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

Headlines

FreeBSD 14

• [Quick update](https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2023-11-21-late-breaking-FreeBSD-14-breakage.html)
• [Vermaden’s FreeBSD 14 valuable news] (https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/11/17/valuable-freebsd-14-0-release-updates)

News Roundup

Reading your RSS feed on FreeBSD

Manipulate PDF files easily with pdftk

clang(1)/llvm updated to version 16

NetBSD Security Advisory 2023-007: multiple vulnerabilities in ftpd(8)

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 - zpool disk allocation questions

• Kevin - shell question

  ---

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

• Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel

  ---

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

Headlines

Differences between base and ports LLVM in OpenBSD

Using Netgraph for FreeBSD’s bhyve Networking

News Roundup

Audio on FreeBSD – Quick Guide

[Legends start at 1.0! – FreeBSD in 1993]

• Part 1
• Part 2 *** ### Hacker News running by FreeBSD. Take that, Linux! *** ### TrueNAS 13 ***

Beastie Bits

• Notable OpenBSD news you may have missed, 2022-06-28 edition
• rEFInd design for all the BSDs
• OpenBGPD 7.4 released
• Hotfix GhostBSD 22.06.18 ISO is now available *** ###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 - Jails Question

• Freezr - A few questions

• A different Brad - Drive question

• 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

Reviewing my first OpenBSD port, and what I'd do differently 10 years later

Install NetBSD 9.2 on a DEC Alpha CPU in QEMU with X11

News Roundup

FreeBSD Experiment Rethinks the OS Install

The switch to FreeBSD rc.d is coming

Irix gets LLVM

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

• Miceal - a few questions
• Nelson - dummynet

• 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

History of FreeBSD - Part 3: Early Days of FreeBSD

In this third part of our series on the history of FreeBSD, we start tracing the early days of FreeBSD and the events that would eventually shape the project and the future of open source software.

---

A mesh VPN using OpenBSD and WireGuard

WireGuard is a new coming to OpenBSD 6.8 and it looks like a simple and efficient way to connect computers.
I own a few VPS (hello Vultr, hello OpenBSD.amsterdam) that tend to be connected through filtered public services and/or SSH tunnels. And that’s neither efficient nor easy to manage. Here comes the wg(4) era where all those peers will communicate with a bit more privacy and ease of management.

---

News Roundup

Foundation Sponsors FreeBSD LLDB Improvements

With FreeBSD Foundation grant, Moritz Systems improved LLDB support for FreeBSD
The LLDB project builds on libraries provided by LLVM and Clang to provide a great modern debugger. It uses the Clang ASTs and the expression parser, LLVM JIT, LLVM disassembler, etc so that it provides an experience that “just works”. It is also blazing fast and more permissively licensed than GDB, the GNU Debugger.
LLDB is the default debugger in Xcode on macOS and supports debugging C, Objective-C, and C++ on the desktop and iOS devices and the simulator.

---

Host your Cryptpad web office suite with OpenBSD

In this article I will explain how to deploy your own Cryptpad instance with OpenBSD. Cryptpad is a web office suite featuring easy real time collaboration on documents. Cryptpad is written in JavaScript and the daemon acts as a web server.

Beastie Bits

• OPNsense 20.7.7 Released
• Introducing OpenZFS 2.0 Webinar - Jan 20th @ noon Eastern / 17:00 UTC.
• BSD In Die Hard
• Managing jails with Ansible: a showcase for building a container infrastructure on FreeBSD
• BSD Hardware
• New WINE chapter in FreeBSD handbook ***

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

• scott- zfs question
• Bruce - copy paste on esxi

• Julian - an apology for Allan

  ---

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

  ---

Headlines

FreeBSD is an amazing operating System

Update 2020-01-21: Since I wrote this article it got posted on Hacker News, Reddit and Lobster, and a few people have emailed me with comments. I have updated the article with comments where I have found it needed. As an important side note I would like to point out that I am not a FreeBSD developer, there may be things going on in the FreeBSD world that I know absolutely nothing about. I am also not glued to the FreeBSD developer mailing lists. I am not a FreeBSD "fanboy". I have been using GNU/Linux a ton more for the past two decades than FreeBSD, mainly due to hardware incompatibility (lacking or buggy drivers), and I love both Debian GNU/Linux and Arch Linux just as much as FreeBSD. However, I am concerned about the development of GNU/Linux as of late. Also this article is not about me trying to make anyone switch from something else to FreeBSD. It's about why I like FreeBSD and that I recommend you try it out if you're into messing with operating systems.

I think the year was late 1999 or mid 2000 when I one day was browsing computer books at my favorite bookshop and I discovered the book The Complete FreeBSD third edition from 1999 by Greg Lehey. With the book came 4 CD Roms with FreeBSD 3.3.

I had already familiarized myself with GNU/Linux in 1998, and I was in the process of migrating every server and desktop operating system away from Microsoft Windows, both at home and at my company, to GNU/Linux, initially Red Hat Linux and then later Debian GNU/Linux, which eventually became my favorite GNU/Linux distribution for many years.

When I first saw The Complete FreeBSD book by Greg Lehey I remember noticing the text on the front page that said, "The Free Version of Berkeley UNIX" and "Rock Solid Stability", and I was immediately intrigued! What was that all about? A free UNIX operating system! And rock solid stability? That sounded amazing.

Hyperbola Dev Interview

In late December 2019, Hyperbola announced that they would be making major changes to their project. They have decided to drop the Linux kernel in favor of forking the OpenBSD kernel. This announcement only came months after Project Trident announced that they were going in the opposite direction (from BSD to Linux).

Hyperbola also plans to replace all software that is not GPL v3 compliant with new versions that are.

To get more insight into the future of their new project, I interviewed Andre, co-founder of Hyperbola.

News Roundup

Improving the ptrace(2) API and preparing for LLVM-10.0

This month I have improved the NetBSD ptrace(2) API, removing one legacy interface with a few flaws and replacing it with two new calls with new features, and removing technical debt.

As LLVM 10.0 is branching now soon (Jan 15th 2020), I worked on proper support of the LLVM features for NetBSD 9.0 (today RC1) and NetBSD HEAD (future 10.0).

The first FreeBSD conference in Australia

FreeBSD has existed as an operating system, project, and foundation for more than twenty years, and its earlier incantations have exited for far longer. The old guard have been developing code, porting software, and writing documentation for longer than I’ve existed. I’ve been using it for more than a decade for personal projects, and professionally for half that time.

While there are many prominent Australian FreeBSD contributors, sysadmins, and users, we’ve always had to venture overseas for conferences. We’re always told Australians are among the most ardent travellers, but I always wondered if we could do a domestic event as well.

And on Tuesday, we did! Deb Goodkin and the FreeBSD Foundation graciously organised and chaired a dedicated FreeBSD miniconf at the long-running linux.conf.au event held each year in a different city in Australia and New Zealand.

A practical guide to containers on FreeNAS for a depraved psychopath

This is a simple write-up to setup Docker on FreeNAS 11 or FreeBSD 11.

But muh jails?

You know that jails are dope and you know that jails are dope, yet no one else knows it. So here we are stuck with docker. Two years ago I would be the last person to recommend using docker, but a whole lot of things has changes past years…

So jails are dead then?

No, jails are still dope, but jails lack tools to manage them. Yes, there are a few tools, but they meant for hard-core FreeBSD users who used to suffering. Docker allows you to run applications without deep knowledge of application you’re running. It will also allow you to run applications that are not ported to FreeBSD.

Why you should migrate everything from Linux to BSD

As an operating system GNU/Linux has become a real mess because of the fragmented nature of the project, the bloatware in the kernel, and because of the jerking around by commercial interests.

• Response Should you migrate from Linux to BSD? It depends.

Beastie Bits

• Using the OpenBSD ports tree with dedicated users
• broot on FreeBSD
• A Trip down Memory Lane
• Running syslog-ng in BastilleBSD
• NASA : Using Software Packages in pkgsrc

Feedback/Questions

• All of our questions this week were pretty technical in nature so I'm going to save those for the next episode so Allan can weigh in on them, since if we cover them now we're basically going to be deferring to Allan anyway.

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

Headlines

Linux Professional Institute Releases BSD Specialist Certification - re BSD Certification Group

Linux Professional Institute extends its Open Technology certification track with the BSD Specialist Certification. Starting October 30, 2019, BSD Specialist exams will be globally available. The certification was developed in collaboration with the BSD Certification Group which merged with Linux Professional Institute in 2018.

G. Matthew Rice, the Executive Director of Linux Professional Institute says that "the release of the BSD Specialist certification marks a major milestone for Linux Professional Institute. With this new credential, we are reaffirming our belief in the value of, and support for, all open source technologies. As much as possible, future credentials and educational programs will include coverage of BSD.”

