Coming up this time on the show, we'll be talking with the CTO of Xinuos, David Meyer, about their adoption of FreeBSD. We also discuss the BSD license model for businesses and the benefits of contributing changes back.
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Headlines
Enabling FreeBSD on AArch64
One of the things the FreeBSD foundation has been dumping money into lately is ARM64 support, but we haven't heard too much about it - this article should change thatSince it's on a mainstream ARM site, the article begins with a bit of FreeBSD history, leading up to the current work on ARM64There's also a summary of some of the ARM work done at this year's BSDCan, including details about running it on the Cavium ThunderX platform (which has 48 cores)As of just a couple months ago, dtrace is even working on this new architectureCome 11.0-RELEASE, the plan is for ARM64 to get the same "tier 1" treatment as X86, which would imply binary updates for base and ports - something Raspberry Pi users often complain about not having***
OpenBSD's tcpdump detailed
Most people are probably familiar with tcpdump, a very useful packet sniffing and capturing utility that's included in all the main BSD base systemsThis video guide is specifically about the version in OpenBSD, which has gone through some major changes (it's pretty much a fork with no version number anymore)Unlike on the other platforms, OpenBSD's tcpdump will always run in a chroot as an unprivileged user - this has saved it from a number of high-profile exploitsIt also has support for the "pf.os" system, allowing you to filter out operating system fingerprints in the packet capturesThere's also PF (and pflog) integration, letting you see which line in your ruleset triggered a specific matchBeing able to run tcpdump directly on your router is pretty awesome for troubleshooting***
More FreeBSD foundation at BSDCan
The FreeBSD foundation has another round of trip reports from this year's BSDCanFirst up is Kamil Czekirda, who gives a good summary of some of the devsummit, FreeBSD-related presentations, some tutorials, getting freebsd-update bugs fixed and of course eating cakeA second post from Christian Brueffer, who cleverly planned ahead to avoid jetlag, details how he got some things done during the FreeBSD devsummitTheir third report is from our buddy Warren Block, who (unsurprisingly) worked on a lot of documentation-related things, including getting more people involved with writing themIn true doc team style, his report is the most well-written of the bunch, including lots of links and a clear separation of topics (doc lounge, contributing to the wiki, presentations...)Finally, the fourth one comes to us from Shonali Balakrishna, who also gives an outline of some of the talks"Not only does a BSD conference have way too many very smart people in one room, but also some of the nicest."***
DragonFly on the Chromebook C720
If you've got one of the Chromebook laptops and weren't happy with the included OS, DragonFlyBSD might be worth a goThis article is a "mini-report" on how DragonFly functions on the device as a desktop, and While the 2GB of RAM proved to be a bit limiting, most of the hardware is well-supportedDragonFly's wiki has a full guide on getting set up on one of these devices as well***
Interview - David Meyer -
[email protected] / @xinuos
Xinuos, BSD license model vs. others, community interaction
News Roundup
Introducing LiteBSD
We definitely don't talk about 4.4BSD a lot on the showLiteBSD is "a variant of [the] 4.4BSD operating system adapted for microcontrollers"If you've got really, really old hardware (or are working in the embedded space) then this might be an interesting hobby project to look info***
HardenedBSD announces ASLR completion
HardenedBSD, now officially a full-on fork of FreeBSD, has declared their ASLR patchset to be completeThe latest and last addition to the work was VDSO (Virtual Dynamic Shared Object) randomization, which is now configurable with a sysctlThis post gives a summary of the six main features they've added since the beginningOnly a few small things are left to do - man page cleanups, possibly shared object load order improvements***
Unlock the reaper
In the ongoing quest to make more of OpenBSD SMP-friendly, a new patch was posted that unlocks the reaper in the kernelWhen there's a zombie process causing a resource leak, it's the reaper's job to deallocate their resources (and yes we're still talking about computers, not horror movies)Initial testing has yielded positive results and no regressionsThey're looking for testers, so you can install a -current snapshot and get it automaticallyAn updated version of the patch is coming soon tooA hackathon is going on right now, so you can expect more SMP improvements in the near future***
The importance of mentoring
Adrian Chadd has a blog post up about mentoring new users, and it tells the story of how he originally got into FreeBSDHe tells the story of, at age 11, meeting someone else who knew about making crystal sets that became his role modelEventually we get to his first FreeBSD 1.1 installation (which he temporarily abandoned for Linux, since it didn't have a color "ls" command) and how he started using the OSNowadays, there's a formal mentoring system in FreeBSDWhile he talks about FreeBSD in the post, a lot of the concepts apply to all the BSDs (or even just life in general)***
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