POPULARITY
Linux Lugcast - https://linuxlugcast.com/ Hacker Public Radio - https://hackerpublicradio.org/ Reichsmark - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsmark 7-11 convenience store - https://www.7-eleven.com/ 7-11 pizza - https://www.7-eleven.com/products/pizza Peanut butter sandwich - https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/photos/pb-and-yay- Cereal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cereal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_breakfast_cereals Medicaid - https://www.medicaid.gov/ Raspberry Pi - https://www.raspberrypi.com/ MX Linux - https://mxlinux.org/ MX Linux Pi OS Respin - https://mxlinux.org/blog/mx-23-1-raspberry-pi-os-respin/ Raspberry Pi OS - https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/ Chromium Browser - https://www.chromium.org/chromium-projects/ Firefox Browser - https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ Raspberry Pi 400 - https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/ How Many Open Browser Tabs Is Too Many Open Browser Tabs? - https://lifehacker.com/does-having-too-many-tabs-open-really-slow-down-your-br-1848554140 HDMI - https://www.lifewire.com/hdmi-facts-high-definition-multimedia-interface-1847337 VGA - https://www.howtogeek.com/821620/what-is-vga/ RCA Connectors - https://www.cablethis.com/demystifying-rca-connectors-how-they-impact-your-audio-quality/ Composite Video - https://www.lifewire.com/composite-video-the-basics-1846869 CDC Pascal - https://standardpascal.org/CDC6000pascal.html https://exhibits.stanford.edu/stanford-pubs/catalog/sz874xb6118 Xerox - https://www.xerox.com/en-us IBM - https://www.ibm.com/us-en Thailand Death Train - https://www.bordersofadventure.com/death-railway-kanchanaburi-thailand/ https://www.thaitrainguide.com/death-railway/ West Virginia - https://www.wv.gov/Pages/default.aspx https://wvtourism.com/ Mining Effects On Fishing - https://fisheries.org/policy-media/policy-statements/afs-policy-statement-13/ Mining Land Remediation/Reclamation - https://www.epa.gov/remedytech/green-remediation-best-management-practices-mining-sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mine_reclamation Kwai River - https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g297924-d554151-Reviews-River_Kwai-Kanchanaburi_Kanchanaburi_Province.html Cassava - https://plants.usda.gov/DocumentLibrary/plantguide/pdf/pg_maes.pdf https://codycovefarm.com/plant-profile-cassava-manihot-esculenta/ Sugar Cane - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_Kane Rice - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice https://www.foodnetwork.com/how-to/articles/how-to-make-perfect-rice-a-step-by-step-guide The story of the great Polish train hack - https://www.railway-technology.com/news/the-story-of-the-great-polish-train-hack/?cf-view CompuServe Headquarters turns 50 - https://abc6onyourside.com/news/local/historical-status-given-to-central-ohio-building-that-once-housed-compuserve Compuserve - https://www.compuserve.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe PDP-10 Computer - http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/pdp10.html Linear Power Supply - https://www.tek.com/en/documents/application-note/understanding-linear-power-supply-specifications Switching Power Supply - https://www.eleccircuit.com/what-switching-power-supply-how-does-it-work/ Asperger's Syndrome - https://www.autismspeaks.org/types-autism-what-asperger-syndrome DietPi - https://dietpi.com/ Debian Linux - https://www.debian.org/ XFCE - https://www.xfce.org/ Systemd - https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/what-is-systemd MX-23 XFCE (Bookworm) - https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=362478 Thorium Web Browser - https://thorium.rocks/ Waterfox Web Browser - https://www.waterfox.net/ Group Speed Dial (FIrefox) - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/groupspeeddial/ Raspberry Pi 5 - https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/ PDP-6 - http://pdp-6.net/ MIT - https://web.mit.edu/ MIT Early AI works - https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5460 ZULU Time - https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/timezone/zulu Daylight Savings Time - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/what-is-us-daylight-saving-time-why-was-it-created-2023-10-31/ Truck Driver Rules & Regulations - https://truckstop.com/blog/understanding-truck-driving-hours-and-regulations/ Amphetamine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphetamine Men In Black - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119654/ Cold War - https://www.britannica.com/event/Cold-War Pershing Ballastic Missle - https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/history/pershing.html Pershing M26 Tank - https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww2/us/m26_pershing.php C4 Plastic Explosive - https://www.military.com/video/ammunition-and-explosives/explosives/c4-explained/1367499806001 Battleship New Jersey - https://www.battleshipnewjersey.org/ B-52 - https://stratofortress.org/history/ Wagner Military Group - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group John Ringo - https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/John-Ringo/1875432 Ghost (John Ringo book) - https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-ringo/ghost-3/ Battleship Wisconsin - https://nauticus.org/explore/battleship-exhibits/about-the-battleship/ Jules Verne - https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/jules-verne M28/M29 Davy Crockett Tactical Nuclear Weapon - https://armyhistory.org/the-m28m29-davy-crockett-nuclear-weapon-system/ PTSD - https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/ptsd/what-is-ptsd Autistic Spectrum - https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/signs.html Dyslexia - https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dyslexia/symptoms-causes/syc-20353552 Boston - https://www.boston.gov/visiting-boston Clinical Depression - https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/depression Maine - https://visitmaine.com/ Spread Spectrum Communications - https://www.edn.com/what-is-spread-spectrum-technology/ Israeli Army Unit that recruits autistic teens - https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/israeli-army-autism/422850/ Open Source - https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-source New Years Resolution - https://www.newsweek.com/new-years-resolution-2022-meaning-origin-ideas-1662947 Mini HDMI Cable - https://www.howtogeek.com/745530/hdmi-vs-mini-hdmi-vs-micro-hdmi-whats-the-difference/ LibreOffice Impress - https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/impress/ Powerpoint - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/powerpoint Google Drive - https://www.google.com/drive/ GPD Win 4 - https://www.gpd.hk/gpdwin4 Coreboot - https://www.coreboot.org/ Libreboot - https://libreboot.org/ FOSDEM - https://fosdem.org/2024/ BIOS - https://computer.howstuffworks.com/bios.htm X11 - https://www.baeldung.com/linux/x11 Wayland - https://wayland.freedesktop.org/ Gnome 3 - https://www.gnome.org/getting-gnome/ Mate - https://mate-desktop.org/ Xorg - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg Open Suse - https://www.opensuse.org/ KDE - https://kde.org/ Unity - https://unityd.org/ Chromebook - https://www.google.com/chromebook/ ASUS EEE PC 901 - https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/asus-eee-pc-901 ASUS EEE PC X101CH - https://www.cnet.com/reviews/asus-eee-pc-x101ch-review/ Star Labs - https://us.starlabs.systems/?shpxid=fc6f3491-925e-4b6c-aba5-4477924fc432 Pulse Audio - https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/ Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) - https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/obsessive-compulsive-disorder-ocd STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math) - https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-stem-4150175
First up in the news: Mint Monthly News, Steam Deck exceeds 10,000 games, Red Hat fights public opinion, new LibreBoot is out, Google whines about their new AI search, Peppermint OS upgrades to Bookworm, a new KaOS, First Amendment fails at Supremes, and Solus 4 is released In security and privacy, StackRot is here, and so is ProtonPass Then in our Wanderings, Moss makes money, Joe goes 3D, Bill mics up, and Majid thumbs his nose at inflation Download
The oldest machines we'd be willing to daily drive including a ThinkPad with Libreboot, the ways that old laptops are sometimes better, and why Microsoft's silly Windows 11 requirements are great for the second hand Linux-friendly laptop market. Plus why we missed the climate change aspect of speculation about the future. HelloFresh... Read More
The oldest machines we'd be willing to daily drive including a ThinkPad with Libreboot, the ways that old laptops are sometimes better, and why Microsoft's silly Windows 11 requirements are great for the second hand Linux-friendly laptop market. Plus why we missed the climate change aspect of speculation about the future. HelloFresh … Continue reading "Linux After Dark – Episode 46"
Rynek PC jest spadkobiercą 40 lat rozwoju który bardzo silnie związał użytkowników z “oprogramowaniem układowym”, którego nie sposób się pozbyć. Od BIOS po UEFI na binarnych fragmentach FW urządzeń peryferyjnych skończywszy, zawsze gdzieś w systemie czyha potencjalny cichy intruz.Nasuwają się więc pytania: “Czy jesteśmy skazani na Firmware”? Czy producenci sprzętu tworzą tajną lożę i chcą zawładnąć światem poprzez szpiegowanie nieświadomych użytkowników? W czyim interesie jest zaszywanie w krzemie instrukcji procesora weryfikujących podpis cyfrowy oprogramowania? Na te i podobne pytania postaramy się odpowiedzieć w tym odcinku podcastu Poziom Niżej.Prowadzący: Radosław Biernacki, Marcin Wojtas, Jan DąbrośHashtag: acpi, bios, coreboot, firmware, secureboot, uefi### Plan odcinka# 00:00 - Wprowadzenie# 04:56 - Czym jest firmware# 10:33 - Trochę historii - BIOS# 17:43 - Czas obecny - UEFI# 22:50 - EDK2# 28:30 - CSM - czyli UEFI potrafi w BIOS# 29:50 - Coreboot - KISS# 31:05 - Libreboot# 33:30 - Bootloader, czyli co następuje po…# 35:45 - RaspberryPi jako beneficjent otwartego firmware# 38:35 - Bootrom - czyli jak uruchamiają się nowoczesne procesory# 42:40 - Detale wczesnych etapów uruchomienia systemu# 45:40 - Microcode# 48:00 - Inicjalizacja (trening) RAM# 52:12 - Bootloader# 56:40 - Skąd firmware bierze sterowniki? (OptionROM)# 1:01:30 - Jak ładowany i uruchamiany jest kod kernela?# 1:03:18 - Dlaczego kelnerowi potrzebny jest opis sprzętu i środowiska?# 1:05:28 - Jak dokonywane są aktualizacje firmware?# 1:09:55 - ACPI# 1:17:25 - DeviceTree i “sprawa ARM”# 1:21:32 - System Management BIOS (SMBIOS)# 1:23:10 - Bezpieczeństwo, zaufanie i prywatność# 1:26:10 - SecureBoot i VerifiedBoot# 1:31:45 - TPM# 1:35:50 - Podsumowanie# 1:39:25 - Bonus ### Linki do materiałów dodatkowych:# 22:55 - Specyfikacja UEFI - https://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/UEFI_Spec_2_8_final.pdf# 23:19 - Repozytorium EDK2 - https://github.com/tianocore/edk2# 27:07 - Implementacja "UEFI runtime services" w u-boot - https://source.denx.de/u-boot/u-boot/-/blob/master/lib/efi_loader/efi_runtime.c# 30:18 - Repozytorium i strona główna coreboot - https://review.coreboot.org/plugins/gitiles/coreboot/+/refs/heads/master, https://www.coreboot.org/# 31:13 - Strona główna libreboot - https://libreboot.org/# 31:35 - Repozytorium FSP - https://github.com/intel/FSP# 33:14 - Repozytorium oreboot - https://github.com/oreboot/oreboot# 35:15 - Strona główna i repozytorium LinuxBoot - https://www.linuxboot.org/, https://github.com/linuxboot/linuxboot# 44:05 - IME - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine# 49:17 - Więcej o SPD(Serial Presence Detect) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_presence_detect# 59:16 - 1:01:30 - Sterownik do uruchamiania instrukcji x86 na AArch64 https://github.com/ardbiesheuvel/X86EmulatorPkg# 1:04:23 - Opis "runtime services" w specyfikacji UEFI: https://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/UEFI_Spec_2_9_2021_03_18.pdf#page=308# 1:05:06 - Opis "EFI system table": https://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/UEFI_Spec_2_9_2021_03_18.pdf#page=168# 1:11:46 - link do kernel.org i arch/arm/mach*: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/arch/arm?h=master# 1:14:30 - Specyfikacja ACPI i główne koncepty: https://uefi.org/specs/ACPI/6.4/index.html + https://uefi.org/specs/ACPI/6.4/03_ACPI_Concepts/ACPI_Concepts.html#acpi-concepts# 1:15:20 - Specyfikacja AML: https://uefi.org/specs/ACPI/6.4/20_AML_Specification/AML_Specification.html# 1:21:40 - Specyfikacja SMBIOS - https://www.dmtf.org/sites/default/files/standards/documents/DSP0134_3.6.0.pdf# 1:29:50 - Podcast Poziom Niżej #006 - "Bezpieczeństwo w krzemie zaklęte" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqaeyaH8jFs# 1:31:45 - Wpis dotyczący ataku na komunikacją SPI pomiędzy CPU a TPM - https://dolosgroup.io/blog/2021/7/9/from-stolen-laptop-to-inside-the-company-network
Peter hat versucht Technik zu importieren, Marius hat versehentlich einen Laptop gekauft und außerdem reden sie über den ROMA RISC-V Laptop, was bedeutet der Digital Markets Act für Apple, Microsoft Store vs. Open Source, Libreboot 20220710 released, Apple Lockdown Mode und vieles mehr!
Peter hat versucht Technik zu importieren, Marius hat versehentlich einen Laptop gekauft und außerdem reden sie über den ROMA RISC-V Laptop, was bedeutet der Digital Markets Act für Apple, Microsoft Store vs. Open Source, Libreboot 20220710 released, Apple Lockdown Mode und vieles mehr!
Peter hat versucht Technik zu importieren, Marius hat versehentlich einen Laptop gekauft und außerdem reden sie über den ROMA RISC-V Laptop, was bedeutet der Digital Markets Act für Apple, Microsoft Store vs. Open Source, Libreboot 20220710 released, Apple Lockdown Mode und vieles mehr!
