Bsd Now

NetBSD LLVM sanitizers and GDB regression test suite, Ada—The Language of Cost Savings, Homura - a Windows Games Launcher for FreeBSD, FreeBSD core team appoints a WG to explore transition to Git, OpenBSD 6.6 Beta tagged, Project Trident 12-U5 update now available, and more. Headlines LLVM santizers and GDB regression test suite. (http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/llvm_santizers_and_gdb_regression) As NetBSD-9 is branched, I have been asked to finish the LLVM sanitizer integration. This work is now accomplished and with MKLLVM=yes build option (by default off), the distribution will be populated with LLVM files for ASan, TSan, MSan, UBSan, libFuzzer, SafeStack and XRay. I have also transplanted basesystem GDB patched to my GDB repository and managed to run the GDB regression test-suite. NetBSD distribution changes I have enhanced and imported my local MKSANITIZER code that makes whole distribution sanitization possible. Few real bugs were fixed and a number of patches were newly written to reflect the current

vBSDcon 2019 recap, Unix at 50, OpenBSD on fan-less Tuxedo InfinityBook, humungus - an hg server, how to configure a network dump in FreeBSD, and more. Headlines vBSDcon Recap Allan and Benedict attended vBSDcon 2019, which ended last week. It was held again at the Hyatt Regency Reston and the main conference was organized by Dan Langille of BSDCan fame.The two day conference was preceded by a one day FreeBSD hackathon, where FreeBSD developers had the chance to work on patches and PRs. In the evening, a reception was held to welcome attendees and give them a chance to chat and get to know each other over food and drinks. The first day of the conference was opened with a Keynote by Paul Vixie about DNS over HTTPS (DoH). He explained how we got to the current state and what challenges (technical and social) this entails. If you missed this talk and are dying to see it, it will also be presented at EuroBSDCon next week John Baldwin followed up by giving an overview of the work on “In-Kernel TLS Framing and Encr

Unix virtual memory when you have no swap space, Dsynth details on Dragonfly, Instant Workstation on FreeBSD, new servers new tech, Experimenting with streaming setups on NetBSD, NetBSD’s progress towards Steam support thanks to GSoC, and more. Headlines What has to happen with Unix virtual memory when you have no swap space (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/NoSwapConsequence) Recently, Artem S. Tashkinov wrote on the Linux kernel mailing list about a Linux problem under memory pressure (via, and threaded here). The specific reproduction instructions involved having low RAM, turning off swap space, and then putting the system under load, and when that happened (emphasis mine): Once you hit a situation when opening a new tab requires more RAM than is currently available, the system will stall hard. You will barely be able to move the mouse pointer. Your disk LED will be flashing incessantly (I'm not entirely sure why). [...] I'm afraid I have bad news for the people snickering at Linux here; if yo

OpenBSD on 7th gen Thinkpad X1 Carbon, how to install FreeBSD on a MacBook, Kernel portion of in-kernel TLS (KTLS), Boot Environments on DragonflyBSD, Project Trident Updates, vBSDcon schedule, and more. Headlines OpenBSD on the Thinkpad X1 Carbon 7th Gen (https://jcs.org/2019/08/14/x1c7) Another year, another ThinkPad X1 Carbon, this time with a Dolby Atmos sound system and a smaller battery. The seventh generation X1 Carbon isn't much different than the fifth and sixth generations. I opted for the non-vPro Core i5-8265U, 16Gb of RAM, a 512Gb NVMe SSD, and a matte non-touch WQHD display at ~300 nits. A brighter 500-nit 4k display is available, though early reports indicated it severely impacts battery life. Gone are the microSD card slot on the back and 1mm of overall thickness (from 15.95mm to 14.95mm), but also 6Whr of battery (down to 51Whr) and a little bit of travel in the keyboard and TrackPoint buttons. I still very much like the feel of both of them, so kudos to Lenovo for not going too far down the

The UNIX Philosophy in 2019, why use package managers, touchpad interrupted, Porting wine to amd64 on NetBSD second evaluation report, Enhancing Syzkaller Support for NetBSD, all about the Pinebook Pro, killing a process and all of its descendants, fast software the best software, and more. Headlines The UNIX Philosophy in 2019 (https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/6/1_Entry_1.html) Today, Linux and open source rules the world, and the UNIX philosophy is widely considered compulsory. Organizations are striving to build small, focused applications that work collaboratively in a cloud and microservices environment. We rely on the network, as well as HTTP (text) APIs for storing and referencing data. Moreover, nearly all configuration is stored and communicated using text (e.g. YAML, JSON or XML). And while the UNIX philosophy has changed dramatically over the past 5 decades, it hasn’t strayed too far from Ken Thompson’s original definition in 1973: We write programs that do one thing and d

