NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

FreeBSD quarterly status report for Q4 2020

Block spammers/abusive IPs with Pf-badhost in OpenBSD. A 'must have' security tool!

Pf-badhost is a very practical, robust, stable and lightweight security script for network servers.
It's compatible with BSD based operating systems such as {Open,Free,Net,Dragonfly}BSD and MacOS. It prevents potentially-bad IP addresses that could possibly attack your servers (and waste your bandwidth and fill your logfiles), by blocking all those IPs contacting your server, and therefore it makes your server network/resources lighter and the logs of important services running on your server become simpler, more readable and efficient.

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News Roundup

Bastille Port Redirection and Persistence

Bastille supports redirecting (rdr) ports from the host system into target containers. This port redirection is commonly used when running Internet services such as web servers, dns servers, email and many others. Any service you want to make public outside of your cluster will likely require port redirection (with some exceptions, see below).

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FreeBSD Wall Display Computer

I've recently added a wall mounted 30" monitor for Grafana in my home. I can highly recommend doing the same, especially in a world where more work from home is becoming the norm.

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The etymology of command-line tools

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GhostBSD 21.01.15 Release Notes

I am happy to announce the availability of the new ISO 21.01.15. This new ISO comes with a clean-up of packages that include removing LibreOffice and Telegram from the default selection. We did this to bring the zfs RW live file systems to run without problem on 4GB of ram machine. We also removed the UFS full disk option from the installer. Users can still use custom partitions to setup UFS partition, but we discourage it. We also fixed the Next button's restriction in the custom partition related to some bug that people reported. We also fix the missing default locale setup and added the default setup for Linux Steam, not to forget this ISO includes kernel, userland and numerous application updates.

Beastie Bits

• Interview with Brian Kernighan *** ###Tarsnap

• This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.

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

  ---

NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

The Origin of the Shell

CTSS was developed during 1963 and 64. I was at MIT on the computer center staff at that time. After having written dozens of commands for CTSS, I reached the stage where I felt that commands should be usable as building blocks for writing more commands, just like subroutine libraries. Hence, I wrote "RUNCOM", a sort of shell driving the execution of command scripts, with argument substitution. The tool became instantly most popular, as it became possible to go home in the evening while leaving behind long runcoms executing overnight. It was quite neat for boring and repetitive tasks such as renaming, moving, updating, compiling, etc. whole directories of files for system and application maintenance and monitoring.

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Return to Plan 9

Plan 9 from Bell Labs has held the same charm after my last visit that took a few days. This time I'll keep this operating system in an emulator where I can explore into it when I am distracted.

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News Roundup

Why a new BSD?

This article is to explain some decisions and plans made by the ArisbluBSD team, why we are making our own thing, and what the plan is for the OS. We mainly want to talk about five things: desktop, package management, software availability, custom software, and the future of the OS. We mostly want to explain what the goal of the OS is, and how we plan to expand in the near future. Without further ado, let's explain ArisbluBSD's plan.

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OPNsense 20.7.5 released

We return briefly for a small patch set and plan to pin the 20.1 upgrade path to this particular version to avoid unnecessary stepping stones. We wish you all a healthy Friday. And of course: patch responsibly!

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Midnight BSD 2.0 Release Status

We identified some issues with the 2.0 ISOs slated for release with the ZFS bootloader not working.
Until this issue is resolved, we are unable to build release ISOs. We've left the old ones up as they work fine for anyone using UFS.

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HardenedBSD November 2020 Status Report

We're getting close to the end of November. My wife and I have plans this weekend, so I thought I'd take the time to write November's status report today.

