Bsd Now

OpenBSD 6.7 on PC Engines, NetBSD code study, DRM Update on OpenBSD, Booting FreeBSD on HPE Microserver SATA port, 3 ways to multiboot, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/) Headlines OpenBSD 6.7 on PC Engines APU4D4 (https://www.tumfatig.net/20200530/openbsd-6-7-on-pc-engines-apu4d4/) I just got myself a PC Engines APU4D4. I miss an OpenBSD box providing home services. It’s quite simple to install and run OpenBSD on this machine. And you can even update the BIOS from OpenBSD. NetBSD code study (http://silas.net.br/codereading/netbsd-code.html) News Roundup Booting FreeBSD off the HPE MicroServer Gen8 ODD SATA port (https://rubenerd.com/booting-freebsd-off-the-microserver-odd-sata-port/) My small homelab post generated a ton of questions and comments, most of them specific to running FreeBSD on the HP MicroServer. I’ll try and answer these over the coming week. Josh Paxton emailed to ask how I got FreeBSD booting on it, given the unconventional booting

TrueNAS is Multi-OS, Encrypted ZFS on NetBSD, FreeBSD’s new Code of Conduct, Gaming on OpenBSD, dig a little deeper, Hammer2 and periodic snapshots, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/) Headlines TrueNAS is Multi-OS (https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/truenas-multi-os/) There was a time in history where all that mattered was an Operating System (OS) and the hardware it ran on — the “pre-software era”, if you will. Your hardware dictated the OS you used. Once software applications became prominent, your hardware’s OS determined the applications you could run. Application vendors were forced to juggle the burden of “portability” between OS platforms, choosing carefully the operating systems they’d develop their software to. Then, there were the great OS Wars of the 1990s, replete with the rampant competition, licensing battles, and nasty lawsuits, which more or less gave birth to the “open source OS” era. The advent of the hypervisor simultaneously gave way

Upgrading OpenBSD, Where do Unix man pages come from?, Help for NetBSD’s VAX port, FreeBSD on Dell Latitude 7390, PFS Tool changes in DragonflyBSD, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/) Headlines How to Upgrade OpenBSD and Build a Kernel (https://cromwell-intl.com/open-source/openbsd-kernel.html) Let's see how to upgrade your OpenBSD system. Maybe you are doing this because the latest release just came out. If so, this is pretty simple: back up your data, boot from install media, and select "Upgrade" instead of "Install". But maybe the latest release has been out for a few months. Why would we go through the trouble of building and installing a new kernel or other core system components? Maybe some patches have been released to improve system security or stability. It is pretty easy to build and install a kernel on OpenBSD, easier and simpler in many ways than it is on Linux. The History of man pages (https://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html) Where do UNIX

FreeBSD 11.4-RC 2 available, OpenBSD 6.7 on a PineBook Pro 64, How OpenZFS Keeps Your Data Safe, Bringing FreeBSD to EC2, FreeBSD 2020 Community Survey, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/) Headlines FreeBSD 11.4-RC2 Now Available (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2020-May/092320.html) The second RC build of the 11.4-RELEASE release cycle is now available. + 11.4-RELEASE notes (https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.4R/relnotes.html) (still in progress at the time of recording) Install OpenBSD 6.7-current on a PineBook Pro 64 (https://xosc.org/pinebookpro.html) This document is work in progress and I'll update the date above once I change something. If you have something to add, remarks, etc please contact me. Preferably via Mastodon but other means of communication are also fine. News Roundup Understanding How OpenZFS Keeps Your Data Safe (https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/openzfs-keeps-your-data-safe/) Veteran technology writer Jim Salter

Scheduling in NetBSD, ZFS vs. RAID on Ironwolf disks, OpenBSD on Microsoft Surface Go 2, FreeBSD for Linux sysadmins, FreeBSD on Lenovo T480, and more. NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/) Headlines Scheduling in NetBSD – Part 1 (https://manikishan.wordpress.com/2020/05/10/scheduling-in-netbsd-part-1/) In this blog, we will discuss about the 4.4BSD Thread scheduler one of the two schedulers in NetBSD and a few OS APIs that can be used to control the schedulers and get information while executing. ZFS versus RAID: Eight Ironwolf disks, two filesystems, one winner (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/zfs-versus-raid-eight-ironwolf-disks-two-filesystems-one-winner/) This has been a long while in the making—it's test results time. To truly understand the fundamentals of computer storage, it's important to explore the impact of various conventional RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) topologies on performance. It's also important to understand what ZFS is

