From: Miod Vallat To:
mac68k@openbsd.org
Subject: pulling the plug on OpenBSD/mac68k
Date: Wed, 20. Jun 2012 21:44:15
Hello folks,
unless you had been living in on a rainbow[1], you had seen it coming:
OpenBSD/mac68k has been retired to the Attic today.
There will be no more OpenBSD activity on this platform. Reasons
behind this are multiple:
- lack of manpower and motivated developers is the main reason.
- low-end hardware platform (no DMA controller... come on... except on the
AV models, for which there is no proper documentation anyway)
- no friendly firmware: it's a shame we need to use MacOS as the
bootloader. Projects such as EMILE[2] allow for real MacOS-free
systems to be built, but only on a few systems.
Also, we are worried that the horsepower of these old systems is not
enough to allow for proper security[3]. Although we hope none of you
OpenBSD/mac68k users have your macs directly connected to the hostile
internet, these platforms can not provide enough crypto performance and
enough entropy to be deemed reliable, as soon as you untrusted users
having access to them.
If you had been running OpenBSD on your macs until today, we are
thanking you for your trust in OpenBSD. However, we are strongly
advising you to replace them with better systems. Really, do yourself a
favour and pick any other supported machine. You won't regret it.
Miod
[1] Beware of the rainbow's end:
http://www.faradaytheblob.com/?p=417
[2]
http://emile.sourceforge.net/ is a standalone bootloader for a very
small subset of 68k-based macintoshes
[3] Note that this does not only concern mac68k, but the other
m68k-based platforms, and arguably more systems. They might forcibly
get retired soon. The unofficial project policy is to keep
supporting a platform as long as the fastest systems available still
meet our security requirements. Thus we are still supporting (and
running fine, I'd mention) on a 16.66MHz Sun 4/260 - which still
runs circles around most of the m68k macintoshes due to a much
better memory and I/O system - because the same kernel will also run
on much faster sparc systems.
