NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Interview - Kyle Evans - kevans@freebsd.org / @kaevans91

Tarsnap

• This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

  ---

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Chasing a bad commit

While working on a big project where multiple teams merge their feature branches frequently into a release Git branch, developers often run into situations where they find that some of their work have been either removed, modified or affected by someone else's work accidentally. It can happen in smaller teams as well. Two features could have been working perfectly fine until they got merged together and broke something. That's a highly possible case. There are many other cases which could cause such hard to understand and subtle bugs which even continuous integration (CI) systems running the entire test suite of our projects couldn't catch.
We are not going to discuss how such subtle bugs can get into our release branch because that's just a wild territory out there. Instead, we can definitely discuss about how to find a commit that deviated from an expected outcome of a certain feature. The deviation could be any behaviour of our code that we can measure distinctively — either good or bad in general.

New FreeBSD Core Team Elected

The FreeBSD Project is pleased to announce the completion of the 2020 Core Team election. Active committers to the project have elected your Eleventh FreeBSD Core Team.!

• Baptiste Daroussin (bapt)
• Ed Maste (emaste)
• George V. Neville-Neil (gnn)
• Hiroki Sato (hrs)
• Kyle Evans (kevans)
• Mark Johnston (markj)
• Scott Long (scottl)
• Sean Chittenden (seanc)
• Warner Losh (imp) ***

News Roundup

Getting Started with NetBSD on the Pinebook Pro

If you buy a Pinebook Pro now, it comes with Manjaro Linux on the internal eMMC storage. Let’s install NetBSD instead!
The easiest way to get started is to buy a decent micro-SD card (what sort of markings it should have is a science of its own, by the way) and install NetBSD on that. On a warm boot (i.e. when rebooting a running system), the micro-SD card has priority compared to the eMMC, so the system will boot from there.

• A FreeBSD developer has borrowed some of the NetBSD code to get audio working on RockPro64 and Pinebook Pro: https://twitter.com/kernelnomicon/status/1282790609778905088 ***

FreeBSD on the Intel 10th Gen i3 NUC

I have ended up with some 10th Gen i3 NUC's (NUC10i3FNH to be specific) to put to work in my testbed. These are quite new devices, the build date on the boxes is 13APR2020. Before I figure out what their true role is (one of them might have to run linux) I need to install FreeBSD -CURRENT and see how performance and hardware support is.

pf table size check and change

Did you know there’s a default size limit to pf’s state table? I did not, but it makes sense that there is one. If for some reason you bump into this limit (difficult for home use, I’d think), here’s how you change it
There is a table-entries limit specified, you can see current settings with
'pfctl -s all'. You can adjust the limits in the /etc/pf.conf file
containing the rules with a line like this near the top:
set limit table-entries 100000

• In the original mail thread, there is mention of the FreeBSD sysctl net.pf.request_maxcount, which controls the maximum number of entries that can be sent as a single ioctl(). This allows the user to adjust the memory limit for how big of a list the kernel is willing to allocate memory for. ***

Beastie Bits

• tmux and bhyve
• Azure and FreeBSD
• Groff Tutorial *** ###Tarsnap
• This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Tarsnap Mastery

Feedback/Questions

• Chris - ZFS Question
• Patrick - Tarsnap
• Pin - pkgsrc ***
• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***

Headlines

Entropy

A brief introduction to randomness

• Problem: Computers are very predictable. This is by design.

But what if we want them to act unpredictably? This is very useful if we want to secure our private communications with randomized keys, or not let people cheat at video games, or if we're doing statistical simulations or similar.

Logs grinding Netatalk on FreeBSD to a hault

I’ve heard it said the cobbler’s children walk barefoot. While posessing the qualities of a famed financial investment strategy, it speaks to how we generally put more effort into things for others than ourselves; at least in business.
The HP Microserver I share with Clara is a modest affair compared to what we run at work. It has six spinning rust drives and two SSDs which are ZFS-mirrored; not even in a RAID 10 equivalent. This is underlaid with GELI for encryption, and served to our Macs with Netatalk over gigabit Ethernet with jumbo frames.

News Roundup

NetBSD Core Team Changes

Matt Thomas (matt@) has served on the NetBSD core team for over ten years, and has made many contributions, including ELF functionality, being the long-time VAX maintainer, gcc contributor, the generic pmap, and also networking functionality, and platform bring-up over the years. Matt has stepped down from the NetBSD core team, and we thank him for his many, extensive contributions.
Robert Elz (kre@), a long time BSD contributor, has kindly accepted the offer to join the core team, and help us out with the benefit of his experience and advice over many years. Amongst other things, Robert has been maintaining our shell, liaising with the Austin Group, and bringing it up to date with modern functionality.

