BSD Now - Episodes Tagged with “Rump Kernels”

64: Rump Kernels Revisited

JT Pennington — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 08:00:00 -0500

This time on the show, we'll be talking with Justin Cormack about NetBSD rump kernels. We'll learn how to run them on other operating systems, what's planned for the future and a lot more. As always, answers to viewer-submitted questions and all the news for the week, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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EuroBSDCon 2014 talks and tutorials

The 2014 EuroBSDCon videos have been online for over a month, but unannounced - keep in mind these links may be temporary (but we'll mention their new location in a future show and fix the show notes if that's the case)
Arun Thomas, BSD ARM Kernel Internals
Ted Unangst, Developing Software in a Hostile Environment
Martin Pieuchot, Taming OpenBSD Network Stack Dragons
Henning Brauer, OpenBGPD turns 10 years
Claudio Jeker, vscsi and iscsid iSCSI initiator the OpenBSD way
Paul Irofti, Making OpenBSD Useful on the Octeon Network Gear
Baptiste Daroussin, Cross Building the FreeBSD ports tree
Boris Astardzhiev, Smartcom’s control plane software, a customized version of FreeBSD
Michał Dubiel, OpenStack and OpenContrail for FreeBSD platform
Martin Husemann & Joerg Sonnenberger, Tool-chaining the Hydra, the ongoing quest for modern toolchains in NetBSD
Taylor R Campbell, The entropic principle: /dev/u?random and NetBSD
Dag-Erling Smørgrav, Securing sensitive & restricted data
Peter Hansteen, Building The Network You Need With PF
Stefan Sperling, Subversion for FreeBSD developers
Peter Hansteen, Transition to OpenBSD 5.6
Ingo Schwarze, Let’s make manuals more useful
Francois Tigeot, Improving DragonFly’s performance with PostgreSQL
Justin Cormack, Running Applications on the NetBSD Rump Kernel
Pierre Pronchery, EdgeBSD, a year later
Peter Hessler, Using routing domains or tables in a production network
Sean Bruno, QEMU user mode on FreeBSD
Kristaps Dzonsons, Bugs Ex Ante
Yann Sionneau, Porting NetBSD to the LatticeMico32 open source CPU
Alexander Nasonov, JIT Code Generator for NetBSD
Masao Uebayashi, Porting Valgrind to NetBSD and OpenBSD
Marc Espie, parallel make, working with legacy code
Francois Tigeot, Porting the drm-kms graphic drivers to DragonFly
The following talks (from the Vitosha track room) are all currently missing:
Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD, Looking forward to another 10 years (but we have another recording)
Theo de Raadt, Randomness, how arc4random has grown since 1998 (but we have another recording)
Kris Moore, Snapshots, Replication, and Boot-Environments
Kirk McKusick, An Introduction to the Implementation of ZFS
John-Mark Gurney, Optimizing GELI Performance
Emmanuel Dreyfus, FUSE and beyond, bridging filesystems
Lourival Vieira Neto, NPF scripting with Lua
Andy Tanenbaum, A Reimplementation of NetBSD Based on a Microkernel
Stefano Garzarella, Software segmentation offloading for FreeBSD
Ted Unangst, LibreSSL
Shawn Webb, Introducing ASLR In FreeBSD
Ed Maste, The LLDB Debugger in FreeBSD
Philip Guenther, Secure lazy binding ***

OpenBSD adopts SipHash

Even more DJB crypto somehow finds its way into OpenBSD's base system
This time it's SipHash, a family of pseudorandom functions that's resistant to hash bucket flooding attacks while still providing good performance
After an initial import and some clever early usage, a few developers agreed that it would be better to use it in a lot more places
It will now be used in the filesystem, and the plan is to utilize it to protect all kernel hash functions
Some other places that Bernstein's work can be found in OpenBSD include the ChaCha20-Poly1305 authenticated stream cipher and Curve25519 KEX used in SSH, ChaCha20 used in the RNG, and Ed25519 keys used in signify and SSH ***

FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE

FreeBSD's release engineering team likes to troll us by uploading new versions just a few hours after we finish recording an episode
The first maintenance update for the 10.x branch is out, improving upon a lot of things found in 10.0-RELEASE
The vt driver was merged from -CURRENT and can now be enabled with a loader.conf switch (and can even be used on a PlayStation 3)
Bhyve has gotten quite a lot of fixes and improvements from its initial debut in 10.0, including boot support for ZFS
Lots of new ARM hardware is supported now, including SMP support for most of them
A new kernel selection menu was added to the loader, so you can switch between newer and older kernels at boot time
10.1 is the first to support UEFI booting on amd64, which also has serial console support now
Lots of third party software (OpenSSH, OpenSSL, Unbound..) and drivers have gotten updates to newer versions
It's a worthy update from 10.0, or a good time to try the 10.x branch if you were avoiding the first .0 release, so grab an ISO or upgrade today
Check the detailed release notes for more information on all the changes
Also take a look at some of the known problems to see if you'll be affected by any of them
PC-BSD was also updated accordingly with some of their own unique features and changes ***

arc4random - Randomization for All Occasions

Theo de Raadt gave an updated version of his EuroBSDCon presentation at Hackfest 2014 in Quebec
The presentation is mainly about OpenBSD's arc4random function, and outlines the overall poor state of randomization in the 90s and how it has evolved in OpenBSD over time
It begins with some interesting history on OpenBSD and how it became a security-focused OS - in 1996, their syslogd got broken into and "suddenly we became interested in security"
The talk also touches on how low-level changes can shake up the software ecosystem and third party packages that everyone uses
There's some funny history on the name of the function (being called arc4random despite not using RC4 anymore) and an overall status update on various platforms' usage of it
Very detailed and informative presentation, and the slides can be found here
A great quote from the beginning: "We consider ourselves a community of (probably rather strange) people who work on software specifically for the purpose of trying to make it better. We take a 'whole-systems' approach: trying to change everything in the ecosystem that's under our control, trying to see if we can make it better. We gain a lot of strength by being able to throw backwards compatibility out the window. So that means that we're able to do research and the minute that we decide that something isn't right, we'll design an alternative for it and push it in. And if it ends up breaking everybody's machines from the previous stage to the next stage, that's fine because we'll end up in a happier place." ***

Interview - Justin Cormack - justin@netbsd.org / @justincormack

NetBSD on Xen, rump kernels, various topics

News Roundup

The FreeBSD foundation's biggest donation

The FreeBSD foundation has a new blog post about the largest donation they've ever gotten
From the CEO of WhatsApp comes a whopping one million dollars in a single donation
It also has some comments from the donor about why they use BSD and why it's important to give back
Be sure to donate to the foundation of whatever BSD you use when you can - every little bit helps, especially for OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonFly who don't have huge companies supporting them regularly like FreeBSD does ***

OpenZFS Dev Summit 2014 videos

Videos from the recent OpenZFS developer summit are being uploaded, with speakers from different represented platforms and companies
Matt Ahrens, opening keynote
Raphael Carvalho, Platform Overview: ZFS on OSv
Brian Behlendorf, Platform Overview: ZFS on Linux
Prakash Surya, Platform Overview: illumos
Xin Li, Platform Overview: FreeBSD
All platforms, Group Q&A Session
Dave Pacheco, Manta
Saso Kiselkov, Compression
George Wilson, Performance
Tim Feldman, Host-Aware SMR
Pavel Zakharov, Fast File Cloning
The audio is pretty poor on all of them unfortunately ***

BSDTalk 248

Our friend Will Backman is still busy getting BSD interviews as well
This time he sits down with Matthew Dillon, the lead developer of DragonFly BSD
We've never had Dillon on the show, so you'll definitely want to give this one a listen
They mainly discuss all the big changes coming in DragonFly's upcoming 4.0 release ***

MeetBSD 2014 videos

The presentations from this year's MeetBSD conference are starting to appear online as well
Kirk McKusick, A Narrative History of BSD
Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD: The Next 10 Years
Brendan Gregg, Performance Analysis
The slides can be found here ***

