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OpenBSD turns 4.0

Stephen Shankland Former Principal Writer
Stephen Shankland worked at CNET from 1998 to 2024 and wrote about processors, digital photography, AI, quantum computing, computer science, materials science, supercomputers, drones, browsers, 3D printing, USB, and new computing technology in general. He has a soft spot in his heart for standards groups and I/O interfaces. His first big scoop was about radioactive cat poop.
Expertise Processors, semiconductors, web browsers, quantum computing, supercomputers, AI, 3D printing, drones, computer science, physics, programming, materials science, USB, UWB, Android, digital photography, science. Credentials
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Stephen Shankland

Developers released openBSD 4.0 this week, including support for Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc III processors.

Sun released its UltraSparc III systems in 2000, but supporting the servers was tough because Sun refused to release documentation about some supporting processors, said OpenBSD leader Theo de Raadt.

The Unix variant uses older versions 2.95 and 3.3.5 of the GCC compiler, in contrast to most Linux products that have moved to versions of GCC 4. "GCC keeps getting slower and slower every single release, and all this is happening without any clear benefit," de Raadt said. "It takes way longer to compile source, and the resulting binaries are significantly bigger and run only a tiny bit faster."

OpenBSD doesn't aim for particular niches, but it's popular in network applications, de Raadt said. "The biggest users of OpenBSD these days are people who need our fancy networking features," he said. "We have redundant failover firewalling and some really fancy routing support built in. No one else can match the power and flexibility of our tools in that area, not even Cisco. Our tools have a significantly lower price tag."