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

Headlines

AsiaBSDCon 2023 Trip Report

Converting My X201 ThinkPad into a Slabtop

News Roundup

Stream your OpenBSD desktop audio to other devices

The Gnome and Its "Secret Place"

ttyload - Linux/Unix color-coded graphical tracking tool for load average in a terminal

Beastie Bits

• [OpenIndiana with a Sun Microsystems 22" LCD monitor. Running on a 1.8GHz quad core AMD Phenom 9100e processor, 4Gb RAM, nVidia GEForce GT630.](https://www.reddit.com/r/unix/comments/13otjnt/openindiana_with_a_sun_microsystems_22_lcd/)
• [cron(8) now supports random ranges with steps](https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20230507122935&utm_source=bsdweekly)
• [BSDCan 2024 Reorganization](https://mwl.io/archives/22799)
• [Depenguin me](https://depenguin.me/)

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 and the BSDNow Patreon

Headlines

5 Key Reasons to Consider Open Source Storage Over Commercial Offerings

OpenBSD Minimalist Desktop

News Roundup

BSD-XFCE

Creating an Alpine Linux VM on bhyve - with root on ZFS (optionally encrypted)

FreeBSD Jail Quick Setup with Networking (2022)

Beastie Bits

EuroBSDcon videos are now up
LibreSSL 3.6.1 released
Raspberry Pi 4 with FreeBSD 13-RELEASE: A Perfect Miniature Homelab

AsiaBSDcon 2023 CfP

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

• John - Allan's meetup
• Matthew - atime and a question
• Valentin - Becoming a FreeBSD Developer

• 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 and the BSDNow Patreon

Headlines

GhostBSD 22.01 is available

Packet Scheduling with Dummynet and FreeBSD

News Roundup

Inside zone installation

Why the FreeBSD Desktop and my Linux Rant

How to install Gnome on OpenBSD

The important Unix idea of the "virtual filesystem switch"

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

• Paul - A Plug
• Rollniak - Bhyve Questions
• Russell - pf pointers ***
• 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

Choosing The Right ZFS Pool Layout

Recent and not so recent changes in OpenBSD that make life better (and may turn up elsewhere too)

News Roundup

GhostBSD 21.09.06 ISO's now available

Fair Internet bandwidth management on a network using OpenBSD

NetBSD wifi router project update

• Bonus NetBSD Recent Developments: NetBSD on the Apple M1 *** ### HardenedBSD August 2021 Status Report ### FreeBSD Journal July/August 2021: Desktop/Wireless *** ### 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

• James - backup question
• Jonathon - certifications
• Marty - RPG CLI ***
• 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

Why You Should Use BSD Licensing for Your Next Open Source Project or Product

The term “open source” has its origins in the context of software development, designating a specific approach to developing computer programs. Nowadays, however, it stands for a broad set of values – open source means open exchange, transparency, collaborative participation and development for the benefit of the entire community.

---

Update on FreeBSD Foundation Investment in Linuxulator

Dr. Emmett Brown’s similar-sounding Flux Capacitor from the movie Back to the Future bridged the dimension of time, uniting past, present, and future for the McFlys. Similarly, the FreeBSDⓇ Linuxulator project also bridges dimensions – in our case, these are LinuxⓇ and FreeBSD.

---

News Roundup

OPNsense 21.1.5 released

This is mainly a security and reliablility update. There are several FreeBSD
security advisories and updates for third party tools such as curl.

• OPNsense to rebase on FreeBSD 13 *** ### FreeBSD meetings on the Desktop FreeBSD on the desktop is a whole stack - X11, Qt, KDE Frameworks, KDE Plasma and KDE Gear, and Wayland, and Poppler and GTK - o my! *** ### Running FreeBSD jails with containerd 1.5 containerd 1.5.0 was released today and now works on a new operating system: FreeBSD! This new release includes a series of patches (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) which allow containerd to build, enable the native and zfs snapshotters, and use a compatible runtime like runj. *** ### Markdown, DocBook, and the quest for semantic documentation on NetBSD.org Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of maintenance of the NetBSD website. It contains a boatload of documentation, much of which was originally written in the 2000s. It has some special requirements: it has to work in text-based web browsers like lynx, or maybe even without any working browser installed at all, or just ftp(1) for downloading plain text over HTTP. Naturally, the most important parts are static, suitable for serving from the standard NetBSD http server, which runs from inetd by default. ***

Beastie Bits

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

• Alrekur - An Interesting FreeBSD Find They presented at the FreeBSD Vendor summit last year too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LUdZseNrpE
• Sven - feedback
• Robert - firewalling

• 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

FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience

With the release of FreeBSD 13.0 on the horizon, I wanted to see how it shapes up on my Lenovo T450 laptop. Previous major releases on this laptop, using it as a workstation, felt very rough around the edges but with 13, it feels like the developers got it right.

