October 23, 2013

8: A Brief Introduction

1 hour 21 minutes

This week, we chat with Antti Kantee from the NetBSD project about a crazy little thing called rump kernels. We'll also be showing you all the different cool things you can do with BSD and the Tor network, as well as discussing all the latest news. So sit back and enjoy BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

Headlines

FreeBSD July-September 2013 Status Report

Quarterly FreeBSD status report is out with A LOT of updates, we'll cover a few of them

Highlights include AES-NI Improvements for GELI, Capsicum development, Continuation of the Newcons Project, Download Manager Service for the Ports Collection, status updates from all the various FreeBSD teams, FreeBSD on EC2 news, updates to the CSPRNG, much more

We've covered some of these things already, but there's lots to read in the announcement

See full page for details on everything

***

Dragonfly SMP contention update

Lots of work going in to reducing SMP contention in the next Dragonfly release

Anything which forks and/or execs a lot will now run as close to optimally as it is possible to run on a multi-core box

The lead developer was using poudriere and noticed the performance difference, says this is "a fairly major milestone for the project"

Lots of technical details in the mailing list post, check it out

***

FreeBSD gets "first boot" rc.d scripts

Colin Percival added support for scripts that run on the first boot

Might be desirable for embedded systems to automatically download and apply patches

Similarly, it can be used to invoke freebsd-update to patch your system on the first bootup

Could also be used to download and run a script or install ports or packages

Already MFCed to 10-STABLE and 9-STABLE and added to ports

Lots of possibilities

***

NetBSD gets lua scripting in the kernel

NetBSD gained support for the Lua scripting language in the kernel

A luactl command was added to easily manipulate it

It will be interesting to see what can come out of this

Speaking of NetBSD kernels, that leads us into our interview!

***

Interview - Antti Kantee - [email protected] / @anttikantee

The anykernel and rump kernels

rump kernels in userspace, rump kernels + applications on Xen, fs-utils, rump kernel compiled to javascript

Tutorial

Running a Tor relay, bridge, exit or hidden service

News Roundup

Second PCBSD feature digest is out

Weekly PCBSD digest is out to tell you about new features

Mentions switching over all bug reports to trac.pcbsd.org

Life Preserver has finished development and is now being tested

PCBSD 10.0 ISOs coming soon

***

OpenBSD imports VXLAN interface

VXLAN is a virtual extensible local area network tunnel interface

UDP-based tunneling protocol for overlaying virtualized layer 2 networks over layer 3 networks

***

OpenZFS Office Hours

The question and answer session with Matt has been uploaded

Covers lots of topics ranging from cross-compatibility to performance improvements and trivia

We'll be trying to get Matt on for an interview sometime, already contacted him

***

BSDMag's October issue is out

Free monthly BSD magazine releases another issue

Topics include FreeBSD moving to SVN, a BSD programming intro, new PCBSD utilities, migrating from Linux to BSD and OpenBSD LTS updates (which we already covered!)

***

Feedback/Questions

Ben writes in

Brian writes in

Toby writes in

Noah writes in

***

...more

View all episodes

By JT Pennington

4.9

8989 ratings