There’s a FreeBSD Forums thread about ZFS and Hammer, as several people have pointed out to me. It’s interesting to see, but there isn’t a lot of quantitative discussion. (It’s a forum post, not a white paper, though.)
Remembered to do this all at the last minute, after I got the new server up.
- LibertyBSD, an OpenBSD fork with no non-free firmware.
- OPNSense, a FreeBSD-based firewall that is new to me.
- OpenBSD projects that aren’t OpenBSD.
- Broken build tracker for pkgsrc. (via)
- pkgsrc-2014Q4 is out.
- pkgviews is gone from pkgsrc.
- NetBSD can now record MIDI files from /dev/music.
- How to see hidden pf tables.
- The OpenBSD Foundation met their fundraising goal for 2014.
- Typing in Japanese in OpenBSD. (via)
- Tor relay issues on OpenBSD, in two slightly munged threads.
- OpenBSD and syslog, over TCP.
- FreeBSD has updated to Unbound 1.5.1 and clang/llvm/lldb to 3.5.0.
- bhyve on FreeBSD has an improved Real Time Clock.
- GNU texinfo is out of FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD’s asr(4) driver is gone too.
- pcc 1.1.0 was recently released. (via)
The BSDNow people aren’t slowing down for the holidays, as there’s another episode this week. The interview is with Dan Langille, about the 2015 BSDCan conference. He’s also the person behind freebsddiary.org, which served as partial inspiration for the Digest. There’s also more video presentation links, news items, and so on.
The list is shorter this week; I blame the Christmas holiday.
- OpenBSD now has position-independent executables for some architectures. That may mean changing your upgrade strategy. (5.6 upgrade guide here)
- FreeBSD now has frequency/voltage control on the Raspberry Pi.
- There’s a lot of v7 ARM architectures. I can see why people are waiting for AARMv8.
- FreeBSD has a new NFS client/server.
- RamNode is another VPS provider that supports BSD. (via)
- Also, cloudspin.me.
- [ is a binary program.
BSDNow isn’t slowing down for Christmas, cause there’s a new episode up. There’s two interviews this time – Erwin Lansing, about BSD in Europe, and Cristina Vintila, about BSD conferences. The rest of the episode is a bunch of “How did you get into BSD?” stories from viewers, both in text (i.e. read out from email) and the occasional video answer.
BSDTalk 249 is an 11 minute interview with Scott Long, who is involved with Netflix’s FreeBSD-based local caching appliances. This conversation is from MeetBSD 2014, though I heard Scott talk about the same subject at the last NYCBSDCon – it’s an astounding amount of data flowing through those machines.
BSDNow 068 has a large number video links to various BSD conference videos, a bunch of other article links,, and an interview of Michael W. Lucas about his new FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials book.
Get ready for some reading.
- There’s some packages moving from pkgsrc-wip to pkgsrc proper.
- pkgsrc-2014Q4 branching is planned for Monday the 15th.
- PC-BSD now has an automatic package/security patch upgrade mechanism.
- Steam on PC-BSD. Holy grail, there.
- PC-BSD needs testers for the new Update Manager, for moving from 10 to 10.1
- NetBSD has imported BIND 9.10.1-P1.
- OpenBSD has added skgpio(4), a driver for the Soekris net6501 GPIO port and LEDs.
- OpenBSD has updated Unbound to 1.5.1.
- Some Japanese input methods for OpenBSD that may work on other BSDs, too.
- pfqstat, a replacements for pfstat designed to work with Charted.
- I don’t know what the ‘BERI Virtio Networking Frontend’ is, but FreeBSD’s got it.
- fstyp(8), the filesystem detector.
- FreeBSD has added AES-ICM and AES-GCM modes to OpenCrypto.
- If you’re stopping in NYC, NYCBUG would like to hear you talk on a topic of interest.
- The case for distributed operating systems in the data center. Sounds like DragonFly’s original charter. (via)
- BSDNow wants to hear your getting-into-BSD story.
- OpenBSD libc version 78.
- There’s a lot of FreeBSD systems at NYI.
- “FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials” is now in physical print.
- “Networking for System Administrators” is next to come out.
- And “Tarsnap Mastery” is next to be written.
- …We’re all benefiting from Michael Lucas going full-time on writing.
BSDNow’s episode this week focuses on the just-released Bitrig 1.0, and has an interview with Patrick Wildt of that project. There’s also coverage of other topics, including the new poudriere release – that’s the tool that bulk builds packages for DragonFly and FreeBSD, though I don’t know if it’s unified across both operating systems yet.
I have been building up quite the variety this week.
- Bitrig 1.0 has been released.
- Writing NetBSD Sound Drivers in Haskell. (PDF, via)
- ruBSD 2014, happening December 13th in Moscow. (via)
- How to configure full disk encryption in PC-BSD 10.1. (via)
- BSD Magazine for November 2014. (via) Why don’t they put new issue announcements in their RSS?
- A week of pkgsrc #5.
- FreeBSD Foundation’s 2014 year-end fundraising.
- FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials is hitting the printers. There’s a quiet mention of the next two books in that series, too.
- Two new kernel errata for OpenBSD.
- BSDCan 2015 (June 2015) has opened up its call for papers, now through Jan 19th, 2015. (via)
- A conversation about UTF-8, Unicode, and file systems.
- A conversation about random vs. phrase passwords.
- New Directions in Operating Systems conference notes. Lots of BSD stuff in there. (via)
- nih-0.13.0 is out for pkgsrc.