OpenZFS Trip Report

The seventh annual OpenZFS Developer Summit took place on November 4th and 5th in San Francisco and brought together a healthy mix of familiar faces and new community participants. Several folks from iXsystems took part in the talks, hacking, and socializing at this amazing annual event. The messages of the event can be summed up as Unification, Refinement, and Ecosystem Tooling.

News Roundup

Using FreeBSD with Ports (2/2): Tool-assisted updating

• Part 1 here: https://eerielinux.wordpress.com/2019/08/18/using-freebsd-with-ports-1-2-classic-way-with-tools/

In the previous post I explained why sometimes building your software from ports may make sense on FreeBSD. I also introduced the reader to the old-fashioned way of using tools to make working with ports a bit more convenient.

In this follow-up post we’re going to take a closer look at portmaster and see how it especially makes updating from ports much, much easier. For people coming here without having read the previous article: What I describe here is not what every FreeBSD admin today should consider good practice (any more)! It can still be useful in special cases, but my main intention is to discuss this for building up the foundation for what you actually should do today.

LLDB Threading support now ready for mainline

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, 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 and fixing watchpoint support. Then, I've started working on improving thread support which is taking longer than expected. You can read more about that in my September 2019 report.

So far the number of issues uncovered while enabling proper threading support has stopped me from merging the work-in-progress patches. However, I've finally reached the point where I believe that the current work can be merged and the remaining problems can be resolved afterwards. More on that and other LLVM-related events happening during the last month in this report.

Linux VS open source UNIX

Beastie Bits

• Support for Realtek RTL8125 2.5Gb Ethernet controller
• Computer Files Are Going Extinct
• FreeBSD kernel hacking
• Modern BSD Computing for Fun on a VAX! Trying to use a VAX in today's world by Jeff Armstrong
• MidnightBSD 1.2 Released

Feedback/Questions

• Paulo - Zfs snapshots
• Phillip - GCP
• A Listener - Old episodes?

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

Headlines

LLVM santizers and GDB regression test suite.

As NetBSD-9 is branched, I have been asked to finish the LLVM sanitizer integration. This work is now accomplished and with MKLLVM=yes build option (by default off), the distribution will be populated with LLVM files for ASan, TSan, MSan, UBSan, libFuzzer, SafeStack and XRay.

I have also transplanted basesystem GDB patched to my GDB repository and managed to run the GDB regression test-suite.

• NetBSD distribution changes

I have enhanced and imported my local MKSANITIZER code that makes whole distribution sanitization possible. Few real bugs were fixed and a number of patches were newly written to reflect the current NetBSD sources state. I have also merged another chunk of the fruits of the GSoC-2018 project with fuzzing the userland (by plusun@).

• The following changes were committed to the sources:
  • ab7de18d0283 Cherry-pick upstream compiler-rt patches for LLVM sanitizers
  • 966c62a34e30 Add LLVM sanitizers in the MKLLVM=yes build
  • 8367b667adb9 telnetd: Stop defining the same variables concurrently in bss and data
  • fe72740f64bf fsck: Stop defining the same variable concurrently in bss and data
  • 40e89e890d66 Fix build of t_ubsan/t_ubsanxx under MKSANITIZER
  • b71326fd7b67 Avoid symbol clashes in tests/usr.bin/id under MKSANITIZER
  • c581f2e39fa5 Avoid symbol clashes in fs/nfs/nfsservice under MKSANITIZER
  • 030a4686a3c6 Avoid symbol clashes in bin/df under MKSANITIZER
  • fd9679f6e8b1 Avoid symbol clashes in usr.sbin/ypserv/ypserv under MKSANITIZER
  • 5df2d7939ce3 Stop defining _rpcsvcdirty in bss and data
  • 5fafbe8b8f64 Add missing extern declaration of ib_mach_emips in installboot
  • d134584be69a Add SANITIZER_RENAME_CLASSES in bsd.prog.mk
  • 2d00d9b08eae Adapt tests/kernel/t_subr_prf for MKSANITIZER
  • ce54363fe452 Ship with sanitizer/lsan_interface.h for GCC 7
  • 7bd5ee95e9a0 Ship with sanitizer/lsan_interface.h for LLVM 7
  • d8671fba7a78 Set NODEBUG for LLVM sanitizers
  • 242cd44890a2 Add PAXCTL_FLAG rules for MKSANITIZER
  • 5e80ab99d9ce Avoid symbol clashes in test/rump/modautoload/t_modautoload with sanitizers
  • e7ce7ecd9c2a sysctl: Add indirection of symbols to remove clash with sanitizers
  • 231aea846aba traceroute: Add indirection of symbol to remove clash with sanitizers
  • 8d85053f487c sockstat: Add indirection of symbols to remove clash with sanitizers
  • 81b333ab151a netstat: Add indirection of symbols to remove clash with sanitizers
  • a472baefefe8 Correct the memset(3)'s third argument in i386 biosdisk.c
  • 7e4e92115bc3 Add ATF c and c++ tests for TSan, MSan, libFuzzer
  • 921ddc9bc97c Set NOSANITIZER in i386 ramdisk image
  • 64361771c78d Enhance MKSANITIZER support
  • 3b5608f80a2b Define target_not_supported_body() in TSan, MSan and libFuzzer tests
  • c27f4619d513 Avoids signedness bit shift in db_get_value()
  • 680c5b3cc24f Fix LLVM sanitizer build by GCC (HAVE_LLVM=no)
  • 4ecfbbba2f2a Rework the LLVM compiler_rt build rules
  • 748813da5547 Correct the build rules of LLVM sanitizers
  • 20e223156dee Enhance the support of LLVM sanitizers
  • 0bb38eb2f20d Register syms.extra in LLVM sanitizer .syms files
  • Almost all of the mentioned commits were backported to NetBSD-9 and will land 9.0.

Homura - a Windows Games Launcher for FreeBSD

Inspired by lutris (a Linux gaming platform), we would like to provide a game launcher to play windows games on FreeBSD.

• Makes it easier to run games on FreeBSD, by providing the tweaks and dependencies for you
• Dependencies
  • curl
  • bash
  • p7zip
  • zenity
  • webfonts
  • alsa-utils (Optional)
  • winetricks
  • vulkan-tools
  • mesa-demos
  • i386-wine-devel on amd64 or wine-devel on i386

News Roundup

Ada—The Language of Cost Savings?

Many myths surround the Ada programming language, but it continues to be used and evolve at the same time. And while the increased adoption of Ada and SPARK, its provable subset, is slow, it’s noticeable. Ada already addresses more of the features found in found in heavily used embedded languages like C+ and C#. It also tackles problems addressed by upcoming languages like Rust.

Chris concludes, “Development technologies have a profound impact on one of the largest and most variable costs associated with embedded-system engineering—labor. At a time when on-time system deployment can not only impact customer satisfaction, but access to services revenue streams, engineering team efficiency is at a premium. Our research showed that programming language choices can have significant influence in this area, leading to shorter projects, better schedules and, ultimately, lower development costs. While a variety of factors can influence and dictate language choice, our research showed that Ada’s evolution has made it an increasingly compelling option for engineering organizations, providing both technically and financially sound solution.”

In general, Ada already makes embedded “programming in the large” much easier by handling issues that aren’t even addressed in other languages. Though these features are often provided by third-party software, it results in inconsistent practices among developers. Ada also supports the gamut of embedded platforms from systems like Arm’s Cortex-M through supercomputers. Learning Ada isn’t as hard as one might think and the benefits can be significant.

FreeBSD core team appoints a WG to explore transitioning from Subversion to Git.

• The FreeBSD Core Team is the governing body of FreeBSD.

Core approved source commit bits for Doug Moore (dougm), Chuck Silvers (chs), Brandon Bergren (bdragon), and a vendor commit bit for Scott Phillips (scottph).

The annual developer survey closed on 2019-04-02. Of the 397 developers, 243 took the survey with an average completion time of 12 minutes. The public survey closed on 2019-05-13. It was taken by 3637 users and had a 79% completion rate. A presentation of the survey results took place at BSDCan 2019.

The core team voted to appoint a working group to explore transitioning our source code 'source of truth' from Subversion to Git. Core asked Ed Maste to chair the group as Ed has been researching this topic for some time. For example, Ed gave a MeetBSD 2018 talk on the topic.

There is a variety of viewpoints within core regarding where and how to host a Git repository, however core feels that Git is the prudent path forward.

