Hey, another terse title, and I didn’t even write it! This BSDNow episode talks about the recent ZFS conference. It’s interesting to think there can be a meetup about a file system that isn’t really held to a vendor at this point. There ‘s a number of other articles, too – I’m just a bit late noting it.
A recent and new CPU bug, CVE-2018-8897, is fixed in DragonFly. THis applies to both Intel and AMD processors. I’m happy to see that the CERT page lists equal notification timing for a whole lot of operating systems, rather than the few that heard about Spectre/Meltdown early.
Following that topic, Matthew Dillon has “fleshed out” Spectre mitigations, and his commit message details the current state. The sysctl ‘machdep.spectre_mitigation’ will tell you what’s set at any given point.
Update: update.
I managed to miss posting about BSDNow 244, “C is a Lie”. That provocative title is about how C isn’t a low-level language, not that it doesn’t work. Among other things, this week has new-to-me history about the Larrabee architecture, which I only have heard about indirectly.
BUGs BUGs BUGs!
- The May 15th SemiBUG meeting will be a hands-on web server workshop. Bring equipment.
- The June 19th SemiBUG meeting will be on BCHS.
- The May 2 NYCBUG meeting has no official presentation, but it’s happening.
- BSD licensed bc in NetBSD. The GNU version was removed in other BSDs. (Thanks, Bill Sorenson)
- SMTP client added to -current.
- OPNSense 18.1.6 image refresh.
- New talks, and the F-bomb. Michael W. Lucas convention talk mostly on ZFS.
- Writing FreeBSD Malware. (via)
- Introduction to email (pt. 2): Mail dialog / the “mail” command.
- Spectre Variant 2 mitigation for kernel committed to -current.
- p2k18 Hackathon report: Solene Rapenne (solene@) on joining the project, packages progress. I like hearing background on how people get brought into a community project.
- Bareos Backup Server on FreeBSD.
- A crapload of p2k18 hackathon reports.
- Getting my new laptop to work. (via)
- sndio party.
- NetBSD GSoC projects for 2018. (via)
NYCBUG is having a social (i.e. no presenter) meeting this month – tonight, in fact. Go, talk BSD, drink.
There’s a social meeting for KnoxBUG tonight – go, if you are near.
Some nice tech explanations this week.
- OpenBSD on my fanless desktop computer. Read to find out more about the RUNBSD stickers. (via)
- OpenBSD Community Goes Gold for 2018!
- Hardware accelerated AES/HMAC-SHA on octeons.
- Caddy Web Server on FreeBSD.
- free command for OpenBSD. I’d love to see a deep dive into the various BSD *stat commands. (via)
- Call for Papers | EuroBSDcon 2018. (via)
- Towards Secure System Graphics: Arcan and OpenBSD. (via)
- NetBSD 8.0RC1 is out.
- Running my own git server. On OpenBSD. (via)
- Perl @INC – customizing it for FreeBSD.
BSDNow episode 243 has no interview but a bunch of release news. I like seeing a note from Dag-Erling Smørgrav about 2 decades as a committer. I also consider aarch64 support in NetBSD interesting.
Reduce, the “second oldest computer algebra system”, has been ported to DragonFly (and there’s work on other BSDs). The post about this has lots of links to more information; if you’re a Maple or Mathematica user, this will definitely interest you.
Opinion time: The Reddit / Hacker News forums have reached the anything/everything point where there’s no longer a focus. Lobste.rs is worth visiting, though, for BSD content and in general.
MAP_STACKStack Register Checking Committed to -current.- Nextcloud 13 on FreeBSD. (via)
- Run OpenBSD on your web server. (via)
- Introduction to HardenedBSD World. (via)
- MirBSD Korn Shell on Jehanne. (via)
- Distributed Object Storage with Minio on FreeBSD. (via)
- Open vSwitch Overview.
- How to do math on the Linux command line. Or BSD.
- IKEV2 EAP User name/Password client on *BSD.
- Taylor Campbell, new to netbsd-core.
- [on sale] Bioware, FTL, System Shock, and more. (OpenBSD Gaming, though it may extend to other BSDs.)
- BSD Magazine wants article feedback.
- OpenBSD router/firewall?
BSDNow 242 has no interview and the normal wide range of topics: TrueOS, F-Stack, jails, SmartOS, and most interesting to me, open source business model development with iXSystems.
Totally last-minute summary, but I’m hitting every BSD category.
- Godot running on OpenBSD, though I didn’t know what Godot was.
