November 24, 2025
BSD Battle: Speed vs Stability
We're (now) moving from OpenBSD to FreeBSD for firewalls
Speed wins the firewall fight; fans want receipts, businesses fear the upgrade treadmill
TLDR: A team swapped OpenBSD for FreeBSD to speed up firewalls on 10‑gig networks. The comments split between applauding speed, warning that OpenBSD’s no‑LTS upgrades scare businesses, and citing new OpenBSD performance gains while asking for the FreeBSD downsides the author didn’t spill.
Cue the BSD battle: one shop says they’re ditching OpenBSD for FreeBSD to make their firewalls faster on 10‑gig networks, and the comments erupted—or, at first, didn’t. “What’s so amazing about this?” asked 0xWTF, poking the quiet thread. Then the hot takes arrived: stability fans warned that OpenBSD’s six‑month upgrade cycle is a corporate horror show (no long‑term support), others demanded the missing tea on FreeBSD’s rough edges, and one dreamer imagined drivers and network bits that plug‑and‑play across systems, name‑dropping NDISwrapper.
The author’s gist: FreeBSD runs their packet‑filtering firewall rules faster with less fiddling, plus nice‑to‑haves like starting the system on ZFS (a modern storage system). That performance win is pushing them to rebuild firewalls and VPN servers on FreeBSD and stop spinning up new OpenBSD boxes. Counter‑punch: OpenBSD fans cite fresh TCP (internet traffic) tweaks with reported throughput jumps of 38%–100%, arguing the gap may close. The meme energy is peak “team speed vs team stability,” with quips about BSD divorce court and six‑month speed dating for servers. The mood: practical engineers chose the faster lane today, but the plot twist could be OpenBSD’s comeback—if it lands before everyone finishes moving boxes.
Key Points
- •The author has migrated a significant number of firewalls from OpenBSD to FreeBSD.
- •FreeBSD delivered better PF firewall performance on a 10G network with less tuning than OpenBSD.
- •PF rulesets from OpenBSD were relatively straightforward to convert to FreeBSD.
- •New OpenBSD builds have been stopped; firewalls and recent VPN servers are now built on FreeBSD.
- •Some non-firewall OpenBSD machines will likely be replaced with Ubuntu; returning to OpenBSD is considered unlikely.