[Tor-BSD] Hi new list/Recommended operating platforms

[Brian Callahan]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2013, George Rosamond wrote:

> On 02/19/13 09:24, Brian Callahan wrote:
>> Hi everyone --
>>
>
> And 'hi' to you too Brian.  I was going to wait until it was announced
> to broader audiences, but no need to delay.  The archives are online.
>
>> As mentioned on the NYCBUG Announcement list, the only BSD recommended
>> by the Tor Project is FreeBSD 5.x or higher, despite there being ports
>> for the other BSDs. Does anyone know where I can find the Tor project's
>> rationale behind that?
>>
>
> First thing I'd note is that one of the weaknesses of Tor's network is
> that it's overwhelmingly Linux, and thus a monoculture.  There are OSX,
> FreeBSD, Windows and OpenBSD relays out there, but I think enabling the
> BSDs to be a better performing platform would help diversify the base.
>
> A very useful list:
>
> http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/
>

OK, so looking over this list, it looks like all the major BSDs are 
represented to varying degrees (even the Bitrig guys have a cluster 
running on Bitrig).

According to that site, it looks closer to a biculture of Linux and 
Windows, but I admit that this could be deceiving, and it's really a 
monoculture of Linux.

> So it's in the FAQ:
>
> https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#RelayMemory
>
> But AFAIK, all the BSDs have lower performance than the Linuxes with
> Tor, and I only started recently to dive into the related sysctl knobs.
> Then again, benchmarking is another big path to dive into...
>

This should be relatively easy to diagnose, and quite possible that some 
of the information on that FAQ is outdated (i.e. is Tor on 
OpenBSD/NetBSD/Solaris still forking processes instead of using threads? 
Again, should be relatively easy to at least diagnose).

I don't have the spare hardware to test this myself atm (nor do I have an 
ISP nice enough to let me run a Tor relay) but if someone out there is 
running Tor on OpenBSD, I'd be interested in your outlook on this.

~Brian