Created by three guys who love BSD, we cover the latest news and have an extensive series of tutorials, as well as interviews with various people from all areas of the BSD community. It also serves as a platform for support and questions. We love and advocate FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD and TrueOS. Our show aims to be helpful and informative for new users that want to learn about them, but still be entertaining for the people who are already pros. The show airs on Wednesdays at 2:00PM (US Eastern time) and the edited version is usually up the following day.
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119: There be Dragons, BSD Dragons anyway
This week on BSDNow - It’s getting close to christmas and the This episode was brought to you by iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! *** Headlines n2k15 hackathon reports (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151208172029) tedu@ worked on rebound, malloc hardening, removing legacy code “I don't usually get too involved with the network stack, but sometimes you find yourself at a network hackathon and have to go with the flow. With many developers working in the same area, it can be hard to find an appropriate project, but fortunately there are a few dusty corners in networking land that can be swept up without too much disturbance to others.” “IPv6 is the future of networking. IPv6 has also been the future of networking for 20 years. As a result, a number of features have been proposed, implemented, then obsoleted, but the corresponding code never quite gets deleted. The IPsec stack has followed a somewhat similar trajectory” “I read through various networking headers in search of features that would normally be exposed to userland, but were instead guarded by ifdef _KERNEL. This identified a number of options for setsockopt() that had been officially retired from the API, but the kernel code retained to provide ABI compatibility during a transition period. That transition occurred more than a decade ago. Binary programs from that era no longer run for many other reasons, and so we can delete support. It's only a small improvement, but it gradually reduces the amount of code that needs to be reviewed when making larger more important changes” Ifconfig txpower got similar treatment, as no modern WiFi driver supports it Support for Ethernet Trailers, RFC 893 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc893), enabled zero copy networking on a VAX with 512 byte hardware pages, the feature was removed even before OpenBSD was founded, but the ifconfig option was still in place Alexandr Nedvedicky (sashan@) worked on MP-Safe PF (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151207143819) “I'd like to thank Reyk for hackroom and showing us a Christmas market. It was also my pleasure to meet Mr. Henning in person. Speaking of Henning, let's switch to PF hacking.” “mpi@ came with patch (sent to priv. list only currently), which adds a new lock for PF. It's called PF big lock. The big PF lock essentially establishes a safe playground for PF hackers. The lock currently covers all pftest() function. The pftest() function parts will be gradually unlocked as the work will progress. To make PF big lock safe few more details must be sorted out. The first of them is to avoid recursive calls to pftest(). The pftest() could get entered recursively, when packet hits block rule with return-* action. This is no longer the case as ipsend() functions got introduced (committed change has been discussed privately). Packets sent on behalf of kernel are dispatched using softnet task queue now. We still have to sort out pfroute() functions. The other thing we need to sort out with respect to PF big lock is reference counting for statekey, which gets attached to mbuf. Patch has been sent to hackers, waiting for OK too. The plan is to commit reference counting sometimes next year after CVS will be unlocked. There is one more patch at tech@ waiting for OK. It brings OpenBSD and Solaris PF closer to each other by one tiny little step.” *** ACM Queue: Challenges of Memory Management on Modern NUMA System (http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2852078) “Modern server-class systems are typically built as several multicore chips put together in a single system. Each chip has a local DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) module; together they are referred to as a node. Nodes are connected via a high-speed interconnect, and the system is fully coherent. This means that, transparently to the programmer, a core can issue requests to its node's local memory as well as to the memories of other nodes. The key distinction is that remote requests will take longer, because they are subject to longer wire delays and may have to jump several hops as they traverse the interconnect. The latency of memory-access times is hence non-uniform, because it depends on where the request originates and where it is destined to go. Such systems are referred to as NUMA (non-uniform memory access).” So, depending what core a program is running on, it will have different throughput and latency to specific banks of memory. Therefore, it is usually optimal to try to allocate memory from the bank of ram connected to the CPU that the program is running on, and to keep that program running on that same CPU, rather than moving it around There are a number of different NUMA strategies, including: Fixed, memory is always allocated from a specific bank of memory First Touch, which means that memory is allocated from the bank connected to the CPU that the application is running on when it requests the memory, which can increase performance if the application remains on that same CPU, and the load is balanced optimally Round Robin or Interleave, where memory is allocated evenly, each allocation coming from the next bank of memory so that all banks are used. This method can provide more uniform performance, because it ensures that all memory accesses have the same change to be local vs remote. If even performance is required, this method can be better than something more focused on locality, but that might fail and result in remote access AutoNUMA, A kernel task routinely iterates through the allocated memory of each process and tallies the number of memory pages on each node for that process. It also clears the present bit on the pages, which will force the CPU to stop and enter the page-fault handler when the page is next accessed. In the page-fault handler it records which node and thread is trying to access the page before setting the present bit and allowing execution to continue. Pages that are accessed from remote nodes are put into a queue to be migrated to that node. After a page has already been migrated once, though, future migrations require two recorded accesses from a remote node, which is designed to prevent excessive migrations (known as page bouncing). The paper also introduces a new strategy: Carrefour is a memory-placement algorithm for NUMA systems that focuses on traffic management: placing memory so as to minimize congestion on interconnect links or memory controllers. Trying to strike a balance between locality, and ensuring that the interconnect between a specific pair of CPUs does not become congested, which can make remote accesses even slower Carrefour uses three primary techniques: Memory collocation, Moving memory to a different node so that accesses will likely be local. Replication, Copying memory to several nodes so that threads from each node can access it locally (useful for read-only and read-mostly data). Interleaving, Moving memory such that it is distributed evenly among all nodes. FreeBSD is slowly gaining NUMA capabilities, and currently supports: fixed, round-robin, first-touch. Additionally, it also supports fixed-rr, and first-touch-rr, where if the memory allocation fails, because the fixed domain or first-touch domain is full, it falls back to round-robin. For more information, see numa(4) and numa_setaffinity(2) on 11-CURRENT *** Is that Linux? No it is PC-BSD (http://fossforce.com/2015/12/linux-no-pc-bsd/) Larry Cafiero continues to make some news about his switch to PC-BSD from Linux. This time in an blog post titled “Is that Linux? No, its PC-BSD” he describes an experience out and about where he was asked what is running on his laptop, and was unable for the first time in 9 years to answer, it’s Linux. The blog then goes on to mention his experience up to now running PC-BSD, how the learning curve was fairly easy coming from a Linux background. He mentions that he has noticed an uptick in performance on the system, no specific benchmarks but this “Linux was fast enough on this machine. But in street racing parlance, with PC-BSD I’m burning rubber in all four gears.” The only major nits he mentions is having trouble getting a font to switch in FireFox, and not knowing how to enable GRUB quiet mode. (I’ll have to add a knob back for that) *** Dual booting OS X and OpenBSD with full disk encryption (https://gist.github.com/jcs/5573685) New GPT and UEFI support allow OpenBSD to co-exist with Mac OS X without the need for Boot Camp Assistant or Hybrid MBRs This tutorial walks the read through the steps of installing OpenBSD side-by-side with Mac OS X First the HFS+ partition is shrunk to make room for a new OpenBSD partition Then the OpenBSD installer is run, and the available free space is setup as an encrypted softraid The OpenBSD installer will add itself to the EFI partition Rename the boot loader installed by OpenBSD and replace it with rEFInd, so you will get a boot menu allowing you to select between OpenBSD and OS X *** Interview - Paul Goyette - pgoyette@netbsd.org (mailto:pgoyette@netbsd.org) NetBSD Testing and Modularity *** iXsystems iXsystems Wins Press and Industry Analyst Accolades in Best in Biz Awards 2015 (http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2015/12/08/ixsystems-wins-press-and-industry-analyst-accolades-best-biz-awards-2015) *** News Roundup HOWTO: L2TP/IPSec with OpenBSD (https://www.geeklan.co.uk/?p=2019) *BSD contributor Sevan Janiyan provides an update on setting up a road-warrior VPN This first article walks through setting up the OpenBSD server side, and followup articles will cover configuring various client systems to connect to it The previous tutorial on this configuration is from 2012, and things have improved greatly since then, and is much easier to set up now The tutorial includes PF rules, npppd configuration, and how to enable isakmpd and ipsec L2TP/IPSec is chosen because most operating systems, including Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android, include a native L2TP client, rather than requiring some additional software to be installed *** DragonFly 4.4 Released (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/release44/) DragonFly BSD has made its 4.4 release official this week! A lot of big changes, but some of the highlights Radeon / i915 DRM support for up to Linux Kernel 3.18 Proper collation support for named locales, shared back to FreeBSD 11-CURRENT Regex Support using TRE “As a consequence of the locale upgrades, the original regex library had to be forced into POSIX (single-byte) mode always. The support for multi-byte characters just wasn't there. ” …. “TRE is faster, more capable, and supports multibyte characters, so it's a nice addition to this release.” Other noteworthy, iwm(4) driver, CPU power-saving improvements, import ipfw from FreeBSD (named ipfw3) An interesting tidbit is switching to the Gold linker (http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/15/12/04/2351241/dragonflybsd-44-switches-to-the-gold-linker-by-default) *** Guide to install Ajenti on Nginx with SSL on FreeBSD 10.2 (http://linoxide.com/linux-how-to/install-ajenti-nginx-ssl-freebsd-10-2/) Looking for a webmin-like interface to control your FreeBSD box? Enter Ajenti, and today we have a walkthrough posted on how to get it setup on a FreeBSD 10.2 system. The walkthrough is mostly straightforward, you’ll need a FreeBSD box with root, and will need to install several packages / ports initially. Because there is no native package (yet), it guides you through using python’s PIP installer to fetch