A brief introduction to randomness, logs grinding netatalk to a halt, NetBSD core team changes, Using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests, WireGuard patchset for OpenBSD, FreeBSD 12.1 on a laptop, and more. Headlines Entropy (https://washbear.neocities.org/entropy.html) A brief introduction to randomness Problem: Computers are very predictable. This is by design. But what if we want them to act unpredictably? This is very useful if we want to secure our private communications with randomized keys, or not let people cheat at video games, or if we're doing statistical simulations or similar. Logs grinding Netatalk on FreeBSD to a hault (https://rubenerd.com/logs-grinding-netatalk-on-freebsd-to-a-hault/) I’ve heard it said the cobbler’s children walk barefoot. While posessing the qualities of a famed financial investment strategy, it speaks to how we generally put more effort into things for others than ourselves; at least in business. The HP Microserver I share with Clara is a modest affair compared to

Backup and Restore on NetBSD, OpenBSD 6.7 available, Building a WireGuard Jail with FreeBSD's standard tools, who gets to chown things and quotas, influence TrueNAS CORE roadmap, and more. Headlines Backup and Restore on NetBSD (https://e17i.github.io/articles-netbsd-backup/) Putting together the bits and pieces of a backup and restore concept, while not being rocket science, always seems to be a little bit ungrateful. Most Admin Handbooks handle this topic only within few pages. After replacing my old Mac Mini's OS by NetBSD, I tried to implement an automated backup, allowing me to handle it similarly to the time machine backups I've been using before. Suggestions on how to improve are always welcome. BSD Release: OpenBSD 6.7 (https://distrowatch.com/?newsid=10921) The OpenBSD project produces and operating system which places focus on portability, standardisation, code correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography. The project's latest release is OpenBSD 6.7 which introduces several new improv

5x if_bridge Performance Improvement, How Unix Won, Understanding VLAN Configuration on FreeBSD, Using bhyve PCI passthrough on OmniOS, TrueNAS 11.3-U2 Available, and more. Headlines 5x if_bridge Performance Improvement (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/500-if_bridge-performance-improvement/) With FreeBSD Foundation grant, Kristof Provost harnesses new parallel techniques to uncork performance bottleneck + Kristof also streamed some of his work, providing an interesting insight into how such development work happens + > https://www.twitch.tv/provostk/videos How Unix Won (https://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/617189040564928512/how-unix-won) +> Unix has won in every conceivable way. And in true mythic style, it contains the seeds of its own eclipse. This is my subjective historical narrative of how that happened. I’m using the name “Unix” to include the entire family of operating systems descended from it, or that have been heavily influenced by it. That includes Linux, SunOS, Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X, and ma

Encrypted Crash Dumps in FreeBSD, Time on Unix, Improve ZVOL sync write performance with a taskq, central log host with syslog-ng, NetBSD Entropy overhaul, Setting Up NetBSD Kernel Dev Environment, and more. Headlines EKCD - Encrypted Crash Dumps in FreeBSD (https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/74/) Some time ago, I was describing how to configure networking crash dumps. In that post, I mentioned that there is also the possibility to encrypt crash dumps. Today we will look into this functionality. Initially, it was implemented during Google Summer of Code 2013 by my friend Konrad Witaszczyk, who made it available in FreeBSD 12. If you can understand Polish, you can also look into his presentation on BSD-PL on which he gave a comprehensive review of all kernel crash dumps features. The main issue with crash dumps is that they may include sensitive information available in memory during a crash. They will contain all the data from the kernel and the userland, like passwords, private keys, etc. While dumping them,

FuryBSD 2020Q2 Images Available, Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux, Ars technica reviews GhostBSD, “TLS Mastery” sponsorships open, BSD community show their various collections, a tale of OpenBSD secure memory allocator internals, learn to stop worrying and love SSDs, and more. Headlines FuryBSD 2020Q2 Images Available for XFCE and KDE (https://www.furybsd.org/furybsd-2020-q2-images-are-available-for-xfce-and-kde/) The Q2 2020 images are not a visible leap forward but a functional leap forward. Most effort was spent creating a better out of box experience for automatic Ethernet configuration, working WiFi, webcam, and improved hypervisor support. Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (https://unixsheikh.com/articles/technical-reasons-to-choose-freebsd-over-linux.html) Since I wrote my article "Why you should migrate everything from Linux to BSD" I have been wanting to write something about the technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux and while I cannot possibly cover