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Beastie Bits

• [rga: ripgrep, but also search in PDFs, E-Books, Office documents, zip, tar.gz, etc.](https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2019/rga--ripgrep-for-zip-targz-docx-odt-epub-jpg/)
• [exa - A modern replacement for ls](https://the.exa.website/)
• [The myriad meanings of pwd in Unix systems](https://qmacro.org/2020/11/08/the-meaning-of-pwd-in-unix-systems/)

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

• Karl - Camera Help
• Alejandro - domain registrar
• Johnny - thoughts on 372 ***
• 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

3rd Quarter FreeBSD Report

The call for submissions for the 4th Quarter is out

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OpenZFS 2.0

This Monday, ZFS on Linux lead developer Brian Behlendorf published the OpenZFS 2.0.0 release to GitHub. Along with quite a lot of new features, the announcement brings an end to the former distinction between "ZFS on Linux" and ZFS elsewhere (for example, on FreeBSD). This move has been a long time coming—the FreeBSD community laid out its side of the roadmap two years ago—but this is the release that makes it official.

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News Roundup

Revision 367034

Various new check-hash checks have been added to the UFS filesystem
over various major releases. Superblock check hashes were added for
the 12 release and cylinder-group and inode check hashes will appear
in the 13 release.

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OpenSSL 3.0 /dev/crypto issues on FreeBSD

So, just learned that the OpenSSL devs decided to break /dev/crypto on FreeBSD.

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OS108-9.1 XFCE amd64 released

• OS108 is a fast, open and Secure Desktop Operating System built on top of NetBSD. > Installing OS108 to your hard drive is done by using the sysinst utility, the process is basically the same as installing NetBSD itself. Please refer to the NetBSD guide for installation details, http://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/part-install.html
• Installation Video ***

Beastie Bits

• OpenBGPD 6.8p1 portable: released Nov 5th, 2020
• IRC Awk Bot
• Docker on FreeBSD using bhyve and sshfs
• The UNIX Command Language (1976) ***

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

• santi - openrc
• trond - python2 and mailman

• 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

Adventures in Freebernetes: bhyve My Guest

Part 2 of experiments in FreeBSD and Kubernetes: Creating your first guest

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Tracing Kernel Functions: FBT stack() and arg

In my previous post I described how FBT intercepts function calls and vectors them into the DTrace framework. That laid the foundation for what I want to discuss in this post: the implementation of the stack() action and built-in arg variables. These features rely on the precise layout of the stack, the details of which I touched on previously. In this post I hope to illuminate those details a bit more with the help of some visuals, and then guide you through the implementation of these two DTrace features as they relate to the FBT provider.

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News Roundup

Dummynet: The Better Way of Building FreeBSD Networks

Dummynet is the FreeBSD traffic shaper, packet scheduler, and network emulator. Dummynet allows you to emulate a whole set of network environments in a straight-forward way. It has the ability to model delay, packet loss, and can act as a traffic shaper and policer. Dummynet is roughly equivalent to netem in Linux, but we have found that dummynet is easier to integrate and provides much more consistent results.

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New beginnings: CDBUG virtual meetings

I had overwhelmingly positive responses from the broader *BSD community about restarting CDBUG meetings as virtual, at least for now. Hopefully this works well and even when we're back to in-person meetings we can still find a way to bring in virtual attendees.

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LibreSSL update in DragonFly

DragonFly has a new version of libressl, noting cause it has a newer TLS1.3 implementation – something that may be necessary for you.

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Signal-cli with scli on FreeBSD

So couple of days ago I migrated from macOS on Macbook Pro to FreeBSD on ThinkPad T480s.

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Beastie Bits

• Firefox is not paxctl safe for NetBSD
• FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE on Microsoft Azure Marketplace

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

• carlos - BSD Now around the world
• paulo - freebsd on a Bananapi
  • paulo - followup

• 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

Wayland on BSD

After I posted about the new default window manager in NetBSD I got a few questions, including "when is NetBSD switching from X11 to Wayland?", Wayland being X11's "new" rival. In this blog post, hopefully I can explain why we aren't yet!

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My BSD sucks less than yours

This paper will look at some of the differences between the FreeBSD and OpenBSD operating systems. It is not intended to be solely technical but will also show the different "visions" and design decisions that rule the way things are implemented. It is expected to be a subjective view from two BSD developers and does not pretend to represent these projects in any way.

