What is the technical blocker to installing OpenBSD without a FreeBSD shim, e.g. is there incompatible code in the OpenBSD installer?

On digital ocean you get a very limited set of boot options. You can't provide them your own installer, boot image, kernel, iso, or any of that jazz.

You also don't get a pre-boot console.

For linux, they don't even let you provide your own kernel in userland or the like, so there's actually no way to install a BSD from a linux shim on DO.

FreeBSD on DO is the only way to get an instance that is capable of booting anything non-linux, so it's necessary to start from freebsd.

Edit: It looks like the kernel limitation has been lifted for some linux instances too. See: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-upda...

If yoy want to run your own kernel you can always use kexec (not ideal, but works): https://gist.github.com/cpuguy83/6143347

Has anyone got kexec to boot a non Linux kernel?

This also probably works on other cloud providers if they support a virtualization layer that OpenBSD will work with. I've heard of successes here too: https://vultr.com/

Just be sure you use miniroot58.fs -- OpenBSD 5.8 wasn't released when this was written.

Vultr allows installing from ISO, so no need to shim. I can verify that OpenBSD 5.7-stable will run with no issues. One thing to watch out for is that outgoing TCP connections to port 25 are blocked until you ask them to open it up.

"connections to port 25 are blocked until you ask them to open it up"

Thanks for that info, that seems like a fairly reasonable policy.

5.8 is still currently in development/snapshot - not for amateur users.

5.7 is the latest official release. 5.8 is due on Nov 1.

Worth noting though that if you use the release, you get no updates, security or otherwise, till the next release in 6 months.

And using -stable (release + patches) is a hassle of manually applying patches and re-compiling - no binary updates are available.

If running snapshots is not for amateurs, neither is running stable.

One can receive updates to binary packages for the current -stable release from M:Tier[0] . They also host binpatches for security vulnerabilities in base which can either be installed manually via pkg_add or automatically with their openup[1] tool.

0: https://stable.mtier.org/

1: http://www.mtier.org/index.php/solutions/apps/openup/

That's not entirely accurate. You do get updates, they're just on the patch branch. See http://www.openbsd.org/errata57.html.

Running -stable is fairly simple. If you don't want to rebuild on your DigitalOcean VPS, cut a new release after an update locally, and then apply it on your VPS. See http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq5.html#Release. This should be fairly simple to automate (and you could even write a script that only packages up changed files if you were so inclined).

If you cannot run stable, then I'm pretty sure you should let others do your system administration for you. Stable is very easy to follow with simple instructions: http://www.openbsd.org/stable.html

If you need binaries there is always http://opensource.mtier.org/binpatchng.html

Stable will cleanly build though, where running current snapshots you could come across something temporarily broken or have to debug a tough build if doing it from source. FWIW I just built 5.7 stable and the whole process took an hour and a half for kernel + userland + xenocara with no build issues. Often for stable security patches you just have to rebuild the kernel which is 15 mins work on my older AMD server.

Okay, I know someone here is trying this... success or failure?

I used these instructions a few weeks ago and they worked. You will need to download miniroot58.fs (not miniroot57.fs).

True indeed, the article was written a week before the release of 5.8...

Huh, 5.8 hasn't been released? What you mean is that snapshots / current are now using that version number.

I got it installed, but there were problems. A lot of programs fail with SIGILL, illegal instruction. OpenSSL fails in OPENSSL_ia32_cpuid() Anybody get past this ?

I also get coredumps from openssl, ssh-keygen, and smtpctl on the first boot. The common factor for all of these is the XGETBV instruction - unfortunately it looks like DigitalOcean's setup of KVM doesn't support it.

This was just on amd64 though - installing OpenBSD for i386 seems to work okay, apart from sometimes hanging on boot (not sure why this is).

Tangentially related at best...anybody here succeed doing PXE with virtualbox's tftp and openbsd? I get an unhelpful error msg.

I have done a few bits with PXE booting inc OpenBSD, so I might be able to help if you can provide more detail. (I do feel your pain as PXE error messages are largely pretty vague, but not posting the error message is even less helpful).

VirtualBox's PXE implementation is... interesting. I know it sucks, but try using a CD image of iPXE.