Feedback/Questions

Mailing List Gold

50: VPN, My Dear Watson

JT Pennington — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 08:00:00 -0400

It's our 50th episode, and we're going to show you how to protect your internet traffic with a BSD-based VPN. We'll also be talking to Robert Watson, of the FreeBSD core team, about security research, exploit mitigation and a whole lot more. The latest news and answers to all of your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

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MeetBSD 2014 is approaching

The MeetBSD conference is coming up, and will be held on November 1st and 2nd in San Jose, California
MeetBSD has an "unconference" format, which means there will be both planned talks and community events
All the extra details will be on their site soon
It also has hotels and various other bits of useful information - hopefully with more info on the talks to come
Of course, EuroBSDCon is coming up before then ***

First experiences with OpenBSD

A new blog post that leads off with "tired of the sluggishness of Windows on my laptop and interested in experimenting with a Unix-like that I haven't tried before"
The author read the famous "BSD for Linux users" series (that most of us have surely seen) and decided to give BSD a try
He details his different OS and distro history, concluding with how he "eventually became annoyed at the poor quality of Linux userland software"
From there, it talks about how he used the OpenBSD USB image and got a fully-working system
He especially liked the simplicity of OpenBSD's "hostname.if" system for network configuration
Finally, he gets Xorg working and imports all his usual configuration files - seems to be a happy new user! ***

NetBSD rump kernels on bare metal (and Kansai OSC report)

When you're developing a new OS or a very specialized custom solution, working drivers become one of the hardest things to get right
However, NetBSD's rump kernels - a very unique concept - make this process a lot easier
This blog post talks about the process of starting with just a rump kernel and expanding into an internet-ready system in just a week
Also have a look back at episode 8 for our interview about rump kernels and what exactly they do
While on the topic of NetBSD, there were also a couple of very detailed reports (with lots of pictures!) of the various NetBSD-themed booths at the 2014 Kansai Open Source Conference that we wanted to highlight ***

OpenSSL and LibreSSL updates

OpenSSL pushed out a few new versions, fixing multiple vulnerabilities (nine to be precise!)
Security concerns include leaking memory, possible denial of service, crashing clients, memory exhaustion, TLS downgrades and more
LibreSSL released a new version to address most of the vulnerabilities, but wasn't affected by some of them
Whichever version of whatever SSL you use, make sure it's patched for these issues
DragonFly and OpenBSD are patched as of the time of this recording but, even after a week, NetBSD and FreeBSD are not (outside of -CURRENT) ***

Interview - Robert Watson - rwatson@freebsd.org

FreeBSD architecture, security research techniques, exploit mitigation

Tutorial

Protecting traffic with a BSD-based VPN

News Roundup

A FreeBSD-based CGit server

If you use git (like a certain host of this show) then you've probably considered setting up your own server
This article takes you through the process of setting up a jailed git server, complete with a fancy web frontend
It even shows you how to set up multiple repos with key-based user separation and other cool things
The author of the post is also a listener of the show, thanks for sending it in! ***

Backup devices for small businesses

In this article, different methods of data storage and backup are compared
After weighing the various options, the author comes to an obvious conclusion: FreeNAS is the answer
He praises FreeNAS and the FreeNAS Mini for their tight integration, rock solid FreeBSD base and the great ZFS featureset that it offers
It also goes over some of the hardware specifics in the FreeNAS Mini ***

A new Xenocara interview

As a follow up to last week's OpenSMTPD interview, this Russian blog interviews Matthieu Herrb about Xenocara
If you're not familiar with Xenocara, it's OpenBSD's version of Xorg with some custom patches
In this interview, he discusses how large and complex the upstream X11 development is, how different components are worked on by different people, how they test code (including a new framework) and security auditing
Matthieu is both a developer of upstream Xorg and an OpenBSD developer, so it's natural for him to do a lot of the maintainership work there ***