OpenBSD 6.6 Beta tagged

CVSROOT:    /cvs
Module name:    src
Changes by:    deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org    2019/08/09 21:56:02

Modified files:
    etc/root : root.mail
    share/mk : sys.mk
    sys/arch/macppc/stand/tbxidata: bsd.tbxi
    sys/conf : newvers.sh
    sys/sys : param.h
    usr.bin/signify: signify.1

Log message:
move to 6.6-beta

Preliminary release notes

Improved hardware support, including:

• clang(1) is now provided on powerpc.
• IEEE 802.11 wireless stack improvements:
• Generic network stack improvements:
• Installer improvements:
• Security improvements:
• + Routing daemons and other userland network improvements
• + The ntpd(8) daemon now gets and sets the clock in a secure way when booting even when a battery-backed clock is absent.
• + bgdp(8) improvements
• + Assorted improvements:
• + The filesystem buffer cache now more aggressively uses memory outside the DMA region, to improve cache performance on amd64 machines.
• The BER API previously internal to ldap(1), ldapd(8), ypldap(8), and snmpd(8) has been moved into libutil. See ber_read_elements(3).
• Support for specifying boot device in vm.conf(5).
• OpenSMTPD 6.6.0
• LibreSSL 3.0.X
• API and Documentation Enhancements
• Completed the port of RSA_METHOD accessors from the OpenSSL 1.1 API.
• Documented undescribed options and removed unfunctional options description in openssl(1) manual.
• OpenSSH 8.0

Project Trident 12-U5 update now available

This is the fifth general package update to the STABLE release repository based upon TrueOS 12-Stable.

• Package changes from Stable 12-U4

• Package Summary

  • New Packages: 20
  • Deleted Packages: 24
  • Updated Packages: 279

• New Packages (20)

  • artemis (biology/artemis) : 17.0.1.11
  • catesc (games/catesc) : 0.6
  • dmlc-core (devel/dmlc-core) : 0.3.105
  • go-wtf (sysutils/go-wtf) : 0.20.0_1
  • instead (games/instead) : 3.3.0_1
  • lidarr (net-p2p/lidarr) : 0.6.2.883
  • minerbold (games/minerbold) : 1.4
  • onnx (math/onnx) : 1.5.0
  • openzwave-devel (comms/openzwave-devel) : 1.6.897
  • polkit-qt-1 (sysutils/polkit-qt) : 0.113.0_8
  • py36-traitsui (graphics/py-traitsui) : 6.1.2
  • rubygem-aws-sigv2 (devel/rubygem-aws-sigv2) : 1.0.1
  • rubygem-default_value_for32 (devel/rubygem-default_value_for32) : 3.2.0
  • rubygem-ffi110 (devel/rubygem-ffi110) : 1.10.0
  • rubygem-zeitwerk (devel/rubygem-zeitwerk) : 2.1.9
  • sems (net/sems) : 1.7.0.g20190822
  • skypat (devel/skypat) : 3.1.1
  • tvm (math/tvm) : 0.4.1440
  • vavoom (games/vavoom) : 1.33_15
  • vavoom-extras (games/vavoom-extras) : 1.30_4

• Deleted Packages (24)

  • geeqie (graphics/geeqie) : Unknown reason
  • iriverter (multimedia/iriverter) : Unknown reason
  • kde5 (x11/kde5) : Unknown reason
  • kicad-doc (cad/kicad-doc) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-buildworld (os/buildworld) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland (os/userland) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-base (os/userland-base) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-base-bootstrap (os/userland-base-bootstrap) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-bin (os/userland-bin) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-boot (os/userland-boot) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-conf (os/userland-conf) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-debug (os/userland-debug) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-devtools (os/userland-devtools) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-docs (os/userland-docs) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-lib (os/userland-lib) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-lib32 (os/userland-lib32) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-lib32-development (os/userland-lib32-development) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-rescue (os/userland-rescue) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-sbin (os/userland-sbin) : Unknown reason
  • os-nozfs-userland-tests (os/userland-tests) : Unknown reason
  • photoprint (print/photoprint) : Unknown reason
  • plasma5-plasma (x11/plasma5-plasma) : Unknown reason
  • polkit-qt5 (sysutils/polkit-qt) : Unknown reason
  • secpanel (security/secpanel) : Unknown reason

Beastie Bits

• DragonFlyBSD - msdosfs updates
• Stand out as a speaker
• Not a review of the 7th Gen X1 Carbon
• FreeBSD Meets Linux At The Open Source Summit
• QEMU VM Escape
• Porting wine to amd64 on NetBSD, third evaluation report.
• OpenBSD disabled DoH by default in Firefox

Feedback/Questions

• Reinis - GELI with UEFI
• Mason - Beeping

[CHVT feedback]
DJ - Feedback
Ben - chvt
Harri - Marc's chvt question

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

Headlines

A EULA in FOSS clothing?

There was a tremendous amount of reaction to and discussion about my blog entry on the midlife crisis in open source. As part of this discussion on HN, Jay Kreps of Confluent took the time to write a detailed response — which he shortly thereafter elevated into a blog entry.

Let me be clear that I hold Jay in high regard, as both a software engineer and an entrepreneur — and I appreciate the time he took to write a thoughtful response. That said, there are aspects of his response that I found troubling enough to closely re-read the Confluent Community License — and that in turn has led me to a deeply disturbing realization about what is potentially going on here.

To GitHub: Assuming that this is in fact a EULA, I think it is perilous to allow EULAs to sit in public repositories. It’s one thing to have one click through to accept a license (though again, that itself is dubious), but to say that a git clone is an implicit acceptance of a contract that happens to be sitting somewhere in the repository beggars belief. With efforts like choosealicense.com, GitHub has been a model in guiding projects with respect to licensing; it would be helpful for GitHub’s counsel to weigh in on their view of this new strain of source-available proprietary software and the degree to which it comes into conflict with GitHub’s own terms of service.

To foundations concerned with software liberties, including the Apache Foundation, the Linux Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and the Software Freedom Conservancy: the open source community needs your legal review on this! I don’t think I’m being too alarmist when I say that this is potentially a dangerous new precedent being set; it would be very helpful to have your lawyers offer their perspectives on this, even if they disagree with one another. We seem to be in some terrible new era of frankenlicenses, where the worst of proprietary licenses are bolted on to the goodwill created by open source licenses; we need your legal voices before these creatures destroy the village!

NetBSD and LLVM

NetBSD entering 2019 with more complete LLVM support

I’m recently helping the NetBSD developers to improve the support for this operating system in various LLVM components. As you can read in my previous report, I’ve been focusing on fixing build and test failures for the purpose of improving the buildbot coverage. Previously, I’ve resolved test failures in LLVM, Clang, LLD, libunwind, openmp and partially libc++. During the remainder of the month, I’ve been working on the remaining libc++ test failures, improving the NetBSD clang driver and helping Kamil Rytarowski with compiler-rt.

The process of upstreaming support to LLVM sanitizers has been finalized

I’ve finished the process of upstreaming patches to LLVM sanitizers (almost 2000LOC of local code) and submitted to upstream new improvements for the NetBSD support. Today out of the box (in unpatched version) we have support for a variety of compiler-rt LLVM features: ASan (finds unauthorized memory access), UBSan (finds unspecified code semantics), TSan (finds threading bugs), MSan (finds uninitialized memory use), SafeStack (double stack hardening), Profile (code coverage), XRay (dynamic code tracing); while other ones such as Scudo (hardened allocator) or DFSan (generic data flow sanitizer) are not far away from completeness. The NetBSD support is no longer visibly lacking behind Linux in sanitizers, although there are still failing tests on NetBSD that are not observed on Linux. On the other hand there are features working on NetBSD that are not functional on Linux, like sanitizing programs during early initialization process of OS (this is caused by /proc dependency on Linux that is mounted by startup programs, while NetBSD relies on sysctl(3) interfaces that is always available).

News Roundup

Thoughts on FreeBSD 12.0

Playing with FreeBSD with past week I don’t feel as though there were any big surprises or changes in this release compared to FreeBSD 11. In typical FreeBSD fashion, progress tends to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and this release feels like a polished and improved incremental step forward. I like that the installer handles both UFS and ZFS guided partitioning now and in a friendly manner. In the past I had trouble getting FreeBSD’s boot menu to work with boot environments, but that has been fixed for this release. I like the security options in the installer too. These are not new, but I think worth mentioning. FreeBSD, unlike most Linux distributions, offers several low-level security options (like hiding other users’ processes and randomizing PIDs) and I like having these presented at install time. It’s harder for people to attack what they cannot see, or predict, and FreeBSD optionally makes these little adjustment for us. Something which stands out about FreeBSD, compared to most Linux distributions I run, is that FreeBSD rarely holds the user’s hand, but also rarely surprises the user. This means there is more reading to do up front and new users may struggle to get used to editing configuration files in a text editor. But FreeBSD rarely does anything unless told to do it. Updates rarely change the system’s behaviour, working technology rarely gets swapped out for something new, the system and its applications never crashed during my trial. Everything was rock solid. The operating system may seem like a minimal, blank slate to new users, but it’s wonderfully dependable and predictable in my experience. I probably wouldn’t recommend FreeBSD for desktop use. It’s close relative, GhostBSD, ships with a friendly desktop and does special work to make end user applications run smoothly. But for people who want to run servers, possible for years without change or issues, FreeBSD is a great option. It’s also an attractive choice, in my opinion, for people who like to build their system from the ground up, like you would with Debian’s server install or Arch Linux. Apart from the base tools and documentation, there is nothing on a FreeBSD system apart from what we put on it.

