I’ve been trying to get a patchfix into OpenBSD with no luck. No response to my patch on tech@openbsd.org. This isn’t the first time. Can any OpenBSD contributor help me out?
If you didn’t get any feedback, just keep asking the list for feedback every two weeks by replying to your own post. There’s a bit of luck to it because each patch has to catch someone’s interest in a moment when they have time to deal with it.
It does attract contributors. In fact, this culture is one of the reasons joined the project.
So I eventually started reviewing the diff but failed to do so because it was both malformed (did not apply) and broken (did not compile). That is, instead of focusing on the intented changes, reviewers get thrown back because they did not test it. Note how I explicitly mentioned this in my previous reply.
Edit: I mixed you up with the OP/diff author, text adjusted.
Thank you for the review kn, very much appreciated. I hastily reposted an old version of the patch. I’ll make sure the diff applies cleanly in my reply and fix up the SIGCHLD typo.
Maybe this is how OpenBSD runs things, if that’s the culture there, that’s fine, but don’t expect it to attract very many contributors.
Ah but whose job is it to reply to every mail? Whose job is it to apologize if whoever had the first job failed to deliver? What is this sentient entity called OpenBSD that supposedly runs things? Does it have the power to appoint an individual for such a role?
I assumed that in order to provide funding for a project you need to decide what to fund and what not to fund, and that sort of decision-making is called “running the project”, but I guess I was mistaken, my bad.
I just decided to fund you as my personal assistant. Your salary is $20 a month, you work 24/7, aren’t you so glad that I run you now? Hand over the keys to your house by the way, because with this decision, I run it…
Actually the OpenBSD Foundation isn’t the OpenBSD Project. The OpenBSD Foundation doesn’t own OpenBSD, and there are things it cannot do because it does not own OpenBSD. It can’t hand out commit bits, it can’t change the website, it can’t turn people into mailing list admins.. it does not run OpenBSD. If someone or something really “runs” OpenBSD, I’d say it’s Theo… and no, Theo doesn’t run the Foundation. The Foundation doesn’t run Theo either. The Foundation doesn’t decide what Theo or the individual developers (volunteers mainly!) of the project do, though they can choose to support whatever it is by providing funding.
Which leads to the follow up question.. you want him to force the volunteers to reply to every mail and apologize for every mail that wasn’t responded to? Or you want him to employ people for that purpose? Out of his own pocket?
Sorry, I just don’t see the issue of some messages directed at a volunteer-driven software group going unresponded to because the volunteers happened to be volunteering their time for something else at the time (or whatever the reason).
If people are so entitled to responses, I no longer wonder why some people get burned out on OSS development. I wouldn’t, at least not for that reason, because I have no trouble ignoring issues I don’t have time for. It is my own time.
IMHO kn is right, there is nothing to apologize for.
I’ve seen small businesses provide better support to their users and developers on far less budget than OpenBSD has.
For the past 5 or so years they’ve received hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, and each year they had a surplus averaging ~$100k that they didn’t seem to use for anything.
Are you telling me they can’t afford to pay someone to say, “we’re looking into this”, or “we’re sorry the patch didn’t compile”, or even setup an automated patch submission system? Because if you are, according to their public finances page, that would be a lie.
You are generalizing from one example and you don’t know our comunity well enough to judge it.
During almost 10 years now I have committed many patches from other contributors and never had my own patches go ignored, which is why I stuck around in OpenBSD in the first place.
You are generalizing from one example and you don’t know our comunity well enough to judge it.
And how do you know how well I know the OpenBSD community? You have no clue.
Over on Mastodon I pointed out that OpenBSD “perpetuates false and negative stereotypes that security people don’t care about usability, or that security must come at a cost of usability”.
That’s a fact. And then OpenBSD developer @mulander jumped in to call me a troll, and on top of it, demand that I work for free to submit patches to the project. So I pointed out to him how the OpenBSD community treats those who work for free and submit patches.
I’ve observed this project for many years, and I think it gets a bit too much hype on Lobsters lately for delivering a terrible user experience. Sure, there are lots of things to praise about it, but I don’t see anyone criticizing it for its glaringly obvious faults, so the end result is a community that is delusional, and a harmful role model.
There is nothing to apologize for.
It is a volunteer project. Developers are people who live lives, not borg drones assimilating other people’s patches.
All of your comments in this thread of inappropriate. They are inappropriate regardless of whether other folk’s comments are or are not appropriate and regardless of whether they do or do not contain true statements.
