BSD can be narcissistic too

Hi folks,

Couple of updates since the last time, I have began to port the radare's self plugin for the BSD, starting with FreeBSD then next should be OpenBSD and finishing with our dear friend NetBSD so time for them to have some introspection if you will ;-) Will try to make it available for the next major release at least.

Also tried a bit redis recently, fixing FreeBSD build. similarly a little build fix for clangd (aka clang Daemon) a settings server for editors. It is just a matter of making people aware of BSD specificities, as usual, and  generally they are pretty open to this idea ; in the long run it ends up positively in the vast majority of the cases, at least in my personal experience ...

Going through, as mentioned in a previous post, the next FreeBSD quarterly report, one of them states than some FreeBSD and Intel people are organising a sort of team to be able to provide a better Intel support at large and security matters as well. Seems the Spectre/Meltdown issues brought a positive outcomes after all.

Let's meet up again

Finally it s getting concrete :-) after months of silence there is the next meetup occurring the 8th. We ll try to cover as much as possible, ZFS alone is quite a topic by itself ... but as always it will be a small group but dynamic ... more an exchange of knowledge ... Everyone knows a little something :-) Also the opportunity to cover conferences people might not have attended. As you can see the place is quite nice and largely sufficient to handle a reasonable group so hopefully we will see you over there.

Speaking of Dublin, Monday is public holiday, will be the opportunity to move on on some things which went stale a little. My previous OpenBSD gear had been converted into a real FreeBSD development one, largely sufficient for even LLVM with real parallel build support. By the way, speaking of AMD Ryzen, Larkin (at least) is looking for having a hand on this pretty recent hardware to fix proper hibernate/resume ... Just in case.

In the previous post were mentioned the infamous xorg issue which now have a fix for current so soon should follow a fix via syspatch for the 6.4 release ...

Maybe ... maybe not

Hi folks,

Very soon is the next FreeBSD quarterly report, up to the 31th to submit if you wish your work get noticed via this Github for example or emailing them. Unless you plan to write a book, I think you have still time :-)

Also, about OpenBSD this time, a vulnerability in xorg/xenocara had been notified the temporary workarounds just to type chmod u-s /usr/X11R6/bin/Xorg until a real fix is submitted. That seems to bring concern for Theo which is understandable.

Also our Dublin BSD meetup got a little interest from some users, and this is it :-) the attendees are the ones who give the value of it so if you re willing to come after work hours we'll be more than happy to trigger an event.

Better later than never

Hi folks,

Here is the first (indirect) OpenBSD ports contribution post 6.4 release, so finally pypy changes had been merged. Also another late merge this time for LLVM 7.0.1 as I promised in the last EuroBSDCon to the attendees my fix for X-ray tooling had been backported.

Speaking of conferences, there is the last MeetBSD which took place in California and seemingly had been a great success reading some people reports :-) the Mariusz Zaborski's talk was surely a great one but also two from last EuroBSDCon like Kamil's talk or "What (not) to Monitor" from Andrew Fengler. Seemingly the next "important" BSD event will be the AsiaBSDCon one. We shall see ;-)

Apart of this, few small fixes here and there, also awaiting new sdb release to fix a longtime issue. At last, Haproxy 1.9 release should occur soon-ish. Seems a very much expected one ;-)

Under the radare

Hi folks,

I think now it is safe for the radare FreeBSD port maintainer to update the version as the 3.0.1 release is out.

At the moment, focus are into LLVM 8 for OpenBSD and especially FreeBSD.
For the OpenBSD build, disabling retguard and stack protector features seems to be used, to avoid large creation of their ELF sections and not be able to launch the executables. For FreeBSD, time to switch to the new 13th branch :-)

These days, I did a lot of golang professionally and discovered golangci-lint existence from one Dublin meetups contacts and was able to compare with more known gometalinter. The former might be appreciated from mid-size code due to its faster performance. Also able to highlight the "faulty" code. I recommend.

Further releases ...

... on this surprising hot autumn here in the emerald island.

