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Headlines

Backing out changes doesn.t always pinpoint the problem

• Peter Wemm brings us a fascinating look at debugging an issue which occurred on the FreeBSD build cluster recently.
• Bottom line? Backing out something isn.t necessarily the fix, rather it should be apart of the diagnostic process
• In this particular case, a change to some mmap() functionality ended up exposing a bug in the kernel.s page fault handler which existed since (wait for it.) 1997!
• As Peter mentions at the bottom of the Article, this bug had been showing up for years, but was sporadic and often written off as a networking hiccup. ***

BSD Router Project benchmarks new routing changes to FreeBSD

• A project branch of FreeBSD -CURRENT has been created with a number of optimizations to the routing code
• Alexander V. Chernikov (melifaro@).s routing branch
• The net result is an almost doubling of peak performance in packets per second
• Performance scales well with the number of NIC queues (2 queues is 88% faster than 1 queue, 3 is 270% faster). Unlike the previous code, when the number of queues hits 4, performance is down by only 10%, instead of being cut nearly in half
• Other Benchmark Results, and the tools to do your own tests ***

When is SSL not SSL?

• Our buddy Ted has a good write-up on a weird situation related to licensing of stunnel and LibreSSL
• The problem exists due to stunnel being released with a different license, that is technically incompatible with the GPL, as well as linking against non-OpenSSL versions.
• The author has also decided to create specific named exceptions when the *SSL lib is part of the base operating system, but does not personally consider LibreSSL as a valid linking target on its own
• Ted points out that the LibreSSL team considers LibreSSL == OpenSSL, so this may be a moot concern ***

Update on systembsd

• We.ve mentioned the GSoC project to create a SystemD shim in OpenBSD before. Now we have the slides from Ian Sutton talking about this project.
• As a refresher, this project is to take DBUS and create daemons emulating various systemd components, such as hostnamed, localed, timedated, and friends.
• Written from scratch in C, it was mainly created in the hopes of becoming a port, allowing Gnome and related tools to function on OpenBSD.
• This is a good read, especially for current or aspiring porters who want to bring over newer versions of applications which now depend upon SystemD. ***

Interview - Nigel Williams - [njwilliams@swin.edu.au](njwilliams@swin.edu.au)

Multipath TCP

News Roundup

OpenBSD UEFI boot loader

• We.ve mentioned the ongoing work to bring UEFI booting to OpenBSD and it looks like this has now landed in the tree
• The .fdisk. utility has also been updated with a new -b flag, when used with .-i. will create the special EFI system partition on amd64/i386 . (http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=144139348416071&w=2)
• Some twitter benchmarks ***

FreeBSD Journal, July/August issue

• The latest issue of the FreeBSD Journal has arrived
• As always, the Journal opens with a letter from the FreeBSD Foundation
• Feature Articles:
• Groupon's Deal on FreeBSD -- How to drive adoption of FreeBSD at your organization, and lessons learned in retraining Linux sysadmins
• FreeBSD: The Isilon Experience -- Mistakes not to make when basing a product on FreeBSD. TL;DR: track head
• Reflections on FreeBSD.org: Packages -- A status update on where we are with binary packages, what issues have been overcome, and which still remain
• Inside the Foundation -- An overview of some of the things you might not be aware that the FreeBSD Foundation is doing to support the project and attract the next generation of committers
• Includes a book review of .The Practise of System and Network Administration.
• As usual, various other reports are included: The Ports Report, SVN Update, A conference report, a report from the Essen hackathon, and the Event Calendar ***

Building ARMv6 packages on FreeBSD, the easy way

• Previously we have discussed how to build ARMv6 packages on FreeBSD
• We also interviewed Sean Bruno about his work in this area
• Thankfully, over time this process has been simplified, and no longer requires a lot of manual configuration, or fussing with the .image activator.
• Now, you can just build packages for your Raspberry Pi or similar device, just as simply as you would build for x86, it just takes longer to build. ***

New PC-BSD Release Schedule

• The PC-BSD Team has announce an updated release schedule for beyond 10.2
• This schedule follows more closely the FreeBSD schedules, with major releases only occurring when FreeBSD does the next point update, or major version bump.
• PC-BSD.s source tree has been split into master(current) and stable as well
• PRODUCTION / EDGE packages will be built from stable, with PRODUCTION updated monthly now. The -CURRENT monthly images will contain the master source builds. ***

Feedback/Questions

• Joris writes in
• Anonymous
• Darin ***

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Headlines

OpenBSD hypervisor coming soon

• Our buddy Mike Larkin never rests, and he posted some very tight-lipped console output on Twitter recently
• From what little he revealed at the time, it appeared to be a new hypervisor (that is, X86 hardware virtualization) running on OpenBSD -current, tentatively titled "vmm"
• Later on, he provided a much longer explanation on the mailing list, detailing a bit about what the overall plan for the code is
• Originally started around the time of the Australia hackathon, the work has since picked up more steam, and has gotten a funding boost from the OpenBSD foundation
• One thing to note: this isn't just a port of something like Xen or Bhyve; it's all-new code, and Mike explains why he chose to go that route
• He also answered some basic questions about the requirements, when it'll be available, what OSes it can run, what's left to do, how to get involved and so on ***

