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Xen dom0 in FreeBSD 11-CURRENT

• FreeBSD has just gotten dom0 support for the Xen hypervisor, something NetBSD has had for a while now
• The ports tree will now have a Xen kernel and toolstack, meaning that they can be updated much more rapidly than if they were part of base
• It's currently limited to Intel boxes with EPT and a working IOMMU, running a recent version of the -CURRENT branch, but we'll likely see it when 11.0 comes out
• How will this affect interest in Bhyve? ***

A tale of two educational moments

• Here we have a blog post from an OpenBSD developer about some experiences he had helping people get involved with the project
• It's split into two stories: one that could've gone better, and one that went really well
• For the first one, he found that someone was trying to modify a package from their ports tree to have fewer dependencies
• Experience really showed its worth, and he was able to write a quick patch to do exactly what the other person had been working on for a few hours - but wasn't so encouraging about getting it committed
• In the second story, he discussed updating a different port with a user of a forum, and ended up improving the new user's workflow considerably with just a few tips
• The lesson to take away from this is that we can all help out to encourage and assist new users - everyone was a newbie once ***

What's coming in NetBSD 7

• We first mentioned NetBSD 7.0 on the show in July of 2014, but it still hasn't been released and there hasn't been much public info about it
• This blog post outlines some of the bigger features that we can expect to see when it actually does come out
• Their total platform count is now over 70, so you'd be hard-pressed to find something that it doesn't run on
• There have been a lot of improvements in the graphics area, particularly with DRM/KMS, including Intel Haswell and Nouveau (for nVidia cards)
• Many ARM boards now have full SMP support
• Clang has also finally made its way into the base system, something we're glad to see, and it should be able to build the base OS on i386, AMD64 and ARM - other architectures are still a WIP
• In the crypto department: their PNRG has switched from the broken RC4 to the more modern ChaCha20, OpenSSL has been updated in base and LibreSSL is in pkgsrc
• NetBSD's in-house firewall, npf, has gotten major improvements since its initial debut in NetBSD 6.0
• Looking to the future, NetBSD hopes to integrate a stable ZFS implementation later on ***

OpenZFS office hours

• We mentioned a couple weeks back that the OpenZFS office hours series was starting back up
• They've just uploaded the recording of their most recent freeform discussion, with Justin Gibbs being the main presenter
• In it, they cover how Justin got into ZFS, running in virtualized environments, getting patches into the different projects, getting more people involved, reviewing code, spinning disks vs SSDs, defragging, speeding up resilvering, zfsd and much more ***

Interview - Baptiste Daroussin - bapt@freebsd.org

Packaging the FreeBSD base system with pkgng

Discussion

Packaging the FreeBSD base system with pkgng (follow-up)

Feedback/Questions

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• Joris writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

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Faces of FreeBSD continues

• Our first one details Shteryana Shopova, the local organizer for EuroBSDCon 2014 in Sophia
• Gives some information about how she got into BSD
• "I installed FreeBSD on my laptop, alongside the Windows and Slackware Linux I was running on it at the time. Several months later I realized that apart from FreeBSD, I hadn't booted the other two operating systems in months. So I wiped them out."
• She wrote bsnmpd and extended it with the help of a grant from the FreeBSD Foundation
• We've also got one for Kevin Martin
• Started off with a pinball website, ended up learning about FreeBSD from an ISP and starting his own hosting company
• "FreeBSD has been an asset to our operations, and while we have branched out a bit, we still primarily use FreeBSD and promote it whenever possible. FreeBSD is a terrific technology with a terrific community." ***

OpenPF?

• A blog post over at the Dragonfly digest
• What if we had some cross platform development of OpenBSD's firewall?
• Similar to portable OpenSSH or OpenZFS, there could be a centrally-developed version with compatibility glue
• Right now FreeBSD 9's pf is old, FreeBSD 10's pf is old (but has the best performance of any implementation due to custom patches), NetBSD's pf is old (but they're working on a fork) and Dragonfly's pf is old
• Further complicated by the fact that PF itself doesn’t have a version number, since it was designed to just be ‘the pf that came with OpenBSD 5.4’
• Not likely to happen any time soon, but it's good food for thought ***

Year of BSD on the server

• A good blog post about switching servers from Linux to BSD
• 2014 is going to be the year of a lot of switching, due to FreeBSD 10's amazing new features
• This author was particularly taken with pkgng and the more coherent layout of BSD systems
• Similarly, there was also a recent reddit thread, "Why did you choose BSD over Linux?"
• Both are excellent reads for Linux users that are thinking about making the switch, send 'em to your friends ***

Getting to know your portmgr

• This time in the series they interview Bryan Drewery, a fairly new addition to the team
• He started maintaining portupgrade and portmaster, and eventually ended up on the ports management team
• Believe it or not, his wife actually had a lot to do with him getting into FreeBSD full-time
• Lots of fun trivia and background about him
• Speaking of portmgr, our interview for today is... ***

Interview - Baptiste Daroussin - bapt@freebsd.org

The future of FreeBSD's binary packages, ports' features, various topics

News Roundup

pfSense december hang out

• Interview/presentation from pfSense developer Chris Buechler with an accompanying blog post
• "This is the first in what will be a monthly recurring series. Each month, we’ll have a how to tutorial on a specific topic or area of the system, and updates on development and other happenings with the project. We have several topics in mind, but also welcome community suggestions on topics"
• Speaking of pfSense, they recently opened an online store
• We're planning on having a pfSense episode next month! ***

BSDMag December issue is out

• The free monthly BSD magazine gets a new release for December
• Topics include CARP on FreeBSD, more BSD programming, "unix basics for security professionals," some kernel introductions, using OpenBSD as a transparent proxy with relayd, GhostBSD overview and some stuff about SSH ***

OpenBSD gets tmpfs

• In addition to the recently-added FUSE support, OpenBSD now has tmpfs
• To get more testing, it was enabled by default in -current
• Should make its way into 5.5 if everything goes according to plan
• Enables lots of new possibilities, like our ccache and tmpfs guide ***

PCBSD weekly digests

• Catching up with all the work going on in PCBSD land..
• 10.0-RC2 is now available
• The big pkgng 1.2 problems seem to have been worked out ***

Feedback/Questions

• Remy writes in
• Jason writes in
• Rob writes in
• John writes in
• Stuart writes in ***