and get Ajenti running. The author links to some pre-built rc.d scripts and other helpful config files on GitHub, which will further assist in the process of making it run on FreeBSD. Ajenti by itself may not be the best to serve publically, so it also provides instructions on how to protect the connection by serving it through nginx / SSL, a must-have if you plan on using this over unsecure networks. *** BSDCan 2016 CFP is up! (http://www.bsdcan.org/2016/papers.php) BSDCan is the biggest North American BSD conference, and my personal favourite The call for papers is now out, and I would like to see more first-time submitters this year If you do anything interesting with or on a BSD, please write a proposal Are the machines you run BSD on bigger or smaller than what most people have? Tell us about it Are you running a big farm that does something interesting? Is your university research using BSD? Do you have an idea for a great new subsystem or utility? Have you suffered through some horrible ordeal? Make sure the rest of us know the best way out when it happens to us. Did you build a radar that runs NetBSD? A telescope controlled by FreeBSD? Have you run an ISP at the north pole using Jails? Do you run a usergroup and have tips to share? Have you combined the features and tools of a BSD in a new and interesting way? Don’t have a talk to give? Teach a tutorial! The conference will arrange your air travel and hotel, and you’ll get to spend a few great days with the best community on earth Michael W. Lucas’s post about the 2015 proposals and rejections (http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/2325) *** Beastie Bits OpenBSD's lightweight web server now in FreeBSD's ports tree (http://www.freshports.org/www/obhttpd/) Stephen Bourne's NYCBUG talk is online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI_bZhV7wpI) Looking for owner to FreeBSDWiki (http://freebsdwiki.net/index.php/Main_Page) HOWTO: OpenBSD Mail Server (http://frozen-geek.net/openbsd-email-server-1/) A new magic getopt library (http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2015-12-06-magic-getopt.html) PXE boot OpenBSD from OpenWRT (http://uggedal.com/journal/pxe-boot-openbsd-from-openwrt/) Supporting the OpenBSD project (http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/227054) Feedback/Questions Zachary - FreeBSD Jails (http://slexy.org/view/s20pbRLRRz) Robert - Iocage help! (http://slexy.org/view/s2jGy34fy2) Kjell - Server Management (http://slexy.org/view/s20Ht8JfpL) Brian - NAS Setup (http://slexy.org/view/s2GYtvd7hU) Mike - Radius Followup (http://slexy.org/view/s21EVs6aUg) Laszlo - Best Stocking Ever (http://slexy.org/view/s205zZiJCv) ***
118: BSD is go for Launch
Coming up on BSDNow - We know init systems have been all the rage This episode was brought to you by iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! *** Headlines Interview with Renato Westphal (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151123113224&mode=expanded) An interview with Brazilian OpenBSD developer Renato Westphal He describes how he first got into OpenBSD, working on a University-Industry partnership program and looking to deploy LDP (Label Distribution Protocol) for MPLS. He ported OpenBSDs ldpd(8) to Linux, but then contributed his bug fixes and improvements back to OpenBSD When asked if he was motivated to replace closed-source router implementations with OpenBSD: “Well, I don't administer any network, I work full time as a programmer. I have some friends however that succeeded replacing closed vendor solutions with OpenBSD boxes and that for sure motivates me to keep doing what I'm doing. My biggest motivation, however, is the challenge of resolving complex problems writing trivially simple code that is both secure and efficient.” They also go on to discuss some of the interesting features of EIGRP, and developing eigrpd(8) What do you think is missing from routing in OpenBSD: “Implementing new features and protocols while they are in their draft stage in IETF. I'd like to see OpenBSD as the reference platform for the development of new routing and networking technologies in general” *** Let’s Encrypt on a FreeBSD NGINX reverse proxy (http://savagedlight.me/2015/11/24/lets-encrypt-on-a-freebsd-nginx-reverse-proxy/) We have a neat guide/story today on how to setup the “Let’s Encrypt” certificates on a FreeBSD / nginx reverse proxy Backstory: For those who don’t know, “Let’s Encrypt” (https://letsencrypt.org) is a new Certificate Authority, which will allow you to create free and automated certificates. They have been in closed beta for several months now, and will be opening to a public beta Dec 3rd (tomorrow) This guide is particularly timely, since by the time most of you are watching this episode, the public beta will be up and running. Most of the instructions are fairly straight-forward. She starts by installing the lets-encrypt package from ports/pkg and modifying her nginx with a ‘catch-all’ vhost that re-directs traffic to the https versions of a site. With that done, the certificate creation is just a few commands to get started, in which she shows creating a cert for multiple domains As a bonus! She includes a nice renewal script which can be run from cron. It will monitor the certs daily, and renew it when it’s 14 days from expiring, or throw an error for somebody to look at. *** Mike Larkins OpenBSD vmm subsystem now in tree (http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=144822644214614&w=2) An openBSD native hypervisor has taken another step closer to reality, with Mike Larkin pushing the initial bits of “vmm” into the base kernel/world He mentions in the commit message that it still needs a lot of work, and as such is disabled by default. However for the adventurous among you, it can be turned on and tested Right now there is no BIOS, and as such it can only be used to boot other OpenBSD instances, although he mentions other BSD’s could be supported fairly quickly (He did a 1 hour port to bootstrap NetBSD) No big documentation expected for this release, since there is so much ongoing churn. Take a look at the man page for details on getting started. *** The story of how Yahoo switched to FreeBSD (http://zer0.org/daemons/yahoobsd.html) Yahoo originally started running on SunOS, but quickly found it not able to cope with the high frequency of HTTP requests “Having spend many frustrating hours trying to install other PC OS's, I was a bit skeptical. I had no intention of spending three days trying to install yet another one. To my surprise I went to the FreeBSD Web site, downloaded the floppy boot image, booted a PC with the created floppy, answered a few install questions, and a few minutes later FreeBSD was installing over the Net. The real surprise was when I came back later to a fully configured system that actually worked.” “If anything had gone wrong with that install it would likely been the end of that trial. Luckily for us that it was the easiest and most painless OS installs I had ever experienced.” Just that easily, Yahoo might never have ended up on FreeBSD “A couple of days later we added a FreeBSD box to our cluster of Web servers. Not only did it out-perform the rest of our machines, but it was more stable.” From my understanding of stories told over dinner, Yahoo had a few very important perl scripts, and they tended to crash on Linux, but kept running without issue on FreeBSD Related hackernews thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10558288) *** iXsystems iXsystem's recap of LISA 2015 (https://www.ixsystems.com/whats-new/lisa-2015/) *** Interview - Mark Heily - mark@heily.com (mailto:mark@heily.com) / @MarkHeily (https://twitter.com/MarkHeily) relaunchd (https://github.com/mheily/relaunchd) *** News Roundup Inline Intrusion Prevision System is an upcoming OPNSense Feature (https://opnsense.org/inline-intrusion-prevention/) The next OPNSense release, 16.1 is around the corner and today we have a sneak peek at their new Inline Intrusion Prevention system Suricata working with Netmap 2.1 enabled version, which allows Deep Packet Inspection of traffic. Such as looking at each packet individually and only blocking specific ones. They use the example of blocking Warcraft (oh noes!) Enabling this feature is just a simple mouse-click away, and various default rules are included as part of the Emerging Threats Community rules. *** Matthew Dillion working on Hardlinks in Hammer2 (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2015-November/458763.html) We have an interesting commit from Matthew Dillon for Hammer2, specifically targeted at hard-links The backstory he gives us: “The H2 design has had a long-standing problem of losing track of hardlinks when intermediate directories are renamed, breaking the common-parent-directory design for the inode target.” The implemented fix was one which instead places the hardlink target in the first common parent directory, which is marked with “xlink” via chflag If no parent directory is marked “xlink”, it will fall-through instead to the root of the mount They also modified their installworld to set “/” /usr/,/var/,/home/ as “xlink” flagged This prevents moving hard-links across these directories, but is similar to dealing with multiple partitions / datasets already. *** Japan's NetBSD User Group showed off some NetBSD machines at the 2015 Tokushima Open Source Conference (http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/talk/2015-November/016403.html) It’s been a little while since we’ve shown off a bunch of odd devices running NetBSD, but we have an update from the 2015 Tokushima Open Source Conference. This time around, we have pictures of the booth, as well as a variety of oddities such as: ODroid-C1 / Sharp X68030 Sharp NetWalker Sharp WZero3 (Cell phone) Give them a look, this time around they have nice cards pictured which details the hardware being used (in english none the less!) *** One of the three OpenBSD users Blog Post by Adam Wolk (http://blog.tintagel.pl/2015/11/22/one-of-the-three-openbsd-users.html) An OpenBSD user comments on a recent interaction with the syncthing project (a dropbox like alternative) The application has an auto-update feature (which doesn’t mix well with package systems in the first place), but it doesn’t work on OpenBSD because there is no /proc/curproc/file to determine the filename of the executable. This is a trivially easy task, but when the bug was reported, syncthings response was “Maybe one of the three (https://data.syncthing.net/#metrics) OpenBSD users feel strongly enough about this to propose a patch. :D” Part of the issue is that many users (especially the type that would run OpenBSD) opt out of reporting metrics, so OpenBSD is under-represented in the metrics the project developers are basing their decisions on Maybe someone can post a patch to solve the problem. While FreeBSD can provide a linux procfs, it would be better to use a more portable way to get the location of the process binary *** BeastieBits DragonFly BSD 4.4 RC branch created (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2015-November/458818.html) HOWTO: NFS booting bhyve (http://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/39/) DragonFly BSD is looking for a 4.4 RC image by the end of November (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/kernel/2015-November/175040.html) Support for Atheros QCA953x "Honeybee" has been added to FreeBSD (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=290910) Top updated in DragonflyBSD to allow the 'c' command (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2015-November/458692.html) FreeBSD textbook makes appearance on the 6pm news in the Netherlands 12:49 (http://www.npo.nl/nos-journaal/30-11-2015/POW_00941854) SemiBug gives a recap of its Inaugural meeting and its plans for future meetups (http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/2495) *** Feedback/Questions Adam - GELI on USB (http://slexy.org/view/s204HRCPdR) Noble - Radius on FreeBSD (http://slexy.org/view/s21q2WWisr) Jim - Backporting Wifi Code (http://slexy.org/view/s21L59OGyF) Mohammad - Zombies! (http://slexy.org/view/s20nWwzTGS) Miguel - ScaleEngine BTS (http://slexy.org/view/s201Kpd4GX) ***
117: The Cantrill Strikes Back: ...
