Coming up this week on the show! We've got an interview with Dag-Erling Smørgrav, the current security officer of FreeBSD, to discuss what exactly being in such an important position is like. The latest news, answers to your emails and even some LibreSSL drama, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
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g2k14 hackathon reports
Nearly 50 OpenBSD developers gathered in Ljubljana, Slovenia from July 8-14 for a hackathonLots of work got done - in just the first two weeks of July, there were over 1000 commits to their CVS treeSome of the developers wrote in to document what they were up to at the eventBob Beck planned to work on kernel stuff, but then "LibreSSL happened" and he spent most of his time working on thatMiod Vallat also tells about his LibreSSL experiencesBrent Cook, a new developer, worked mainly on the portable version of LibreSSL (and we'll be interviewing him next week!)Henning Brauer worked on VLAN bpf and various things related to IPv6 and network interfaces (and he still hates IPv6)Martin Pieuchot fixed some bugs in the USB stack, softraid and misc other thingsMarc Espie improved the package code, enabling some speed ups, fixed some ports that broke with LibreSSL and some of the new changes and also did some work on ensuring snapshot consistencyMartin Pelikan integrated read-only ext4 supportVadim Zhukov did lots of ports work, including working on KDE4Theo de Raadt created a new, more secure system call, "sendsyslog" and did a lot of work with /etc, sysmerge and the rc scriptsPaul Irofti worked on the USB stack, specifically for the Octeon platformSebastian Benoit worked on relayd filters and IPv6 codeJasper Lievisse Adriaanse did work with puppet, packages and the bootloaderJonathan Gray imported newer Mesa libraries and did a lot with Xenocara, including work in the installer for autodetectionStefan Sperling fixed a lot of issues with wireless driversFlorian Obser did many things related to IPv6Ingo Schwarze worked on mandoc, as usual, and also rewrote the openbsd.org man.cgi interfaceKen Westerback hacked on dhclient and dhcpd, and also got dump working on 4k sector drivesMatthieu Herrb worked on updating and modernizing parts of xenocara***
FreeBSD pf discussion takes off
Concerns from last week, about FreeBSD's packet filter being old and unmaintained, seemed to have finally sparked some conversation about the topic on the "questions" and "current" mailing lists (unfortunately people didn't always use reply-all so you have to cross-reference the two lists to follow the whole conversation sometimes)Straight from the SMP FreeBSD pf maintainer: "no one right now [is actively developing pf on FreeBSD]"Searching for documentation online for pf is troublesome because there are two incompatible syntaxesFreeBSD's pf man pages are lacking, and some of FreeBSD's documentation still links to OpenBSD's pages, which won't work anymore - possibly turning away would-be BSD converts because it's frustratingThere's also the issue of importing patches from pfSense, but most of those still haven't been done eitherLots of disagreement among developers vs. users...Many users are very vocal about wanting it updated, saying the syntax change is no big deal and is worth the benefits - developers aren't interestedHenning Brauer, the main developer of pf on OpenBSD, has been very nice and offered to help the other BSDs get their pf fixed on multiple occasionsGleb Smirnoff, author of the FreeBSD-specific SMP patches, questions Henning's claims about OpenBSD's improved speed as "uncorroborated claims" (but neither side has provided any public benchmarks)Gleb had to abandon his work on FreeBSD's pf because funding ran out***
LibreSSL progress update
LibreSSL's first few portable releases have come out and they're making great progress, releasing 2.0.3 two days agoLots of non-OpenBSD people are starting to contribute, sending in patches via the tech mailing listHowever, there has already been some drama... with Linux usersThere was a problem with Linux's PRNG, and LibreSSL was unforgiving of it, not making an effort to randomize something that could not provide real entropyThis "problem" doesn't affect OpenBSD's native implementation, only the portable versionThe developers decide to weigh in to calm the misinformation and rageA fix was added in 2.0.2, and Linux may even get a new system call to handle this properly now - remember to say thanks, guysTed Unangst has a really good post about the whole situation, definitely check it outAs a follow-up from last week, bapt says they're working on building the whole FreeBSD ports tree against LibreSSL, but lots of things still need some patching to work properly - if you're a port maintainer, please test your ports against it***
Preparation for NetBSD 7
The release process for NetBSD 7.0 is finally underwayThe netbsd-7 CVS branch should be created around July 26th, which marks the start of the first beta period, which will be lasting until SeptemberIf you run NetBSD, that'll be a great time to help test on as many platforms as you can (this is especially true on custom embedded applications)They're also looking for some help updating documentation and fixing any bugs that get reportedAnother formal announcement will be made when the beta binaries are up***
Interview - Dag-Erling Smørgrav - [email protected] / @RealEvilDES
The role of the FreeBSD Security Officer, recent ports features, various topics
News Roundup
BSDCan ports and packages WG
Back at BSDCan this year, there was a special event for discussion of FreeBSD ports and packagesBapt talked about package building, poudriere and the systems the foundation funded for compiling packagesThere's also some detail about the signing infrastructure and different mirrorsPorts people and source people need to talk more often about ABI breakageThe post also includes information about pkg 1.3, the old pkg tools' EOL, the quarterly stable package sets and a lot more (it's a huge post!)***
Cross-compiling ports with QEMU and poudriere
With recent QEMU features, you can basically chroot into a completely different architectureThis article goes through the process of building ARMv6 packages on a normal X86 boxNote though that this requires 10-STABLE or 11-CURRENT and an extra patch for QEMU right nowThe poudriere-devel port now has a "qemu user" option that will pull in all the requirementsHopefully this will pave the way for official pkgng packages on those lesser-used architectures***
Cloning FreeBSD with ZFS send
For a FreeBSD mail server that MWL runs, he wanted to have a way to easily restore the whole system if something were to happenThis post shows his entire process in creating a mirror machine, using ZFS for everythingThe "zfs send" and "zfs snapshot" commands really come in handy for thisHe does the whole thing from a live CD, pretty impressive***
FreeBSD Overview series
A new blog series we stumbled upon about a Linux user switching to BSDIn part one, he gives a little background on being "done with Linux distros" and documents his initial experience getting and installing FreeBSD 10He was pleasantly surprised to be able to use ZFS without jumping through hoops and doing custom kernelsMost of what he was used to on Linux was already in the default FreeBSD (except bash...)Part two documents his experiences with pkgng and ports ***
Feedback/Questions
Bostjan writes inRick writes inClint writes inEsteban writes inBen writes inMatt sends in pictures of his FreeBSD CD collection***