Doc Sovryn is back for another Sovryn Tech Subscriber Q&A episode, only available to Patreon Sovryn Tech Patrons! Talking the Libreboot scandal, the Facebook "Thankful React", a bunch of blockchain nonsense and your album of the week! WOO! Feel free to send in more questions for future entries!SHOW NOTES: --"Thankful React Reaction" --"Libreboot Follow-up" --"Best Exchange for Bitcoins and Altcoins?" --"Nxt's Ardor" --"Mysterium VPN" --Album of the Week: "Harem Scarem - United" RETROSHARE KEY FOR CONTENT: CQEGAf8AAAJYxsBNBFkIjOgBCADBvtSR234Yb5ODyEik8bJoa09TN+DaOZTr1VvA RFPoBQLVqsk7Q3isc33bcmX3xBmCUXmjX/tDgw3BaxHHY7BKG0To3VE9+HBt90t3 QLM2c+piFRlTYZNlxsbWZkxE00g6QymB77DmHv8S9TchsXuLiG60ilylcUsxgJEr tJkJ7aujla6gTAar/w62WmpMSJdf5CwWHNyEU142rqRe78iimGbaUOX/hTDLx2Ci 9CTpqgCRTTzObeL9yclNrNr/nF31wjD407Mz12VV20EIHZADT4ibckIy5PYfNESL L0MhDD+YvAtMaEQXTr5+c82QZY2wpKcZ2o7KwBbyyMIKxUTBABEBAAHNJEFhcm9u IEUgKEdlbmVyYXRlZCBieSBSZXRyb1NoYXJlKSA8PsLAXwQTAQIAEwUCWQiM6AkQ NuBIOCEKTDQCGQEAAKmeB/9qcD86SNL/wAEJWm8wUlKc0ClsYs8t7ZUv1v1eNX+J 9YeyyrCspSGQqGbqq2m4GzOLBt6ugDUU9fUNsJJlEYY3diQqH79qXXeP0a3KhQ+h tJotDkxRaiHvgBKhrPrzSEpYQ63du18jGwFXu4FPAO+FwbzBqQu/RZFVPXcqyci9 hYAgrPmzweANQVUs+/tJCoC1dAQg7XxW25hNgLMsFOpc7EQFTe5WBqOjjQjze3Dt 88T1D0Hgnc9TOw12pU6jFYslMj+Nom4AB6X6JlO+UBgHY4+gDbiAfAqtmUPKqPAr 3bb1SQFaw4xNoZvk7NdhCFRKix7b1jvpsLZIUjsbvGzbAgZIMDI+BAADBsCoAckE AAQABgZTZXJ2ZXIFEDz57tjPISKR78vcDaLtzOEHA2CavA== APPENDIX: --"Mysterium Network" Link: https://mysterium.network/ --"Nxt's Ardor" Link: https://www.ardorplatform.org/=========================http://www.zog.ninja
Doc Sovryn is back for another Sovryn Tech Subscriber Q&A episode, only available to Patreon Sovryn Tech Patrons! Talking the Libreboot scandal, the Facebook "Thankful React", a bunch of blockchain nonsense and your album of the week! WOO! Feel free to send in more questions for future entries!SHOW NOTES: --"Thankful React Reaction" --"Libreboot Follow-up" --"Best Exchange for Bitcoins and Altcoins?" --"Nxt's Ardor" --"Mysterium VPN" --Album of the Week: "Harem Scarem - United" RETROSHARE KEY FOR CONTENT: CQEGAf8AAAJYxsBNBFkIjOgBCADBvtSR234Yb5ODyEik8bJoa09TN+DaOZTr1VvA RFPoBQLVqsk7Q3isc33bcmX3xBmCUXmjX/tDgw3BaxHHY7BKG0To3VE9+HBt90t3 QLM2c+piFRlTYZNlxsbWZkxE00g6QymB77DmHv8S9TchsXuLiG60ilylcUsxgJEr tJkJ7aujla6gTAar/w62WmpMSJdf5CwWHNyEU142rqRe78iimGbaUOX/hTDLx2Ci 9CTpqgCRTTzObeL9yclNrNr/nF31wjD407Mz12VV20EIHZADT4ibckIy5PYfNESL L0MhDD+YvAtMaEQXTr5+c82QZY2wpKcZ2o7KwBbyyMIKxUTBABEBAAHNJEFhcm9u IEUgKEdlbmVyYXRlZCBieSBSZXRyb1NoYXJlKSA8PsLAXwQTAQIAEwUCWQiM6AkQ NuBIOCEKTDQCGQEAAKmeB/9qcD86SNL/wAEJWm8wUlKc0ClsYs8t7ZUv1v1eNX+J 9YeyyrCspSGQqGbqq2m4GzOLBt6ugDUU9fUNsJJlEYY3diQqH79qXXeP0a3KhQ+h tJotDkxRaiHvgBKhrPrzSEpYQ63du18jGwFXu4FPAO+FwbzBqQu/RZFVPXcqyci9 hYAgrPmzweANQVUs+/tJCoC1dAQg7XxW25hNgLMsFOpc7EQFTe5WBqOjjQjze3Dt 88T1D0Hgnc9TOw12pU6jFYslMj+Nom4AB6X6JlO+UBgHY4+gDbiAfAqtmUPKqPAr 3bb1SQFaw4xNoZvk7NdhCFRKix7b1jvpsLZIUjsbvGzbAgZIMDI+BAADBsCoAckE AAQABgZTZXJ2ZXIFEDz57tjPISKR78vcDaLtzOEHA2CavA== APPENDIX: --"Mysterium Network" Link: https://mysterium.network/ --"Nxt's Ardor" Link: https://www.ardorplatform.org/=========================http://www.zog.ninja
Vi firar GDPR-veckan med stadigt intrillande mejl från en strid ström av oväntade håll och en hel hög ämnen: Senaste nytt om bendgate VM-GULD!!!!! (ja jag vet att jag är en nörd. / J) GDPR: bra tillfälle att gå igenom alla gamla konton man glömt att man hade Bitcoin-mining drar lika mycket ström som hela Österrike i slutet på detta år Schibstedt (Aftonbladet, SvD, mfl) pausar annonser från Google Libreboot - öppenkällkodsbios för PC-datorer. Men varför? Roligt med copyright-meddelande på projektets hemsida Amiga-acceleratorn - har den kommit? JA! Den fungerar utmärkt! Hur stora diskar kan man sätta i en äldre Amiga? Vintagedatorerforumet börjar ta fart Modelljärnvägens hus Jimmy Svenssons mejlade - Raspberryalternativ med upp till 4 GB RAM Cool, obsolete and unknown tech - Jimmys spellista Det oerhört coola “Bulgariens UFO” Nu kan man ladda ner sina personuppgifter från Apple Googles interna video - den själviska luntan - klassisk Jurassic park (kändes suggestiv, ungefär som Apples flummiga konceptfilm för The Knowledge Navigator) Kommentar på hela eget bibliotek kontra streaming-diskussionen: allt jag vill lyssna på finns inte på Spotify, men streaming har fått mig att lyssna på mer (och till och med lite mer varierad) musik oftare. Eller så är jag bara inne i ett musikskov Finns det bra sätt att dela foton med andra, och låta dem lägga till sina egna? Som går snabbt att sätta upp och använda? (som inte gräver och tar dina metadata och använder för läskiga syften?) Bonusmaterial: Fredrik har sett Solo: a star wars story. Spoilervarning från 1:12:05 Länkar Jockes text om att bli svartlistad Bendgate GDPR Bitcoin-mining drar lika mycket ström som hela Österrike i slutet på detta år Svenska medier tar Googlepaus Libreboot GPL Macbook 1,1 och 2,1 Zorro II Guru meditation www.vintagedatorer.se Kaffelunden Solidtango Modelljärnvägens hus Airmail Rock64 Raspberry Pi-kluster på 40 noder Illers bild Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these Cool, obsolete and unknown tech - Jimmys spellista E.T. Buzludzhamonumentet - “Bulgariens UFO” Ladda ner all data Apple har om dig UFO-huset i Örebro - de heter tydligen Futuro Googles “selfish ledger” Duplex - Googles AI som ringer telefonsamtal åt en Apples knowledge navigator-video Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should Against all odds Jockes 80-tals-lista Owncloud HEIF Solo: a star wars story - behöver Han Solo en backstory? Tarkin Thumb wars - bästa Star wars-parodin någonsin? Fullständig avsnittsinformation finns här: https://www.bjoremanmelin.se/podcast/avsnitt-125-gdpar.html.
We take a look at two-faced Oracle, cover a FAMP installation, how Netflix works the complex stuff, and show you who the patron of yak shaving is. This episode was brought to you by Headlines Why is Oracle so two-faced over open source? (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/12/oracle_must_grow_up_on_open_source/) Oracle loves open source. Except when the database giant hates open source. Which, according to its recent lobbying of the US federal government, seems to be "most of the time". Yes, Oracle has recently joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to up its support for open-source Kubernetes and, yes, it has long supported (and contributed to) Linux. And, yes, Oracle has even gone so far as to (finally) open up Java development by putting it under a foundation's stewardship. Yet this same, seemingly open Oracle has actively hammered the US government to consider that "there is no math that can justify open source from a cost perspective as the cost of support plus the opportunity cost of forgoing features, functions, automation and security overwhelm any presumed cost savings." That punch to the face was delivered in a letter to Christopher Liddell, a former Microsoft CFO and now director of Trump's American Technology Council, by Kenneth Glueck, Oracle senior vice president. The US government had courted input on its IT modernisation programme. Others writing back to Liddell included AT&T, Cisco, Microsoft and VMware. In other words, based on its letter, what Oracle wants us to believe is that open source leads to greater costs and poorly secured, limply featured software. Nor is Oracle content to leave it there, also arguing that open source is exactly how the private sector does not function, seemingly forgetting that most of the leading infrastructure, big data, and mobile software today is open source. Details! Rather than take this counterproductive detour into self-serving silliness, Oracle would do better to follow Microsoft's path. Microsoft, too, used to Janus-face its way through open source, simultaneously supporting and bashing it. Only under chief executive Satya Nadella's reign did Microsoft realise it's OK to fully embrace open source, and its financial results have loved the commitment. Oracle has much to learn, and emulate, in Microsoft's approach. I love you, you're perfect. Now change Oracle has never been particularly warm and fuzzy about open source. As founder Larry Ellison might put it, Oracle is a profit-seeking corporation, not a peace-loving charity. To the extent that Oracle embraces open source, therefore it does so for financial reward, just like every other corporation. Few, however, are as blunt as Oracle about this fact of corporate open-source life. As Ellison told the Financial Times back in 2006: "If an open-source product gets good enough, we'll simply take it. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it – a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that's what we'll do. "So it is not disruptive at all – you have to find places to add value. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane... We don't have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source." "Exploit" sounds about right. While Oracle doesn't crack the top-10 corporate contributors to the Linux kernel, it does register a respectable number 12, which helps it influence the platform enough to feel comfortable building its IaaS offering on Linux (and Xen for virtualisation). Oracle has also managed to continue growing MySQL's clout in the industry while improving it as a product and business. As for Kubernetes, Oracle's decision to join the CNCF also came with P&L strings attached. "CNCF technologies such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, gRPC and OpenTracing are critical parts of both our own and our customers' development toolchains," said Mark Cavage, vice president of software development at Oracle. One can argue that Oracle has figured out the exploitation angle reasonably well. This, however, refers to the right kind of exploitation, the kind that even free software activist Richard Stallman can love (or, at least, tolerate). But when it comes to government lobbying, Oracle looks a lot more like Mr Hyde than Dr Jekyll. Lies, damned lies, and Oracle lobbying The current US president has many problems (OK, many, many problems), but his decision to follow the Obama administration's support for IT modernisation is commendable. Most recently, the Trump White House asked for feedback on how best to continue improving government IT. Oracle's response is high comedy in many respects. As TechDirt's Mike Masnick summarises, Oracle's "latest crusade is against open-source technology being used by the federal government – and against the government hiring people out of Silicon Valley to help create more modern systems. Instead, Oracle would apparently prefer the government just give it lots of money." Oracle is very good at making lots of money. As such, its request for even more isn't too surprising. What is surprising is the brazenness of its position. As Masnick opines: "The sheer contempt found in Oracle's submission on IT modernization is pretty stunning." Why? Because Oracle contradicts much that it publicly states in other forums about open source and innovation. More than this, Oracle contradicts much of what we now know is essential to competitive differentiation in an increasingly software and data-driven world. Take, for example, Oracle's contention that "significant IT development expertise is not... central to successful modernization efforts". What? In our "software is eating the world" existence Oracle clearly believes that CIOs are buyers, not doers: "The most important skill set of CIOs today is to critically compete and evaluate commercial alternatives to capture the benefits of innovation conducted at scale, and then to manage the implementation of those technologies efficiently." While there is some truth to Oracle's claim – every project shouldn't be a custom one-off that must be supported forever – it's crazy to think that a CIO – government or otherwise – is doing their job effectively by simply shovelling cash into vendors' bank accounts. Indeed, as Masnick points out: "If it weren't for Oracle's failures, there might not even be a USDS [the US Digital Service created in 2014 to modernise federal IT]. USDS really grew out of the emergency hiring of some top-notch internet engineers in response to the Healthcare.gov rollout debacle. And if you don't recall, a big part of that debacle was blamed on Oracle's technology." In short, blindly giving money to Oracle and other big vendors is the opposite of IT modernisation. In its letter to Liddell, Oracle proceeded to make the fantastic (by which I mean "silly and false") claim that "the fact is that the use of open-source software has been declining rapidly in the private sector". What?!? This is so incredibly untrue that Oracle should score points for being willing to say it out loud. Take a stroll through the most prominent software in big data (Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, etc.), mobile (Android), application development (Kubernetes, Docker), machine learning/AI (TensorFlow, MxNet), and compare it to Oracle's statement. One conclusion must be that Oracle believes its CIO audience is incredibly stupid. Oracle then tells a half-truth by declaring: "There is no math that can justify open source from a cost perspective." How so? Because "the cost of support plus the opportunity cost of forgoing features, functions, automation and security overwhelm any presumed cost savings." Which I guess is why Oracle doesn't use any open source like Linux, Kubernetes, etc. in its services. Oops. The Vendor Formerly Known As Satan The thing is, Oracle doesn't need to do this and, for its own good, shouldn't do this. After all, we already know how this plays out. We need only look at what happened with Microsoft. Remember when Microsoft wanted us to "get the facts" about Linux? Now it's a big-time contributor to Linux. Remember when it told us open source was anti-American and a cancer? Now it aggressively contributes to a huge variety of open-source projects, some of them homegrown in Redmond, and tells the world that "Microsoft loves open source." Of course, Microsoft loves open source for the same reason any corporation does: it drives revenue as developers look to build applications filled with open-source components on Azure. There's nothing wrong with that. Would Microsoft prefer government IT to purchase SQL Server instead of open-source-licensed PostgreSQL? Sure. But look for a single line in its response to the Trump executive order that signals "open source is bad". You won't find it. Why? Because Microsoft understands that open source is a friend, not foe, and has learned how to monetise it. Microsoft, in short, is no longer conflicted about open source. It can compete at the product level while embracing open source at the project level, which helps fuel its overall product and business strategy. Oracle isn't there yet, and is still stuck where Microsoft was a decade ago. It's time to grow up, Oracle. For a company that builds great software and understands that it increasingly needs to depend on open source to build that software, it's disingenuous at best to lobby the US government to put the freeze on open source. Oracle needs to learn from Microsoft, stop worrying and love the open-source bomb. It was a key ingredient in Microsoft's resurgence. Maybe it could help Oracle get a cloud clue, too. Install FAMP on FreeBSD (https://www.linuxsecrets.com/home/3164-install-famp-on-freebsd) The acronym FAMP refers to a set of free open source applications which are commonly used in Web server environments called Apache, MySQL and PHP on the FreeBSD operating system, which provides a server stack that provides web services, database and PHP. Prerequisites sudo Installed and working - Please read