NetBSD 9.0 release process has started, xargs, a tale of two spellcheckers, Adapting TriforceAFL for NetBSD, Exploiting a no-name freebsd kernel vulnerability, and more. Headlines NetBSD 9.0 release process has started (https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-announce/2019/07/31/msg000301.html) If you have been following source-changes, you may have noticed the creation of the netbsd-9 branch! It has some really exciting items that we worked on: + New AArch64 architecture support: + Symmetric and asymmetrical multiprocessing support (aka big.LITTLE) + Support for running 32-bit binaries + UEFI and ACPI support + Support for SBSA/SBBR (server-class) hardware. + The FDT-ization of many ARM boards: + the 32-bit GENERIC kernel lists 129 different DTS configurations + the 64-bit GENERIC64 kernel lists 74 different DTS configurations + All supported by a single kernel, without requiring per-board configuration. + Graphics driver update, matching Linux 4.4, adding support for up to Kaby Lake based Intel graphics

OPNsense 19.7.1 is out, ZFS on Linux still has annoying issues with ARC size, Hammer2 is now default, NetBSD audio – an application perspective, new FreeNAS Mini, and more. Headlines OPNsense 19.7.1 (https://opnsense.org/opnsense-19-7-1-released/) We do not wish to keep you from enjoying your summer time, but this is a recommended security update enriched with reliability fixes for the new 19.7 series. Of special note are performance improvements as well as a fix for a longstanding NAT before IPsec limitation. Full patch notes: system: do not create automatic copies of existing gateways system: do not translate empty tunables descriptions system: remove unwanted form action tags system: do not include Syslog-ng in rc.freebsd handler system: fix manual system log stop/start/restart system: scoped IPv6 "%" could confuse mwexecf(), use plain mwexec() instead system: allow curl-based downloads to use both trusted and local authorities system: fix group privilege print and correctly redirect after edit system: u

DragonFlyBSD Project Update - colo upgrade, future trends, resuming ZFS send, realtime bandwidth terminal graph visualization, fixing telnet fixes, a chapter from the FBI’s history with OpenBSD and an OpenSSH vuln, and more. Headlines DragonFlyBSD Project Update - colo upgrade, future trends (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2019-July/358226.html) For the last week I've been testing out a replacement for Monster, our 48-core opteron server. The project will be removing Monster from the colo in a week or two and replacing it with three machines which together will use half the power that Monster did alone. The goal is to clear out a little power budget in the colo and to really beef-up our package-building capabilities to reduce the turn-around time needed to test ports syncs and updates to the binary package system. Currently we use two blades to do most of the building, plus monster sometimes. The blades take almost a week (120 hours+) to do a full synth run and monster takes around 27.5 hours

Replacing a (silently) failing disk in a ZFS pool, OPNsense 19.7 RC1 released, implementing DRM ioctl support for NetBSD, High quality/low latency VOIP server with umurmur/Mumble on OpenBSD, the PDP-7 where Unix began, LLDB watchpoints, and more. Headlines Replacing a (silently) failing disk in a ZFS pool (https://imil.net/blog/2019/07/02/Replacing-a-silently-failing-disk-in-a-ZFS-pool/) Maybe I can’t read, but I have the feeling that official documentations explain every single corner case for a given tool, except the one you will actually need. My today’s struggle: replacing a disk within a FreeBSD ZFS pool. What? there’s a shitton of docs on this topic! Are you stupid? I don’t know, maybe. Yet none covered the process in a simple, straight and complete manner. OPNsense 19.7 RC1 released (https://opnsense.org/opnsense-19-7-rc1-released/) Hi there, For four and a half years now, OPNsense is driving innovation through modularising and hardening the open source firewall, with simple and reliable firmware upgra

