Merry Christmas folks !

Hope all is fine in your side wherever your plan is :-) Finally, the FreeBSD status report of this soon 2018 year ending is available. Notably, the Continuous Integration progress/improvements ; this is something never to neglects, regression tests are important in professional contexts as we all know, in open source's as well. Also, all about the boot loader improvement work, better UEFI support for example. Otherwise, all the points I mentioned in earlier posts are there, HardenedBSD, the FreeBSD/Intel coordination and my work on LLVM 7. After all these readings, we can tell 2018 had been a good year.

In the PHP's world, the 7.3.1 next release its on its way, means the first Release Candidate is planned, to fix early bugs found in the 7.3.0's.

Apart of this, nothing really new, a bit of self imposed pause with hacking for couple of days in my side :-) with plans for 2019. In the meantime I wish you good holidays if you have any !

FOSDEM and BSD ...

Was discussed already a while ago but there is again the next year the special BSD sessions within the famous FOSDEM. I share the same opinions as many other IT folks, FOSDEM is one of the most worthy event to go to. This year as you can see, there are enough topics to satisfy various tastes and not "developer-centered". If I had to choose, the most interesting time would be KLEAK from Thomas Barabosch without even blinking ; surely the "FreeBSD/RISC-V with LLVM" talk will have its shares of amazements ... also glad to see PostgreSQL/FreeBSD talk, PostgreSQL which was always one my favourite FOSS SQL database :-) Beyond that, as often mentioned, FOSDEM is also the opportunity to meet very diverse profiles ... so do not hesitate ...

For curiosity for who do not know already, there is an interesting ongoing discussion about OpenRC integration within FreeBSD. We shall see how it goes ... If it can speed up the boot time (among other things of course) that should do !

FreeBSD (future 13) following-up

Hi folks,

Probably some of the FreeBSD -current users had noticed already but clang/llvm 7.0.1 had been imported by @dim. By recompiling the whole system today, I was pleasantly surprised to see it happened sooner than I expected :-) Glad to see that the result of all the work I witnessed from a lot of talented people comes to reality in one of my preferred system ; even thought most of amazing new tools (like llvm-exegesis, llvm-mca) are only available via the package version ... I hope OpenBSD will follow.

While at LLVM, Kamil still continue his work on more BSD api interceptions and sometimes I help testing them. Planning to port for FreeBSD what is relevant once the "dust settles" a bit ... If you find, as I do, that his work is important, donating to the NetBSD foundation would not be superfluous.

So since, my little contribution to the mongo C driver had been accepted and merged, again it is more about bringing more equality with Linux. even though it is a bit more for professional purpose, still glad it landed for broader usage.

capsicum into LLVM ... finally

Hi folks,

In a previous post, I mentioned I worked into capsicum API interception into LLVM's sanitisers. Today, I was finally able to commit the last bits. Thanks to Ed Maste and also Mark Johnston who happily welcomed these with open armed (and pretty easily). As a reminder, the goal is to intercept ,when the capsicum api read/write the rights permission bits, to see if these capsicum data structures are valid.

Another reminder, doom 3 FOSS client is finally now released, it might know be played as much as yquake2/ioquake3 for example in the OpenBSD community but I know some folks who will gladly do ;-)

Speaking of game, there is a new promising one, Spacepunk, from the same who authored Barony. In an early stage for the moment, but there is a good chance it will be appealing in the end (and possible to contribute too), I am pretty confident about this ... I wish more commercial games would follow this business model.

Following-up on porting getentropy/getrandom in the"outside world", gnupg (more exactly its dependencies) might benefit it. My small change had been reviewed, seemingly accepted but yet to be merged.

Twelve number does not bring bad luck usually ...

... as a proof FreeBSD got the release right in schedule :-) No surprise for the usual users, it had been advertised, retweeted million of times (if not billions) and so on ... but that is good to know all went well ... Here are well summarised the most important changes, apart of this, as a reminder, for who is interested in security/cryptography ... getrandom syscall had been ported from Linux (and its wrapper getentropy, with similar signature as the original openbsd implementation) had been added ; all of this by Conrad Meyer if I am not mistaken ... Then that means several user land software/libraries are using it, I have been ported in advance some during the last months, and still do ... In my side, I can count 3 little contributions in this FreeBSD release ... in the userland, 2 concerning libcasper and another was the top command line fix, also, in addition, a sort of indirect one when Conrad Meyer introduced Blake2 API which I just updated, at the time, to use better memory clearance  ; also contributed to more packages than the last time (radare, barony for example ...). My little truss command line fix had just been merged so too late for this release, anyway not being a real threatening issue it is understandable if it is not backported ;-)

Personally I did not feel much this 12th release, using only already -CURRENT like numerous people ;  but I have the feeling other will enjoy this pretty much which represent, as you can witness, a tremendous amount of work ...

Apart of this, I still continue my work on the future LLVM 8, today I ve committed a little change into the static code analysis department to detect possible wrong usage of explicit_bzero (and its older "sibling" bzero) and also still work on improving capsicum api interception in the sanitization part. I wish you all well in this relatively warm end of autumn ;-)

Peel hash pea, back to the roots ...

Hi folks,

Finally this week, PHP 7.3.0 was released (this 6th) with as you can see enough changes from the previous 7.2.x branch. Notably it replaces and embraces the pcre2 api which has less limitations and more thoughtful than pcre1 is. More importantly, paying attention to the deprecated apis before migrating is always the wisest move. For a more detailed report, there is the Changelog in my side my most noticeable contribution is about ZEND_SECURE_ZERO improvements.

Apart of this, I committed first bunch of capsicum api interception within LLVM sanitisers, I have further plans for a little bit later. For the rest, it s about catching up in various levels with either NetBSD or Linux.

As usual, little contributions here and there, today I added slightly better NetBSD support for the famous botan library (C++ cryptography), as usual with radare2 we move forward to the future 3.2.x branch ... Also a bunch of little Merge Requests in review ; hopefully some of them will make their way.