BSD Now

Allan, Benedict and Tom are MIA, so JT fills in with two friends.

This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

• Practical IOT Hacking book out by no starch press

Why You Should Use BSD Licensing for Your Next Open Source Project or Product, Update on FreeBSD Foundation Investment in Linuxulator, OPNsense 21.1.5 released, FreeBSD meetings on the Desktop, Running FreeBSD jails with containerd 1.5, Markdown, DocBook, and the quest for semantic documentation on NetBSD.org, and more.

NOTES

The term “open source” has its origins in the context of software development, designating a specific approach to developing computer programs. Nowadays, however, it stands for a broad set of values – open source means open exchange, transparency, collaborative participation and development for the benefit of the entire community.

Dr. Emmett Brown’s similar-sounding Flux Capacitor from the movie Back to the Future bridged the dimension of time, uniting past, present, and future for the McFlys. Similarly, the FreeBSDⓇ Linuxulator project also bridges dimensions – in our case, these are LinuxⓇ and FreeBSD.

This is mainly a security and reliablility update. There are several FreeBSD

It's time to say goodbye to the GPL, a new OCI Runtime for FreeBSD Jails, A bit of Xenix history, On Updating QEMU's bsd-user fork, FreeBSD 13 on a 12 year old laptop, and more.

NOTES

The trigger for this post is the reinstating of Richard Stallman, a very problematic character, to the board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). I am appalled by this move, and join others in the call for his removal.

Today, I open-sourced runj, a new experimental, proof-of-concept OCI-compatible runtime for FreeBSD jails. For the past 6.5 years I’ve been working on Linux containers, but never really had much experience with FreeBSD jails. runj (pronounced “run jay”) is a vehicle for me to learn more about FreeBSD in general and jails in particular. With my position on the Technical Oversight Board of the Open Containers Initiative, I’m also interested in understanding how the OCI runtime specification can be adapted to other operating systems like FreeBSD.

From 1986 to 1989, I worked in the Xenix1 group at Microsoft. It was my first job out of school, and I was the most junior person on the team. I was hopelessly naive, inexperienced, generally clueless, and borderline incompetent, but my coworkers were kind, supportive and enormously forgiving – just a lovely bunch of folks.

My old (2009) HP laptop now runs FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE.

Dog's Garage Runs OpenBSD, EuroBSDcon 2021 Call for Papers, FreeBSD’s iostat, The state of toolchains in NetBSD, Bandwidth limiting on OpenBSD 6.8, FreeBSD's ports migration to git and its impact on HardenedBSD, TrueNAS 12.0-U3 has been released, and more.

NOTES

I was inspired by the April 2017 article in undeadly.org about getting OpenBSD running on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. My goal was to use a Raspberry Pi running OpenBSD to monitor the temperature in my garage from my home. My dog has his own little "apartment" inside the garage, so I want to keep an eye on the temperature. (I don't rely on this device. He sleeps inside the house whenever he wants.)

While FreeBSD and OpenBSD both switched to using LLVM/Clang as their base system compiler, NetBSD picked a different path and remained with GCC and binutils regardless of the license change to GPLv3. However, it doesn't mean that the NetBSD project endorses this license, and the NetBSD Foundation's has issued a statement about its position on the subject.

I will explain how to limit bandwidth on OpenBSD using its firewall PF (Packet Filter) queuing capability. It is a very powerful feature but it may be hard to understand at first. What is very important to understand is that it's technically not possible to limit the bandwidth of the whole system, because once data is getting on your network interface, it's already there and got by your router, what is possible is to limit the upload rate to cap the download rate.

FreeBSD completed their ports migration from subversion to git. Prior to the official switch, we used the read-only mirror FreeBSD had at GitHub[1]. The new repo is at [2]. A cursory glance at the new repo will show that the commit hashes changed. This presents an issue with HardenedBSD's ports tree in our merge-based workflow.

iXsystems is excited to announce TrueNAS 12.0-U3 was released today and marks an important milestone in the transition from FreeNAS to TrueNAS. TrueNAS 12.0 is now considered by iXsystems to be a higher quality release than FreeNAS 11.3-U5, our previous benchmark. The new TrueNAS documentation site has also reached a point where it has more content and capabilities than FreeNAS. TrueNAS 12.0 is ready for mission-critical enterprise deployments.

FreeBSD 13 is here, multi-factor authentication on OpenBSD, KDE on FreeBSD 2021o2, NetBSD GSoC report, a working D compiler on OpenBSD, and more

NOTES

In this article I will explain how to add a bit more security to your OpenBSD system by adding a requirement for user logging into the system, locally or by ssh. I will explain how to setup 2 factor authentication (2FA) using TOTP on OpenBSD

Gosh, second octant already! Well, let’s take a look at the big things that happened in KDE-on-FreeBSD in these six-and-a-half weeks.

