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Gigabyte MA10-ST0 with pfSense 2.4 & FreeNAS 11.0-U4

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User Cliff Robinson did some compatibility testing for the Gigabyte MA10-ST0 server motherboard with the latest pfSense 2.4 and FreeNAS 11.0. The article also discusses Intel Atom C3000 compatibility with the FreeBSD operating system. You may view the full report below.

Why Compatibility Testing is Important

Whenever a new generation of server hardware comes out, there is a lag before the OSes support the new hardware. This is normal. FreeBSD is a popular OS for embedded networking appliances as well as storage appliances. There are many commercial offerings that build upon FreeBSD based on the licensing. Along with these commercial offerings, FreeNAS and pfSense are popular storage and networking offerings based on FreeBSD so we wanted to try them out with the new hardware. The onboard eMMC storage of the Gigabyte MA10-ST0 is intended for embedded OS installs like both pfSense and FreeNAS use.

Testing the Gigabyte MA10-ST0 with pfSense 2.4-Release and FreeNAS 11.0-U4

 

FreeBSD Support for ZFS Channel Programs

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Michael Larabel of Phoronix reports that FreeBSD 12 will support ZFS Channel Programs, which allows for Lua scripts to executive administrative tasks. See their blog and discussion links below.

ZCP allows small Lua scripts to be executed for carrying out administrative tasks on the ZFS file-system for tasks like dropping old snapshots and other maintenance. The FreeBSD implementation does execute these commands in a sandboxed environment and enforces memory/time limits to fend off potential rogue Lua scripts.

Original post: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ZFS-FreeBSD-ZCP

ZFS channel program (ZCP) is a small script written in a domain specific language that manipulate ZFS internals in a single, atomically-visible operation. For instance, to delete all snapshots of a filesystem a ZCP could be written which 1) generates the list of snapshots, 2) traverses that list, and 3) destroys each snapshot unconditionally.

OpenZFS page: http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Projects/ZFS_Channel_Programs

Other:  Phoronix discussion | FreeBSD Has A New ZFS Boot Management Tool & Library

 

FreeBSD Hardware Support / How Good is Gaming on FreeBSD? (self.freebsd)

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Check out this lengthy discussion on /r/FreeBSD about current hardware for support for FreeBSD. In addition, another thread discusses the current state of gaming on FreeBSD.

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.1R/hardware.html

There you go. :)

Yes, basically all amd64 procs are supported.

Ryzen also works very nicely as well. Really not notably different from a OS standpoint than previous ones.

FreeBSD Hardware Support from freebsd

Working on it :)

12-CURRENT with drm-next-kmod supports modern Intel and AMD Radeon GPUs, and nVidia provides their official proprietary driver.

Check out my ports fork — it already includes Mesa 17.2.1 with Vulkan drivers (for Radeon mostly), the Vulkan loader, vkQuake, fixed OpenMW, VCMI, Dolphin from git master, and more. (Most of this stuff will eventually end up in upstream ports…)

So you can play Wii/GameCube games in Dolphin (with Vulkan), PS3 games in RPCS3 (also with Vulkan), 3DS games in Citra, PSP games in PPSSPP… also Linux games with the Linux compatibility layer (“Linuxulator”), Windows games in Wine, WebGL games in Firefox or Chromium.

However, there’s no WoW64 Wine (both 32 and 64 bit app support) in ports/pkg yet — you have to build that manually. Linuxulator doesn’t run current Steam yet (doesn’t connect to the server because some socket option isn’t implemented)…

How Good is Gaming on FreeBSD? from freebsd

FreeBSD – AMD Zen/Ryzen Temp Monitoring [Phoronix]

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Michael Larabel of Phoronix reports that FreeBSD developers have figured out temperature monitoring on the AMD Zen/Ryzen processor. You may also see a detailed bug report from the FreeBSD mailing list below.
While Linux users of AMD’s new Zen-based Ryzen/Threadripper/Epyc processors are still waiting for thermal driver support to hit the mainline Linux kernel, FreeBSD developers have already managed to produce the Zen “Family 17h” CPU thermal monitoring support on their own.

From this FreeBSD bug report, developers have managed to get the AMD CPU temperature monitoring working for Zen processors under Linux with their existing temperature driver.

Original post: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Zen-FreeBSD-Temps
FreeBSD Bugzilla:  https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=218264
Discussion: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/bsd-mac-os-x-hurd-others/974991-freebsd-developers-tackle-amd-zen-ryzen-temperature-monitoring-before-linux

[Phoronix] FreeBSD/TrueOS On The Xeon Scalable + Tyan GT24E-B7106

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Michael Larabel of Phoronix has tried out TrueOS & FreeBSD on a Xeon scalable platform / Tyan GT24E-B7106 1U server. Check out the link below for the results of his test.

While we have tested a number of Linux distributions on Intel’s new Xeon Scalable platform, here are some initial BSD tests using two Xeon Gold 6138 processors with the Tyan GT24E-B7106 1U barebones server.

