OSX Archives - FreeBSDNews.com

FreeBSD 11.0 vs Ubuntu 16.04 vs. macOS Sierra Benchmarks by Michael Larabel

October 7, 2016 By Cao Leave a Comment

Michael Larabel of Phoronix performed several benchmark tests between the latest FreeBSD (note that it is not the official 11.0-RELEASE), Ubuntu, and macOS Sierra operating systems on the MacBook Air. The tests performed range from SQLite, OpenMP, to the LLVM Clang compiler. See the link below for the detailed results.

Yesterday I published some macOS 10.2 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS benchmarks from a Mac Mini and MacBook Air systems. For those curious if BSDs can outperform macOS Sierra on Apple hardware, I tested the MacBook Air with FreeBSD 11.0 compared to the Linux and macOS results on that Core i5 system. Here are those results.

FreeBSD 11.0 AMD64 was tested on the Haswell-based MacBook Air and it actually worked well. Even the HD Graphics 5000 were playing nicely with the FreeBSD DRM Intel driver. The MacBook Air is equipped with a Core i5 4250U CPU with HD Graphics 5000, 4GB of DDR3 memory, and a 120GB Apple SSD. The install was smooth and was off to the races with testing.

Read about the benchmark results: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?item=freebsd-ubuntu-sierra&num=1&page=article

A ZFS developer’s analysis of Apple’s new APFS file system (arstechnica.com)

July 8, 2016 By Cao Leave a Comment

ZFS developer Adam H. Leventhal writes an in-depth comparison between ZFS–a prominent filesystem in BSD systems, and APFS–a new filesystem developed for Apple’s macOS and replacing its aging HFS+. The author discusses its snapshot and backup, management, performance, efficiency, and data integrity features.

APFS, the Apple File System, was itself started in 2014 with Giampaolo as its lead engineer. It’s a stand-alone, from-scratch implementation (an earlier version of this post noted a dependency on Core Storage, but Giampaolo set me straight in this comment). I asked him about looking for inspiration in other modern file systems such as BSD’s HAMMER, Linux’s btrfs, or OpenZFS (Solaris, illumos, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, etc.), all of which have features similar to what APFS intends to deliver. (And note that Apple built a fairly complete port of ZFS, though Giampaolo was not apparently part of the group advocating for it.) Giampaolo explained that he was aware of them as a self-described file system guy (he built the file system in BeOS, unfairly relegated to obscurity when Apple opted to purchase NeXTSTEP instead), but didn’t delve too deeply for fear, he said, of tainting himself.

Full article: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/06/a-zfs-developers-analysis-of-the-good-and-bad-in-apples-new-apfs-file-system/

Discussion thread on /r/programming: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4pziho/a_zfs_developers_analysis_of_apples_new_apfs_file/t1_d4pw7vc

How-To: Cross Compile Rust from OS X to FreeBSD

April 1, 2016 By Cao Leave a Comment

el-capitan rust User yohanesu75 shows us how to cross compile Rust from Mac OS X to the FreeBSD operating system. Rust is a programming language designed for “safety, speed, and concurrency”. See the link below for the full instructions.

About this repository

This repository contain instructions on how to build a cross compiler and a set of files that I build on my El Capitan machine.

If you don’t want to build the necessary files yourself, clone this repository, skip to Rust section and take it from there.

If you don’t need a gcc cross compiler for C/C++ maybe there is a easier and faster way of making a cross toolchain for only Rust. Please let me know if you know it.

Prerequisites

A FreeBSD 11 machine (real or virtual).
A Mac OS X computer.

Setup

On OS X, declare variables we need and create the folder for cross compile files.

Full tutorial: https://github.com/yohanesu75/crossrust

The tale of an OS X to FreeBSD user

December 9, 2015 By Cao Leave a Comment

User mirrorshades recounts their story of transitioning from a long time OS X user to FreeBSD.

I’ve been using Mac OS X since the Public Beta, though not as a daily driver for a few years after it was initially released.

Pismo, PowerMac, PowerBook (12″ albook!), MacBook, iMac… It’s been a long road, really, and until the last few years I’ve been very happy.

Before OS X, I used Linux or OpenBSD as a desktop (and before that Windows 3.1), and was generally pretty happy for many years, but I did spend a lot of time screwing around with X11 configs and dist-upgrade breaking my world, and all the usual stuff you might remember from 2003 or 2004.

Read the entire story here: http://mirrorshades.net/post/132753032310

xhyve

June 17, 2015 By Cao Leave a Comment

For those who would like to use bhyve for OS X, a BSD-licensed virtualizer has been ported. Check out xhyve below. xhyve_logo

xhyve is a lightweight virtualization solution for OS X that is capable of running Linux. It is a port of FreeBSD’s bhyve…

super lightweight, only 230 KB in size

completely standalone, no dependencies

the only BSD-licensed virtualizer on OS X

does not require a kernel extension (bhyve’s kernel code was ported to user mode code calling into Hypervisor.framework)

multi-CPU support

networking support

can run off-the-shelf Linux distributions (and could be extended to run other operating systems)

See this weblog post for instructions on running Tiny Core Linux or Ubuntu Server with xhyve.

