Headlines

OpenBSD Full Disk Encryption with CoreBoot and Tianocore Payload

It has been a while since I have posted here so I wanted to share something that was surprisingly difficult for me to figure out. I have a Thinkpad T440p that I have flashed with Coreboot 4.11 with some special patches that allow the newer machine to work. When I got the laptop, the default BIOS was UEFI and I installed two operating systems.

Windows 10 with bitlocker full disk encryption on the “normal” drive (I replaced the spinning 2.5″ disk with an SSD)

Ubuntu 19.10 on the m.2 SATA drive that I installed using LUKS full disk encryption

I purchased one of those carriers for the optical bay that allows you to install a third SSD and so I did that with the intent of putting OpenBSD on it. Since my other two operating systems were running full disk encryption, I wanted to do the same on OpenBSD.

• See article for rest of story

FreeBSD 12.0 EOL

Dear FreeBSD community,

As of February 29, 2020, FreeBSD 12.0 will reach end-of-life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Users of FreeBSD 12.0 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a newer release as soon as possible.

• 12.1 Active release
• 12.2 Release Schedule

News Roundup

Some effects of the ZFS DVA format on data layout and growing ZFS pools

One piece of ZFS terminology is DVA and DVAs, which is short for Data Virtual Address. For ZFS, a DVA is the equivalent of a block number in other filesystems; it tells ZFS where to find whatever data we're talking about. The short summary of what fields DVAs have and what they mean is that DVAs tell us how to find blocks by giving us their vdev (by number) and their byte offset into that particular vdev (and then their size). A typical DVA might say that you find what it's talking about on vdev 0 at byte offset 0x53a40ed000. There are some consequences of this that I hadn't really thought about until the other day.

Right away we can see why ZFS has a problem removing a vdev; the vdev's number is burned into every DVA that refers to data on it. If there's no vdev 0 in the pool, ZFS has no idea where to even start looking for data because all addressing is relative to the vdev. ZFS pool shrinking gets around this by adding a translation layer that says where to find the portions of vdev 0 that you care about after it's been removed.

Warning! Active Directory Security Changes Require TrueNAS and FreeNAS Updates.

• Critical Information for Current FreeNAS and TrueNAS Users

Microsoft is changing the security defaults for Active Directory to eliminate some security vulnerabilities in its protocols. Unfortunately, these new security defaults may disrupt existing FreeNAS/TrueNAS deployments once Windows systems are updated. The Windows updates may appear sometime in March 2020; no official date has been announced as of yet.

FreeNAS and TrueNAS users that utilize Active Directory should update to version 11.3 (or 11.2-U8) to avoid potential disruption of their networks when updating to the latest versions of Windows software after March 1, 2020. Version 11.3 has been released and version 11.2-U8 will be available in early March.

Full name of the FreeBSD Root Account

NetBSD now has a users(7) and groups(7) manual. Looking into what entries existed in the passwd and group files I wondered about root’s full name who we now know as Charlie Root in the BSDs....

OpenBSD Go Situation

Over in the fediverse, Pete Zaitcev had a reaction to my entry on OpenBSD versus Prometheus for us:

I don't think the situation is usually that bad. Our situation with Prometheus is basically a worst case scenario for Go on OpenBSD, and most people will have much better results, especially if you stick to supported OpenBSD versions.

If you stick to supported OpenBSD versions, upgrading your machines as older OpenBSD releases fall out of support (as the OpenBSD people want you to do), you should not have any problems with your own Go programs. The latest Go release will support the currently supported OpenBSD versions (as long as OpenBSD remains a supported platform for Go), and the Go 1.0 compatibility guarantee means that you can always rebuild your current Go programs with newer versions of Go. You might have problems with compiled binaries that you don't want to rebuild, but my understanding is that this is the case for OpenBSD in general; it doesn't guarantee a stable ABI even for C programs (cf). If you use OpenBSD, you have to be prepared to rebuild your code after OpenBSD upgrades regardless of what language it's written in.