My code can be found at github.com/teknokatze/src in the gsoc2020 branch, at the time of writing some of it is still missing. The test facilities and logs can be found in github.com/teknokatze/gsoc2020. A diff can be found at github which will later be split into several patches before it is sent to QA for merging.

Dr. Brian Robert Callahan (bcallah@) blogged about his work in getting D compiler(s) working under OpenBSD.

Comparing sandboxing techniques, Statement on FreeBSD development processes, customizing FreeBSD ports and packages, the quest for a comfortable NetBSD desktop, Nginx as a TCP/UDP relay, HardenedBSD March 2021 Status Report, Detailed Behaviors of Unix Signal, and more

NOTES

I had the opportunity to implement a sandbox and I'd like to write about the differences between the various sandboxing techniques available on three different operating systems: FreeBSD, Linux and OpenBSD.

In light of the recent commentary on FreeBSD's development practices, members of the Core team would like to issue the following statement.

A basic intro to building your own packages

FVWM substantially allows one to build a fully-fledged lightweight desktop environment from scratch, with an almost unparalleled degree of freedom. Although using FVWM does not require any knowledge of programming languages, it is possible to extend it with M4, C, and Perl preprocessing.

In this tutorial I will explain how to use Nginx as a TCP or UDP relay as an alternative to Haproxy or Relayd. This mean nginx will be able to accept requests on a port (TCP/UDP) and relay it to another backend without knowing about the content. It also permits to negociates a TLS session with the client and relay to a non-TLS backend. In this example I will explain how to configure Nginx to accept TLS requests to transmit it to my Gemini server Vger, Gemini protocol has TLS as a requirement.

This month, I worked on finding and fixing the regression that caused kernel panics on our package builders. I think I found the issue: I made it so that the HARDENEDBSD amd64 kernel just included GENERIC so that we follow FreeBSD's toggling of features. Doing so added QUEUE_MACRO_DEBUG_TRASH to our kernel config. That option is the likely culprit. If the next package build (with the option removed) completes, I will commit the change that removes QUEUE_MACRO_DEBUG_TRASH from the HARDENEDBSD amd64 kernel.

When Unix is mentioned in this document it means macOS or Linux as they are the mainly used Unix at this moment. When shell is mentioned it means Bash or Zsh. Most demos are written in C for macOS with Apple libc and Linux with glibc.

FreeBSD 13.0 Full Desktop Experience, FreeBSD on ARM64 in the Cloud, Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace, Inferno is open source as well, NetBSD hits donation milestone, grep returns (standard input) on FreeBSD, Random Programming Challenge, OpenBSD Adds Support for Coordinated Mars Time (MTC) and more

NOTES

This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

With the release of FreeBSD 13.0 on the horizon, I wanted to see how it shapes up on my Lenovo T450 laptop. Previous major releases on this laptop, using it as a workstation, felt very rough around the edges but with 13, it feels like the developers got it right.

Until the end of June, Amazon AWS is offering free ARM64 Graviton instances, learn how to try out FreeBSD to ARMv8 in the cloud

The releases below represent the historical releases of Plan 9. The two versions of 4th Edition represent the initial release and the final version available from Bell Labs as it was updated and patched. All historical releases of Plan 9 have been re-released under the terms of the MIT license.

I was dealing with a bizarre error with grep(1) on FreeBSD, and it soon infected my macOS and NetBSD machines too. It was driving me crazy!

OpenBSD Adds Support for Coordinated Mars Time (MTC)

To make sure that OpenBSD can be used elsewhere than just earth, this diff introduces Coordinated Mars Time (MTC), the Mars equivalent of earth’s Universal Time (UTC).

Customizing the FreeBSD Kernel, OpenBSD/loongson on the Lemote Fuloong, how ZFS on Linux brings up pools and filesystems at boot under systemd, LLDB: FreeBSD Legacy Process Plugin Removed, FreshBSD 2021, gmid, Danschmid’s Poudriere Guide in english, and more

NOTES

Learn more about customizing the build of the FreeBSD kernel and its loadable modules

In my article about running OpenBSD/loongson on the Lemote Yeeloong back in 2016, I mentioned looking for a Fuloong. All hope seemed lost until the Summer of 2017, when a fellow OpenBSD developer was contacted by a generous user (Thanks again, Lars!) offering to donate two Lemote Fuloong machines, and I was lucky enough to get one of those units.

