In this BSD Now episode, hosts Allan Jude and Kris Moore discuss Leo Laporte, a known US tech journalist, about his switch to FreeBSD. In addition, learn about the upcoming OpenBSD 6.0 release. Press play below to tune in:
For this week’s roundup of BSD related content from BSD Now – http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2016_07_27-the_lepotre_has_landed
In this BSD Now episode, hosts Kris Moore and Allan Jude interview Dru Lavigne — documentation specialist and FreeBSD docs committer. In addition, they discuss a Kernel Fuzing audit done for OpenBSD and improvements to the ‘C’ client for LetsEncrypt.
For the weekly roundup of BSD related content from BSD Now – http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2016_07_20-fuzzy_auditing
Michael Larabel of Phoronix recently compared three BSD systems (DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, and PC-BSD) against ten Linux distributions, starting with benchmarks all the way to file compression speeds.
Earlier this week I posted the results of a 10-way Linux distribution battle on the same Intel Xeon system and using all of the popular and latest Linux distribution releases. Taking things further, the article today has those results complemented by results on the Xeon system for several BSD operating systems. For seeing how the BSD performance stacks up to Linux, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, and the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD were benchmarked.
Read his full report here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=3bsd-10linux&num=1
Thanks to DragonFlyDigest for the link.
Michael Larabel of Phoronix.com has published an article rounding up the most popular BSD stories in 2014. Grab a cup of coffee and reflect on one of BSD’s biggest years:
Over the past week or so I’ve shared many top ten / year-end lists of our most popular open-source content on Phoronix. Most of the focus has been on our majority Linux focus while in this article is a look at the top ten BSD articles on Phoronix from 2014.
In 2014 saw the forking of OpenSSL to LibreSSL, the release of FreeBSD 10.0 and 10.1, KMS/DRM graphics driver improvements for BSD, the continued progress of PC-BSD in being an easy FreeBSD desktop platform, and many other advancements. Here’s the ten most viewed BSD articles on Phoronix for 2014:
The 10 Best Features Of FreeBSD 10.0
With a bit of luck FreeBSD 10.0 will be released in the next few days so here’s a look at the arguably ten best features of this next major BSD operating system release.My 10 Minute Experience With PC-BSD 10.0
With FreeBSD 10.0 having been released and the final release of the PC-BSD 10.0 coming this week, I decided to try out the PC-BSD 10.0-RC5 ahead of the final release. While I intended to run some benchmarks of FreeBSD/PC-BSD 10.0 against its predecessor and compared to Linux distributions, this initial PC-BSD 10.0 encounter was cut short after about ten minutes.PC-BSD Is Developing Its Own Desktop Environment
The PC-BSD project is developing its own desktop environment from scratch! The ultimate plan is for Lumina to become a full-featured, open-source desktop environment that may ultimately replace KDE as its default desktop environment.OpenBSD Foundation At Risk Of Shutting Down
The OpenBSD Foundation is running into a situation of lack of funding to the point that they can’t even cover their electricity costs and may be forced to suspend or reduce their operations without additional help.FreeBSD 10.0 Has Finally Been Released
It’s been delayed by many months but the official release of FreeBSD 10.0 has shipped today!FreeBSD Receives A Million Dollar Donation
The FreeBSD has received their largest ever single donation: $1,000,000 USD.KMS Drivers Break The Console In FreeBSD 10
While FreeBSD 10.0 is exciting for finally having an AMD Radeon DRM/KMS driver as one of the major features of the new OS, the quality isn’t yet on par with the open-source graphics support found on Linux from where the code was originally ported.OpenBSD Drops Support For Loadable Kernel Modules
Interestingly the OpenBSD developers have decided to remove support for loadable kernel modules from the BSD distribution’s next release.Radeon Now Work Well On PC-BSD, But USB Mouse Support Is Iffy
Since last month’s release of FreeBSD 10.0 and PC-BSD 10.0 that followed, many Phoronix readers have been asking about benchmarks of this major BSD operating system update that’s home to many new features. Here’s an update on my FreeBSD/PC-BSD 10.0 testing thus far.OpenSSL Forked By OpenBSD Into LibreSSL
Following the fallout from the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug, OpenBSD developers have decided to fork the OpenSSL code-base to create LibreSSL.
Original post: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTg3NzQ
This blog post by
OpenBSD and FreeBSD are both great OS that I admire and use. OpenBSD is considered more secure since it is its main goal, but FreeBSD can be tweaked to be pretty well hardened as well. Depending on the forums or to who we ask, we will have different opinions. But what are the facts? Which OS is more secure and why?
I am not asking the question about which one is globally better, as “better” has a different meaning depending on the context and the needs (ISP routers, data
base servers, home gateway, desktop system, storage server or appliance, etc…). On some enterprises doing a major OS upgrade every 6 months or every year is doable, on others, it’s not possible at all. Also, it depends if one needs performance for streaming (Netflix), or if security is a top priority for a redondant firewall. Everyone needs is different, and both OS are highly useful.
If we strictly focus on security, how FreeBSD compares to OpenBSD security wise? In what follows, we will dig into memory protection, system and network security features, and default “out of the box” security. The purpose is to give unbiased facts, to compare point by point both OS. I am not trying to find the “best” OS and discredit the other, I love and use both :-) Let us try to find out the integrated security features of both OS, the visit continues below!
