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 ***

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Customizing the FreeBSD Kernel

Learn more about customizing the build of the FreeBSD kernel and its loadable modules

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OpenBSD/loongson on the Lemote Fuloong

In my article about running OpenBSD/loongson on the Lemote Yeeloong back in 2016, I mentioned looking for a Fuloong. All hope seemed lost until the Summer of 2017, when a fellow OpenBSD developer was contacted by a generous user (Thanks again, Lars!) offering to donate two Lemote Fuloong machines, and I was lucky enough to get one of those units.

News Roundup

How ZFS on Linux brings up pools and filesystems at boot under systemd

On Solaris and Illumos, how ZFS pools and filesystems were brought up at boot was always a partial mystery to me (and it seemed to involve the kernel knowing a lot about /etc/zfs/zpool.cache). On Linux, additional software RAID arrays are brought up mostly through udev rules, which has its own complications. For a long time I had the general impression that ZFS on Linux also worked through udev rules to recognize vdev components, much like software RAID. However, this turns out to not be the case and the modern ZFS on Linux boot process is quite straightforward on systemd systems.

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LLDB: FreeBSD Legacy Process Plugin Removed

During the past month we’ve successfully removed the legacy FreeBSD plugin and continued improving the new one. We have prepared an implementation of hardware breakpoint and watchpoint support for FreeBSD/AArch64, and iterated over all tests that currently fail on that platform. Therefore, we have concluded the second milestone.

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FreshBSD 2021

6 weeks ago I created a branch for a significant rework of FreshBSD. Nearly 300 commits later, and just a week shy of our 15th anniversary, the result is what you’re looking at now. I hope you like it.

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gmid is a gemini server for unixes.

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Danschmid’s Poudriere Guide now in english

The ports system is one of FreeBSD's greatest advantages for users who want flexibility and control over their software. It enables administrators to easily create and manage source-based installations using a system that is robust and predictable.

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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 ***

Special Guest: Tom Jones.

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

FreeBSD USB Audio

I recently got a Behringer UMC22 sound card for video conferencing and DJing. This page documents what I’ve learned about using this sound card, and USB audio in general, on FreeBSD.
tl;dr: Everything works as long as the sound card follows the USB audio device class specification.

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Kyua: An introduction for NetBSD users

Kyua's current goal is to reimplement only the ATF tools while maintaining backwards compatibility with the tests written with the ATF libraries (i.e. with the NetBSD test suite).
Because Kyua is a replacement of some ATF components, the end goal is to integrate Kyua into the NetBSD base system (just as ATF is) and remove the deprecated ATF components. Removing the deprecated components will allow us to make the above-mentioned improvements to Kyua, as well as many others, without having to deal with the obsolete ATF code base. Discussing how and when this transition might happen is out of the scope of this document at the moment.

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News Roundup

Keeping backup ZFS on Linux kernel modules around

I'm a long term user of ZFS on Linux and over pretty much all of the time I've used it, I've built it from the latest development version. Generally this means I update my ZoL build at the same time as I update my Fedora kernel, since a ZoL update requires a kernel reboot anyway. This is a little bit daring, of course, although the ZoL development version has generally been quite solid (and this way I get the latest features and improvements long before I otherwise would).

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Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster

As I was browsing the web and catching up on some sites I visit periodically, I found a cool article from Tom Hayden about using Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) and mrjob in order to compute some statistics on win/loss ratios for chess games he downloaded from the millionbase archive, and generally have fun with EMR. Since the data volume was only about 1.75GB containing around 2 million chess games, I was skeptical of using Hadoop for the task, but I can understand his goal of learning and having fun with mrjob and EMR. Since the problem is basically just to look at the result lines of each file and aggregate the different results, it seems ideally suited to stream processing with shell commands. I tried this out, and for the same amount of data I was able to use my laptop to get the results in about 12 seconds (processing speed of about 270MB/sec), while the Hadoop processing took about 26 minutes (processing speed of about 1.14MB/sec).