Today, no real surprise, OpenBSD 6.4 is out, so before the 1st of November, here the "changelog". I think from now we can start to forget the old 1st May/1st November hardcoded dates :-)

radare2 finally got to 3.0.0 but there is a quick 3.0.1 "hotfix" version already scheduled (today or tomorrow). Also autumn is the sign of life coming down :-) so FreeBSD 10.4 End of Life is soon-ish albeit the date is not hardcoded yet. FreeBSD 11 and soon FreeBSD 12 have sufficiently new features and stability to be interesting, I personally appreciate the shorter lifetime of FreeBSD releases between major branches, compared to how it used to be ...

Months ago mentioned couple of times people reporting issues with Intel components. In a personal level, I started to move towards AMD and its Ryzen branding as a new OpenBSD machine. Some people might be more interested by ARM laptops instead. No disappointment so far, the extra power will serve me right for LLVM builds as well. You can find people who tested this sort of combo like qbit here. Also pypy will finally have a major bump version resulted from a patch I did quite a time ago (and which I almost forgot :-)).

BSD Now / EuroBSDCon

Hi folks,

I guess I am late :-) but just stumbled across the BSDNow episode where there is the last EuroBSDCon report and also the llvm 7 announce here ; that is the basically this year souvenir as was the interview the previous year :-) So I confirm as well thanks to Dimitry Andric for having helping for early review last year and now importing things into FreeBSD source tree :-)

Countdown ...

Hi again,

Here you can see how many days left before OpenBSD decides to bump the versioning here ... Noted also that even though it is disabled wisely for now because of the tree lock, lldb had been imported. On OpenBSD it can debug a simple core dump, but can't attach to a process. But that is already a lot (and there is gdb from the ports too) ! so awaiting the tree unlock in the following weeks ... So great work from the small OpenBSD source team (as usual, but they never disappoint).

Noted as well BSDMag has been inactive for couple of months (at least in appearance), no new issue since the last time, hope all is fine over there in Poland ...

In a personal level not too much since, only I did a very little contribution to lugaru (was the opportunity to see I miss C++ some days :-)) also not visible yet but takes a bit into NetBSD world (I mean more than usual) as I do not necessarily like to limit my world and like to discover strengths from other perspectives.

From LLVM point of view, after Esan for FreeBSD is completely merged (frontend bit), I ll have a bit of Darwin work (possibly), we ll see.

Having an impact and feeling the weight of it

Hi folks,

Here, the number of meetup groups are rising, for various topics ; but just for IT matters, there is either ones which cover wide range of points some much more specific (related to a programming language, even a specific framework). Prove that people will always need to reunite face to face ; even more for technologies ... "ironically". They are mostly interesting in general even though I distantiate myself from it a little, at least at the moment.

Speaking of communication, finally the work I did for porting a subset of LLVM/compiler-rt to OpenBSD get noticed and some people reached me out about this. You kind of expect this, but in the same time catch you "out of guard" nevertheless :-) That proves it had been useful doing so, that solves real problems and grows a little bit the toolbox of the OpenBSD developer ...

To go on this, finally the first half of esan for FreeBSD had been committed, still waiting the frontend part thought to be fully usable ; in the meantime I spent few hours to abstract/refactor the php openssl module which seems to be an accepted idea, still wait to be merged then I will expand on this idea further more all of this, hopefully, for the future 7.4 release.

Also ... I had another take on nginx/njs recently after the little sandbox contribution. Basically improving a bit the crypto module. You can see the summary here ... Apart of this, the usual ... little video games fixes here and there.

This is it for now, waiting for late autumn releases (FreeBSD 12, php 7.3 and so on).

6 years later ...

... after my arrival in Dublin I just realised how things went now starting autumn cleaning, throwing old things ... I did not think I would still be here :-)

So about news, OpenBSD 6.4 is expected in one month but might occur earlier now since couple of releases the usual pace had been broken ... Anyway the page already exist if you are curious. As usual, this release will be a breakthrough for better or worse depends how you see things :-)

In a more personal level, I started "serious" changes into LLVM 8, ported CFI (and merged) for FreeBSD and NetBSD, hopefully esan will follow soon-ish for FreeBSD (only for now). I m trying to back port for the soon 7.0.1 version my previous llvm xray fix ... we shall see.

Barony 3.2.2 had been committed into the FreeBSD ports tree and soon should follow OpenBSD. I did the same for pkgsrc (WIP) as well.

And also other little contributions here and there not yet committed which I ll mention in due time.

Happy beginning of autumn ;-)