Rethinking OpenBSD security, FreeBSD 2020 Q1 status report, the notion of progress and user interfaces, Comments about Thomas E. Dickey on NetBSD curses, making Unix a little more Plan9-like, Not-actually Linux distro review: FreeBSD, and more. Headlines Rethinking OpenBSD Security (https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/rethinking-openbsd-security) OpenBSD aims to be a secure operating system. In the past few months there were quite a few security errata, however. That’s not too unusual, but some of the recent ones were a bit special. One might even say bad. The OpenBSD approach to security has a few aspects, two of which might be avoiding errors and minimizing the risk of mistakes. Other people have other ideas about how to build secure systems. I think it’s worth examining whether the OpenBSD approach works, or if this is evidence that it’s doomed to failure. I picked a few errata, not all of them, that were interesting and happened to suit my narrative. FreeBSD 2020 Q1 Quarterly report (https://www.freebsd.org/

Tales from a core file, Lenovo X260 BIOS Update with OpenBSD, the problem of Unix iowait and multi-CPU machines, Hugo workflow using FreeBSD Jails, Caddy, Restic; extending NetBSD-7 branch support, a tale of two hypervisor bugs, and more. Headlines Tales From a Core File - Lessons from the Unix stdio ABI: 40 Years Later (https://fingolfin.org/blog/20200327/stdio-abi.html) On the side, I’ve been wrapping up some improvements to the classic Unix stdio libraries in illumos. stdio contains the classic functions like fopen(), printf(), and the security nightmare gets(). While working on support for fmemopen() and friends I got to reacquaint myself with some of the joys of the stdio ABI and its history from 7th Edition Unix. With that in mind, let’s dive into this, history, and some mistakes not to repeat. While this is written from the perspective of the C programming language, aspects of it apply to many other languages. Update Lenovo X260 BIOS with OpenBSD (https://www.tumfatig.net/20200331/update-lenovo-x260-bi

NetBSD 8.2 is available, NextCloud on OpenBSD, X11 screen locking, NetBSD and RISC OS running parallel, community feedback about switching to BSD, and more. Headlines NetBSD 8.2 is available! (http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_8_2_is_available) The third release in the NetBSD-8 is now available. This release includes all the security fixes in NetBSD-8 up until this point, and other fixes deemed important for stability. Some highlights include: x86: fixed regression in booting old CPUs x86: Hyper-V Gen.2 VM framebuffer support httpd(8): fixed various security issues ixg(4): various fixes / improvements x86 efiboot: add tftp support, fix issues on machines with many memory segments, improve graphics mode logic to work on more machines. Various kernel memory info leaks fixes Update expat to 2.2.8 Fix ryzen USB issues and support xHCI version 3.10. Accept root device specification as NAME=label. Add multiboot 2 support to x86 bootloaders. Fix for CVE-2019-9506: 'Key Negotiation of Bluetooth' attack. nouveau

Shell text processing, data rebalancing on ZFS mirrors, Add Security Headers with OpenBSD relayd, ZFS filesystem hierarchy in ZFS pools, speeding up ZSH, How Unix pipes work, grow ZFS pools over time, the real reason ifconfig on Linux is deprecated, clear your terminal in style, and more. Headlines Text processing in the shell (https://blog.balthazar-rouberol.com/text-processing-in-the-shell) This article is part of a self-published book project by Balthazar Rouberol and Etienne Brodu, ex-roommates, friends and colleagues, aiming at empowering the up and coming generation of developers. We currently are hard at work on it! One of the things that makes the shell an invaluable tool is the amount of available text processing commands, and the ability to easily pipe them into each other to build complex text processing workflows. These commands can make it trivial to perform text and data analysis, convert data between different formats, filter lines, etc. When working with text data, the philosophy is to break a

Fighting the Coronavirus with FreeBSD, Wireguard VPN Howto in OPNsense, NomadBSD 1.3.1 available, fresh GhostBSD 20.02, New FuryBSD XFCE and KDE images, pf-badhost 0.3 released, and more. Headlines Fighting the Coronavirus with FreeBSD (https://www.leidinger.net/blog/2020/03/19/fighting-the-coronavirus-with-freebsd-foldinghome/) Here is a quick HOWTO for those who want to provide some FreeBSD based compute resources to help finding vaccines. UPDATE 2020-03-22: 0mp@ made a port out of this, it is in “biology/linux-foldingathome”. Per default it will now pick up some SARS-CoV‑2 (COVID-19) related folding tasks. There are some more config options (e.g. how much of the system resources are used). Please refer to the official Folding@Home site for more information about that. Be also aware that there is a big rise in compute resources donated to Folding@Home, so the pool of available work units may be empty from time to time, but they are working on adding more work units. Be patient. How to configure the Wireguar