FreeBSD 11.3 has been released, OpenBSD workstation, write your own fuzzer for the NetBSD kernel, Exploiting FreeBSD-SA-19:02.fd, streaming to twitch using OpenBSD, 3 different ways of dumping hex contents of a file, and more. Headlines FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE Announcement (https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.3R/announce.html) The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/11 branch. Some of the highlights: The clang, llvm, lld, lldb, and compiler-rt utilities as well as libc++ have been updated to upstream version 8.0.0. The ELF Tool Chain has been updated to version r3614. OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.0.2s. The ZFS filesystem has been updated to implement parallel mounting. The loader(8) has been updated to extend geli(8) support to all architectures. The pkg(8) utility has been updated to version 1.10.5. The KDE desktop environment has been updated to version 5.15.3. The GNOME desktop environment has been

Am5x86 based retro UNIX build log, setting up services in a FreeNAS Jail, first taste of DragonflyBSD, streaming Netflix on NetBSD, NetBSD on the last G4 Mac mini, Hammer vs Hammer2, and more. Headlines Polprog's Am5x86 based retro UNIX build log (https://polprog.net/blog/486/) I have recently acquired an Am5x86 computer, in a surprisingly good condition. This is an ongoing project, check this page often for updates! I began by connecting a front panel. The panel came from a different chassis and is slightly too wide, so I had to attach it with a couple of zip-ties. However, that makes it stick out from the PC front at an angle, allowing easy access when the computer sits at the floor - and thats where it is most of the time. It's not that bad, to be honest, and its way easier to access than it would be, if mounted vertically There is a mains switch on the front panel because the computer uses an older style power supply. Those power supplies instead of relying on a PSON signal, like modern ATX supplies, run

Website protection with OPNsense, FreeBSD Support Pull Request for ZFS-on-Linux, How much has Unix changed, Porting Wine to amd64 on NetBSD, FreeBSD Enterprise 1 PB Storage, the death watch for X11 has started, and more. Headlines Website protection with OPNsense (https://medium.com/@jccwbb/website-protection-with-opnsense-3586a529d487) with nginx plugin OPNsense become a strong full featured Web Application Firewall (WAF) The OPNsense security platform can help you to protect your network and your webservers with the nginx plugin addition. In old days, install an open source firewall was a very trick task, but today it can be done with few clicks (or key strokes). In this article I'll not describe the detailed OPNsense installation process, but you can watch this video that was extracted from my OPNsense course available in Udemy. The video is in portuguese language, but with the translation CC Youtube feature you may be able to follow it without problems (if you don't are a portuguese speaker ofcourse) :-)

DragonflyBSD 5.6 is out, OpenBSD Vulkan Support, bad utmp implementations in glibc and FreeBSD, OpenSSH protects itself against Side Channel attacks, ZFS vs OpenZFS, and more. Headlines DragonflyBSD 5.6 is out (https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release56) Version 5.6.0 released 17 June 2019 Version 5.6.1 released 19 June 2019 (https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/06/19/23091.html) Big-ticket items Improved VM Informal test results showing the changes from 5.4 to 5.6 are available. Reduce stalls in the kernel vmpagealloc() code (vmpagelist_find()). Improve page allocation algorithm to avoid re-iterating the same queues as the search is widened. Add a vmpagehash*() API that allows the kernel to do heuristical lockless lookups of VM pages. Change vmhold() and vmunhold() semantics to not require any spin-locks. Change vmpagewakeup() to not require any spin-locks. Change wiring vm_page's no longer manipulates the queue the page is on, saving a lot of overhead. Instead, the page will be removed from its queue only if th

OpenZFS-kmod port available, using blacklistd with NPF as fail2ban replacement, ZFS raidz expansion alpha preview 1, audio VU-meter increases CO2 footprint rant, XSAVE and compat32 kernel work for LLDB, where icons for modern X applications come from, and more. Headlines ZFSonFreeBSD ports renamed OpenZFS (https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/openzfs-kmod) The ZFS on FreeBSD project has renamed the userland and kernel ports from zol and zol-kmod to openzfs and openzfs-kmod The new versions from this week are IOCTL compatible with the command line tools in FreeBSD 12.0, so you can use the old userland with the new kernel module (although obviously not the new features) With the renaming it is easier to specify which kernel module you want to load in /boot/loader.conf: > zfs_load=”YES” or > openzfs_load=”YES” To load traditional or the newer version of ZFS The kmod still requires FreeBSD 12-stable or 13-current because it depends on the newer crypto support in the kernel for the ZFS native encryption feature. Al

