Nearly the end of 2015, what have changed so far ?

Hi folks,

Since couple of months, at home I ve changed quite a few the OSes I use the most. While professionally, I still use mainly FreeBSD and Linux, at home I use more OpenBSD over FreeBSD, and I use also more NetBSD than before and use Linux only when I need to. Might be for many reasons, for the sake of diversification, in the case of OpenBSD I got more used to the "atmosphere" of the tech mailing list and kinda appreciate the innovative approach of NetBSD, hence I got more involved whenever I can, packaging systems included.

Also since a couple of weeks I work on a specific branch of Haproxy for OpenBSD. On Linux, Haproxy takes advantage, in tcp mode, (especially with modern kernel versions) of the popular splice syscall to transfer data between two sockets, which is effective as everything is done in kernel's side. There is a more or less similar solution on OpenBSD, sosplice which is usable in the userland side via setsockopt ; I try to see if it can take advantage of this feature. Indeed, a couple of tests were done with Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, despite Linux was in an older hardware it was noticeably faster. However, this OpenBSD branch is more a "proof of concept" than anything else, probably will never make its way to Haproxy but the performance increased slightly at least.