Why FreeBSD should not adopt launchd

• Last week we mentioned a talk Jordan Hubbard gave about integrating various parts of Mac OS X into FreeBSD
• One of the changes, perhaps the most controversial item on the list, was the adoption of launchd to replace the init system (replacing init systems seems to cause backlash, we've learned)
• In this article, the author talks about why he thinks this is a bad idea
• He doesn't oppose the integration into FreeBSD-derived projects, like FreeNAS and PC-BSD, only vanilla FreeBSD itself - this is also explained in more detail
• The post includes both high-level descriptions and low-level technical details, and provides an interesting outlook on the situation and possibilities
• Reddit had quite a bit to say about this one, some in agreement and some not ***

DragonFly graphics improvements

• The DragonFlyBSD guys are at it again, merging newer support and fixes into their i915 (Intel) graphics stack
• This latest update brings them in sync with Linux 3.17, and includes Haswell fixes, DisplayPort fixes, improvements for Broadwell and even Cherryview GPUs
• You should also see some power management improvements, longer battery life and various other bug fixes
• If you're running DragonFly, especially on a laptop, you'll want to get this stuff on your machine quick - big improvements all around ***

OpenBSD tames the userland

• Last week we mentioned OpenBSD's tame framework getting support for file whitelists, and said that the userland integration was next - well, now here we are
• Theo posted a mega diff of nearly 100 smaller diffs, adding tame support to many areas of the userland tools
• It's still a work-in-progress version; there's still more to be added (including the file path whitelist stuff)
• Some classic utilities are even being reworked to make taming them easier - the "w" command, for example
• The diff provides some good insight on exactly how to restrict different types of utilities, as well as how easy it is to actually do so (and en masse)
• More discussion can be found on HN, as one might expect
• If you're a software developer, and especially if your software is in ports already, consider adding some more fine-grained tame support in your next release ***

Interview - Scott Courtney - vbsdcon@verisign.com / @verisign

vBSDCon 2015

News Roundup

OPNsense, beyond the fork

• We first heard about OPNsense back in January, and they've since released nearly 40 versions, spanning over 5,000 commits
• This is their first big status update, covering some of the things that've happened since the project was born
• There's been a lot of community growth and participation, mass bug fixing, new features added, experimental builds with ASLR and much more - the report touches on a little of everything ***

LibreSSL nukes SSLv3

• With their latest release, LibreSSL began to turn off SSLv3 support, starting with the "openssl" command
• At the time, SSLv3 wasn't disabled entirely because of some things in the OpenBSD ports tree requiring it (apache being one odd example)
• They've now flipped the switch, and the process of complete removal has started
• From the Undeadly summary, "This is an important step for the security of the LibreSSL library and, by extension, the ports tree. It does, however, require lots of testing of the resulting packages, as some of the fallout may be at runtime (so not detected during the build). That is part of why this is committed at this point during the release cycle: it gives the community more time to test packages and report issues so that these can be fixed. When these fixes are then pushed upstream, the entire software ecosystem will benefit. In short: you know what to do!"
• With this change and a few more to follow shortly, Libre*SSL* won't actually support SSL anymore - time to rename it "LibreTLS" ***

FreeBSD MPTCP updated

• For anyone unaware, Multipath TCP is "an ongoing effort of the Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF) Multipath TCP working group, that aims at allowing a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection to use multiple paths to maximize resource usage and increase redundancy."
• There's been work out of an Australian university to add support for it to the FreeBSD kernel, and the patchset was recently updated
• Including in this latest version is an overview of the protocol, how to get it compiled in, current features and limitations and some info about the routing requirements
• Some big performance gains can be had with MPTCP, but only if both the client and server systems support it - getting it into the FreeBSD kernel would be a good start ***

UEFI and GPT in OpenBSD

• There hasn't been much fanfare about it yet, but some initial UEFI and GPT-related commits have been creeping into OpenBSD recently
• Some support for UEFI booting has landed in the kernel, and more bits are being slowly enabled after review
• This comes along with a number of other commits related to GPT, much of which is being refactored and slowly reintroduced
• Currently, you have to do some disklabel wizardry to bypass the MBR limit and access more than 2TB of space on a single drive, but it should "just work" with GPT (once everything's in)
• The UEFI bootloader support has been committed, so stay tuned for more updates as further progress is made ***

Feedback/Questions

• John writes in
• Mason writes in
• Earl writes in ***

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Interview - Bryan Cantrill - bryan@joyent.com / @bcantrill

BSD and Solaris history, illumos, dtrace, Joyent, pkgsrc, various topics (and rants)

Feedback/Questions

• Randy writes in
• Jared writes in
• Steve writes in ***