FreeBSD 12.0 Performance Against Windows & Linux On An Intel Xeon Server

Last week I posted benchmarks of Windows Server 2019 against various Linux distributions using a Tyan dual socket Intel Xeon server. In this article are some complementary results when adding in the performance of FreeBSD 11.2 against the new FreeBSD 12.0 stable release for this leading BSD operating system. As some fun benchmarks to end out 2018, here are the results of FreeBSD 11.2/12.0 (including an additional run when using GCC rather than Clang) up against Windows Server and several enterprise-ready Linux distributions. While FreeBSD 12.0 had picked up just one win of the Windows/Linux comparisons run, the FreeBSD performance is moving in the right direction. FreeBSD 12.0 was certainly faster than FreeBSD 11.2 on this dual Intel Xeon Scalable server based on a Tyan 1U platform. Meanwhile, to no surprise given the data last week, Clear Linux was by far the fastest out-of-the-box operating system tested. I did run some extra benchmarks on FreeBSD 11.2/12.0 with this hardware: in total I ran 120 benchmarks for these BSD tests. Of the 120 tests, there were just 15 cases where FreeBSD 11.2 was faster than 12.0. Seeing FreeBSD 12.0 faster than 11.2 nearly 90% of the time is an accomplishment and usually with other operating systems we see more of a mixed bag on new releases with not such solidly better performance. It was also great seeing the competitive performance out of FreeBSD when using the Clang compiler for the source-based tests compared to the GCC8 performance. Additional data available via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

How NetBSD came to be shipped by Microsoft

Google cache in case the site is down

In 2000, Joe Britt, Matt Hershenson and Andy Rubin formed Danger Incorporated. Danger developed the world’s first recognizable smartphone, the Danger HipTop. T-Mobile sold the first HipTop under the brand name Sidekick in October of 2002. Danger had a well developed kernel that had been designed and built in house. The kernel came to be viewed as not a core intellectual property and Danger started a search for a replacement. For business reasons, mostly to do with legal concerns over the Gnu Public License, Danger rejected Linux and began to consider BSD Unix as a replacement for the kernel. In 2006 I was hired by Mike Chen, the manager of the kernel development group to investigate the feasibility of replacing the Danger kernel with a BSD kernel, to select the version of BSD to use, to develop a prototype and to develop the plan for adapting BSD to Danger’s requirements. NetBSD was easily the best choice among the BSD variations at the time because it had well developed cross development tools. It was easy to use a NetBSD desktop running an Intel release to cross compile a NetBSD kernel and runtime for a device running an ARM processor. (Those interested in mailing list archaeology might be amused to investigate NetBSD technical mailing list for mail from picovex, particularly from Bucky Katz at picovex.) We began product development on the specific prototype of the phone that would become the Sidekick LX2009 in 2007 and contracts for the phone were written with T-Mobile. We were about half way through the two year development cycle when Microsoft purchased Danger in 2008. Microsoft would have preferred to ship the Sidekick running Windows/CE rather than NetBSD, but a schedule analysis performed by me, and another by an independent outside contractor, indicated that doing so would result in unacceptable delay.

Beastie Bits

• Unleashed 1.2 Released
• 35th CCC - Taming the Chaos: Can we build systems that actually work?
• Potholes to avoid when migrating to IPv6
• XScreenSaver 5.42
• SSH Examples and Tunnels
• Help request - mbuf(9) - request for comment
• NSA to release free Reverse Engineering Tool
• Running FreeBSD on a Raspberry Pi3 using a custom image created with crochet and poudriere

Feedback/Questions

• Dries - Lets talk a bit about VIMAGE jails
• ohb - Question About ZFS Root Dataset
• Micah - Active-Active NAS Sync recommendations

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

##Headlines

###[FreeBSD DevSummit & EuroBSDcon 2018 in Romania]

• Your hosts are back from EuroBSDcon 2018 held in Bucharest, Romania this year. The first two days of the conference are used for tutorials and devsummits (FreeBSD and NetBSD), while the last two are for talks.
• Although Benedict organized the devsummit in large parts, he did not attend it this year. He held his Ansible tutorial in the morning of the first day, followed by Niclas Zeising’s new ports and poudriere tutorial (which had a record attendance). It was intended for beginners that had never used poudriere before and those who wanted to create their first port. The tutorial was well received and Niclas already has ideas for extending it for future conferences.
• On the second day, Benedict took Kirk McKusick’s “An Introduction to the FreeBSD Open-Source Operating System” tutorial, held as a one full day class this year. Although it was reduced in content, it went into enough depth of many areas of the kernel and operating system to spark many questions from attendees. Clearly, this is a good start into kernel programming as Kirk provides enough material and backstories to understand why certain things are implemented as they are.
• Olivier Robert took [https://www.talegraph.com/tales/l2o9ltrvsE](pictures from the devsummit) and created a nice gallery out of it.
• Devsummit evenings saw dinners at two restaurants that allowed developers to spend some time talking over food and drinks.
• The conference opened on the next day with the opening session held by Mihai Carabas. He introduced the first keynote speaker, a colleague of his who presented “Lightweight virtualization with LightVM and Unikraft”.
• Benedict helped out at the FreeBSD Foundation sponsor table and talked to people. He saw the following talks in between:

Selfhosting as an alternative to the public cloud (by Albert Dengg)
Using Boot Environments at Scale (by Allan Jude)
Livepatching FreeBSD kernel (by Maciej Grochowski)
FreeBSD: What to (Not) Monitor (by Andrew Fengler)
FreeBSD Graphics (by Niclas Zeising)

• Allan spent a lot of time talking to people and helping track down issues they were having, in addition to attending many talks:

  Hacking together a FreeBSD presentation streaming box – For as little as possible (by Tom Jones)
  Introduction of FreeBSD in new environments (by Baptiste Daroussin)
  Keynote: Some computing and networking historical perspectives (by Ron Broersma)
  Livepatching FreeBSD kernel (by Maciej Grochowski)
  FreeBSD: What to (Not) Monitor (by Andrew Fengler)
  Being a BSD user (by Roller Angel)
  From “Hello World” to the VFS Layer: building a beadm for DragonFly BSD (by Michael Voight)

• We also met the winner of our Power Bagel raffle from Episode 2^8. He received the item in the meantime and had it with him at the conference, providing a power outlet to charge other people’s devices.
• During the closing session, GroffTheBSDGoat was handed over to Deb Goodkin, who will bring the little guy to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference and then to MeetBSD later this year. It was also revealed that next year’s EuroBSDcon will be held in Lillehammer, Norway.
• Thanks to all the speakers, helpers, sponsors, organizers, and attendees for making it a successful conferences. There were no talks recorded this year, but the slides will be uploaded to the EuroBSDcon website in a couple of weeks. The OpenBSD talks are already available, so check them out.

###Software disenchantment

I’ve been programming for 15 years now. Recently our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and the IT in general.
Modern cars work, let’s say for the sake of argument, at 98% of what’s physically possible with the current engine design. Modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions. All planes converged to the optimal size/form/load and basically look the same.
Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance. Everybody just seems to be ok with it. People are often even proud about how much inefficient it is, as in “why should we worry, computers are fast enough”:
@tveastman: I have a Python program I run every day, it takes 1.5 seconds. I spent six hours re-writing it in rust, now it takes 0.06 seconds. That efficiency improvement means I’ll make my time back in 41 years, 24 days :-)
You’ve probably heard this mantra: “programmer time is more expensive than computer time”. What it means basically is that we’re wasting computers at an unprecedented scale. Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? With computers, we do that all the time.