This episode was brought to you by iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! *** Headlines Why did I choose the DragonFlyBSD Operating System by Siju George (http://bsdmag.org/siju_george/) We have a new article this week by Siju George posted over at BSDMag, talking about his reasons for using DragonFlyBSD in production. He ran through periods of using both Free/OpenBSD, but different reasons led him away from each. Specifically problems doing port upgrades on FreeBSD, and the time required to do fsck / raid parity checks on OpenBSD. During his research, he had heard about the HAMMER file-system, but didn’t know of anybody running it in production. After some mailing list conversions, and pointers from Matthew Dillon, he took the plunge and switched. Now he has fallen in love with the operating system, some of the key strengths he notes at: Rolling-Release model, which can be upgraded every few weeks or whenever he has the time No time-consuming fsck after a unclean shutdown No RAID parity checks while still having redundancy Able to add volumes to HAMMER on the fly He also mentions looking forward to HAMMER2, and its potential for easy clustering support, along with eventual CARP implementation so he can run two systems on the same IP. *** The Devil & BSD - Larry Cafiero (http://fossforce.com/2015/11/devil-bsd-leaving-linux-behind/) A story that has been making the rounds on social media is by Larry Cafiero, on his reasons for deciding to switch from Linux over to the BSD side of things. While most of the reasons are over the conflicts surrounding behavior by Linux leaders towards those in the community, he does mention that he has converted his main workstation over to PC-BSD. According to Larry, “With a couple of hours of adding backup files and tweaking (augmented by a variety of “oh, look” moments which could easily make me the ADHD Foundation Poster Boy), it looks exactly like my personally modified Korora 22 Xfce which graced the machine earlier. “ He also gave a great compliment to the quality of the docs / applications in PC-BSD: “In addition, you have to like a operating system which gives you a book — in this case, the PC-BSD Handbook — which should be the gold standard of documentation. It’s enviable, as in, “man, I wish I had written that.” Also programs like AppCafe provide a plethora of FOSS software, so there’s no shortage of programs. Side by side, there’s nothing on the Linux side of things that is lacking on the BSD side of things.” Regardless the initial reason for the switch, we are glad to have him and any other switchers join us on the BSD side of FOSS. *** New resource for BSD-schoolin’ (http://teachbsd.org/) “The initial repository (https://github.com/teachbsd/course) contains all of the material for the practitioner and masters style courses as well as a PDF for the teaching guide. All of the material is licensed under a BSD doc team license, also visible in the repo and on the github site.” “we expect all other work, including the extension of the practitioner course to 5 days, and the adaptation of the graduate course to undergraduates will be in the github repo” “Our goal now is to recruit a small number of universities to partner with us to teach this material. We will keep you posted on our progress.” We are working on getting an interview lined up to talk more about this project If I somehow find the time, I am try to contribute towards a sysadmin course similar to what I used to teach at an Arts&Tech College here in Canada *** A Few thoughts on OpenBSD 5.8 (http://lippard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/a-few-thoughts-on-openbsd-58.html) A user details their thoughts, reactions, and concerns after upgrading to OpenBSD 5.8 Among the changes: sudo was removed and replaced as doas. The user decided to make the switch, but ran into a bug with line continuation (\ to escape newline to continue a long line) The removal of TCP Wrappers support from ssh - this caused a number of rules in hosts.allow to no longer be respected. The FreeBSD port of openssh-portable has a patch to readd TCP wrappers because many people find it useful, including myself, when the ssh is in a jail and cannot run a firewall The removal of the pfrules= rc.conf variable. “I used to just put the default pf.conf rules file in place with each release and upgrade, and keep my changes in a pf.conf.local file that was specified in the pfrules variable. The effect was that from the period after the upgrade until I noticed the change, my systems were using the default rules and thus more exposed than they were supposed to be” This is what is often called a “POLA Violation”, Policy of Least Astonishment. When deciding what the system should do after some change or new feature is introduced, it should be the thing that will be the least “surprising” to the user. Having your firewall rules suddenly not apply, is surprising. “A minor annoying change that was made in 5.8 was putting the file /var/unbound/db/root.key into /etc/changelist, so that the file gets checked daily by the security script. The issue with this is that if you are actually using unbound with DNSSEC, this file changes daily, though only in the comments” It is very helpful to see a list of feedback like this after a release, so that the next release can be better I would be interested in seeing similar feedback for the other BSDs *** Interview - Bryan Cantrill - @bcantrill (https://twitter.com/bcantrill) Linux Interface Rants News Roundup FreeBSD AMI building AMI - Colin’s Corner (http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2015-11-21-FreeBSD-AMI-builder-AMI.html) Colin Percival (Of TarSnap Fame) has brought us a new article this week on how to create your own custom EC2 AMI builds. This new tool and instructions allows the creation of AMI files, without needing to go through the hassle of doing a fresh FreeBSD release build each time. Essentially it works similar to Colin’s previous “de-penguinator” utility, by running a FreeBSD in a memory instance, allowing the disk to be unmounted and prepped for becoming an AMI. The hope is that this new work allows easier creation of a new variety of “customized” FreeBSD instances, for end users to download and deploy at will. *** Peter Hessler on OpenBSD / OpenBGPd (https://ripe71.ripe.net/archives/video/1200/) Last week a new video landed of Peter Hessler giving us a status update on OpenBSD tech, and OpenBGPd specifically Of interest, he notes that LibreSSL is being used in iOS / OSX, and of course PF is used all over, Apple, BSD, Solaris and even a Windows port! OpenNTPD gets a mention as well, still ZERO CVEs for the lifetime of the project On the OpenBGPd side, it is considered production ready, so no reason to hold back deployment Very “feature-complete”, able to handle Edge Router, Route server, Multi-RIB. Slew of optional features like route reflector, looking glass, mrt dumps, mpls / mpls vpn. Bugs fixed, crashers, memory constraints and performance has been improved Filtering Performance, in example provided, importing 561K rules / 60K prefixes, went from 35 minutes down to 30 seconds. *** Onion Omega Updates (https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-wifi-build/wiki/Onion-Omega) I have a newer kernel config that will be committed soon that hooks up the system LED, and the three LEDs on the expansion dock via /dev/led I also have the I2C interface working to talk to the Relay and Servo expansions I have not determined the exact protocol for the Servo expansions, but the relay expansion is fairly simple to operate Instructions have been added to the wiki I have managed to use the GPIO to toggle external LEDs and to read the value from a switch I have also used the Servo PWM controller to dim an LED and control the speed of a PWM computer case fan My plan is to operate a 32x32 multi colour LED matrix from the device for an interactive christmas display *** FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS Book review (http://www.cyberciti.biz/datacenter/book-review-freebsd-mastery-zfs/) Book can be purchased here (http://smile.amazon.com/FreeBSD-Mastery-ZFS-7/dp/0692452354/) or from the list of vendors including directly from the author here (http://www.zfsbook.com/) *** Beastie Bits Computer History Museum is looking for Bell Labs UNIX (http://www.computerhistory.org/artifactdonation/) ACM Queue Portrait: Robert Watson (https://youtu.be/rA_5Cz99z28) Video Collection about BSD History, put together by FreeBSDNews (https://www.freebsdnews.com/2015/11/12/bsd-videos/) Minix announces its 2016 conference (http://www.minix3.org/conference/2016/) Chris Henschen from fP Technologies' talk about BSD is now online (http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2015/10/bsdtalk258-chris-henschen-from-fp.html) Mike Larkin and Theo de Raadt's talks from Hackfest this year in Quebec are online (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151123161651&mode=expanded) FreeBSD on a BeagleBoneBlack with a Touchscreen Display (http://kernelnomicon.org/?p=534) Dan Langille will be talking at CINLUG (http://www.cinlug.org/meetings/2015/December) Feedback/Questions John - Rpi2 and BSD (http://slexy.org/view/s2Gm06eC0Y) Roger - Win10 + FreeBSD (http://slexy.org/view/s2Kf2FG84H) Anonymous - Sharing Socket (http://slexy.org/view/s21bOG5UhS) Brad - Scrub Repaired (http://slexy.org/view/s20bKjCNXW) Kelly - Automated Provisioning (http://slexy.org/view/s2qb07BC2G) ***
116: Arcing ZFS
This episode was brought to you by iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! Headlines How to create new binary packages in the Ports system on OpenBSD (http://functionallyparanoid.com/2015/11/06/where-do-binary-packages-come-from/) Creating a port is often a great first step you can take to get involved in your favorite BSD of choice, and (often) doesn’t require any actual programming to do so. In this article we have a great walkthrough for users on creating a new ported application, and eventually binary package, on OpenBSD As mentioned in the tutorial, a good starting place is always an existing port, which can you use as a template for your new creation. Tip: Try to pick something similar, I.E. python for a python app, Qt for Qt, etc. This tutorial will first walk you through the process of creating your Makefile and related description about the new port. Once you’ve created the initial Makefile, there are a bunch of new “make” targets you can begin to run to try building your port, everything from “make fetch” to “make makesum” and “make package”. Using these tests you can verify that your port is correct and results in the installable package/app you wanted. *** Status update on pledge(2) (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151116152318) OpenBSD has been working very aggressively to convert much of their base system applications to using pledge(2) “Formerly Tame(2)) Theo has provided a great status update on where that stands as of right now and the numbers look like the following: Out of 600 ELF binaries, 368 of them have been updated to utilize pledge(2) in some manner This is quite a few, and includes everything from openssl, ping, sftp, grep, gzip and much more There are still a number of “pledge-able” commands waiting for conversion, such as login, sysctl, nfsd, ssh and others. He also mentions that there does exist some subset of commands which aren’t viable pledge(2) candidates, such as simple things like “true”, or commands like reboot/mount or even perl itself. *** FreeBSD booting on the Onion Omega (https://onion.io/omega/) Tiny $19 MIPS SoC ($25 with dock that provides built in mini-USB Serial interface, power supply, LED lights, GPIO expansion, USB port, etc) A number of pluggable ‘expansions’ are available, including: Arduino Dock (connect the Omega device to your existing Arduino components) Blue Tooth Lower Energy 10/100 Ethernet Port Relay expansion (2 relays each, can stack up to 8 expansions to control 16 relays) Servo expansion (control up to 16 PWM servos, like robotic arms or camera mounts) OLED expansion (1" monochrome 128x64 OLED display) Thermal Printer Kit (includes all wiring and other components) The device is the product of a successful Kick Starter campaign (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/onion/onion-omega-invention-platform-for-the-internet-of/description) from March of this year Specs: Atheros AR9330 rev1 400MHZ MIPS 24K 64MB DDR2 400MHz 16MB Flash 802.11b/g/n 150Mbps Atheros Wifi + 100mbps Atheros Wired Ethernet 18 GPIO Pins USB Controller Using the freebsd-wifi-build (https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-wifi-build/wiki) tool, I was able to build a new firmware for the device based on a profile for a similar device based on the same Atheros chip. I hope to have time to validate some of the settings and get them posted up into the wiki and get the kernel configuration committed to FreeBSD in the next week or two It is an interesting device compared to the TP-Link WDR3600’s we did at BSDCan, as it has twice as much flash, leaving more room for the system image, but only half as much ram, and a slower CPU *** SSH Performance testing (https://wiki.freebsd.org/SSHPerf) There has been a discussion (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2015-November/058244.html) about the value of upkeeping the HPN (High Performance Networking) patch to OpenSSH in the base system of FreeBSD As part of this, I did some fresh benchmarks on my pair of new high end servers The remaining part to be done is testing different levels of latency By tweaking the socket buffer sizes, I was able to saturate the full 10 gigabit with netcat, iperf, etc From the tests that have been done so far, it doesn’t