DragonFlyBSD's kernel optimizations pay off, differences between OpenBSD and Linux, NetBSD 2019 Google Summer of Code project list, Reducing that contention, fnaify 1.3 released, vmctl(8): CLI syntax changes, and things that Linux distributions should not do when packaging. Headlines DragonFlyBSD's Kernel Optimizations Are Paying Off (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=dragonfly-55-threadripper&num=1) DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has been working on a big VM rework in the name of performance and other kernel improvements recently. Here is a look at how those DragonFlyBSD 5.5-DEVELOPMENT improvements are paying off compared to DragonFlyBSD 5.4 as well as FreeBSD 12 and five Linux distribution releases. With Dillon using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper system, we used that too for this round of BSD vs. Linux performance benchmarks. The work by Dillon on the VM overhaul and other changes (including more HAMMER2 file-system work) will ultimately culminate with the DragonFlyBSD 5.6 release

GPU passthrough on bhyve, confusion with used/free disk space on ZFS, OmniOS Community Edition, pfSense 2.4.4 Release p3, NetBSD 8.1 RC1, FreeNAS as your Server OS, and more. Headlines GPU Passthrough Reported Working on Bhyve Normally we cover news focused on KVM and sometimes Xen, but something very special has happened with their younger cousin in the BSD world, Bhyve. For those that don’t know, Bhyve (pronounced bee-hive) is the native hypervisor in FreeBSD. It has many powerful features, but one that’s been a pain point for some years now is VGA passthrough. Consumer GPUs have not been useable until very recently despite limited success with enterprise cards. However, Twitter user Michael Yuji found a workaround that enables passing through a consumer card to any *nix system configured to use X11: https://twitter.com/michael_yuji/status/1127136891365658625 All you have to do is add a line pointing the X server to the Bus ID of the passed card and the VM will boot, with acceleration and e

FreeBSD 11.3-beta 1 is out, BSDCan 2019 recap, OpenIndiana 2019.04 is out, Overview of ZFS Pools in FreeNAS, why open source firmware is important for security, a new Opnsense release, wireguard on OpenBSD, and more. Headlines FreeBSD 11.3-b1 is out BSDCan 2019 Recap We’re back from BSDCan and it was a packed week as always. It started with bhyvecon on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Benedict spent the whole day in productive meetings: annual FreeBSD Foundation board meeting and FreeBSD Journal editorial board meeting. On Wednesday, tutorials for BSDCan started as well as the FreeBSD Developer Summit. In the mornings, there were presentations in the big auditorium, while working groups about networking, failsafe bootcode, development web services, swap space management, and testing/CI were held. Friday had a similar format with an update from the FreeBSD core team and the “have, need, want” session for FreeBSD 13. In the afternoon, there were working groups about translation tools, package base, GSoC/Outreachy, or

Running AIX on QEMU on Linux on Windows, your NAS fleet with TrueCommand, Unleashed 1.3 is available, LLDB: CPU register inspection support extension, V7 Unix programs often not written as expected, and more. Headlines Running AiX on QEMU on Linux on Windows YES it’s real! I’m using the Linux subsystem on Windows, as it’s easier to build this Qemu tree from source. I’m using Debian, but these steps will work on other systems that use Debian as a base. first thing first, you need to get your system with the needed pre-requisites to compile Great with those in place, now clone Artyom Tarasenko’s source repository Since the frame buffer apparently isn’t quite working just yet, I configure for something more like a text mode build. Now for me, GCC 7 didn’t build the source cleanly. I had to make a change to the file config-host.mak and remove all references to -Werror. Also I removed the sound hooks, as we won’t need them. Now you can build Qemu. Okay, all being well you now have a Qemu. Now fo

36 year old UFS bug fixed, a BSD for the road, automatic upgrades with OpenBSD, DTrace ext2fs support in FreeBSD, Dedicated SSH tunnel user, upgrading VMM VMs to OpenBSD 6.5, and more. Headlines 36+ year old bug in FFS/UFS discovered and patched This update eliminates a kernel stack disclosure bug in UFS/FFS directory entries that is caused by uninitialized directory entry padding written to the disk. When the directory entry is written to disk, it is written as a full 32bit entry, and the unused bytes were not initialized, so could possibly contain sensitive data from the kernel stack It can be viewed by any user with read access to that directory. Up to 3 bytes of kernel stack are disclosed per file entry, depending on the the amount of padding the kernel needs to pad out the entry to a 32 bit boundary. The offset in the kernel stack that is disclosed is a function of the filename size. Furthermore, if the user can create files in a directory, this 3 byte window can be expanded 3 bytes at a