Apache PHP5 or PHP7 MySQL or MariaDB Install your favorite editor, ours is vi Note: You don't need to upgrade FreeBSD but make sure all patches have been installed and your port tree is up-2-date if you plan to update by ports. Install Ports portsnap fetch You must use sudo for each indivdual command during installations. Please see link above for installing sudo. Searching Available Apache Versions to Install pkg search apache Install Apache To install Apache 2.4 using pkg. The apache 2.4 user account managing Apache is www in FreeBSD. pkg install apache24 Confirmation yes prompt and hit y for yes to install Apache 2.4 This installs Apache and its dependencies. Enable Apache use sysrc to update services to be started at boot time, Command below adds "apache24enable="YES" to the /etc/rc.conf file. For sysrc commands please read ```sysrc apache24enable=yes Start Apache service apache24 start``` Visit web address by accessing your server's public IP address in your web browser How To find Your Server's Public IP Address If you do not know what your server's public IP address is, there are a number of ways that you can find it. Usually, this is the address you use to connect to your server through SSH. ifconfig vtnet0 | grep "inet " | awk '{ print $2 }' Now that you have the public IP address, you may use it in your web browser's address bar to access your web server. Install MySQL Now that we have our web server up and running, it is time to install MySQL, the relational database management system. The MySQL server will organize and provide access to databases where our server can store information. Install MySQL 5.7 using pkg by typing pkg install mysql57-server Enter y at the confirmation prompt. This installs the MySQL server and client packages. To enable MySQL server as a service, add mysqlenable="YES" to the /etc/rc.conf file. This sysrc command will do just that ```sysrc mysqlenable=yes Now start the MySQL server service mysql-server start Now run the security script that will remove some dangerous defaults and slightly restrict access to your database system. mysqlsecureinstallation``` Answer all questions to secure your newly installed MySQL database. Enter current password for root (enter for none): [RETURN] Your database system is now set up and we can move on. Install PHP5 or PHP70 pkg search php70 Install PHP70 you would do the following by typing pkg install php70-mysqli mod_php70 Note: In these instructions we are using php5.7 not php7.0. We will be coming out with php7.0 instructions with FPM. PHP is the component of our setup that will process code to display dynamic content. It can run scripts, connect to MySQL databases to get information, and hand the processed content over to the web server to display. We're going to install the modphp, php-mysql, and php-mysqli packages. To install PHP 5.7 with pkg, run this command ```pkg install modphp56 php56-mysql php56-mysqli Copy sample PHP configuration file into place. cp /usr/local/etc/php.ini-production /usr/local/etc/php.ini Regenerate the system's cached information about your installed executable files rehash``` Before using PHP, you must configure it to work with Apache. Install PHP Modules (Optional) To enhance the functionality of PHP, we can optionally install some additional modules. To see the available options for PHP 5.6 modules and libraries, you can type this into your system pkg search php56 Get more information about each module you can look at the long description of the package by typing pkg search -f apache24 Optional Install Example pkg install php56-calendar Configure Apache to Use PHP Module Open the Apache configuration file vim /usr/local/etc/apache24/Includes/php.conf DirectoryIndex index.php index.html Next, we will configure Apache to process requested PHP files with the PHP processor. Add these lines to the end of the file: SetHandler application/x-httpd-php SetHandler application/x-httpd-php-source Now restart Apache to put the changes into effect service apache24 restart Test PHP Processing By default, the DocumentRoot is set to /usr/local/www/apache24/data. We can create the info.php file under that location by typing vim /usr/local/www/apache24/data/info.php Add following line to info.php and save it. Details on info.php info.php file gives you information about your server from the perspective of PHP. It' useful for debugging and to ensure that your settings are being applied correctly. If this was successful, then your PHP is working as expected. You probably want to remove info.php after testing because it could actually give information about your server to unauthorized users. Remove file by typing rm /usr/local/www/apache24/data/info.php Note: Make sure Apache / meaning the root of Apache is owned by user which should have been created during the Apache install is the owner of the /usr/local/www structure. That explains FAMP on FreeBSD. IXsystems IXsystems TrueNAS X10 Torture Test & Fail Over Systems In Action with the ZFS File System (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG_NvKuh530) How Netflix works: what happens every time you hit Play (https://medium.com/refraction-tech-everything/how-netflix-works-the-hugely-simplified-complex-stuff-that-happens-every-time-you-hit-play-3a40c9be254b) Not long ago, House of Cards came back for the fifth season, finally ending a long wait for binge watchers across the world who are interested in an American politician's ruthless ascendance to presidency. For them, kicking off a marathon is as simple as reaching out for your device or remote, opening the Netflix app and hitting Play. Simple, fast and instantly gratifying. What isn't as simple is what goes into running Netflix, a service that streams around 250 million hours of video per day to around 98 million paying subscribers in 190 countries. At this scale, providing quality entertainment in a matter of a few seconds to every user is no joke. And as much as it means building top-notch infrastructure at a scale no other Internet service has done before, it also means that a lot of participants in the experience have to be negotiated with and kept satiated?—?from production companies supplying the content, to internet providers dealing with the network traffic Netflix brings upon them. This is, in short and in the most layman terms, how Netflix works. Let us just try to understand how Netflix is structured on the technological side with a simple example. Netflix literally ushered in a revolution around ten years ago by rewriting the applications that run the entire service to fit into a microservices architecture?—?which means that each application, or microservice's code and resources are its very own. It will not share any of it with any other app by nature. And when two applications do need to talk to each other, they use an application programming interface (API)?—?a tightly-controlled set of rules that both programs can handle. Developers can now make many changes, small or huge, to each application as long as they ensure that it plays well with the API. And since the one program knows the other's API properly, no change will break the exchange of information. Netflix estimates that it uses around 700 microservices to control each of the many parts of what makes up the entire Netflix service: one microservice stores what all shows you watched, one deducts the monthly fee from your credit card, one provides your device with the correct video files that it can play, one takes a look at your watching history and uses algorithms to guess a list of movies that you will like, and one will provide the names and images of these movies to be shown in a list on the main menu. And that's the tip of the iceberg. Netflix engineers can make changes to any part of the application and can introduce new changes rapidly while ensuring that nothing else in the entire service breaks down. They made a courageous decision to get rid of maintaining their own servers and move all of their stuff to the cloud?—?i.e. run everything on the servers of someone else who dealt with maintaining the hardware while Netflix engineers wrote hundreds of programs and deployed it on the servers rapidly. The someone else they chose for their cloud-based infrastructure is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Netflix works on thousands of devices, and each of them play a different format of video and sound files. Another set of AWS servers take this original film file, and convert it into hundreds of files, each meant to play the entire show or film on a particular type of device and a particular screen size or video quality. One file will work exclusively on the iPad, one on a full HD Android phone, one on a Sony TV that can play 4K video and Dolby sound, one on a Windows computer, and so on. Even more of these files can be made with varying video qualities so that they are easier to load on a poor network connection. This is a process known as transcoding. A special piece of code is also added to these files to lock them with what is called digital rights management or DRM?—?a technological measure which prevents piracy of films. The Netflix app or website determines what particular device you are using to watch, and fetches the exact file for that show meant to specially play on your particular device, with a particular video quality based on how fast your internet is at that moment. Here, instead of relying on AWS servers, they install their very own around the world. But it has only one purpose?—?to store content smartly and deliver it to users. Netflix strikes deals with internet service providers and provides them the red box you saw above at no cost. ISPs install these along with their servers. These Open Connect boxes download the Netflix library for their region from the main servers in the US?—?if there are multiple of them, each will rather store content that is more popular with Netflix users in a region to prioritise speed. So a rarely watched film might take time to load more than a Stranger Things episode. Now, when you will connect to Netflix, the closest Open Connect box to you will deliver the content you need, thus videos load faster than if your Netflix app tried to load it from the main servers in the US. In a nutshell… This is what happens when you hit that Play button: Hundreds of microservices, or tiny independent programs, work together to make one large Netflix service. Content legally acquired or licensed is converted into a size that fits your screen, and protected from being copied. Servers across the world make a copy of it and store it so that the closest one to you delivers it at max quality and speed. When you select a show, your Netflix app cherry picks which of these servers will it load the video from> You are now gripped by Frank Underwood's chilling tactics, given depression by BoJack Horseman's rollercoaster life, tickled by Dev in Master of None and made phobic to the future of technology by the stories in Black Mirror. And your lifespan decreases as your binge watching turns you into a couch potato. It looked so simple before, right? News Roundup Moving FreshPorts (http://dan.langille.org/2017/11/15/moving-freshports/) Today I moved the FreshPorts website from one server to another. My goal is for nobody to notice. In preparation for this move, I have: DNS TTL reduced to 60s Posted to Twitter Updated the status page Put the website put in offline mode: What was missed I turned off commit processing on the new server, but I did not do this on the old server. I should have: sudo svc -d /var/service/freshports That stops processing of incoming commits. No data is lost, but it keeps the two databases at the same spot in history. Commit processing could continue during the database dumping, but that does not affect the dump, which will be consistent regardless. The offline code Here is the basic stuff I used to put the website into offline mode. The main points are: header(“HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable”); ErrorDocument 404 /index.php I move the DocumentRoot to a new directory, containing only index.php. Every error invokes index.php, which returns a 503 code. The dump The database dump just started (Sun Nov 5 17:07:22 UTC 2017). root@pg96:~ # /usr/bin/time pg_dump -h 206.127.23.226 -Fc -U dan freshports.org > freshports.org.9.6.dump That should take about 30 minutes. I have set a timer to remind me. Total time was: 1464.82 real 1324.96 user 37.22 sys The MD5 is: MD5 (freshports.org.9.6.dump) = 5249b45a93332b8344c9ce01245a05d5 It is now: Sun Nov 5 17:34:07 UTC 2017 The rsync The rsync should take about 10-20 minutes. I have already done an rsync of yesterday's dump file. The rsync today should copy over only the deltas (i.e. differences). The rsync started at about Sun Nov 5 17:36:05 UTC 2017 That took 2m9.091s The MD5 matches. The restore The restore should take about 30 minutes. I ran this test yesterday. It is now Sun Nov 5 17:40:03 UTC 2017. $ createdb -T template0 -E SQL_ASCII freshports.testing $ time pg_restore -j 16 -d freshports.testing freshports.org.9.6.dump Done. real 25m21.108s user 1m57.508s sys 0m15.172s It is now Sun Nov 5 18:06:22 UTC 2017. Insert break here About here, I took a 30 minute break to run an errand. It was worth it. Changing DNS I'm ready to change DNS now. It is Sun Nov 5 19:49:20 EST 2017 Done. And nearly immediately, traffic started. How many misses? During this process, XXXXX requests were declined: $ grep -c '" 503 ' /usr/websites/log/freshports.org-access.log XXXXX That's it, we're done Total elapsed time: 1 hour 48 minutes. There are still a number of things to follow up on, but that was the transfers. The new FreshPorts Server (http://dan.langille.org/2017/11/17/x8dtu-3/) *** Using bhyve on top of CEPH (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-virtualization/2017-November/005876.html) Hi, Just an info point. I'm preparing for a lecture tomorrow, and thought why not do an actual demo.... Like to be friends with Murphy :) So after I started the cluster: 5 jails with 7 OSDs This what I manually needed to do to boot a memory stick Start een Bhyve instance rbd --dest-pool rbddata --no-progress import memstick.img memstick rbd-ggate map rbddata/memstick ggate-devvice is available on /dev/ggate1 kldload vmm kldload nmdm kldload iftap kldload ifbridge kldload cpuctl sysctl net.link.tap.uponopen=1 ifconfig bridge0 create ifconfig bridge0 addm em0 up ifconfig ifconfig tap11 create ifconfig bridge0 addm tap11 ifconfig tap11 up load the GGate disk in bhyve bhyveload -c /dev/nmdm11A -m 2G -d /dev/ggate1 FB11 and boot a single from it. bhyve -H -P -A -c 1 -m 2G -l com1,/dev/nmdm11A -s 0:0,hostbridge -s 1:0,lpc -s 2:0,virtio-net,tap11 -s 4,ahci-hd,/dev/ggate1 FB11 & bhyvectl --vm=FB11 --get-stats Connect to the VM cu -l /dev/nmdm11B And that'll give you a bhyve VM running on an RBD image over ggate. In the installer I tested reading from the bootdisk: root@:/ # dd if=/dev/ada0 of=/dev/null bs=32M 21+1 records in 21+1 records out 734077952 bytes transferred in 5.306260 secs (138341865 bytes/sec) which is a nice 138Mb/sec. Hope the demonstration does work out tomorrow. --WjW *** Donald Knuth - The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves (http://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/) Excerpts: In 2015, I gave a talk in which I called Donald Knuth the Patron Saint of Yak Shaves. The reason is that Donald Knuth achieved the most perfect and long-running yak shave: TeX. I figured this is worth repeating. How to achieve the ultimate Yak Shave The ultimate yak shave is the combination of improbable circumstance, the privilege to be able to shave at your hearts will and the will