BSD Now

FreeBSD Qt WebEngine GPU Acceleration, the grind of FreeBSD’s wireless stack, thoughts on overlooking Illumos's syseventadm, when Unix learned to reboot, New EXT2/3/4 File-System driver in DragonflyBSD, and more.

NOTES

FreeBSD has a handful of Qt WebEngine-based browsers. Falkon, and Otter-Browser, and qutebrowser and probably others, too. All of them can run into issues on FreeBSD with GPU-accelerated rendering not working. Let’s look at some of the workarounds.

The NanoPi NEO2 from FriendlyARM has been serving me well since 2018, being my test machine for OpenBSD/arm64 related things.

Yes, it's been a while since I posted here and yes, it's been a while since I was actively working on FreeBSD's wireless stack. Life's been .. well, life. I started the ath10k port in 2015. I wasn't expecting it to take 5 years, but here we are. My life has changed quite a lot since 2015 and a lot of the things I was doing in 2015 just stopped being fun for a while.

In a comment on my praise of ZFS on Linux's ZFS event daemon, Joshua M. Clulow noted that Illumos (and thus OmniOS) has an equivalent in syseventadm, which dates back to Solaris. I hadn't previously known about syseventadm, despite having run Solaris fileservers and OmniOS fileservers for the better part of a decade, and that gives me some tangled feelings.

Recently, a friend asked me the history of halt, and when did we have to stop with the sync / sync / sync dance before running halt or reboot. The two are related, it turns out.

While DragonFlyBSD has its own, original HAMMER2 file-system, for those needing to access data from EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 file-systems, there is a brand new "ext2fs" driver implementation for this BSD operating system.

Casey - openbsd wirewall

FreeBSD Q2 Quarterly Status report of 2020, Traditional Unix Toolchains, BastilleBSD 0.7 released, Finding meltdown on DragonflyBSD, and more

NOTES

This report will be covering FreeBSD related projects between April and June, and covers a diverse set of topics ranging from kernel updates over userland and ports, as well to third-party work.

Older Unix systems tend to be fairly uniform in how they handle the so-called 'toolchain' for creating binaries. This blog will give a quick overview of the toolchain pipeline for Unix systems that follow the V7 tradition (which evolved along with Unix, a topic for a separate blog maybe).

This release matures the project from 0.6.x -> 0.7.x. Continued testing and bug fixes are proving Bastille capable for a range of use-cases. New (experimental) features are examples of innovation from community contribution and feedback. Thank you.

Interview with Warner Losh about Unix history, the 2.11-BSD restoration project, the Unix heritage society, proper booting, and what devmatch is.

Special Guest: Warner Losh.

Emulex: The Cheapest 10gbe for Your Homelab, In Search of 2.11BSD, as released, Fakecracker: NetBSD as a Function Based MicroVM, First powerpc64 snapshots available for OpenBSD, OPNsense 20.1.8 released, and more.

NOTES

Years ago, the hunt for the cheapest 10gbe NICs resulted in buying Mellanox ConnectX-2 single-port 10gbe network cards from eBay for around $10. Nowadays those cards have increased in cost to around $20-30. While still cheap, not quite the cheapest. There are now alternatives!

Almost all of the BSD releases have been well preserved. If you want to find 1BSD, or 2BSD or 4.3-TAHOE BSD you can find them online with little fuss. However, if you search for 2.11BSD, you'll find it easily enough, but it won't be the original. You'll find either the latest patched version (2.11BSD pl 469), or one of the earlier popular version (pl 430 is popular). You can even find the RetroBSD project which used 2.11BSD as a starting point to create systems for tiny mips-based PIC controllers. You'll find every single patch that's been issued for the system.

In November 2018 AWS published an Open Source tool called Firecracker, mostly a virtual machine monitor relying on KVM, a small sized Linux kernel, and a stripped down version of Qemu. What baffled me was the speed at which the virtual machine would fire up and run the service. The whole process is to be compared to a container, but safer, as it does not share the kernel nor any resource, it is a separate and dedicated virtual machine.

