This time on the show, we'll be talking with Justin Cormack about NetBSD rump kernels. We'll learn how to run them on other operating systems, what's planned for the future and a lot more. As always, answers to viewer-submitted questions and all the news for the week, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
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EuroBSDCon 2014 talks and tutorials
The 2014 EuroBSDCon videos have been online for over a month, but unannounced - keep in mind these links may be temporary (but we'll mention their new location in a future show and fix the show notes if that's the case)Arun Thomas, BSD ARM Kernel InternalsTed Unangst, Developing Software in a Hostile EnvironmentMartin Pieuchot, Taming OpenBSD Network Stack DragonsHenning Brauer, OpenBGPD turns 10 yearsClaudio Jeker, vscsi and iscsid iSCSI initiator the OpenBSD wayPaul Irofti, Making OpenBSD Useful on the Octeon Network GearBaptiste Daroussin, Cross Building the FreeBSD ports treeBoris Astardzhiev, Smartcom’s control plane software, a customized version of FreeBSDMichał Dubiel, OpenStack and OpenContrail for FreeBSD platformMartin Husemann & Joerg Sonnenberger, Tool-chaining the Hydra, the ongoing quest for modern toolchains in NetBSDTaylor R Campbell, The entropic principle: /dev/u?random and NetBSDDag-Erling Smørgrav, Securing sensitive & restricted dataPeter Hansteen, Building The Network You Need With PFStefan Sperling, Subversion for FreeBSD developersPeter Hansteen, Transition to OpenBSD 5.6Ingo Schwarze, Let’s make manuals more usefulFrancois Tigeot, Improving DragonFly’s performance with PostgreSQLJustin Cormack, Running Applications on the NetBSD Rump KernelPierre Pronchery, EdgeBSD, a year laterPeter Hessler, Using routing domains or tables in a production networkSean Bruno, QEMU user mode on FreeBSDKristaps Dzonsons, Bugs Ex AnteYann Sionneau, Porting NetBSD to the LatticeMico32 open source CPUAlexander Nasonov, JIT Code Generator for NetBSDMasao Uebayashi, Porting Valgrind to NetBSD and OpenBSDMarc Espie, parallel make, working with legacy codeFrancois Tigeot, Porting the drm-kms graphic drivers to DragonFlyThe following talks (from the Vitosha track room) are all currently missing:Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD, Looking forward to another 10 years (but we have another recording)Theo de Raadt, Randomness, how arc4random has grown since 1998 (but we have another recording)Kris Moore, Snapshots, Replication, and Boot-EnvironmentsKirk McKusick, An Introduction to the Implementation of ZFSJohn-Mark Gurney, Optimizing GELI PerformanceEmmanuel Dreyfus, FUSE and beyond, bridging filesystemsLourival Vieira Neto, NPF scripting with LuaAndy Tanenbaum, A Reimplementation of NetBSD Based on a MicrokernelStefano Garzarella, Software segmentation offloading for FreeBSDTed Unangst, LibreSSLShawn Webb, Introducing ASLR In FreeBSDEd Maste, The LLDB Debugger in FreeBSDPhilip Guenther, Secure lazy binding***
OpenBSD adopts SipHash
Even more DJB crypto somehow finds its way into OpenBSD's base systemThis time it's SipHash, a family of pseudorandom functions that's resistant to hash bucket flooding attacks while still providing good performanceAfter an initial import and some clever early usage, a few developers agreed that it would be better to use it in a lot more placesIt will now be used in the filesystem, and the plan is to utilize it to protect all kernel hash functionsSome other places that Bernstein's work can be found in OpenBSD include the ChaCha20-Poly1305 authenticated stream cipher and Curve25519 KEX used in SSH, ChaCha20 used in the RNG, and Ed25519 keys used in signify and SSH***
FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE
