April 08, 2015

84: pkg remove freebsd-update

1 hour 14 minutes

On this week's mini-episode, we'll be talking with Baptiste Daroussin about packaging the FreeBSD base system with pkgng. Is this the best way going forward, or are we getting dangerously close to being Linux-like? We'll find out, and also get to a couple of your emails while we're at it, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

Xen dom0 in FreeBSD 11-CURRENT

FreeBSD has just gotten dom0 support for the Xen hypervisor, something NetBSD has had for a while now

The ports tree will now have a Xen kernel and toolstack, meaning that they can be updated much more rapidly than if they were part of base

It's currently limited to Intel boxes with EPT and a working IOMMU, running a recent version of the -CURRENT branch, but we'll likely see it when 11.0 comes out

How will this affect interest in Bhyve?

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A tale of two educational moments

Here we have a blog post from an OpenBSD developer about some experiences he had helping people get involved with the project

It's split into two stories: one that could've gone better, and one that went really well

For the first one, he found that someone was trying to modify a package from their ports tree to have fewer dependencies

Experience really showed its worth, and he was able to write a quick patch to do exactly what the other person had been working on for a few hours - but wasn't so encouraging about getting it committed

In the second story, he discussed updating a different port with a user of a forum, and ended up improving the new user's workflow considerably with just a few tips

The lesson to take away from this is that we can all help out to encourage and assist new users - everyone was a newbie once

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What's coming in NetBSD 7

We first mentioned NetBSD 7.0 on the show in July of 2014, but it still hasn't been released and there hasn't been much public info about it

This blog post outlines some of the bigger features that we can expect to see when it actually does come out

Their total platform count is now over 70, so you'd be hard-pressed to find something that it doesn't run on

There have been a lot of improvements in the graphics area, particularly with DRM/KMS, including Intel Haswell and Nouveau (for nVidia cards)

Many ARM boards now have full SMP support

Clang has also finally made its way into the base system, something we're glad to see, and it should be able to build the base OS on i386, AMD64 and ARM - other architectures are still a WIP

In the crypto department: their PNRG has switched from the broken RC4 to the more modern ChaCha20, OpenSSL has been updated in base and LibreSSL is in pkgsrc

NetBSD's in-house firewall, npf, has gotten major improvements since its initial debut in NetBSD 6.0

Looking to the future, NetBSD hopes to integrate a stable ZFS implementation later on

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OpenZFS office hours

We mentioned a couple weeks back that the OpenZFS office hours series was starting back up

They've just uploaded the recording of their most recent freeform discussion, with Justin Gibbs being the main presenter

In it, they cover how Justin got into ZFS, running in virtualized environments, getting patches into the different projects, getting more people involved, reviewing code, spinning disks vs SSDs, defragging, speeding up resilvering, zfsd and much more

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Interview - Baptiste Daroussin - [email protected]

Packaging the FreeBSD base system with pkgng

Discussion

Packaging the FreeBSD base system with pkgng (follow-up)

Feedback/Questions

Jeff writes in

Anonymous writes in

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Joris writes in

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Mailing List Gold

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By JT Pennington

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