FreeBSD – Page 24 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2014/05/172014/05/17

In Other BSDs for 2014/05/17

Some leftovers from last week since I’m catching up, so get ready to read.

What’s wrong with systemd. Matches some of my thoughts – Linux is transitioning from being against the monolith of Microsoft, to assuming a dominant place. (via)
DiscoverBSD summary for 2014/05/12.
PC-BSD Digest 28 has images of the new AppCafe.
PC-BSD Digest 29 summarizes how PBIs are changing (for the better).
NanoBSD and Raspberry Pi. (via)
UNIX: Automating your server inventory (Mostly can apply to BSD systems)
BSD Magazine for April: Free Pascal and other topics.
LibreSSL will be portable. I still want a portable pf.
FreeBSD 8.3 is EOL.
Epoch, an init replacement to avoid systemd, may work on OpenBSD.
DMARC is causing some changes for FreeBSD mailing lists. (hey, this will affect DragonFly, too, maybe.)
The pkgsrc-wip@ mailing lists are now switched to tech-pkg@ for NetBSD.
OpenBSD now stack-shuffles.
FreeBSD has added the mrsas(4) driver. (Why doesn’t it show up in a man page search at the site?)
Sometimes, Google DTRT.
FreeBSD has added the LM75 i2c temp sensor driver.
JabirOS 2.0, a fork from FreeBSD 10.
Michael W. Lucas has some notes from the pre-BSDCan FreeBSD Devsummit.
If you dig into the BSDCan schedule, some of the presentation have slides linked. Undeadly has linked to a number of them directly.

2014/05/12

Atheros updates for sleep

Matthew Dillon brought in Adrian Chadd’s sleep state changes for the ath(4) driver from FreeBSD to DragonFly; you may see reduced power usage if you have the appropriate hardware.

2014/05/062014/05/01

NYCBUG tomorrow: Bhyve

NYCBUG has a presentation from John Baldwin, happening on the 7th (tomorrow!), all about Bhyve, the BSD hypervisor.

2014/05/032014/05/03

In Other BSDs for 2014/05/03

Updated late this week because of circumstances.

Michael W. Lucas is appearing at PenguinCon.
Do you use Kerberos or SRP in libssl? Ted Unangst wants to know. (Thanks, Amit Kulkarni)
Speaking of which, OpenSSH no longer requires OpenSSL.
OpenBSD 5.5 is out.
BSD for embedded devices?
The FreeBSD Foundation has a spring fundraising campaign started.
PC-BSD has a FAQ up for their new Lumina desktop environment.Writing your own desktop environment is a lot of work. Supporting all the Linuxisms in the existing ones is possibly worse…
pkgsrc Perl package status is now automatically generated.
Peek and poke freely on FreeBSD.
PC-BSD’s new AppCafe handles package management – or at least the interface. I haven’t looked hard enough to know if it’s using pkg.
CheriBSD is feeding back.
OpenSSH is getting pulled into parts?
/dev/full is always what it says it is. (related: lindev(4) is gone.)
OpenBSD 5.5 is out. Here’s the signing policy that goes with it.

2014/04/30

A pkg 1.3 change to enjoy

The pkg tool, used in DragonFly (and FreeBSD) for ports, is at version 1.2. Version 1.3 will apparently be able to solve the problem where one port is ended and replaced with another. This is a problem that’s been around forever, and I don’t just mean with pkg. I don’t know how soon 1.3 will be out, or what version FreeBSD is at.

2014/04/192014/04/18

In Other BSDs for 2014/04/19

I’ve got “coverage” of most every BSD this week.

OpenBSD has brought in OpenSSL – and is modifying it severely. Instead of linking to the many commits as they tear it into little bits, I’ll just link to this Lobste.rs post. Will it be OpenOpenSSL? It looks like it’s for internal consumption only. Undeadly has a similar summation. Apparently there’s a running blog of the changes, or at least the snarky comments.
Have you never been to BSDCan? Dan Langille asks the question. As he points out, BSD conventions are awesome, where you get to meet some smart people and put names to faces.
“I have been given the option of Linux or BSD at work…” A discussion of BSD as a Java development platform.
FreeBSD has added the if_nf10bmac(4) driver, for the “NetFPGA-10G Embedded CPU Ethernet Core”, which appears to be a programmable network card? I’m not sure how it all works together.
Goodbye EISA on FreeBSD. (Gone long ago on DragonFly.)
NetBSD src and pkgsrc changes are being twittered. (NetBSD link does not work just now when I tried it.)
PC-BSD Digest 26 mentions the addition of a new desktop environment called Lumina, built just for PC-BSD.

