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> Development has to start somewhere. If everyone shared your “verdict” no one would create drivers for this stuff.

IMHO it's the opposite. Development is stalled because everyone is afraid to say that "the king is naked".

OpenBSDs seems to have a cultural tendency to bash away all criticism: "you don't need that (ex), you're not using the right laptop, etc" - it's your own fault it doesn't work. That definitely discourages contributions, at least from me.

OpenBSD has been bragging about laptop support - that they're "dogfooding" by actually running it on their laptops, while FreeBSD is apple fanboys who use virtualization. Of course you need the right laptop, a Thinkpad, otherwise you're a cheap idiot. And, as this (for some reason popular) article shows, it still can't be a new Thinkpad, and you need to replace the wireless card... And if you dare post performance and battery life benchmarks, oh boy...

Thus OpenBSD's growing reputation for being a circle-jerk. Self-deception is not a virtue!

In the meantime, Linux now works perfectly on every laptop I try it on, even closing the performance / battery life gap with Windows, so even a diehard license zealot like me can no longer use BSD...

> Through the glory of people who work on making things better instead of complaining about them on the internet, there is a diff that fixes the audio issues!

Good.

> OpenBSD has no bluetooth stack.

Yeah, that'll persuade more people to use OpenBSD on laptop and mobile devices... /s

> Who ever said anything about a dongle??

The whole point of having a laptop is mobility. More and more people work from WiFi (or cellular connections via mobile hotspot) in places where an Ethernet cable isn't available: bus, taxi, hotel, park, coffee shop, etc.

If the WiFi card isn't supported by the OS, a dongle is your least bad option. And I found that a tiny dongle performs very poorly, you need a big one with an antenna - one more thing you have to carry around with you.

> dmesg was sent to the locations I care about. If you want, feel free to send it to where ever you want it to go.

Good. But every dmesg doesn't warrant a cross-posted article with this many upvotes, especially when it's not actually news and not good. Thus my grumpy response.

> What hardware doesn’t come from China?

There are degrees of hardware security and freedom, as with software. Lenovo has been caught with many deceptive practices, and so it scores very low on that security and freedom scale. (And additional point deductions if you're forced to buy it with Windows.) OpenBSD scores highly, but the fact that it focuses on Lenovo hardware is a big minus. In the meantime, System76 scores better by moving in the right direction: bringing assembly to the Colorado and inching closer to open hardware.

Here's a concise primer: (<200 pages, but pretty comprehensive) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0997316020/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_apa_i_OxrGDbFRNNK9Y

Here are some short (I think they're all <30 minutes) YouTube videos that give a crash course. Brian Will is awesome at giving a complete, concise overview of concepts.

Hardware: https://youtu.be/9-KUm9YpPm0

Operating Systems: https://youtu.be/9GDX-IyZ_C8

Unix System Calls: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL993D01B05C47C28D

Unix Terminals and Shells: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFAC320731F539902

Data Structures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA7BE376E483F4EE4

He has more on his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/briantwill

Plus he has an overview hosted on github: https://brianwill.github.io

If the man page doesn't list the card as being supported then it's probably safe to assume that it isn't. The OpenBSD documentation has always been excellent from my experience.

I don't know what country you're from so I'm not sure about the pricing where you are. But from a quick check on Amazon UK, the cheapest passively cooled GPU seems to be the 1GB Radeon HD 5450. Though to be honest, it seems a little puny. If I were going to buy a passive card I would probably go for the 2GB Radeon HD 6450. Still not too pricey, but a bit more powerful. Both cards are supported by the Radeon driver. Though I must point out that I have no experience with either card, so buyer beware, as always.

email: You havesmtpd with which you can receive email and deliver it locally, reading it with mail(1), and sending replies back using smtpd as long as your ISP/DNS is configured for outbound mail (or you configure smtpd to use a smart-host for relaying the mail).

web: You have httpd & relayd in base (MWL wrote a book on them if you need). If all you want to serve is static pages, httpd will do just fine. If you want to serve dynamic pages, you can configure httpd with slowcgi and then farm out the dynamic serving to scripts using any of the available stock languages (C, /bin/sh, awk, or perl though I don't know which perl modules are available out of the box). You can also tie into tools like ftp which will perform web requests if you need to hit remote API endpoints.

other dev: The system comes with a C compiler and scripting languages (as above, various shells & awk(1) as well as sed(1)). You have text editors: ed(1), vi(1), and mg(1) available out of the box. You have version control with either cvs(1) or rcs(1). You have project management with make(1).

games: You have the whole bsdgames collection (if you opted for them at install-time). Check out man 6 intro for a list of games.

networking: You have snmpd for network management, pf for building firewalls. lpd for sharing out printers. iscsid for dealing with iSCSI devices. unbound for DNS caching.

