AsiaBSDcon review, Meltdown and Spectre Patches in FreeBSD stable, Interview with MidnightBSD founder, 8 months with TrueOS, mysteries of GNU and BSD split

Speculative execution vulnerability mitigation is a work in progress. This advisory addresses the most significant issues for FreeBSD 11.1 on amd64 CPUs. We expect to update this advisory to include 10.x for amd64 CPUs. Future FreeBSD releases will address this issue on i386 and other CPUs. freebsd-update will include changes on i386 as part of this update due to common code changes shared between amd64 and i386, however it contains no functional changes for i386 (in particular, it does not mitigate the issue on i386).

Recently, I have taken a little dip into the world of BSD. As part of my attempt to understand the BSD world a little better, I connected with Lucas Holt (MidnightBSD founder and lead developer) to ask him a few questions about his project. Here are his answers.

It’s FOSS: Please explain MidnightBSD in a nutshell. How is it different than other BSDs?

Lucas Holt: MidnightBSD is a desktop focused operating system. When it’s considered stable, it will provide a full desktop experience. This differs from other efforts such as TrueOS or GhostBSD in that it’s not a distro of FreeBSD, but rather a fork. MidnightBSD has its own package manager, mport as well as unique package cluster software and several features built into user land such as mDNSresponder, libdispatch, and customizations throughout the system.

It’s FOSS: Who is MidnightBSD aimed at?

Lucas Holt: The goal with MidnightBSD has always been to provide a desktop OS that’s usable for everyday tasks and that even somewhat non technical people can use. Early versions of Mac OS X were certainly an inspiration. In practice, we’re rather far from that goal at this point, but it’s been an excellent learning opportunity.

It’s FOSS: What is your background in computers?

Lucas Holt: I started in technical support at a small ISP and moved into web design and system administration. While there, I learned BSDi, Solaris and Linux. I also started tinkering with programming web apps in ASP and a little perl CGI. I then did a mix of programming and system administration jobs through college and graduated with a bachelors in C.S. from Eastern Michigan University. During that time, I learned NetBSD and FreeBSD. I started working on several projects such as porting Apple’s HFS+ code to FreeBSD 6 and working on getting the nforce2 chipset SATA controller working with FreeBSD 6, with the latter getting committed. I got a real taste for BSD and after seeing the lack of interest in the community for desktop BSDs, I started MidnightBSD. I began work on it in late 2005.

It’s FOSS: I recently installed TrueOS. I was disappointed that a couple of the programs I wanted were not available. The FreeBSD port system looked mildly complicated for beginners. I’m used to using pacman to get the job done quickly. How does MidnightBSD deal with ports?

Lucas Holt: MidnightBSD has it’s own port system, mports, which shared similarities with FreeBSD ports as well as some ideas from OpenBSD. We decided early on that decent package management was essential for regular users. Power users will still use ports for certain software, but it’s just so time consuming to build everything. We started work on our own package manager, mport.

It’s FOSS: During your June 2015 interview on BSDNow, you mentioned that even though you support both i386 and amd64, that you recommend people choose amd64. Do you have any plans to drop i386 support in the future, like many have done?

Lucas Holt: Yes, we do plan to drop i386 support, mostly because of the extra work needed to build and maintain packages. I’ve held off on this so far because I had a lot of feedback from users in South America that they still needed it. For now, the plan is to keep i386 support through 1.0 release. That’s probably a year or two out.

It’s FOSS: What desktop environments does MidnightBSD support?

Lucas Holt: The original plan was to use Etoile as a desktop environment, but that project changed focus. We currently support Xfce, Gnome 3, WindowMaker + GNUstep + Gworkspace as primary choices. We also have several other window managers and desktop environments available such as Enlightenment, rat poison, afterstep, etc.

It’s FOSS: What is MidnightBSD’s default filesystem? Do you support DragonflyBSD’s HAMMER filesystem? What other filesystems?

Lucas Holt: Boot volumes are UFS2. We also support ZFS for additional storage. We have read support for ExFat, NTFS, ext2, CD9660. NFS v3 and v4 are also supported for network file systems.

It’s FOSS: Is MidnightBSD affected by the recent Spectre and Meltdown issues?

Lucas Holt: Yes. Most operating systems were affected by these issues. We were not informed of the issue until the general public became aware. Work is ongoing to come up with appropriate mitigations. Unfortunately, we do not have a patch yet.

It’s FOSS: The Raspberry Pi and its many clones have made the ARM platform very popular. Are there any plans to make MidnightBSD available on that platform?

Lucas Holt: No immediate plans. ARM is an interesting architecture, but by the very nature of SoC designs, takes a lot of work to support a broad number of devices. It might be possible when we stop supporting i386 or if someone volunteers to work on the ARM port.