---

Using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests

In a post to the ports@ mailing list, Landry Breuil (landry@) shared some of his notes on using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests.

WireGuard patchset for OpenBSD

A while ago I wanted to learn more about OpenBSD development. So I picked a project, in this case WireGuard, to develop a native client for. Over the last two years, with many different iterations, and working closely with the WireGuard's creator (Jason [Jason A. Donenfeld - Ed.], CC'd), it started to become a serious project eventually reaching parity with other official implementations. Finally, we are here and I think it is time for any further development to happen inside the src tree.

---

FreeBSD 12.1 on a laptop

I’m using FreeBSD again on a laptop for some reasons so expect to read more about FreeBSD here. This tutorial explain how to get a graphical desktop using FreeBSD 12.1.

---

Beastie Bits

• List of useful FreeBSD Commands
• Master Your Network With Unix Command Line Tools
• Original Unix containers aka FreeBSD jails
• Flashback : 2003 Article : Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor
• FreeBSD Journal March/April 2020 Filesystems: ZFS Encryption, FUSE, and more, plus Network Bridges
• HAMBug meeting will be online again in June, so those from all over the world are welcome to join, June 9th (2nd Tuesday of each month) at 18:30 Eastern

Feedback/Questions

• + Lyubomir - GELI and ZFS
• Patrick - powerd and powerd++

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

Headlines

LLVM santizers and GDB regression test suite.

As NetBSD-9 is branched, I have been asked to finish the LLVM sanitizer integration. This work is now accomplished and with MKLLVM=yes build option (by default off), the distribution will be populated with LLVM files for ASan, TSan, MSan, UBSan, libFuzzer, SafeStack and XRay.

I have also transplanted basesystem GDB patched to my GDB repository and managed to run the GDB regression test-suite.

• NetBSD distribution changes

I have enhanced and imported my local MKSANITIZER code that makes whole distribution sanitization possible. Few real bugs were fixed and a number of patches were newly written to reflect the current NetBSD sources state. I have also merged another chunk of the fruits of the GSoC-2018 project with fuzzing the userland (by plusun@).

• The following changes were committed to the sources:
  • ab7de18d0283 Cherry-pick upstream compiler-rt patches for LLVM sanitizers
  • 966c62a34e30 Add LLVM sanitizers in the MKLLVM=yes build
  • 8367b667adb9 telnetd: Stop defining the same variables concurrently in bss and data
  • fe72740f64bf fsck: Stop defining the same variable concurrently in bss and data
  • 40e89e890d66 Fix build of t_ubsan/t_ubsanxx under MKSANITIZER
  • b71326fd7b67 Avoid symbol clashes in tests/usr.bin/id under MKSANITIZER
  • c581f2e39fa5 Avoid symbol clashes in fs/nfs/nfsservice under MKSANITIZER
  • 030a4686a3c6 Avoid symbol clashes in bin/df under MKSANITIZER
  • fd9679f6e8b1 Avoid symbol clashes in usr.sbin/ypserv/ypserv under MKSANITIZER
  • 5df2d7939ce3 Stop defining _rpcsvcdirty in bss and data
  • 5fafbe8b8f64 Add missing extern declaration of ib_mach_emips in installboot
  • d134584be69a Add SANITIZER_RENAME_CLASSES in bsd.prog.mk
  • 2d00d9b08eae Adapt tests/kernel/t_subr_prf for MKSANITIZER
  • ce54363fe452 Ship with sanitizer/lsan_interface.h for GCC 7
  • 7bd5ee95e9a0 Ship with sanitizer/lsan_interface.h for LLVM 7
  • d8671fba7a78 Set NODEBUG for LLVM sanitizers
  • 242cd44890a2 Add PAXCTL_FLAG rules for MKSANITIZER
  • 5e80ab99d9ce Avoid symbol clashes in test/rump/modautoload/t_modautoload with sanitizers
  • e7ce7ecd9c2a sysctl: Add indirection of symbols to remove clash with sanitizers
  • 231aea846aba traceroute: Add indirection of symbol to remove clash with sanitizers
  • 8d85053f487c sockstat: Add indirection of symbols to remove clash with sanitizers
  • 81b333ab151a netstat: Add indirection of symbols to remove clash with sanitizers
  • a472baefefe8 Correct the memset(3)'s third argument in i386 biosdisk.c
  • 7e4e92115bc3 Add ATF c and c++ tests for TSan, MSan, libFuzzer
  • 921ddc9bc97c Set NOSANITIZER in i386 ramdisk image
  • 64361771c78d Enhance MKSANITIZER support
  • 3b5608f80a2b Define target_not_supported_body() in TSan, MSan and libFuzzer tests
  • c27f4619d513 Avoids signedness bit shift in db_get_value()
  • 680c5b3cc24f Fix LLVM sanitizer build by GCC (HAVE_LLVM=no)
  • 4ecfbbba2f2a Rework the LLVM compiler_rt build rules
  • 748813da5547 Correct the build rules of LLVM sanitizers
  • 20e223156dee Enhance the support of LLVM sanitizers
  • 0bb38eb2f20d Register syms.extra in LLVM sanitizer .syms files
  • Almost all of the mentioned commits were backported to NetBSD-9 and will land 9.0.