OpenBSD Full disk encryption with coreboot and tianocore, FreeBSD 12.0 EOL, ZFS DVA layout, OpenBSD’s Go situation, AD updates requires changes in TrueNAS and FreeNAS, full name of FreeBSD’s root account, and more. Headlines OpenBSD Full Disk Encryption with CoreBoot and Tianocore Payload (https://functionallyparanoid.com/2020/03/07/openbsd-full-disk-encryption-with-coreboot-and-tianocore-payload/) It has been a while since I have posted here so I wanted to share something that was surprisingly difficult for me to figure out. I have a Thinkpad T440p that I have flashed with Coreboot 4.11 with some special patches that allow the newer machine to work. When I got the laptop, the default BIOS was UEFI and I installed two operating systems. Windows 10 with bitlocker full disk encryption on the “normal” drive (I replaced the spinning 2.5″ disk with an SSD) Ubuntu 19.10 on the m.2 SATA drive that I installed using LUKS full disk encryption I purchased one of those carriers for the optical bay that allows you to i

FreeBSD on Power, DragonflyBSD 5.8 is here, Unifying FreeNAS/TrueNAS, OpenBSD vs. Prometheus and Go, gcc 4.2.1 removed from FreeBSD base, and more. Headlines FreeBSD on Power (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/power-to-the-people-making-freebsd-a-first-class-citizen-on-power/) The power and promise of all open source software is freedom. Another way to express freedom is choice — choice of platforms, deployment models, stacks, configurations, etc. The FreeBSD Foundation is dedicated to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide. But, what does this mean, exactly, you may wonder. The truth is it means many different things, but in all cases the Foundation acts to expand freedom and choice so that FreeBSD users have the power to serve their varied compute needs. This blog tells the story of one specific way the Foundation helps a member of the community provide greater hardware choice for all FreeBSD users. Dragonfly 5.8 (https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release58/) DragonFly version

Why ZFS is doing filesystem checksumming right, better TMPFS throughput performance on DragonFlyBSD, reshaping pools with ZFS, PKGSRC on Manjaro aarch64 Pinebook-pro, central log host with syslog-ng on FreeBSD, and more. Headlines Checksumming in filesystems, and why ZFS is doing it right (https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/73/) One of the best aspects of ZFS is its reliability. This can be accomplished using a few features like copy-on-write approach and checksumming. Today we will look at how ZFS does checksumming and why it does it the proper way. Most of the file systems don’t provide any integrity checking and fail in several scenarios: Data bit flips - when the data that we wanted to store are bit flipped by the hard drives, or cables, and the wrong data is stored on the hard drive. Misdirected writes - when the CPU/cable/hard drive will bit flip a block to which the data should be written. Misdirected read - when we miss reading the block when a bit flip occurred. Phantom writes - when the write operat

Meet FuryBSD, NetBSD 9.0 has been released, OpenBSD Foundation 2019 campaign wrapup, a retrospective on OmniOS ZFS-based NFS fileservers, NetBSD Fundraising 2020 goal, OpenSSH 8.2 released, and more.## Headlines Meet FuryBSD: A New Desktop BSD Distribution (https://itsfoss.com/furybsd/) At its heart, FuryBSD is a very simple beast. According to the site, “FuryBSD is a back to basics lightweight desktop distribution based on stock FreeBSD.” It is basically FreeBSD with a desktop environment pre-configured and several apps preinstalled. The goal is to quickly get a FreeBSD-based system running on your computer. You might be thinking that this sounds a lot like a couple of other BSDs that are available, such as NomadBSD and GhostBSD. The major difference between those BSDs and FuryBSD is that FuryBSD is much closer to stock FreeBSD. For example, FuryBSD uses the FreeBSD installer, while others have created their own installers and utilities. As it states on the site, “Although FuryBSD may resemble past graphical

Distrowatch reviews FuryBSD, LLDB on i386 for NetBSD, wpa_supplicant as lower-class citizen, KDE on FreeBSD updates, Travel Grant for BSDCan open, ZFS dataset for testing iocage within a jail, and more. Headlines Distrowatch Fury BSD Review (https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20200127#furybsd) FuryBSD is the most recent addition to the DistroWatch database and provides a live desktop operating system based on FreeBSD. FuryBSD is not entirely different in its goals from NomadBSD, which we discussed recently. I wanted to take this FreeBSD-based project for a test drive and see how it compares to NomadBSD and other desktop-oriented projects in the FreeBSD family. FuryBSD supplies hybrid ISO/USB images which can be used to run a live desktop. There are two desktop editions currently, both for 64-bit (x86_64) machines: Xfce and KDE Plasma. The Xfce edition is 1.4GB in size and is the flavour I downloaded. The KDE Plasma edition is about 3.0GB in size. My fresh install of FuryBSD booted to a graphical login s