• Everything is unbearably slow

Look around: our portable computers are thousands of times more powerful than the ones that brought man to the moon. Yet every other webpage struggles to maintain a smooth 60fps scroll on the latest top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. I can comfortably play games, watch 4K videos but not scroll web pages? How is it ok?
Google Inbox, a web app written by Google, running in Chrome browser also by Google, takes 13 seconds to open moderately-sized emails:
It also animates empty white boxes instead of showing their content because it’s the only way anything can be animated on a webpage with decent performance. No, decent doesn’t mean 60fps, it’s rather “as fast as this web page could possibly go”. I’m dying to see web community answer when 120Hz displays become mainstream. Shit barely hits 60Hz already.
Windows 10 takes 30 minutes to update. What could it possibly be doing for that long? That much time is enough to fully format my SSD drive, download a fresh build and install it like 5 times in a row.
Pavel Fatin: Typing in editor is a relatively simple process, so even 286 PCs were able to provide a rather fluid typing experience.
Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, all you have to do is update tiny rectangular region and modern text editors can’t do that in 16ms. It’s a lot of time. A LOT. A 3D game can fill the whole screen with hundreds of thousands (!!!) of polygons in the same 16ms and also process input, recalculate the world and dynamically load/unload resources. How come?
As a general trend, we’re not getting faster software with more features. We’re getting faster hardware that runs slower software with the same features. Everything works way below the possible speed. Ever wonder why your phone needs 30 to 60 seconds to boot? Why can’t it boot, say, in one second? There are no physical limitations to that. I would love to see that. I would love to see limits reached and explored, utilizing every last bit of performance we can get for something meaningful in a meaningful way.

• Everything is HUUUUGE

And then there’s bloat. Web apps could open up to 10× faster if you just simply block all ads. Google begs everyone to stop shooting themselves in their feet with AMP initiative—a technology solution to a problem that doesn’t need any technology, just a little bit of common sense. If you remove bloat, the web becomes crazy fast. How smart do you have to be to understand that?
Android system with no apps takes almost 6 Gb. Just think for a second how obscenely HUGE that number is. What’s in there, HD movies? I guess it’s basically code: kernel, drivers. Some string and resources too, sure, but those can’t be big. So, how many drivers do you need for a phone?
Windows 95 was 30Mb. Today we have web pages heavier than that! Windows 10 is 4Gb, which is 133 times as big. But is it 133 times as superior? I mean, functionally they are basically the same. Yes, we have Cortana, but I doubt it takes 3970 Mb. But whatever Windows 10 is, is Android really 150% of that?
Google keyboard app routinely eats 150 Mb. Is an app that draws 30 keys on a screen really five times more complex than the whole Windows 95? Google app, which is basically just a package for Google Web Search, is 350 Mb! Google Play Services, which I do not use (I don’t buy books, music or videos there)—300 Mb that just sit there and which I’m unable to delete.
All that leaves me around 1 Gb for my photos after I install all the essential (social, chats, maps, taxi, banks etc) apps. And that’s with no games and no music at all! Remember times when an OS, apps and all your data fit on a floppy?
Your desktop todo app is probably written in Electron and thus has userland driver for Xbox 360 controller in it, can render 3d graphics and play audio and take photos with your web camera.
A simple text chat is notorious for its load speed and memory consumption. Yes, you really have to count Slack in as a resource-heavy application. I mean, chatroom and barebones text editor, those are supposed to be two of the less demanding apps in the whole world. Welcome to 2018.
At least it works, you might say. Well, bigger doesn’t imply better. Bigger means someone has lost control. Bigger means we don’t know what’s going on. Bigger means complexity tax, performance tax, reliability tax. This is not the norm and should not become the norm. Overweight apps should mean a red flag. They should mean run away scared.

• Better world manifesto

I want to see progress. I want change. I want state-of-the-art in software engineering to improve, not just stand still. I don’t want to reinvent the same stuff over and over, less performant and more bloated each time. I want something to believe in, a worthy end goal, a future better than what we have today, and I want a community of engineers who share that vision.
What we have today is not progress. We barely meet business goals with poor tools applied over the top. We’re stuck in local optima and nobody wants to move out. It’s not even a good place, it’s bloated and inefficient. We just somehow got used to it.
So I want to call it out: where we are today is bullshit. As engineers, we can, and should, and will do better. We can have better tools, we can build better apps, faster, more predictable, more reliable, using fewer resources (orders of magnitude fewer!). We need to understand deeply what are we doing and why. We need to deliver: reliably, predictably, with topmost quality. We can—and should–take pride in our work. Not just “given what we had…”—no buts!
I hope I’m not alone at this. I hope there are people out there who want to do the same. I’d appreciate if we at least start talking about how absurdly bad our current situation in the software industry is. And then we maybe figure out how to get out.

##News Roundup
###[llvm-announce] LLVM 7.0.0 Release

I am pleased to announce that LLVM 7 is now available.

Get it here: https://llvm.org/releases/download.html#7.0.0

The release contains the work on trunk up to SVN revision 338536 plus
work on the release branch. It is the result of the community's work
over the past six months, including: function multiversioning in Clang
with the 'target' attribute for ELF-based x86/x86_64 targets, improved
PCH support in clang-cl, preliminary DWARF v5 support, basic support
for OpenMP 4.5 offloading to NVPTX, OpenCL C++ support, MSan, X-Ray
and libFuzzer support for FreeBSD, early UBSan, X-Ray and libFuzzer
support for OpenBSD, UBSan checks for implicit conversions, many
long-tail compatibility issues fixed in lld which is now production
ready for ELF, COFF and MinGW, new tools llvm-exegesis, llvm-mca and
diagtool. And as usual, many optimizations, improved diagnostics, and
bug fixes.

For more details, see the release notes:
https://llvm.org/releases/7.0.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
https://llvm.org/releases/7.0.0/tools/clang/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
https://llvm.org/releases/7.0.0/tools/clang/tools/extra/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
https://llvm.org/releases/7.0.0/tools/lld/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

Thanks to everyone who helped with filing, fixing, and code reviewing
for the release-blocking bugs!

Special thanks to the release testers and packagers: Bero
Rosenkränzer, Brian Cain, Dimitry Andric, Jonas Hahnfeld, Lei Huang
Michał Górny, Sylvestre Ledru, Takumi Nakamura, and Vedant Kumar.

For questions or comments about the release, please contact the
community on the mailing lists. Onwards to LLVM 8!

Cheers,
Hans

###Update your Thinkpad’s bios with Linux or OpenBSD

• Get your new bios

At first, go to the Lenovo website and download your new bios:

• Go to lenovo support
• Use the search bar to find your product (example for me, x270)
• Choose the right product (if necessary) and click search
• On the right side, click on Update Your System
• Click on BIOS/UEFI
• Choose *BIOS Update (Bootable CD) for Windows *
• Download

For me the file is called like this : r0iuj25wd.iso

• Extract bios update

Now you will need to install geteltorito.

• With OpenBSD:

$ doas pkg_add geteltorito
quirks-3.7 signed on 2018-09-09T13:15:19Z
geteltorito-0.6: ok

• With Debian:

$ sudo apt-get install genisoimage

• Now we will extract the bios update :

$ geteltorito -o bios_update.img r0iuj25wd.iso
Booting catalog starts at sector: 20
Manufacturer of CD: NERO BURNING ROM VER 12
Image architecture: x86
Boot media type is: harddisk
El Torito image starts at sector 27 and has 43008 sector(s) of 512 Bytes

Image has been written to file "bios_update.img".
This will create a file called bios_update.img.

• Put the image on an USB key
• CAREFULL : on my computer, my USB key is sda1 on Linux and sd1 on OpenBSD.

Please check twice on your computer the name of your USB key.

• With OpenBSD :

$ doas dd if=bios_update.img of=/dev/rsd1c

• With Linux :

$ sudo dd if=bios_update.img of=/dev/sda

Now all you need is to reboot, to boot on your USB key and follow the instructions. Enjoy 😉

###Announcing The HardenedBSD Foundation

In June of 2018, we announced our intent to become a not-for-profit, tax-exempt 501©(3) organization in the United States. It took a dedicated team months of work behind-the-scenes to make that happen. On 06 September 2018, HardenedBSD Foundation Corp was granted 501©(3) status, from which point all US-based persons making donations can deduct the donation from their taxes.
We are grateful for those who contribute to HardenedBSD in whatever way they can. Thank you for making HardenedBSD possible. We look forward to a bright future, driven by a helpful and positive community.