FreeBSD's release engineering team likes to troll us by uploading new versions just a few hours after we finish recording an episodeThe first maintenance update for the 10.x branch is out, improving upon a lot of things found in 10.0-RELEASEThe vt driver was merged from -CURRENT and can now be enabled with a loader.conf switch (and can even be used on a PlayStation 3)Bhyve has gotten quite a lot of fixes and improvements from its initial debut in 10.0, including boot support for ZFSLots of new ARM hardware is supported now, including SMP support for most of themA new kernel selection menu was added to the loader, so you can switch between newer and older kernels at boot time10.1 is the first to support UEFI booting on amd64, which also has serial console support nowLots of third party software (OpenSSH, OpenSSL, Unbound..) and drivers have gotten updates to newer versionsIt's a worthy update from 10.0, or a good time to try the 10.x branch if you were avoiding the first .0 release, so grab an ISO or upgrade todayCheck the detailed release notes for more information on all the changesAlso take a look at some of the known problems to see if you'll be affected by any of themPC-BSD was also updated accordingly with some of their own unique features and changes***
arc4random - Randomization for All Occasions
Theo de Raadt gave an updated version of his EuroBSDCon presentation at Hackfest 2014 in QuebecThe presentation is mainly about OpenBSD's arc4random function, and outlines the overall poor state of randomization in the 90s and how it has evolved in OpenBSD over timeIt begins with some interesting history on OpenBSD and how it became a security-focused OS - in 1996, their syslogd got broken into and "suddenly we became interested in security"The talk also touches on how low-level changes can shake up the software ecosystem and third party packages that everyone usesThere's some funny history on the name of the function (being called arc4random despite not using RC4 anymore) and an overall status update on various platforms' usage of itVery detailed and informative presentation, and the slides can be found hereA great quote from the beginning: "We consider ourselves a community of (probably rather strange) people who work on software specifically for the purpose of trying to make it better. We take a 'whole-systems' approach: trying to change everything in the ecosystem that's under our control, trying to see if we can make it better. We gain a lot of strength by being able to throw backwards compatibility out the window. So that means that we're able to do research and the minute that we decide that something isn't right, we'll design an alternative for it and push it in. And if it ends up breaking everybody's machines from the previous stage to the next stage, that's fine because we'll end up in a happier place."***
Interview - Justin Cormack -
[email protected] / @justincormack
NetBSD on Xen, rump kernels, various topics
News Roundup
The FreeBSD foundation's biggest donation
The FreeBSD foundation has a new blog post about the largest donation they've ever gottenFrom the CEO of WhatsApp comes a whopping one million dollars in a single donationIt also has some comments from the donor about why they use BSD and why it's important to give backBe sure to donate to the foundation of whatever BSD you use when you can - every little bit helps, especially for OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonFly who don't have huge companies supporting them regularly like FreeBSD does***
OpenZFS Dev Summit 2014 videos
Videos from the recent OpenZFS developer summit are being uploaded, with speakers from different represented platforms and companiesMatt Ahrens, opening keynoteRaphael Carvalho, Platform Overview: ZFS on OSvBrian Behlendorf, Platform Overview: ZFS on LinuxPrakash Surya, Platform Overview: illumosXin Li, Platform Overview: FreeBSDAll platforms, Group Q&A SessionDave Pacheco, MantaSaso Kiselkov, CompressionGeorge Wilson, PerformanceTim Feldman, Host-Aware SMRPavel Zakharov, Fast File CloningThe audio is pretty poor on all of them unfortunately***
BSDTalk 248
Our friend Will Backman is still busy getting BSD interviews as wellThis time he sits down with Matthew Dillon, the lead developer of DragonFly BSDWe've never had Dillon on the show, so you'll definitely want to give this one a listenThey mainly discuss all the big changes coming in DragonFly's upcoming 4.0 release***
MeetBSD 2014 videos
The presentations from this year's MeetBSD conference are starting to appear online as wellKirk McKusick, A Narrative History of BSDJordan Hubbard, FreeBSD: The Next 10 YearsBrendan Gregg, Performance AnalysisThe slides can be found here***
Feedback/Questions
Dominik writes inSteven writes inFlorian writes inRichard writes inKevin writes in***
Mailing List Gold
Contributing without codeCompression isn't a CRIMESecuring web browsers***
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