped toaster, so it can't ever literally be "secure by default", it's just a compromise on the tradeoff scale that's more security-oriented than most. It still needs to be usable (for some set of people) and it still has to achieve some baseline level of performance to be usable - I was trying to get some clarity on the latter.

You seem to imply that security will always result in less speed or less usability, and that is not always the case. The thing with OpenBSD is that security will always come first between the three values when they clash, but they don't always clash. And yes, it is the most secure OS out there if you are to judge by the statistics over its history. I'd say that only two remote holes in so many years pretty much grants them the "secure by default" label. Maybe looking from outside it seems like security is all they think about, but my impression is that it is more about correctness and simplicity, and that security comes as a consequence. As an example of simplicity, I am not personally aware of any install that is so simple as theirs. Except maybe ubuntu's, but then with ubuntu you end up with a mess of interdependent packages and it will be a hell to uninstall shit you don't need.

> You seem to imply that security will always result in less speed or less usability, and that is not always the case.

Certainly not always, but often enough and more so than usual with Spectre and Meltdown.

> As an example of simplicity, I am not personally aware of any install that is so simple as theirs. Except maybe ubuntu's, but then with ubuntu you end up with a mess of interdependent packages and it will be a hell to uninstall shit you don't need.

That's an interesting point. How does it compare in terms of simplicity to the other BSDs (FreeBSD and Dragonfly) or something like Arch Linux?

> That's an interesting point. How does it compare in terms of simplicity to the other BSDs (FreeBSD and Dragonfly) or something like Arch Linux?

I'm not familiar with FreeBSD and DragonFly, but I have used NetBSD in the past and a bit of Arch Linux. The system management is way more consistent in OpenBSD, things generally work and are more reliable. The package management system is a pleasure to work with, and when you want to remove unused packages or dependencies of previously installed packages, it's simple and consistent. It actually works. When you are configuring something, most of the time there is one single way to do it, and it's well documented. And the simplicity can't really be compared to Arch Linux. Fire up a vm and install OpenBSD to it, just for the experience. It's mostly just accepting the defaults, extremely simple.

Fair enough, thanks. I'll try it out just to see what it's like.

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