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

Headlines

FreeBSD 13.1 Release is available

Unix command line conventions over time

News Roundup

Branching for NetBSD 10

Microbyhve

Own Your Calendar & Contacts With OpenBSD, Baïkal, and FOSS Android

Twenty years ago today, Jeff filed the PSARC case for the ZFS filesystem

Tarsnap

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Feedback/Questions

• Scott - FreeBSD and supercomputing
• Nick - Thanks and some shout outs

• 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 Qt WebEngine GPU Acceleration

FreeBSD has a handful of Qt WebEngine-based browsers. Falkon, and Otter-Browser, and qutebrowser and probably others, too. All of them can run into issues on FreeBSD with GPU-accelerated rendering not working. Let’s look at some of the workarounds.

NetBSD on the Nanopi Neo2

The NanoPi NEO2 from FriendlyARM has been serving me well since 2018, being my test machine for OpenBSD/arm64 related things.
As NetBSD/evbarm finally gained support for AArch64 in NetBSD 9.0, released back in February, I decided to give it a try on this device. The board only has 512MB of RAM, and this is where NetBSD really shines. Things have become a lot easier since jmcneill@ now provides bootable ARM images for a variety of devices, including the NanoPi NEO2.

I'm back into the grind of FreeBSD's wireless stack and 802.11ac

Yes, it's been a while since I posted here and yes, it's been a while since I was actively working on FreeBSD's wireless stack. Life's been .. well, life. I started the ath10k port in 2015. I wasn't expecting it to take 5 years, but here we are. My life has changed quite a lot since 2015 and a lot of the things I was doing in 2015 just stopped being fun for a while.
But the stars have aligned and it's fun again, so here I am.

News Roundup

Some thoughts on us overlooking Illumos's syseventadm

In a comment on my praise of ZFS on Linux's ZFS event daemon, Joshua M. Clulow noted that Illumos (and thus OmniOS) has an equivalent in syseventadm, which dates back to Solaris. I hadn't previously known about syseventadm, despite having run Solaris fileservers and OmniOS fileservers for the better part of a decade, and that gives me some tangled feelings.

When Unix learned to reboot

Recently, a friend asked me the history of halt, and when did we have to stop with the sync / sync / sync dance before running halt or reboot. The two are related, it turns out.

DragonFlyBSD Lands New EXT2/3/4 File-System Driver

While DragonFlyBSD has its own, original HAMMER2 file-system, for those needing to access data from EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 file-systems, there is a brand new "ext2fs" driver implementation for this BSD operating system.
DragonFlyBSD has long offered an EXT2 file-system driver (that also handles EXT3 and EXT4) while hitting their Git tree this week is a new version. The new sys/vfs/ext2fs driver, which will ultimately replace their existing sys/gnu/vfs/ext2fs driver is based on a port from FreeBSD code. As such, this driver is BSD licensed rather than GPL. But besides the more liberal license to jive with the BSD world, this new driver has various feature/functionality improvements over the prior version. However, there are some known bugs so for the time being both file-system drivers will co-exist.

Beastie Bits

• LibreOffice 7.0 call for testing
• More touchpad support

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

Casey - openbsd wirewall
Daryl - zfs
Raymond - hpe microserver

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

Headlines

EKCD - Encrypted Crash Dumps in FreeBSD

Some time ago, I was describing how to configure networking crash dumps. In that post, I mentioned that there is also the possibility to encrypt crash dumps. Today we will look into this functionality. Initially, it was implemented during Google Summer of Code 2013 by my friend Konrad Witaszczyk, who made it available in FreeBSD 12. If you can understand Polish, you can also look into his presentation on BSD-PL on which he gave a comprehensive review of all kernel crash dumps features.

The main issue with crash dumps is that they may include sensitive information available in memory during a crash. They will contain all the data from the kernel and the userland, like passwords, private keys, etc. While dumping them, they are written to unencrypted storage, so if somebody took out the hard drive, they could access sensitive data. If you are sending a crash dump through the network, it may be captured by third parties. Locally the data are written directly to a dump device, skipping the GEOM subsystem. The purpose of that is to allow a kernel to write a crash dump even in case a panic occurs in the GEOM subsystem. It means that a crash dump cannot be automatically encrypted with GELI.

Time on Unix

Time, a word that is entangled in everything in our lives, something we’re intimately familiar with. Keeping track of it is important for many activities we do.

Over millennia we’ve developed different ways to calculate it. Most prominently, we’ve relied on the position the sun appears to be at in the sky, what is called apparent solar time.

We’ve decided to split it as seasons pass, counting one full cycle of the 4 seasons as a year, a full rotation around the sun. We’ve also divided the passing of light to the lack thereof as days, a rotation of the earth on itself. Moving on to more precise clock divisions such as seconds, minutes, and hours, units that meant different things at different points in history. Ultimately, as travel got faster, the different ways of counting time that evolved in multiple places had to converge. People had to agree on what it all meant.

See the article for more

News Roundup

Improve ZVOL sync write performance by using a taskq

A central log host with syslog-ng on FreeBSD - Part 1

syslog-ng is the Swiss army knife of log management. You can collect logs from any source, process them in real time and deliver them to wide range of destinations. It allows you to flexibly collect, parse, classify, rewrite and correlate logs from across your infrastructure. This is why syslog-ng is the perfect solution for the central log host of my (mainly) FreeBSD based infrastructure.

HEADS UP: NetBSD Entropy Overhaul

This week I committed an overhaul of the kernel entropy system. Please let me know if you observe any snags! For the technical background, see the thread on tech-kern a few months ago: https://mail-index.NetBSD.org/tech-kern/2019/12/21/msg025876.html.

Setting Up NetBSD Kernel Dev Environment

I used T_PAGEFLT’s blog post as a reference for setting my NetBSD kernel development environment since his website is down I’m putting down the steps here so it would be helpful for starters.

Beastie Bits

• You can now use ccache to speed up dsynth even more.
• Improving libossaudio, and the future of OSS in NetBSD
• DragonFlyBSD DHCPCD Import dhcpcd-9.0.2 with the following changes
• Reminder: watch this space for upcoming FreeBSD Office Hours, next is May 13th at 2pm Eastern, 18:00 UTC

Feedback/Questions

• Ghislain - ZFS Question
• Jake - Paypal Donations
• Oswin - Hammer tutorial

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