It’s FOSS: Does MidnightBSD offer support for Linux applications?

Lucas Holt: Yes, we offer Linux emulation. It’s emulating a 2.6.16 kernel currently and that needs to be updated so support newer apps. It’s possible to run semi-recent versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, Java, and OpenOffice on it though. I’ve also used it to host game servers in the past and play older games such as Quake 3, enemy territory, etc.

It’s FOSS: Could you comment on the recent dust-up between the Pale Moon browser developers and the team behind the OpenBSD ports system?

Lucas Holt: I found this discussion frustrating. Many of the BSD projects hear a lot of complaints about browser availability and compatibility. With Firefox moving to Rust, it makes it even more difficult. Then you get into branding issues. Like Firefox, the Pale Moon developers have decided to protect their brand at the cost of users. Unlike the Firefox devs, they’ve made even stranger requirements for branding. It is not possible to use a system library version of anything with Pale Moon and keep their branding requirements. As such, we cannot offer Pale Moon in MidnightBSD.

It’s FOSS: If someone wanted to contribute to your project, both financial and technical, how can they do that?

Lucas Holt: Financial assistance for the project can be submitted online. We have a page outlining how to make donations with Patreon, Paypal or via bitcoin. Donations are not tax deductible. You can learn more at http://www.midnightbsd.org/donate/

I would like to thank Lucas for taking the time to reply to my many questions. For more information about MidnightBSD or to download it, please visit their website. The most recent version of MidnightBSD is 0.8.6.

I vowed to write down what I felt about TrueOS if I ever got to the six month mark of usage. This is just that. This is neither a tutorial, nor a piece of evangelism dedicated towards it.

This is also not a review of specific parts of TrueOS such as Lumina or AppCafe, since I don't use them at all.

In the spirit of presenting a screen shot, here is my i3wm displaying 4 windows in one screen - a configuration that I never use. https://inflo.ws/blog/images/trues-screenshot.png

I need a tiling wm with multi-desktop capability. As regards what I do with a computer, it is fairly straightforward to describe if I just list down my most frequently used applications.

All of these are available as binary packages from the repository. Since I use Intellij Ultimate edition, I decided to download the no-jdk linux version from the website rather than install it. This would make sure that it gets updated regularly.

I ran various Linux distributions from 2001 all the way till 2009, till I discovered Arch, and continued with it till 2017. I tried out Void for two months before I switched to TrueOS.

Over the last few years, I started feeling like no matter which Linux distribution I touched, they all just stopped making a lot of sense. Generally in the way things were organised, and particularly in terms of software like systemd, which just got pushed down my throat. I couldn't wrap my head around half the things going on in my computer.

Mostly I found that Linux distributions stopped becoming a collection of applications that got developed together to something more coupled by software mechanisms like systemd - and that process was more and more opaque. I don't want to talk about the merits and de-merits of systemd, lets just say that I found it of no use and an unnecessary hassle.

In February, I found myself in charge of the entire technology stack of a company, and I was free to make choices. A friend who was a long time FreeBSD user convinced me to try it on the servers. My requirement then was to run Postgres, Rabbitmq, Nginx and a couple of JVM processes. The setup was zero hassle and it hasn't changed much in a year.

About three months of running FreeBSD-11.x on servers was enough for me to consider it for my laptop. I was very apprehensive of hardware support, but luckily my computer is a Thinkpad, and Thinkpads sort of work out of the box with various BSDs.

My general requirements were:

I had to pick from FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, since these were the major BSDs that I was familiar with. One of my requirements was that I needed to be able to run VMs just in case I needed to test something on Windows/Linux. This ruled out OpenBSD. Then I was left with NetBSD and FreeBSD. NetBSD's driver support for newer Intel chip-sets were questionable, and FreeBSD was the only choice then.

When I was digging through FreeBSD forums, I found out that running the 11.x RELEASE on my laptop was out of the question since it didn't have proper drivers for my chip-set either.

A few more hours of digging led me to GhostBSD and TrueOS. I picked TrueOS straightaway because - well because TrueOS came from the old PC-BSD and it was built off FreeBSD-12-CURRENT with the latest drivers integrated.

I downloaded the UNSTABLE version available in June 2017, backed up ALL my data and home directory, and then installed it. There were no glitches during installation - I simply followed the installation as described in the handbook and everything was fine.

My entire switch from Arch/Void to TrueOS took about an hour, discounting the time it took to backup my data to an external hard disk. It was that easy. Everything I wanted to work just worked, everything was available in the repo.

Tweaks from cooltrainer.org : I discovered this excellent tutorial that describes setting up a FreeBSD 11 desktop. It documents several useful tweaks, some of which I applied. A few examples - Fonts, VirtualBox, Firewall, UTF-8 sections.

