Coming up on the show this week, we've got an interview with Brendan Gregg of Netflix. He's got a lot to say about performance tuning and benchmarks, and even some pretty funny stories about how people have done them incorrectly. As always, this week's news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
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Even more BSD presentation videos
More videos from this year's MeetBSD and OpenZFS devsummit were uploaded since last weekRobert Ryan, At the Heart of the Digital EconomyFreeNAS & ZFS, The Indestructible Duo - Except for the Hard DrivesRichard Yao, libzfs_core and ioctl stabilizationOpenZFS, Company lightning talksOpenZFS, Hackathon Presentation and AwardsPavel Zakharov, Fast File CloningRick Reed, Half a billion unsuspecting FreeBSD usersAlex Reece & Matt Ahrens, Device RemovalChris Side, Channel ProgramsDavid Maxwell, The Unix command pipelineBe sure to check out the giant list of videos from last week's episode if you haven't seen them already***
NetBSD on a Cobalt Qube 2
The Cobalt Qube was a very expensive networking appliance around 2000In 2014, you can apparently get one of these MIPS-based machines for about forty bucksThis blog post details getting NetBSD installed and set up on the rare relic of our networking pastIf you're an old-time fan of RISC or MIPS CPUs, this'll be a treat for youLots of great pictures of the hardware too***
OpenBSD vs. AFL
In their never-ending security audit, some OpenBSD developers have been hitting various parts of the tree with a fuzzerIf you're not familiar, fuzzing is a semi-automated way to test programs for crashes and potential security problemsThe program being subjected to torture gets all sorts of random and invalid input, in the hopes of uncovering overflows and other bugsAmerican Fuzzy Lop, in particular, has provided some interesting results across various open source projects recentlySo far, it's fixed some NULL pointer dereferences in OpenSSH, various crashes in tcpdump and mandoc and a few other thingsAFL has an impressive list of CVEs (vulnerabilities) that it's helped developers discover and fixIt also made its way into OpenBSD ports, FreeBSD ports and NetBSD's pkgsrc very recently, so you can try it out for yourself***
GNOME 3 hits the FreeBSD ports tree
While you've been able to run GNOME 3 on PC-BSD and OpenBSD for a while, it hasn't actually hit the FreeBSD ports tree.. until nowNow you can play with GNOME 3 and all its goodies (as well as Cinnamon 2.2, which this also brings in) on vanilla FreeBSDBe sure to check the commit message and /usr/ports/UPDATING if you're upgrading from GNOME 2You might also want to go back and listen to our interview with Joe Marcus Clark about GNOME's portability***
Interview - Brendan Gregg -
[email protected] / @brendangregg
Performance tuning, benchmarks, debugging
News Roundup
DragonFlyBSD 4.0 released
A new major version of DragonFly, 4.0.1, was just recently announcedThis version includes support for Haswell GPUs, lots of SMP improvements (including some in PF) and support for up to 256 CPUsIt's also the first release to drop support for i386, so it joins PCBSD in the 64 bit-only clubCheck the release notes for all the details, including networking and kernel improvements, as well as some crypto changes***
Can we talk about FreeBSD vs Linux
Hackernews had a recent thread about discussing Linux vs BSD, and the trolls stayed away for onceRather than rehashing why one is "better" than the other, it was focused on explaining some of the differences between ecosystems and communitiesIf you're one of the many people who watch our show just out of curiosity about the BSD world, this might be a good thread to readSomeone in the comments even gave bsdnow.tv a mention as a good resource to learn, thanks guy***
OpenBSD IPSEC tunnel guide
If you've ever wanted to connect two networks with OpenBSD gateways, this is the article for youIt shows how to set up an IPSEC tunnel between destinations, how to lock it down and how to access all the machines on the other network just like they were on your LANThe article also explains some of the basics of IPSEC if you're not familiar with all the terminology, so this isn't just for expertsThough the article itself is a few years old, it mostly still applies to the latest stuff todayAll the tools used are in the OpenBSD base system, so that's pretty handy too***
DragonFly starts work on IPFW2
DragonFlyBSD, much like FreeBSD, comes with more than one firewall you can useNow it looks like you're going to have yet another choice, as someone is working on a fork of IPFW (which is actually already in its second version, so it should be "IPFW3")Not a whole lot is known yet; it's still in heavy development, but there's a brief roadmap page with some planned additionsThe guy who's working on this has already agreed to come on the show for an interview, but we're going to give him a chance to get some more work done firstExpect that sometime next year, once he's made some progress***
Feedback/Questions
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