FreeBSD Laptop Find Out Battery Life Status Command

I know how to find out battery life status using Linux operating system. How do I monitor battery status on a laptop running FreeBSD version 9.x/10.x/11.x/12.x?
You can use any one of the following commands to get battery status under FreeBSD laptop including remaining battery life and more.

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Beastie Bits

BSD Beer
Awk for JSON
Drawing Pictures The Unix Way - with pic and troff
Refactoring the FreeBSD Kernel with Checked C

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

• Jason - German Locales
• pcwizz - Router Style Device
• predrag - OpenBSD Router Hardware ***
• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***

Headlines

NetBSD 9.0 release process has started

If you have been following source-changes, you may have noticed the creation of the netbsd-9 branch! It has some really exciting items that we worked on:

• New AArch64 architecture support:
  • Symmetric and asymmetrical multiprocessing support (aka big.LITTLE)
  • Support for running 32-bit binaries
  • UEFI and ACPI support
  • Support for SBSA/SBBR (server-class) hardware.
• The FDT-ization of many ARM boards:
  • the 32-bit GENERIC kernel lists 129 different DTS configurations
  • the 64-bit GENERIC64 kernel lists 74 different DTS configurations
  • All supported by a single kernel, without requiring per-board configuration.
• Graphics driver update, matching Linux 4.4, adding support for up to Kaby Lake based Intel graphics devices.
• ZFS has been updated to a modern version and seen many bugfixes.
• New hardware-accelerated virtualization via NVMM.
• NPF performance improvements and bug fixes. A new lookup algorithm, thmap, is now the default.
• NVMe performance improvements
• Optional kernel ASLR support, and partial kernel ASLR for the default configuration.
• Kernel sanitizers:
  • KLEAK, detecting memory leaks
  • KASAN, detecting memory overruns
  • KUBSAN, detecting undefined behaviour
  • These have been used together with continuous fuzzing via the syzkaller project to find many bugs that were fixed.
• The removal of outdated networking components such as ISDN and all of its drivers
• The installer is now capable of performing GPT UEFI installations.
• Dramatically improved support for userland sanitizers, as well as the option to build all of NetBSD's userland using them for bug-finding.
• Update to graphics userland: Mesa was updated to 18.3.4, and llvmpipe is now available for several architectures, providing 3D graphics even in the absence of a supported GPU.

We try to test NetBSD as best as we can, but your testing can help NetBSD 9.0 a great release. Please test it and let us know of any bugs you find.

• Binaries are available at https://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-9/latest/

xargs wtf

xargs is probably one of the more difficult to understand of the unix command arsenal and of course that just means it’s one of the most useful too.
I discovered a handy trick that I thought was worth a share. Please note there are probably other (better) ways to do this but I did my stackoverflow research and found nothing better.
xargs — at least how I’ve most utilized it — is handy for taking some number of lines as input and doing some work per line. It’s hard to be more specific than that as it does so much else.
It literally took me an hour of piecing together random man pages + tips from 11 year olds on stack overflow, but eventually I produced this gem:
This is an example of how to find files matching a certain pattern and rename each of them. It sounds so trivial (and it is) but it demonstrates some cool tricks in an easy concept.

News Roundup

PkgSrc: A Tale of Two Spellcheckers

This is a transcript of the talk I gave at pkgsrcCon 2019 in Cambridge, UK. It is about spellcheckers, but there are much more general software engineering lessons that we can learn from this case study.
The reason I got into this subject at all was my paternal leave last year, when I finally had some more time to spend working on pkgsrc. It was a tiny item in the enormous TODO file at the top of the source tree (“update enchant to version 2.2”) that made me go into this rabbit hole.

Adapting TriforceAFL for NetBSD, Part 2

I have been working on adapting TriforceAFL for NetBSD kernel syscall fuzzing. This blog post summarizes the work done until the second evaluation.
For work done during the first coding period, check out this post.

• Summary > So far, the TriforceNetBSDSyscallFuzzer has been made available in the form of a pkgsrc package with the ability to fuzz most of NetBSD syscalls. In the final coding period of GSoC. I plan to analyse the crashes that were found until now. Integrate sanitizers, try and find more bugs and finally wrap up neatly with detailed documentation. > Last but not least, I would like to thank my mentor, Kamil Rytarowski for helping me through the process and guiding me. It has been a wonderful learning experience so far!