2014/04/122014/04/11

In Other BSDs for 2014/04/12

Some out-of-the-ordinary things this week.

BSDTV, a new YouTube channel. It has several videos from the recent NYCBSDCon.
pfSense 2.1.1 is out. No, wait, it’s 2.1.2!
Installing packages from a custom FreeBSD repository. Applies to DragonFly, too.
DiscoverBSD’s news summary for 2014/04/07.
A partially tongue-in-cheek suggestion for an OpenOpenSSL.
FreeBSDNews.net is now owned by? maintained by? iXSystems, which seems to be singlehandedly building as much FreeBSD ecosystem as possible – that’s good!
Bitrig is dropping i386 support.
FreeBSD Journal #2 is out.
The OpenBSD Foundation reached their goal for the year.
The FreeBSD Foundation is kicking off their campaign.
PC-BSD Digest 25 is out.
Mount your NetBSD ISO directly from the file server.
FreeBSD supports UDP-Lite, which appears to be the network protocol equivalent of turning over a bucket of ball bearings and saying “Grab what you can.”
OpenBSD starts to bring back 4.4BSD more.
Peter N. M. Hansteen wants to know what you do with OpenBSD in a conference-presentationish sort of way. Specifically, EuroBSDCon.
Jordan Hubbard talks about compiler choices for FreeBSD, and points out that the processor choices these days are Intel or ARM, and that’s it.

2014/04/08

Heartbleed and BSD

If you didn’t know what the Heartbleed bug is, here’s your explanation, plus details. (via). You should probably update your systems.

2014/04/052014/04/05

In Other BSDs for 2014/04/05

Another week.

BSDCan 2014 will have the BSD Professional Certification exam available (as beta)
“The Design And Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System” second edition, is up for pre-order. (comments are rude/funny.)
The DiscoverBSD summary for 2014/03/31.
The PC-BSD Digest 24.
reop, an follow-up from OpenBSD’s signify
The FreeBSDNews link roundup.
Michael W. Lucas follows up on a prank with a description of how to get a BSD convention going.
Peter N. M. Hansteen wants feedback on his BSDCan tutorials.
Joystick support always sounds like a good idea.
The Playstation 2 is back as a NetBSD platform.
Turn partitions into disk images on FreeBSD.
You can possibly create x86 USB images with NetBSD. (you couldn’t before?)
NetBSD imported starsign, for signing data. Since it’s an external program, I tried searching for its origin… Google failed spectacularly, with astrology links galore.
NetBSD also added dust, which appears to be a sensible utility. (Update: both this and starsign apparently written by Alistair Crooks.)
I didn’t know serial ports could go this fast.
pkgsrc-2014Q1 is out.
Pkgsrc is looking at signing packages, too.
Some conversation about building machines with a bunch of network ports. From openbsd-misc, but probably applies across the board.
Video of the April 1 NYCBUG presentation on random number generation is available.

2014/04/012014/04/01

Editor too big

Normally I don’t bother linking to things on/around April 1st, but these two are good and arrived early.

Update: apparently fake source changes is a thing.

2014/03/222014/03/28

In Other BSDs for 2014/03/22

I have a list of commits I’ve saved between the various BSDs of licenses getting corrected to the 2-clause BSD license; that would definitely be a good cross-BSD project to sync.

DiscoverBSD has a free KVM VPS for the taking – if you write about the BSD-specific thing you are doing with it.
Also, DiscoverBSD’s news summary for the 17th.
OpenBSD packages are generally up to date. The place I found this linked has comments noting the need to run multiple versions of Ruby to test – even multiple subversions, like different revisions of 1.9.x. I think that points at a different problem…
There’s mg, which is a ‘micro GNU/Emacs’, found in OpenBSD. There’s also apparently a portable version. (via)
OpenBSD’s upd(4) needs testing.
OpenBSD has switched to Unbound, and it is apparently easy to enable DNSSEC.
I didn’t expect rcp to be removed from OpenBSD, or a Thulsa Doom reference.
Two small package managers for OpenBSD: sqlport and pkg_mgr.
The hp300, mvme68k and mvme88k ports are gone from OpenBSD.
If you’re using pkgsrc, php-fpm may be a better module than mod_php.
FreeBSD has a faster SHA2.
pkgsrcCon 2014’s Call for Papers is up.
PC-BSD Digest 22.
Hubert Feyrer has linked some NetBSD-specific slides from AsiaBSDCon 2014.
Michael W. Lucas’s NYCBSDCon 2014 talk is up on Youtube.