Original: http://onethingwell.org/post/121265557390/xhyve

Baseline Mac OS X Support #1113

January 9, 2015 By Cao Leave a Comment

User landonf wrote this patchset to allow baseline Mac OS X support.

Howdy,

The patches here add support for building on Mac OS X; with these changes, all included tests (executed via `make check’) pass on both Mac OS X and FreeBSD.

I don’t anticipate an immediate merge, but I wanted to go ahead and open this to allow for comment.

This patchset primarily consists of:

Adding compatibility shims for BSD-specific or later POSIX functionality that Mac OS X doesn’t support (see compat/)

Adding pkg_macho.c with support for Mach-O binary analysis.

For pkg_macho.c, I used BSD-licensed Mach-O parsing code written for MacPorts‘ shared library/executable analysis (external/libmachista).

The primarily outstanding issues I have yet to tackle:

Making sure I didn’t miss any style(9) bugs.

Finishing shared library analysis handling (marked with MACTODO in pkg_macho.c):

Universal binary handling. I’m currently stuffing the architecture(s) supported by libraries into their library paths, as a file suffix. This is not the final solution, but I haven’t decided how to tackle this yet.

dyld specific features:

Required/compatibility version fields that must match between the linking image and linked library.

Relative library path handling via dyld‘s @loader_path, @executable_path, etc.

Cheers!

Check out the patch from GitHub here: https://github.com/freebsd/pkg/pull/1113

HowTo: Use ps, kill, nice, and killall To Manage processes in FreeBSD and OS X Unix Operating System

January 3, 2015 By Cao Leave a Comment

This tutorial by nixCraft shows us how to use various commands to manage processes in FreeBSD and OS X.

I‘m a new Unix system user. How can I manage process on a FreeBSD operating systems?

A process is nothing but an executing program on FreeBSD or Unix-like system. Each process on the system provides the resources needed to run a program such as vim or firefox. Each process has:

Tutorial details

Difficulty Easy (rss)

Root privileges Yes

Requirements FreeBSD or Unix-like os

Estimated completion time 10m

A unique process identifier number (PID)

A virtual address space

A security context

Open devices/handles, executable code

Environment variables, priority and more.

In this quick tutorial, I will write about process management on a FreeBSD operating systems.

Tutorial details
Difficulty	Easy (rss)
Root privileges	Yes
Requirements	FreeBSD or Unix-like os
Estimated completion time	10m

Full instructions here: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-use-ps-kill-nice-killall-to-manage-processes-in-freebsd-unix/

Bash Vulnerability in FreeBSD

September 27, 2014 By Cao Leave a Comment

As has been widely reported, a major vulnerability in bash has been discovered. This vulnerability, which is being referred to as “Shellshock”, is considerably less severe in FreeBSD than most other Unix-like systems because bash is not in the base system, and FreeBSD does not link /bin/sh to bash by default. However, anyone running a system that uses bash, or especially one that might allow external input into bash environments, should be aware of this issue and patch any potentially vulnerable systems as soon as possible.

Brian Drewery (bdrewery [at] freebsd.org) has patched the FreeBSD bash port to disable function importing from the environment unless an option is set at build time. Packages should be available soon.

Brian also gave the following tips for reducing exposure to this vulnerablity:

The port is fixed with all known public exploits. The package is
building currently.

However bash still allows the crazy exporting of functions and may still
have other parser bugs. I would recommend for the immediate future not
using bash for forced ssh commands as well as these guidelines:

1. Do not ever link /bin/sh to bash. This is why it is such a big
problem on Linux, as system(3) will run bash by default from CGI.
2. Web/CGI users should have shell of /sbin/nologin.
3. Don’t write CGI in shell script / Stop using CGI :)
4. httpd/CGId should never run as root, nor “apache”. Sandbox each
application into its own user.
5. Custom restrictive shells, like scponly, should not be written in bash.
6. SSH authorized_keys/sshd_config forced commands should also not be
written in bash.

Time Machine backups on FreeBSD 10

August 26, 2014 By Cao Leave a Comment

hero_timemachine_lg This article by khubla.com shows us how to create Time Machine backups in FreeBSD 10 through netatalk3.

I usually work on a Macbook, and I use keyless ssh with a cron job to do nightly backups. It works very well. However, I decided to try backups with Time Machine, using my FreeBSD-10 server as the host.

The first step is to install netatalk3, and nss_mdns
pkg install netatalk3
pkg install nss_mdns

For the full instructions, check out the following page: http://blog.khubla.com/freebsd/timemachine-backups-on-freebsd-10