Exploiting a no-name freebsd kernel vulnerability

• A new patch has been recently shipped in FreeBSD kernels to fix a vulnerability (cve-2019-5602) present in the cdrom device. In this post, we will introduce the bug and discuss its exploitation on pre/post-SMEP FreeBSD revisions. > A closer look at the commit 6bcf6e3 shows that when invoking the CDIOCREADSUBCHANNEL_SYSSPACE ioctl, data are copied with bcopy instead of the copyout primitive. This endows a local attacker belonging to the operator group with an arbitrary write primitive in the kernel memory.

[Allan and Benedicts Conference Gear Breakdown]

• Benedict’s Gear:

  GlocalMe G3 Mobile Travel HotSpot and Powerbank
  Mogics Power Bagel
  Charby Sense Power Cable

• Allan’s Gear:

  Huawei E5770s-320 4G LTE 150 Mbps Mobile WiFi Pro
  AOW Global Data SIM Card for On-Demand 4G LTE Mobile Data in Over 90 Countries
  All my devices charge from USB-C, so that is great
  More USB thumb drives than strictly necessary
  My Lenovo X270 laptop running FreeBSD 13-current
  My 2016 Macbook Pro (a prize from the raffle at vBSDCon 2017) that I use for email and video conferencing to preserve battery on my FreeBSD machine for work

Beastie Bits

• Replacing the Unix tradition (Warning may be rage inducing)
• Installing OpenBSD over remote serial on the AtomicPI
• Zen 2 and DragonFly
• Improve Docking on FreeBSD
• Register for vBSDCon 2019, Sept 5-7 in Reston VA. Early bird ends August 15th.
• Register for EuroBSDCon 2019, Sept 19-22 in Lillehammer, Norway

Feedback/Questions

• JT - Congrats

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

Headlines

Radeon KMS commited

• Committed by Jean-Sebastien Pedron
• Brings kernel mode setting to -CURRENT, will be in 10.0-RELEASE (ETA 12/2013)
• 10-STABLE is expected to be branched in October, to begin the process of stabilizing development
• Initial testing shows it works well
• May be merged to 9.X, but due to changes to the VM subsystem this will require a lot of work, and is currently not a priority for the Radeon KMS developer
• Still suffers from the syscons / KMS switcher issues, same as Intel video
• More info: https://wiki.freebsd.org/AMD_GPU ***

VeriSign Embraces FreeBSD

• "BSD is quite literally at the very core foundation of what makes the Internet work"
• Using BSD and Linux together provides reliability and diversity
• Verisign gives back to the community, runs vBSDCon
• "You get comfortable with something because it works well for your particular purposes and can find a good community that you can interact with. That all rang true for us with FreeBSD." ***

fetch/libfetch get a makeover

• Adds support for SSL certificate verification
• Requires root ca bundle (security/root_ca_nss)
• Still missing TLS SNI support (Server Name Indication, allows name based virtual hosts over SSL) ***