###How you migrate ZFS filesystems matters

If you want to move a ZFS filesystem around from one host to another, you have two general approaches; you can use ‘zfs send’ and ‘zfs receive’, or you can use a user level copying tool such as rsync (or ‘tar -cf | tar -xf’, or any number of similar options). Until recently, I had considered these two approaches to be more or less equivalent apart from their convenience and speed (which generally tilted in favour of ‘zfs send’). It turns out that this is not necessarily the case and there are situations where you will want one instead of the other.
We have had two generations of ZFS fileservers so far, the Solaris ones and the OmniOS ones. When we moved from the first generation to the second generation, we migrated filesystems across using ‘zfs send’, including the filesystem with my home directory in it (we did this for various reasons). Recently I discovered that some old things in my filesystem didn’t have file type information in their directory entries. ZFS has been adding file type information to directories for a long time, but not quite as long as my home directory has been on ZFS.
This illustrates an important difference between the ‘zfs send’ approach and the rsync approach, which is that zfs send doesn’t update or change at least some ZFS on-disk data structures, in the way that re-writing them from scratch from user level does. There are both positives and negatives to this, and a certain amount of rewriting does happen even in the ‘zfs send’ case (for example, all of the block pointers get changed, and ZFS will re-compress your data as applicable).
I knew that in theory you had to copy things at the user level if you wanted to make sure that your ZFS filesystem and everything in it was fully up to date with the latest ZFS features. But I didn’t expect to hit a situation where it mattered in practice until, well, I did. Now I suspect that old files on our old filesystems may be partially missing a number of things, and I’m wondering how much of the various changes in ‘zfs upgrade -v’ apply even to old data.
(I’d run into this sort of general thing before when I looked into ext3 to ext4 conversion on Linux.)
With all that said, I doubt this will change our plans for migrating our ZFS filesystems in the future (to our third generation fileservers). ZFS sending and receiving is just too convenient, too fast and too reliable to give up. Rsync isn’t bad, but it’s not the same, and so we only use it when we have to (when we’re moving only some of the people in a filesystem instead of all of them, for example).
PS: I was going to try to say something about what ‘zfs send’ did and didn’t update, but having looked briefly at the code I’ve concluded that I need to do more research before running my keyboard off. In the mean time, you can read the OpenZFS wiki page on ZFS send and receive, which has plenty of juicy technical details.
PPS: Since eliminating all-zero blocks is a form of compression, you can turn zero-filled files into sparse files through a ZFS send/receive if the destination has compression enabled. As far as I know, genuine sparse files on the source will stay sparse through a ZFS send/receive even if they’re sent to a destination with compression off.

##Beastie Bits

• BSD Users Stockholm Meetup #4: Tuesday, November 13, 2018 at 18:00
• BSD Poland User Group: Next Meeting: October 11, 2018, 18:15 - 21:15 at Warsaw University of Technology
• n2k18 Hackathon report: Ken Westerback (krw@) on disklabel(8) work, dhclient(8) progress
• Running MirageOS Unikernels on OpenBSD in vmm (Now Works)
• vmm(4) gets support for qcow2
• MeetBSD and SecurityBsides
• Colin Percival reduced FreeBSD startup time from 10627ms (11.2) to 4738ms (12.0)
• FreeBSD 11.1 end-of-life
• KnoxBug: Monday, October 1, 2018 at 18:00: Real-world Performance Advantages of NVDIMM and NVMe: Case Study with OpenZFS

##Feedback/Questions

• Todd - 2 Nics, 1 bhyve and a jail cell
• Thomas - Deep Dive
• Morgan - Send/Receive to Manage Fragmentation?
• Dominik - hierarchical jails -> networking

• 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

LUKS in OpenBSD

• Last week, we were surprised to find out that DragonFlyBSD has support for dm-crypt, sometimes referred to as LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup)
• It looks like they might not be the only BSD with support for it for much longer, as OpenBSD is currently reviewing a patch for it as well
• LUKS would presumably be an additional option in OpenBSD's softraid system, which already provides native disk encryption
• Support hasn't been officially committed yet, it's still going through testing, but the code is there if you want to try it out and report your findings
• If enabled, this might pave the way for the first (semi-)cross platform encryption scheme since the demise of TrueCrypt (and maybe other BSDs will get it too in time) ***

FreeBSD gets 64bit Linux emulation

• For those who might be unfamiliar, FreeBSD has an emulation layer to run Linux-only binaries (as rare as they may be)
• The most common use case is for desktop users, enabling them to run proprietary applications like Adobe Flash or Skype
• Similar systems can also be found in NetBSD and OpenBSD (though disabled by default on the latter)
• However, until now, it's only supported binaries compiled for the i386 architecture
• This new update, already committed to -CURRENT, will open some new possibilities that weren't previously possible
• Meanwhile, HardenedBSD considers removing the emulation layer entirely ***

BSD at Open Source Conference 2015 Nagoya

• We've covered the Japanese NetBSD users group setting up lots of machines at various conferences in the past, but now they're expanding
• Their latest report includes many of the NetBSD things you'd expect, but also a couple OpenBSD machines
• Some of the NetBSD ones included a Power Mac G4, SHARP NetWalker, Cubieboard2 and the not-so-foreign Raspberry Pi
• One new addition of interest is the OMRON LUNA88k, running the luna88k port of OpenBSD
• There was even an old cell phone running Windows games on NetBSD
• Check the mailing list post for some links to all of the nice pictures ***

LLVM introduces OpenMP support

• One of the things that has kept some people in the GCC camp is the lack of OpenMP support in LLVM
• According to the blog post, it "enables Clang users to harness full power of modern multi-core processors with vector units"
• With Clang being the default in FreeBSD, Bitrig and OS X, and with some other BSDs exploring the option of switching, the need for this potential speed boost was definitely there
• This could also open some doors for more BSD in the area of high performance computing, putting an end to the current Linux monopoly ***

Interview - Eric, FSF, John, Jose, Kris and Stewart

Various "man on the street" style mini-interviews

News Roundup

BSD-licensed gettext replacement

• If you've ever installed ports on any of the BSDs, you've probably had GNU's gettext pulled in as a dependency
• Wikipedia says "gettext is an internationalization and localization (i18n) system commonly used for writing multilingual programs on Unix-like computer operating systems"
• A new BSD-licensed rewrite has begun, with the initial version being for NetBSD (but it's likely to be portable)
• If you've got some coding skills, get involved with the project - the more freely-licensed replacements, the better ***

Unix history git repo

• A git repository was recently created to show off some Unix source code history
• The repository contains 659 thousand commits and 2306 merges
• You can see early 386BSD commits all the way up to some of the more modern FreeBSD code
• If you want to browse through the giant codebase, it can be a great history lesson ***

PCBSD 10.1.2 and Lumina updates

• We mentioned 10.1.1 being released last week (and all the cool features a couple weeks before) but now 10.1.2 is out
• This minor update contained a few hotfixes: RAID-Z installation, cache and log devices and the text-only installer in UEFI mode
• There's also a new post on the PCBSD blog about Lumina, answering some frequently asked questions and giving a general status update ***

Feedback/Questions

• Jake writes in
• Van writes in
• Anonymous writes in
• Dominik writes in (text answer)
• Chris writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Death by chocolate ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Solaris' networking future is with OpenBSD

• A curious patch from someone with an Oracle email address was recently sent in to one of the OpenBSD mailing lists
• It was revealed that future releases of Solaris are going to drop their IPFilter firewall entirely, in favor of a port of the current version of PF
• For anyone unfamiliar with the history of PF, it was actually made as a replacement for IPFilter in OpenBSD, due to some licensing issues
• What's more, Solaris was the original development platform for IPFilter, so the fact that it would be replaced in its own home is pretty interesting
• This blog post goes through some of the backstory of the two firewalls
• PF is in a lot of places - other BSDs, Mac OS X and iOS - but there are plenty of other OpenBSD-developed technologies end up ported to other projects too
• "Many of the world's largest corporations and government agencies are heavy Solaris users, meaning that even if you're neither an OpenBSD user or a Solaris user, your kit is likely interacting intensely with both kinds, and with Solaris moving to OpenBSD's PF for their filtering needs, we will all be benefiting even more from the OpenBSD project's emphasis on correctness, quality and security"
• You're welcome, Oracle ***

BAFUG discussion videos

• The Bay Area FreeBSD users group has been uploading some videos from their recent meetings
• Sean Bruno gave a recap of his experiences at EuroBSDCon last year, including the devsummit and some proposed ideas from it (as well as their current status)
• Craig Rodrigues also gave a talk about Kyua and the FreeBSD testing framework
• Lastly, Kip Macy gave a talk titled "network stack changes, user-level FreeBSD"
• The main two subjects there are some network stack changes, and how to get more people contributing, but there's also open discussion about a variety of FreeBSD topics
• If you're close to the Bay Area in California, be sure to check out their group and attend a meeting sometime ***

More than just a makefile

• If you're not a BSD user just yet, you might be wondering how the various ports and pkgsrc systems compare to the binary way of doing things on Linux
• This blog entry talks about the ports system in OpenBSD, but a lot of the concepts apply to all the ports systems across the BSDs
• As it turns out, the ports system really isn't that different from a binary package manager - they are what's used to create binary packages, after all
• The author goes through what makefiles do, customizing which options software is compiled with, patching source code to build and getting those patches back upstream
• After that, he shows you how to get your new port tested, if you're interesting in doing some porting yourself, and getting involved with the rest of the community
• This post is very long and there's a lot more to it, so check it out (and more discussion on Hacker News) ***

