OpenBSD Journal

AMD64 support on the way in now.

Contributed by jose on from the hammer-time dept.

Janne Johansson was one of a few to write: "Mickey has been importing art@s and his work on adding AMD64 to the list of supported platforms for OpenBSD.

Quote from the commit-message:
Log message:
an amd64 arch support.
hacked by art@ from netbsd sources and then later debugged by me into the shape where it can host itself. no bootloader yet as needs redoing from the recent advanced i386 sources (anyone? ;) "

Note that it still needs some work on the bootloader part.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By blocked () sadf@gov.ru on http://putin.ru

    i guess openbsd will dead if netbsd will dead before ;)

    Comments

    1. By gwyllion () on

      FreeBSD has amd64 support as well.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward () on

        It would be considerably more difficult to steal the sourch for future changes from FreeBSD than NetBSD because of greater architectural differences. Kinda sad that OpenBSD doesn't do anything on its own, though.

        Comments

        1. By Martin Reindl () mreindl@catai.org on htto://open.bsdcow.net

          Look at mvme88k or pegasos. OpenBSD is the only free operating system running there. And none of the other BSD's support pegasos yet. Also, the NetBSD/hp700 port is based on OpenBSD/hppa.

        2. By Simon () on

          I don't think it's about not doing development themself, there is just no reason for doing work that someone else already did.

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward () on

            I agree, why re-invent the wheel?

            OpenBSD started from NetBSD and there's no reason all the BSD's can't share with one another. After all, that's what OSS is all about.

        3. By Anthony () on

          " Kinda sad that OpenBSD doesn't do anything on its own, though. "

          W^X, ProPolice everywhere, PF sync, etc

        4. By SH () on

          Oh my, a Slashdot troll actually found this site. Where did you copy/paste this from?

        5. By Peter Hessler () spambox@theapt.org on http://www.theapt.org

          I was there when Art started on making the amd64 work. They cross-compiled on a NetBSD machine, and booted from that. I bought Art a beer, when he was able to figure out how to make the console scroll w/o panicing (Harder than you think).


          I appriciate that not talking about things that you don't understand is a new concept, but please try to use that here. Thanks.

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward () on

            I totally agree.

            If something bothers you, fix it.
            If you can't, shut up :)

        6. By Anonymous Coward () on

          Kinda sad that OpenBSD doesn't do anything on its own, though


          And what's so sad about it, how would it be better if the code was original? I hate NIH attitude!

        7. By Anonymous Coward () on

          Uh, in addition to what others have mentioned: hppa

          Now go away, troll.

  2. By Anonymous Coward () on

    Ah... OpenBSD, where you can have as many processors as you like, as long as its 1.

    Comments

    1. By Brad () brad at comstyle dot com on mailto:brad at comstyle dot com

      I don't see any diffs from you for SMP.

      Comments

      1. By Aasmund () on

        Please can we stop this "Why don't yo fix this yourself instead of asking for a feature" attitude?

        While it's a good point, we have heard it so many times now that it is utterly pointless. Many people don't know how to do things, but may very well desire them.

        Comments

        1. By tedu () on

          you know what i really want? a nice plate of warm cookies. unfortunately, i'm not much of a cook, so i can't make them myself. i'll just go tell everyone i meet i want cookies over and over until i get some.

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward () on

            When you get some please share them around - I feel like a cookie too :-p

          2. By Anonymous Coward () on

            you know what i really want? a nice plate of warm cookies.

            I bake good vegan cookies. Let me know where to send them and i will, though they might not be warm by the time they get there. You keep coding and i'll keep baking.

            Comments

            1. By krh () on

              > good vegan cookies

              Don't exist. I want butter and eggs in my cookies.

          3. By Aasmund () on

            I'll remember this the next time we are at a party together and you didn't bring enough beers ;)

            Yes - that's free as in beer.

        2. By Anonymous Coward () on

          Yes, I mean, OpenBSD isn't all bad, so what if it doesn't support SMP? I mean, its got PF, and nothing else has that ... oh wait, FreeBSD has it. And so what if Net and FreeBSD scale better? With only one processor, its not like you're going to do anything other than run a router on your 386 anyway.

          Comments

          1. By MotleyFool () on

            Oh yeah, so you think FreeBSD invented PF?

            Comments

            1. By Anonymous Coward () on

              No-one seriously thinks FreeBSD originated PF. However FreeBSD + PF is what I have running on my SMP boxes because OpenBSD doesn't support SMP but I want PF's superior capabilities.

              Theo might like supporting niche processors like the VIA with it's crypto support but with the rest of the world developing SMT capable chips and dual core chips, OpenBSD is going to get edged out if it doesn't have SMP.

              Comments

              1. By Anonymous Coward () on

                What are you using that you need SMP so bad? Please provide examples. I would like to see these results to justify SMP over security, not to mention extra hardware costs.

                What's the throughput of a dual CPU setup? If it's 1.75x faster than a single CPU setup, then it might be worth it. However, I doubt it'll be anything higher than 1.25x.

  3. By Anonymous Coward () on

    If memory serves, Theo has commented that the x86-64 ISA contains some tweaks (e.g., in the memory manager's permissions system) that make it more interesting from a security perspective. Could someone knowledgeable on the subject comment about what security-related things are better on x86-64 with the current code, and what's planned?

    Comments

    1. By Anthony () on

      I'm no expert, but it seems to me that one would be able to spread out memory across the address space a lot more, allowing increased use of stuff like guard pages. On i386, you can run out of address space pretty quick. I know that much from me own experience.

      But, let me repeat, I'm no expert. :)

    2. By mirabile () mirabile@bsdcow.net on http://mirbsd.de/

      It has a W^X per-page protection, not just a
      line drawn across the VM space "below is
      writable, above is executable" by means of
      segments.

      What I miss about the Opteron is an ISA slot
      for my graphics card (Hercules) though.

      Comments

      1. By Alejandro Belluscio () baldusi@hotmail.com on mailto:baldusi@hotmail.com

        Don't you also miss the RLL HD interface for your old disks? Or the complete incompatibility with your 100 ns SIPP RAM? :-)

        Regards

        Comments

        1. By Ian McWilliam () i dot mcwilliam at uws dot edu dot au on mailto:i dot mcwilliam at uws dot edu dot au

          What I really, really , really miss is

          8-bit CPU wth a 16-bit address bus that runs at 1MHz and porcesses 500,000 8-bit operations a second.
          64K ram.
          Cassette interface.

          AND SOFTWARE WITHOUT BLOAT"N"BUGS!

          Alas those days are gone............

      2. By Anonymous Coward () on

        it is so sad to see people having no idea about things that they talk about and turning great inventions into marketing buzzcrap.

        there is no such thing as W^X per page protection.
        what is there is no-exec protection bit that has
        no more to do with W^X than rubber with internal combustion engine.

        besides. no-exec exists on some x86-32 processors too.

  4. By Anonymous Coward () on

    What can people do to help?

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