BSD Now

Adding glue to a desktop environment, flashing the BIOS on a PC Engine, revive a Cisco IDS into a capable OpenBSD computer, An OpenBSD WindowMaker desktop, RealTime data compression, the love for pipes, and more. ##Headlines ### Adding Glue To a Desktop Environment In this article we will put some light on a lot of tools used in the world of Unix desktop environment customization, particularly reg...

Strategic thinking to keep FreeBSD relevant, reflecting on the soul of a new machine, 10GbE Benchmarks On Nine Linux Distros and FreeBSD, NetBSD integrating LLVM sanitizers in base, FreeNAS 11.2 distrowatch review, and more. ##Headlines ### Strategic thinking, or what I think what we need to do to keep FreeBSD relevant Since I participate in the FreeBSD project there are from time to time some voi...

We recap FOSDEM 2019, FreeBSD Foundation January update, OPNsense 19.1 released, the hardware-assisted virtualization challenge, ZFS and GPL terror, ClonOS 19.01-RELEASE, and more. Headlines FOSDEM 2019 Recap Allan and I were at FOSDEM 2019 in Brussels, Belgium over the weekend. On the Friday before, we held a FreeBSD Devsummit in a hotel conference room, with 25 people attending. We talked about...

We’re at FOSDEM 2019 this week having fun. We’d never leave you in a lurch, so we have recorded an interview with Niclas Zeising of the FreeBSD graphics team for you. Enjoy. ##Interview - Niclas Zeising - zeising@FreeBSD.org / @niclaszeising Interview topic: FreeBSD Graphics Stack BR: Welcome Niclas. Since this is your first time on BSDNow, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you started...

Project Trident 18.12 released, Spotifyd on NetBSD, OPNsense 18.7.10 is available, Ultra EPYC AMD Powered Sun Ultra 24 Workstation, OpenRsync, LLD porting to NetBSD, and more. ##Headlines ### AsiaBSDCon 2019 Call for Papers You have until Jan 30th to submit Full paper requirement is relaxed a bit this year (this year ONLY!) due to the short submission window. You don’t need all 10-12 pages, but it...

SCP client vulnerabilities, BSDs vs Linux benchmarks on a Tyan EPYC Server, fame for the Unix inventors, Die IPv4, GhostBSD 18.12 released, Unix in pictures, and more. ##Headlines ### scp client multiple vulnerabilities Overview SCP clients from multiple vendors are susceptible to a malicious scp server performing unauthorized changes to target directory and/or client output manipulation. Descript...

A EULA in FOSS clothing, NetBSD with more LLVM support, Thoughts on FreeBSD 12.0, FreeBSD Performance against Windows and Linux on Xeon, Microsoft shipping NetBSD, and more. Headlines A EULA in FOSS clothing? There was a tremendous amount of reaction to and discussion about my blog entry on the midlife crisis in open source . As part of this discussion on HN, Jay Kreps of Confluent took the time t...

The future of ZFS in FreeBSD, we pick highlights from the FreeBSD quarterly status report, flying with the raven, modern KDE on FreeBSD, many ways to launch FreeBSD in EC2, GOG installers on NetBSD, and more. Headlines The future of ZFS in FreeBSD The sources for FreeBSD’s ZFS support are currently taken directly from Illumos with local ifdefs to support the peculiarities of FreeBSD where the Sola...

We sat down at BSDCan 2018 to interview Kirk McKusick about various topics ranging about the early years of Berkeley Unix, his continuing work on UFS, the governance of FreeBSD, and more. ##Interview - Kirk McKusick - mckusick@mckusick.com 25 years of FreeBSD How Kirk got started in BSD, at the very beginning Predicting the Future How the code and community grew The leadership of the project, and...

The Open Source midlife crisis, Donald Knuth The Yoda of Silicon Valley, Certbot For OpenBSD's httpd, how to upgrade FreeBSD from 11 to 12, level up your nmap game, NetBSD desktop, and more. ##Headlines ### Open Source Confronts its midlife crisis Midlife is tough: the idealism of youth has faded, as has inevitably some of its fitness and vigor. At the same time, the responsibilities of adulthood...

FreeBSD 12.0 is finally here, partly-cloudy IPsec VPN, KLEAK with NetBSD, How to create synth repos, GhostBSD author interview, and more. ##Headlines ### FreeBSD 12.0 is available After a long release cycle, the wait is over: FreeBSD 12.0 is now officially available. We’ve picked a few interesting things to cover in the show, make sure to read the full Release Notes Userland: Group permissions on...

DragonflyBSD 5.4 has been released, down the Gopher hole with OpenBSD, OpenBSD in stereo with VFIO, BSD/OS the best candidate for legally tested open source Unix, OpenBGPD adds diversity to the routing server landscape, and more. Headlines DragonflyBSD 5.4 released DragonFly version 5.4 brings a new system compiler in GCC 8, improved NUMA support, a large of number network and virtual machine driv...

Assembly language on OpenBSD, using bhyve for FreeBSD development, FreeBSD Gaming, FreeBSD for Thanksgiving, no space left on Dragonfly’s hammer2, and more. ##Headlines ### Assembly language on OpenBSD amd64+arm64 This is a short introduction to assembly language programming on OpenBSD/amd64+arm64. Because of security features in the kernel, I have had to rethink a series of tutorials covering Aar...