Securing your home fences

• Hopefully all our listeners have realized that trusting your network(s) to a consumer router is a bad idea by now
• We hear from a lot of users who want to set up some kind of BSD-based firewall, but don't hear back from them after they've done it.. until now
• In this post, someone goes through the process of setting up a home firewall using OPNsense on a PCEngines APU board
• He notes that you have a lot of options software-wise, including vanilla FreeBSD, OpenBSD or even Linux, but decided to go with OPNsense because of the easy interface and configuration
• The post covers all the hardware you'll need, getting the OS installed to a flash drive or SD card and going through the whole process
• Finally, he goes through setting up the firewall with the graphical interface, applying updates and finishing everything up
• If you don't have any experience using a serial console, this guide also has some good info for beginners about those (which also applies to regular FreeBSD)
• We love super-detailed guides like this, so everyone should write more and send them to us immediately ***

Interview - Pascal Stumpf - pascal@openbsd.org

Static PIE in OpenBSD

News Roundup

LLVM's new libFuzzer

• We've discussed fuzzing on the show a number of times, albeit mostly with the American Fuzzy Lop utility
• It looks like LLVM is going to have their own fuzzing tool too now
• The Clang and LLVM guys are no strangers to this type of code testing, but decided to "close the loop" and start fuzzing parts of LLVM (including Clang) using LLVM itself
• With Clang being the default in both FreeBSD and Bitrig, and with the other BSDs considering the switch, this could make for some good bug hunting across all the projects in the future ***

HardenedBSD upgrades secadm

• The HardenedBSD guys have released a new version of their secadm tool, with the showcase feature being integriforce support
• We covered both the secadm tool and integriforce in previous episodes, but the short version is that it's a way to prevent files from being altered (even as root)
• Their integriforce feature itself has also gotten a couple improvements: shared objects are now checked too, instead of just binaries, and it uses more caching to speed up the whole process now ***

RAID5 returns to OpenBSD

• OpenBSD's softraid subsystem, somewhat similar to FreeBSD's GEOM, has had experimental RAID5 support for a while
• However, it was exactly that - experimental - and required a recompile to enable
• With some work from recent hackathons, the final piece was added to enable resuming partial array rebuilds
• Now it's on by default, and there's a call for testing being put out, so grab a snapshot and put the code through its paces
• The bioctl softraid command also now supports DUIDs during pseudo-device detachment, possibly paving the way for the installer to drop the "do you want to enable DUIDs?" question entirely ***

pkgng 1.5.0 released

• Going back to what we talked about last week, the final version of pkgng 1.5.0 is out
• The "provides" and "requires" support is finally in a regular release
• A new "-r" switch will allow for direct installation to a chroot or alternate root directory
• Memory usage should be much better now, and some general code speed-ups were added
• This version also introduces support for Mac OS X, NetBSD and EdgeBSD - it'll be interesting to see if anything comes of that
• Many more bugs were fixed, so check the mailing list announcement for the rest (and plenty new bugs were added, according to bapt) ***

p2k15 hackathon reports

• There was another OpenBSD hackathon that just finished up in the UK - this time it was mainly for ports work
• As usual, the developers sent in reports of some of the things they got done at the event
• Landry Breuil, both an upstream Mozilla developer and an OpenBSD developer, wrote in about the work he did on the Firefox port (specifically WebRTC) and some others, as well as reviewing lots of patches that were ready to commit
• Stefan Sperling wrote in, detailing his work with wireless chipsets, specifically when the vendor doesn't provide any hardware documentation, as well as updating some of the games in ports
• Ken Westerback also sent in a report, but decided to be a rebel and not work on ports at all - he got a lot of GPT-related work done, and also reviewed the RAID5 support we talked about earlier ***

Feedback/Questions

• Shaun writes in
• Hrishi writes in
• Randy writes in
• Zach writes in
• Ben writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Gstreamer hates us
• At least he's honest
• I find myself in a situation ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Bitrig 1.0 released

• If you haven't heard of it, Bitrig is a fork of OpenBSD that started a couple years ago
• According to their FAQ, some of their goals include: only supporting modern hardware and a limited set of CPU architectures, replacing nearly all GNU tools in base with BSD versions and having better virtualization support
• They've finally announced their first official release, 1.0
• This release introduces support for Clang 3.4, replacing the old GCC, along with libc++ replacing the GNU version
• It also includes filesystem journaling, support for GPT and - most importantly - a hacker-style console with green text on black background
• One of the developers answered some questions about it on Hacker News too ***

Is it time to try BSD?

• Here we get a little peek into the Linux world - more and more people are considering switching
• On a more mainstream tech news site, they have an article about people switching away from Linux and to BSD
• People are starting to get even more suspicious of systemd, and lots of drama in the Linux world is leading a whole new group of potential users over to the BSD side
• This article explores some pros and cons of switching, and features opinions of various users ***

Poudriere 3.1 released

• One of the first things we ever covered on the show was poudriere, a tool with a funny name that's used to build binary packages from FreeBSD ports
• It's come a long way since then, and bdrewery and bapt have just announced a new major version
• This new release features a redesigned web interface to check on the status of your packages
• There are lots of new bulk building options to preserve packages even if some fail to compile - this makes maintaining a production repo much easier
• It also introduces a useful new "pkgclean" subcommand to clean out your repository of packages that aren't needed anymore, and poudriere keeps it cleaner by default as well now
• Check the full release notes for all the additions and bug fixes ***

Firewalling with OpenBSD's pf and pfsync

• A talk by David Gwynne from an Australian conference was uploaded, with the subject matter being pf and pfsync
• He uses pf to manage 60 internal networks with a single firewall
• The talk gives some background on how pf originally came to be and some OpenBSD 101 for the uninitiated
• It also touches on different rulesets, use cases, configuration syntax, placing limits on connections, ospf, authpf, segregating VLANs, synproxy handling and a lot more
• The second half of the presentation focuses on pfsync and carp for failover and redundancy
• With two BSD boxes running pfsync, you can actually patch your kernel and still stay connected to IRC ***

Interview - Patrick Wildt - patrick@bitrig.org / @bitrig

The initial release of Bitrig

News Roundup

Infrastructural enhancements at NYI

• The FreeBSD foundation put up a new blog post detailing some hardware improvements they've recently done
• Their eastern US colocation is hosted at New York Internet, and is used for FTP mirrors, pkgng mirrors, and also as a place for developers to test things
• There've been fourteen machines purchased since July, and now FreeBSD boasts a total of sixty-eight physical boxes there
• This blog post goes into detail about how those servers are used and details some of the network topology ***

The long tail of MD5

• Our friend Ted Unangst is on a quest to replace all instances of MD5 in OpenBSD's tree with something more modern
• In this blog post, he goes through some of the different areas where MD5 still lives, and discovers how easy (or impossible) it would be to replace
• Through some recent commits, OpenBSD now uses SHA512 in some places that you might not expect
• Some other places require a bit more care… ***

DragonFly cheat sheet

• If you've been thinking of trying out DragonFlyBSD lately, this might make the transition a bit easier
• A user-created "cheat sheet" on the website lists some common answers to beginner questions
• The page features a walkthrough of the installer, some shell tips and workarounds for various issues
• At the end, it also has some things that new users can get involved with to help out ***

Experiences with an OpenBSD laptop

• A lot of people seem to be interested in trying out some form of BSD on their laptop, and this article details just that
• The author got interested in OpenBSD mostly because of the security focus and the fact that it's not Linux
• In this blog post, he goes through the steps of researching, installing, configuring, upgrading and finally actually using it on his Thinkpad
• He even gives us a mention as a good place to learn more about BSD, thanks! ***

PC-BSD Updates

• A call for testing of a new update system has gone out
• Conversion to Qt5 for utils has taken place ***

Feedback/Questions

• Chris writes in
• AJ writes in
• Dan writes in
• Jeff writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Over 440% faster
• The PF conundrum (edit: Allan misspoke about PF performance during this segment, apologies.)
• Violating bad standards
• apt-get rid of systemd ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

