In this BSD Now episode, hosts Allan Jude & Benedict Reuschling discuss the Spectre & Meltdown situation, look at NetBSD memory sanitizer progress, Postgres on ZFS, and show us a bit about NomadBSD. Press play below to tune in:
Jupiter Broadcasting show notes: http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/121362/the-spectre-of-meltdown-bsd-now-228/
The FreeBSD Security Team have issued a notice regarding the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerability, known to affect many Intel systems around the world. A fix is in progress and will be announced soon.You may view the report from various websites below.
By now, we're sure most everyone have heard of the Meltdown and Spectre attacks. If not, head over to https://meltdownattack.com/ and get an overview. Additional technical details are available from Google Project Zero. https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/01/reading-privileged-memory-with-side.html The FreeBSD Security Team was notified of the issue in late December and received a briefing under NDA with the original embargo date of January 9th. Since we received relatively late notice of the issue, our ability to provide fixes is delayed.
Original announcement: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-security/2018-January/009719.html
Official FreeBSD Security Officer Response to Meltdown and Spectre, outlook on timeline for patches from freebsd
FreeBSD developers posted they were notified about the Meltdown and Spectre attacks in late December. They are currently still figuring out their plans for fending off these possible attacks and have no estimates yet when patches may be available.
Phoronix: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=BSD-Spectre-Response
NVIDIA FreeBSD driver patch: http://www.hackbusters.com/news/stories/2470639-nvidia-releases-meltdown-and-spectre-updates
In this BSD Now episode, hosts Benedict Reuschling & Allan Jude walk us through dumping a PS4 kernel in 6 days, discuss NetBSD 7.11, show us how to run FreeBSD on Thinkpad T470, and update us on the OpenBSD’s pledge progress. Click play below to tune in:
Jupiter Broadcasting show notes: http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/121122/the-long-core-dump-bsd-now-227/
This presentation by Ilja van Sprundel discusses how the major BSDs handle their security kernel bug advisories — FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.
In this presentation I start off asking the question “How come there are only a handful of BSD security kernel bugs advisories released every year?” and then proceed to try and look at some data from several sources.
It should come as no surprise that those sources are fairly limited and somewhat outdated.
The presentation then moves on to try and collect some data ourselves. This is done by actively investigating and auditing. Code review, fuzzing, runtime testing on all 3 major BSD distributions [NetBSD/OpenBSD/FreeBSD]. This is done by first investigating what would be good places where the bugs might be. Once determined, a detailed review is performed of these places. Samples and demos will be shown.
I end the presentation with some results and conclusions. I will list what the outcome was in terms of bugs found, and who – based on the data I now have – among the three main BSD distributions can be seen as the clear winner and loser. I will go into detail about the code quality observed and give some pointers on how to improve some code. Lastly I will try and answer the question I set out to answer (“How come there are only a handful of BSD security kernel bugs advisories released every year?”).
Link: https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8968-are_all_bsds_created_equally#t=408
This guide by Linux Commando will show you how to test out FreeBSD on a virtual machine in Debian. For Linux users interested in trying out FreeBSD, check out this guide to get started.
Using VirtualBox to build FreeBSD VM on Debian
Many virtualization software (aka hypervisors) can run on the host operating system of Linux. Notable open-source software include VirtualBox, KVM, and Xen. This post outlines how to 1) install VirtualBox on Debian 9 (Stretch), and 2) build a FreeBSD virtual machine.Prepare for installation
Perform the following steps prior to installing VirtualBox:
1. Enable virtualization technology in BIOS.
2. Download FreeBSD ISO.
Enable virtualization in BIOS …
Full tutorial: https://linuxcommando.blogspot.com/2017/12/using-virtualbox-to-build-freebsd-vm-on.html
In this BSD Now episode, hosts Allan Jude & Benedict Reuschling give us a summary on the FreeBSD Q3 status report, explore good and bad syscalls, list GOG games for OpenBSD, and show us the capabilities of devmatch. Click play below to tune in:
Jupiter Broadcasting show notes: http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/120967/ssl-santas-syscall-list-bsd-now-226/
The developers of FreeBSD have made available the 3rd quarter status report for 2017. You will find reports from the Release Engineering Team, Ports Collection, FreeBSD Core Team, and FreeBSD Foundation. Some of the things mentioned are FreeBSD CI, Intel iWarp support, AMD Zen support, Absolute FreeBSD 3rd Edition, Puppet, fundraising efforts, and more. See the link below for the full detailed report.
FreeBSD Project Quarterly Status Report - 3rd Quarter 2017 This quarter's FreeBSD developments continue to provide excitement and promise for further developments. I myself have a soft spot for manual pages, so it is especially good to see that we have gained some documentation for writing them (and I hope that this will translate to more and improved manual pages in the future!). The core@ entry is also of particular note, with the introduction of the FCP process and the recognition of the first non-committer FreeBSD Project Member (and more). Read on to find out more about these, as well as improved support for the AMD Zen family of processors (e.g., Ryzen), and a whole lot more! --Benjamin Kaduk
FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report – Third Quarter 2017: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2017-December/067948.htm
Phoronix reports that developers are working on FreeBSD support for Wayland’s Weston, a display server protocol. It appears that FreeBSD Weston patches are on the way. See the links below for the full story.
FreeBSD support for Weston is interesting with the Intel/Radeon DRM/KMS drivers maturing in the *BSD space as a prerequisite for good Wayland support. For these FreeBSD Weston patches, upstream Wayland developers have already expressed apprehension over merging the patches due to the greater maintenance burden and the upstream developers not being experienced with BSD development. It’s looking like a partial solution will be to merge some prep patches that add some preprocessor directives around some portions of the code that is Linux-specific. From there it’s easier for the FreeBSD ports folks to maintain their FreeBSD-enablement patches on their end.
Phoronix: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Weston-FreeBSD-HiDPI-Rust
Discussion: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/node/995651
Update:
FreeBSD Looks At Making Wayland Support Available By Default: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeBSD-Wayland-Availability
Phoronix discussion: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/node/997025
In this BSD Now episode, hosts Benedict Reuschling & Allan Jude discuss TrueOS stable 17.12 release, show us an OpenBSD workstation guide, learnings from PDP-11, recap on FreeBSD 2017 releng, and DuoSSH. Press play below to tune in:
Jupiter Broadcasting show notes: http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/120797/the-one-true-os-bsd-now-225/
In this BSD Now episode, hosts Benedict Reuschling & Allan Jude try to answer what happens to an open source project when a developer dies, tell us about the last bootstrapped tech company in Silicon Valley, update us on the NetBSD Thread sanitizer, and show us how to use cabal on OpenBSD. Press play below to tune in:
Jupiter Broadcasting show notes: http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/120657/the-bus-factor-bsd-now-224/