Homura - a Windows Games Launcher for FreeBSD

Inspired by lutris (a Linux gaming platform), we would like to provide a game launcher to play windows games on FreeBSD.

• Makes it easier to run games on FreeBSD, by providing the tweaks and dependencies for you
• Dependencies
  • curl
  • bash
  • p7zip
  • zenity
  • webfonts
  • alsa-utils (Optional)
  • winetricks
  • vulkan-tools
  • mesa-demos
  • i386-wine-devel on amd64 or wine-devel on i386

News Roundup

Ada—The Language of Cost Savings?

Many myths surround the Ada programming language, but it continues to be used and evolve at the same time. And while the increased adoption of Ada and SPARK, its provable subset, is slow, it’s noticeable. Ada already addresses more of the features found in found in heavily used embedded languages like C+ and C#. It also tackles problems addressed by upcoming languages like Rust.

Chris concludes, “Development technologies have a profound impact on one of the largest and most variable costs associated with embedded-system engineering—labor. At a time when on-time system deployment can not only impact customer satisfaction, but access to services revenue streams, engineering team efficiency is at a premium. Our research showed that programming language choices can have significant influence in this area, leading to shorter projects, better schedules and, ultimately, lower development costs. While a variety of factors can influence and dictate language choice, our research showed that Ada’s evolution has made it an increasingly compelling option for engineering organizations, providing both technically and financially sound solution.”

In general, Ada already makes embedded “programming in the large” much easier by handling issues that aren’t even addressed in other languages. Though these features are often provided by third-party software, it results in inconsistent practices among developers. Ada also supports the gamut of embedded platforms from systems like Arm’s Cortex-M through supercomputers. Learning Ada isn’t as hard as one might think and the benefits can be significant.

FreeBSD core team appoints a WG to explore transitioning from Subversion to Git.

• The FreeBSD Core Team is the governing body of FreeBSD.

Core approved source commit bits for Doug Moore (dougm), Chuck Silvers (chs), Brandon Bergren (bdragon), and a vendor commit bit for Scott Phillips (scottph).

The annual developer survey closed on 2019-04-02. Of the 397 developers, 243 took the survey with an average completion time of 12 minutes. The public survey closed on 2019-05-13. It was taken by 3637 users and had a 79% completion rate. A presentation of the survey results took place at BSDCan 2019.

The core team voted to appoint a working group to explore transitioning our source code 'source of truth' from Subversion to Git. Core asked Ed Maste to chair the group as Ed has been researching this topic for some time. For example, Ed gave a MeetBSD 2018 talk on the topic.

There is a variety of viewpoints within core regarding where and how to host a Git repository, however core feels that Git is the prudent path forward.

OpenBSD 6.6 Beta tagged

CVSROOT:    /cvs
Module name:    src
Changes by:    deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org    2019/08/09 21:56:02

Modified files:
    etc/root : root.mail
    share/mk : sys.mk
    sys/arch/macppc/stand/tbxidata: bsd.tbxi
    sys/conf : newvers.sh
    sys/sys : param.h
    usr.bin/signify: signify.1

Log message:
move to 6.6-beta

Preliminary release notes

Improved hardware support, including:

• clang(1) is now provided on powerpc.
• IEEE 802.11 wireless stack improvements:
• Generic network stack improvements:
• Installer improvements:
• Security improvements:
• + Routing daemons and other userland network improvements
• + The ntpd(8) daemon now gets and sets the clock in a secure way when booting even when a battery-backed clock is absent.
• + bgdp(8) improvements
• + Assorted improvements:
• + The filesystem buffer cache now more aggressively uses memory outside the DMA region, to improve cache performance on amd64 machines.
• The BER API previously internal to ldap(1), ldapd(8), ypldap(8), and snmpd(8) has been moved into libutil. See ber_read_elements(3).
• Support for specifying boot device in vm.conf(5).
• OpenSMTPD 6.6.0
• LibreSSL 3.0.X
• API and Documentation Enhancements
• Completed the port of RSA_METHOD accessors from the OpenSSL 1.1 API.
• Documented undescribed options and removed unfunctional options description in openssl(1) manual.
• OpenSSH 8.0

Project Trident 12-U5 update now available

This is the fifth general package update to the STABLE release repository based upon TrueOS 12-Stable.