Since we reported the first bits of powerpc64 support going into the tree on 16 May, work has progressed at a steady pace, resulting in snapshots now being available for this platform.

Sorry about the delay while we chased a race condition in the updates back to an issue with the latest FreeBSD package manager updates. For now we reverted to our current version but all relevant third party packages have been updated as updates became available over the last weeks, e.g. cURL and Python, and hostapd / wpa_supplicant amongst others.

Special Guest: Warner Losh.

Chasing a bad commit, New FreeBSD Core Team elected, Getting Started with NetBSD on the Pinebook Pro, FreeBSD on the Intel 10th Gen i3 NUC, pf table size check and change, and more.

NOTES

While working on a big project where multiple teams merge their feature branches frequently into a release Git branch, developers often run into situations where they find that some of their work have been either removed, modified or affected by someone else's work accidentally. It can happen in smaller teams as well. Two features could have been working perfectly fine until they got merged together and broke something. That's a highly possible case. There are many other cases which could cause such hard to understand and subtle bugs which even continuous integration (CI) systems running the entire test suite of our projects couldn't catch.

The FreeBSD Project is pleased to announce the completion of the 2020 Core Team election. Active committers to the project have elected your Eleventh FreeBSD Core Team.!

If you buy a Pinebook Pro now, it comes with Manjaro Linux on the internal eMMC storage. Let’s install NetBSD instead!

I have ended up with some 10th Gen i3 NUC's (NUC10i3FNH to be specific) to put to work in my testbed. These are quite new devices, the build date on the boxes is 13APR2020. Before I figure out what their true role is (one of them might have to run linux) I need to install FreeBSD -CURRENT and see how performance and hardware support is.

Did you know there’s a default size limit to pf’s state table? I did not, but it makes sense that there is one. If for some reason you bump into this limit (difficult for home use, I’d think), here’s how you change it

Throw-Away Browser on FreeBSD With "pot" within 5 minutes, OmniOS as OpenBSD guest with bhyve, BSD vs Linux distro development, My FreeBSD Laptop Build, FreeBSD CURRENT Binary Upgrades, and more.

NOTES

pot is a great and relatively new jail management tool. It offers DevOps style provisioning and can even be used to provide Docker-like, scalable cloud services together with nomad and consul (more about this in Orchestrating jails with nomad and pot).

Today I will be creating a OpenBSD guest via bhyve on OmniOS. I will also be adding a Pass Through Ethernet Controller so I can have a multi-homed guest that will serve as a firewall/router.

Q: Comparing-apples-to-BSDs asks: I was reading one of the old articles from the archive. One of the things mentioned was how the BSDs have a distinct approach in terms of packaging the base system relative to userland apps, and that the Linux distros at the time were not following the same practice. Are there Linux distros that have adopted the same approach in modern times? If not, are there technical limitations that are preventing them from doing so, such as some distros supporting multiple kernel versions maybe?

I have always liked Thinkpad hardware and when I started to do more commuting I decided I needed something that had a decent sized screen but fit well on a bus. Luckily about this time Lenovo gave me a nice gift in the Thinkpad X390. Its basically the famous X2xx series but with a 13” screen and smaller bezel.

Yubikey-agent on FreeBSD, Managing Kubernetes clusters from OpenBSD, History of FreeBSD part 1, Running Jitsi-Meet in a FreeBSD Jail, Command Line Bug Hunting in FreeBSD, Game of Github, Wireguard official merged into OpenBSD, and more

NOTES

Some time ago Filippo Valsorda wrote yubikey-agent, seamless SSH agent for YubiKeys. I really like YubiKeys and worked on the FreeBSD support for U2F in Chromium and pyu2f, getting yubikey-agent ported looked like an interesting project. It took some hacking to make it work but overall it wasn’t hard. Following is the roadmap on how to get it set up on FreeBSD. The actual details depend on your system (as you will see)

This should work with OpenBSD 6.7. I write this while the source tree is locked for release, so even if I use -current this is as close as -current gets to -release

FreeBSD, a free and open-source Unix-like operating system has been around since 1993. However, its origins are directly linked to that of BSD, and further back, those of Unix. During this History of FreeBSD series, we will talk about how Unix came to be, and how Berkeley’s Unix developed at Bell Labs.

