Back to green emerald !

AsiaBSDCon is definitely over since the last post and I left the following day with a lot of souvenirs I won t forget anytime soon ! As a reminder, there is now available the full written contents of this event as PDF some are pretty verbose, some others (like mine) are a brief summary but nevertheless, it is worthy to keep. Speaking of contents, the video will be released in step by step in the usual Youtube channel starting with the George Neville-Neil talk which I attended. I have less pessimistic view about the topic than he does and would have put the collaboration between projects in a wider perspective, less pushing away other capable to help fixing common problems as well. But worthy to watch that's for sure I appreciated the embedded development aspect of this talk very much and with his unique sense of humour :-). Otherwise, a little patience is required before you get the chance to see your preferred speaker (in my side I ll watch at least the Mariusz Zaborski's video once out) :-)

Following-up on previous GitHub repositories worthy to look at, if you are into Android developments, I may recommend to look after this project ... pretty useful ... otherwise if you re into FreeBSD, bhyve and ARM there is this one too (it had been mentioned quite a few in this AsiaBSDCon anyway).

Otherwise, back to little contributions since, we still prepare radar 3.4.0 for very soon (april-ish I might say) fixing last bugs, when I was away I improved a little bit botan support for Mac os and it had been merged. Also Ed Maste had approved my little proposal to support MIPS elf sections .I have bigger plans for soon hopefully some will come to fruition.

Day two ...

... "Et voila"!! it was a nice first AsiaBSDCon personally, for this second day I had hard time to choose which talk was the best, especially from the afternoon ... some serious contenders :-)

- Porting go in netbsd arm64 with Maya Rashish ... It is much less easy than it appears, "just" to display the hello world demo, a lot of assembly needed to be done !

- Another path for code quality ? Automated software verification and openbsd with Moritz Buhl, the topic by itself interested me very much even though it seems there is, for now at least, less return than work need to be invested in but still worthwhile, the more code verification means used the better ...

- Improvements to Virtual Machine State Save and Restore / Live migration from Bhyve from Darius Mihai

and Mihai Carabas ... pretty interesting duo for an interesting topic ! The most interesting part to me was the problems brought about clock source in one hand and the migration of memory state in another and which solutions they brought to solve it.

- Finalizing booting requirements for a guest running bhyvearm with Mihai Carabas which to me expanded more into the previous talk, that allowed me to learn more about Arm architecture.

- Finally the "overoptimistic" (means in the end the speaker thought it was already lunch time but we were well behind :-)) but nevertheless interesting talk FreeBSD - Improving block I/O compatibility in bhyve with Sergiu Weisz, again an expansion of the virtualisation topic on FreeBSD focusing on solutions provided for file format supports.

I wish I got more as in the mid day the jet lag caught up and got the best of me :-) but overall I was very pleased with what I heard and saw.

I was able to do little hackery in between talks but I m impressed the level of hackery of other folks around me :-) Time now to enjoy this last day and in the meantime take care and enjoy this end of week end !

Japan's tour

Moshimoshi folks !

As mentioned in previous posts, there is AsiaBSDCon, held in the University of Sciences in Tokyo,  ongoing and already lot of interesting talks went by. 

Similar as last year, there is my personal preferences :

- Adventure in DRMLand with Emmanuel Vadot.

- Intel HAXM/ NetBSD kernel by Kamil Rytarowski.

- bhyve arm64 by Alexandru Elisei.

- powerpc 64 support on FreeBSD by Piotr Kubaj.

So as you can see, almost as the time order presents it ! Also in a personal level I enjoy discovering for the time this country and appreciate the exuberant "eccentric" nature of the city, the vast majority of the population is very smiley and welcoming, not counting the not less surprising meals and incredible stores (especially electronic and similar). That was also the opportunity to expand on my previous talk in Romania last year, so I gave an updated version in the beginning of the afternoon with quite some stress while forgetting some of the points I wanted to mention to be honest :-) but seems some of the attendees appreciated this ...

Tomorrow will be not less interesting I have yet to decide which to attend though, will keep you posted ... While away, some of my previous submissions had been accepted, first radare2/rabin2 will now display the full compiler toolchain used (Elf only for now), Stalker/Xray-16 had accepted my little additional metadata in the debug console, hopefully more to come soon-ish in the meantime I wish you well !

LLVM 8 import starting

Hi folks, following up the now rc3 tagged of LLVM 8.0.0, Dimitry Andric had decided to import it in the base system already. Indeed, generally the 3rd or so release candidate already reflects the final release ; the changes, at this stage, usually occurs more into the documentations for example, it is pretty safe as is ... Curious as always, I personally already planned to recompile the whole system as I write to benefit all the improvements I mentioned over the last months.

While at LLVM ; like many other "githubers", I go through other people projects and one particularly attracted my attention, if you are interested into LLVM IR generation, there is this Java-7 compatible compiler even though it requires a particular environment to build it all and even if you do not have direct professional or personal usage per se ; it can be somewhat an interesting subject of study. About php, the awaited new feature, which is the JIT support, is still under review as I write, despite it is Dmitry Stogov behind the keyboard it needs to take time to fix and improve as it is tested ... but ... it might be for soon !

Personally, these last days I have been pushing few improvements to radare to report better arm and mips ELF binaries sections or also more specifically adding OpenBSD sections. Also, I have been pushing a tiny update to the NSS library, which "powers" Firefox for example, to support the new getentropy call from FreeBSD 12 which had been merged ; another slightly more important code will be reviewed.The jemalloc project had entered into the release candidate phase thus my little contribution to improve the profiling for FreeBSD won t be into the soon 5.2 release as I pushed a bit too late :-) but that is very understandable ; they need to be careful as it undergoes stress tests and so on.