- Finding what you’re looking for on Linux. BSD too. I link it because I always forget arguments to find(1).
- OPNsense 18.1.6 released.
- New M-Series storage devices from iXSystems.
- How to write ATF tests for NetBSD. (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 2 – Install. (via)
- Using FreeBSD Text Dumps. (via)
- Transparent network audio with mpd & sndiod. (via)
- Michael W. Lucas’s Penguicon 2018 Schedule. Several BSD presentations.
- pkg vs. underlying OS upgrades.
- The BSDCan 2018 schedule is posted.
This week’s BSDNow interviews Kevin Bowling of Greenlight Networks, plus lots of filesystem conversation.
I haven’t been able to say this in a while, but: I like cross-pollination.
As the title says, you can register for BSDCan 2018 now.
(Not leaving this for the weekend BSD summary cause I need to remind myself to plan for travel if possible.)
Losing power at home this week put a dent in my reading throughput, so to speak, but this will do.
- DragonFFI: FFI/JIT for the C language using Clang/LLVM. Not actually related to DragonFly or really BSD, but I like the synchronicity. (via)
- Simplifying Linux with … fish? Or BSD.
- New BSDMag issue – with a feature on OpenBSD Gaming. (via)
- Tarsnap pricing change.
- BSDCan 2018 schedule is up. Some people from my employer are going; I may too.
- DIY Hardware firewall on OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD 6.3 Released.
- Untangle vs pfSense.
- Nextcloud 13 on FreeBSD. (via)
- 32+ great indie games now playable on -current; 7 currently on sale! Rogue Legacy is fun, though I’ve only played the Windows version, not on any BSD.
- TrueNAS 11.1 – What’s New.
This week’s BSDNow has an intriguing title, and the show covers a number of hardware and software changes – no interview.
So, you may have noticed that author Michael W. Lucas has been releasing regular books in his “Mastery” series, focusing on various tools. I like linking to his work because he writes inclusively about BSD, even when it isn’t the topic of the book.
He’s on his 13th Mastery book, and it’s April 1st, April Fools Day. Anyone who knows his sense of humor might suspect he would take advantage of this confluence of minor events. He did: he wrote “ed Mastery“.
ed(1), for those unfamiliar, is a text editor that doesn’t show you what you are working on – it was written more than 4 decades ago when you didn’t have a computer screen – just a printer. It’s a limitation that is positively difficult to duplicate today.
It was present in the very first release of UNIX from AT&T – the operating system was written using it! This does, at first, seem like a bit of a joke – people usually only claim to use ed when they want to show how they triumphed over adversity.
This being a book in the Mastery series, however, means that Lucas explores how to use the tool in-depth. His tongue is firmly planted in cheek, meaning he is taking this seriously and not seriously at the same time. The odd thing is that since this is the proto-editor that stands behind sed, vi, nvi, vim, and sorta emacs, a lot of the movement and control commands apply to everything. The regular expressions here are the model all the following editors stick to, by and large.
It’s humor, and the book knows it’s humorous both in topic and content. But it actually works as an explanation of how to work through ed to accomplish goals. I can’t imagine it’s easy to get into a situation where ed would be your only option… but I can see how the tools for shifting data around or automating text changes come right out of these processes.
It’s available now, through the usual sources and DRM-free from the author.
(Obligatory disclosure: Lucas sent me an electronic copy of the book and asked me to talk about it on April Fool’s Day, if I wanted to. I am bad at payola.)
Happy Almost Fool’s Easter Day! I have to be at work in a few hours, at 3 AM, so this is all I was able to find in the time I have.
- Re: door opening sensor HW for OpenBSD? (via)
- Userland PCI drivers. NetBSD. (via)
- A nice note about OpenBSD right on the Void Linux page. (see lower left.)
- 40 years BSD Mail – 1978-03-25 – 2018-03-25. (via)
- A Note on SYSVIPC and Jails on FreeBSD. (via)
- Boosting the NetBSD release handling. (via)
- How does DragonflyBSD compare to FreeBSD?
- OpenBSD 6.3 Retro Gaming Station with a microsoft sidewinder gamepad pro. Works great!
- Handling of daemon/gid/uid in application.
- The February 2018 iXSystems newsletter.
- Introduction to email (pt. 1): Email basics.
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 1 – Simplified Boot.
- What’s a good BSD to start out with?
BSDNow 239 does not have an interview, but it does talk about using OpenBSD to prevent unwanted traffic out to the internet, plus a ‘poetic license’.