The open-rc init system is familiar and is well documented.

This was an alien concept to me, but the first time I did an update without waiting for a CDN sync to finish, my computer booted into the shell and remained there. The friendly people at TrueOS discourse asked me to roll back to an older BE and wait for sync to finish.

My experience with boot environments was enough to convince me about the utility of ZFS. I am still reading about it and trying things out, and whatever I read just convinces me more about why it is good.

Coming from the Linux world, how the FreeBSD file-system is laid out seemed odd at first. Then I realised that it was the Linux distros that were doing the odd thing. e.g : The whole OS is split into base system and applications. All the non base system configurations and apps go into /usr/local. That made a lot of sense.

The handbooks for both TrueOS and FreeBSD are really really good. For e.g, I kept some files in an LUKS encrypted drive (when I used Arch Linux). To find an equivalent, all I had to do was read the handbook and look at the GELI section. It is actually nice being able to go to a source like Handbook and things from there just work.

The TrueOS community on both Telegram as well as on Discourse are very friendly and patient. They help out a lot and do not get upset when I pose really stupid questions. TrueOS core developers hangout in the Telegram chat-room too, and it is nice being able to talk to them directly about things.

The following things that worked during my Linux tenure doesn't work in TrueOS.

These are not major concerns for the kind of work I do, so it doesn't bother me much. I run a WinXP VM to play some old games, and a Bunsenlabs installation for Linux things like Hangouts/Netflix.

I don't have a video calling system setup in TrueOS because I use my phone for both voice and video calls exclusively.

Great community - whether on Discourse or on the telegram channel, the people make you feel welcome. If things go unanswered, someone will promise to work on it/file a bug/suggest work-arounds.

Switching to TrueOS was philosophical as well - I thought a lot more about licenses, and I have arrived at the conclusion that I like BSD more than GPL. I believe it is a more practical license.

I believe TrueOS is improving continuously, and is a great desktop UNIX if you put some time into it.

Good news for people doing upgrades only once per year: syspatches will be provided for both supported releases. The commit from T.J. Townsend (tj@) speaks for itself:

Thanks to all the developers involved in providing these!

Recently, I was playing around with the split command-line tool on Mac OS X, and I decided to chop a 4000-line file into 4000 separate single-line files. However, when I attempted to run split -l1, I ran into a funny error:

split: too many files

Curious to see if any splitting had occurred, I ran ls and sure enough, a huge list of filenames appeared, such as:

Now I could see why you'd run out of unique filenames - there are only 26 letters in the alphabet and these filenames were only three letters long. Also, they all seemed to begin with the letter "x".

I checked the manual for split's defaults and confirmed what I was seeing:

each file into which the file is split is named by the prefix followed by a lexically ordered suffix using suffix_length characters in the range 'a-z'. If -a is not specified, two letters are used as the suffix....with the prefix 'x' and with suffixes as above.

Got it, so running split with the defaults for prefix name and suffix length will give me filenames that always start with the letter "x" followed by two-letter alphabetical permutations composed of a-z letters, with repeats allowed. I say "repeats allowed" because I noticed filenames such as xaa and xbb in the output.

Side node: The reason why I say "permutations" rather than "combinations" is because letter order matters. For example, xab and xba are two distinct and legitimate filenames. Here's a nice explanation about the difference between permutations and combinations.

So how many filenames can you get from the BSD split tool using the defaults? There are permutation formulas out there for repeating values and non-repeating values. Based on split's behavior, I wanted to use the repeating values formula:

nr where n equals the number of possible values (26 for a-z) and r equals the number of values (2, since there are only 2 letters after "x" in the filename).

262 = 676

So the total number of filename permutations allowed with BSD split's defaults should be 676.

To double check, I ran ls | wc -l to get the total number of files in my split_test directory. The output was 677. If you subtract my original input file, input.txt, then you have 676, or the number of permutations split would allow before running out of filenames!

Neat. But I still wanted my 4000 files.

While 262 permutations doesn't support 4000 different filenames, I wondered if I could increase r to 3. Then, I'd have 17,576 different filename permutations to play with - more than enough.

Earlier, I remembered the manual mentioning suffix length:

-a suffix_length

So I passed 3 in with the -a flag and guess what? I got my 4000 files!

But that was a lot of work. It would be great if split would just handle these permutations and suffix lengths by default!

In fact, I vaguely remember splitting large files into smaller ones with numerical filenames, which I prefer. I also remember not having to worry about suffixes in the past. But numerical filenames didn't seem to be an option with split installed on Mac OS X - there was no mention of it in the manual.

Turns out that I was remembering GNU split from using the Debian OS two years ago, a different flavor of the split tool with different defaults and behaviors.

Michael Lucas is speaking at mug.org 10 April 2018