FreeBSD 11.1 and the FreeBSD-derivative desktop/workstation-focused TrueOS (formerly known as PC-BSD) were the primary candidates for testing. TrueOS stable is currently tracking FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT development. Both TrueOS and FreeBSD 11.1 x64 were running fine on this Tyan + Xeon Gold server. No immediate problems to note and was able to put it through its benchmarking paces without any sweat.

…..

Nevertheless, it’s great to see TrueOS / FreeBSD running fine with the Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs and the Tyan GT24E-B7106.

Original post: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=xeon-gold-bsd&num=1

[How-To] Raspberry Pi FreeBSD Web Server

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User spacemonkey shows us how to get a FreeBSD web server set up on Raspberry Pi. Follow the link below for the full set of instructions.

0. Introduction


The purpose of this guide is to provide step by step instructions on how to set up a system consisting of a Raspberry Pi credit card-sized computer, running the FreeBSD operating system and the nginx web server. The server is meant to operate “headless” (i.e. without a display or keyboard) and run at relatively low power (approximately 2 to 4 Watts). This guide assumes that the reader has some minimal familiarity with a Linux/Unix/BSD-like environment.

NOTE: Due to Raspberry Pi’s relatively low power CPU, some of the steps described below (e.g. compiling software) will take a few hours. Patience is a virtue :)

Aside from patience, you’ll need the following hardware:

– Raspberry Pi
– Power supply for the Raspberry Pi
– USB keyboard
– Display (with HDMI or Composite video connector)
– SD Card (recommended minimum size 4 GB)
– Ethernet cable
– A BSD or Linux PC with an SD card slot

1. Booting FreeBSD on the Raspberry Pi …

Full tutorial: http://devio.us/~spacemonkey/raspberry_pi_freebsd_web_server_howto.html

The BeaST storage is one year old

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User mezzantrop gives us an update on his FreeBSD dual-controller storage system dubbed BeaST. He has updated the project page and BeaST paper, as well as posted another article about zpool switching. Read the full updates at the links provided.

We all know that ZFS pool is designed to be used by a single machine only at any particular point of time, and when we want to access a zpool from another system we have to export it and import to the new server. This disadvantage makes simultaneous direct usage of the pool quite impossible for reliable dual-controllered storage systems.

Approaching online zpool switching between two FreeBSD machines

A year has passed since I got early results with the BeaST storage system concept. The first public announce was made on 2016.04.22 and the full paper was published a week after.

The BeaST storage is one year old

[How-To] Using a Raspberry Pi as a serial console server for FreeBSD

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This short guide by user solence will show you how to set your Raspberry Pi as a serial console server for FreeBSD. Follow the link below for the full set of instructions.

My home server runs FreeBSD 11.0, and, of course, has full disk encryption. This requires a passphrase to be entered while booting, so I need a keyboard and monitor attached, and have to be in the same room for restarts and after power outages. This is not acceptable at all. There is no need for a display and keyboard otherwise, and I want to be able to enter the passphrase remotely, but without compromising security. Luckily, the server has a serial port and I have a spare Raspberry Pi. So I can connect the serial port to the Raspberry Pi, SSH into it and use the serial console of the server just like physical access. Hooray for stuff from the 1960s still being useful!

So first things first, I need to connect the Raspberry Pi to the serial console. Since it only has USB (aside from GPIO), a USB to serial port adapter is necessary. The Raspberry Pi runs FreeBSD 11.0, which has good out-of-the-box support for the Prolific PL2303 chipset, so I just ordered a cheap apdater based on it. It probably works with Linux as well, if you’re using Raspbian. You can use dmesg to check if it was detected correctly:

Using a Raspberry Pi as a serial console server for FreeBSD

Intel donates $250,000 to FreeBSD Foundation

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Recently, the FreeBSD Foundation announced a $250,000 donation from the computing giant Intel. This news follows a partnership between the open-source operating system, the Foundation behind it, and Intel to further improve FreeBSD support on Intel hardware.

 We were thrilled to announce at AsiaBSDCon 2017 a collaborative effort and partnership with Intel. Intel has committed to a $250,000 donation to show their support for FreeBSD as a viable operating system, foster collaboration between Intel, the Foundation, and FreeBSD, and to improve the support of FreeBSD in Intel products and technologies. Find out more about the partnership here.

New Uranium Level Donation and Collaborative Partnership with Intel: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/latest-news/new-uranium-level-donation-and-collaborative-partnership-with-intel/

[How-To] Installing & Updating FreeBSD 11.0 on Raspberry Pi

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This guide by user  will show you how to install and update FreeBSD 11.0 on a Raspberry Pi machine. Follow the link below for the full set of instructions.

FreeBSD runs great on a Raspberry Pi, but the official images are all stable or current branches and there is no support for binary updates, i.e. freebsd-update. So I tried to figure out how to install the latest release version and keep it updated as well, without starting from scratch with a new image every time.

While it is possible to build a kernel and world on the Raspberry Pi itself, it takes about a week to finish (trust me, I tried) and you need a much larger /tmp on a disk or share for it to work in the first place. Since FreeBSD can also be cross-compiled, I decided to use my Xeon box to do the heavy lifting and then just install it on the Raspberry Pi.

Full tutorial: https://nerdazoid.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/installing-and-updating-freebsd-11-0-release-on-a-raspberry-pi/