Video

• EuroBSDCon 2017 Part 1
• EuroBSDCon 2017 Part 2

News Roundup

Even on SSDs, ongoing activity can slow down ZFS scrubs drastically

Back in the days of our OmniOS fileservers, which used HDs (spinning rust) across iSCSI, we wound up changing kernel tunables to speed up ZFS scrubs and saw a significant improvement. When we migrated to our current Linux fileservers with SSDs, I didn't bother including these tunables (or the Linux equivalent), because I expected that SSDs were fast enough that it didn't matter. Indeed, our SSD pools generally scrub like lightning.

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OpenBSD on the Desktop (Part I)

Let's install OpenBSD on a Lenovo Thinkpad X270. I used this computer for my computer science studies. It has both Arch Linux and Windows 10 installed as dual boot. Now that I'm no longer required to run Windows, I can ditch the dual boot and install an operating system of my choice.

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A simple shell status bar for OpenBSD and cwm(1)

These days, I try to use simple and stock software as much as possible on my OpenBSD laptop. I’ve been playing with cwm(1) for weeks and I was missing a status bar. After trying things like Tint2, Polybar etc, I discovered @gonzalo’s termbar. Thanks a lot!
As I love scripting, I decided to build my own.

---

Beastie Bits

DragonFly v5.8.3 released to address to issues
OpenSSH 8.4 released

---

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

• Dane - FreeBSD vs Linux in Microservices and Containters
• Mason - questions.md
• Michael - Tmux License.md

• 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

A 35 Year Old Bug in Patch

Larry Wall posted patch 1.3 to mod.sources on May 8, 1985. A number of versions followed over the years. It's been a faithful alley for a long, long time. I've never had a problem with patch until I embarked on the 2.11BSD restoration project. In going over the logs very carefully, I've discovered a bug that bites this effort twice. It's quite interesting to use 27 year old patches to find this bug while restoring a 29 year old OS...

Sandbox for FreeBSD

A sandbox is a software which artificially limits access to the specific resources on the target according to the assigned policy. The sandbox installs hooks to the kernel syscalls and other sub-systems in order to interrupt the events triggered by the application. From the application point of view, application working as usual, but when it wants to access, for instance, /dev/kmem the sandbox software decides against the assigned sandbox scheme whether to grant or deny access.
In our case, the sandbox is a kernel module which uses MAC (Mandatory Access Control) Framework developed by the TrustedBSD team. All necessary hooks were introduced to the FreeBSD kernel.

• Source Code
• Documentation

News Roundup

Changing from one dataset to another within a jail

ZFS has a the ability to share itself within a jail. That gives the jail some autonomy, and I like that.
I’ve written briefly about that, specifically for iocage. More recently, I started using a zfs snapshot for caching clearing.
The purpose of this post is to document the existing configuration of the production FreshPorts webserver and outline the plan on how to modify it for more zfs-snapshot-based cache clearing.

You don’t need tmux or screen for ZFS

Back in January I mentioned how to add redundancy to a ZFS pool by adding a mirrored drive. Someone with a private account on Twitter asked me why FreeBSD—and NetBSD!—doesn’t ship with a tmux or screen equivilent in base in order to daemonise the process and let them run in the background.
ZFS already does this for its internal commands.

HardenedBSD August 2020 Status Report and Call for Donations

This last month has largely been a quiet one. I've restarted work on porting five-year-old work from the Code Pointer Integrity (CPI) project into HardenedBSD. Chiefly, I've started forward-porting the libc and rtld bits from the CPI project and now need to look at llvm compiler/linker enhancements. We need to be able to apply SafeStack to shared objects, not just application binaries. This forward-porting work I'm doing is to support that effort.
The infrastructure has settled and is now churning normally and happily. We're still working out bandwidth issues. We hope to have a new fiber line ran by the end of September.
As part of this status report, I'm issuing a formal call for donations. I'm aiming for $4,000.00 USD for a newer self-hosted Gitea server. I hope to purchase the new server before the end of 2020.