Please drop the issue, do not bring it back up, and do not engage in this style of discussion again on lobste.rs.
Sorry I’m not entirely sure what the best way is to post a link to a thread on the OpenBSD listserv. If you log in you should be able to see the thread.
On the general topic of performance, OpenBSD is usually known to be not as fast as other BSDs or Linux? Can someone who knows more about this say what the reasons are? Is it just programming that isn’t focused on micro optimisation or is there a necessary tradeoff between security and speed?
It’s not always a tradeoff, but doing it right takes huge effort. Anyone who ran fbsd 5.x with the 3? different thread models and emulating linux threads for mysql perf knows there is lots more to it than just flipping a bit and let the cores race around at their whim.
Obsd seems to try ‘not screw up’ with available manpower and that means being behind. Might also mean less silly bugs slip through.
Not a contributor but I am lurking in the community for quite a while now and AFAIK the largest reason why OpenBSD is as “performant” as it is, is that they don’t aim for performance. So the trade off is not as much about security as it is about man power and interest.
What I can say is that it was never performing bad for any workload I aimed for, besides web browsing - which is getting better and better.
But I also value those lovely man pages, sane defaults and the overall stable and thus boring interfaces that they keep on providing and improving without alienating long time users more than “performance” whatever the metric is by which you want to measure it.
According to my best knowledge KERNEL_LOCK is the so called big kernel lock. By having these syscalls not use that lock performance is supposed to increase.
Thank you all for the effort!
I’ve been trying to get a patchfix into OpenBSD with no luck. No response to my patch on tech@openbsd.org. This isn’t the first time. Can any OpenBSD contributor help me out?
If you didn’t get any feedback, just keep asking the list for feedback every two weeks by replying to your own post. There’s a bit of luck to it because each patch has to catch someone’s interest in a moment when they have time to deal with it.
Cool I can do that, thanks for the tip.
[Comment from banned user removed]
Nothing to apologize for - what did you expect? Sending reminders is a common idiom on tech@ where a mail gets drown easily by other threads.
Making sure your submissions are well tested and reasoned helps getting a response, but you cannot demand anything.
Maybe this is how OpenBSD runs things, if that’s the culture there, that’s fine, but don’t expect it to attract very many contributors.
It does attract contributors. In fact, this culture is one of the reasons joined the project.
So I eventually started reviewing the diff but failed to do so because it was both malformed (did not apply) and broken (did not compile). That is, instead of focusing on the intented changes, reviewers get thrown back because they did not test it. Note how I explicitly mentioned this in my previous reply.
Edit: I mixed you up with the OP/diff author, text adjusted.
Thank you for the review kn, very much appreciated. I hastily reposted an old version of the patch. I’ll make sure the diff applies cleanly in my reply and fix up the SIGCHLD typo.
Ah but whose job is it to reply to every mail? Whose job is it to apologize if whoever had the first job failed to deliver? What is this sentient entity called OpenBSD that supposedly runs things? Does it have the power to appoint an individual for such a role?
[Comment from banned user removed]
You gotta be joking. They provide funding for the project. They don’t run the project.
I assumed that in order to provide funding for a project you need to decide what to fund and what not to fund, and that sort of decision-making is called “running the project”, but I guess I was mistaken, my bad.
I just decided to fund you as my personal assistant. Your salary is $20 a month, you work 24/7, aren’t you so glad that I run you now? Hand over the keys to your house by the way, because with this decision, I run it…
Actually the OpenBSD Foundation isn’t the OpenBSD Project. The OpenBSD Foundation doesn’t own OpenBSD, and there are things it cannot do because it does not own OpenBSD. It can’t hand out commit bits, it can’t change the website, it can’t turn people into mailing list admins.. it does not run OpenBSD. If someone or something really “runs” OpenBSD, I’d say it’s Theo… and no, Theo doesn’t run the Foundation. The Foundation doesn’t run Theo either. The Foundation doesn’t decide what Theo or the individual developers (volunteers mainly!) of the project do, though they can choose to support whatever it is by providing funding.
[Comment from banned user removed]
Which leads to the follow up question.. you want him to force the volunteers to reply to every mail and apologize for every mail that wasn’t responded to? Or you want him to employ people for that purpose? Out of his own pocket?
