BSDNow 251 has one of the more fun titles ever, and goes into HAMMER encryption, BSDCan details, and a number of other things that make for good BSD news.
Half billion tries for a HAMMER2 bug
I’m pulling a quote off of IRC to show some of the testing on HAMMER2, specifically as the background for this commit:
14:22 <@dillon_> ^^^ hammer2 bug, could reproduce it around once a day doing a continuous rm -rf on hardlinked snapshots. reproduced about once every 500 million directory entries or so
I am somewhat tickled by the notion that you might have a problem after deleting half a billion directory entries.
SemiBUG, tonight: James Turner and BHCS
SemiBUG meets tonight at 7 PM, and James Turner is presenting about BHCS. I rarely say this, but: I wish I was closer to Michigan. Go, if you are near.
Update: the files referenced during the talk.
DragonFly 5.2.2 tagged
I’ve tagged and built DragonFly 5.2.2. This is mostly so that our current release image includes the fixes for the LazyFP bug, CVE-2018-3665. My email to users@ has upgrade details.
Lazy Reading for 2018/06/17
I’m going heavy on history this week.
- “an imaginary mail order computer games shop in 1985“.
- NeoVim, a refactoring of Vim.
- “The Obscuritory, a blog about lesser-known, odder games and software.” (via)
- Pulling the rug out from under an internet protocol.
- Building the Commodore that should have existed. (via)
- Via the previous link, the C256 Foenix Project. A Commodore 128 sequel.
- The Arcade Flyer Archive, advertising material around arcade games. (via)
- AtlTVHead, a project. (Video)
- OpenStreetMap Should Be a Priority for the Open Source Community. (via)
- Webrings. Was there ever a BSD one? I don’t know…
- Student events at SC18 this fall – sign up now to participate. That’s “SC” as in “SuperComputing” – they will have a Cray on display, for instance. (via)
- “There’s real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, et al“. The argument isn’t valid, I think – you’ll get the same problem with new tools; it’s really reinvention, not improvement. (via)
- Yore Computer, old UK computer magazine pages. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2018/06/16
Lots of different items, probably because of BSDCan.
- EuroBSDCon 2018 is happening September 20-23 at University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania – Call for papers ends tomorrow.
- June HardenedBSD Foundation Update. (via)
- FreeBSD 11.2-RC2 Available.
- Valuable News – 2018/06/09.
- Pledge and Unveil in OpenBSD [pdf]. Knew about pledge, not about unveil. (via)
- OpenBSD at BSDCan 2018. A summary post.
- TBW60: #OpenBSD @BSDCAN 2017 Interview. Video. “TBW” == The Brothers WISP; a series I did not know about. Stumbled into this by accident.
- Project Trident, the GUI version of TrueOS.
- BSDCan 2018 Recap and SELF 2018 Recap from iXSystems.
- Apple Airport Extreme == NetBSD, which I did not know.
- OpenBSD adds “-n” to crontab(5): “no mail when everything went OK” A good idea. (via)
- pNFS server in FreeBSD. (via)
- (Open)BSD equivalent of nmtui (curses Wi-Fi network chooser)
- syspatch(8) for OpenBSD. Included in other convention coverage, I’m sure, but I found this tool interesting. (PDF, via).
BSDNow 250: BSDCan 2018 recap
I am typing BSDXXX phrases a lot, it seems. BSDNow 250 goes over the just-finished BSDCan. There’s a ton of events, so get reading/listening.
NX on by default for reads
DragonFly has had NX (Non-eXecutable) support for some time. It’s now on by default for read operations in DragonFly master – not the current release. You can step it up to level 2, for write operations, with a loader tunable, but it may cause issues with dports.
CPU bug hardening added to DragonFly
Matthew Dillon’s added some patches to DragonFly related to securing floating point state, following similar work in OpenBSD. There isn’t a reported catchy-name issue to match it, like Spectre/Meltdown – yet.
(If anyone has a good link to the similar OpenBSD commits, please share; I did not find them on a cursory search.)
Update: the fix is now in 5.2 and an update is recommended.
mkinitrd out, initrd in
There was an optional ‘make initrd’ step in the DragonFly build process, where you can create a small binary to use for mounting encrypted root drives.
Aaron LI has removed mkinitrd in favor of ‘make initrd’, which builds a separate binary to use in exactly those situations. See the commit message for more detail. It incidentally creates a ‘/rescue’ directory and works as a rescue ramdisk, similar to other BSDs, if you should ever need it. (See updated MOTD for details)
Lazy Reading for 2018/06/10
It’s been a busy week and I didn’t have overflow from last week to help, so these are very fresh links.
- With ARM Wide Open. Acorn, where ARM processors first showed up.
- That led me to the BBC film Micro Men, a neat movie about not-Silicon-Valley early computing.