look like even the NONE cipher can reach that level of performance because of the MAC (Message Authentication Code) It does appear that some of the auto-tuning in HPN is not worked as expected Explicitly setting -oTcpRcvBuf=7168 (KB) is enough to saturate a gigabit with 50ms RTT (round trip time) *** iXsystems iX gives an overview of FreeBSD at SeaGl 2015 (https://www.ixsystems.com/whats-new/seagl-2015/) On the FreeNAS Blog, Michael Dexter explains the ZFS Intent Log and SLOG (http://www.freenas.org/whats-new/2015/11/zfs-zil-and-slog-demystified.html) Interview - George Wilson - wilzun@gmail.com (mailto:wilzun@gmail.com) / @zfsdude (https://twitter.com/zfsdude) OpenZFS and Delphix *** News Roundup Nicholas Marriott has replaced the aging version of less(1) in OpenBSD (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151105223808) Sometimes less isn’t more, it’s just less In this story, we have news that the old version of less(1) in OpenBSD has now been ripped out in favor of the more modern fork from illumos founder Garrett D’Amore. In addition to being a “more” modern version, it also includes far “less” of the portability code, uses terminfo, replacing termcap and is more POSIX compliant. *** FreeBSD gets initial support for advanced SMR drives (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2015-November/058522.html) Kenneth D. Merry ken@freebsd.org has developed initial support for Host Managed, and Host Aware Shingled Magnetic Recording drives in FreeBSD, available as a patch against both -current and 10-stable “This includes support for Host Managed, Host Aware and Drive Managed SMRdrives that are either SCSI (ZBC) or ATA (ZAC) attached via a SAScontroller. This does not include support for SMR ATA drives attached viaan ATA controller. Also, I have not yet figured out how to properly detecta Host Managed ATA drive, so this code won't do that.” SMR drives have overlapping tracks, because the read head can be much smaller than the write head The drawback to this approach is that writes to the disk must take place in 256 MB “zones” that must be written from the beginning New features in the patch: A new 'camcontrol zone' command that allows displaying and managing drive zones via SCSI/ATA passthrough. A new zonectl(8) utility that uses the new DIOCZONECMD ioctl to display and manage zones via the da(4) (and later ada(4)) driver. Changes to diskinfo -v to display the zone mode of a drive. A new disk zone API, sys/sys/disk_zone.h. A new bio type, BIO_ZONE, and modifications to GEOM to support it. This new bio will allow filesystems to query zone support in a drive and manage zoned drives. Extensive modifications to the da(4) driver to handle probing SCSI and SATA behind SAS SMR drives. Additional CAM CDB building functions for zone commands. “We (Spectra Logic) are working on ZFS changes that will use this CAM and GEOM infrastructure to make ZFS play well with SMR drives. Those changes aren't yet done.” It is good to see active development in this area, especially from experts in archival storage A second patch (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2015-November/058521.html) is also offered, that improves the pass(4) passthrough interface for disks, and introduces a new camdd(8) command, a version of dd that uses the pass(4) interface, kqueue, and separate reader/writer threads for improved performance He also presents a feature wishlist that includes some interesting benchmarking features, including a ‘sink’ mode, where reads from the device are just thrown away, rather than having to write then to /dev/null *** Initial implemtnation of 802.11n now in iwm(4) (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151112212739) OpenBSD laptop users rejoice! 802.11n has landed! Initially only for the iwm(4) driver, support is planned for other devices in the future Includes support for all the required (non-optional) bits to make 802.11N functional Adds a new 11n mode to ifmedia, and MCS (modulation coding scheme) that sits alongside the ieee80211_rateset structure. No support for MIMO / SGI (Short Guard Interval) or 40 MHz wide-channels, but perhaps we will see those in a future update. They are asking users for testing against a wide variety of any/all APs! *** Freebsd adds support for Bluetooth LE Security Management (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=290038) FreeBSD + BlueTooth, not something we discuss a lot about, but it is still under active development. The most recently added features come from Takanori Watanabe, and adds new LE Security Management. Specifically, it enables support for BLE Security Manager Protocol(SMP), and enables a userland tool to wait for the underlying HCI connection to be encrypted. *** Building OpnSense on HardenedBSD (http://0xfeedface.org/2015/11/07/hbsd-opnsense.html) Looking for a way to further Harden your router? We have a tutorial from the HardenedBSD developer, Shawn Webb, about how to build OpnSense on HBSD 10-STABLE. You’ll need to first be running HBSD 10-STABLE somewhere, in this article he is using bhyve for the builder VM. The build process itself is mostly pretty straight-forward, but there are a number of different repos that all have to be checked out, so pay attention to which goes where. +In this example he does a targeted build for a Netgate RCC-VE-4860, but you can pick your particular build. *** Beastie Bits 1 BTC bounty for chromium bug! (https://github.com/gliaskos/freebsd-chromium/issues/40) DesktopBSD 2.0 M1 released (http://www.desktopbsd.net/forums/threads/desktopbsd-2-0-m1-released.806/) By implementing asynchronous pru_attach for UDP, Sepherosa Ziehau has increased connect rate by around 15K connections per second (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2015-October/458500.html) Stephen Bourne, known for the Bourne Shell, will be giving a talk at NYCBUG this week (http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/talk/2015-October/016384.html) Tor Browser 5.0.3 for OpenBSD released (http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/talk/2015-October/016390.html) The Tor BSD Diversity Project (https://torbsd.github.io/) aim to Increase the number of Tor relays running BSDs. We envision this happening by increasing the total number of relays, with the addition of more BSD users running relays; Make the Tor Browser available under BSD operating systems using native packaging mechanisms. Our first target is OpenBSD; Engage the broader BSD community about the Tor anonymity network and the place that BSD Unix should occupy in the privacy community at large. Screenshots from Unix People circa 2002 (https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developers--unix-people-2002/) Feedback/Questions Dominik - Bhyve Setup (http://slexy.org/view/s21xTyirkO) John - beadm + GELI (http://slexy.org/view/s2YVi7ULlJ) Darrall - ZFS + RAID = Problems (http://slexy.org/view/s20lRTaZSy) Hamza - Which shell? (http://slexy.org/view/s2omNWdTBU) Amenia - FreeBSD routing (http://slexy.org/view/s21Y8bPbnm) ***
115: Controlling the Transmissions
Controlling the Transmissions This episode was brought to you by iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! *** Headlines FreeBSD 2015 Vendor Dev Summit (https://wiki.freebsd.org/201511VendorDevSummit) FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Third Quarter 2015 (https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2015-07-2015-09.html) We have a fresh quarterly status report from the FreeBSD project. Once again it almost merits an entire show, but we will try to hit all the highlights. Bhyve - Porting of the Intel edk2 UEFI firmware, allowing Windows in headless mode, and Illumos support. Also porting to ARM has begun! Improved Support for Acer C720 ChromeBooks High Availability Clustering in CTL (Cam Target Layer) Root Remounting (Similar to pivot_root in Linux). This work allows using “reboot -r” to do a fast-reboot, with a partial shutdown, kill all processes, and re-mount rootfs and boot. Especially useful for booting from mfs or similar then transitioning to iscsi or some other backing storage OpenCL Support in Mesa, as well as kernel progress on the i915 driver Improved support for UEFI FrameBuffer on a bunch of recent MacBook Pro and other Macs, in addition to improvements to “vt” framebuffer driver for high resolution displays. ZFS support for UEFI Boot (Needs testing, but used in PC-BSD for a couple months now), and importing new features from IllumOS (resumable send, receive prefetch, replication checksumming, 50% less ram required for L2ARC, better prefetch) DTrace SDT probes added to TCP code, to replace the old TCPDEBUG kernel option. Recompiling the kernel is no longer required to debug TCP, just use DTrace Ongoing work to bring us a native port/package of GitLab *** Meteor, the popular javascript web application framework has been forked to run on FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD - FreeBSD testers requested (https://forums.meteor.com/t/freebsd-testers-please/12919/10) We have a public call for testing for FreeBSD users of Meteor by Tom Freudenberg The included link includes all the details on how to currently get meteor boot-strapped on your box and bring up the server So far the reports are positive, many users reporting that it is running on their 10.2 systems / jails just fine. Just a day ago the original porter mentioned that OpenBSD is ready to go for testing using the prepared dev bundle. *** Mike Larkin work continues on an native OpenBSD hypervisor, which he has announced is now booting (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151101223132) Speaking of OpenBSD, we have an update from Mike Larkin about the status of the OpenBSD native hypervisor vmm(4). His twitter post included the output from a successful VM bootup of OpenBSD 5.8-current, all the way to multi-user While the code hasn’t been committed (yet) we will keep you informed when it lands so you too can begin playing with it. *** This is how I like open source (http://blog.etoilebsd.net/post/This_is_how_I_like_opensource) A blog post by FreeBSD Core Team member, and one of the lead developers of pkg, Baptiste Daroussin One project he has been working on is string collation Garrett d'Amore (of IllumOS) implemented unicode string collation while working for Nexenta and made it BSD license John Marino (from Dragonfly) imported the work done on Illumos into Dragonfly, while he was doing that he decided, it was probably a good idea to rework how locales are handled He discovered that Edwin Groothuis (from FreeBSD) had long ago started a project to simplify locales handling on FreeBSD He extended the tools written by Edwin and has been able to update Dragonfly to the latest (v27 so far) unicode definitions John Marino has worked with Bapt many times on various projects (including bringing pkg and ports to Dragonfly) Bapt decided it was time that FreeBSD got proper string collation support as well, and worked with John to import the support to FreeBSD Bapt spotted a couple of bugs and worked with John on fixing them: issues with eucJP encoding, issues with Russian encoding (John did most of the work on tracking down and fixing the bugs), Bapt also converted localedef (the tool to generate the locales) into using BSD license only code (original version used the CDDL libavl library which I modified to use tree(3)), fixed issues. I also took the locale generation from Edwin (extended by John) This work resulted in a nice flow of patches going from Dragonfly to FreeBSD and from FreeBSD to Dragonfly. And now Garrett is interested in grabbing back our patches into Illumos! The result of this collaboration is that now 3 OS share the same implementation for collation support! This is very good because when one discovers a bug the 3 of them benefit the fix! The biggest win here is that this was a lot of work, and not an area that many people are interested in working on, so it was especially important to share the work rather than reimplement it separately. *** Interview - Hiren Panchasara - hiren@freebsd.org (mailto:hiren@freebsd.org) / @hirenpanchasara (https://twitter.com/hirenpanchasara) Improving TCP *** iXsystems MissonComplete winners (https://www.ixsystems.com/whats-new/october-missioncomplete-winners/) *** News Roundup LibreSSL 2.3.1 released (http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/LibreSSL/libressl-2.3.1-relnotes.txt) LibreSSl keeps on chugging, the latest release has landed, 2.3.1, which is the second snapshot based upon the OpenBSD 5.9 development branch. Currently they are targeting a stable ABI/API sometime around March 2016 for the 2.3.X series. Included in this update are ASN. 1 cleanups and some compliance fixes for RFC5280 Switched internally to timet, with a check that the host OS supports 64bit timet Various TLS fixes, including the ability to check cert validity times with tlspeercert_not{before|after} Fixed a reported memory leak in OBJ_obj2txt *** Guide for Installing Ghost w/ Nginx on FreeBSD (http://linoxide.com/linux-how-to/install-ghost-nginx-freebsd-10-2/) A nice walkthrough for the week, we’ve found an article about how to install the Ghost blogging platform on FreeBSD 10.2. For those who don’t know, Ghost is a MIT licensed blogging tool, started in 2012 by a former WordPress UI developer and is entirely coded in Node.js While a port for FreeBSD does not yet exist (somebody get on that please), this tutorial can walk you through the process of getting it deployed manually Most of the requirements are simple, www/node, www/npm and sqlite3. With those installed, most of the steps are simply creating the username / home for ghost, and some “npm” setup. The walkthrough even includes a handy rc.d script, making