---

FreeBSD on ARM64 in the Cloud

Until the end of June, Amazon AWS is offering free ARM64 Graviton instances, learn how to try out FreeBSD to ARMv8 in the cloud

---

Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace!

The releases below represent the historical releases of Plan 9. The two versions of 4th Edition represent the initial release and the final version available from Bell Labs as it was updated and patched. All historical releases of Plan 9 have been re-released under the terms of the MIT license.

• Inferno is open source as well *** ## News Roundup ### Hitting donation milestone, financial report for 2020 We nearly hit our 2020 donation milestone set after the release of 9.0 of $50,000. ***

grep returns (standard input) on FreeBSD

I was dealing with a bizarre error with grep(1) on FreeBSD, and it soon infected my macOS and NetBSD machines too. It was driving me crazy!

---

Random Programming Challenge

---

This better not be an April Fools Joke… I want to see this actually implemented. I’ll donate $100 to the first BSD that actually implements this for real. Who’s with me?

OpenBSD Adds Support for Coordinated Mars Time (MTC)

To make sure that OpenBSD can be used elsewhere than just earth, this diff introduces Coordinated Mars Time (MTC), the Mars equivalent of earth’s Universal Time (UTC).
OpenZFS had a good one too

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

• Brandon - router

• Lawrence - Is BSD for me

• miguel - printing

• 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

FreeBSD 13 BETA Benchmarks - Performance Is Much Better

FreeBSD Jails – Deep Dive into the Beginning of FreeBSD Containers

In recent years, containers and virtualization have become a buzzword in the Linux community, especially with the rise of Docker and Kubernetes. What many people probably don’t realize is that these ideas have been around for a very long time. Today, we will be looking at Jails and how they became part of FreeBSD.

---

News Roundup

FreeBSD Jobs

• The FreeBSD Foundation is looking for a Senior Arm Kernel Engineer
• The FreeBSD Foundation is also looking for an Open Source Project Coordinator. *** ### helloSystem Releases New ISOs For This macOS-Inspired BSD Desktop OS > The helloSystem motto is being a "desktop system for creators with focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability. Based on FreeBSD. Less, but better!" The desktop utilities are written with PyQt5. *** ### A Trip into FreeBSD > I normally deal with Linux machines. Linux is what I know and it's what I've been using since I was in college. A friend of mine has been coaxing me into trying out FreeBSD, and I decided to try it out and see what it's like. Here's some details about my experience and what I've learned. *** ###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.

Beastie Bits

• Testing Linux Steam Proton on GhostBSD with BSD linuxulator - NO Audio
• New Build of DragonFlyBSD 5.8
• Install OpenBSD 6.8 on PINE64 ROCK64 Media Board
• FOSDEM BSD Track Videos are up ***
• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***

Special Guest: Dan Langille.

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Wayland on BSD

After I posted about the new default window manager in NetBSD I got a few questions, including "when is NetBSD switching from X11 to Wayland?", Wayland being X11's "new" rival. In this blog post, hopefully I can explain why we aren't yet!

---

My BSD sucks less than yours

This paper will look at some of the differences between the FreeBSD and OpenBSD operating systems. It is not intended to be solely technical but will also show the different "visions" and design decisions that rule the way things are implemented. It is expected to be a subjective view from two BSD developers and does not pretend to represent these projects in any way.

Video

• EuroBSDCon 2017 Part 1
• EuroBSDCon 2017 Part 2

News Roundup

Even on SSDs, ongoing activity can slow down ZFS scrubs drastically

Back in the days of our OmniOS fileservers, which used HDs (spinning rust) across iSCSI, we wound up changing kernel tunables to speed up ZFS scrubs and saw a significant improvement. When we migrated to our current Linux fileservers with SSDs, I didn't bother including these tunables (or the Linux equivalent), because I expected that SSDs were fast enough that it didn't matter. Indeed, our SSD pools generally scrub like lightning.

---

OpenBSD on the Desktop (Part I)

Let's install OpenBSD on a Lenovo Thinkpad X270. I used this computer for my computer science studies. It has both Arch Linux and Windows 10 installed as dual boot. Now that I'm no longer required to run Windows, I can ditch the dual boot and install an operating system of my choice.

---

A simple shell status bar for OpenBSD and cwm(1)

These days, I try to use simple and stock software as much as possible on my OpenBSD laptop. I’ve been playing with cwm(1) for weeks and I was missing a status bar. After trying things like Tint2, Polybar etc, I discovered @gonzalo’s termbar. Thanks a lot!
As I love scripting, I decided to build my own.

---

Beastie Bits

DragonFly v5.8.3 released to address to issues
OpenSSH 8.4 released

---

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

• Dane - FreeBSD vs Linux in Microservices and Containters
• Mason - questions.md
• Michael - Tmux License.md

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

Meet FuryBSD: A New Desktop BSD Distribution

At its heart, FuryBSD is a very simple beast. According to the site, “FuryBSD is a back to basics lightweight desktop distribution based on stock FreeBSD.” It is basically FreeBSD with a desktop environment pre-configured and several apps preinstalled. The goal is to quickly get a FreeBSD-based system running on your computer.

