Solaris Admins: For A Glimpse Of Your Networking Future, Install OpenBSD

Yet another proprietary tech titan turns to the free OpenBSD operating system as their source of innovation in the networking and security arena.

Roughly a week ago, on April 5th, 2015, parts of Oracle's roadmap for upcoming releases of their Solaris operating system was leaked in a message to the public OpenBSD tech developer mailing list. This is notable for several reasons, one is that Solaris, then owned and developed by (the now defunct) Sun Microsystems, was the original development platform for Darren Reed's IP Filter, more commonly known as IPF, which in turn was the software PF was designed to replace.

Note: This piece is also available without trackers but classic formatting only here.

IPF was the original firewall in OpenBSD, and had at the time also been ported to NetBSD, FreeBSD and several other systems. However, over time IPF appears to have fallen out of favor almost everywhere, and as the (perhaps not quite intended as such) announcement has it,

IPF in Solaris is on its death row.

Which we can reasonably be taken to mean that Oracle, like the OpenBSD project back in 2001 but possibly not for the same reasons, are abandoning the legacy IP Filter code base, and moving on to something newer:

PF in 11.3 release will be available as optional firewall. We hope to make PF default (and only firewall) in Solaris 12. You've made excellent job, your PF is crystal-clear design.

Perhaps due to Oracle's practice of putting beta testers under non-disclosure agreements, or possibly because essentially no tech journalists ever read OpenBSD developer-focused mailing lists, Oracle's PF plans have not generated much attention in the press.

I personally find it quite interesting that the Oracle Solaris team are apparently taking in the PF code from OpenBSD. As far as I'm aware release dates for Solaris 11.3 and 12 have not been announced yet, but looking at the release cycle churn (check back to the Wikipedia page's Version history section), it's reasonable to assume that the first Solaris release with PF should be out some time in 2015.

The OpenBSD packet filter subsystem PF is not the first example of OpenBSD-originated software ending up in other projects or even in commercial, proprietary products.

Basically every Unix out there ships some version of OpenSSH, which is developed and maintained as part of the OpenBSD project, with a -portable flavor maintained in sync for others to use (a model that has been adopted by several other OpenBSD associated projects such as the OpenBGPD routing daemon, the OpenSMTPD mail daemon, and most recently, the LibreSSL TLS library. The portable flavors have generally seen extensive use outside the OpenBSD sphere such as Linux distributions and other Unixes.

The interesting thing this time around is that Oracle are apparently now taking their PF code directly from OpenBSD, in contrast to earlier code recipients such as Blackberry (who became PF consumers via NetBSD) and Apple, whose main interface with the world of open source appears to be the FreeBSD project, except for the time when the FreeBSD project was a little too slow in updating their PF code, ported over a fresher version and added some features under their own, non-compatible license.

Going back to the possibly unintended announcement, the fact that the Oracle developers produced a patch against OpenBSD-current, which was committed only a few days later, indicates that most likely they are working with fairly recent code and are probably following OpenBSD development closely.

If Oracle, or at least the Solaris parts of their distinctly non-diminutive organization, have started waking up to the fact that OpenBSD-originated software is high quality, secure stuff, we'll all be benefiting. Many of the world's largest corporations and government agencies are heavy Solaris users, meaning that even if you're neither an OpenBSD user or a Solaris user, your kit is likely interacting intensely with both kinds, and with Solaris moving to OpenBSD's PF for their filtering needs, we will all be benefiting even more from the OpenBSD project's emphasis on correctness, quality and security in the released OpenBSD code.

If you're a Solaris admin who's wondering what this all means to you, you can do several things to prepare for the future. One is to install OpenBSD somewhere (an LDOM in a spare corner of your T-series kit or an M-series domain will do, as will most kinds of x86ish kit) - preferably, also buying a CD set.

A second possibly smart action (and I've been dying to say this for a while to Solaris folks) is to buy The Book of PF -- recently updated to cover new features such as the traffic shaping system.

And finally, if you're based in North America (or if your boss is willing to fly you to Ottawa in June anyway), there's a BSDCan tutorial session you probably want to take a closer look at, featuring yours truly. Similar sessions elsewhere may be announced later, watch the Upcoming talks section on the upper right. If you're thinking of going to Ottawa or my other sessions, you may want to take a peek at my notes on tutorials originally for two earlier BSDCan sessions. (Note for latecomers, those events are in the past, but future, similar sessions will be announced at the conference websites in due course)

Update 2015-04-15: Several commenters and correspondents have asked two related questions: "Will Oracle contribute code and patches back?" and "Will Oracle donate to OpenBSD?". The answer to the first question is that it looks like they've already started. Which is of course nice. Bugfixes and well implemented feature enhancements are welcome, as long as they come under an acceptable license. The answer to the second question is, we don't know yet. It probably won't hurt if the Oracle developers themselves as well as Solaris users start pointing the powers that be at Oracle in the direction of the OpenBSD project's Donations page, which outlines several useful approaches to help financing the project.

Update 2015-07-07: The first public Solaris 11.3 beta is out, and it contains a port of PF circa OpenBSD 5.5. Sasha Nedvedicky (Oracle's main PF on Solaris developer) offers some more details on his blog.

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