Important parts of Unix's history happened before readline support was common

Unix and things that run on Unix have been around for a long time now. In particular, GNU Readline was first released in 1989 (as was Bash), which is long enough ago for it (or lookalikes) to become pretty much pervasive, especially in Unix shells. Today it's easy to think of readline support as something that's always been there. But of course this isn't the case. Unix in its modern form dates from V7 in 1979 and 4.2 BSD in 1983, so a lot of Unix was developed before readline and was to some degree shaped by the lack of it.

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

• Mason - mailserver
• casey - freebsd on decline
• denis - postgres ***
• 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

OpenZFS with ZSTD land in FreeBSD 13

• ZStandard Compression for OpenZFS > The primary benefit is maintaining a completely shared code base with the community allowing FreeBSD to receive new features sooner and with less effort. > I would advise against doing 'zpool upgrade' or creating indispensable pools using new features until this change has had a month+ to soak.
• Rebasing FreeBSD’s OpenZFS on the new upstream was sponsored by iXsystems
• The competition of ZSTD support for OpenZFS was sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation ***

LibreSSL documentation status update

More than six years ago, LibreSSL was forked from OpenSSL, and almost two years ago, i explained the status of LibreSSL documentation during EuroBSDCon 2018 in Bucuresti. So it seems providing an update might be in order.
Note that this is not an update regarding LibreSSL status in general because i'm not the right person to talk about the big picture of working on the LibreSSL code, my work has been quite focussed on documentation. All the same, it is fair to say that even though the number of developers working on it is somewhat limited, the LibreSSL project is quite alive, typically having a release every few months. Progress continues being made with respect to porting and adding new functionality (for example regarding TLSv1.3, CMS, RSA-PSS, RSA-OAEP, GOST, SM3, SM4, XChaCha20 during the last two years), OpenSSL compatibility improvements (including providing additional OpenSSL-1.1 APIs), and lots of bug fixes and code cleanup.

FreeBSD on SPARC64 (is dead)

’m coming pretty late to the party, because SPARC64 support in FreeBSD is apparently doomed: After the POWER platform made the switch to a LLVM/Clang-based toolchain, SPARC64 is one of the last ones that still uses the ancient GCC 4.2-based toolchain that the project wants to finally get rid off (it has already happened as I was writing this – looks like the firm plan was not so firm after all, since they killed it off early). And compared to the other platforms it has seen not too much love in recent times… SPARC64 being a great platform, I’d be quite sad to see it go. But before that happens let’s see what the current status is and what would need to be done if it were to survive, shall we?

News Roundup

Bringing zpool checkpoints to a FreeBSD bootloader

Almost two years ago I wrote a blog post about checkpoints in ZFS. I didn’t hide that I was a big fan of them. That said, after those two years, I still feel that there are underappreciated features in the ZFS world, so I decided to do something about that.
Currently, one of the best practices for upgrading your operating system is to use boot environments. They are a great feature for managing multiple kernels and userlands. They are based on juggling which ZFS datasets are mounted. Each dataset has its own version of the system. Unfortunately, boot environments have their limitations. If we, for example, upgrade our ZFS pool, we may not be able to use older versions of the system anymore.
The big advantage of boot environments is that they have very good tools. Two main tools are beadm (which was created by vermaden) and bectl (which currently is in the FreeBSD base system). These tools allow us to create and manage boot environments.

Beastie Bits

• The First Unix Port
• TLS Mastery updates, August 2020
• What is the Oldest BSD Distribution still around today

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

• ben - zfs send questions
• lars - zfs pool question
• neutron - bectl vs beadm

• 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

FreeBSD USB Audio

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

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Kyua: An introduction for NetBSD users

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

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News Roundup

Keeping backup ZFS on Linux kernel modules around

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

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

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

FreeBSD Laptop Find Out Battery Life Status Command

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

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Beastie Bits

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

Tarsnap

• This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.

Feedback/Questions

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

Headlines

Rethinking OpenBSD Security

OpenBSD aims to be a secure operating system. In the past few months there were quite a few security errata, however. That’s not too unusual, but some of the recent ones were a bit special. One might even say bad. The OpenBSD approach to security has a few aspects, two of which might be avoiding errors and minimizing the risk of mistakes. Other people have other ideas about how to build secure systems. I think it’s worth examining whether the OpenBSD approach works, or if this is evidence that it’s doomed to failure.
I picked a few errata, not all of them, that were interesting and happened to suit my narrative.