You might be thinking that this sounds a lot like a couple of other BSDs that are available, such as NomadBSD and GhostBSD. The major difference between those BSDs and FuryBSD is that FuryBSD is much closer to stock FreeBSD. For example, FuryBSD uses the FreeBSD installer, while others have created their own installers and utilities.

As it states on the site, “Although FuryBSD may resemble past graphical BSD projects like PC-BSD and TrueOS, FuryBSD is created by a different team and takes a different approach focusing on tight integration with FreeBSD. This keeps overhead low and maintains compatibility with upstream.” The lead dev also told me that “One key focus for FuryBSD is for it to be a small live media with a few assistive tools to test drivers for hardware.”

Currently, you can go to the FuryBSD homepage and download either an XFCE or KDE LiveCD. A GNOME version is in the works.

NetBSD 9.0

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.0, the seventeenth major release of the NetBSD operating system.

This release brings significant improvements in terms of hardware support, quality assurance, security, along with new features and hundreds of bug fixes. Here are some highlights of this new release.

News Roundup

OpenBSD Foundation 2019 campaign wrapup

Our target for 2019 was CDN$300K. Our community's continued generosity combined with our corporate donors exceeded that nicely. In addition we received the largest single donation in our history, CDN$380K from Smartisan. The return of Google was another welcome event. Altogether 2019 was our most successful campaign to date, yielding CDN$692K in total.

We thank all our donors, Iridium (Smartisan), Platinum (Yandex, Google), Gold (Microsoft, Facebook) Silver (2Keys) and Bronze (genua, Thinkst Canary). But especially our community of smaller donors whose contributions are the bedrock of our support. Thank you all!

• OpenBSD Foundation 2019 Fundraising Goal Exceeded

A retrospective on our OmniOS ZFS-based NFS fileservers

Our OmniOS fileservers have now been out of service for about six months, which makes it somewhat past time for a retrospective on them. Our OmniOS fileservers followed on our Solaris fileservers, which I wrote a two part retrospective on (part 1, part 2), and have now been replaced by our Linux fileservers. To be honest, I have been sitting on my hands about writing this retrospective because we have mixed feelings about our OmniOS fileservers.

I will put the summary up front. OmniOS worked reasonably well for us over its lifespan here and looking back I think it was almost certainly the right choice for us at the time we made that choice (which was 2013 and 2014). However it was not without issues that marred our experience with it in practice, although not enough to make me regret that we ran it (and ran it for as long as we did). Part of our issues are likely due to a design mistake in making our fileservers too big, although this design mistake was probably magnified when we were unable to use Intel 10G-T networking in OmniOS.

On the one hand, our OmniOS fileservers worked, almost always reliably. Like our Solaris fileservers before them, they ran quietly for years without needing much attention, delivering NFS fileservice to our Ubuntu servers; specifically, we ran them for about five years (2014 through 2019, although we started migrating away at the end of 2018). Over this time we had only minor hardware issues and not all that many disk failures, and we suffered no data loss (with ZFS checksums likely saving us several times, and certainly providing good reassurances). Our overall environment was easy to manage and was pretty much problem free in the face of things like failed disks. I'm pretty sure that our users saw a NFS environment that was solid, reliable, and performed well pretty much all of the time, which is the important thing. So OmniOS basically delivered the fileserver environment we wanted.

NetBSD Fundraising 2020 goal

Is it really more than 10 years since we last had an official fundraising drive?

Looking at old TNF financial reports I noticed that we have been doing quite well financially over the last years, with a steady stream of small and medium donations, and most of the time only moderate expenditures. The last fundraising drive back in 2009 was a giant success, and we have lived off it until now.

OpenSSH 8.2 released February 14, 2020

OpenSSH 8.2 was released on 2020-02-14. It is available from the mirrors listed at https://www.openssh.com/.

OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support.

Once again, we would like to thank the OpenSSH community for their continued support of the project, especially those who contributed code or patches, reported bugs, tested snapshots or donated to the project. More information on donations may be found at:

• https://www.openssh.com/donations.html

Beastie Bits

• FreeNAS vs. Unraid: GRUDGE MATCH!
• Unix Toolbox
• Rigs of Rods - OpenBSD Physics Game
• NYCBug - Dr Vixie
• Hamilton BSD User group will meet again on March 10th](http://studybsd.com/)
• BSD Stockholm - Meetup March 3rd 2020

Feedback/Questions

• Shirkdog - Question
• Master One - ZFS + Suspend/resume
• Micah Roth - ZFS write caching

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

##Headlines
###OpenBSD/NetBSD on FreeBSD using grub2-bhyve

When I was writing a blog post about the process title, I needed a couple of virtual machines with OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Ubuntu. Before that day I mainly used FreeBSD and Windows with bhyve. I spent some time trying to set up an OpenBSD using bhyve and UEFI as described here. I had numerous problems trying to use it, and this was the day I discovered the grub2-bhyve tool, and I love it!
The grub2-bhyve allows you to load a kernel using GRUB bootloader. GRUB supports most of the operating systems with a standard configuration, so exactly the same method can be used to install NetBSD or Ubuntu. First, let’s install grub2-bhyve on our FreeBSD box:

# pkg install grub2-bhyve

To run grub2-bhyve we need to provide at least the name of the VM. In bhyve, if the memsize is not specified the default VM is created with 256MB of the memory.

