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Enabling FreeBSD on AArch64

• One of the things the FreeBSD foundation has been dumping money into lately is ARM64 support, but we haven't heard too much about it - this article should change that
• Since it's on a mainstream ARM site, the article begins with a bit of FreeBSD history, leading up to the current work on ARM64
• There's also a summary of some of the ARM work done at this year's BSDCan, including details about running it on the Cavium ThunderX platform (which has 48 cores)
• As of just a couple months ago, dtrace is even working on this new architecture
• Come 11.0-RELEASE, the plan is for ARM64 to get the same "tier 1" treatment as X86, which would imply binary updates for base and ports - something Raspberry Pi users often complain about not having ***

OpenBSD's tcpdump detailed

• Most people are probably familiar with tcpdump, a very useful packet sniffing and capturing utility that's included in all the main BSD base systems
• This video guide is specifically about the version in OpenBSD, which has gone through some major changes (it's pretty much a fork with no version number anymore)
• Unlike on the other platforms, OpenBSD's tcpdump will always run in a chroot as an unprivileged user - this has saved it from a number of high-profile exploits
• It also has support for the "pf.os" system, allowing you to filter out operating system fingerprints in the packet captures
• There's also PF (and pflog) integration, letting you see which line in your ruleset triggered a specific match
• Being able to run tcpdump directly on your router is pretty awesome for troubleshooting ***

More FreeBSD foundation at BSDCan

• The FreeBSD foundation has another round of trip reports from this year's BSDCan
• First up is Kamil Czekirda, who gives a good summary of some of the devsummit, FreeBSD-related presentations, some tutorials, getting freebsd-update bugs fixed and of course eating cake
• A second post from Christian Brueffer, who cleverly planned ahead to avoid jetlag, details how he got some things done during the FreeBSD devsummit
• Their third report is from our buddy Warren Block, who (unsurprisingly) worked on a lot of documentation-related things, including getting more people involved with writing them
• In true doc team style, his report is the most well-written of the bunch, including lots of links and a clear separation of topics (doc lounge, contributing to the wiki, presentations...)
• Finally, the fourth one comes to us from Shonali Balakrishna, who also gives an outline of some of the talks
• "Not only does a BSD conference have way too many very smart people in one room, but also some of the nicest." ***

DragonFly on the Chromebook C720

• If you've got one of the Chromebook laptops and weren't happy with the included OS, DragonFlyBSD might be worth a go
• This article is a "mini-report" on how DragonFly functions on the device as a desktop, and
• While the 2GB of RAM proved to be a bit limiting, most of the hardware is well-supported
• DragonFly's wiki has a full guide on getting set up on one of these devices as well ***

Interview - David Meyer - info@xinuos.com / @xinuos

Xinuos, BSD license model vs. others, community interaction

News Roundup

Introducing LiteBSD

• We definitely don't talk about 4.4BSD a lot on the show
• LiteBSD is "a variant of [the] 4.4BSD operating system adapted for microcontrollers"
• If you've got really, really old hardware (or are working in the embedded space) then this might be an interesting hobby project to look info ***

HardenedBSD announces ASLR completion

• HardenedBSD, now officially a full-on fork of FreeBSD, has declared their ASLR patchset to be complete
• The latest and last addition to the work was VDSO (Virtual Dynamic Shared Object) randomization, which is now configurable with a sysctl
• This post gives a summary of the six main features they've added since the beginning
• Only a few small things are left to do - man page cleanups, possibly shared object load order improvements ***

Unlock the reaper

• In the ongoing quest to make more of OpenBSD SMP-friendly, a new patch was posted that unlocks the reaper in the kernel
• When there's a zombie process causing a resource leak, it's the reaper's job to deallocate their resources (and yes we're still talking about computers, not horror movies)
• Initial testing has yielded positive results and no regressions
• They're looking for testers, so you can install a -current snapshot and get it automatically
• An updated version of the patch is coming soon too
• A hackathon is going on right now, so you can expect more SMP improvements in the near future ***