to follow things through to the end. Here's the way it was achieved with TeX. The recount is purely mine, inaccurate and obviously there for fun. I'll avoid the most boring facts that everyone always tells, such as why Knuth's checks have their own Wikipedia page. Community Shaving is Best Shaving Since the release of TeX, the community has been busy working on using it as a platform. If you ever downloaded the full TeX distribution, please bear in mind that you are downloading the amassed work of over 40 years, to make sure that each and every TeX document ever written builds. We're talking about documents here. But mostly, two big projects sprung out of that. The first is LaTeX by Leslie Lamport. Lamport is a very productive researcher, famous for research in formal methods through TLA+ and also known laying groundwork for many distributed algorithms. LaTeX is based on the idea of separating presentation and content. It is based around the idea of document classes, which then describe the way a certain document is laid out. Think Markdown, just much more complex. The second is ConTeXt, which is far more focused on fine grained layout control. The Moral of the Story Whenever you feel like “can't we just replace this whole thing, it can't be so hard” when handling TeX, don't forget how many years of work and especially knowledge were poured into that system. Typesetting isn't the most popular knowledge around programmers. Especially see it in the context of the space it is in: they can't remove legacy. Ever. That would break documents. TeX is also not a programming language. It might resemble one, but mostly, it should be approached as a typesetting system first. A lot of it's confusing lingo gets much better then. It's not programming lingo. By approaching TeX with an understanding for its history, a lot of things can be learned from it. And yes, a replacement would be great, but it would take ages. In any case, I hope I thoroughly convinced you why Donald Knuth is the Patron Saint of Yak Shaves. Extra Credits This comes out of a enjoyable discussion with [Arne from Lambda Island](https://lambdaisland.com/https://lambdaisland.com/, who listened and said “you should totally turn this into a talk”. Vincent's trip to EuroBSDCon 2017 (http://www.vincentdelft.be/post/post_20171016) My euroBSDCon 2017 Posted on 2017-10-16 09:43:00 from Vincent in Open Bsd Let me just share my feedback on those 2 days spent in Paris for the EuroBSDCon. My 1st BSDCon. I'm not a developer, contributor, ... Do not expect to improve your skills with OpenBSD with this text :-) I know, we are on October 16th, and the EuroBSDCon of Paris was 3 weeks ago :( I'm not quick !!! Sorry for that Arrival at 10h, I'm too late for the start of the key note. The few persons behind a desk welcome me by talking in Dutch, mainly because of my name. Indeed, Delft is a city in Netherlands, but also a well known university. I inform them that I'm from Belgium, and the discussion moves to the fact the Fosdem is located in Brussels. I receive my nice T-shirt white and blue, a bit like the marine T-shirts, but with the nice EuroBSDCon logo. I'm asking where are the different rooms reserved for the BSD event. We have 1 big on the 1st floor, 1 medium 1 level below, and 2 smalls 1 level above. All are really easy to access. In this entrance we have 4 or 5 tables with some persons representing their company. Those are mainly the big sponsors of the event providing details about their activity and business. I discuss a little bit with StormShield and Gandi. On other tables people are selling BSD t-shirts, and they will quickly be sold. "Is it done yet ?" The never ending story of pkg tools In the last Fosdem, I've already hear Antoine and Baptiste presenting the OpenBSD and FreeBSD battle, I decide to listen Marc Espie in the medium room called Karnak. Marc explains that he has rewritten completely the pkg_add command. He explains that, at contrario with other elements of OpenBSD, the packages tools must be backward compatible and stable on a longer period than 12 months (the support period for OpenBSD). On the funny side, he explains that he has his best idea inside his bath. Hackathons are also used to validate some ideas with other OpenBSD developers. All in all, he explains that the most time consuming part is to imagine a good solution. Coding it is quite straightforward. He adds that better an idea is, shorter the implementation will be. A Tale of six motherboards, three BSDs and coreboot After the lunch I decide to listen the talk about Coreboot. Indeed, 1 or 2 years ago I had listened the Libreboot project at Fosdem. Since they did several references to Coreboot, it's a perfect occasion to listen more carefully to this project. Piotr and Katazyba Kubaj explains us how to boot a machine without the native Bios. Indeed Coreboot can replace the bios, and de facto avoid several binaries imposed by the vendor. They explain that some motherboards are supporting their code. But they also show how difficult it is to flash a Bios and replace it by Coreboot. They even have destroyed a motherboard during the installation. Apparently because the power supply they were using was not stable enough with the 3v. It's really amazing to see that open source developers can go, by themselves, to such deep technical level. State of the DragonFly's graphics stack After this Coreboot talk, I decide to stay in the room to follow the presentation of Fran?ois Tigeot. Fran?ois is now one of the core developer of DrangonflyBSD, an amazing BSD system having his own filesystem called Hammer. Hammer offers several amazing features like snapshots, checksum data integrity, deduplication, ... Francois has spent his last years to integrate the video drivers developed for Linux inside DrangonflyBSD. He explains that instead of adapting this code for the video card to the kernel API of DrangonflyBSD, he has "simply" build an intermediate layer between the kernel of DragonflyBSD and the video drivers. This is not said in the talk, but this effort is very impressive. Indeed, this is more or less a linux emulator inside DragonflyBSD. Francois explains that he has started with Intel video driver (drm/i915), but now he is able to run drm/radeon quite well, but also drm/amdgpu and drm/nouveau. Discovering OpenBSD on AWS Then I move to the small room at the upper level to follow a presentation made by Laurent Bernaille on OpenBSD and AWS. First Laurent explains that he is re-using the work done by Antoine Jacoutot concerning the integration of OpenBSD inside AWS. But on top of that he has integrated several other Open Source solutions allowing him to build OpenBSD machines very quickly with one command. Moreover those machines will have the network config, the required packages, ... On top of the slides presented, he shows us, in a real demo, how this system works. Amazing presentation which shows that, by putting the correct tools together, a machine builds and configure other machines in one go. OpenBSD Testing Infrastructure Behind bluhm.genua.de Here Jan Klemkow explains us that he has setup a lab where he is able to run different OpenBSD architectures. The system has been designed to be able to install, on demand, a certain version of OpenBSD on the different available machines. On top of that a regression test script can be triggered. This provides reports showing what is working and what is not more working on the different machines. If I've well understood, Jan is willing to provide such lab to the core developers of OpenBSD in order to allow them to validate easily and quickly their code. Some more effort is needed to reach this goal, but with what exists today, Jan and his colleague are quite close. Since his company is using OpenBSD business, to his eyes this system is a "tit for tat" to the OpenBSD community. French story on cybercrime Then comes the second keynote of the day in the big auditorium. This talk is performed by the colonel of french gendarmerie. Mr Freyssinet, who is head of the Cyber crimes unit inside the Gendarmerie. Mr Freyssinet explains that the "bad guys" are more and more volatile across countries, and more and more organized. The small hacker in his room, alone, is no more the reality. As a consequence the different national police investigators are collaborating more inside an organization called Interpol. What is amazing in his talk is that Mr Freyssinet talks about "Crime as a service". Indeed, more and more hackers are selling their services to some "bad and temporary organizations". Social event It's now time for the famous social event on the river: la Seine. The organizers ask us to go, by small groups, to a station. There is a walk of 15 minutes inside Paris. Hopefully the weather is perfect. To identify them clearly several organizers takes a "beastie fork" in their hands and walk on the sidewalk generating some amazing reactions from some citizens and toursits. Some of them recognize the Freebsd logo and ask us some details. Amazing :-) We walk on small and big sidewalks until a small stair going under the street. There, we have a train station a bit like a metro station. 3 stations later they ask us to go out. We walk few minutes and come in front of a boat having a double deck: one inside, with nice tables and chairs and one on the roof. But the crew ask us to go up, on the second deck. There, we are welcome with a glass of wine. The tour Eiffel is just at few 100 meters from us. Every hour the Eiffel tower is blinking for 5 minutes with thousands of small lights. Brilliant :-) We see also the "statue de la libertee" (the small one) which is on a small island in the middle of the river. During the whole night the bar will be open with drinks and some appetizers, snacks, ... Such walking diner is perfect to talk with many different persons. I've discussed with several persons just using BSD, they are not, like me, deep and specialized developers. One was from Switzerland, another one from Austria, and another one from Netherlands. But I've also followed a discussion with Theo de Raadt, several persons of the FreeBSD foundation. Some are very technical guys, other just users, like me. But all with the same passion for one of the BSD system. Amazing evening. OpenBSD's small steps towards DTrace (a tale about DDB and CTF) On the second day, I decide to sleep enough in order to have enough resources to drive back to my home (3 hours by car). So I miss the 1st presentations, and arrive at the event around 10h30. Lot of persons are already present. Some faces are less "fresh" than others. I decide to listen to Dtrace in OpenBSD. After 10 minutes I am so lost into those too technical explainations, that I decide to open and look at my PC. My OpenBSD laptop is rarely leaving my home, so I've never had the need to have a screen locking system. In a crowded environment, this is better. So I was looking for a simple solution. I've looked at how to use xlock. I've combined it with the /ets/apm/suspend script, ... Always very easy to use OpenBSD :-) The OpenBSD web stack Then I decide to follow the presentation of Michael W Lucas. Well know person for his different books about "Absolute OpenBSD", Relayd", ... Michael talks about the httpd daemon inside OpenBSD. But he also present his integration with Carp, Relayd, PF, FastCGI, the rules based on LUA regexp (opposed to perl regexp), ... For sure he emphasis on the security aspect of those tools: privilege separation, chroot, ... OpenSMTPD, current state of affairs Then I follow the presentation of Gilles Chehade about the OpenSMTPD project. Amazing presentation that, on top of the technical challenges, shows how to manage such project across the years. Gilles is working on OpenSMTPD since 2007, thus 10 years !!!. He explains the different decisions they took to make the software as simple as possible to use, but as secure as possible, too: privilege separation, chroot, pledge, random malloc, ? . The development starts on BSD systems, but once quite well known they received lot of contributions from Linux developers. Hoisting: lessons learned integrating pledge into 500 programs After a small break, I decide to listen to Theo de Raadt, the founder of OpenBSD. In his own style, with trekking boots, shorts, backpack. Theo starts by saying that Pledge is the outcome of nightmares. Theo explains that the book called "Hacking blind" presenting the BROP has worried him since few years. That's why he developed Pledge as a tool killing a process as soon as possible when there is an unforeseen behavior of this program. For example, with Pledge a program which can only write to disk will be immediately killed if he tries to reach network. By implementing Pledge in the +-500 programs present in the "base", OpenBSD is becoming more secured and more robust. Conclusion My first EuroBSDCon was a great, interesting and cool event. I've discussed with several BSD enthusiasts. I'm using OpenBSD since 2010, but I'm not a developer, so I was worried to be "lost" in the middle of experts. In fact it was not the case. At EuroBSDCon you have many different type of enthusiasts BSD's users. What is nice with the EuroBSDCon is that the organizers foresee everything for you. You just have to sit and listen. They foresee even how to spend, in a funny and very cool attitude, the evening of Saturday. > The small draw back is that all of this has a cost. In my case the whole weekend cost me a bit more than 500euro. Based on what I've learned, what I've saw this is very acceptable price. Nearly all presentations I saw give me a valuable input for my daily job. For sure, the total price is also linked to my personal choice: hotel, parking. And I'm surely biased because I'm used to go to the Fosdem in Brussels which cost nothing (entrance) and is approximately 45 minutes of my home. But Fosdem is not the same atmosphere and presentations are less linked to my daily job. I do not regret my trip to EuroBSDCon and will surely plan other ones. Beastie Bits Important munitions lawyering (https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/10/important-munitions-lawyering/) AsiaBSDCon 2018 CFP is now open, until December 15th (https://2018.asiabsdcon.org/) ZSTD Compression for ZFS by Allan Jude (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWnWEitDPlM&feature=share) NetBSD on Allwinner SoCs Update (https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_on_allwinner_socs_update) *** Feedback/Questions Tim - Creating Multi Boot USB sticks (http://dpaste.com/0FKTJK3#wrap) Nomen - ZFS Questions (http://dpaste.com/1HY5MFB) JJ - Questions (http://dpaste.com/3ZGNSK9#wrap) Lars - Hardening Diffie-Hellman (http://dpaste.com/3TRXXN4) ***