Check out the full comparison here – http://networkfilter.blogspot.com/2014/12/security-openbsd-vs-freebsd.html
In this BSD Now episode, hosts Kris Moore and Allan Jude interview Brent Cook, a new OpenBSD developer, about a portable version of LibreSSL. In addition, they discuss the FreeBSD port of LibreSSL.
Check out the official page here: http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2014_07_30-liberating_ssl
The developers of OpenBSD have just released version 5.5. This release includes the feature time_t being made available for 64 bits on all platforms, improvements to the installer, improved hardware support, and various changes to the network stack. In addition, there were updates in several apps such as GNOME 3.10.2, KDE 3.5.10 / 4.11.5, Xfce 4.10, MySQL 5.1.73 and Postegre SQL 9.3.2, Postfix 2.11, etc.
The OpenBSD project produces a FREE, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system. Our efforts emphasize portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography. OpenBSD supports binary emulation of most programs from SVR4 (Solaris), FreeBSD, Linux, BSD/OS, SunOS and HP-UX. OpenBSD is freely available from our FTP sites, and also available in an inexpensive 3-CD set.
To read the full release notes, head on over to this link: http://www.openbsd.org/55.html
The OpenBSD team has started its own fork of OpenSSL, due to the backlash from the Heartbleed bug. The new project will be called LibreSSL, and is based on OpenSSL 1.0.1g. The team has already begun working on a major clean up of the code. The following list outlines the changes they have made so far:
Check out the full notes / comments here: https://lobste.rs/s/3utipo/openbsd_has_started_a_massive_strip-down_and_cleanup_of_openssl/comments/fkwgqw
Update – you can find real time updates on this page here: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/lib/libssl/src/ssl/
Welcome to the weekly (Free)BSD news round-up (week 44) where we have a mix of news snippets, links, howto’s and software/package updates for you all. These tid-bits are all very interesting and news worthy, yet too small to package as individual posts.
A FreeBSD Success Story
… Then, we switched the server to a new one, quad core, sixty gigabytes of ram and two terabytes of disk. This time, I chose FreeBSD because I knew that it would work greatly ! Linux could have worked too, maybe we could have more performance, but it would not be as easy to manage as our FreeBSD box… More
Bernhard Fröhlich joined the FreeBSD Ports Team in October.
1. FreeNAS 8.3 User Guide
The FreeNAS 8.3.0 Users Guide is available for download as EPUB, HTML and PDF.
2. M0n0wall 1.34b1 released
Manuel Kasper has announced Beta1 of M0n0wall 1.34.
“A maintenance version in the m0n0wall 1.3 branch has been released: 1.34b1 includes the CSRF-related fixes recently made to the beta branch, as well as a few others security-relevant things. Nothing is high priority, but once 1.34b1 has received some wider testing, it will be re-released as 1.34, and 1.33 users will be recommended to upgrade.”
1. FreeBSD/Raspberry Pi
Gonzo has mentions that he has moved his FreeBSD/Raspberry Pi project into FreeBSD Head / Current.
2 KNemo 0.7.4 receives major improvements for FreeBSD
KNemo is a tool that monitors the network traffic and provides a tray widget for every network interface, support for network statistics, and different icon themes.
Highlights of the release are:
• Bugs in the BSD backend has been fixed;
• Wrong traffic bug reported on FreeBSD has been repaired;
• Wrong encryption state for mixed WEP connections on FreeBSD has been fixed;
• Default gateway previously undetected on FreeBSD is now working properly;
• A monochrome icon theme has been added;
• Support for the legacy system tray icon has been removed;
• Embedded plotter code has been dropped in favor of libksignalplotter.
As some of you may have seen already RootBSD has a new website. It looks very clean and slick and looks more ‘web 2.0’ than the previous version.
RootBSD was established with one goal in mind: to provide reliable, flexible, and supported BSD-based hosting services to professionals and businesses. Our extensive selection of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux hosting packages means there is a right package for almost everyone.
1. PfSense Weekend (Brazil)
There will be a classroom pfSense weekend in Porto Alegre (Brazil) from 14-16 December. More details on http://www.cursopfsense.com.br/
In October 2012 the following people became new committers or were given enhanced FreeBSD update rights: Simon J. Gerraty (src), Erwin Lansing (src, ports) and Eitan Adler (src, ports, doc).
OpenBSD 5.2 arrives with improved multi-core support.
The OpenBSD project has released version 5.2 of its free BSD-based UNIX-like operating system. According to its developers, the most important change in the new release is the switch from user-level to kernel-level threads. This allows programs with multiple threads to use multiple CPU cores. (via)
Gleb Smirnoff writes on the FreeBSD PF Mailing List about a some improvements he has made to make Packet Filter (PF) SMP-scalable and faster:
“As you already may now, last half a year I’ve been working on making pf SMP-scalable and faster in general. More info can be found here:
Since that announce in June, I’ve been running experimental code for more than 2 months in production on several routers. Also, some brave people volunteered to be beta-testers and also run the experimental branch in last couple of months. Code proved to be stable enough.
The new code performs better in production: less CPU load, less jitter, more responsive system under high load. It performs better under synthetic benchmarks like random generated UDP flood. It performs much better when DoS comes in.”