Building a high performance FreeBSD samba server

If you've got to PXE boot several hundred Windows boxes to upgrade from XP to 7, what's the best solution?
FreeBSD, ZFS and Samba obviously!
The master image and related files clock in at over 20GB, and will be accessed at the same time by all of those clients
This article documents that process, highlighting some specific configuration tweaks to maximize performance (including NIC bonding)
It doesn't even require the newest or best hardware with the right changes, pretty cool ***

Feedback/Questions

30: Documentation is King

JT Pennington — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 08:00:00 -0400

Finally hit 30 episodes! Today we'll be chatting with Warren Block to discuss BSD documentation efforts and future plans. If you've ever wondered about the scary world of mailing lists, today's tutorial will show you the basics of how to get help and contribute back. There's lots to get to today, so sit back and enjoy some BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

OpenBSD on a Sun T5120

Our buddy Ted Unangst got himself a cool Sun box
Of course he had to write a post about installing and running OpenBSD on it
The post goes through some of the quirks and steps to go through in case you're interested in one of these fine SPARC machines
He's also got another post about OpenBSD on a Dell CS24-SC server ***

Bhyvecon 2014 videos are up

Like we mentioned last week, Bhyvecon was an almost-impromptu conference before AsiaBSDCon
The talks have apparently already been uploaded!
Subjects include Bhyve's past, present and future, OSv on Bhyve, a general introduction to the tool, migrating those last few pesky Linux boxes to virtualization
Lots more detail in the videos, so check 'em all out ***

Building a FreeBSD wireless access point

We've got a new blog post about creating a wireless access point with FreeBSD
After all the recent news of consumer routers being pwned like candy, it's time for people to start building BSD routers
The author goes through a lot of the process of getting one set up using good ol' FreeBSD
Using hostapd, he's able to share his wireless card in hostap mode and offer DHCP to all the clients
Plenty of config files and more messy details in the post ***

Switching from Synology to FreeNAS

The author has been considering getting a NAS for quite a while and documents his research
He was faced with the compromise of convenience vs. flexibility - prebuilt or DIY
After seeing the potential security issues with proprietary NAS devices, and dealing with frustration with trying to get bugs fixed, he makes the right choice
The post also goes into some detail about his setup, all the things he needed a NAS to do as well as all the advantages an open source solution would give ***

Interview - Warren Block - wblock@freebsd.org

FreeBSD's documentation project, igor, doceng

Tutorial

The world of BSD mailing lists

News Roundup

HAMMER2 work and notes

Matthew Dillon has posted some updated notes about the development of the new HAMMER version
The start of a cluster API was committed to the tree
There are also links to design document, a freemap design document, a changes list and a todo list ***

BSD Breaking Barriers

Our friend MWL gave a talk at NYCBSDCon about BSD "breaking barriers"
"What makes the BSD operating systems special? Why should you deploy your applications on BSD? Why does the BSD community keep growing, and why do Linux sites like DistroWatch say that BSD is where the interesting development work is happening? We'll cover the not-so-obvious reasons why BSD still stands tall after almost 40 years."
He also has another upcoming talk, (or "webcast") called "Beyond Security: Getting to Know OpenBSD's Real Purpose"
"OpenBSD is frequently billed as a high-security operating system. That's true, but security isn't the OpenBSD Project's main goal. This webcast will introduce systems administrators to OpenBSD, explain the project's mission, and discuss the features and benefits."
It's on May 27th and will hopefully be recorded ***

FreeBSD in a chroot

Finch, "FreeBSD running IN a CHroot," is a new project
It's a way to extend the functionality of restricted USB-based FreeBSD systems (FreeNAS, etc.)
All the details and some interesting use cases are on the github page
He really needs to change the project name though ***

PCBSD weekly digest

Lots of bugfixes for PCBSD coming down the tubes
LZ4 compression is now enabled by default on the whole pool
The latest 10-STABLE has been imported and builds are going
Also the latest GNOME and Cinnamon builds have been imported and much more ***

Feedback/Questions

Bostjan writes in (IRC suggests md5deep)
Don writes in
kaltheat writes in (We use R0DE Podcast microphones and Logitech C920 HD webcams)
Harri writes in ***