We read a trip report about FreeBSD in China, look at how Unix deals with Signals, a stats collector in DragonFlyBSD & much more! This episode was brought to you by Headlines Trip Report: FreeBSD in China at COPU and LinuxCon (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/trip-report-freebsd-in-china-at-copu-and-linuxcon/) This trip report is from Deb Goodkin, the Executive Director of the FreeBSD Foundation. She travelled to China in May 2017 to promote FreeBSD, meet with companies, and participate in discussions around Open Source. > In May of 2017, we were invited to give a talk about FreeBSD at COPU's (China Open Source Promotional Unit) Open Source China, Open Source World Summit, which took place June 21-22, in Beijing. This was a tremendous opportunity to talk about the advantages of FreeBSD to the open source leaders and organizations interested in open source. I was honored to represent the Project and Foundation and give the presentation “FreeBSD Advantages and Applications”. > Since I was already going to be in Beijing, and LinuxCon China was being held right before the COPU event, Microsoft invited me to be part of a women-in-tech panel they were sponsoring. There were six of us on the panel including two from Microsoft, one from the Linux Foundation, one from Accenture of China, and one from Women Who Code. Two of us spoke in English, with everyone else speaking Chinese. It was disappointing that we didn't have translators, because I would have loved hearing everyone's answers. We had excellent questions from the audience at the end. I also had a chance to talk with a journalist from Beijing, where I emphasized how contributing to an open source project, like FreeBSD, is a wonderful way to get experience to boost your resume for a job. > The first day of LinuxCon also happened to be FreeBSD Day. I had my posters with me and was thrilled to have the Honorary Chairman of COPU (also known as the “Father of Open Source in China”) hold one up for a photo op. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get a copy of that photo for proof (I'm still working on it!). We spent a long time discussing the strengths of FreeBSD. He believes there are many applications in China that could benefit from FreeBSD, especially for embedded devices, university research, and open source education. We had more time throughout the week to discuss FreeBSD in more detail. > Since I was at LinuxCon, I had a chance to meet with people from the Linux Foundation, other open source projects, and some of our donors. With LinuxCon changing its name to Open Source Summit, I discussed how important it is to include minority voices like ours to contribute to improving the open source ecosystem. The people I talked to within the Linux Foundation agreed and suggested that we get someone from the Project to give a talk at the Open Source Summit in Prague this October. Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation Executive Director, suggested having a BSD track at the summits. We did miss the call for proposals for that conference, but we need to get people to consider submitting proposals for the Open Source Summits in 2018. > I talked to a CTO from a company that donates to us and he brought up his belief that FreeBSD is much easier to get started on as a contributor. He talked about the steep path in Linux to getting contributions accepted due to having over 10,000 developers and the hierarchy of decision makers, from Linus to his main lieutenants to the layers beneath him. It can take 6 months to get your changes in! > On Tuesday, Kylie and I met with a representative from Huawei, who we've been meeting over the phone with over the past few months. Huawei has a FreeBSD contributor and is looking to add more. We were thrilled to hear they decided to donate this year. We look forward to helping them get up to speed with FreeBSD and collaborate with the Project. > Wednesday marked the beginning of COPU and the reason I flew all the way to Beijing! We started the summit with having a group photo of all the speakers:The honorary chairman, Professor Lu in the front middle. > My presentation was called “FreeBSD Advantages and Applications”. A lot of the material came from Foundation Board President, George-Neville-Neil's presentation, “FreeBSD is not a Linux Distribution”, which is a wonderful introduction to FreeBSD and includes the history of FreeBSD, who uses it and why, and which features stand out. My presentation went well, with Professor Lu and others engaged through the translators. Afterwards, I was invited to a VIP dinner, which I was thrilled about. > The only hitch was that Kylie and I were running a FreeBSD meetup that evening, and both were important! Beijing during rush hour is crazy, even trying to go only a couple of miles is challenging. We made plans that I would go to the meetup and give the same presentation, and then head back to the dinner. Amazingly, it worked out. Check out the rest of her trip report and stay tuned for more news from the region as this is one of the focus areas of the Foundation. *** Unix: Dealing with signals (http://www.networkworld.com/article/3211296/linux/unix-dealing-with-signals.html) Signals on Unix systems are critical to the way processes live and die. This article looks at how they're generated, how they work, and how processes receive or block them On Unix systems, there are several ways to send signals to processes—with a kill command, with a keyboard sequence (like control-C), or through a program Signals are also generated by hardware exceptions such as segmentation faults and illegal instructions, timers and child process termination. But how do you know what signals a process will react to? After all, what a process is programmed to do and able to ignore is another issue. Fortunately, the /proc file system makes information about how processes handle signals (and which they block or ignore) accessible with commands like the one shown below. In this command, we're looking at information related to the login shell for the current user, the "$$" representing the current process. On FreeBSD, you can use procstat -i PID to get that and even more information, and easier to digest form P if signal is pending in the global process queue I if signal delivery disposition is SIGIGN C if signal delivery is to catch it Catching a signal requires that a signal handling function exists in the process to handle a given signal. The SIGKILL (9) and SIGSTOP (#) signals cannot be ignored or caught. For example, if you wanted to tell the kernel that ctrl-C's are to be ignored, you would include something like this in your source code: signal(SIGINT, SIGIGN); To ensure that the default action for a signal is taken, you would do something like this instead: signal(SIGSEGV, SIGDFL); + The article then shows some ways to send signals from the command line, for example to send SIGHUP to a process with pid 1234: kill -HUP 1234 + You can get a list of the different signals by running kill -l On Unix systems, signals are used to send all kinds of information to running processes, and they come from user commands, other processes, and the kernel itself. Through /proc, information about how processes are handling signals is now easily accessible and, with just a little manipulation of the data, easy to understand. links owned by NGZ erroneously marked as on loan (https://smartos.org/bugview/OS-6274) NGZ (Non-Global Zone), is IllumOS speak for their equivalent to a jail > As reported by user brianewell in smartos-live#737, NGZ ip tunnels stopped persisting across zone reboot. This behavior appeared in the 20170202 PI and was not present in previous releases. After much spelunking I determined that this was caused by a regression introduced in commit 33df115 (part of the OS-5363 work). The regression was a one-line change to link_activate() which marks NGZ links as on loan when they are in fact not loaned because the NGZ created and owns the link. “On loan” means the interface belongs to the host (GZ, Global Zone), and has been loaned to the NGZ (Jail) This regression was easy to introduce because of the subtle nature of this code and lack of comments. I'm going to remove the regressive line, add clarifying comments, and also add some asserts. The following is a detailed analysis of the issue, how I debugged it, and why my one-line change caused the regression: To start I verified that PI 20170119 work as expected: booted 20170119 created iptun (named v4sys76) inside of a native NGZ (names sos-zone) performed a reboot of sos-zone zlogin to sos-zone and verify iptun still exists after reboot Then I booted the GZ into PI 20170202 and verified the iptun did not show up booted 20170202 started sos-zone zlogin and verified the iptun was missing At this point I thought I would recreate the iptun and see if I could monitor the zone halt/boot process for the culprit, but instead I received an error from dladm: "object already exists". I didn't expect this. So I used mdb to inspect the dlmgmtd state. Sure enough the iptun exists in dlmgmtd. Okay, so if the link already exists, why doesn't it show up (in either the GZ or the NGZ)? If a link is not marked as active then it won't show up when you query dladm. When booting the zone on 20170119 the llflags for the iptun contained the value 0x3. So the problem is the link is not marked as active on the 20170202 PI. The linkactivate() function is responsible for marking a link as active. I used dtrace to verify this function was called on the 20170202 PI and that the dlmgmtlinkt had the correct llflags value. So the iptun link structure has the correct llflags when linkactivate() returns but when I inspect the same structure with mdb afterwards the value has changed. Sometime after linkactivate() completes some other process changed the llflags value. My next question was: where is linkactivate() called and what comes after it that might affect the llflags? I did another trace and got this stack. The dlmgmtupid() function calls dlmgmtwritedbentry() after linkactivate() and that can change the flags. But dtrace proved the llflags value was still 0x3 after returning from this function. With no obvious questions left I then asked cscope to show me all places where llflags is modified. As I walked through the list I used dtrace to eliminate candidates one at a time -- until I reached dlmgmtdestroycommon(). I would not have expected this function to show up during zone boot but sure enough it was being called somehow, and by someone. Who? Since there is no easy way to track door calls it was at this point I decided to go nuclear and use the dtrace stop action to stop dlmgmtd when it hits dlmgmtdestroycommon(). Then I used mdb -k to inspect the door info for the dlmgmtd threads and look for my culprit. The culprit is doupiptun() caused by the dladm up-iptun call. Using ptree I then realized this was happening as part of the zone boot under the network/iptun svc startup. At this point it was a matter of doing a zlogin to sos-zone and running truss on dladm up-iptun to find the real reason why dladmdestroydatalinkid() is called. So the link is marked as inactive because dladmgetsnapconf() fails with DLADMSTATUSDENIED which is mapped to EACCESS. Looking at the dladmgetsnapconf() code I see the following “The caller is in a non-global zone and the persistent configuration belongs to the global zone.” What this is saying is that if a link is marked "on loan" (meaning it's technically owned/created by the GZ but assigned/loaned to the NGZ) and the zone calling dladmgetsnapconf() is an NGZ then return EACCESS because the configuration of the link is up to the GZ, not the NGZ. This code is correct and should be enforced, but why is it tripping in PI 20170202 and not 20170119? It comes back to my earlier observation that in the 20170202 PI we marked the iptun as "on loan" but not in the older one. Why? Well as it turns out while fixing OS-5363 I fixed what I thought was a bug in linkactivate() When I first read this code it was my understanding that anytime we added a link to a zone's datalink list, by calling zoneadddatalink(), that link was then considered "on loan". My understanding was incorrect. The linkactivate() code has a subtleness that eluded me. There are two cases in linkactivate(): 1. The link is under an NGZ's datalink list but it's lllinkid doesn't reflect that (e.g., the link is found under zoneid 3 but lllinkid is 0). In this case the link is owned by the GZ but is being loaned to an NGZ and the link state should be updated accordingly. We get in this situation when dlmgmtd is restated for some reason (it must resync it's in-memory state with the state of the system). 2. The link is NOT under any NGZ's (zonecheckdatalink() is only concerned with NGZs) datalink list but its llzoneid holds the value of an NGZ. This indicates that the link is owned by an NGZ but for whatever reason is not currently under the NGZ's datalink list (e.g., because we are booting the zone and we now need to assign the link to its list). So the fix is to revert that one line change as well as add some clarifying comments and also some asserts to prevent further confusion in the future. + A nice breakdown by Ryan Zezeski of how he accidently introduced a regression, and how he tracked it down using dtrace and mdb New experimental statistics collector in master (http://dpaste.com/2YP0X9C) Master now has an in-kernel statistics collector which is enabled by default, and a (still primitive) user land program to access it. This recorder samples the state of the machine once every 10 seconds and records it in a large FIFO, all in-kernel. The FIFO typically contains 8192 entries, or around the last 23 hours worth of data. Statistics recorded include current load, user/sys/idle cpu use, swap use, VM fault rate, VM memory statistics, and counters for syscalls, path lookups, and various interrupt types. A few more useful counters will probably be added... I'd like to tie cpu temperature, fork rate, and exec rate in at some point, as well as network and disk traffic. The statistics gathering takes essentially no real overhead and is always on, so any user at the spur of the moment with no prior intent can query the last 23 hours worth of data. There is a user frontend to the data called 'kcollect' (its tied into the buildworld now). Currently still primitive. Ultimately my intention is to integrate it with a dbm database for long-term statistical data retention (if desired) using an occasional (like once-an-hour) cron-job to soak up anything new, with plenty of wiggle room due to the amount of time the kernel keeps itself. This is better and less invasive than having a userland statistics gathering script running every few minutes from cron and has the advantage of giving you a lot of data on the spur of the moment without having to ask for it before-hand. If you have gnuplot installed (pkg install gnuplot), kcollect can generate some useful graphs based on the in-kernel data. Well, it will be boring if the machine isn't doing anything :-). There are options to use gnuplot to generate a plot window in X or a .jpg or .png file, and other options to set the width and height and such. At the moment the gnuplot output uses a subset of statically defined fields to plot but ultimately the field list it uses will be specifiable. Sample image generated during a synth run (http://apollo.backplane.com/DFlyMisc/kcollect03.jpg) News Roundup openbsd changes of note 626 (https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/openbsd-changes-of-note-626) Hackerthon is imminent. There are two signals one can receive after accessing invalid memory, SIGBUS and SIGSEGV. Nobody seems to know what the difference is or should be, although some theories have been unearthed. Make some attempt to be slightly more consistent and predictable in OpenBSD. Introduces jiffies in an effort to appease our penguin oppressors. Clarify that IP.OF.UPSTREAM.RESOLVER is not actually the hostname of a server you can use. Switch acpibat to use _BIX before _BIF, which means you might see discharge cycle counts, too. Assorted clang compatibility. clang uses -Oz to mean optimize for size and -Os for something else, so make gcc accept -Oz so all makefiles can be the same. Adjust some hardlinks. Make sure we build gcc with gcc. The SSLcheckprivate_key function is a lie. Switch the amd64 and i386 compiler to clang and see what happens. We are moving towards using wscons (wstpad) as the driver for touchpads. Dancing with the stars, er, NET_LOCK(). clang emits lots of warnings. Fix some of them. Turn off a bunch of clang builtins because we have a strong preference that code use