FreeBSD 2020 Q1 Quarterly report

Welcome, to the quarterly reports, of the future! Well, at least the first quarterly report from 2020. The new timeline, mentioned in the last few reports, still holds, which brings us to this report, which covers the period of January 2020 - March 2020.

News Roundup

The Notion of Progress and User Interfaces

One trait of modern Western culture is the notion of progress. A view claiming, at large, everything is getting better and better.

How should we think about progress? Both in general and regarding technology?

Thomas E. Dickey on NetBSD curses

I was recently pointed at a web page on Thomas E. Dickeys site talking about NetBSD curses. It seems initially that the page was intended to be a pointer to some differences between ncurses and NetBSD curses and does appear to start off in this vein but it seems that the author has lost the plot as the document evolved and the tail end of it seems to be devolving into some sort of slanging match. I don't want to go through Mr. Dickey's document point by point, that would be tedious but I would like to pick out some of the things that I believe to be the most egregious. Please note that even though I am a NetBSD developer, the opinions below are my own and not the NetBSD projects.

Making Unix a little more Plan9-like

I’m not really interested in defending anything. I tried out plan9port and liked it, but I have to live in Unix land. Here’s how I set that up.

A Warning

The suckless community, and some of the plan9 communities, are dominated by jackasses. I hope that’s strong enough wording to impress the severity. Don’t go into IRC for help. Stay off the suckless email list. The software is great, the people who write it are well-spoken and well-reasoned, but for some reason the fandom is horrible to everyone.

Not-actually Linux distro review: FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE

This month's Linux distro review isn't of a Linux distribution at all—instead, we're taking a look at FreeBSD, the original gangster of free Unix-like operating systems.

The first FreeBSD release was in 1993, but the operating system's roots go further back—considerably further back. FreeBSD started out in 1992 as a patch-release of Bill and Lynne Jolitz's 386BSD—but 386BSD itself came from the original Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). BSD itself goes back to 1977—for reference, Linus Torvalds was only seven years old then.

Before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge something up front—our distro reviews include the desktop experience, and that is very much not FreeBSD's strength. FreeBSD is far, far better suited to running as a headless server than as a desktop! We're going to get a full desktop running on it anyway, because according to Lee Hutchinson, I hate myself—and also because we can't imagine readers wouldn't care about it.

FreeBSD does not provide a good desktop experience, to say the least. But if you're hankering for a BSD-based desktop, don't worry—we're already planning a followup review of GhostBSD, a desktop-focused BSD distribution.

Beastie Bits

• Wifi renewal restarted
• HAMMER2 and a quick start for DragonFly
• Engineering NetBSD 9.0
• Antivirus Protection using OPNsense Plugins
• BSDCan Home Lab Panel recording session: May 5th at 18:00 UTC

BSDNow is going Independent

• After being part of Jupiter Broadcasting since we started back in 2013, BSDNow is moving to become independent. We extend a very large thank you to Jupiter Broadcasting and Linux Academy for hosting us for so many years, and allowing us to bring you over 100 episodes without advertisements. LinuxAcademy is now under new leadership, and we understand that cutbacks needed to be made, and that BSD is not their core product. That does not mean your favourite BSD podcast is going away, we will continue and we expect things will not look much different. What does this mean for you, the listener? Not much will change, just make sure your subscription is via the RSS feed at BSDNow.tv rather than one of the Jupiter Broadcasting feeds. We will update you with more news as things settle out.

Feedback/Questions

• Jordyn - ZFS Pool Problem

  • debug - https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/raw/master/episodes/347/feedback/dbg.txt

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

Headlines

OpenBSD has to be a BSD Unix and you couldn't duplicate it with Linux

OpenBSD has a well deserved reputation for putting security and a clean system (for code, documentation, and so on) first, and everything else second. OpenBSD is of course based on BSD (it's right there in the name) and descends from FreeBSD NetBSD (you can read the history here). But one of the questions you could ask about it is whether it had to be that way, and in particular if you could build something like OpenBSD on top of Linux. I believe that the answer is no.