---------

For your sports-score example, I imagine there's some web API endpoint you can hit for various sports-scores, so I'd use ftp(1) using the -o - to dump the data to stdout, then piping that output to awk to slice it and dice it to extract the relevant information and display it or write it to a file.

edit: markdown

I don’t think OpenBSD supports Broadcom WiFi at all. Your best bet is probably to get a supported USB adapter. I have a couple of these that live in my OpenBSD laptops that have junky onboard WiFi. Mostly old Macs with Broadcom WiFi.

> https://www.amazon.com/Absolute-OpenBSD-2nd-Practical-Paranoid-ebook/dp/B00CH96VB4/

It works even for the last versions of openBSD? I will be happily buy it if yes!

>Absolute OpenBSD: Unix for the Practical Paranoid by Michael W. Lucas >http://www.amazon.com/dp/1593274769/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_JJWRub0F94Q3S

this book is a goldmine. Read, learn, grow :)

I didn't specifically check your card, but if /u/phessier (and a team) is working on a patch for it, your wifi should be supported soon. in the interim, maybe try picking up a supported USB wifi dongle?

Been using one of [these](Jetway JBC361F35-T40E-B AMD G-T40E APU 1.0GHz A50M, DDR3-1066 SO-DIMM, 2x GBLAN, Audio, 1x SATA 6G, 4x USB 2.0, DVI, CF Slot, 4x COM, 1x mSATA / mini-PCIe Slot 3.5 Inch SBC https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009SDL5M2/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_PZYmyb0BQVKZ1) as an OpenBSD router for the last 9 months or so. Been working like a champ.

An old, old Unix thing (if you're interested in that stuff, the book _Lion's Commentary on Unix_ is awesome, and so is the Minix book, _Operating System Design Principles_ or something like that... _Operating Systems Design and Implementation_ ... Google knows exactly what "the Minix book" is =P)...

Unix is a pre-emptively multitasking OS. Cooperative multitasking OSes are thankfully extinct or nearly. Those would wait until a process decided that it was done with the CPU and gave the CPU back to the OS before changing tasks. That includes changing tasks between the database app running and the user interface that handles mouse movements and keyboard processes and clicks such as clicks to just close the damn thing. Pretty clearly that would allow any badly written program to wedge the whole computer, except instead of "badly written", "not extremely well written". It's doomed to fail.

So Unix fires off an interrupt several times per second, such 100 (that's the tick and the tick frequency) that interrupts the program and runs the OS task scheduler. The OS task scheduler looks to see if there is anything else of the same or higher priority that also needs to run, and if so, pauses the currently running task and fires up the other one that needs to run. That's called a context switch. That keeps the system responsive and multitasking. You could have 100 tasks waiting for CPU and all of them will get some CPU every second.

But that wasn't designed for laptops running on battery that only have a few tasks. This interrupt runs 100 times a second even if no tasks are waiting for CPU (maybe X is waiting for input events... and waiting for input/output is part of this system I've ignored). The CPU would ideally be in a snooze state taking very little power, but this keeps waking it up.

Ticks also help the OS keep time, compute internal stats such as how much data is being transferred in a time period, how many processes are waiting for the CPU, etc. Stats are updated each time this timer interrupt goes off.

"Tickless" systems on the other hand don't interrupt or wake up the CPU at any fixed interval. If it wakes up the CPU once and discovered that no tasks are waiting for the CPU, it won't wake it up again for a long time. Input events including the touchpad and network and disk also generate interrupts which wake up the CPU so that is okay.

Also, the timer to change context (move from one waiting process to the next) can be higher or lower. If only two tasks want CPU, it can change context less often, or if a thousand tasks are waiting and processing would otherwise be locking out the UI, it can change tasks more often by deciding that the next task change will be in 0.001 seconds instead of 0.01.

