NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon

Headlines

Mindshare: Analyzing Bsd Kernels for Uninitialized Memory Disclosures Using Binary Ninja

Sharing Dual-Licensed Drivers between Linux and FreeBSD

News Roundup

A Few of My Favorite Things About The OpenBSD Packet Filter Tools

How to trigger services restart after OpenBSD update

Gems from the Man Page Trenches

Beastie Bits

The MIPS ThinkPad
Nix Gems
Running PalmOS without PalmOS
"OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems" draft done!

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.

Feedback/Questions

• Brad - zfs and databases
• Kevin - EMACS
• Michal - virtual OSS

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

Headlines

5x if_bridge Performance Improvement

With FreeBSD Foundation grant, Kristof Provost harnesses new parallel techniques to uncork performance bottleneck

• Kristof also streamed some of his work, providing an interesting insight into how such development work happens
• > https://www.twitch.tv/provostk/videos ***

How Unix Won

+> Unix has won in every conceivable way. And in true mythic style, it contains the seeds of its own eclipse. This is my subjective historical narrative of how that happened.

I’m using the name “Unix” to include the entire family of operating systems descended from it, or that have been heavily influenced by it. That includes Linux, SunOS, Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X, and many, many others.
Both major mobile OSs, Android and iOS, have Unix roots. Their billions of users dwarf those using clunky things like laptops and desktops, but even there, Windows is only the non-Unix viable OS. Almost everything running server-side in giant datacenters is Linux.
How did Unix win?

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News Roundup

Check logs of central syslog-ng log host on FreeBSD

This blog post continues where the blog post A central log host with syslog-ng on FreeBSD left off. Open source solutions to check syslog log messages exist, such as Logcheck or Logwatch. Although these are not to difficult to implement and maintain, I still found these to much. So I went for my own home grown solution to check the syslog messages of the SoCruel.NU central log host. And the solution presented in this blog post works pretty well for me!

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Understanding VLAN Configuration on FreeBSD

Until recently, I’ve never had a chance to use VLANs on FreeBSD hosts, though I sometimes configure them on ethernet switches.
But when I was playing with vnet jails, I suddenly got interested in VLAN configuration on FreeBSD and experimented with it for some time.
I wrote this short article to summarize my current understanding of how to configure VLANs on FreeBSD.

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Using bhyve PCI passthrough on OmniOS

Some hardware is not supported in illumos yet, but luckily there is bhyve which supports pci passthrough to any guest operating system. To continue with my OmniOS desktop on "modern" hardware I would love wifi support, so why not using a bhyve guest as router zone which provide the required drivers?

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TrueNAS 11.3-U2 is Generally Available

TrueNAS 11.3-U2.1 is generally available as of 4/22/2020. This update is based on FreeNAS 11.3-U2 which has had over 50k deployments and received excellent community and third party reviews. The Release Notes are available on the iXsystems.com website.

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Beastie Bits

HardenedBSD April 2020 Status Report
NYC Bug’s Mailing List - Listing of open Dev Jobs

Feedback/Questions

• Greg - Lenovo
• Matt - BSD Packaging

• Morgan - Performance

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

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Headlines

EKCD - Encrypted Crash Dumps in FreeBSD

Some time ago, I was describing how to configure networking crash dumps. In that post, I mentioned that there is also the possibility to encrypt crash dumps. Today we will look into this functionality. Initially, it was implemented during Google Summer of Code 2013 by my friend Konrad Witaszczyk, who made it available in FreeBSD 12. If you can understand Polish, you can also look into his presentation on BSD-PL on which he gave a comprehensive review of all kernel crash dumps features.

The main issue with crash dumps is that they may include sensitive information available in memory during a crash. They will contain all the data from the kernel and the userland, like passwords, private keys, etc. While dumping them, they are written to unencrypted storage, so if somebody took out the hard drive, they could access sensitive data. If you are sending a crash dump through the network, it may be captured by third parties. Locally the data are written directly to a dump device, skipping the GEOM subsystem. The purpose of that is to allow a kernel to write a crash dump even in case a panic occurs in the GEOM subsystem. It means that a crash dump cannot be automatically encrypted with GELI.

Time on Unix

Time, a word that is entangled in everything in our lives, something we’re intimately familiar with. Keeping track of it is important for many activities we do.

Over millennia we’ve developed different ways to calculate it. Most prominently, we’ve relied on the position the sun appears to be at in the sky, what is called apparent solar time.

We’ve decided to split it as seasons pass, counting one full cycle of the 4 seasons as a year, a full rotation around the sun. We’ve also divided the passing of light to the lack thereof as days, a rotation of the earth on itself. Moving on to more precise clock divisions such as seconds, minutes, and hours, units that meant different things at different points in history. Ultimately, as travel got faster, the different ways of counting time that evolved in multiple places had to converge. People had to agree on what it all meant.

See the article for more

News Roundup

Improve ZVOL sync write performance by using a taskq

A central log host with syslog-ng on FreeBSD - Part 1

syslog-ng is the Swiss army knife of log management. You can collect logs from any source, process them in real time and deliver them to wide range of destinations. It allows you to flexibly collect, parse, classify, rewrite and correlate logs from across your infrastructure. This is why syslog-ng is the perfect solution for the central log host of my (mainly) FreeBSD based infrastructure.

HEADS UP: NetBSD Entropy Overhaul

This week I committed an overhaul of the kernel entropy system. Please let me know if you observe any snags! For the technical background, see the thread on tech-kern a few months ago: https://mail-index.NetBSD.org/tech-kern/2019/12/21/msg025876.html.

Setting Up NetBSD Kernel Dev Environment

I used T_PAGEFLT’s blog post as a reference for setting my NetBSD kernel development environment since his website is down I’m putting down the steps here so it would be helpful for starters.

Beastie Bits

• You can now use ccache to speed up dsynth even more.
• Improving libossaudio, and the future of OSS in NetBSD
• DragonFlyBSD DHCPCD Import dhcpcd-9.0.2 with the following changes
• Reminder: watch this space for upcoming FreeBSD Office Hours, next is May 13th at 2pm Eastern, 18:00 UTC

Feedback/Questions

• Ghislain - ZFS Question
• Jake - Paypal Donations
• Oswin - Hammer tutorial

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