• Package changes from Stable 12-U4

• Package Summary

  • New Packages: 20
  • Deleted Packages: 24
  • Updated Packages: 279

• New Packages (20)

  • artemis (biology/artemis) : 17.0.1.11
  • catesc (games/catesc) : 0.6
  • dmlc-core (devel/dmlc-core) : 0.3.105
  • go-wtf (sysutils/go-wtf) : 0.20.0_1
  • instead (games/instead) : 3.3.0_1
  • lidarr (net-p2p/lidarr) : 0.6.2.883
  • minerbold (games/minerbold) : 1.4
  • onnx (math/onnx) : 1.5.0
  • openzwave-devel (comms/openzwave-devel) : 1.6.897
  • polkit-qt-1 (sysutils/polkit-qt) : 0.113.0_8
  • py36-traitsui (graphics/py-traitsui) : 6.1.2
  • rubygem-aws-sigv2 (devel/rubygem-aws-sigv2) : 1.0.1
  • rubygem-default_value_for32 (devel/rubygem-default_value_for32) : 3.2.0
  • rubygem-ffi110 (devel/rubygem-ffi110) : 1.10.0
  • rubygem-zeitwerk (devel/rubygem-zeitwerk) : 2.1.9
  • sems (net/sems) : 1.7.0.g20190822
  • skypat (devel/skypat) : 3.1.1
  • tvm (math/tvm) : 0.4.1440
  • vavoom (games/vavoom) : 1.33_15
  • vavoom-extras (games/vavoom-extras) : 1.30_4

• Deleted Packages (24)

  • geeqie (graphics/geeqie) : Unknown reason
  • iriverter (multimedia/iriverter) : Unknown reason
  • kde5 (x11/kde5) : Unknown reason
  • kicad-doc (cad/kicad-doc) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-buildworld (os/buildworld) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland (os/userland) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-base (os/userland-base) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-base-bootstrap (os/userland-base-bootstrap) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-bin (os/userland-bin) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-boot (os/userland-boot) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-conf (os/userland-conf) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-debug (os/userland-debug) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-devtools (os/userland-devtools) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-docs (os/userland-docs) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-lib (os/userland-lib) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-lib32 (os/userland-lib32) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-lib32-development (os/userland-lib32-development) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-rescue (os/userland-rescue) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-sbin (os/userland-sbin) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-tests (os/userland-tests) : Unknown reason
  • photoprint (print/photoprint) : Unknown reason
  • plasma5-plasma (x11/plasma5-plasma) : Unknown reason
  • polkit-qt5 (sysutils/polkit-qt) : Unknown reason
  • secpanel (security/secpanel) : Unknown reason

Beastie Bits

• DragonFlyBSD - msdosfs updates
• Stand out as a speaker
• Not a review of the 7th Gen X1 Carbon
• FreeBSD Meets Linux At The Open Source Summit
• QEMU VM Escape
• Porting wine to amd64 on NetBSD, third evaluation report.
• OpenBSD disabled DoH by default in Firefox

Feedback/Questions

• Reinis - GELI with UEFI
• Mason - Beeping

[CHVT feedback]
DJ - Feedback
Ben - chvt
Harri - Marc's chvt question

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

OpenBSD 5.5 released

• If you ordered a CD set then you've probably had it for a little while already, but OpenBSD has formally announced the public release of 5.5
• This is one of the biggest releases to date, with a very long list of changes and improvements
• Some of the highlights include: time_t being 64 bit on all platforms, release sets and binary packages being signed with the new signify tool, a new autoinstall feature of the installer, SMP support on Alpha, a new AViiON port, lots of new hardware drivers including newer NICs, the new vxlan driver, relayd improvements, a new pf queue system for bandwidth shaping, dhcpd and dhclient fixes, OpenSMTPD 5.4.2 and all its new features, position-independent executables being default for i386, the RNG has been replaced with ChaCha20 as well as some other security improvements, FUSE support, tmpfs, softraid partitions larger than 2TB and a RAID 5 implementation, OpenSSH 6.6 with all its new features and fixes... and a lot more
• The full list of changes is HUGE, be sure to read through it all if you're interested in the details
• If you're doing an upgrade from 5.4 instead of a fresh install, pay careful attention to the upgrade guide as there are some very specific steps for this version
• Also be sure to apply the errata patches on your new installations... especially those OpenSSL ones (some of which still aren't fixed in the other BSDs yet)
• On the topic of errata patches, the project is now going to also send them out (signed) via the announce mailing list, a very welcome change
• Congrats to the whole team on this great release - 5.6 is going to be even more awesome with "Libre"SSL and lots of other stuff that's currently in development ***

