NOTES
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Headlines

FreeBSD Performance Observability

Advance!BSD – thoughts on a not-for-profit project to support *BSD (1/2)

News Roundup

Maintainership Change :: Lumina Desktop Environment

Study the past if you would define the Future

How to Handle Secrets on the Command Line

Following NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD Now Has "COVID"

Tarsnap

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Feedback/Questions

• Jim - freebsd kde
• michal - zfs question
• tim - lumina and snapshots ***
• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***

Headlines

Distrowatch Fury BSD Review

FuryBSD is the most recent addition to the DistroWatch database and provides a live desktop operating system based on FreeBSD. FuryBSD is not entirely different in its goals from NomadBSD, which we discussed recently. I wanted to take this FreeBSD-based project for a test drive and see how it compares to NomadBSD and other desktop-oriented projects in the FreeBSD family.

FuryBSD supplies hybrid ISO/USB images which can be used to run a live desktop. There are two desktop editions currently, both for 64-bit (x86_64) machines: Xfce and KDE Plasma. The Xfce edition is 1.4GB in size and is the flavour I downloaded. The KDE Plasma edition is about 3.0GB in size.

My fresh install of FuryBSD booted to a graphical login screen. From there I could sign into my account, which brings up the Xfce desktop. The installed version of Xfce is the same as the live version, with a few minor changes. Most of the desktop icons have been removed with just the file manager launchers remaining. The Getting Started and System Information icons have been removed. Otherwise the experience is virtually identical to the live media.

FuryBSD uses a theme that is mostly grey and white with creamy yellow folder icons. The application menu launchers tend to have neutral icons, neither particularly bright and detailed or minimal.

LLDB now works on i386

Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages.

In February 2019, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. So far I've been working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support, extending NetBSD's ptrace interface to cover more register types and fix compat32 issues, fixing watchpoint and threading support.

The original NetBSD port of LLDB was focused on amd64 only. In January, I have extended it to support i386 executables. This includes both 32-bit builds of LLDB (running natively on i386 kernel or via compat32) and debugging 32-bit programs from 64-bit LLDB.

News Roundup

wpa_supplicant is definitely a lower-class citizen, sorry

wpa_supplicant is definitely a lower-class citizen, sorry.

I increasingly wonder why this stuff matters; transit costs are so much lower than the period when eduroam was setup, and their reliance on 802.11x is super weird in a world where, for the most part
+ entire cities have open wifi in their downtown core
+ edu vs edu+transit split horizon problems have to be solved anyways
+ many universities have parallel open wifi
+ rate limiting / fare-share approaches for the open-net, on unmetered
+ flat-rate solves the problem
+ LTE hotspot off a phone isn't a rip off anymore
+ other open networks exist

essentially no one else feels compelled to do use 802.11x for a so called "semi-open access network", so I think they've lost the plot on friction vs benefit.

(we've held hackathons at EDU campus that are locked down like that, and in every case we've said no way, gotten a wire with open net, and built our own wifi. we will not subject our developers to that extra complexity).

KDE FreeBSD Updates Feb 2020

Some bits and bobs from the KDE FreeBSD team in february 2020. We met at the FreeBSD devsummit before FOSDEM, along with other FreeBSD people. Plans were made, schemes were forged, and Groff the Goat was introduced to some new people.

• The big ticket things:
  • Frameworks are at 5.66
  • Plasma is at 5.17.5 (the beta 5.18 hasn’t been tried)
  • KDE release service has landed 19.12.2 (same day it was released)
• Developer-centric:
  • KDevelop is at 5.5.0
  • KUserfeedback landed its 1.0.0 release
  • CMake is 3.16.3
• Applications:
  • Musescore is at 3.4.2
  • Elisa now part of the KDE release service updates
• Fuure work:
  • KIO-Fuse probably needs extra real-world testing on FreeBSD. I don’t have that kind of mounts (just NFS in /etc/fstab) so I’m not the target audience.
  • KTextEditor is missing .editorconfig support. That can come in with the next frameworks update, when consumers update anyway. Chasing it in an intermediate release is a bit problematic because it does require some rebuilds of consumers.

Travel Grant Application for BSDCan is now open

Hi everyone,

The Travel Grant Application for BSDCan 2020 is now open. The Foundation can help you attend BSDCan through our travel grant program. Travel grants are available to FreeBSD developers and advocates who need assistance with travel expenses for attending conferences related to FreeBSD development. BSDCan 2020 applications are due April 9, 2020. Find out more and apply at: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/what-we-do/grants/travel-grants/

Did you know the Foundation also provides grants for technical events not specifically focused on BSD? If you feel that your attendance at one of these events will benefit the FreeBSD Project and Community and you need assistance getting there, please fill out the general travel grant application. Your application must be received 7 weeks prior to the event. The general application can be found here: https://goo.gl/forms/QzsOMR8Jra0vqFYH2

Creating a ZFS dataset for testing iocage within a jail

• Be warned, this failed. I’m stalled and I have not completed this.

I’m going to do jails within a jail. I already do that with poudriere in a jail but here I want to test an older version of iocage before upgrading my current jail hosts to a newer version.