# grub-bhyve test
GNU GRUB version 2.00
Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB lists possible command
completions. Anywhere else TAB lists possible device or file completions.


grub>

After running grub-bhyve command we will enter the GRUB loader. If we type the ls command, we will see all the available devices. In the case of the grub2-bhyve there is one additional device called “(host)” that is always available and allows the host filesystem to be accessed. We can list files under that device.

grub> ls
(host)
grub> ls (host)/
libexec/ bin/ usr/ bhyve/ compat/ tank/ etc/ boot/ net/ entropy proc/ lib/ root/ sys/ mnt/ rescue/ tmp/ home/ sbin/ media/ jail/ COPYRIGHT var/ dev/
grub>

To exit console simply type ‘reboot’. I would like to install my new operating system under a ZVOL ztank/bhyve/post. On another terminal, we create:

# zfs create -V 10G ztank/bhyve/post

If you don’t use ZFS for some crazy reason you can also create a raw blob using the truncate(1) command.

# truncate -s 10G post.img

I recommend installing an operating system from the disk image (installXX.fs for OpenBSD and NetBSD-X.X-amd64-install.img for NetBSD). Now we need to create a device map for a GRUB.

cat > /tmp/post.map << EOF
(hd0) /directory/to/disk/image
(hd1) /dev/zvol/ztank/bhyve/post
EOF

The mapping files describe the names for files in the GRUB. In our case under hd0 we will have an installation image and in hd1 we will have our ZVOL/blob. You can also try to use an ISO image then instead of using hd0 device name use a cd0. When we will run the grub-bhyve command we will see two additional devices.

# grub-bhyve -m /tmp/post.map post
grub> ls
(hd0) (hd0,msdos4) (hd0,msdos1) (hd0,openbsd9) (hd0,openbsd1) (hd1) (host)

The hd0 (in this example OpenBSD image) contains multiple partitions. We can check what is on it.

grub> ls (hd0,msdos4)/
boot bsd 6.4/ etc/

And this is the partition that contains a kernel. Now we can set a root device, load an OpenBSD kernel and boot:

grub> set root=(hd0,msdos4)
grub> kopenbsd -h com0 -r sd0a /bsd
grub> boot

After that, we can run bhyve virtual machine. In my case it is:

# bhyve -c 1 -w -u -H \
-s 0,amd_hostbridge \
-s 3,ahci-hd,/directory/to/disk/image \
-s 4,ahci-hd,/dev/zvol/ztank/bhyve/post \
-s 31,lpc -l com1,stdio \
post

Unfortunately explaining the whole bhyve(8) command line is beyond this article. After installing the operating system remove hd0 from the mapping file and the image from the bhyve(8) command. If you don’t want to type all those GRUB commands, you can simply redirect them to the standard input.

cat << EOF | grub-bhyve -m /tmp/post.map -M 512 post
set root=(hd0,4)
kopenbsd -h com0 -r sd0a /bsd
boot
EOF

