2018 ... a new start

Hi folks, and Happy New Year !

Everyone already heard about Meltdown and Spectre, the most important is all open source oses are doing their best to provide mitigations while limiting the unavoidable performance hits ; the good side of it that led to some BSD projects to work together (like DragonflyBSD and OpenBSD people) in these problems, sharing concerns and solutions.

In the meantime, in a more personal level, I have been doing few professional contributions, like for Python (the uuid module build fix for *BSD) and possibly the libb2 dependency (improvement proposal). Last December, I got interested into fuzzing through American Flop Fuzz and LLVM lib fuzzer each one having its own interest, but was frustrated the latter did not have FreeBSD support. So I just provided a patchset in the fuzzer itself and the compiler frontends ... This will be available from clang 7.0 ...

Apart of this, as usual various small contributions to php, video games here and there or just simply helping out giving OpenBSD internal patchset upstream. Might be back writing a little bit for BSDMag as well. Otherwise, in a more or less near future, waiting for a special event but at this time very unsure it is going to happen but will keep you posted.

Barony TurningWheel

Hi folks,

Not too much news since the last time except that TurningWheel gladly accepted my changes for their game Barony a pretty good rogue-like's one; game sold in Steam, GOG ... at least. Changes to make it playable under BSD systems (not too much of effort to be honest, the game does not use too much system specific features). Kids seem to like it, I had much difficulty to convince my own daughter to let it go :-)

Video games weekend

Hi folks,

This week end was cloudy, thus I spent a little time (again) on OpenSpades fixing few things and for a change on the open source version of Jedi Academy/Outcast engine to make it buildable under BSD (at least FreeBSD and OpenBSD for instance), although there is no official release for the latter, it might land into BSD ports trees at some point ...

And ... I now co-organize the only Dublin BSD Group with Anton Whalley, hopefully will meet some  good irish BSD fans ;-)

Kore.io with DeviceAtlas

Hi folks,

Today while reading my usual tech posts, I found an interesting small project, kore.io, which is a simple but fast web server written in C compatible with Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD (but that can work under NetBSD by modifying a little bit the source code ;-)) and Darwin, an event driven one, the workers are per cpu (Linux, FreeBSD and Darwin). which allows to make easily a custom module. Indeed, if you have experience with making apache, nginx modules ... etc ... it's even easier than those ones ;-). So for this purpose, I used a DeviceAtlas API ... Basically it writes a json as a response which contains our usual properties from the user-agent given.

kore loads the small deviceatlas module

Bot detected !

I discussed briefly with the main developer, Joris Vink, quite responsive and nice person I'd say ... The only small downside which he admited himself is (at least for the moment) you cannot define new directives per module but you can easily add new ones no worries ;-) To run small web applications, kore should be sufficient, regarding its low memory usage (with the DeviceAtlas module, more or less 40 MB per worker) and speed (especially under Linux and FreeBSD).

2014 retrospective

Hi folks,

Almost the end of 2014 ... When I recall what happens this year, I feel pretty good. Since I decided to contribute to Open Source projects, I put my small mark in operating systems used by many, increased my operating systems knowledge (obviously the BSD ones mainly, a bit Linux too), made valuable contacts like HardenedBSD guys (especially Shawn Webb and Oliver Pinter), some core FreeBSD committers like Baptiste Daroussin, some BSD Mag folks ... Wrote some articles for BSD Mag (since the last time I wrote another one which will be published in January).

To summarize :

- Kea project merged my PostgreSQL support + my fixes.
- Slighty later, DragonflyBSD merged upstream my spinlock patch.
- HardenedBSD folks decided to get me involved on their project.
- EuroBSD Con 2014, especially the Shawn Webb's conference. Although a bit disappointed that Vitosha room's videos are not available yet.
- Since then I ported some OpenBSD libc functions, updated arc4random (both kernel and userland ones). First work of Ptrace hardening support.
- Got interested on Stack Smashing Protection and studied BSD and Linux choices.
- I started to port LibreSSL (the real version, not the portable one ...), which led me to get interested in assembly (x86-64 mainly). That compiles already, still need refinement later.
- Some security fixes/patches for FreeBSD were merged upstream.
- One fix for OpenBSD is merged upstream.

Since then,  FreeBSD/HardenedBSD and OpenBSD are my main operating systems and now I know them much better, I had reconsidered a bit my opinion about the whole BSD thing.

1/ I consider OpenBSD better now, the whole source code has very good quality, clear, less "patchwork" than some other operating systems. Of course, the security focus attracts me pretty much. In base, I particularly like relayd and httpd (both from reyk@), it took me few hours to update the yacc parsing part (config) + the code update to make a custom version which use both Device Atlas API.

What blocks me to use OpenBSD more :
- Lack of real modern filesystem (like ZFS/Hammer 2).
- Cannot do serious virtualisation, nothing comparable to bhyve, no Virtualbox (I do not think it ll happen anytime soon) ; it is a feature I use very often (if not daily), uses lot of different operating systems more or less "exotic" ... cannot live without ...

The fact that OpenBSD is slower than FreeBSD does not bother me too much though.

2/ FreeBSD is still my preferred BSD among all (I run only HardenedBSD flavour now). I appreciate a lot ZFS, Dtrace, bhyve ... Even just the latter is amazing by itself ... The fact that clang is in base too (I hope OpenBSD will do the step one day) ... Not to mention the specific HardenedBSD features like ASLR, segvguard and so on ... Few things bother me a bit (like cddl code but it is understandable for realistic reasons ... I can imagine the big amount of work required to make a full BSD comparable version from scratch).

3/ DragonflyBSD ... I still like this one, regarding the (much) smaller community they represent, they make great work (great Haswell support for example).

4/ NetBSD, I have good respect for this project and runs it time in time in my VirtualBox. I do not dislike, it just does not fit totally my needs/expectations. Although I admire the fact that it can be ran as rump kernel ... Just awesome.

The fact that BSD provides both the kernel and the userland in a whole consistent part is what I like the most in a pure developer point of view. In the opposite, we have the Linux kernel then the whole "dispatched" GNU userland. Linux is not a bad operating system at all, just I like less the way it is.

So, for 2015, some new other things await me, hopefully. Great wishes to all.

ASLR on FreeBSD

Hi folks.
During my free time I wanted to see the "status" of BSD and decided to dedicate an old laptop for OpenBSD. It is worthy, apart of its secure reputation, nothing fancy installed, everything is consistent and rocks solid.

The ASLR implementation is quite good and helpful to detect some "nasty" hidden bugs :-) and with MALLOC_STATS enabled (thanks Mr Moerbeek ... OpenBSD does not have Valgrind, not yet at least ...) for the memory leaks, I have all I need :-).

Then I checked the ASLR status for FreeBSD, the last BSD without it (I know FreeBSD since 2004 and I expect ASLR implementation on it since those years, while Linux has it since quite long time and it rocks solid ...). Still nothing ! But ... will be for the next 11 branch and can be set on/off not only globally but for a specific jail for example !

Awesome and quite interesting ... I am looking for it.