- MXE11: run UNIX on a microcontroller. Pocket PDP/11. (via)
- WiGLE, mapping of WiFi everywhere. There’s a certain amount of approximation, but still interesting. (via)
- DungeonFS, both a FUSE filesystem and dungeon crawl. (via)
- A few notes on daily blogging. Relevant to why I do this thing you are reading now.
- How Instagram’s Feed Works. It bothers me that what you see is filtered by how you use their tools, not by what you actually like. (via)
- The History of Telecommunications. (via)
- OpenVMS/x86_64: Proof Points to x86-64 First Boot (May 29th 2018). As someone who still has a VAX running… I’m interested.
- Stupid
cmd.exetricks: Changing directories with forward slashes instead of backslashes. I find this entertaining. - Six hacks for less(1). I don’t think of less(1) as configurable, but it is.
- GitHub: quo vadis? This note gets it right: self host, self host, self host self host self host. We all have the tools; don’t let a startup sell them back to you.
In Other BSDs for 2018/06/09
BSDCan is running this weekend. There is, depending on what time you are reading this, a livestream.
- Retguard: An improved stack protector for OpenBSD. (via)
- Mailing lists vs Github. Relevant to most every BSD project. (via)
- need help determining the best HA solution for 3 pfSense VM guests.
- OpenBSD’s ksh(1) does not export PWD, causing unexpected problems. (via)
- GOG.com summer sale – OpenBSD highlights.
- libcsi – Crypto Simplified Interface.
- Author Discoverability.
- Your own VPN with OpenIKED & OpenBSD. (via)
- zedenv, a ZFS Boot Environment Manager for FreeBSD and Linux. (via)
- TrueOS to Focus On Core Operating System. Not a name change; it’s work on becoming a base like Debian. (via)
- Isotop: French desktop-oriented OpenBSD distro. (via)
- May 2018 Status Report: Cross-DSO CFI in HardenedBSD. (via)
- Silent Fanless FreeBSD Desktop/Server.
- Valuable News – 2018/06/05.
MosChip PCIe serial com support in DragonFly
If you have a serial card add-in, DragonFly can now output the console to it – a way to run completely headless. It’s not quite like a normal on-motherboard serial port boot, so look at the commit notes for implementation details.
BSDNow 249: Router On A Stick
BSDNow 249 is covering a really wide range of topics including an uncommon amount of NetBSD, so I’m going to do the easy thing and repeat the summary: “OpenZFS and DTrace updates in NetBSD, NetBSD network security stack audit, Performance of MySQL on ZFS, OpenSMTP results from p2k18, legacy Windows backup to FreeNAS, ZFS block size importance, and NetBSD as router on a stick.”
NYCBUG meeting, Bryant Park
NYCBUG is having an outdoors meeting in Bryant Park, today, 6:45 PM. Go, if you are near.
Lazy Reading for 2018/06/03
Treat this week: footage of a college animatronic project I was slightly involved in. See below.
- Maintaining Notepad is not a full-time job, but it’s not an empty job either.
- Concise Computational Literature is Now Online in Taper. 1KB items only.
- 80s Home Robot History. The first example is classic open source.
- Alphachat, economic film analysis. This podcast episode is talking about Tron/Tron Legacy. (via)
- Ten years of Vim. (via)
- 30 years later, QBasic is still the best. I link to this story because years ago, in college, some of my roommates built an entire animatronic gargoyle project around it. I found the footage, recently. (via)
- Vim 8.1 released. (via)
- Hints for writing Unix tools. (via)
- Reverse NES emulation. (via)
- We Did Our First Kickstarter! And It Worked! Linking to it because the games are interesting, but also because it’s a viewpoint where he says “We’re getting older, enough so that the end of our careers is in sight. ” Not something you normally think of for an indie developer.
- Eudora, BSD-licensed. (via many places)
- WTFUtil, fun-looking terminal report screen. (via)
- OnlineASCIITools.com. Exactly what it sounds like.
In Other BSDs for 2017/06/02
One of these links will be very useful to someone.
- Join us, building a full OpenBSD mailserver. (via)
- Valuable News 2018/05/25.
- May 2018 Status Report: Cross-DSO CFI in HardenedBSD. (via)
- BSDJobs.com. (via)
- Research Positions – Aberdeen Scotland.
- NetBSD: a new version of the CDDL dtrace and ZFS code. (via)
- OpenBSD Kernel Internals — Creation of process from user-space to kernel space. (via)
- iXsystems Newsletter: The April 2018 Edition.
- OPNsense 18.1.9 released.
- OpenBSD’s httpd gets URL rewrite Not the final patch. (via)
- BSD: Networking Included. Some extremely useful tips in here for network troubleshooting. (via)
- Boot All the Things! (via)
Little shaves in DragonFly buildworld
BSDNow 248: Show Me the Mooney
BSDNow 248 has an interview with Patrick Mooney, talking about bhyve, along with the usual news summaries.
New event filter work for DragonFly
Bug reports are usually unexciting, but it’s always fun to see someone working through a new idea, especially when it’s something enabled by doing it on DragonFly.