• In this post:
  • FreeBSD 12.1
  • py36-iocage-1.2_3
  • py36-iocage-1.2_4

This post includes my errors and mistakes. Perhaps you should proceed carefully and read it all first.

Beastie Bits

• Reminder: the FreeBSD Journal is free! Check out these great articles
• Serenity GUI desktop running on an OpenBSD kernel
• The Open Source Parts of MacOS
• FOSDEM videos available

Feedback/Questions

• Michael - Install with ZFS
• Mohammad - Server Freeze
• Todd - ZFS Questions

• 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

Portscout ported to OpenBSD

• Portscout is a popular utility used in the FreeBSD ports infrastructure
• It lets port maintainers know when there's a new version of the upstream software available by automatically checking the distfile mirror
• Now OpenBSD porters can enjoy the same convenience, as it's been ported over
• You can view the status online to see how it works and who maintains what
• The developer who ported it is working to get all the current features working on OpenBSD, and added a few new features as well
• He decided to fork and rename it a few days later ***

Sysadmins and systemd refugees flocking to BSD

• With all the drama in Linux land about the rapid changes to their init system, a lot of people are looking at BSD alternatives
• This "you got your Windows in my Linux" article (and accompanying comments) give a nice glimpse into the minds of some of those switchers
• Both server administrators and regular everyday users are switching away from Linux, as more and more distros give them no choice but to use systemd
• Fortunately, the BSD communities are usually very welcoming of switchers - it's pretty nice on this side! ***

OpenBSD's versioning schemes

• Ted Unangst explains the various versioning systems within OpenBSD, from the base to libraries to other included software
• In contrast to FreeBSD's release cycle, OpenBSD isn't as concerned with breaking backwards compatibility (but only if it's needed to make progress)
• This allows them to innovate and introduce new features a lot more easily, and get those features in a stable release that everyone uses
• He also details the difference between branches, their errata system and lack of "patch levels" for security
• Some other things in OpenBSD don't have version numbers at all, like tmux
• "Every release adds some new features, fixes some old bugs, probably adds a new bug or two, and, if I have anything to say about it, removes some old features." ***

VAXstation 4000 Model 90 booting NetBSD

• We found a video of NetBSD booting on a 22 year old VAX workstation, circa 1992
• This system has a monstrous 71 MHz CPU and 128MB of ECC RAM
• It continues in part two, where we learn that it would've cost around $25,000 when it was released!
• The uploader talks about his experiences getting NetBSD on it, what does and doesn't work, etc
• It's interesting to see that such old hardware isn't necessarily obsolete just because newer things have come out since then (but maybe don't try to build world on it...) ***

Interview - Ken Moore - ken@pcbsd.org

The Lumina desktop environment

Special segment

Lumina walkthrough

News Roundup

Suricata for IDS on pfSense

• While most people are familiar with Snort as an intrusion detection system, Suricata is another choice
• This guide goes through the steps of installing and configuring it on a public-facing pfSense box
• Part two details some of the configuration steps
• One other cool thing about Suricata - it's compatible with Snort rules, so you can use the same updates
• There's also another recent post about snort as well, if that's more your style
• If you run pfSense (or any BSD) as an edge router for a lot of users, this might be worth looking into ***

OpenBSD's systemd API emulation project

• This story was pretty popular in the mainstream news this week
• For the Google Summer of Code, a student is writing emulation wrappers for some of systemd's functions
• There was consideration from some Linux users to port over the finished emulation back to Linux, so they wouldn't have to run the full systemd
• One particularly interesting Slashdot comment snippet: "We are currently migrating a large number (much larger than planned after initial results) of systems from RHEL to BSD - a decision taken due to general unhappiness with RHEL6, but SystemD pushed us towards BSD rather than another Linux distro - and in some cases are seeing throughput gains of greater than 10% on what should be equivalent Linux and BSD server builds. The re-learning curve wasn't as steep as we expected, general system stability seems to be better too, and BSD's security reputation goes without saying."
• It will NOT be in the base system - only in ports, and only installed as a dependency for things like newer GNOME that require such APIs
• In the long run, BSD will still be safe from systemd's reign of terror, but will hopefully still be compatible with some third party packages like GNOME that insist on using it ***

GhostBSD 4 previewed

• The GhostBSD project is moving along, slowly getting closer to the 4 release
• This article shows some of the progress made, and includes lots of screenshots and interesting graphical frontends
• If you're not too familiar with GhostBSD, we interviewed the lead developer a little while back ***

NetBSD on the Banana Pi

• The Banana Pi is a tasty alternative to the Raspberry Pi, with similar hardware specs
• In this blog post, a NetBSD developer details his experiences in getting NetBSD to run on it
• After studying how the prebuilt Linux image booted, he made some notes and started hacking
• Ethernet, one of the few things not working, is being looked into and he's hoping to get it fully supported for the upcoming NetBSD 7.0
• They're only about $65 as of the time we're recording this, so it might be a fun project to try ***

Feedback/Questions

• Antonio writes in
• Garegin writes in
• Erno writes in
• Brandon writes in ***