On Solaris and Illumos, how ZFS pools and filesystems were brought up at boot was always a partial mystery to me (and it seemed to involve the kernel knowing a lot about /etc/zfs/zpool.cache). On Linux, additional software RAID arrays are brought up mostly through udev rules, which has its own complications. For a long time I had the general impression that ZFS on Linux also worked through udev rules to recognize vdev components, much like software RAID. However, this turns out to not be the case and the modern ZFS on Linux boot process is quite straightforward on systemd systems.

During the past month we’ve successfully removed the legacy FreeBSD plugin and continued improving the new one. We have prepared an implementation of hardware breakpoint and watchpoint support for FreeBSD/AArch64, and iterated over all tests that currently fail on that platform. Therefore, we have concluded the second milestone.

6 weeks ago I created a branch for a significant rework of FreshBSD. Nearly 300 commits later, and just a week shy of our 15th anniversary, the result is what you’re looking at now. I hope you like it.

The ports system is one of FreeBSD's greatest advantages for users who want flexibility and control over their software. It enables administrators to easily create and manage source-based installations using a system that is robust and predictable.

Special Guest: Tom Jones.

FreeBSD Network Troubleshooting, The State of FreeBSD, dhcpleased, bhyve for Calamares Development, EFS automount and ebsnvme-id, Old Usenix pictures, and more.

NOTES

FreeBSD has a full set of debugging features, and the network stack is able to report a ton of information. So much that it can be hard to figure out what is relevant and what is not.

License to thrill: Ahead of v13.0, the FreeBSD team talks about Linux and the completed toolchain project that changes everything

With the following commit, Florian Obser (florian@) imported dhcpleased(8), DHCP daemon to acquire IPv4 address leases from servers, plus dhcpleasectl(8), a utility to control the daemon:

bhyve (pronounced “bee hive”) is a hypervisor for BSD systems (and Illumos / openSolaris). It is geared towards server workloads, but does support desktop-oriented operation as well. I spent some time wayyyy back in November wrestling with it in order to replace VirtualBox for Calamares testing on FreeBSD. The “golden hint” as far as I’m concerned came from Karen Bruner and now I have a functioning Calamares test-ground that is more useful than before.

As my regular readers will be aware, I've been working on and gradually improving FreeBSD/EC2 for many years. Recently I've added two new features, which are available in the weekly HEAD and 12-STABLE snapshots and will appear in releases starting from 12.2-RELEASE.

EuroBSDcon is the European technical conference for users and developers of BSD-based systems. The conference is scheduled to take place September 16-19 2021 in Vienna, Austria or as an all-online event if COVID-19 developments dictate. The tutorials will be held on Thursday and Friday to registered participants and the talks are presented to conference attendees on Saturday and Sunday.

campgndd will be held May 28th, 29th and 30th 2021, from wherever you happen to be.

Special Guest: Tom Jones.

Tracing the History of ARM and FreeBSD, Make ‘less’ more friendly, NomadBSD 1.4 Release, Create an Ubuntu Linux jail on FreeBSD 12.2, OPNsense 21.1.2 released, Midnight BSD and BastilleBSD, and more.

NOTES

When we think of computers, we generally think of laptops and desktops. Each one of these systems is powered by an Intel or AMD chip based on the x86 architecture. It might feel like you spend all day interacting with these kinds of systems, but you would be wrong.

You probably know about less: it is a standard tool that allows scrolling up and down in documents that do not fit on a single screen. Less has a very handy feature, which can be turned on by invoking it with the -i flag. This causes less to ignore case when searching. For example, ‘udf’ will find ‘udf’, ‘UDF’, ‘UdF’, and any other combination of upper-case and lower-case. If you’re used to searching in a web browser, this is probably what you want. But less is even more clever than that. If your search pattern contains upper-case letters, the ignore-case feature will be disabled. So if you’re looking for ‘QXml’, you will not be bothered by matches for the lower-case ‘qxml’. (This is equivalent to ignorecase + smartcase in vim.)

Version 1.4 of NomadBSD, a persistent live system for USB flash drives based on FreeBSD and featuring a graphical user interface built around Openbox, has been released: “We are pleased to present the release of NomadBSD 1.4.

Work has so far been focused on the firmware update process to ensure its safety around edge cases and recovery methods for the worst case. To that end 21.1.3 will likely receive the full revamp including API and GUI changes for a swift transition after thorough testing of the changes now available in the development package of this release.

We recently added a new port, mports/sysutils/bastille that allows you to manage containers. This is a port of a project that originally targetted FreeBSD, but also works on HardenedBSD.