Comment by schmuckonwheels
5 days ago
Linus has been very clear on avoiding the opposite, which is the OpenBSD situation: they obsess about security so much that nothing else matters to them, which is how you end up with a mature 30 year old OS that still has a dogshit unreliable filesystem in 2026.
To paraphrase LT, security bugs are important, but so are all the other bugs.
OpenBSD doesn't really stress about security so much as they made that their identity and marketing campaign - their OS is lacking too many basic capabilities a security focused OS should have.
> To paraphrase LT, security bugs are important, but so are all the other bugs.
Right, this is wrong, and that's the problem. Security bugs as a class are always going to be more important than certain other classes of bugs.
I have to disagree it's worst than you think ; open-bsd has so many mitigation in place that your computer will probably run 50% slower than a traditional OS. In reality you do not want to be playing 100% safety everywhere because this is simply expensive. You might prefer to create an isolated network on which you can set up un-mitigated servers - those will be able to run at 100% capacity.
This can be looked upon when compiling the linux kernel, the mitigation options are rather numerous - and you'll have to also pick a sleep time ; what i'm saying is - currently linux only allows you to tune a machine to a specific requirement - it's not a spaceship on which you can change the sleep time frequency; dynamically shutdown mitigation ; and imagine that you are performing - In the same spirit, if you are holding keys on anything else than open-bsd ; I hope for you that you have properly looked up what you were installing.
And their ‘no remote holes’ is true for a base install with no packages, not necessarily a full system.
I think the OpenBSD approach of secure coding is outdated. The goal should have always been to take human error out of the equation as much as possible. Rust and other modern memory safe languages move things in that direction, you don’t need ultra strict coding standards and a bible of compiler flags.
> I think the OpenBSD approach of secure coding is outdated.
I don't think it's outdated it's a core part of the puzzle. The problem with their approach is they rely on it 100%, and have not enough in place (and yes, I'm aware of all the mitigations they do have) to protect against bugs they miss. This is a lot less true now than it was 15 - 20 years ago, but it's still not great IMO.