Beastie Bits

• Test your TOR
• OPNsense 20.1.1 released
• pkg for FreeBSD 1.13

Feedback/Questions

• Bostjan writes in about Wireguard
• Charlie has a followup to wpa_supplicant as lower class citizen
• Lars writes about LibreSSL as a positive example

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

Headlines

FreeBSD on Power

The power and promise of all open source software is freedom. Another way to express freedom is choice — choice of platforms, deployment models, stacks, configurations, etc.

The FreeBSD Foundation is dedicated to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide. But, what does this mean, exactly, you may wonder. The truth is it means many different things, but in all cases the Foundation acts to expand freedom and choice so that FreeBSD users have the power to serve their varied compute needs.

This blog tells the story of one specific way the Foundation helps a member of the community provide greater hardware choice for all FreeBSD users.

Dragonfly 5.8

DragonFly version 5.8 brings a new dsynth utility for building your own binary dports packages, plus significant support work to speed up that build - up to and including the entire collection. Additional progress has been made on GPU and signal support.

The details of all commits between the 5.6 and 5.8 branches are available in the associated commit messages for 5.8.0rc1 and 5.8.0. Also see /usr/src/UPDATING for specific file changes in PAM.

• See article for rest of information

2nd HamBUG meeting recap

• The second meeting of the Hamilton BSD Users Group took place last night
• The next meeting is scheduled for the 2nd Tuesday of the month, April 14th 2020

News Roundup

FreeNAS/TrueNAS Brand Unification

FreeNAS and TrueNAS have been separate-but-related members of the #1 Open Source storage software family since 2012. FreeNAS is the free Open Source version with an expert community and has led the pursuit of innovations like Plugins and VMs. TrueNAS is the enterprise version for organizations of all sizes that need additional uptime and performance, as well as the enterprise-grade support necessary for critical data and applications.

From the beginning at iXsystems, we’ve developed, tested, documented, and released both as separate products, even though the vast majority of code is shared. This was a deliberate technical decision in the beginning but over time became less of a necessity and more of “just how we’ve always done it”. Furthermore, to change it was going to require a serious overhaul to how we build and package both products, among other things, so we continued to kick the can down the road. As we made systematic improvements to development and QA efficiency over the past few years, the redundant release process became almost impossible to ignore as our next major efficiency roadblock to overcome. So, we’ve finally rolled up our sleeves.

With the recent 11.3 release, TrueNAS gained parity with FreeNAS on features like VMs and Plugins, further homogenizing the code. Today, we announce the next phase of evolution for FreeNAS and TrueNAS.

OpenBSD versus Prometheus (and Go).

We have a decent number of OpenBSD machines that do important things (and that have sometimes experienced problems like running out of disk space), and we have a Prometheus based metrics and monitoring system. The Prometheus host agent has enough support for OpenBSD to be able to report on critical metrics, including things like local disk space. Despite all of this, after some investigation I've determined that it's not really sensible to even try to deploy the host agent on our OpenBSD machines. This is due to a combination of factors that have at their root OpenBSD's lack of ABI stability

FreeBSD removed gcc from base

As described in Warner's email message[1] to the FreeBSD-arch mailing list we have reached GCC 4.2.1's retirement date. At this time all supported architectures either use in-tree Clang, or rely on external toolchain (i.e., a contemporary GCC version from ports).

GCC 4.2.1 was released July 18, 2007 and was imported into FreeBSD later that year, in r171825. GCC has served us well, but version 4.2.1 is obsolete and not used by default on any architecture in FreeBSD. It does not support modern C and does not support arm64 or RISC-V.

Beastie Bits

• New Archive location for Dragonfly 4.x
• A dead simple git cheat sheet
• Xorg 1.20.7 on HardenedBSD Comes with IE/RELRO+BIND_NOW/CFI/SafeStack Protections

Feedback/Questions

• Niclas writes in Regarding the Lenovo E595 user (episode 340)
• Lyubomir writes about GELI and ZFS
• Peter writes in about scaling FreeBSD jails

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