OpenBSD 5.5 released

• If you ordered a CD set then you've probably had it for a little while already, but OpenBSD has formally announced the public release of 5.5
• This is one of the biggest releases to date, with a very long list of changes and improvements
• Some of the highlights include: time_t being 64 bit on all platforms, release sets and binary packages being signed with the new signify tool, a new autoinstall feature of the installer, SMP support on Alpha, a new AViiON port, lots of new hardware drivers including newer NICs, the new vxlan driver, relayd improvements, a new pf queue system for bandwidth shaping, dhcpd and dhclient fixes, OpenSMTPD 5.4.2 and all its new features, position-independent executables being default for i386, the RNG has been replaced with ChaCha20 as well as some other security improvements, FUSE support, tmpfs, softraid partitions larger than 2TB and a RAID 5 implementation, OpenSSH 6.6 with all its new features and fixes... and a lot more
• The full list of changes is HUGE, be sure to read through it all if you're interested in the details
• If you're doing an upgrade from 5.4 instead of a fresh install, pay careful attention to the upgrade guide as there are some very specific steps for this version
• Also be sure to apply the errata patches on your new installations... especially those OpenSSL ones (some of which still aren't fixed in the other BSDs yet)
• On the topic of errata patches, the project is now going to also send them out (signed) via the announce mailing list, a very welcome change
• Congrats to the whole team on this great release - 5.6 is going to be even more awesome with "Libre"SSL and lots of other stuff that's currently in development ***

FreeBSD foundation funding highlights

• The FreeBSD foundation posts a new update on how they're spending the money that everyone donates
• "As we embark on our 15th year of serving the FreeBSD Project and community, we are proud of what we've done to help FreeBSD become the most innovative, reliable, and high-performance operation system"
• During this spring, they want to highlight the new UEFI boot support and newcons
• There's a lot of details about what exactly UEFI is and why we need it going forward
• FreeBSD has also needed some updates to its console to support UTF8 and wide characters
• Hopefully this series will continue and we'll get to see what other work is being sponsored ***

OpenSSH without OpenSSL

• The OpenSSH team has been hard at work, making it even better, and now OpenSSL is completely optional
• Since it won't have access to the primitives OpenSSL uses, there will be a trade-off of features vs. security
• This version will drop support for legacy SSH v1, and the only two cryptographic algorithms supported are an in-house implementation of AES in counter mode and the new combination of the Chacha20 stream cipher with Poly1305 for packet integrity
• Key exchange is limited to elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman and the newer Curve25519 KEXs
• No support for RSA, DSA or ECDSA public keys - only Ed25519
• It also includes a new buffer API and a set of wrappers to make it compatible with the existing API
• Believe it or not, this was planned before all the heartbleed craziness
• Maybe someday soon we'll have a mini-openssh-portable in FreeBSD ports and NetBSD pkgsrc, would be really neat ***

BSDMag's April 2014 issue is out

• The free monthly BSD magazine has got a new issue available for download
• This time the articles include: pascal on BSD, an introduction to revision control systems and configuration management, deploying NetBSD on AWS EC2, more GIMP tutorials, an AsiaBSDCon 2014 report and a piece about how easily credit cards are stolen online
• Anyone can contribute to the magazine, just send the editors an email about what you want to write
• No Linux articles this time around, good ***

Interview - David Chisnall - theraven@freebsd.org

The LLVM/Clang switch, FreeBSD's core team, various topics

Tutorial

RAID in FreeBSD and OpenBSD

News Roundup

BSDTalk episode 240

• Our buddy Will Backman has uploaded a new episode of BSDTalk, this time with our other buddy GNN as the guest - mainly to talk about NTP and keeping reliable time
• Topics include the specific details of crystals used in watches and computers to keep time, how temperature affects the quality, different sources of inaccuracy, some general NTP information, why you might want extremely precise time, different time sources (GPS, satellite, etc), differences in stratum levels, the problem of packet delay and estimating the round trip time, some of the recent NTP amplification attacks, the downsides to using UDP instead of TCP and... much more
• GNN also talks a little about the Precision Time Protocol and how it's different than NTP
• Two people we've interviewed talking to each other, awesome
• If you're interested in NTP, be sure to see our tutorial too ***

m2k14 trip reports

• We've got a few more reports from the recent OpenBSD hackathon in Morocco
• The first one is from Antoine Jacoutot (who is a key GNOME porter and gave us the screenshots for the OpenBSD desktop tutorial)
• "Since I always fail at actually doing whatever I have planned for a hackathon, this time I decided to come to m2k14 unprepared about what I was going to do"
• He got lots of work done with ports and pushing GNOME-related patches back up to the main project, then worked on fixing ports' compatibility with LibreSSL
• Speaking of LibreSSL, there's an article all would-be portable version writers should probably read and take into consideration
• Jasper Adriaanse also writes about what he got done over there
• He cleaned up and fixed the puppet port to work better with OpenBSD ***

Why you should use FreeBSD on your cloud VPS

• Here we have a blog post from Atlantic, a VPS and hosting provider, about 10 reasons for using FreeBSD
• Starts off with a little bit of BSD history for those who are unfamiliar with it and only know Linux and Windows
• The 10 reasons are: community, stability, collaboration, ease of use, ports, security, ZFS, GEOM, sound and having lots of options
• The post goes into detail about each of them and why FreeBSD makes a great choice for a VPS OS ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• Big changes coming in the way PCBSD manages software
• The PBI system, AppCafe and related tools are all going to use pkgng now
• The AppCafe will no longer be limited to PBIs, so much more software will be easily available from the ports tree
• New rating system coming soon and much more ***

Feedback/Questions

• Martin writes in
• John writes in
• Alex writes in
• Goetz writes in
• Jarrad writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD foundation's 2013 fundraising results

• The FreeBSD foundation finally counted all the money they made in 2013
• $768,562 from 1659 donors
• Nice little blog post from the team with a giant beastie picture
• "We have already started our 2014 fundraising efforts. As of the end of January we are just under $40,000. Our goal is to raise $1,000,000. We are currently finalizing our 2014 budget. We plan to publish both our 2013 financial report and our 2014 budget soon."
• A special thanks to all the BSD Now listeners that contributed, the foundation was really glad that we sent some people their way (and they mentioned us on Facebook) ***

OpenSSH 6.5 released

• We mentioned the CFT last week, and it's finally here!
• New key exchange using elliptic-curve Diffie Hellman in Daniel Bernstein's Curve25519 (now the default when both clients support it)
• Ed25519 public keys are now available for host keys and user keys, considered more secure than DSA and ECDSA
• Funny side effect: if you ONLY enable ed25519 host keys, all the compromised Linux boxes can't even attempt to login lol~
• New bcrypt private key type, 500,000,000 times harder to brute force
• Chacha20-poly1305 transport cipher that builds an encrypted and authenticated stream in one
• Portable version already in FreeBSD -CURRENT, and ports
• Lots more bugfixes and features, see the full release note or our interview with Damien
• Work has already started on 6.6, which can be used without OpenSSL! ***

Crazed Ferrets in a Berkeley Shower

• In 2000, MWL wrote an essay for linux.com about why he uses the BSD license: "It’s actually stood up fairly well to the test of time, but it’s fourteen years old now."
• This is basically an updated version about why he uses the BSD license, in response to recent comments from Richard Stallman
• Very nice post that gives some history about Berkeley, the basics of the BSD-style licenses and their contrast to the GNU GPL
• Check out the full post if you're one of those people that gets into license arguments
• The takeaway is "BSD is about making the world a better place. For everyone." ***

OpenBSD on BeagleBone Black

• Beaglebone Blacks are cheap little ARM devices similar to a Raspberry Pi
• A blog post about installing OpenBSD on a BBB from.. our guest for today!
• He describes it as "everything I wish I knew before installing the newly renamed armv7 port on a BeagleBone Black"
• It goes through the whole process, details different storage options and some workarounds
• Could be a really fun weekend project if you're interested in small or embedded devices ***

Interview - Ted Unangst - tedu@openbsd.org / @tedunangst

OpenBSD's signify infrastructure, ZFS on OpenBSD

Tutorial

Running an NTP server

News Roundup

Getting started with FreeBSD

• A new video and blog series about starting out with FreeBSD
• The author has been a fan since the 90s and has installed it on every server he's worked with
• He mentioned some of the advantages of BSD over Linux and how to approach explaining them to new users
• The first video is the installation, then he goes on to packages and other topics - 4 videos so far ***

More OpenBSD hackathon reports

• As a followup to last week, this time Kenneth Westerback writes about his NZ hackathon experience
• He arrived with two goals: disklabel fixes for drives with 4k sectors and some dhclient work
• This summary goes into detail about all the stuff he got done there ***

X11 in a jail

• We've gotten at least one feedback email about running X in a jail Well.. with this commit, looks like now you can!
• A new tunable option will let jails access /dev/kmem and similar device nodes
• Along with a change to DRM, this allows full X11 in a jail
• Be sure to check out our jail tutorial and jailed VNC tutorial for ideas ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• 10.0 "Joule Edition" finally released!
• AMD graphics are now officially supported
• GNOME3, MATE and Cinnamon desktops are available
• Grub updates and fixes
• PCBSD also got a mention in eweek ***

Feedback/Questions

• Justin writes in
• Daniel writes in
• Martin writes in
• Alex writes in - unofficial FreeBSD RPI Images
• James writes in
• John writes in ***