- BSD presentations (including DragonFly) at the X Developers Conference. I mentioned the event itself before, but that link wasn’t open to non-subscribers until later, as pointed out to me.
- Coreboot on the BSDs.
- More talk about embedded OpenBSD on cheap machines, including thin client machines repurposed into routers.
- Noticed in that previous link: <$100 Ubuquiti EdgeRouter-Lites can run OpenBSD? FreeBSD too, apparently.
- Is it time to give BSDs a try?
- Fixing PC-BSD upgrade issues.
The 66th BSDNow episode has an interview with Paul Schenkeveld about BSD conferences, and of course the usual variety of news, including something about a BSD-powered library in Africa; something that is entirely out of the blue to me.
Despite the US holiday, here’s a pile of BSD material.
- BSD on Mini ITX.
- Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?
- DiscoverBSD for 2014/11/24.
- pkgsrc and i386 may have issues on partial rebuild. Or not? Follow the thread.
- lang/guile16 is leaving pkgsrc soon.
- check-update, a script for finding what packages in pkgsrc need to be updated.
- FreeBSD now has libgpio, I think for those general purpose I/O connectors on small ARM boards that are all the rage.
- FreeBSD has switched to mandoc.
- Your SGI hardware running OpenBSD will now tell you via LCD.
- Tools for checking for updated packages on OpenBSD. (read the whole thread)
- Conversations about a home PF-based router. “APU units run hot but are OK” seems to be the thread consensus.
This week’s BSDNow episode, 8,000,000 Mogofoo-ops, includes an interview with Brendan Gregg of Netflix, along with more recent convention video links. It also mentions GNOME3 working on FreeBSD – it’s working on DragonFly too.
I’ve placed an image slider over on the right side of the website; it’s all BSD-related books. Each image is linked to a page about the book where you can buy it. It’s not paid advertising, or perhaps advertising at all; there’s no in-kind benefit. It’s specifically books I think people would find interesting to read, and we’d all benefit by the expansion of the BSD ‘ecosystem’.
The most recent edition added is Michael W. Lucas’s FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials, which is out in ebook form today, and printed form soon.
I actually got this started early, for once, instead of completing in a panic on Friday night.
- The Move from Linux to FreeBSD. (via)
- BSDTalk247 – FreeBSD: The Next 10 Years with Jordan Hubbard. I meant to post this before; lost track.
- /var/tmp now links to /tmp on OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD now has perl 5.20.1 in base.
- Making FireFox less insecure on OpenBSD.
- You can peek at what ‘roles’ are being put together for PC-BSD installs. Or just watch this video.
- PC-BSD and TrueOS version 10.1 released, Lumina 0.7.2 tagged.
- Linux Top 3: PC-BSD 10.1 Linux Mint 17.1 and Mageia 5.
- FreeBSD now supports the Trendnet TEW-646UBH wireless adapter.
- BSD Router Project (bsdrp) version 1.53 is out.
- NetBSD has updated tcpdump/libpcap.
- retiring crypt
- shtk 1.6 now available.
- NYCBSDCon made about $1k for each of the BSDs.
- WhatsApp donate $1MM to the FreeBSD Foundation.
- DiscoverBSD for 2014/11/17.
- Workaday Software For BSD On the Desktop?
- Book Review: Book of PF, 3rd Edition.
BSDNow 064 (somehow, 64 seems a nicer milestone than 50) links to a huge pile of EuroBSDCon 2014 videos, including 2 DragonFly presentations. There’s also an interview with Justin Cormack, who must be cool; I can tell from his name. There’s a lot more material just written on the page after the video, so I’ll point you at the actual content instead of repeating.
I hadn’t caught this yet cause I am working extra hours, but Matthias did: Matthew Dillon talks about DragonFly and the 4.0 release for a good 43 minutes on BSDTalk.
Totally last minute.
- People still add things to telnet?
- FreeBSD has removed faith(4) and faithd(8).
- FreeBSD ports now has stack smashing protection on by default.
- FreeBSD 10.1 is out. (And PC-BSD follows)
- PC-BSd is looking at ‘roles‘.
- Printing device trees in OpenBSD.
- Munin and pf queues.
- Contributing. (Applies to any BSD, really.)
- pkgsrc-2014Q3 packages for illumos available.
- DiscoverBSD for 2014/11/10.
- from the annals of uvm, OpenBSD virtual memory.
- BSD Magazine: Hardened BSD.
- BSDFan, for Thinkpad fans on any? BSD.
- FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials” is less than a month away. The author’s giving a sudo talk soon, too.
BSDNow 063 has the normal news articles and links, and an interview of Kristaps Džonsons, one of the people working on mandoc. There’s also a tutorial on bandwidth throttling with pf.
Snow finally hit my area yesterday, which makes me happy.
- PC-BSD 10.1-RC2 Released.
- FreeBSD 10.1-RC4 now available.
- Building an OpenBSD firewall and router
- Michael W. Lucas’s next book: “Networking for Sysadmins“. BSD-friendly, of course.
- See also: his sci-fi work, not BSD related.
- PC-BSD’s Lumina gains plugins. (one link of several)
- pkgsrc-2014Q3 packages for OSX now available
- OpenBSD adds SipHash.
- OpenBSD has enabled USB3.
- The signed Book of PF made $3000 at auction.
- FreeBSD now uses vt(4) instead of syscons by default.
- Improving bcd(6)