Good idea or Bad idea?

[Mike Hernandez]

On or near Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 08:02:06PM +0100, Mark Rowlands wrote something along the lines of:
> There are definitely security benefits from stripping unwanted services from 
> your system and I rather like to know that my system (and ports) are up to 
> date with the latest patches which occasionally requires that you rebuild 
> everything. 
> 
> I would imagine that there is some very minor perfomance benefit in that my 
> new kernel and all its bits and pieces is 22mb smaller than the default 
> shipped in RELENG_6
> 
>  18M    ./kernel
>  42M    ./kernel.old
>

Smaller kernel size is plus, and staying up to date with the latest patches is also
a benefit that I hadn't considered. Are there security patches for 6.0 already?

I just noticed so many mails on this list recently re: build failures that I thought 
it would be good to ask if there really was any noticeable performance increase. 
I know that the OpenBSD project actually discourages users from building the system 
unless it is absolutely necessary, noting that it's more likely to cause problems than 
to provide any tangible benefits.

So far it looks like a worthwhile venture :) I'd certainly like to see if there are
any differences in terms of speed between the default binary build (which for me is
i386, and interestingly enough is still called i386 even though 386 itself is no
longer supported as of 6.0) and a build done with march=686.  It looks as though
either way the upgrade to 6.0 should leave me with a system that "feels" faster.

I'd like to wait till the Saturday but I'm not sure how much longer I can fight off
the urge to start the minute I get home hehe

Thanks to all who replied! And thanks to the FreeBSD team for giving me 0 reasons to
miss Linux =)


Mike H