the possibility of a port seem much more likely *** Adrian Chadd on 'Why attention to detail matters when you're a kernel developer (http://adrianchadd.blogspot.com/2015/10/fixing-up-qca9558-performance-on.html) Adrian was correctly trolled in the FreeBSD embedded IRC chatroom and started looking at why the bridging performance in MIPS boards was so bad 120-150 mbit/sec is not really enough anymore Using previous MIPS24k support as a starting point, Adrian managed to get HWPMC (Hardware Performance Monitoring Counters) working on MIPS74k Using the data collected from the performance counters Adrian was able to figure out that packets were being copied in order to meet alignment requirements of the NIC and the FreeBSD networking stack. It turns out this is no longer a requirement for most modern Atheros NICs, so the workaround could be removed Now performance was 180 mbit/sec Next, on the receive side, only the TCP stack requires strict alignment, the ethernet stack does not, so offset the start point by 2 bytes so that TCP ends up aligned, and problem solved. Or not, no performance difference... The problem appeared to be busdma, Ian Lepore had recently made improves in this area on armv6 and helpfully ported these over to MIPS Now 420 mbit/sec. Getting better, but not as fast as Linux After some further investigation, a missing ‘sync’ operation was added, and the memory caching was changed from writethrough to writeback Things were so fast now, that the descriptor ring was being run through the ring so quickly as to hit the next descriptor that is still being setup. The first was to mark the first descriptor of a multi-descriptor packet as ‘empty’ until the entire chain was setup, so it would not be processed before the latter bits were done being added to the ring. So now MIPS can bridge at 720 mbit/sec, and route 320 mbit/sec Adrian wants to improve the routing speed and get it caught up to the bridging speed, but as always, free time is scarce. *** Switching from OS X to FreeBSD (http://mirrorshades.net/post/132753032310) The story of a user who had used OS X since its beta, but 10.9 and 10.10, became more and more dissatisfied They found they were spending too much time fighting with the system, rather than getting work done They cover the new workstation they bought, and the process of getting FreeBSD going on it, including why they chose FreeBSD rather than PCBSD Also covered it setting up a Lenovo X220 laptop They setup the i3wm and mutt The blog is very detailed and goes so far as to share a github repo of dotfiles and configuration files to ease the transition from OS X. *** BeastieBits The Stack behind Netflix's scaling (http://www.scalescale.com/the-stack-behind-netflix-scaling/) The Amiga port of NetBSD now has xorg support (https://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2015/11/04/msg069873.html) NetBSD has announced EOL for v5.x to be November 9th (http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/end_of_life_for_netbsd) RetroArch ports allow playing PlayStation, Sega, Atari, etc., games on FreeBSD (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2015-November/058266.html) OpenBSD booting on a 75mhz Cyrex system with 32MB RAM (http://gfycat.com/InnocentSneakyEwe) Matthew Green reports Nouveau Nvidia can support GL with his latest commit (http://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2015/10/29/msg069729.html) Releases! OPNsense releases 15.7.18 (https://opnsense.org/opnsense-15-7-18-released/) pfSense releases 2.2.5 (https://blog.pfsense.org/?p=1925) Feedback/Questions Eric (http://slexy.org/view/s2ogdURldm) Andrew (http://slexy.org/view/s22bK2LZLm) Joseph (http://slexy.org/view/s2to6ZpBTc) Sean (http://slexy.org/view/s2oLU0KM7Y) Dustin (http://slexy.org/view/s21k6oKvle) *** For those of you curious about Kris' new lighting here are the links to what he is using. Softbox Light Diffuser (http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OTG6474?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00&pldnSite=1) Full Spectrum 5500K CFL Bulb (http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00198U6U6?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00) ***
114: BSD-Schooling
This week, Allan is out of town at another Developer Summit, but we have a great episode coming This episode was brought to you by iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! *** Headlines WhatsApp founder, on how it got so HUGE (http://www.wired.com/2015/10/whatsapps-co-founder-on-how-the-iconoclastic-app-got-huge/) Wired has interviewed WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, about the infrastructure behind WhatsApp WhatsApp manages 900 million users with a team of 50, while Twitter needs around 4,000 employees to manage 300 million users. “FreeBSD has a nicely tuned network stack and extremely good reliability. We find managing FreeBSD installations to be quite straightforward.” “Linux is a beast of complexity. FreeBSD has the advantage of being a single distribution with an extraordinarily good ports collection.” “To us, it has been an advantage as we have had very few problems that have occurred at the OS level. With Linux, you tend to have to wrangle more and you want to avoid that if you can.” “FreeBSD happened because both Jan and I have experience with FreeBSD from Yahoo!.” Additional Coverage (http://uk.businessinsider.com/whatsapp-built-using-erlang-and-freebsd-2015-10) *** User feedback in the SystemD vs BSD init (https://www.textplain.net/blog/2015/problems-with-systemd-and-why-i-like-bsd-init/) We have a very detailed blog post this week from Randy Westlund, about his experiences on Linux and BSD, contrasting the init systems. What he finds is that while, it does make some things easier, such as writing a service file once, and having it run everywhere, the tradeoff comes in the complexity and lack of transparency. Another area of concern was the reproducibility of boots, how in his examples on servers, there can often be times when services start in different orders, to save a few moments of boot-time. His take on the simplicity of BSD’s startup scripts is that they are very easy to hack on and monitor, while not introducing the feature creep we have seen in sysd. It will be interesting to see NextBSD / LaunchD and how it compares in the future! *** Learn to embrace open source, or get buried (http://opensource.com/business/15/10/ato-interview-jim-salter) At the recent “All Things Open” conference, opensource.com interviewed Jim Salter He describes how he first got started using FreeBSD to host his personal website He then goes on to talk about starting FreeBSDWiki.net and what its goals were The interview then talks about using Open Source at solve customers’ problems at his consulting firm Finally, the talks about his presentation at AllThingsOpen: Move Over, Rsync (http://allthingsopen.org/talks/move-over-rsync/) about switching to ZFS replication *** HP’s CTO Urges businesses to avoid permissive licenses (http://lwn.net/Articles/660428/) Martin Fink went on a rant about the negative effects of license proliferation While I agree that having too many new licenses is confusing and adds difficulty, I didn’t agree with his closing point “He then ended the session with an extended appeal to move the open-source software industry away from permissive licenses like Apache 2.0 and toward copyleft licenses like the GPL” “The Apache 2.0 license is currently the most widely used "permissive" license. But the thing that developers overlook when adopting it, he said, is that by using Apache they are also making a choice about how much work they will have to put into building any sort of community around the project. If you look at Apache-licensed projects, he noted, "you'll find that they are very top-heavy with 'governance' structures." Technical committees, working groups, and various boards, he said, are needed to make such projects function. But if you look at copyleft projects, he added, you find that those structures simply are not needed.” There are plenty of smaller permissively licensed projects that do not have this sort of structure, infact, most of this structure comes from being an Apache run project, rather than from using the Apache or any other permissive license Luckily, he goes on to state that the “OpenSwitch code is released under the Apache 2.0 license, he said, because the other partner companies viewed that as a requirement.” “HP wanted to get networking companies and hardware suppliers on board. In order to get all of the legal departments at all of the partners to sign on to the project, he said, HP was forced to go with a permissive license” Hopefully the trend towards permissive licenses continues Additionally, in a separate LWN post: RMS Says: “I am not saying that competitors to a GNU package are unjust or bad -- that isn't necessarily so. The pertinent point is that they are competitors. The goal of the GNU Project is for GNU to win the competition. Each GNU package is a part of the GNU system, and should contribute to the success of the GNU Project. Thus, each GNU package should encourage people to run other GNU packages rather than their competitors -- even competitors which are free software.” (http://lwn.net/Articles/659757/) Never thought I’d see RMS espousing vendor lock-in *** Interview - Brian Callahan - bcallah@devio.us (mailto:bcallah@devio.us) / @twitter (https://twitter.com/__briancallahan) The BSDs in Education *** News Roundup Digital Libraries in Africa making use of DragonflyBSD and HAMMER (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2015-October/228403.html) In the international development context, we have an interesting post from Michael Wilson of the PeerCorps Trust Fund. They are using DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD to support the Tanzanian Digital Library Initiative in very resource-limited settings. They cite among the most important reasons for using BSD as the availability and quality of the documentation, as well as the robustness of the filesystems, both ZFS and HAMMER. Their website is now online over at (http://www.tandli.com/) , check it out to see exactly how BSD is being used in the field *** netflix hits > 65gbps from a single freebsd box (https://twitter.com/ed_maste/status/655120086248763396) A single socket server, with a high end Xeon E5 processor and a dual ported Chelsio T580 (2x 40 Gbps ports) set a netflix record pushing over 65 Gbps of traffic from a single machine The videos were being pushed from SSDs and some new high end NVMe devices The previous record at Netflix was 52 Gbps from a single machine, but only with very experimental settings. The current work is under much more typical settings By the end of that night, traffic surged to over 70 Gbps Only about 10-15% of that traffic was encrypted with the in-kernel TLS engine that Netflix has been working on with John-Mark Gurney It was reported that the machine was only using about 65% cpu, and had plenty of head room If I remember the discussion correctly, there were about 60,000 streams running off the machine *** Lumina Desktop 0.8.7 has been released (http://lumina-desktop.org/lumina-desktop-0-8-7-released/) A very large update has landed for PC-BSD’s Lumina desktop A brand new “Start” menu has been added, which enables quick launch of favorite apps, pinning to desktop / favorites and more. Desktop icons have been overhauled, with better font support, and a new Grid system for placement of icons. Support for other BSD’s such as DragonFly has been improved, along with TONS of internal changes to functionality and backends. Almost too many things to list here, but the link above will have full details, along with screenshots. *** A LiveUSB for NetBSD has been released by Jibbed (http://www.jibbed.org/) After a three year absence, the Jibbed project has come back with a Live USB image for NetBSD! The image contains NetBSD 7.0, and is fully R/W, allowing you to run the entire system from a single USB drive. Images are available for 8Gb and 4Gb sticks (64bit and 32bit respectively), along with VirtualBox images as well For those wanting X, it includes both X and TWM, although ‘pkgin’ is available, so you can quickly add other desktops to the image *** Beastie Bits After recent discussions of revisiting W^X support in Mozilla Firefox, David Coppa has flipped the switch to enable it for OpenBSD users running -current. (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151021191401&mode=expanded) Using the vt(4) driver to change console resolution (http://lme.postach.io/post/changing-console-resolution-in-freebsd-10-with-vt-4) The FreeBSD Foundation gives a great final overview of the Grace Hopper Conference (http://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2015/10/conference-recap-grace-hopper.html) A dialog about Compilers in the (BSD) base system (https://medium.com/@jmmv/compilers-in-the-bsd-base-system-1c4515a18c49) One upping their 48-core work from July, The Semihalf team shows off their the 96-core SMP support for FreeBSD on Cavium ThunderX (ARMv8 architecture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q5aDEt18mw) NYC Bug's November meeting will be featuring a talk by Stephen R. Bourne (http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/talk/2015-October/016384.html) New not-just-BSD postcast, hosted by two OpenBSD devs Brandon Mercer and Joshua Stein (http://garbage.fm/) Feedback/Questions Stefan (http://slexy.org/view/s21wjbhCJ4) Zach (http://slexy.org/view/s21TbKS5t0) Jake (http://slexy.org/view/s20AkO1i1R) Corey (http://slexy.org/view/s2nrUMatU5) Robroy (http://slexy.org/view/s2pZsC7arX) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv)
113: What’s Next for BSD?