our libc versions. Some other changes because clang is not gcc. Among other curiosities, static variables in the special .openbsd.randomdata are sometimes assumed to be all zero, leading the clang optimizer to eliminate reads of such variables. Some more pledge rules for sed. If the script doesn't require opening new files, don't let it. Backport a bajillion fixes to stable. Release errata. RFC 1885 was obsoleted nearly 20 years ago by RFC 2463 which was obsoleted over 10 years ago by RFC 4443. We are probably not going back. Update libexpat to 2.2.3. vmm: support more than 3855MB guest memory. Merge libdrm 2.4.82. Disable SSE optimizations on i386/amd64 for SlowBcopy. It is supposed to be slow. Prevents crashes when talking to memory mapped video memory in a hypervisor. The $25 “FREEDOM Laptop!” (https://functionallyparanoid.com/2017/08/08/the-25-freedom-laptop/) Time to get back to the original intent of this blog – talking about my paranoid obsession with information security! So break out your tinfoil hats my friends because this will be a fun ride. I'm looking for the most open source / freedom respecting portable computing experience I can possibly find and I'm going to document my work in real-time so you will get to experience the ups (and possibly the downs) of that path through the universe. With that said, let's get rolling. When I built my OpenBSD router using the APU2 board, I discovered that there are some amd64 systems that use open source BIOS. This one used Coreboot and after some investigation I discovered that there was an even more paranoid open source BIOS called Libreboot out there. That started to feel like it might scratch my itch. Well, after playing around with some lower-powered systems like my APU2 board, my Thinkpad x230 and my SPARC64 boxes, I thought, if it runs amd64 code and I can run an open source operating system on it, the thing should be powerful enough for me to do most (if not all) of what I need it to do. At this point, I started looking for a viable machine. From a performance perspective, it looked like the Thinkpad x200, T400, T500 and W500 were all viable candidates. After paying attention on eBay for a while, I saw something that was either going to be a sweet deal, or a throwaway piece of garbage! I found a listing for a Thinkpad T500 that said it didn't come with a power adapter and was 100% untested. From looking at the photos, it seemed like there was nothing that had been molested about it. Obviously, nobody was jumping on something this risky so I thought, “what the heck” and dropped a bit at the opening price of $24.99. Well, guess what. I won the auction. Now to see what I got. When the laptop showed up, I discovered it was minus its hard drive (but the outside plastic cover was still in place). I plugged in my x230's power adapter and hit the button. I got lights and was dropped to the BIOS screen. To my eternal joy, I discovered that the machine I had purchased for $25 was 100% functional and included the T9400 2.54 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and the 1680×1050 display panel. W00t! First things first, I need to get this machine a hard drive and get the RAM upgraded from the 2GB that it showed up with to 8GB. Good news is that these two purchases only totaled $50 for the pair. An aftermarket 9-cell replacement battery was another $20. Throw in a supported WiFi card that doesn't require a non-free blob from Libreboot at $5.99 off of eBay and $5 for a hard drive caddy and I'm looking at about $65 in additional parts bringing the total cost of the laptop, fully loaded up at just over $100. Not bad at all… Once all of the parts arrived and were installed, now for the fun part. Disassembling the entire thing down to the motherboard so we can re-flash the BIOS with Libreboot. The guide looks particularly challenging for this but hey, I have a nice set of screwdrivers from iFixit and a remarkable lack of fear when it comes to disassembling things. Should be fun! Well, fun didn't even come close. I wish I had shot some pictures along the way because at one point I had a heap of parts in one corner of my “workbench” (the dining room table) and just the bare motherboard, minus the CPU sitting in front of me. With the help of a clip and a bunch of whoops wires (patch cables), I connected my Beaglebone Black to the BIOS chip on the bare motherboard and attempted to read the chip. #fail I figured out after doing some more digging that you need to use the connector on the left side of the BBB if you hold it with the power connector facing away from you. In addition, you should probably read the entire process through instead of stopping at the exciting pinout connector diagram because I missed the bit about the 3.3v power supply need to have ground connected to pin 2 of the BIOS chip. Speaking of that infamous 3.3v power supply, I managed to bend a paperclip into a U shape and jam it into the connector of an old ATX power supply I had in a closet and source power from that. I felt like MacGyver for that one! I was able to successfully read the original Thinkpad BIOS and then flash the Libreboot + Grub2 VESA framebuffer image onto the laptop! I gulped loudly and started the reassembly process. Other than having some cable routing difficulties because the replacement WiFi card didn't have a 5Ghz antenna, it all went back together. Now for the moment of truth! I hit the power button and everything worked!!! At this point I happily scurried to download the latest snapshot of OpenBSD – current and install it. Well, things got a little weird here. Looks like I have to use GRUB to boot this machine now and GRUB won't boot an OpenBSD machine with Full Disk Encryption. That was a bit of a bummer for me. I tilted against that windmill for several days and then finally admitted defeat. So now what to do? Install Arch? Well, here's where I think the crazy caught up to me. I decided to be an utter sell out and install Ubuntu Gnome Edition 17.04 (since that will be the default DE going forward) with full disk encryption. I figured I could have fun playing around in a foreign land and try to harden the heck out of that operating system. I called Ubuntu “grandma's Linux” because a friend of mine installed it on his mom's laptop for her but I figured what the heck – let's see how the other half live! At this point, while I didn't have what I originally set out to do – build a laptop with Libreboot and OpenBSD, I did have a nice compromise that is as well hardened as I can possibly make it and very functional in terms of being able to do what I need to do on a day to day basis. Do I wish it was more portable? Of course. This thing is like a six or seven pounder. However, I feel much more secure in knowing that the vast majority of the code running on this machine is open source and has all the eyes of the community on it, versus something that comes from a vendor that we cannot inspect. My hope is that someone with the talent (unfortunately I lack those skills) takes an interest in getting FDE working with Libreboot on OpenBSD and I will most happily nuke and repave this “ancient of days” machine to run that! FreeBSD Programmers Report Ryzen SMT Bug That Hangs Or Resets Machines (https://hothardware.com/news/freebsd-programmers-report-ryzen-smt-bug-that-hangs-or-resets-machines) It's starting to look like there's an inherent bug with AMD's Zen-based chips that is causing issues on Unix-based operating systems, with both Linux and FreeBSD confirmed. The bug doesn't just affect Ryzen desktop chips, but also AMD's enterprise EPYC chips. It seems safe to assume that Threadripper will bundle it in, as well. It's not entirely clear what is causing the issue, but it's related to the CPU being maxed out in operations, thus causing data to get shifted around in memory, ultimately resulting in unstable software. If the bug is exercised a certain way, it can even cause machines to reset. The revelation about the issue on FreeBSD was posted to the official repository, where the issue is said to happen when threads can lock up, and then cause the system to become unstable. Getting rid of the issue seems as simple as disabling SMT, but that would then negate the benefits provided by having so many threads at-the-ready. On the Linux side of the Unix fence, Phoronix reports on similar issues, where stressing Zen chips with intensive benchmarks can cause one segmentation fault after another. The issue is so profound, that Phoronix Test Suite developer Michael Larabel introduced a special test that can be run to act as a bit of a proof-of-concept. To test another way, PTS can be run with this command: PTS_CONCURRENT_TEST_RUNS=4 TOTAL_LOOP_TIME=60 phoronix-test-suite stress-run build-linux-kernel build-php build-apache build-imagemagick Running this command will compile four different software projects at once, over and over, for an hour. Before long, segfaults should begin to appear (as seen in the shot above). It's not entirely clear if both sets of issues here are related, but seeing as both involve stressing the CPU to its limit, it seems likely. Whether or not this could be patched on a kernel or EFI level is something yet to be seen. TrueOS - UNSTABLE update: 8/7/17 (https://www.trueos.org/blog/unstable-update-8717/) A new UNSTABLE update for TrueOS is available! Released regularly, UNSTABLE updates are the full “rolling release” of TrueOS. UNSTABLE includes experimental features, bugfixes, and other CURRENT FreeBSD work. It is meant to be used by those users interested in using the latest TrueOS and FreeBSD developments to help test and improve these projects. WARNING: UNSTABLE updates are released primarily for TrueOS and FreeBSD testing/experimentation purposes. Update and run UNSTABLE “at your own risk”. Note: There was a CDN issue over the weekend that caused issues for early updaters. Everything appears to be resolved and the update is fully available again. If you encountered instability or package issues from updating on 8/6 or 8/5, roll back to a previous boot environment and run the update again. Changes: UNSTABLE .iso and .img files beginning with TrueOS-2017-08-3-x64 will be available to download from http://download.trueos.org/unstable/amd64/. Due to CDN issues, these are not quite available, look for them later today or tomorrow (8/8/17). This update resyncs all ports with FreeBSD as of 8.1.2017. This includes: New/updated FreeBSD Kernel and World & New DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) next. Experimental patch for libhyve-remote: (From htps://github.com/trueos/freebsd/commit/a67a73e49538448629ea27, thanks araujobsd) The libhyve-remote aims to abstract functionalities from other third party libraries like libvncserver, freerdp, and spice to be used in hypervisor implementation. With a basic data structure it is easy to implement any remote desktop protocol without digging into the protocol specification or third part libraries – check some of our examples.We don't statically link any third party library, instead we use a dynamic linker and load only the functionality necessary to launch the service.Our target is to abstract functionalities from libvncserver, freerdp and spice. Right now, libhyve-remote only supports libvncserver. It is possible to launch a VNC server with different screen resolution as well as with authentication.With this patch we implement support for bhyve to use libhyve-remote that basically abstract some functionalities from libvncserver. We can: Enable wait state, Enable authentication, Enable different resolutions< Have a better compression. Also, we add a new -s flag for vncserver, if the libhyve-remote library is not present in the system, we fallback to bhyve RFB implementation. For example: -s 2,fbuf,tcp=0.0.0.0:5937,w=800,h=600,password=1234567,vncserver,wait New SysAdm Client pages under the System Management category: System Control: This is an interface to browse all the sysctl's on the system. Devices: This lists all known information about devices on the designated system. Lumina Theming: Lumina is testing new theming functionality! By default (in UNSTABLE), a heavily customized version of the Qt5ct engine is included and enabled. This is intended to allow users to quickly adjust themes/icon packs without needing to log out and back in. This also fixes a bug in Insight with different icons loading for the side and primary windows. Look for more information about this new functionality to be discussed on the Lumina Website. Update to Iridium Web Browser: Iridium is a Chromium based browser built with user privacy and security as the primary concern, but still maintaining the speed and usability of Chromium. It is now up to date – give it a try and let us know what you think (search for iridium-browser in AppCafe). Beastie Bits GhostBSD 11.1 Alpha1 is ready (http://www.ghostbsd.org/11.1-ALPHA1) A Special CharmBUG announcement (https://www.meetup.com/CharmBUG/events/242563414/) Byhve Obfuscation Part 1 of Many (https://github.com/HardenedBSD/hardenedBSD/commit/59eabffdca53275086493836f732f24195f3a91d) New BSDMag is out (https://bsdmag.org/download/bsd-magazine-overriding-libc-functions/) git: kernel - Lower VMMAXUSER_ADDRESS to finalize work-around for Ryzen bug (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2017-August/626190.html) Ken Thompson corrects one of his biggest regrets (https://twitter.com/_rsc/status/897555509141794817) *** Feedback/Questions Hans - zxfer (http://dpaste.com/2SQYQV2) Harza - Google Summer of Code (http://dpaste.com/2175GEB) tadslot - Microphones, Proprietary software, and feedback (http://dpaste.com/154MY1H) Florian - ZFS/Jail (http://dpaste.com/2V9VFAC) Modifying a ZFS root system to a beadm layout (http://dan.langille.org/2015/03/11/modifying-a-zfs-root-system-to-a-beadm-layout/) ***
Yet more Ubuntu fallout including forks of their dead desktop and mobile platform, Libreboot wants to rejoin GNU, mobile Linux coming together, IoT standardisation and how to spread the word about FOSS on LNL 10. News Wayland and GNOME to be default in Ubuntu 17.10 Yunit tries to avoid a mutiny as UBports looks... Read More
Está no ar mais um episódio do Opencast. Neste episódio Ivan e Diego falam mais uma vez sobre os assuntos e notícias relacionados ao mundo do software livre. Links do episódio Vídeo sobre nosso financiamento coletivo Seja nosso Padrinho no Padrim.com.br Colabore conosco via pagseguro ou paypal Canal Tecnologia Aberta Tv no Youtube Canal do Hack ‘n’ Cast no Telegram Campanha para o WikiLab O que vem para o Ubuntu? Canonical CEO Jane Silber Announces She’s Stepping Down Ubuntu GNOME To Merge with Ubuntu, Will No Longer Be a Separate Flavor Ubuntu Is Switching to Wayland 5 acontecimentos importantes depois do anúncio da Canonical sobre o Unity e Ubuntu Phone Android como container no Ubuntu Lançado OpenBSD 6.1 Delphi retorna ao Linux FCC tentando quebrar a neutralidade da red LibreBoot de volta ao GNU IA para detectar comentários raivosos o/ Microsoft lança calendário que prevê o fim do Windows 10 Mobile em 2019 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/opencast/message
Joe Ressington of Late Night Linux joins Wes to discuss just what makes a “Proper” distribution. Then the latest news about Libreboot and the Free Software Foundation, Containers explained in pictures & our complaints about the latest Telegram release. Plus Fedora has the perfect desktop for Hacker News & Android is now king of the internet.
We dig deep into the LibreBoot project, how the Intel ME problem impacts open source & limits badass free laptops. Then we spend Wes’ money and shop for his next perfect Linux rig. Plus we discuss the big changeup at FreeNAS & more!