The importance of mentoring

• Adrian Chadd has a blog post up about mentoring new users, and it tells the story of how he originally got into FreeBSD
• He tells the story of, at age 11, meeting someone else who knew about making crystal sets that became his role model
• Eventually we get to his first FreeBSD 1.1 installation (which he temporarily abandoned for Linux, since it didn't have a color "ls" command) and how he started using the OS
• Nowadays, there's a formal mentoring system in FreeBSD
• While he talks about FreeBSD in the post, a lot of the concepts apply to all the BSDs (or even just life in general) ***

Feedback/Questions

• Sean writes in
• Herminio writes in
• Stuart writes in
• Richard writes in ***

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FreeBSD foundation's 2013 fundraising results

• The FreeBSD foundation finally counted all the money they made in 2013
• $768,562 from 1659 donors
• Nice little blog post from the team with a giant beastie picture
• "We have already started our 2014 fundraising efforts. As of the end of January we are just under $40,000. Our goal is to raise $1,000,000. We are currently finalizing our 2014 budget. We plan to publish both our 2013 financial report and our 2014 budget soon."
• A special thanks to all the BSD Now listeners that contributed, the foundation was really glad that we sent some people their way (and they mentioned us on Facebook) ***

OpenSSH 6.5 released

• We mentioned the CFT last week, and it's finally here!
• New key exchange using elliptic-curve Diffie Hellman in Daniel Bernstein's Curve25519 (now the default when both clients support it)
• Ed25519 public keys are now available for host keys and user keys, considered more secure than DSA and ECDSA
• Funny side effect: if you ONLY enable ed25519 host keys, all the compromised Linux boxes can't even attempt to login lol~
• New bcrypt private key type, 500,000,000 times harder to brute force
• Chacha20-poly1305 transport cipher that builds an encrypted and authenticated stream in one
• Portable version already in FreeBSD -CURRENT, and ports
• Lots more bugfixes and features, see the full release note or our interview with Damien
• Work has already started on 6.6, which can be used without OpenSSL! ***

Crazed Ferrets in a Berkeley Shower

• In 2000, MWL wrote an essay for linux.com about why he uses the BSD license: "It’s actually stood up fairly well to the test of time, but it’s fourteen years old now."
• This is basically an updated version about why he uses the BSD license, in response to recent comments from Richard Stallman
• Very nice post that gives some history about Berkeley, the basics of the BSD-style licenses and their contrast to the GNU GPL
• Check out the full post if you're one of those people that gets into license arguments
• The takeaway is "BSD is about making the world a better place. For everyone." ***

OpenBSD on BeagleBone Black

• Beaglebone Blacks are cheap little ARM devices similar to a Raspberry Pi
• A blog post about installing OpenBSD on a BBB from.. our guest for today!
• He describes it as "everything I wish I knew before installing the newly renamed armv7 port on a BeagleBone Black"
• It goes through the whole process, details different storage options and some workarounds
• Could be a really fun weekend project if you're interested in small or embedded devices ***

Interview - Ted Unangst - tedu@openbsd.org / @tedunangst

OpenBSD's signify infrastructure, ZFS on OpenBSD

Tutorial

Running an NTP server

News Roundup

Getting started with FreeBSD

• A new video and blog series about starting out with FreeBSD
• The author has been a fan since the 90s and has installed it on every server he's worked with
• He mentioned some of the advantages of BSD over Linux and how to approach explaining them to new users
• The first video is the installation, then he goes on to packages and other topics - 4 videos so far ***

More OpenBSD hackathon reports

• As a followup to last week, this time Kenneth Westerback writes about his NZ hackathon experience
• He arrived with two goals: disklabel fixes for drives with 4k sectors and some dhclient work
• This summary goes into detail about all the stuff he got done there ***

X11 in a jail

• We've gotten at least one feedback email about running X in a jail Well.. with this commit, looks like now you can!
• A new tunable option will let jails access /dev/kmem and similar device nodes
• Along with a change to DRM, this allows full X11 in a jail
• Be sure to check out our jail tutorial and jailed VNC tutorial for ideas ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• 10.0 "Joule Edition" finally released!
• AMD graphics are now officially supported
• GNOME3, MATE and Cinnamon desktops are available
• Grub updates and fixes
• PCBSD also got a mention in eweek ***

Feedback/Questions

• Justin writes in
• Daniel writes in
• Martin writes in
• Alex writes in - unofficial FreeBSD RPI Images
• James writes in
• John writes in ***