Linux and the *BSDs have a significantly different model of what they are. BSDs have a 'base system' that provides an integrated and fully operational core Unix, covering the kernel, C library and compiler, and the normal Unix user level programs, all maintained and distributed by the particular BSD. Linux is not a single unit this way, and instead all of the component parts are maintained separately and assembled in various ways by various Linux distributions. Both approaches have their advantages, but one big one for the BSD approach is that it enables global changes.

Making global changes is an important part of what makes OpenBSD's approach to improving security, code maintenance, and so on work. Because it directly maintains everything as a unit, OpenBSD is in a position to introduce new C library or kernel APIs (or change them) and then immediately update all sorts of things in user level programs to use the new API. This takes a certain amount of work, of course, but it's possible to do it at all. And because OpenBSD can do this sort of ambitious global change, it does.

This goes further than just the ability to make global changes, because in theory you can patch in global changes on top of a bunch of separate upstream projects. Because OpenBSD is in control of its entire base system, it's not forced to try to reconcile different development priorities or integrate clashing changes. OpenBSD can decide (and has) that only certain sorts of changes will be accepted into its system at all, no matter what people want. If there are features or entire programs that don't fit into what OpenBSD will accept, they just lose out.

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report 2019Q4

Here is the last quarterly status report for 2019. As you might remember from last report, we changed our timeline: now we collect reports the last month of each quarter and we edit and publish the full document the next month. Thus, we cover here the period October 2019 - December 2019.

If you thought that the FreeBSD community was less active in the Christmas' quarter you will be glad to be proven wrong: a quick glance at the summary will be sufficient to see that much work has been done in the last months.

Have a nice read!

News Roundup

OPNsense 19.7.9 released

As 20.1 nears we will be making adjustments to the scope of the release with an announcement following shortly.

For now, this update brings you a GeoIP database configuration page for aliases which is now required due to upstream database policy changes and a number of prominent third-party software updates we are happy to see included.

Archives are important to retain and pass on knowledge

Archives are important. When they are public and available for searching, it retains and passes on knowledge. It saves vast amounts of time.

HardenedBSD Tor Onion Service v3 Nodes

I've been working today on deploying Tor Onion Service v3 nodes across our build infrastructure. I'm happy to announce that the public portion of this is now completed. Below you will find various onion service hostnames and their match to our infrastructure.

• hardenedbsd.org: lkiw4tmbudbr43hbyhm636sarn73vuow77czzohdbqdpjuq3vdzvenyd.onion
• ci-01.nyi.hardenedbsd.org: qspcqclhifj3tcpojsbwoxgwanlo2wakti2ia4wozxjcldkxmw2yj3yd.onion
• ci-03.md.hardenedbsd.org: eqvnohly4tjrkpwatdhgptftabpesofirnhz5kq7jzn4zd6ernpvnpqd.onion
• ci-04.md.hardenedbsd.org: rfqabq2w65nhdkukeqwf27r7h5xfh53h3uns6n74feeyl7s5fbjxczqd.onion
• git-01.md.hardenedbsd.org: dacxzjk3kq5mmepbdd3ai2ifynlzxsnpl2cnkfhridqfywihrfftapid.onion

Beastie Bits

• The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (MIT Course)
• An old Unix Ad
• OpenBSD syscall call-from verification
• OpenBSD/arm64 on Pinebook
• Reminder: First Southern Ontario BSD user group meeting, February 11th (this coming Tuesday!) 18:30 at Boston Pizza on Upper James st, Hamilton.
• NYCBUG: March meeting will feature Dr. Paul Vixie and his new talk “Operating Systems as Dumb Pipes”
• 8th Meetup of the Stockholm BUG: March 3 at 18:00
• Polish BSD User Group meets on Feb 11, 2020 at 18:15

Feedback/Questions

• Sean - ZFS and Creation Dates
• Christopher - Help on ZFS Disaster Recovery
• Mike - Encrypted ZFS Send

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