Thoughts on NetBSD 8.0, Monitoring love for a GigaBit OpenBSD firewall, cat’s source history, X.org root permission bug, thoughts on OpenBSD as a desktop, and NomadBSD review. ##Headlines ### Some thoughts on NetBSD 8.0 NetBSD is a highly portable operating system which can be run on dozens of different hardware architectures. The operating system’s clean and minimal design allow it to be run in a...

Byproducts of reading OpenBSD’s netcat code, learnings from porting your own projects to FreeBSD, OpenBSD’s unveil(), NetBSD’s Virtual Machine Monitor, what 'dependency' means in Unix init systems, jailing bhyve, and more. ##Headlines ### The byproducts of reading OpenBSD netcat code When I took part in a training last year, I heard about netcat for the first time. During that class, the tutor sho...

MidnightBSD 1.0 released, MeetBSD review, EuroBSDcon trip reports, DNS over TLS in FreeBSD 12, Upgrading OpenBSD with Ansible, how to use smartd to run tests on your drives automatically, and more. ##Headlines ### MidnightBSD 1.0 now available I’m happy to announce the availability of MidnightBSD 1.0 for amd64 and i386. Over the years, many ambitious goals were set for our 1.0 release. As it appro...

OpenBSD 6.4 released, GhostBSD RC2 released, MeetBSD - the ultimate hallway track, DragonflyBSD desktop on a Thinkpad, Porting keybase to NetBSD, OpenSSH 7.9, and draft-ietf-6man-ipv6only-flag in FreeBSD. ##Headlines ### OpenBSD 6.4 released See a detailed log of changes between the 6.3 and 6.4 releases. See the information on the FTP page for a list of mirror machines. Have a look at the 6.4 erra...

FreeBSD Foundation September Update, tiny C lib for programming Unix daemons, EuroBSDcon trip reports, GhostBSD tested on real hardware, and a BSD auth module for duress. ##Headlines ### FreeBSD Foundation Update, September 2018 MESSAGE FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Dear FreeBSD Community Member, It is hard to believe that September is over. The Foundation team had a busy month promoting FreeBSD all...

6 metrics for zpool performance, 2FA with ssh on OpenBSD, ZFS maintaining file type information in dirs, everything old is new again, netcat demystified, and more. ##Headlines ### Six Metrics for Measuring ZFS Pool Performance Part 1 The layout of a ZFS storage pool has a significant impact on system performance under various workloads. Given the importance of picking the right configuration for y...

We have a long interview with fiction and non-fiction author Michael W. Lucas for you this week as well as questions from the audience. ##Headlines ##Interview - Michael W. Lucas - mwlucas@michaelwlucas.com / @mwlauthor BR: [Welcome Back] AJ: What have you been doing since last we talked to you [ed, ssh, and af3e] BR: Tell us more about AF3e AJ: How did the first Absolute FreeBSD come about? BR: D...

Running OpenBSD/NetBSD on FreeBSD using grub2-bhyve, vermaden’s FreeBSD story, thoughts on OpenBSD on the desktop, history of file type info in Unix dirs, Multiboot a Pinebook KDE neon image, and more. ##Headlines ### OpenBSD/NetBSD on FreeBSD using grub2-bhyve When I was writing a blog post about the process title, I needed a couple of virtual machines with OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Ubuntu. Before tha...

We report from our experiences at EuroBSDcon, disenchant software, LLVM 7.0.0 has been released, Thinkpad BIOS update options, HardenedBSD Foundation announced, and ZFS send vs. rsync. ##Headlines ###[FreeBSD DevSummit & EuroBSDcon 2018 in Romania] Your hosts are back from EuroBSDcon 2018 held in Bucharest, Romania this year. The first two days of the conference are used for tutorials and devs...

FreeBSD and DragonflyBSD benchmarks on AMD’s Threadripper, NetBSD 7.2 has been released, optimized out DTrace kernel symbols, stuck UEFI bootloaders, why ed is not a good editor today, tell your BSD story, and more. ##Headlines ### FreeBSD & DragonFlyBSD Put Up A Strong Fight On AMD’s Threadripper 2990WX, Benchmarks Against Linux The past two weeks I have been delivering a great deal of AMD Th...

Mitigating Spectre/Meltdown on HP Proliant servers, omniOS installation setup, debugging a memory corruption issue on OpenBSD, CfT for OpenZFS native encryption, Asigra TrueNAS backup appliance shown at VMworld, NetBSD 6 EoL, and more. ##Headlines ### How to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown on an HP Proliant server with FreeBSD As recently announced in a previous article I wanted to write a couple of...

OpenBSD on Microsoft Surface Go, FreeBSD Foundation August Update, What’s taking so long with Project Trident, pkgsrc config file versioning, and MacOS remnants in ZFS code. ##Headlines ### OpenBSD on the Microsoft Surface Go For some reason I like small laptops and the constraints they place on me (as long as they’re still usable). I used a Dell Mini 9 for a long time back in the netbook days and...