Due to the situation with COVID-19 that also lead to people being confined to their homes in South Africa as well, we decided to provide a (freely usable of course) Jitsi Meet instance to the community being hosted in South Africa on our FreeBSD environment.

FreeBSD uses bugzilla for tracking bugs, taking feature requests, regressions and issues in the Operating System. The web interface for bugzilla is okay, but if you want to do a lot of batch operations it is slow to deal with. We are planning to run a bugsquash on July 11th and that really needs some tooling to help any hackers that show up process the giant bug list we have.

OpenBSD 6.7 on PC Engines, NetBSD code study, DRM Update on OpenBSD, Booting FreeBSD on HPE Microserver SATA port, 3 ways to multiboot, and more.

NOTES

I just got myself a PC Engines APU4D4. I miss an OpenBSD box providing home services. It’s quite simple to install and run OpenBSD on this machine. And you can even update the BIOS from OpenBSD.

My small homelab post generated a ton of questions and comments, most of them specific to running FreeBSD on the HP MicroServer. I’ll try and answer these over the coming week.

multiboot installation of a BSD system with other operating systems

TrueNAS is Multi-OS, Encrypted ZFS on NetBSD, FreeBSD’s new Code of Conduct, Gaming on OpenBSD, dig a little deeper, Hammer2 and periodic snapshots, and more.

NOTES

There was a time in history where all that mattered was an Operating System (OS) and the hardware it ran on — the “pre-software era”, if you will. Your hardware dictated the OS you used.

I had one of my other HP Microservers brought back from the office last week to help with this working-from-home world we’re in right now. I was going to wipe an old version of Debian Wheezy/Xen and install FreeBSD to mirror my other machines before thinking: why not NetBSD?

While no one would expect this, there are huge efforts from a small team to bring more games into OpenBSD. In fact, now some commercial games works natively now, thanks to Mono or Java. There are no wine or linux emulation layer in OpenBSD.

I knew the existence of the dig command but didn't exactly know when and how to use it. Then, just recently I encountered an issue that allowed me to learn and make use of it.

The first version of HAMMER took automatic snapshots, set within the config for each filesystem. HAMMER2 now also takes automatic snapshots, via periodic(8) like most every repeating task on your DragonFly system.

Upgrading OpenBSD, Where do Unix man pages come from?, Help for NetBSD’s VAX port, FreeBSD on Dell Latitude 7390, PFS Tool changes in DragonflyBSD, and more.

NOTES

Let's see how to upgrade your OpenBSD system. Maybe you are doing this because the latest release just came out. If so, this is pretty simple: back up your data, boot from install media, and select "Upgrade" instead of "Install". But maybe the latest release has been out for a few months. Why would we go through the trouble of building and installing a new kernel or other core system components? Maybe some patches have been released to improve system security or stability. It is pretty easy to build and install a kernel on OpenBSD, easier and simpler in many ways than it is on Linux.

Where do UNIX manpages come from? Who introduced the section-based layout of NAME, SYNOPSIS, and so on? And for manpage authors: where were those economical two- and three-letter instructions developed?

The VAX is the oldest machine architecture still supported by NetBSD.

As a FreeBSD developer, I make a point of using FreeBSD whenever I can — including on the desktop. I've been running FreeBSD on laptops since 2004; this hasn't always been easy, but over the years I've found that the situation has generally been improving. One of the things we still lack is adequate documentation, however — so I'm writing this to provide an example for users and also Google bait in case anyone runs into some of the problems I had to address.

HAMMER2 just became a little more DWIM: the pfs-list and pfs-delete directives will now look across all mounted filesystems, not just the current directory’s mount path. pfs-delete won’t delete any filesystem name that appears in more than one place, though