Coming up on this week’s episode, we have an interview This episode was brought to you by iX Systems Mission Complete (https://www.ixsystems.com/missioncomplete/) Submit your story of how you accomplished a mission with FreeBSD, FreeNAS, or iXsystems hardware, and you could win monthly prizes, and have your story featured in the FreeBSD Journal! *** Headlines OpenBSD 5.8 is released on the 20th birthday of the OpenBSD project (http://bsdsec.net/articles/openbsd-5-8-released) 5.8 has landed, and just in time for the 20th birthday of OpenBSD, Oct 18th A long list of changes can be found on the release announcement, but here’s a small scattering of them Drivers for new hardware, such as: rtwn = Realtek RTL8188CE wifi hpb = HyperTransport bridge in IBM CPC945 Improved sensor support for upd driver (USB power devices) Jumbo frame support on re driver, using RTL8168C/D/E/F/G and RTL8411 Updated to installer, improve autoinstall, and questions about SSH setup Sudo in base has been replace with “doas”, sudo moved to package tree New file(1) command with sandboxing and priv separation The tame(2) API WiP Improvements to the httpd(8) daemon, such as support for lua pattern matching redirections Bugfixes and the security updates to OpenSMTPD 5.4.4 LibreSSL security fixes, removed SSLv3 support from openssl(1) (Still working on nuking SSLv3 from all ports) And much more, too much to mention here, read the notes for all the gory details! OpenBSD Developer Interviews To go along with the 20th birthday, we have a whole slew of new interviews brought to us by the beastie.pl team. English and Polish are both provided, so be sure not to miss these! Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (http://beastie.pl/deweloperzy-openbsd-dmitrij-d-czarkoff/) Vadim Zhukov (http://beastie.pl/deweloperzy-openbsd-vadim-zhukov/) Marc Espie (http://beastie.pl/deweloperzy-openbsd-marc-espie/) Bryan Steele (http://beastie.pl/deweloperzy-openbsd-bryan-steele/) Ingo Schwarze (http://beastie.pl/deweloperzy-openbsd-ingo-schwarze/) Gilles Chehade (http://beastie.pl/deweloperzy-openbsd-gilles-chehade/) Jean-Sébastien Pédron has submitted a call for testing out the neIntel i915 driver (http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-x11/2015-October/016758.html) A very eagerly awaited feature, Haswell GPU support has begun the testing process The main developer, Jean-Sébastien Pédron dumbbell@freebsd.org looking for users to test the patch, both those that have older supported cards (Sandybridge, Ivybridge) that are currently working, and users with Haswell devices that have, until now, not been supported Included is a link to the Wiki with instructions on how to enable debugging, and grab the updated branch of FreeBSD with the graphical improvements. Jean-Sébastien is calling for testers to send results both good and bad over to the freebsd-x11 mailing lists For those who want an “out of box solution” the next PC-BSD 11.0-CURRENT November images will include these changes as well How to install FreeBSD on a Raspberry Pi 2 (http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-install-freebsd-on-raspberry-pi-2-model-b/) We have a nice walkthrough this week on how to install FreeBSD, both 10 or 11-CURRENT on a RPi 2! The walkthrough shows us how to use OSX to copy the image to SD card, then booting. In this case, we have him using a USB to serial cable to capture output with screen This is a pretty quick way for users sitting on a RPi2 to get up and running with FreeBSD Interview - Jordan Hubbard - jkh@ixsystems.com (mailto:email@email) NextBSD (http://www.nextbsd.org/) | NextBSD Github (https://github.com/NextBSD/NextBSD) Beastie Bits OpenBSD's Source Tree turned 20 on October 18th (https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=144515087006177&w=2) GhostBSD working on Graphical ZFS Configuration Utility (https://plus.google.com/+GhostbsdOrg/posts/JoNZzrKrhtB) EuroBSDcon 2014 videos finally online (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz6C-szau90f9Vn07A6W2aA/videos) Postdoctoral research position at Memorial University is open (http://www.mun.ca/postdoc/tc-postdoc-2015.pdf) NetBSD Security Advisory: TCP LAST_ACK memory exhaustion, reported by NetFlix and Juniper (http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/security/advisories/NetBSD-SA2015-009.txt.asc) DesktopBSD making a comeback? (http://www.desktopbsd.net/forums/threads/desktopbsd-2-0-roadmap.798/) Feedback/Questions Steve (http://slexy.org/view/s20PllfFXt) Ben (http://slexy.org/view/s21jJm1lFN) Frank (http://slexy.org/view/s20TsrN3uq) Tyler (http://slexy.org/view/s20AydOevW)
112: Tracing the source
This week Allan is away at a ZFS conference, so it seems This episode was brought to you by Headlines pfsense - 2.3 alpha snapshots available (https://blog.pfsense.org/?p=1854) pfsense 2.3 Features and Changes (https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/2.3_New_Features_and_Changes) The entire front end has been re-written Upgrade of base OS to FreeBSD 10-STABLE The PPTP server component has been removed, PBIs have been replaced with pkg PHP upgraded to 5.6 The web interface has been converted to Bootstrap *** BSDMag October 2015 out (http://bsdmag.org/download/bsd-09-2015/) A Look at the New PC-BSD 10.2 - Kris Moore Basis Of The Lumina Desktop Environment 18 - Ken Moore A Secure Webserver on FreeBSD with Hiawatha - David Carlier Defeating CryptoLocker Attacks with ZFS - Michael Dexter Emerging Technology Has Increasingly Been a Force for Both Good and Evil - Rob Somerville Interviews with: Dru Lavigne, Luca Ferrari, Oleksandr Rybalko *** OpnSense 15.7.14 Released (https://opnsense.org/opnsense-15-7-14-released/) Another update to OpnSense has landed! Some of the notable takeaways this time are that it isn’t a security update Major rework of the firewall rules sections including, rules, schedules, virtual ip, nat and aliases pages Latest BIND and Squid packages Improved configuration management, including fixes to importing an old config file. New location for configuration history / backups. *** OpenBSD in Toyota Highlander (http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=144327954931983&w=2) Images (http://imgur.com/a/SMVdp) While looking through the ‘Software Information’ screen of a Toyota Highlander, Chad Dougherty of the ACM found a bunch of OpenBSD copyright notices At least one of which I recognize as OpenCrypto, because of the comment about “transforms” It is likely that the vehicle is running QNX, which contains various bits of BSD QNX: Third Party License Terms List version 2.17 (http://support7.qnx.com/download/download/25111/TPLTL.v2.17.Jul23-13.pdf) Some highlights Robert N. M. Watson (FreeBSD) TrustedBSD Project (FreeBSD) NetBSD Foundation NASA Ames Research Center (NetBSD) Damien Miller (OpenBSD) Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD) Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc. Bob Beck (OpenBSD) Christos Zoulas (NetBSD) Markus Friedl (OpenBSD) Henning Brauer (OpenBSD) Network Associates Technology, Inc. (FreeBSD) 100s of others OpenSSH seems to be included It also seems to contain tcpdump for some reason Interview - Adam Leventhal - adam.leventhal@delphix.com (mailto:adam.leventhal@delphix.com) / @ahl (https://twitter.com/ahl) ZFS and DTrace Beastie-Bits isboot, an iSCSI boot driver for FreeBSD 9 and 10 (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2015-September/057572.html) tame() is now called pledge() (http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=144469071208559&w=2) Interview with NetBSD developer Leoardo Taccari (http://beastie.pl/deweloperzy-netbsd-7-0-leonardo-taccari/) Fuguita releases LiveCD based on OpenBSD 5.8 (http://fuguita.org/index.php?FuguIta) Dtrace toolkit gets an update and imported into NetBSD (http://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2015/09/30/msg069173.html) An older article about how to do failover / load-balancing in pfsense (http://www.tecmint.com/how-to-setup-failover-and-load-balancing-in-pfsense/) Feedback/Questions Michael writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s217HyOZ9U) Possniffer writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s2YODjppwX) Erno writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s21xltQ6jd) ***
111: Xenocratic Oath
Coming up on this weeks episode, we have BSD news, tidbits and articles out the wazoo to share. Also, be sure to stick around for our interview with Brandon Mercer as he tells us about OpenBSD being used in the healthcare industry. This episode was brought to you by Headlines NetBSD 7.0 Release Announcement (http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-7/NetBSD-7.0.html) DRM/KMS support brings accelerated graphics to x86 systems using modern Intel and Radeon devices (Linux 3.15) Multiprocessor ARM support. Support for many new ARM boards, including the Raspberry Pi 2 and BeagleBone Black Major NPF improvements: BPF with just-in-time (JIT) compilation by default support for dynamic rules support for static (stateless) NAT support for IPv6-to-IPv6 Network Prefix Translation (NPTv6) as per RFC 6296 support for CDB based tables (uses perfect hashing and guarantees lock-free O(1) lookups) Multiprocessor support in the USB subsystem. GPT support in sysinst via the extended partitioning menu. Lua kernel scripting GCC 4.8.4, which brings support for C++11 Experimental support for SSD TRIM in wd(4) and FFS tetris(6): Add colours and a 'down' key, defaulting to 'n'. It moves the block down a line, if it fits. *** CloudFlare develops interesting new netmap feature (https://blog.cloudflare.com/single-rx-queue-kernel-bypass-with-netmap/) Normally, when Netmap is enabled on an interface, the kernel is bypassed and all of the packets go to the Netmap consumers CloudFlare has developed a feature that allows all but one of the RX queues to remain connected to the kernel, and only a single queue be passed to Netmap The change is a simple modification to the nm_open API, allowing the application to open only a specific queue of the NIC, rather than the entire thing The RSS or other hashing must be modified to not direct traffic to this queue Then specific flows are directed to the netmap application for matching traffic For example under Linux: ethtool -X eth3 weight 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 ethtool -K eth3 lro off gro off ethtool -N eth3 flow-type udp4 dst-port 53 action 4 Directs all name server traffic to NIC queue number 4 Currently there is no tool like ethtool to accomplish this same under FreeBSD I wonder if the flows could be identified more specifically using something like ipfw-netmap *** Building your own OpenBSD based Mail server! (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/12/feature_last_post_build_mail_server/?mt=1442858572214) part 2 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/19/feature_last_post_build_mailserver_part_2/) part 3 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/26/feature_last_post_build_mailserver_part_3/) The UK Register gives us a great writeup on getting your own mail server setup specifically on OpenBSD 5.7 In this article they used a MiniPC the Acer Revo One RL85, which is a decently priced little box for a mail server (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/24/review_acer_revo_one_rl85_/) While a bit lengthy in 3 parts, it does provide a good walkthrough of getting OpenBSD setup, PostFix and DoveCot configured and working. In the final installment it also provides details on spam filtering and antivirus scanning. Getting started with the UEFI bootloader on OpenBSD (http://blog.jasper.la/openbsd-uefi-bootloader-howto/) If you've been listening over the past few weeks, you've heard about OpenBSD.s new UEFI boot-loader. We now have a blog post with detailed instructions on how to get setup with this on your own system. The initial setup is pretty straightforward, and should only take a few minutes at most. In involves the usual fdisk commands to create a FAT EFI partition, and placing the bootx64.efi file in the correct location. As a bonus, we even get instructions on how to enable the frame-buffer driver on systems without native Intel video support (ThinkPad x250 in this example) *** Recipe for building a 10Mpps FreeBSD based router (http://blog.cochard.me/2015/09/receipt-for-building-10mpps-freebsd.html) Olivier, (of FreeNAS and BSD Router Project fame) treats us this week to a neat blog post about building your own high-performance 10Mpps FreeBSD router As he first mentions, the hardware required will need to be beefy, no $200 miniPC here. In his setup he uses a 8 core Intel Xeon E5-2650, along with a Quad port 10 Gigabit Chelsio TS540-CR. He mentions that this doesn't work quite on stock FreeBSD yet, you will need to pull code in from the projects/routing (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/projects/routing/) which fixes an issue with scaling on cores, in this case he is shrinking the NIC queues down to 4 from 8. If you don't feel like doing the compiles yourself, he also includes links to experimental BSDRouter project images which he used to do the benchmarks Bonus! Nice graphic of the benchmarks from enabling IPFW or PF and what that does to the performance. *** Interview - Brandon Mercer - bmercer@openbsd.org (mailto:bmercer@openbsd.org) / @knowmercymod (https://twitter.com/knowmercymod) OpenBSD in Healthcare Sorry about the audio quality degradation. The last 7 or 8 minutes of the interview had to be cut, a problem with the software that captures the audio from skype and adds it to our compositor. My local