June 03, 2015

92: BSD After Midnight

1 hour 7 minutes

Coming up this week, we'll be chatting with Lucas Holt, founder of MidnightBSD. It's a slightly lesser-known fork of FreeBSD, with a focus on easy desktop use. We'll find out what's different about it and why it was created. Answers to your emails and all this week's news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

Zocker, it's like docker on FreeBSD

Containment is always a hot topic, and docker has gotten a lot of hype in Linux land in the last couple years - they're working on native FreeBSD support at the moment

This blog post is about a docker-like script, mainly for ease-of-use, that uses only jails and ZFS in the base system

In total, it's 1,500 lines of shell script

The post goes through the process of using the tool, showing off all the subcommands and explaining the configuration

In contrast to something like ezjail, Zocker utilizes the jail.conf system in the 10.x branch

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Patrol Read in OpenBSD

OpenBSD has recently imported some new code to support the Patrol Read function of some RAID controllers

In a nutshell, Patrol Read is a function that lets you check the health of your drives in the background, similar to a zpool "scrub" operation

The goal is to protect file integrity by detecting drive failures before they can damage your data

It detects bad blocks and prevents silent data corruption, while marking any bad sectors it finds

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HAMMER 2 improvements

DragonFly BSD has been working on the second generation HAMMER FS

It now uses LZ4 compression by default, which we've been big fans of in ZFS

They've also switched to a faster CRC algorithm, further improving HAMMER's performance, especially when using iSCSI

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FreeBSD foundation May update

The FreeBSD foundation has published another update newsletter, detailing some of the things they've been up to lately

In it, you'll find some development status updates: notably more ARM64 work and the addition of 64 bit Linux emulation

Some improvements were also made to FreeBSD's release building process for non-X86 architectures

There's also an AsiaBSDCon recap that covers some of the presentations and the dev events

They also have an accompanying blog post where Glen Barber talks about more sysadmin and clusteradm work at NYI

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Interview - Lucas Holt - [email protected] / @midnightbsd

MidnightBSD

News Roundup

The launchd on train is never coming

Replacement of init systems has been quite controversial in the last few years

Fortunately, the BSDs have avoided most of that conflict thus far, but there have been a few efforts made to port launchd from OS X

This blog post details the author's opinion on why he thinks we're never going to have launchd in any of the BSDs

Email us your thoughts on the matter

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Native SSH comes to… Windows

In what may be the first (and last) mention of Microsoft on BSD Now...

They've just recently announced that PowerShell will get native SSH support in the near future

It's not based on the commercial SSH either, it's the same one from OpenBSD that we already use everywhere

Up until now, interacting between BSD and Windows has required something like PuTTY, WinSCP, FileZilla or Cygwin - most of which are based on really outdated versions

The announcement also promises that they'll be working with the OpenSSH community, so we'll see how many Microsoft-submitted patches make it upstream (or how many donations they make)

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Moving to FreeBSD

This blog post describes a long-time Linux user's first BSD switching experience

The author first talks about his Linux journey, eventually coming to love the more customization-friendly systems, but the journey ended with systemd

After doing a bit of research, he gave FreeBSD a try and ended up liking it - the rest of the post mostly covers why that is

He also plans to write about his experience with other BSDs, and is writing some tutorials too - we'll check in with him again later on

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