Firefox won't crash if you raise the memory limit in /etc/login.conf. OpenBSD kills processes using more than 512MB by default.

Not quite what happens. OpenBSD doesn’t kill processes that use too much memory—it just causes any more memory allocation to fail. A well‐written program would detect that out‐of‐memory condition and try to handle it (maybe pause, or print a message to the user, or exit cleanly), but Firefox is not well‐written, and just crashes…

On the other hand, on Linux allocations succeed even when there isn’t enough memory on the system, and the OOM killer will kill a process once it starts using too much memory. Unlike the OpenBSD way, there’s no way for a process to detect that it’s using too much memory and handle it gracefully—you have to trust that the OOM killer is intelligent enough to never kill the wrong program…

Aborting on OOM is actually a deliberate decision by Firefox, to avoid the complication of dealing with failure cases (and NULLs getting everywhere) in every single memory allocation:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Infallible_memory_a...

Thanks for clarifying.

I suppose it's more accurate to say that while OpenBSD doesn't kill processes outright, it maintains an environment where poor quality software will more likely crash than do harm.

The source of login(1) for anyone interested <http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/login/>.

Wow, I'll remember this the next time someone tells me memory allocations can't fail.

Seems like a great design overall, but I'm not sure how I feel about the fixed 512MB limit. That's too high in almost all cases, and too low for a few exceptions (e.g. browsers). Not that I have any suggestions for how to do it better, while still being reliable/predictable.

The limit is configurable, and is also set per login class. System daemons run with lower limits. If you create a user while installing, it’s added to the “staff” user class, which has higher limits than users added later—this works pretty well for the common use‐cases of “single user desktop” and “server meant to be accessed by multiple unprivileged users”. Of course, you can always configure these limits in login.conf if your situation doesn’t match up well.

> Never knew sudo was a openBSD project.

It's not. It just happens to be currently maintained by someone who is also an OpenBSD developer.

"currently maintained" seems to imply that this is a recent thing, so just to point out, millert has been maintaining sudo since before 1994.

Didn't openbsd attempt to rewrite sudo recently? There was a point about simplifying its configuration syntax.

Also, as a long time BSD fanboy, I've never considered OpenBSD to be a desktop OS. It's a great OS that I use on routers and servers, but never a desktop. I had a period where I used FreeBSD on my laptop but once I went Linux, I never looked back.

The utility is now doas(1) (http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man1/...)

Also, I'm surprised: I'm actually thinking about leaving Linux to put FreeBSD (or OpenBSD?) on my laptop (Linux is just too unstable and base utilities change non-stop: ip(8), iw(8), ifconfig(8), iwconfig(8), dhcpcd(8), systemd...)

> Didn't openbsd attempt to rewrite sudo recently? There was a point about simplifying its configuration syntax.

As the other two commenters said, you must be thinking of doas. Doas isn't a rewrite of sudo, it's an entirely new program with a different goal: capture the most common use cases of sudo and do away with most of the complexity to support the more involved scenario. This is a pretty common pattern in OpenBSD actually: provide the simple tool by default, let power users install the more complex tools if they need it for their work.

> Didn't openbsd attempt to rewrite sudo recently?

You're thinking of doas, perhaps?

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man1/...

Have you tried OpenBSD for desktop? FreeBSD on the desktop is, well, a pain. Hence PCBSD. But OpenBSD is actually pretty good at being a desktop, as long as you can live without some things like Flash and other things that will never be there.

PC-BSD is "the Ubuntu of BSD" – a preconfigured GUI, a GUI app "store" etc. If you can install OpenBSD, you don't need it.

FreeBSD on the desktop is not a pain!

FreeBSD on the desktop used be take a fair amount of fiddling. If that's no longer true then that's awesome! :)

A major cause of pain people are hit by when they try to use an operating system other than Windows is that they are uninformed about hardware compatibility. Frequently, when someone wants to try out a new OS, they'll try to install on their desktop/laptop/whatever and they will be frustrated to find a broken mess.

The correct way to get started with a new OS is to first try it out in a virtual machine. If you find that you enjoy using it, buy compatible hardware and go metal.

Strange, it's my desktop. I wonder how I manage.

I saw and thought the same thing at the bottom there! I also didn't know "su" = "substitue user" therfore "sudo" is "substitue user do".