NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

The Open-Source Software bubble that is and the blogging bubble that was

Building Customized FreeBSD Images

News Roundup

Updating to Minecraft 1.17 in FreeBSD

Upgrading a FreeBSD 12.2 jail to FreeBSD 13 using mkjail

DragonFlyBSD 6.0 Is Performing Very Well Against Ubuntu Linux, FreeBSD 13.0

An OpenBSD Consumer Gateway Launch

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

• CY - bearssl
• Marc - that tarsnap ad
• nycbug

• 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

How to Upgrade OpenBSD and Build a Kernel

Let's see how to upgrade your OpenBSD system. Maybe you are doing this because the latest release just came out. If so, this is pretty simple: back up your data, boot from install media, and select "Upgrade" instead of "Install". But maybe the latest release has been out for a few months. Why would we go through the trouble of building and installing a new kernel or other core system components? Maybe some patches have been released to improve system security or stability. It is pretty easy to build and install a kernel on OpenBSD, easier and simpler in many ways than it is on Linux.

The History of man pages

Where do UNIX manpages come from? Who introduced the section-based layout of NAME, SYNOPSIS, and so on? And for manpage authors: where were those economical two- and three-letter instructions developed?

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VAX port needs help

The VAX is the oldest machine architecture still supported by NetBSD.
Unfortunately there is another challenge, totally outside of NetBSD, but affecting the VAX port big time: the compiler support for VAX is ... let's say sub-optimal. It is also risking to be dropped completely by gcc upstream.
Now here is where people can help: there is a bounty campaign to finance a gcc hacker to fix the hardest and most immediate issue with gcc for VAX. Without this being resolved, gcc will drop support for VAX in a near future version.

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My new FreeBSD Laptop: Dell Latitude 7390

As a FreeBSD developer, I make a point of using FreeBSD whenever I can — including on the desktop. I've been running FreeBSD on laptops since 2004; this hasn't always been easy, but over the years I've found that the situation has generally been improving. One of the things we still lack is adequate documentation, however — so I'm writing this to provide an example for users and also Google bait in case anyone runs into some of the problems I had to address.

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PFS tool changes in DragonFly

HAMMER2 just became a little more DWIM: the pfs-list and pfs-delete directives will now look across all mounted filesystems, not just the current directory’s mount path. pfs-delete won’t delete any filesystem name that appears in more than one place, though

• git: hammer2 - Enhance pfs-list and pfs-delete Enhance pfs-list to list PFSs available across all mounted hammer2 filesystems instead of just the current directory's mount. A specific mount may be specified via -s mountpt. Enhance pfs-delete to look for the PFS name across all mounted hammer2 filesystems instead of just the current directory's mount. As a safety, pfs-delete will refuse to delete PFS names which are duplicated across multiple mounts. A specific mount may be specified via -s mountpt.

Beastie Bits

• BastilleBSD Templates
• Tianocore update
• Reminder: FreeBSD Office Hours on June 24, 2020 *** ###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

• Niclas - Regarding the Lenovo E595 user from Episode 340
• Erik - What happened with the video
• Igor - Boot Environments ***
• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv ***

Headlines

Upgrading FreeBSD from 11.3 to 12.1

Now here’s something more like what I was originally expecting the content on this blog to look like. I’m in the process of moving all of our FreeBSD servers (about 30 in total) from 11.3 to 12.1. We have our own local build of the OS, and until “packaged base” gets to a state where it’s reliably usable, we’re stuck doing upgrades the old-fashioned way. I created a set of notes for myself while cranking through these upgrades and I wanted to share them since they are not really work-specific and this process isn’t very well documented for people who haven’t been doing this sort of upgrade process for 25 years.

Our source and object trees are read-only exported from the build server over NFS, which causes things to be slow. /etc/make.conf and /etc/src.conf are symbolic links on all of our servers to the master copies in /usr/src so that make installworld can find the configuration parameters the system was built with.

Switching Distrowatch over to BSD

This may be a little off-topic for this board (forgive me if it is, please). However, I wanted to say that I'm one of the people who works on DistroWatch (distrowatch.com) and this past week we had to deal with a server facing hardware failure. We had a discussion about whether to continue running Debian or switch to something else.

The primary "something else" option turned out to be FreeBSD and it is what we eventually went with. It took a while to convert everything over from working with Debian GNU/Linux to FreeBSD 12 (some script incompatibilities, different paths, some changes to web server configuration, networking IPv6 troubles). But in the end we ended up with a good, FreeBSD-based experience.

Since the transition was successful, though certainly not seamless, I thought people might want to do a Q&A on the migration process. Especially for those thinking of making the same switch.

News Roundup

iked(8) automatic IPv6 blocking removed

iked(8) no longer automatically blocks unencrypted outbound IPv6 packets. This feature was intended to avoid accidental leakage, but in practice was found to mostly be a cause of misconfiguration.

If you previously used iked(8)'s -6 flag to disable this feature, it is no longer needed and should be removed from /etc/rc.conf.local if used.

Linus says dont run ZFS

“Don’t use ZFS. It’s that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me.”

This is what Linus Torvalds said in a mailing list to once again express his disliking for ZFS filesystem specially over its licensing.

To avoid unnecessary confusion, this is more intended for Linux distributions, kernel developers and maintainers rather than individual Linux users.

GSoC 2019 Final Report: Incorporating the memory-hard Argon2 hashing scheme into NetBSD

We successfully incorporated the Argon2 reference implementation into NetBSD/amd64 for our 2019 Google Summer of Coding project. We introduced our project here and provided some hints on how to select parameters here. For our final report, we will provide an overview of what changes were made to complete the project.

The Argon2 reference implementation, available here, is available under both the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 and the Apache Public License 2.0. To import the reference implementation into src/external, we chose to use the Apache 2.0 license for this project.

Working towards LLDB on i386 NetBSD

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 2019, 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, fixing watchpoint and threading support.

Throughout December I've continued working on our build bot maintenance, in particular enabling compiler-rt tests. I've revived and finished my old patch for extended register state (XState) in core dumps. I've started working on bringing proper i386 support to LLDB.

Beastie Bits

• An open source Civilization V
• BSD Groups in Italy
• Why is Wednesday, November 17, 1858 the base time for OpenVMS?
• Benchmarking shell pipelines and the Unix “tools” philosophy
• LPI and BSD working together

Feedback/Questions

• Pat - March Meeting
• Madhukar - Overheating Laptop
• Warren - R vs S

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