This week on the show, we've got all sorts of goodies to discuss. Starting with, vmm, vkernels, raspberry pi and much more! Some iX folks are visiting from out of This episode was brought to you by Headlines vmm enabled (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20161012092516&mode=flat&count=15) VMM, the OpenBSD hypervisor, has been imported into current It has similar hardware requirements to bhyve, a Intel Nehalem or newer CPU with the hardware virtualization features enabled in the BIOS AMD support has not been started yet OpenBSD is the only supported guest It would be interesting to hear from viewers that have tried it, and hear how it does, and what still needs more work *** vkernels go COW (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2016-October/624675.html) The DragonflyBSD feature, vkernels, has gained a new Copy-On-Write functionality Disk images can now be mounted RO or RW, but changes will not be written back to the image file This allows multiple vkernels to share the same disk image “Note that when the vkernel operates on an image in this mode, modifications will eat up system memory and swap, so the user should be cognizant of the use-case. Still, the flexibility of being able to mount the image R+W should not be underestimated.” This is another feature we'd love to hear from viewers that have tried it out. *** Basic support for the RPI3 has landed in FreeBSD-CURRENT (https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/rpi3) The long awaited bits to allow FreeBSD to boot on the Raspberry Pi 3 have landed There is still a bit of work to be done, some of the as mentioned in Oleksandr's blog post: Raspberry Pi support in HEAD (https://kernelnomicon.org/?p=690) “Raspberry Pi 3 limited support was committed to HEAD. Most of drivers should work with upstream dtb, RNG requires attention because callout mode seems to be broken and there is no IRQ in upstream device tree file. SMP is work in progress. There are some compatibility issue with VCHIQ driver due to some assumptions that are true only for ARM platform. “ This is exciting work. No HDMI support (yet), so if you plan on trying this out make sure you have your USB->Serial adapter cables ready to go. Full Instructions to get started with your RPI 3 can be found on the FreeBSD Wiki (https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/rpi3) Relatively soon, I imagine there will be a RaspBSD build for the RPI3 to make it easier to get started Eventually there will be official FreeBSD images as well *** OpenBSD switches softraid crypto from PKCS5 PBKDF2 to bcrypt PBKDF. (https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/2ba69c71e92471fe05f305bfa35aeac543ebec1f) After the discussion a few weeks ago when a user wrote a tool to brute force their forgotten OpenBSD Full Disk Encryption password (from a password list of possible variations of their password), it was discovered that OpenBSD defaulted to using just 8192 iterations of PKCSv5 for the key derivation function with a SHA1-HMAC The number of iterations can be manually controlled by the user when creating the softraid volume By comparison, FreeBSDs GELI full disk encryption used a benchmark to pick a number of iterations that would take more than 2 seconds to complete, generally resulting in a number of iterations over 1 million on most modern hardware. The algorithm is based on a SHA512-HMAC However, inefficiency in the implementation of PKCSv5 in GELI resulted in the implementation being 50% slower than some other implementations, meaning the effective security was only about 1 second per attempt, rather than the intended 2 seconds. The improved PKCSv5 implementation is out for review currently. This commit to OpenBSD changes the default key derivation function to be based on bcrypt and a SHA512-HMAC instead. OpenBSD also now uses a benchmark to pick a number of of iterations that will take approximately 1 second per attempt “One weakness of PBKDF2 is that while its number of iterations can be adjusted to make it take an arbitrarily large amount of computing time, it can be implemented with a small circuit and very little RAM, which makes brute-force attacks using application-specific integrated circuits or graphics processing units relatively cheap. The bcrypt key derivation function requires a larger amount of RAM (but still not tunable separately, i. e. fixed for a given amount of CPU time) and is slightly stronger against such attacks, while the more modern scrypt key derivation function can use arbitrarily large amounts of memory and is therefore more resistant to ASIC and GPU attacks.” The upgrade to the bcrypt, which has proven to be quite resistant to cracking by GPUs is a significant enhancement to OpenBSDs encrypted softraid feature *** Interview - Josh Paetzel - email@email (mailto:email@email) / @bsdunix4ever (https://twitter.com/bsdunix4ever) MeetBSD ZFS Panel FreeNAS - graceful network reload Pxeboot *** News Roundup EC2's most dangerous feature (http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2016-10-09-EC2s-most-dangerous-feature.html) Colin Percival, FreeBSD's unofficial EC2 maintainer, has published a blog post about “EC2's most dangerous feature” “As a FreeBSD developer — and someone who writes in C — I believe strongly in the idea of "tools, not policy". If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, I'll help you deliver the bullet to your foot as efficiently and reliably as possible. UNIX has always been built around the idea that systems administrators are better equipped to figure out what they want than the developers of the OS, and it's almost impossible to prevent foot-shooting without also limiting useful functionality. The most powerful tools are inevitably dangerous, and often the best solution is to simply ensure that they come with sufficient warning labels attached; but occasionally I see tools which not only lack important warning labels, but are also designed in a way which makes them far more dangerous than necessary. Such a case is IAM Roles for Amazon EC2.” “A review for readers unfamiliar with this feature: Amazon IAM (Identity and Access Management) is a service which allows for the creation of access credentials which are limited in scope; for example, you can have keys which can read objects from Amazon S3 but cannot write any objects. IAM Roles for EC2 are a mechanism for automatically creating such credentials and distributing them to EC2 instances; you specify a policy and launch an EC2 instance with that Role attached, and magic happens making time-limited credentials available via the EC2 instance metadata. This simplifies the task of creating and distributing credentials and is very convenient; I use it in my FreeBSD AMI Builder AMI, for example. Despite being convenient, there are two rather scary problems with this feature which severely limit the situations where I'd recommend using it.” “The first problem is one of configuration: The language used to specify IAM Policies is not sufficient to allow for EC2 instances to be properly limited in their powers. For example, suppose you want to allow EC2 instances to create, attach, detach, and delete Elastic Block Store volumes automatically — useful if you want to have filesystems automatically scaling up and down depending on the amount of data which they contain. The obvious way to do this is would be to "tag" the volumes belonging to an EC2 instance and provide a Role which can only act on volumes tagged to the instance where the Role was provided; while the second part of this (limiting actions to tagged volumes) seems to be possible, there is no way to require specific API call parameters on all permitted CreateVolume calls, as would be necessary to require that a tag is applied to any new volumes being created by the instance.” “As problematic as the configuration is, a far larger problem with IAM Roles for Amazon EC2 is access control — or, to be more precise, the lack thereof. As I mentioned earlier, IAM Role credentials are exposed to EC2 instances via the EC2 instance metadata system: In other words, they're available from http://169.254.169.254/. (I presume that the "EC2ws" HTTP server which responds is running in another Xen domain on the same physical hardware, but that implementation detail is unimportant.) This makes the credentials easy for programs to obtain... unfortunately, too easy for programs to obtain. UNIX is designed as a multi-user operating system, with multiple users and groups and permission flags and often even more sophisticated ACLs — but there are very few systems which control the ability to make outgoing HTTP requests. We write software which relies on privilege separation to reduce the likelihood that a bug will result in a full system compromise; but if a process which is running as user nobody and chrooted into /var/empty is still able to fetch AWS keys which can read every one of the objects you have stored in S3, do you really have any meaningful privilege separation? To borrow a phrase from Ted Unangst, the way that IAM Roles expose credentials to EC2 instances makes them a very effective exploit mitigation mitigation technique.” “To make it worse, exposing credentials — and other metadata, for that matter — via HTTP is completely unnecessary. EC2 runs on Xen, which already has a perfectly good key-value data store for conveying metadata between the host and guest instances. It would be absolutely trivial for Amazon to place EC2 metadata, including IAM credentials, into XenStore; and almost as trivial for EC2 instances to expose XenStore as a filesystem to which standard UNIX permissions could be applied, providing IAM Role credentials with the full range of access control functionality which UNIX affords to files stored on disk. Of course, there is a lot of code out there which relies on fetching EC2 instance metadata over HTTP, and trivial or not it would still take time to write code for pushing EC2 metadata into XenStore and exposing it via a filesystem inside instances; so even if someone at AWS reads this blog post and immediately says "hey, we should fix this", I'm sure we'll be stuck with the problems in IAM Roles for years to come.” “So consider this a warning label: IAM Roles for EC2 may seem like a gun which you can use to efficiently and reliably shoot yourself in the foot; but in fact it's more like a gun which is difficult to aim and might be fired by someone on the other side of the room snapping his fingers. Handle with care!” *** Open-source storage that doesn't suck? Our man tries to break TrueNAS (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/18/truenas_review/) The storage reviewer over at TheRegister got their hands on a TrueNAS and gave it a try “Data storage is difficult, and ZFS-based storage doubly so. There's a lot of money to be made if you can do storage right, so it's uncommon to see a storage company with an open-source model deliver storage that doesn't suck.” “To become TrueNAS, FreeNAS's code is feature-frozen and tested rigorously. Bleeding-edge development continues with FreeNAS, and FreeNAS comes with far fewer guarantees than does TrueNAS.” “iXsystems provided a Z20 hybrid storage array. The Z20 is a dual-controller, SAS-based, high-availability, hybrid storage array. The testing unit came with a 2x 10GbE NIC per controller and retails around US$24k. The unit shipped with 10x 300GB 10k RPM magnetic hard drives, an 8GB ZIL SSD and a 200GB L2ARC SSD. 50GiB of RAM was dedicated to the ARC by the system's autotune feature.” The review tests the performance of the TrueNAS, which they found acceptable for spinning rust, but they also tested the HA features While the look of the UI didn't impress them, the functionality and built in help did “The UI contains truly excellent mouseover tooltips that provide detailed information and rationale for almost every setting. An experienced sysadmin will be able to navigate the TrueNAS UI with ease. An experienced storage admin who knows what all the terms mean won't have to refer to a wiki or the more traditional help manual, but the same can't be said for the uninitiated.” “After a lot of testing, I'd trust my data to the TrueNAS. I am convinced that it will ensure the availability of my data to within any reasonable test, and do so as a high availability solution. That's more than I can say for a lot of storage out there.” “iXsystems produce a storage array that is decent enough to entice away some existing users of the likes of EMC, NetApp, Dell or HP. Honestly, that's not something I thought possible going into this review. It's a nice surprise.” *** OpenBSD now officially on GitHub (https://github.com/openbsd) Got a couple of new OpenBSD items to bring to your attention today. First up, for those who didn't know, OpenBSD development has (always?) taken place in CVS, similar to NetBSD and previously FreeBSD. However today, Git fans can rejoice, since there is now an “official” read-only github mirror of their sources for public consumption. Since this is read-only, I will assume (unless told otherwise) that pull-requests and whatnot aren't taken. But this will come in handy for the “git-enabled” among us who need an easier way to checkout OpenBSD sources. There is also not yet a guarantee about the stability of the exporter. If you base a fork on the github branch, and something goes wrong with the exporter, the data may be reexported with different hashes, making it difficult to rebase your fork. How to install LibertyBSD or OpenBSD on a libreboot system (https://libreboot.org/docs/bsd/openbsd.html) For the second part of our OpenBSD stories, we have a pretty detailed document posted over at LibreBoot.org with details on how to boot-strap OpenBSD (Or LibertyBSD) using their open-source bios replacement. We've covered blog posts and other tidbits about this process in the past, but this seems to be the definitive version (so far) to reference. Some of the niceties include instructions on getting the USB image formatted not just on OpenBSD, but also FreeBSD, Linux and NetBSD. Instructions on how to boot without full-disk-encryption are provided, with a mention that so far Libreboot + Grub does not support FDE (yet). I would imagine somebody will need to port over the openBSD FDE crypto support to GRUB, as was done with GELI at some point. Lastly some instructions on how to configure grub, and troubleshoot if something goes wrong will help round-out this story. Give it a whirl, let us know if you run into issues. Editorial Aside - Personally I find the libreboot stuff fascinating. It really is one of the last areas that we don't have full control of our systems with open-source. With the growth of EFI, it seems we rely on a closed-source binary / mini-OS of sorts just to boot our Open Source solutions, which needs to be addressed. Hats off to the LibreBoot folks for taking on this important challenge. *** FreeNAS 9.10 – LAGG & VLAN Overview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqSH_uQSArQ) A video tutorial on FreeNAS's official YouTube Channel Covers the advanced networking features, Link Aggregation and VLANs Covers what the features do, and in the case of LAGG, how each of the modes work and when you might want to use it *** Beastie Bits Remote BSD Developer Position is up for grabs (https://www.cybercoders.com/bsd-developer-remote-job-305206) Isilon is hiring for a FreeBSD Security position (https://twitter.com/jeamland/status/785965716717441024) Google has ported the Networked real-time multi-player BSD game (https://github.com/google/web-bsd-hunt) A bunch of OpenBSD Tips (http://www.vincentdelft.be) The last OpenBSD 6.0 Limited Edition CD has sold (http://www.ebay.com/itm/-/332000602939) Dan spots George Neville-Neil on TV at the Airport (https://twitter.com/DLangille/status/788477000876892162) gnn on CNN (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7zlxgtBA6o) SoloBSD releases v 6.0 built upon OpenBSD (http://solobsd.blogspot.com/2016/10/release-solobsd-60-openbsd-edition.html) Upcoming KnoxBug looks at PacBSD - Oct 25th (http://knoxbug.org/content/2016-10-25) Feedback/Questions Morgan - Ports and Packages (http://pastebin.com/Kr9ykKTu) Mat - ZFS Memory (http://pastebin.com/EwpTpp6D) Thomas - FreeBSD Path Length (http://pastebin.com/HYMPtfjz) Cy - OpenBSD and NetHogs (http://pastebin.com/vGxZHMWE) Lars - Editors (http://pastebin.com/5FMz116T) ***
Está no ar mais um episódio do Opencast. Neste episódio Ivan, Diego e Hélio falam de mais alguns acontecimentos que foram notícia na última semana. Links do Episódio Vídeo sobre nosso financiamento coletivo Seja nosso Padrim no Padrim.com.br Colabore conosco via pagseguro ou paypal Canal Tecnologia Aberta Tv no Youtube Libreboot não faz mais parte do GNU Lenovo bloqueia a instalação do Linux Ubuntu tablet OTA 13 Lançado Firefox 49 Netflix no Firefox no Linux --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/opencast/message