Sorry, I'm not familiar with debugging drivers. Quick google reveals it might involve turning debug mode on with ifconfig, running /etc/netstart and viewing more verbose dmesg resulting from debug mode. See ifconfig (8):

http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man8/ifconfig.8

Two USB adapters I've had success with using OpenBSD 5.9:

USB-ethernet (axe driver):

http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MC704LL/A/apple-usb-ethernet-adapter

USB-wireless (urtwn driver):

https://www.amazon.com/Edimax-EW-7811Un-150Mbps-Raspberry-Supports/dp/B003MTTJOY

> There are loads of books dealing with Unix and POSIX APIs.

There are many good C books. I've found Linux Systems Programming to be a good book that mostly caters to Linux, but delves into BSD occasionally.

Chapter 32 of Secure Architectures with OpenBSD shows you how to tweak/compile the kernel

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321193660

https://www.amazon.com/Book-PF-No-Nonsense-OpenBSD-Firewall-ebook/dp/B00O9A7E88/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1481714449&sr=8-1&keywords=book+of+pf+openbsd

Absolute OpenBSD might be as close as you can get to a handbook. There's a Kindle version: https://www.amazon.com/Absolute-OpenBSD-2nd-Practical-Paranoid-ebook/dp/B00CH96VB4/

My latop model: https://www.amazon.com/Dell-Inspiron-i3-7130U-Windows-Laptop/dp/B07GKZJ8CX.

I'm sorry. I'm new to OpenBSD. I don't know how to disable acpi and when I the computer continues to boot before I can try adding the -c option. Anyway to overcome this

Yeah, one of these (supported by urtwn) in one of these. Not ideal, but hopefully temporary.

Unfortunately, there's almost no "OpenBSD" kernel books in the wild. However you can glean from the OpenBSD source, the mailing lists, and https://www.amazon.com/Design-Implementation-FreeBSD-Operating-System/dp/0321968972/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517846809&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Design+and+Implementation+of+the+FreeBSD+Operating+System

It is this device
I do not currently know how to receive the NMEA data on OCM3 not COM2 though. I don't have a datasheet for it though, but I have connected it to a raspberry pi running Linux with the NMEA data through the RXD pin and the PPS though a GPIO pin. For that, the NMEA works no problem and the uart is enabled in the preboot and then the kernel loads pps_core and pps_gpio

I would recommend The Book of PF: 3rd Edition. Also, even though this page isnt updated any longer it is helpful: http://www.bsdnow.tv/tutorials/openbsd-router

Here is my /etc/pf.conf file with some minor alterations:


ext_if="bge0"
int_if="bge1"
dmz_if="bge2"
int_net="10.10.199.0/24"
dmz_net="172.30.67.0/24"
broken="224.0.0.22 127.0.0.0/8 192.168.0.0/16 172.16.0.0/12 \
10.0.0.0/8 169.254.0.0/16 192.0.2.0/24 \
198.51.100.0/24, 203.0.113.0/24, \
169.254.0.0/16 0.0.0.0/8 240.0.0.0/4 255.255.255.255/32"
set optimization aggressive
set block-policy return
set skip on { lo }
queue main on $ext_if bandwidth 10M
queue defq parent main bandwidth 2500K default
queue web parent main bandwidth 7100K
queue icmp parent main bandwidth 400K
antispoof for { $ext_if, $int_if, $dmz_if }
match in all scrub (no-df random-id max-mss 1440)
match out on $ext_if set prio (5, 6)
match out on $ext_if proto tcp to port { www, https } \
set queue web
match out on $ext_if proto icmp queue icmp
match out on $ext_if from !($ext_if:network) to any nat-to ($ext_if:0)
block in log on $ext_if
pass out
block in quick on $ext_if from { $broken no-route urpf-failed } to any
block out quick on $ext_if from any to { no-route $broken }
pass on { $int_if, $dmz_if }
pass in quick on { $int_if, $dmz_if } inet proto tcp to port ftp \
divert-to 127.0.0.1 port 8021
block proto tcp from any to any port 1688
block log from $dmz_net to $int_net