###My FreeBSD Story

My first devices/computers/consoles (not at the same time) that I remember were Atari 2600 and Pegasus console which was hardware clone of the Nintendo NES.
Back then I did not even knew that it was Atari 2600 as I referred to it as Video Computer System … and I did not even knew any english by then. It took me about two decades to get to know (by accident) that this Video Computer System was Atari 2600
Then I got AMIGA 600 computer (or should I say my parents bought it for me) which served both for playing computer games and also other activities for the first time. AMIGA is the computer that had the greatest influence on me, as it was the first time I studied the books about Amiga Workbench operating system and learned commands from Amiga Shell terminal. I loved the idea of Ram Disk icon/directory on the desktop that allowed me to transparently put any things in system memory. I still miss that concept on today’s desktop systems … and I still remember how dismal I was when I watched Amiga Deathbed Vigil movie.
At the end of 1998 I got my first PC that of course came with Windows and that computer served both as gaming machine and as well as typical tool. One time I dig into the internals with Windows Registry (which left me disgusted by its concepts and implementation) and its limited command line interface provided by CMD.EXE executable. I remember that the heart of this box was not the CPU or the motherboard but the graphics accelerator – the legendary 3Dfx Voodoo card. This company (3Dfx) – their attitude and philosophy – also left solid fingerprint on my way. Like AMIGA did.
After ‘migration’ from AMIGA to PC it never again ‘felt right’. The games were cool but the Windows system was horrible. Time has passed and different Windows versions and hardware modifications took place. Windows XP felt really heavy at that time, not to mention Windows 2000 for example with even bigger hardware requirements. I also do not understand all the hate about Windows ME. It crashed with the same frequency as Windows 98 or later Windows 98 Second Edition but maybe my hardware was different ??
I do not have any ‘mine’ screenshots from that period as I lost all my 40 GB (huge then) drive of data when I moved/resized the partition with Partition Magic to get some more space from the less filled C: drive. That day I learned hard that “there are people who do backups and people who will do backups”. I never lost data again as I had multiple copies of my data, but the same as Netheril fall the lost data was was gone forever.
I always followed various alternatives which led me to try Linux in 2003, after reading about various distributions philosophies I decided to run Slackware Linux with KDE 3. My buddy used Aurox Linux by then (one of the few Linux distributions from Poland) and encouraged me to do the same – especially in the context of fixing possible problems as he already knew it and also as he recently dumped Windows system. But Slackware sounded like a better idea so I took that path instead. At first I dual booted between Windows XP and Slackware Linux cause I had everything worked out on the Windows world while I often felt helpless in the Linux world, so I would reboot into Windows to play some games or find a solution for Linux problem if that was required. I remember how strange the concept of dual clipboards (PRIMARY and SECONDARY) was for me by then. I was amazed why ‘so much better’ system as Linux (at least marketed that way) needs a system tray program to literally manage the clipboard. On Windows it was obvious, you do [CTRL]+[C] to copy and [CTRL]+[V] to paste things, but on Linux there (no I know its X11 feature) there were two clipboards that were synchronized by this little system tray program from KDE 3. It was also unthinkable for me that I will ‘lost’ contents of last/recent [CTRL]+[C] operation if I close the application from which the copy was made. I settled down a little on Slackware but not for long. I really did not liked manual dependency management for packages for example. Also KDE 3 was really ugly and despite trying all possible options I was not able to tweak it into something nice looking.
After half a year on Slackware I checked the Linux distributions again and decided to try Gentoo Linux. I definitely agree with the image below which visualizes Gentoo Linux experience, especially when You install it for he first time ??
Of course I went with the most hardcore version with self building Stage 1 (compiler and toolchain) which was horrible idea at that time because compilation on slow single core machine took forever … but after many hours I got Gentoo installed. I now have to decide which desktop environment to use. I have read a lot of good news about Fluxbox at that time so this is what I tried. It was very weird experience (to create everything in GUI from scratch) but very pleasant one. That recalled me the times of AMIGA … but Linux came in the way too much often. The more I dig into Gentoo Linux the more I read that lots of Gentoo features are based on FreeBSD solutions. Gentoo Portage is a clone of FreeBSD Ports. That ‘central’ /etc/rc.conf system configuration file concept was taken from FreeBSD as well. So I started to gather information about FreeBSD. The (then) FreeBSD website or FreeBSD Ports site (still) felt little outdated to say the least but that did not discouraged me.
Somewhere in 2005 I installed FreeBSD 5.4 on my computer. The beginnings were hard, like the earlier step with Gentoo but similarly like Gentoo the FreeBSD project came with a lot of great documentation. While Gentoo documentation is concentrated within various Gentoo Wiki sites the FreeBSD project comes with ‘official’ documentation in the form of Handbook and FAQ. I remember my first questions at the now nonexistent BSDForums.org site – for example one of the first ones – how to scroll the terminal output in the plain console. I now know that I had to push Scroll Lock button but it was something totally new for me.
Why FreeBSD and not OpenBSD or NetBSD? Probably because Gentoo based most their concepts on the FreeBSD solutions, so that led me to FreeBSD instead of the other BSD operating systems. Currently I still use FreeBSD but I keep an steady eye on the OpenBSD, HardenedBSD and DragonFly BSD solutions and improvements.
As the migration path from Linux to FreeBSD is a lot easier – all configuration files from /home can be just copied – the migration was quite fast easy. I again had the Fluxbox configuration which I used on the Gentoo. Now – on FreeBSD – it started to fell even more like AMIGA times. Everything is/has been well thought and had its place and reason. The documentation was good and the FreeBSD Community was second to none.
After 15 years of using various Windows, UNIX (macOS/AIX/HP-UX/Solaris/OpenSolaris/Illumos/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD) and UNIX-like (Linux) systems I always come to conclusion that FreeBSD is the system that sucks least. And sucks least with each release and one day I will write why FreeBSD is such great operating system … if I already haven’t