monitor is analogue and did not experience the issue, so I was unaware of the issue during the recording *** News Roundup Nvidia releases new beta FreeBSD driver along with new kernel module (https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/884727/unix-graphics-announcements-and-news/linux-solaris-and-freebsd-driver-358-09-beta-/) Includes a new kernel module, nvidia-modeset.ko While this module does NOT have any user-settable features, it works with the existing nvidia.ko to provide kernel-mode setting (KMS) used by the integrated DRM within the kernel. The beta adds support for 805A and 960A nvidia cards Also fixes a memory leak and some regressions *** MidnightBSD 0.7-RELEASE (http://www.midnightbsd.org/pipermail/midnightbsd-users/Week-of-Mon-20150914/003462.html) We missed this while away at Euro and elsewhere, but MidnightBSD (A desktop-focused FreeBSD 6.1 Fork) has come out with a new 0.7 release This release primarily focuses on stability, but also includes important security fixes as well. It cherry-picks updates to a variety of FreeBSD base-system updates, and some important ZFS features, such as TRIM and LZ4 compression Their custom .mports. system has also gotten a slew of updates, with almost 2000 packages now available, including a WiP of Gnome3. It also brings support for starting / stopping services automatically at pkg install or removal. They note that this will most likely be the last i386 release, joining the club of other projects that are going 64bit only. *** "Open Source as a Career Path" (http://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/video/5400) The FreeBSD Project held a panel discussion (http://www.cb.uu.se/~kristina/WomENcourage/2014/2015-09-25_Friday/2015-09-25%20113238.JPG) of why Open Source makes a good career path at the ACM.s womENcourage conference in Uppsala, Sweden, the weekend before EuroBSDCon The Panel was lead by Dru Lavigne, and consisted of Deb Goodkin, Benedict Reuschling, Dan Langille, and myself We attempted to provide a cross section of experiences, including women in the field, the academic side, the community side, and the business side During the question period, Dan gave a great answer (https://gist.github.com/dlangille/e262bccdea08b89b5360) to the question of .Why do open source projects still use old technologies like mailing lists and IRC. The day before, the FreeBSD Foundation also had a booth at the career fair. We were the only open source project that attended. Other exhibitors included: Cisco, Facebook, Intel, Google, and Oracle. The following day, Dan also gave a workshop (http://www.cb.uu.se/~kristina/WomENcourage/2014/2015-09-25_Friday/2015-09-25%20113238.JPG) on how to contribute to an open source project *** Beastie-Bits NetBSD 2015PkgSrc Freeze (http://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-users/2015/09/12/msg022186.html) Support for 802.11N for RealTek USB in FreeBSD (https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commits/master/sys/dev/usb/wlan/if_rsu.c) Wayland ported to DragonFlyBSD (https://github.com/DragonFlyBSD/DeltaPorts/pull/123) OpenSMTPd developer debriefs on audit report (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151013161745) FreeBSD fixes issue with pf under Xen with TSO. Errata coming soon (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=289316) Xinuos funds the HardenedBSD project (http://slexy.org/view/s2EBjrxQ9M) Feedback/Questions Evan (http://slexy.org/view/s21PMmNFIs) Darin writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s20qH07ox0) Jochen writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s2d0SFmRlD) ***
110: - Firmware Fights
This week on BSDNow, we get to hear all of Allans post EuroBSDCon wrap-up and a great interview with Benno Rice from Isilon. We got to discuss some of the pain of doing major forklift upgrades, and why your business should track -CURRENT. This episode was brought to you by Headlines EuroBSDCon Videos EuroBSDCon has started posting videos of the talks online already. The videos posted online are archives of the live stream, so some of the videos contain multiple talks Due to a technical complication, some videos only have 1 channel of audio EuroBSDCon Talk Schedule (https://2015.eurobsdcon.org/talks-and-schedule/talk-schedule/) Red Room Videos (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBPvcqZrNuKZuP1LQhlCp-A) Yellow Room Videos (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJk8Kls9LT-Txu-Jhv7csfw) Blue Room Videos (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-3DOxIOI5oHXE1H57g3FzQ) Photos of the conference courtersy of Ollivier Robert (https://assets.keltia.net/photos/EuroBSDCon-2015/) *** A series of OpenSMTPd patches fix multiple vulnerabilities (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151005200020) Qualys recently published an audit of the OpenSNMPd source code (https://www.qualys.com/2015/10/02/opensmtpd-audit-report.txt) The fixes for these vulnerabilities were released as 5.7.2 After its release, two additional vulnerabilities (http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2015/10/04/2) were found. One, in the portable version, newer code that was added after the audit started All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to 5.7.3 OpenBSD users should apply the latest errata or upgrade to the newest snapshot *** FreeBSD updates in -CURRENT (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=288917) Looks like Xen header support has been bumped in FreeBSD from 4.2 -> 4.6 It also enables support for ARM Update to Clang / LLVM to 3.7.0 (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2015-October/057691.html) http://llvm.org/releases/3.7.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html ZFS gets FRU (field replaceable unit) tracking (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=287745) OpenCL makes it way into the ports tree (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=397198) bhyve has grown UEFI support, plus a CSM module bhyve can now boot Windows (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-virtualization/2015-October/003832.html) Currently there is still only a serial console, so the post includes an unattended install .xml file and instructions on how to repack the ISO. Once Windows is installed, you can RDP into the machine bhyve can also now run IllumOS (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-virtualization/2015-October/003833.html) *** OpenBSD Initial Support for Broadwell Graphics (http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=144304997800589&w=2) OpenBSD joins DragonFly now with initial support for broadwell GPUs landing in their development branch This brings Open up to Linux 3.14.52 DRM, and Mark Kettenis mentions that it isn.t perfect yet, and may cause some issues with older hardware, although no major regressions yet *** OpenBSD Slides for TAME (http://www.openbsd.org/papers/tame-fsec2015/) and libTLS APIs (http://www.openbsd.org/papers/libtls-fsec-2015/) The first set of slides are from a talk Theo de Raadt gave in Croatia, they describe the history and impetus for tame Theo specifically avoids comparisons to other sandboxing techniques like capsicum and seccomp, because he is not impartial tame() itself is only about 1200 lines of code Sandboxing the file(1) command with systrace: 300 lines of code, with tame: 4 lines Theo makes the point that .optional security. is irrelevant. If a mitigation feature has a knob to turn it off, some program will break and advise users to turn the feature off. Eventually, no one uses the feature, and it dies This has lead to OpenBSD.s policy: .Once working, these features cannot be disabled. Application bugs must be fixed. The second talk is by Bob Beck, about LibreSSL when LibreSSL was forked from OpenSSL 1.0.1g, it contained 388,000 lines of C code 30 days in LibreSSL, they had deleted 90,000 lines of C OpenSSL 1.0.2d has 432,000 lines of C (728k total), and OpenSSL Current has 411,000 lines of C (over 1 million total) LibreSSL today, contains 297,000 lines of C (511k total) None of the high risk CVEs against OpenSSL (there have been 5) have affected LibreSSL. It turns out removing old code and unneeded features is good for security. The talk focuses on libtls, an alternative to the OpenSSL API, designed to be easier to use and less error prone In the libtls api, if -1 is returned, it is always an error. In OpenSSL, it might not be an error, needs additional code to check errno In OpenBSD: ftp, nc, ntpd, httpd, spamd, syslog have been converted to the new API The OpenBSD Foundation is looking for donations in order to sponsor 2-3 developers to spend 6 months dedicated to LibreSSL *** Interview - Benno Rice - benno@FreeBSD.org (mailto:benno@FreeBSD.org) / @jeamland (https://twitter.com/jeamland) Isilon and building products on top of FreeBSD News Roundup ReLaunchd (https://github.com/mheily/relaunchd/blob/master/doc/rationale.txt) This past week we got a heads up about another init/launchd replacement, this time .Relaunchd. The goals of this project appear to be keeping launchd functionality, while being portable enough to run on FreeBSD / Linux, etc. It also has aspirations of being .container-aware. with support for jailed services, ala-docker, as well as cluster awareness. Written in ruby :(, it also maintains that it wishes to NOT take over PID1 or replace the initial system boot scripts, but extend / leverage them in new ways. *** Static Intrusion Detection in NetBSD (https://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2015/09/24/msg069028.html) Alistar Crooks has committed a new .sid. utility to NetBSD, which allows intrusion detection by comparing the file-system contents to a database of known good values The utility can compare the entire root file system of a modest NetBSD machine in about 15 seconds The following parameters of each file can be checked: atime, block count, ctime, file type, flags, group, inode, link target, mtime, number of links, permissions, size, user, crc32c checksum, sha256 checksum, sha512 checksum A JSON report is issued at the end, for any detected variances *** LibreSSL 2.3.0 in PC-BSD If you.re running PC-BSD 10.2-EDGE or October's -CURRENT image, LibreSSL 2.3.0 is now a thing Thanks to the hard work of Bernard Spil and others, we have merged in the latest LibreSSL which actually removes SSL support in favor of TLS Quite a number of bugs have been fixed, as well as patches brought over from OpenBSD to fix numerous ports. Allan has started a patchset that sets the OpenSSL in base to "private" (http://allanjude.com/bsd/privatessl_2015-10-07.patch) This hides the library so that applications and ports cannot find it, so only tools in the base system, like fetch, will be able to use it. This makes OpenSSL no longer part of the base system ABI, meaning the version can be upgraded without breaking the stable ABI promise. This feature may be important in the future as OpenSSL versions now have EoL dates, that may be sooner than the EoL on the FreeBSD stable branches. *** PC-BSD and boot-environments without GRUB (http://lists.pcbsd.org/pipermail/testing/2015-October/010173.html) In this month.s -CURRENT image of PC-BSD, we began the process of moving back from the GRUB boot-loader, in favor of FreeBSD.s A couple of patches have been included, which enables boot-environment support via the 4th menus (Thanks Allan) and support for booting ZFS on root via UEFI "beadm" has also been updated to seamlessly support both boot-loaders No full-disk encryption support yet (hopefully soon), but GRUB is still available on installer for those who need it *** Import of IWM wireless to DragonFly (http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/commitdiff/24a8d46a22f9106b0c1466c41ba73460d7d22262) Matthew Dillon has recently imported the newer if_iwm driver from FreeBSD -> DragonFly Across the internet, users with newer Intel chipsets rejoiced! Coupled with the latest Broadwell DRM improvements, DragonFly sounds very ready for the latest laptop chipsets Also, looks like progress is being made on i386 removal (http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/commitdiff/cf37dc2040cea9f384bd7d3dcaf24014f441b8a6) *** Feedback/Questions Dan writes in about PCBSD (http://slexy.org/view/s27ZeOiM4t) Matt writes in about ZFS (http://slexy.org/view/s219J3ebx5) Anonymous writes in about problems booting (http://slexy.org/view/s21uuMAmZb) ***
109: Impish BSD
This week, we have a great interview with Warner Losh of the FreeBSD project! We will be discussing everything from automatic kernel module loading, IO scheduling and of course NanoBSD. This episode was brought to you by Interview - Warner Losh - imp@bsdimp.com (imp@bsdimp.com) / @bsdimp (https://twitter.com/bsdimp) SSD performance and driver auto-loader
108: ServeUp BSD
This week on the show, Allan is heading to Sweden, but we have a great interview with Andrew Pantyukhin to bring you. We will be discussing everything from contributions to FreeBSD, which technologies worked best in the datacenter, config management and more. This episode was brought to you by Headlines Allan is away this week, traveling to Sweden for the ACM womENcourage conference followed by EuroBSDCon, but we have an excellent interview for you, so sit back and enjoy the show. Allan will be back on October 5th, so we look forward to bringing you a live show, with all the details about EuroBSD and more! Interview - Andrew Pantyukhin - infofarmer@gmail.com (mailto:infofarmer@gmail.com) / @infofarmer (https://twitter.com/infofarmer) Building products with FreeBSD
107: In their midst