This week on BSDNow, Allan is back from his UK trip and we'll get to hear his thoughts on the developer summit. That plus all the This episode was brought to you by Headlines FreeBSD 11.0-RC1 Available (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2016-August/085277.html) FreeBSD is marching onwards to 11.0, and with it the first RC1 was released. In addition to the usual amd64 architectures, you may want to give it a whirl on your various ARM boards as well, as it includes images for the following systems: 11.0-RC1 amd64 GENERIC 11.0-RC1 i386 GENERIC 11.0-RC1 powerpc GENERIC 11.0-RC1 powerpc64 GENERIC64 11.0-RC1 sparc64 GENERIC 11.0-RC1 armv6 BANANAPI 11.0-RC1 armv6 BEAGLEBONE 11.0-RC1 armv6 CUBIEBOARD 11.0-RC1 armv6 CUBIEBOARD2 11.0-RC1 armv6 CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD 11.0-RC1 armv6 GUMSTIX 11.0-RC1 armv6 RPI-B 11.0-RC1 armv6 RPI2 11.0-RC1 armv6 PANDABOARD 11.0-RC1 armv6 WANDBOARD 11.0-RC1 aarch64 GENERIC For those wondering the list of changes between this and BETA4, we have that as well: A NULL pointer dereference in IPSEC has been fixed. Support for SSH Protocol 1 has been removed. OpenSSH DSA keys have been disabled by default. Users upgrading from prior FreeBSD versions are urged to update their SSH keys to RSA or ECDSA keys before upgrading to 11.0-RC1. PCI-e hotplug on bridges with power controllers has been disabled. A loader tunable (hw.pci.enablepciehp) to disable PCI-e HotPlug has been added. A VESA panic on suspend has been fixed. Google Compute Engine image publication has been fixed. An AES-ICM heap corruption typo bug has been fixed. A regression in pf.conf while parsing the 'interval' keyword has been fixed. A ZFS/VFS deadlock has been fixed. RC2 is delayed while some issues are sorted out (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2016-August/085323.html) RC2 is looming large, but was pushed back a few days while the following bugs are sorted out: Issue with IPv6 UDP traffic being sent from wrong MAC address Layer2 violation with IPv6 *** OpenBSD just added initial support for the RaspberryPi 2 and 3 devices (https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=147059203101111&w=2) It's a good time to be an ARM and BSD enthusiast. In addition to all the ARM images in FreeBSD 11.0, we also have word that initial support for RPi2 and RPi3 has started to land in OpenBSD. Mark Kettenis has posted the following with his Commit: Initial support for Raspberry Pi 2/3. All the hard work done by patrick@, I just cleaned things up a bit. Any bugs introduced in that process are entirely mine. This doesn't work yet. But when it does, you'll need recent firmware from the Raspberry Pi Foundation git repository at: https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware The device tree for the Raspberry Pi is somewhat in flux as bits and pieces to support the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 are committed to the mainline Linux kernel.“ + Exciting news! We will of course keep you informed as to when we have images to play with. Running OpenBSD / PF on a RPi does sound intriguing. drm-4.8-rc2 tagged in drm-next (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-x11/2016-August/017840.html) Remember when FreeBSD lagged so far behind in Graphics support? Well, those days are rapidly coming to an end. Matt Macy has posted an update to the FreeBSD X11 list with news of his DRM branch being caught up all the way to Linux 4.8-RC2 now. This is a huge accomplishment, with Matt commenting: As of this moment sys/dev/drm in the drm-next tree is sync with https://github.com/torvalds/linux drivers/gpu/drm (albeit only for the subset of drivers that FreeBSD supports - i915, radeon, and amdgpu). I feel this is a bit of a milestone as it means that it is possible that in the future graphics support on FreeBSD could proceed in lockstep with Linux. For those who want to try out the latest support, you can build from his branch at the following GitHub location: (https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics) Or, if compiling isn't your thing, TrueOS (The re-branded PC-BSD) will be releasing the a new ISO based upon his update to Linux 4.7 in the coming days, with 4.8-RC2 to follow in the next week or two. *** Installing FreeBSD for Raspberry Pi (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/freebsd/how-to-guides/installing-freebsd-for-raspberry-pi/) People have been running FreeBSD on various RPi devices for a while now, however there are still a lot of people who probably need a hand to get boot-strapped on their RPi system. The FreeBSD foundation has put together a nice tutorial which walks even the most novice user through getting FreeBSD up and running. In particular this could become a good way for students or other FreeBSD newcomers to try out the OS on a relatively low-cost platform outside of a VM. The tutorial starts of with a check-list of the specific items you'll need to get started, for RPi 1 (a/b) or RPi 2 hardware. From there, instructions on how to get the downloaded images onto a sdcard are provided, including Mac and Windows image burning details. With this done, it's really only a matter of plugging in your device to be presented with your new RPi + FreeBSD system. The most important details (the default username/password) at also provided, so don't skim too quickly. *** Interview - Drew Gurkowski Foundation Intern: First time FreeBSD User and Writing Tutorials *** News Roundup FreeBSD's ipfw gets a NAT64 implementation (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=304046) A new feature has been added to FreeBSD's native firewall, ipfw2 The new loadable module implements stateless and stateful NAT64 “Stateless translation is appropriate when a NAT64 translator is used in front of IPv4-only servers to allow them to be reached by remote IPv6-only clients.” With this setup, you map specific IPv6 addresses to the corresponding IPv4 address, allowing IPv4 only servers to be reachable on the v6 network. “Stateful translation is suitable for deployment at the client side or at the service provider, allowing IPv6-only client hosts to reach remote IPv4-only nodes.” This configuration allows many IPv6 only clients to reach the “legacy” internet. The FreeBSD cluster has been waiting for this feature for a while, because they have limited IP addresses, but many service jails that require access to services like GitHub that are not IPv6 enabled. The work was sponsored by Yandex, the Russian search engine and long time FreeBSD user Example configurations for both types are included in the commit message If you would find this feature useful, please take the time to set it up and document the steps and contribute that to the FreeBSD Handbook. *** Update on using LLVM's lld linker in the FreeBSD base system (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-toolchain/2016-August/002240.html) Ed Maste has written a lengthy update on the progress being made towards using LLVM's lld linker as a replacement for GNU's ‘ld'. Ed starts off by giving us some of the potential benefits of using lld vs the 2.17.50 ‘ld' version FreeBSD currently uses: AArch64 (arm64) support Link Time Optimization (LTO) New ABI support Other linker optimization Much faster link times Maintained code base Ed also gives us an update on several of the major blockers: Since the last update in March several lld developers have implemented much of the missing functionality. The main blockers were symbol version support and expression evaluation in the linker script expression parser. Both are now nearly complete“ A detailed plan was also articulated in respect to switching over: Update lld along with the Clang/LLVM 3.9 update that dim@ is working on. Add the bmake build infrastructure, installing as /usr/bin/ld.lld on the same architectures that use Clang (amd64, arm, arm64, i386). I don't think there's a need for a WITH_LLD src.conf knob, but will add one if desired. Update lld again (most likely to a snapshot from upstream SVN) once it is able to link an unmodified FreeBSD kernel. Modify the boot loader and kernel builds to avoid using features not implemented by lld. Introduce a WITHLLDAS_LD knob to have /usr/bin/ld be a ld.lld hardlink instead of /usr/bin/ld.bfd. Request ports exp-runs and issue a call for testing with 3rd party software. Fix issues found during this process. Switch /usr/bin/ld to ld.lld by default in head for the Clang-using architectures. Add a WITHOUTLLDAS_LD knob to switch back to GNU ld. *** How to install FreeBSD with ZFS filesystem on DigitalOcean (https://github.com/fxlv/docs/blob/master/freebsd/freebsd-with-zfs-digitalocean.md) I know we've mentioned using FreeBSD + ZFS on digital ocean in the past, but today we have a nice HowTo by Kaspars Mickevics (fxlv) on GitHub. Before getting started, kaspars mentions some pre-reqs. First up he recommends starting with a Minimum of 2GB of RAM. (The $20/mo droplet). This is to ensure you have plenty of cushion to avoid running out of memory during the process. It is possible to use ZFS with less, but depending on your desired workload this does make sense. From there, checking out “mfsBSD” is discussed, along with details on how to make it suitable for a DO installation. (Mostly just disabling DHCP for the network device) For good measure ‘pkg-static' is also included. With that done, using mfsBSD you will create a tar file, which is then extracted on top of the running system. After rebooting, you will be able to run “bsdinstall” and proceed to installing / formatting your disk with ZFS as normal. A good tutorial, something I may need to do here in the near future. User manages to get OpenBSD and FreeBSD working with Libreboot (https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/libreboot/2016-08/msg00058.html) In a short drive-by post to the Libreboot mailing list Piotr Kubaj gives a quick notice that he managed to get OpenBSD and FreeBSD both booting. > I know GNU people don't like BSD, so let me make it quick :) > > > I've succeeded in booting FreeBSD 11.0-RC1 using txt mode on my X200 > with the newest Libreboot. > > To get installer to boot, I used: > kfreebsd (usb0,gpt3)/boot/kernel/kernel > set FreeBSD.vfs.mountfrom=ufs:/dev/da1p3 > boot > > I didn't try to install yet. > The trick looks relatively simple (looks like GRUB), manually loading the kernel with ‘kfreebsd' and then setting the vfs.root.mountfrom variable to find the USB stick. In an update he also mentions booting OpenBSD with ‘kopenbsd' instead of ‘kfreebsd' (again GRUB syntax) Now somebody will need to test installation of the system (he didn't) and see what other issues may crop up in running BSD on a free BIOS. *** Beastie Bits: The ACPICA (ACPI Component Architecture) coding language AML now in DragonFly BSD (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2016-July/624192.html) Release announcement for 4.3BSD Tahoe from 1988 (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.tahoe/50ManvdM1-s) Feedback/Questions Mike - Jail Uptime (http://pastebin.com/FLpybL6D) Greg - Router Hardware (http://pastebin.com/RGuayhB3) Kristof writes in (http://pastebin.com/NT4zmHiG) Ty - Updates and Logs (http://pastebin.com/CtetZdFg) Benjamin - MTA Bug (http://pastebin.com/Qq3VbQG2) ***
This week on the show, we will be interviewing GNN of the FreeBSD project to talk about the new TeachBSD initiative. That plus the latest BSD headlines, all coming your way right now! This episode was brought to you by Headlines FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE Announcement (https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.3R/announce.html) FreeBSD 10.3 has landed, with extended support until April 30, 2018 This is likely to be the last extended support release, as starting with 11, the new support model will encourage upgrading to the latest minor version by ending support for the previous minor version approximately 2 months after each point release. The Major version / stable branch will still be supported for the same 5 year term. This will allow the FreeBSD project to move forward more quickly, while still providing the same level of long term support The UEFI boot loader is much improved, and now supports booting root-on-ZFS, and the beastie menu The beastie menu itself has been updated with support for ZFS Boot Environments The CAM Target Layer (CTL) now supports High Availability, allowing the construction of much more advanced storage systems The 64bit Linux Emulation Layer was backported Reroot support was added, allowing the system to boot off of a minimal image, such as a mfsroot and then reload all of userland from a different root file system (such as iSCSI, NFS, etc) The version of xz(1) has been updated to support multi-threaded compression sesutil(8) has been introduced, making it easier to manage large storage nodes Various ZFS updates As usual, a huge number of driver updates are also included *** How to use OpenBSD with Libreboot: detailed instructions (https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/libreboot/2016-04/msg00010.html) This tutorial covers installing OpenBSD on a Thinkpad X200 using Libreboot, a replacement for the traditional BIOS/firmware that comes from the manufacturer “Since 5.9, OpenBSD supports EFI boot mode, which means that it also have had to support framebuffer out of the box, so lack of proprietary VGA BIOS blob is no longer a problem and you can boot it with unmodified Libreboot binary release 20150518.” “In order to install OpenBSD on such a machine you will need someadditional preparations, since regular install59.fs won't work because bsd.rd doesn't have a framebuffer console.” A few extra steps are required to get it going, but they are outlined in the post This may be very interesting to those who prefer not to depend on binary blobs *** Linking the FreeBSD base system with lld -- status update (http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-March/096449.html) The FreeBSD Foundation's Ed Maste provides an update on the LLVM mailing list about the progress of replacing the GNU linker with the lld in the FreeBSD base system “I'm pleased to report that I can now build a runnable FreeBSD system using lld as the linker (for buildworld), with a few workarounds and work-in-progress patches. I have not yet extensively tested the result but it is possible to login to the resulting system, and basic sanity tests I've tried are successful. Note that the kernel is still linked with ld.bfd.” Outstanding Issues Symbol version support (PR 23231). FreeBSD uses symbol versioning for backwards compatibility Linker script expression support (PR 26731). The FreeBSD kernel linker scripts contain expressions not currently supported by lld Library search paths. GNU LD automatically searches /lib, and lld does not the -N flag makes the text and data sections RW and does not page-align data. It is used by boot loader components. The -dc flag assigns space to common symbols when producing relocatable output (-r). It is used by the /rescue build, which is a single binary assembled from a collection of individual tools (sh, ls, fsck, ...) -Y adds a path to the default library search path. It is used by the lib32 build, which provides i386 builds of the system libraries for compatibility with i386 applications. With the ongoing work, it might be possible for FreeBSD 11 to use lld by default, although it might be best to wait to throw that particular switch *** Your favorite billion user company using BSD just flipped on encryption for all their users -- and it took 15 Engineers to do it (http://www.wired.com/2016/04/forget-apple-vs-fbi-whatsapp-just-switched-encryption-billion-people/) With the help of Moxie Marlinspike's Open Whisper Systems, WhatsApp has integrated the ‘Signal' encryption system for all messages, class, pictures, and videos sent between individuals or groups It uses public key cryptography, very similar to GPG, but with automated public key servers It also includes a system of QR codes to verify the identity of individuals in person, so you can be sure the person you are talking to is actually the person you met with WhatsApp runs their billion user network, using FreeBSD, with only about 50 engineers Only 15 of those engineers we needed to work on the project that has now deployed complete end-to-end encryption across the entire network The Wired article is very detailed and well worth the read *** Interview - George Neville-Neil - gnn@freebsd.org (mailto:gnn@freebsd.org) / @gvnn3 (https://twitter.com/gvnn3) Teaching BSD with Tracing News Roundup Faces of FreeBSD 2016: Scott Long (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/faces-of-freebsd-2016-scott-long/) It's been awhile since we've had a new entry into the “Faces of FreeBSD” series, but due to popular demand it's back! This installment features developer Scott Long, who currently works at NetFlix, previously at Yahoo and Adaptec. Scott got a very early start into BSD, first discovering i386BSD 0.1 on a FTP server at Berkeley, back at 1992. From there on it's been a journey, following along with FreeBSD since version 1.0 in 1993. So what stuff can we blame Scott for? In his own words: I've been a source committer since 2000. I got my start by taking over maintainership of the Adaptec ‘aac' RAID driver. From 2002-2006 I was the Release Engineer and was responsible for the 5.x and 6.x releases. Though the early 5.x releases were not great, they were necessary stepping stones to the success of FreeBSD 6.x and beyond. I'm exceptionally proud of my role in helping FreeBSD move forward during that time. I authored and maintained the ‘mfi' and ‘mps' storage drivers, the ‘udf' filesystem driver, and several smaller sound and USB drivers. I've maintained, or at least touched, most of the storage device drivers in the system to some extent, and I implemented medium-grained locking on the CAM storage stack. Recently I've been working on overall system scalability and performance. ASCII Flow (http://asciiflow.com/) A website that lets to draw and share ASCII diagrams Great for network layout maps, rack diagrams, protocol analysis etc Use it in your presentations and slides Sample (https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BynxTTJrNUOKeWxCVm1ERExrNkU) *** System Under Test: FreeBSD (http://lowlevelbits.org/system-under-test-freebsd/) Part of a series looking at testing across a number of projects Outlines the testing framework of FreeBSD Provides a mini-tutorial on how to run the tests There are some other tests that are now covered, but this is due to a lack of documentation on the fact that the tests exist, and how to run them There is much ongoing work in this area *** Worst April Fools Joke EVER! (http://www.rhyous.com/2016/04/01/microsoft-announces-it-is-acquiring-freebsd-for-300-million/) While a bad April Fool's joke, it also shows some common misconceptions The FreeBSD Foundation does not own the source repository, it is only the care taken of the trademark, and other things that require a single legal entity OpenBSD and NetBSD are not ‘sub brands' of FreeBSD Bash was not ported to Windows, but rather Windows gained a system similar to FreeBSD's linux_compat It would be nice to have ZFS on Windows *** Beastie Bits Credit where credit's due... (https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/55642/) M:Tier's OpenBSD packages and binpatches updated for 5.9 (https://stable.mtier.org/) NYC BUG Meeting (2016-04-06) - Debugging with LLVM, John Wolfe (http://www.nycbug.org/index.cgi) Need to create extremely high traffic loads? kq_sendrecv is worth checking out (http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2016-March/459651.html) If you're in the Maryland region, CharmBug has a meetup next week (http://www.meetup.com/CharmBUG/events/230048300/) How to get a desktop on DragonFly (https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/how_to_get_to_the_desktop/) Linux vs BSD Development Models (https://twitter.com/q5sys/status/717509675630084096) Feedback/Question Paulo - ZFS Setup (http://pastebin.com/raw/GrM0jKZK) Jonathan - Installation (http://pastebin.com/raw/13KCkhMU) Andrew - Career / School (http://pastebin.com/wsx90L2m)