FreeBSD Foundation Semi-Annual Newsletter

• The FreeBSD Foundation took the 20th anniversary of FreeBSD as an opportunity to look at where the project is, and where it might want to go
• The foundation sets out some basic goals that the project should strive towards:
  • Unify User Experience
    • “ensure that knowledge gained mastering one task translates to the next”
    • “if we do pay attention to consistency, not only will FreeBSD be easier to use, it will be easier to learn”
  • Design for Human and Programmatic Use
    • 200 machines used to be considered a large deployment, with high density servers, blades, virtualization and the cloud, that is not so anymore
    • “the tools we provide for status reporting, configuration, and control of FreeBSD just do not scale or fail to provide the desired user experience”
    • “The FreeBSD of tomorrow needs to give programmability and human interaction equal weighting as requirements”
  • Embrace New Ways to Document FreeBSD
    • More ‘Getting Started’ sections in documentation
    • Link to external How-Tos and other documentation
    • “upgrade the cross-referencing and search tools built into FreeBSD, so FreeBSD, not an Internet search engine, is the best place to learn about FreeBSD”
• Spring Fundraising Campaign, April 17 - May 31, raised a total of $219,806 from 12 organizations and 365 individual donors. In the same period last year we raised a total of $23,422 from 2 organizations and 53 individuals
• Funds donated to the FreeBSD Foundation have been used on these projects recently:
• Capsicum security-component framework
• Transparent superpages support of the FreeBSD/ARM architecture
• Expanded and faster IPv6
• Native in-kernel iSCSI stack
• Five New TCP Congestion Control Algorithms
• Direct mapped I/O to avoid extra memory copies
• Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot environment
• Porting FreeBSD to the Genesi Efika MX SmartBook laptop (ARM-based)
• NAND Flash filesystem and storage stack
• Funds were also used to sponsor a number of BSD focused conferences: BSDCan, EuroBSDCon, AsiaBSDCon, BSDDay, NYCBSDCon, vBSDCon, plus Vendor summits and Developer summits
• It is important that the foundation receive donations from individuals, to maintain their tax exempt status in the USA. Even a donation of $5 helps make it clear that the FreeBSD Foundation is backed by a large community, not only a few vendors
• Donate Today ***

The place to B...SD

Ohio Linuxfest, Sept. 13-15, 2013

• Very BSD friendly
• Kirk McKusick giving the keynote
• BSD Certification on the 15th, all other stuff on the 14th
• Multiple BSD talks ***

LinuxCon, Sept. 16-18, 2013

• Dru Lavigne and Kris Moore will be manning a FreeBSD booth
• Number of talks of interest to BSD users, including ZFS coop

EuroBSDCon, Sept. 26-29, 2013

• Tutorials on the 26 & 27th (plus private FreeBSD DevSummit)
• 43 talks spread over 3 tracks on the 28 & 29th
• Keynote by Theo de Raadt
• Hosted in the picturesque St. Julians Area, Malta (Hilton Conference Centre) ***

Interview - Peter Hessler - phessler@openbsd.org / @phessler

Using BGP to distribute spam blacklists and whitelists

Tutorial

Using stunnel to hide your traffic from Deep Packet Inspection

News Roundup

NetBSD 6.1.1 released

• First security/bug fix update of the NetBSD 6.1 release branch
• Fixes 4 security vulnerabilities
• Adds 4 new sysctls to avoid IPv6 DoS attacks
• Misc. other updates ***

Sudo Mastery

• MWL is a well-known author of many BSD books
• Also does SSH, networking, DNSSEC, etc.
• Next book is about sudo, which comes from OpenBSD (did you know that?)
• Available for preorder now at a discounted price ***

Documentation Infrastructure Enhancements

• Gábor Kövesdán has completed a funded project to improve the infrastructure behind the documentation project
• Will upgrade documentation from DocBook 4.2 to DocBook 4.5 and at the same time migrate to proper XML tools.
• DSSSL is an old and dead standard, which will not evolve any more.
• DocBook 5.0 tree added ***

FreeBSD FIBs get new features

• FIBs (as discussed earlier in the interview) are Forward Information Bases (technical term for a routing table)
• The FreeBSD kernel can be compiled to allow you to maintain multiple FIBs, creating separate routing tables for different processes or jails
• In r254943 ps(1) is extended to support a new column ‘fib’, to display which routing table a process is using ***

FreeNAS 9.1.0 and 9.1.1 released

• Many improvements in nearly all areas, big upgrade
• Based on FreeBSD 9-STABLE, lots of new ZFS features
• Cherry picked some features from 10-CURRENT
• New volume manager and easy to use plugin management system
• 9.1.1 released shortly thereafter to fix a few UI and plugin bugs ***

BSD licensed "patch" becomes default

• bsdpatch has become mature, does what GNU patch can do, but has a much better license
• Approved by portmgr@ for use in ports
• Added WITH_GNU_PATCH build option for people who still need it ***