2014/03/152014/03/15

In Other BSDs for 2014/03/15

Another week with lots of links.

DiscoverBSD’s summary for 2014/03/10.
PC-BSD Digest 21 – 10.0.1 release.
FreeBSDNews needs a new maintainer. (am I the old man of BSD blogs? Yeesh.)
FreeBSDNews also has two FreeNAS videos.
OpenBSD is starting on USB 3 support. I assume this is separate from USB4BSD?
OpenBSD has moved to OpenSMTPD by default.
Hubert Feyrer has a summary of recent ARM developments in NetBSD.
The 2014Q1 freeze for pkgsrc starts effectively today, lasting two weeks.
Eric Radman pointed out that non-linear editing is possible on the BSDs using Blender, and here’s a tutorial.
FreeBSD had an ABI change, so rebuild carefully on master.
Man pages added by Microsoft to FreeBSD. It makes sense, but it still makes me pause.
Apache is out of OpenBSD base.
The window manager cwm has been made portable, meaning it’s not just for OpenBSD now.
IPX and AppleTalk have been removed from FreeBSD.

2014/03/10

Setting up Poudriere

Poudriere is the tool for building all of ports/dports, and Michael W. Lucas has written up his experience using it to build a custom ports set. He’s doing on FreeBSD, but if you ignore the geom-specific parts, it should generally apply to DragonFly.

2014/03/082014/03/08

In Other BSDs for 2014/03/08

Links everywhere this week!

ZFS 101. This might be the same material presented at NYCBSDCon; I’m not sure.
Installing FreeBSD 10 to ZFS with a script.
The DiscoverBSD summary for 2014/03/03.
PC-BSD Weekly Digest 20.
Theo De Raadt questions for a Slashdot interview.
OpenSMTPD 5.4.2 is released.
Introduction to FreeNAS development.
GhostBSD activity. (via)
FreeNAS is now 64-bit only. (via)
OpenBSD package building on larger machines.
pkgsrcCon 2014 is happening June 21-22 in London, UK.
The schedule for BSDCan 2014 is out.
Merkletrees. Don’t know what it’s for; just like the name.
NetBSD has a versioning system called ‘bikeshed’. It appears to mostly be plans at this point.
OpenBSD has added qlw(4), a driver for QLogic ISP SCSI HBAs.
Apparently some quirks from decades ago still survive.
Random is more random on BSD than on Linux. (see last paragraph) (via)
If you keep an emergency towel, you may get this joke.

2014/03/012014/02/28

In Other BSDs for 2014/03/01

Another week where I barely need to look up source code commits.

PC-BSD Weekly Digest 18 and Digest 19.
OpenBSD’s signify tool has been backported to OpenBSD versions < 5.5.
Video of an OpenBSD install.
xorg, unprivileged on OpenBSD. (via)
This is a good idea: FreeBSD 10’s release.sh mapped out.
bcrypt() updates in OpenBSD and what it means for you. (also)
iXSystem’s NYCBSDCon 2014 recap. (via nycbug-talk)
A description of those expensive/busy WhatsApp FreeBSD servers. (via)
FreeBSD and Linux, a comparative analysis. (via #nycbug)
NetBSD is bringing in BIND 9.10.0b1. (a beta?)
NetBSD is also in the process of moving from gcc 4.5 to 4.8.
Yes, You Too Can Be An Evil Network Overlord. I still haven’t set up the Netflow system that I want to set up, dangit.
pkg will require libucl. This affects FreeBSD and will affect DragonFly too.
OpenBSD has an experimental USB installer. This may be new to the upcoming release – I don’t know.

2014/02/25

Spreading DMA

The DragonFly Mail Agent is being suggested as a possible sendmail replacement for FreeBSD.

2014/02/222014/02/21

In Other BSDs for 2014/02/22

Read the first item, if nothing else.

