Jacket not warm enough ...

... in this end of January, finally the coldness has decided to show up :-) hope you are all fine whatever your plans are. First, sorry for the motivated people willing to go through the last meetup but finally most of the other organisers could not make it. Professional life or little health issues had came in our way in the last moment. We will try to make it happen as soon as we can ...

Since the last time, OpenBSD started, carefully, to import LLVM 7 (in base) while backporting fixes for the code generation. The port version is planned too as you can see here. Also, for the non hardcode followers, OpenBSD default terminal font had been changed/updated (depends how you see it :-)), which frankly quite rejuvenate it, it is definitely more modern looking to my tastes at least.

In a more personal level, I have been doing quite a lot of Android (NDK) development professionally but still had time to contribute to some of the projects I usually overwatch. For instance, php 7.4 will give FreeBSD the possibility to support the "huge" page features for FreeBSD for the opcache module (thus different than the super page support I mentioned a couple of months ago since it resided in the general zend engine memory allocation). I ve had proposed a little update for the network interface lookup functions too which seems to be accepted (basically displaying also if an interface is up or not) but not merged yet.

I will push further new features to radare, one is the possibility to display a binary hashes suite from rabin2 (for now only visible from r2).

After eight

... Not really mentioning here the famous mint chocolate brand here :-) most likely, for who is interested, LLVM 8 branching had been done just today as scheduled, now time to pass on to the testers people/doc writers/... ! Normally the real release date is still scheduled in a month and half more or less ... Thanks for few FreeBSD people having reviewed few of my changes (Ed Maste, Mark Johnston) ... I'll be watching this test period for a little while if there any concern for sanitisers in BSD for example ... but mainly my mind has already shifted towards the future 9th version. That was my first time following a full release development cycle from the beginning though, so this experience will serve me just fine ...

Having spent most of the time adding api interceptions with Kamil, for next I may spend more time in other sanitiser components I did not look at for a while even though I do not have real precise plans for now. If I can, I may do a bit of static code analysis work again ...


Otherwise got a little "step back" recently, getting stolen laptop and few other things (if it would have been used for proper purposes, it would have been great but I doubt the new owner has such ideas :-)) ... that is just usual events happening in life ... As possible, do not let material possessions define you but what you have up there in your head is much more valuable ;-) now rebuilding slowly but surely my usual unixes environments and all will be fine.

Let's encrypt while we still can !

Hello folks,

A bit of freshness starts to show up in Dublin, at least it reminds us it's January after all :-) But that does not slow down by any mean the creative process. First things ... about BSD Meetups, we wanted to do it in December so apologies we finally did not but that was due to personal schedules (mainly), finally we'll do it next week ... One of the benefits is to see again, after so long, our dear friend Dario ... definitely a very busy CTO ... he'll have so much to say you can bet on it ... So this time, Anton will bring up talks about Rust within FreeBSD (which interest more and more developers, ie mentioned in my previous post the lengthy discussion in freebsd-hackers list). Also I will try not to bore (too much) people about LLVM OpenBSD/FreeBSD support improvements since the 7.0 version ;-) Hopefully Tom Smyth will make it again ; also seemingly some other "old timers" are going back ... We will see !

In the meantime, I took a second cut into botan, the famous C++ cryptography library. I implemented the first grounds for properly sandboxing the client. For OpenBSD/FreeBSD. The main developer will take care of Linux/seccomp support and might extend it for other purposes. Happy my idea was welcomed easily.

Also, finally, my long term change into PHP and its openssl module had been merged. Had been a bit of a battle, with some rebasing in the meantime which shows resilience makes the difference ... That's great, I can finally move on further in my plans ...

Since 2019, in general, I prefer now to step up in term of contributions, in term of importance at least, so I decreased a bit my radare contributions but the changes implement new features, less about just fixing bugs ... We'll see how it will go, in the meantime I wish you all fine !

6.5 on its way

Hi dear folks,

For those who (dare to) use OpenBSD, here is a draft of the summary of the changelog for the next 6.5 version. Notably, finally the mips64 architecture got clang as arm64 and x86 (that is great) :-) there is further more network stack improvements, started with unlocking them previously by mpie@... A bit soon to get all the benefits but we can already have a raw idea. For the third party packages, in my side apart of radare I did not update my own packages I maintain, basically nmap undergoes a lengthy development and bug fixes since the last release, hopefully this project won't face more difficulties as they did in the past. openal might get an update before the next release but that will be it. Somehow, I have the feeling the next OpenBSD 6.6., as a whole, will be a more important game changer ... but we will see ; maybe I will be totally wrong.

Finally, radare2 got its awaited 3.2 release (specifically 3.2.1, 3.2.0 lasted only couple of hours :-)) and despite its nickname it really happened I promise :-) A lot of efforts had been done to fix various build (meson and the autotools-like one), and the usual dev of the visual department had fixed his share of bugs. In the end, all the FreeBSD improvements are available, somehow whoever want to update the FreeBSD port, I would advise to wait proper cutter update as it is aligned to radare releasing ... which should happen not too far from now (usually). OpenBSD port is not affected by such things, so if Edd Barrett does not do, I may take care of it. For next, I have more innovative plans for this software as, for example, adding web authentication for the embedded server which will be reviewed in due time.


Apart of that, I had "planted couple of seeds" since weeks and expect some code reviews in various projects, like redis, some project maintainers might be still in holidays after all. At last, I got questions these last days, yes FreeBSD has end of life and are a bit shorter than used to be and yes you might need to update the last version of your current release if you expect security fixes and updates. FreeBSD might be judged as oses for hobbyists :-) but it is serious as many other projects and used by companies too.

Let's make all 2019's plans real ....

Happy new year folks !

Regardless the nature of your yearly endeavours ... from the very usual losing weight (but right after the last cake please ;-))/jogging 1 mile more/moving to this place you always wished ... to rewriting FreeBSD's userland in Rust (as a fork?) ... wish you, for most of them at least, successes !

In those last days, since my hacking slowed down for some days, I had the opportunity, among other things, to catch up with few BSDNow episodes. The 278th caught my attention the most, enjoyed the long Kirk McKusick interview. Always a pleasure to have hints and anecdots from people who have "seen things through" ... I recommend.

2018 was a nice year in retrospect, like giving a speech to EuroBSDCon or having my LLVM credentials

Hopefully, will do my best to keep up this year ... we ll see :-)
So back to my usual hacking time, slowly but surely coming back to normal pace ... As usual, radare2 plans a new release very soon, 3.2.0. We spent lot of time to fix lot of bugs, in my side I improved slightly the FreeBSD support in the debugging area as well.
For LLVM 8, I still try to push what I can into the api interceptions, focusing at the moment on the FreeBSD specifics though. For this year, I plan to port another game for BSD, at least I will try ; will keep you posted in due time for the progress.
For PHP, it s very actively moving towards 7.3.1, all most visible bugs fixes are actually merged. That slows down a bit the future 7.4 innovation but that worths it...