This week, we are going to be talking with Aaron Poffenberger, who has much to share about his first-hand experience in infiltrating Linux conferences with BSD-goodness. This episode was brought to you by Headlines Alexander Motin implements CTL High Availability (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/r287621) CTL HA allows two .head. nodes to be connected to the same set of disks, safely An HA storage appliance usually consists of 2 totally separate servers, connected to a shared set of disks in separate JBOD sleds The problem with this setup is that if both machines try to use the disks at the same time, bad things will happen With CTL HA, the two nodes can communicate, in this case over a special TCP protocol, to coordinate and make sure they do not step on each others toes, allowing safe operation The CTL HA implementation in FreeBSD can operate in the following four modes: Active/Unavailable -- without interlink between nodes Active/Standby -- with the second node handling only basic LUN discovery and reservation, synchronizing with the first node through the interlink Active/Active -- with both nodes processing commands and accessing the backing storage, synchronizing with the first node through the interlink Active/Proxy -- with second node working as proxy, transferring all commands to the first node for execution through the interlink The custom TCP protocol has no authentication, so it should never be enabled on public interfaces Doc Update (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=287707) *** Panel Self-Refresh support lands in DragonFlyBSD (http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/commitdiff/d13e957b0d66a395b3736c43f18972c282bbd58a) In what seems almost weekly improvements being made to the Xorg stack for DragonFly, we now have Panel Self-Refresh landing, thanks to Imre Vadász Understanding Panel Self-Refresh (http://www.anandtech.com/show/7208/understanding-panel-self-refresh) and More about Panel Self-Refresh (http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/introducing-the-panel-self-refresh-technology/) In a nutshell, the above articles talks about how in the case of static images on the screen, power-savings can be obtained by refreshing static images from display memory (frame-buffer), disabling the video processing of the CPU/GPU and associated pipeline during the process. And just for good measure, Imre also committed some further Intel driver cleanup, reducing the diff with Linux 3.17 (http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/commitdiff/6b231eab9db5ef4d4dc3816487d8e3d48941e0e2) *** Introducing Sluice, a new ZFS snapshot management tool (https://bitbucket.org/stevedrake/sluice) A new ZFS snapshot management tool written in Python and modeled after Apple.s Time Machine Simple command line interface No configuration files, settings are stored as ZFS user properties Includes simple remote replication support Can operate on remote systems with the zfs://user@host/path@snapname url schema Future feature list includes .import. command to moved files from non-ZFS storage to ZFS and create a snapshot, and .export. to do the inverse Thanks to Dan for tipping us about this new project *** Why WhatsApp only needs 50 engineers for 900 million users (http://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/) Wired has a good write-up on the behind-the-scenes work taking place at WhatsApp While the article mentions FreeBSD, it spends the bulk of its discussion about Erlang and using its scalable concurrency and deployment of new code to running processes. FB messenger uses Haskell to accomplish much the same thing, while Google and Mozilla are currently trying to bring the same level of flexibility to Go and Rust respectively. video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Ch2j8U0lk) Thanks to Ed for submitting this news item *** Interview - Aaron Poffenberger - email@email (mailto:akp@hypernote.com) / @akpoff (https://twitter.com/akpoff) BSD in a strange place + KM: Go ahead and tell us about yourself and how did you first get involved with BSD? + AJ: You.ve presented recently at Texas Linux Fest, both on FreeBSD and FreeNAS. What specifically prompted you to do that? + KM: What would you say are the main selling points when presenting BSD to Linux users and admins? + AJ: On the flip side of this topic, in what areas to do you think we could improve BSD to present better to Linux users? + KM: What would you specifically recommend to other BSD users or fans who may also want to help present or teach about BSD? Any things specifically to avoid? + AJ: What is the typical depth of knowledge you encounter when presenting BSD to a mostly Linux crowd? Any surprises when doing so? + KM: Since you have done this before, are you mainly writing your own material or borrowing from other talks that have been done on BSD? Do you think there.s a place for some collaboration, maybe having a repository of materials that can be used for other BSD presenters at their local linux conference / LUG? + AJ: Since you are primarily an OpenBSD user have you thought about doing any talks related to it? Is OpenBSD something on the radar of the typical Linux conference-goer? + KM: Is there anything else you would like to mention before we wrap up? News Roundup GhostBSD 10.1 released (http://ghostbsd.org/10.1_release_eve) GhostBSD has given us a new release, this time it also includes XFCE as an alternative to the MATE desktop The installer has been updated to allow using GRUB, BSD loader, or none at all It also includes the new OctoPKG manager, which proves a Qt driven front-end to pkgng Thanks to Shawn for submitting this *** Moving to FreeBSD (https://www.textplain.net/blog/2015/moving-to-freebsd/) In this blog post, Randy Westlund takes us through his journey of moving from Gentoo over to FreeBSD Inspired in part due to Systemd, he first spent some time on Wikipedia reading about BSD before taking the plunge to grab FreeBSD and give it a whirl in a VM. "My first impression was that installation was super easy. Installing Gentoo is done manually and can be a "fun" weekend adventure if you're not sure what you're doing. I can spin up a new FreeBSD VM in five minutes." "There's a man page for everything! And they're well-written! Gentoo has the best documentation of any Linux distro I've used, but FreeBSD is on another level. With a copy of the FreeBSD Handbook and the system man pages, I can actually get things done without tabbing over to Google every five minutes." He goes on to mention everything from Init system, Jails, Security, Community and License, a well-rounded article. Also gives a nice shout-out to PC-BSD as an even easier way to get started on a FreeBSD journey, thanks! Shout out to Matt for tipping us to this blog post *** OpenBSD Enables GPT by default (https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=144190275908215&w=2) Looks like OpenBSD has taken the plunge and enabled GPT by default now Ken Westerback does us the honors, by removing the kernel option for GPT Users on -CURRENT should give this a whirl, and of course report issues back upstream Credit to Jona for writing in about this one *** DISCUSSION: Are reproducible builds worth-while? (http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/reproducible-builds-are-a-waste-of-time) In this weeks article / rant, Ted takes on the notion of reproducible builds being the end-all be-all for security. What about compiler backdoors? This does not prevent shellshock, or other bugs in the code itself Personally, I.m all in favor, another .Trust but verify. mechanism of the distributed binaries, plus it makes it handy to do source builds and not end up with various checksum changes where no code actually changed. *** Feedback/Questions David writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s20Q7XjxNH) Possnfiffer writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s2QtE6XzJK) Daniel writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s20uloOljw) ***
106: Multipath TCP
This week, we have Nigel Williams here to bring us all sorts of info about Multipath TCP, what it is, how it works and the ongoing effort to bring it into FreeBSD. All that and of course the latest BSD news coming your way, right now! This episode was brought to you by Headlines Backing out changes doesn.t always pinpoint the problem (https://blog.crashed.org/dont-backout/) 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 (https://github.com/ocochard/netbenchs/blob/master/Xeon_E5-2650-8Cores-Chelsio_T540-CR/nXxq10g/results/fbsd11-melifaro.r287531/README.md) 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 (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/projects/routing/?view=log) 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 (https://github.com/ocochard/netbenchs) *** When is SSL not SSL? (http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/the-peculiar-libretunnel-situation) 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 (http://darknedgy.net/files/systembsd.pdf) 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 (http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=144115942223734&w=2) 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 (https://twitter.com/mherrb/status/641004331035193344) *** FreeBSD Journal, July/August issue (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/journal/vol2_no4/) 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 (http://blogs.freebsdish.org/brd/2015/08/25/building-arm-packages-with-poudriere-the-simple-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 (http://blog.pcbsd.org/2015/09/new-release-schedule-for-pc-bsd/) 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 (http://slexy.org/view/s21cguSv7E) Anonymous (http://slexy.org/view/s217A5NNGg) Darin (http://slexy.org/view/s20HyiqJV0) ***
105: Virginia BSD Assembly
It's already our two-year anniversary! This time on the show, we'll be chatting with Scott Courtney, vice president of infrastructure engineering at Verisign, about this year's vBSDCon. What's it have to offer in an already-crowded BSD conference space? We'll find out. This episode was brought to you by Headlines OpenBSD hypervisor coming soon (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=144104398132541&w=2) Our buddy Mike Larkin never rests, and he posted some very tight-lipped console output (http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=F2Qbgdde) on Twitter recently From what little he revealed at the time (https://twitter.com/mlarkin2012/status/638265767864070144), it appeared to be a new hypervisor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 (http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/08/26/0/) Last week (http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2015_08_26-beverly_hills_25519) 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 (https://www.reddit.com/r/BSD/comments/3ilhpk) to say (https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/3ilj4i) about this one, some in agreement and some not *** DragonFly graphics improvements (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2015-August/458108.html) 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 (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=144070638327053&w=2) 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 (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=144103945031253&w=2), 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 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10135901), 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 (mailto:vbsdcon@verisign.com) / @verisign (https://twitter.com/verisign) vBSDCon (http://vbsdcon.com/) 2015 News Roundup OPNsense, beyond the fork (https://opnsense.org/opnsense-beyond-the-fork) We first heard about (http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2015_01_14-common_sense_approach) 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 (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20150827112006) With their latest release, LibreSSL began to turn off SSLv3 (http://disablessl3.com) 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, LibreSSL won't actually support SSL anymore - time to rename it "LibreTLS" *** FreeBSD MPTCP updated (http://caia.swin.edu.au/urp/newtcp/mptcp/tools/v05/mptcp-readme-v0.5.txt) For anyone unaware, Multipath TCP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=144092912907778&w=2) 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 (https://github.com/yasuoka/openbsd-uefi) for UEFI booting has landed in the kernel, and more bits are being slowly enabled after review This comes along with a number (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=143732984925140&w=2) of (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=144088136200753&w=2) other (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=144046793225230&w=2) commits (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=144045760723039&w=2) 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 (https://www.marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=144115942223734&w=2), so stay tuned for more updates (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20150902074526&mode=flat) as further (https://twitter.com/kotatsu_mi/status/638909417761562624) progress (https://twitter.com/yojiro/status/638189353601097728) is made *** Feedback/Questions John writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s2sIWfb3Qh) Mason writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s2Ybrx00KI) Earl writes in (http://slexy.org/view/s20FpmR7ZW) ***