##News Roundup
###OpenBSD on the Desktop: some thoughts

I’ve been using OpenBSD on my ThinkPad X230 for some weeks now, and the experience has been peculiar in some ways.
The OS itself in my opinion is not ready for widespread desktop usage, and the development team is not trying to push it in the throat of anybody who wants a Windows or macOS alternative. You need to understand a little bit of how *NIX systems work, because you’ll use CLI more than UI. That’s not necessarily bad, and I’m sure I learned a trick or two that could translate easily to Linux or macOS. Their development process is purely based on developers that love to contribute and hack around, just because it’s fun. Even the mailing list is a cool place to hang on! Code correctness and security are a must, nothing gets committed if it doesn’t get reviewed thoroughly first - nowadays the first two properties should be enforced in every major operating system.
I like the idea of a platform that continually evolves. pledge(2) and unveil(2) are the proof that with a little effort, you can secure existing software better than ever.
I like the “sensible defaults” approach, having an OS ready to be used - UI included if you selected it during the setup process - is great.
Just install a browser and you’re ready to go.
Manual pages on OpenBSD are real manuals, not an extension of the “–help” command found in most CLI softwares. They help you understand inner workings of the operating system, no internet connection needed. There are some trade-offs, too.
Performance is not first-class, mostly because of all the security mitigations and checks done at runtime.
I write Go code in neovim, and sometimes you can feel a slight slowdown when you’re compiling and editing multiple files at the same time, but usually I can’t notice any meaningful difference. Browsers are a different matter though, you can definitely feel something differs from the experience you can have on mainstream operating systems. But again, trade-offs.
To use OpenBSD on the desktop you must be ready to sacrifice some of the goodies of mainstream OSes, but if you’re searching for a zen place to do your computing stuff, it’s the best you can get right now.

###The history of file type information being available in Unix directories

The two things that Unix directory entries absolutely have to have are the name of the directory entry and its ‘inode’, by which we generically mean some stable kernel identifier for the file that will persist if it gets renamed, linked to other directories, and so on. Unsurprisingly, directory entries have had these since the days when you read the raw bytes of directories with read(), and for a long time that was all they had; if you wanted more than the name and the inode number, you had to stat() the file, not just read the directory. Then, well, I’ll quote myself from an old entry on a find optimization:
[…], Unix filesystem developers realized that it was very common for programs reading directories to need to know a bit more about directory entries than just their names, especially their file types (find is the obvious case, but also consider things like ‘ls -F’). Given that the type of an active inode never changes, it’s possible to embed this information straight in the directory entry and then return this to user level, and that’s what developers did; on some systems, readdir(3) will now return directory entries with an additional d_type field that has the directory entry’s type.
On Twitter, I recently grumbled about Illumos not having this d_type field. The ensuing conversation wound up with me curious about exactly where d_type came from and how far back it went. The answer turns out to be a bit surprising due to there being two sides of d_type.
On the kernel side, d_type appears to have shown up in 4.4 BSD. The 4.4 BSD /usr/src/sys/dirent.h has a struct dirent that has a d_type field, but the field isn’t documented in either the comments in the file or in the getdirentries(2) manpage; both of those admit only to the traditional BSD dirent fields. This 4.4 BSD d_type was carried through to things that inherited from 4.4 BSD (Lite), specifically FreeBSD, but it continued to be undocumented for at least a while.
(In FreeBSD, the most convenient history I can find is here, and the d_type field is present in sys/dirent.h as far back as FreeBSD 2.0, which seems to be as far as the repo goes for releases.)
Documentation for d_type appeared in the getdirentries(2) manpage in FreeBSD 2.2.0, where the manpage itself claims to have been updated on May 3rd 1995 (cf). In FreeBSD, this appears to have been part of merging 4.4 BSD ‘Lite2’, which seems to have been done in 1997. I stumbled over a repo of UCB BSD commit history, and in it the documentation appears in this May 3rd 1995 change, which at least has the same date. It appears that FreeBSD 2.2.0 was released some time in 1997, which is when this would have appeared in an official release.
In Linux, it seems that a dirent structure with a d_type member appeared only just before 2.4.0, which was released at the start of 2001. Linux took this long because the d_type field only appeared in the 64-bit ‘large file support’ version of the dirent structure, and so was only return by the new 64-bit getdents64() system call. This would have been a few years after FreeBSD officially documented d_type, and probably many years after it was actually available if you peeked at the structure definition.
As far as I can tell, d_type is present on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Dragonfly BSD, and Darwin (aka MacOS or OS X). It’s not present on Solaris and thus Illumos. As far as other commercial Unixes go, you’re on your own; all the links to manpages for things like AIX from my old entry on the remaining Unixes appear to have rotted away.
Sidebar: The filesystem also matters on modern Unixes
Even if your Unix supports d_type in directory entries, it doesn’t mean that it’s supported by the filesystem of any specific directory. As far as I know, every Unix with d_type support has support for it in their normal local filesystems, but it’s not guaranteed to be in all filesystems, especially non-Unix ones like FAT32. Your code should always be prepared to deal with a file type of DT_UNKNOWN.
It’s also possible to have things the other way around, where you have a filesystem with support for file type information in directories that’s on a Unix that doesn’t support it. There are a number of plausible reasons for this to happen, but they’re either obvious or beyond the scope of this entry.