You may have seen that Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19B; take a look at the graph here to see that WhatsApp has more than double the user count of Facebook, and then look at these two posts on NYCBUG talk noting that WhatsApp uses FreeBSD to serve all those people.
DiscoverBSD’s 2014/02/17 summary.
DiscoverBSD has an interview of Kent Riboe, maintainer of BSDEater.org, which appears to be a BSD RSS feed aggregator. I find the last sentence problematic: “…people shouldn’t need to read first half on one site and then click it to read the following part somewhere else.” I’d like people to read my words on my site, at some point, especially given that 75% of the text on bsdeater.org appear to be me.
GNOME 3 on OpenBSD, on Undeadly. There’s more effort than I realized being put into this.
How to build FreeBSD/EC2 images. (via)
Synopsys bought Coverity. Coverity provided free source code analysis for FreeBSD; no idea if that will continue. (via swildner on #dragonflybsd)
PC-BSD needs testers for a new upgrade method.
Goodbye nve(4), hello nfe(4).
FreeBSD has Synchronous Audio Interface (SAI) support. (Freescale-specific)
NetBSD has imported SQLite 3.8.3.1.
Some discussion of OpenBSD rootkits, or the lack thereof.
Power failure resistance.
LIBC_BUILTINS is no longer used in pkgsrc.

2014/02/192014/02/19

Tokyo meeting and Open Network Hardware

I was remiss in not posting this before it happened, but Issac (.ike) Levy of NYCBUG went to Tokyo to talk about the translation efforts for pfSense, on the 17th. He posted a summary of his talk and slides.

Normally I would be posting this in an “In Other BSDs” Saturday item, but the summary page includes links on Open Network Hardware, which .ike and I talked about at NYCBSDCon. I wanted to create a separate post for it, but he’s got all the links piled in with his talk summary already.

The hardware I want to see as a real product is the Intel ONP Switch Reference Design. (PDF) Having a device that looks like a switch but is actually a normal computer with a lot of network ports – that can run BSD – opens up a huge range of network possibilities.

2014/02/152014/02/16

In Other BSDs for 2014/02/15

Lots of links, yet again.

Michael W. Lucas intends to have more BSD books out this year – at least 2. He goes into great detail on his plans. He hints at other authors with material on the way.
BSD-linked Twitter accounts. I like finding accounts of individual developers, so you can see what projects people are working on. (plz suggest)
The PC-BSD Weekly Digest 16 and number 17.
The latest freebsdnews.net summary.
Another BSD-based product I didn’t know about.
FreeBSD has a new version of netmap.
NetBSD and FreeBSD have brought in version 2.0 of ATF, the Automated Test Framework.
FreeBSD has imported OpenBSD’s RNDIS framework.
More cross-BSD fixes.
Found through this OpenBSD sendmail upgrade: Sendmail, Inc., is now owned by a company called Proofpoint? A ‘security-as-a-service’ provider. I don’t know how to feel about this.
OpenBSD has Intel Centrino Wireless-N 2230, 2200/105/135 support.
OpenBSD supports qle(4), the QLogic ISP24xx fibre channel HBA.
First Impressions of FreeBSD 10 on Distrowatch. (via)
The minimum acceptable OpenSSL for pkgsrc has been bumped up.
Undeadly has several n2k14 hackathon reports.
Ahem. (via Freenode #nycbug)

2014/02/082014/02/06

In Other BSDs for 2014/02/08

As you read this, I’m at NYCBSDCon – or at least should be.

FOSDEM 2014 videos are up. The second item listed is about the new version of ports, which includes dports. (via)
Crochet-FreeBSD, a system for building bootable FreeBSD images for a variety of platforms including x86, ARM, and VM. (via Markus Pfieffer on IRC, indirectly)
Effective Spam and Malware Countermeasures. Seen previously at BSDCan. ‘Greytrapping’, mentioned in the article, is new to me.
Email delivery headaches. Mailing many people is somehow almost always a low-level irritation.
DiscoverBSD’s 2014/02/03 roundup.
Another n2k14 hackathon report. DragonFly uses that DHCP client he’s talking about.
PC-BSD on eWeek.
bsd-cloudinit – FreeBSD on OpenStack. (via)
OpenBSD gained some VAX hardware. The only VAX hardware I ever saw was 6 feet tall; I can’t imagine these are easy to ship.
OpenBSD updated to ldns 1.6.17.
Seen via a pkgsrc list: Berlios.de is closing down its hosting, so this may affect you if you usually grab your pkgsrc packages from there.
The proper way to break the FreeBSD ABI.
Robert Watson’s privilege ideas.
How to switch between mfi(4) and mrsas(4) on FreeBSD. mrsas(4) sounds like MRSA to me, which is a bit more worrisome
FreeBSD supports MegaRAID Fury cards.
The plan for ATF removal in NetBSD.
DragonFly takes the FreeBSD patch(1) updates, and that’s fine, because FreeBSD made those changes to an import of DragonFly’s patch(1). Hooray for cross-pollination!