FreeBSD foundation funding highlights

• The FreeBSD foundation posts a new update on how they're spending the money that everyone donates
• "As we embark on our 15th year of serving the FreeBSD Project and community, we are proud of what we've done to help FreeBSD become the most innovative, reliable, and high-performance operation system"
• During this spring, they want to highlight the new UEFI boot support and newcons
• There's a lot of details about what exactly UEFI is and why we need it going forward
• FreeBSD has also needed some updates to its console to support UTF8 and wide characters
• Hopefully this series will continue and we'll get to see what other work is being sponsored ***

OpenSSH without OpenSSL

• The OpenSSH team has been hard at work, making it even better, and now OpenSSL is completely optional
• Since it won't have access to the primitives OpenSSL uses, there will be a trade-off of features vs. security
• This version will drop support for legacy SSH v1, and the only two cryptographic algorithms supported are an in-house implementation of AES in counter mode and the new combination of the Chacha20 stream cipher with Poly1305 for packet integrity
• Key exchange is limited to elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman and the newer Curve25519 KEXs
• No support for RSA, DSA or ECDSA public keys - only Ed25519
• It also includes a new buffer API and a set of wrappers to make it compatible with the existing API
• Believe it or not, this was planned before all the heartbleed craziness
• Maybe someday soon we'll have a mini-openssh-portable in FreeBSD ports and NetBSD pkgsrc, would be really neat ***

BSDMag's April 2014 issue is out

• The free monthly BSD magazine has got a new issue available for download
• This time the articles include: pascal on BSD, an introduction to revision control systems and configuration management, deploying NetBSD on AWS EC2, more GIMP tutorials, an AsiaBSDCon 2014 report and a piece about how easily credit cards are stolen online
• Anyone can contribute to the magazine, just send the editors an email about what you want to write
• No Linux articles this time around, good ***

Interview - David Chisnall - theraven@freebsd.org

The LLVM/Clang switch, FreeBSD's core team, various topics

Tutorial

RAID in FreeBSD and OpenBSD

News Roundup

BSDTalk episode 240

• Our buddy Will Backman has uploaded a new episode of BSDTalk, this time with our other buddy GNN as the guest - mainly to talk about NTP and keeping reliable time
• Topics include the specific details of crystals used in watches and computers to keep time, how temperature affects the quality, different sources of inaccuracy, some general NTP information, why you might want extremely precise time, different time sources (GPS, satellite, etc), differences in stratum levels, the problem of packet delay and estimating the round trip time, some of the recent NTP amplification attacks, the downsides to using UDP instead of TCP and... much more
• GNN also talks a little about the Precision Time Protocol and how it's different than NTP
• Two people we've interviewed talking to each other, awesome
• If you're interested in NTP, be sure to see our tutorial too ***

m2k14 trip reports

• We've got a few more reports from the recent OpenBSD hackathon in Morocco
• The first one is from Antoine Jacoutot (who is a key GNOME porter and gave us the screenshots for the OpenBSD desktop tutorial)
• "Since I always fail at actually doing whatever I have planned for a hackathon, this time I decided to come to m2k14 unprepared about what I was going to do"
• He got lots of work done with ports and pushing GNOME-related patches back up to the main project, then worked on fixing ports' compatibility with LibreSSL
• Speaking of LibreSSL, there's an article all would-be portable version writers should probably read and take into consideration
• Jasper Adriaanse also writes about what he got done over there
• He cleaned up and fixed the puppet port to work better with OpenBSD ***

Why you should use FreeBSD on your cloud VPS

• Here we have a blog post from Atlantic, a VPS and hosting provider, about 10 reasons for using FreeBSD
• Starts off with a little bit of BSD history for those who are unfamiliar with it and only know Linux and Windows
• The 10 reasons are: community, stability, collaboration, ease of use, ports, security, ZFS, GEOM, sound and having lots of options
• The post goes into detail about each of them and why FreeBSD makes a great choice for a VPS OS ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• Big changes coming in the way PCBSD manages software
• The PBI system, AppCafe and related tools are all going to use pkgng now
• The AppCafe will no longer be limited to PBIs, so much more software will be easily available from the ports tree
• New rating system coming soon and much more ***

Feedback/Questions

• Martin writes in
• John writes in
• Alex writes in
• Goetz writes in
• Jarrad writes in ***