###Multiboot Pinebook KDE neon

Recently a KDE neon image for the Pinebook was announced. There is a new image, with a handful of fixes, which the KDE Plasma team has been working on over the past week and a half.
Here’s a picture of my Pinebook running KDE neon — watching Panic! At the Disco’s High Hopes — sitting in front of my monitor that’s hooked up to one of my openSUSE systems. There are still some errata, and watching video sucks up battery, but for hacking on documentation from my hammock in the garden, or doing IRC meetings it’s a really nice machine.
But one of the neat things about running KDE neon off of an SD card on the Pinebook is that it’s portable — that SD card can move around. So let’s talk about multiboot in the sense of “booting the same OS storage medium in different hardware units” rather than “booting different OS from a medium in a single hardware unit”. On these little ARM boards, u-boot does all the heavy lifting early in the boot process. So to re-use the KDE neon Pinebook image on another ARM board, the u-boot blocks need to be replaced.
I have the u-boot from a Pine64 image (I forget what) lying around, 1015 blocks of 1024 bytes, which I can dd over the u-boot blocks on the SD card, dd bs=1k conv=notrunc,sync if=uboot.img of=/dev/da0 seek=8, and then the same SD card, with the filesystem and data from the Pinebook, will boot on the Pine64 board. Of course, to move the SD card back again, I need to restore the Pinebook u-boot blocks.
Here’s a picture of my Pineboard (the base is a piece of the garden fence, it’s Douglas pine, with 4mm threaded rods acting as the corner posts for my Pine64 mini-rack), with power and network and a serial console attached, along with the serial console output of the same.
The nice thing here is that the same software stack runs on the Pine64 but then has a wired network — which in turn means that if I switch on the other boards in that mini-rack, I’ve got a distcc-capable cluster for fast development, and vast NFS storage (served from ZFS on my FreeBSD machines) for source. I can develop in a high(er) powered environment, and then swap the card around into the Pinebook for testing-on-the-go.
So to sum up: you can multiboot the KDE neon Pinebook image on other Pine64 hardware (i.e. the Pine64 board). To do so, you need to swap around u-boot blocks. The blocks can be picked out of an image built for each board, and then a particular image (e.g. the latest KDE neon Pinebook) can be run on either board.

##Beastie Bits

• Unexpected benefit with Ryzen – reducing power for build server
• Happy #CIDRDay!
• Absolute FreeBSD 3e ship date
• MWL FreeBSD talk @ October 9th 2018 - MUG Meeting
• MeetBSD Oct 19-20
• October’s London *BSD meetup - 9th Oct 2018
• NRW BUG Meeting at Trivago Oct. 9
• Lars Wittebrood blogs about his visit to EuroBSDCon 2018
• EuroBSDcon 2018 OpenBSD slides available
• EuroBSDCon conference site has most slides as well

##Feedback/Questions

• Brad - Unmounted ZFS sends
• Niclas - Report from a Meetup
• Ghislain - Bhyve not used?
• Shane - zpool history and snapshots

• 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

FreeBSD ASLR status update

• Shawn Webb gives us a little update on his address space layout randomization work for FreeBSD
• He's implemented execbase randomization for position-independent executables (which OpenBSD also just enabled globally in 5.5 on i386)
• Work has also started on testing ASLR on ARM, using a Raspberry Pi
• He's giving a presentation at BSDCan this year about his ASLR work
• While we're on the topic of BSDCan... ***

BSDCan tutorials, improving the experience

• Peter Hansteen writes a new blog post about his upcoming BSDCan tutorials
• The tutorials are called "Building the network you need with PF, the OpenBSD packet filter" and "Transitioning to OpenBSD 5.5" - both scheduled to last three hours each
• He's requesting anyone that'll be there to go ahead and contact him, telling him exactly what you'd like to learn
• There's also a bit of background information about the tutorials and how he's looking to improve them
• If you're interested in OpenBSD and going to BSDCan this year, hit him up ***

pkgsrc-2014Q1 released

• The new stable branch of pkgsrc packages has been built and is ready
• Python 3.3 is now a "first class citizen" in pkgsrc
• 14255 packages for NetBSD-current/x86_64, 11233 binary packages built with clang for FreeBSD 10/x86_64
• There's a new release every three months, and remember pkgsrc works on MANY operating systems, not just NetBSD - you could even use pkgsrc instead of pkgng or ports if you were so inclined
• They're also looking into signing packages ***

Only two holes in a heck of a long time, who cares?