Sorry, I just don’t see the issue of some messages directed at a volunteer-driven software group going unresponded to because the volunteers happened to be volunteering their time for something else at the time (or whatever the reason).
If people are so entitled to responses, I no longer wonder why some people get burned out on OSS development. I wouldn’t, at least not for that reason, because I have no trouble ignoring issues I don’t have time for. It is my own time.
IMHO kn is right, there is nothing to apologize for.
I’ve seen small businesses provide better support to their users and developers on far less budget than OpenBSD has.
For the past 5 or so years they’ve received hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, and each year they had a surplus averaging ~$100k that they didn’t seem to use for anything.
Are you telling me they can’t afford to pay someone to say, “we’re looking into this”, or “we’re sorry the patch didn’t compile”, or even setup an automated patch submission system? Because if you are, according to their public finances page, that would be a lie.
The OpenBSD Project isn’t a business. I think you’re just trolling here and it’s dumb.
[Comment from banned user removed]
You are generalizing from one example and you don’t know our comunity well enough to judge it.
During almost 10 years now I have committed many patches from other contributors and never had my own patches go ignored, which is why I stuck around in OpenBSD in the first place.
And how do you know how well I know the OpenBSD community? You have no clue.
Over on Mastodon I pointed out that OpenBSD “perpetuates false and negative stereotypes that security people don’t care about usability, or that security must come at a cost of usability”.
That’s a fact. And then OpenBSD developer @mulander jumped in to call me a troll, and on top of it, demand that I work for free to submit patches to the project. So I pointed out to him how the OpenBSD community treats those who work for free and submit patches.
I’ve observed this project for many years, and I think it gets a bit too much hype on Lobsters lately for delivering a terrible user experience. Sure, there are lots of things to praise about it, but I don’t see anyone criticizing it for its glaringly obvious faults, so the end result is a community that is delusional, and a harmful role model.
Link the thread so people can judge by themselves.
Also link yourself trying to spin the thing around on Mastodon and on twitter.
I did, see my reply below from before your comment. But sure I should have linked it here as well.
Your opinions are not facts. I don’t think the “community” is what’s delusional here.
[Comment from banned user removed]
Great. I hope you feel better now that you’ve got this all out of your system.
There is nothing to apologize for. It is a volunteer project. Developers are people who live lives, not borg drones assimilating other people’s patches.
All of your comments in this thread of inappropriate. They are inappropriate regardless of whether other folk’s comments are or are not appropriate and regardless of whether they do or do not contain true statements.
Please drop the issue, do not bring it back up, and do not engage in this style of discussion again on lobste.rs.
What stsp said, but also, can you link us to the thread?
https://lists.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/mj_wwwusr?list=tech&brief=on&func=archive-get-part&extra=201810/113
I just get
Sorry I’m not entirely sure what the best way is to post a link to a thread on the OpenBSD listserv. If you log in you should be able to see the thread.
EDIT: use this http://openbsd-archive.7691.n7.nabble.com/lib-libfuse-Handle-signals-that-get-sent-to-any-thread-tp352472p353099.html
marc.info works pretty well. I’d say it’s the preferred interface for most people.
thanks for the pointer
Not a contributor, but I figure it might help to point out what patch you sent.
Does anybody have an idea how this affects the performance of those system calls?
On the general topic of performance, OpenBSD is usually known to be not as fast as other BSDs or Linux? Can someone who knows more about this say what the reasons are? Is it just programming that isn’t focused on micro optimisation or is there a necessary tradeoff between security and speed?
It’s not always a tradeoff, but doing it right takes huge effort. Anyone who ran fbsd 5.x with the 3? different thread models and emulating linux threads for mysql perf knows there is lots more to it than just flipping a bit and let the cores race around at their whim. Obsd seems to try ‘not screw up’ with available manpower and that means being behind. Might also mean less silly bugs slip through.
Not a contributor but I am lurking in the community for quite a while now and AFAIK the largest reason why OpenBSD is as “performant” as it is, is that they don’t aim for performance. So the trade off is not as much about security as it is about man power and interest.
What I can say is that it was never performing bad for any workload I aimed for, besides web browsing - which is getting better and better.
But I also value those lovely man pages, sane defaults and the overall stable and thus boring interfaces that they keep on providing and improving without alienating long time users more than “performance” whatever the metric is by which you want to measure it.
According to my best knowledge
KERNEL_LOCKis the so called big kernel lock. By having these syscalls not use that lock performance is supposed to increase.