• A particularly vocal Debian user, a lost soul, somehow finds his way to the misc@ OpenBSD mailing list
• He questions "what's the big deal" about OpenBSD's slogan being "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!"
• Luckily, the community and Theo set the record straight about why you should care about this
• Running insecure applications on OpenBSD is actually more secure than running them on other systems, due to things like ASLR, PIE and all the security features of OpenBSD
• It spawned a discussion about ease of management and Linux's poor security record, definitely worth reading ***

Interview - Dru Lavigne - dru@freebsd.org / @bsdevents

FreeBSD's documentation printing, documentation springs, various topics

Tutorial

Automatic, unattended OpenBSD installs with PXE

News Roundup

pfSense 2.1.1 released

• A new version of pfSense is released, mainly to fix some security issues
• Tracking some recent FreeBSD advisories, pfSense usually only applies the ones that would matter on a firewall or router
• There are also some NIC driver updates and other things
• Of course if you want to learn more about pfSense, watch episode 25
• 2.1.2 is already up for testing too ***

FreeBSD gets UEFI support

• It looks like FreeBSD's battle with UEFI may be coming to a close?
• Ed Maste committed a giant list of patches to enable UEFI support on x86_64
• Look through the list to see all the details and information
• Thanks FreeBSD foundation! ***

Ideas for the next DragonflyBSD release

• Mr. Dragonfly release engineer himself, Justin Sherrill posts some of his ideas for the upcoming release
• They're aiming for late May for the next version
• Ideas include better support for running in a VM, pkgng fixes, documentation updates and PAM support
• Gasp, they're even considering dropping i386 ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• Lots of new PBI updates for 10.0, new runtime implementation
• New support for running 32 bit applications in PBI runtime
• New default CD and DVD player, umplayer
• Latest GNOME 3 and Cinnamon merged, new edge package builds ***

Feedback/Questions

• Remy writes in
• Jan writes in
• Eddie writes in
• Zen writes in
• Sean writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Preorders for cool BSD stuff

• The 2nd edition of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System is up for preorder
• We talked to GNN briefly about it, but he and Kirk have apparently finally finished the book
• "For many years, The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System has been recognized as the most complete, up-to-date, and authoritative technical guide to FreeBSD's internal structure. Now, this definitive guide has been extensively updated to reflect all major FreeBSD improvements between Versions 5 and Versions 11"
• OpenBSD 5.5 preorders are also up, so you can buy a CD set now
• You can help support the project, and even get the -release of the OS before it's available publicly
• 5.5 is a huge release with lots of big changes, so now is the right time to purchase one of these - tell Austin we sent you! ***

pkgsrcCon 2014 CFP

• This year's pkgsrcCon is in London, on June 21st and 22nd
• There's a Call For Papers out now, so you can submit your talks
• Anything related to pkgsrc is fine, it's pretty informal
• Does anyone in the audience know if the talks will be recorded? This con is relatively unknown ***

BSDMag issue for March 2014

• The monthly BSD magazine releases its newest issue
• Topics this time include: deploying NetBSD using AWS EC2, creating a multi-purpose file server with NetBSD, DragonflyBSD as a backup server, more GIMP lessons, network analysis with wireshark and a general security article
• The Linux article trend seems to continue... hmm ***

Non-ECC RAM in FreeNAS

• We've gotten a few questions about ECC RAM with ZFS
• Here we've got a surprising blog post about why someone did not go with ECC RAM for his NAS build
• The article mentions the benefits of ECC and admits it is a better choice in nearly all instances, but unfortunately it's not very widespread in consumer hardware motherboards and it's more expensive
• Regular RAM also has "special" issues with ZFS and pool corruption
• Long post, so check out the whole thing if you've been considering your memory options and weighing the benefits ***

Interview - Pierre Pronchery - khorben@edgebsd.org / @khorben

EdgeBSD (slides)

Tutorial

Building an OpenBSD desktop

News Roundup

Getting to know your portmgr-lurkers

• This week we get to hear from Frederic Culot, colut@
• Originally an OpenBSD user from France, Frederic joined as a ports committer in 2010 and recently joined the portmgr lurkers team
• "FreeBSD is also one of my sources of inspiration when it comes to how organizations behave and innovate, and I find it very interesting to compare FreeBSD with the for-profit companies I work for"
• We get to find out a little bit about him, why he loves FreeBSD and what he does for the project ***

NetBSD on the Playstation 2

• Who doesn't want to run NetBSD on their old PS2?
• The PS2 port of NetBSD was sadly removed in 2009, but it has been revived
• It's using a slightly unusual MIPS CPU that didn't have much GCC support
• Hopefully a bootable kernel will be available soon ***

The FreeBSD Challenge update

• Our friend from the Linux Foundation continues his FreeBSD switching journey
• This time he starts off by discovering virtual machines suck at keeping accurate time, and some ports weren't working because of his clock being way off
• After polling the IRC for help, he finally learns the difference between ntpdate and ntpd and both of their use cases
• Maybe he should've just read our NTP tutorial! ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• The mount tray icon got lots of updates and fixes
• The faulty distribution server has finally been tracked down and... destroyed
• New language localization project is in progress
• Many many updates to ports and PBIs, new -STABLE builds ***

Feedback/Questions

• Antonio writes in
• Patrick writes in
• Chris writes in
• Ron writes in
• Tyler writes in ***