Making system programming fun again

 Hi folks,

The AsiaBSDCon is about to start as I write, the main talk which interests me the most is about NGINX Unit, some seem to be updated versions of previous talks but should be great regardless. Following that, FreeBSD 13.2 is around the corner, starting this week !.

Aside from my usual contributions, I recently stumbled across the Zig programming language which I heard of before already but never really tried. Then after couple of days of experimentation, I was pleasantly surprised how easy is to interact with C, you just need to import and the symbols are available to you ; Zig being also a C/C++ compiler you can build a final binary with those 2/3 languages. I also appreciated the absence of preprocessor, the comptime concept (e.g. a if statement can also evaluate a compile time expression) ; overall Andrew Kelley's optimism and dedication is infectious I find. Seems Zig is at a place where Rust was a decade or so ago, not stable yet but is above an interesting threshold with this 0.10.x version. Those two languages represent some very good candidates as the "next" C (Yes I know there is others like Nim, Odin...). Note that C/C++ are not inherently bad languages, not at all ... they are decades ago old which is very different, it is always good to remember the context ...

Also, I decided recently to give a new go at the redox operating system (which is written in Rust), doing mostly TODOs and my own ideas, most of them are already merged.

May you have a happy new gear

 Hi folks,

2021 is soon ending with a slightly hotter winter than usual but many events still happened since the last post.

- The LLVM 2021 developer's meeting, videos can be found in the LLVM Youtube channel. Also LLVM migrating fully to github, bug tracker included.

- HAProxy 2.5 released (even tough the QUIC/HTTP 3 protocol support is not quite there just yet).

- The long awaited PHP 8.1 finally released.

Also the next FreeBSD quarterly report submission ends soon, as I write but it will be surely enlightening as usual.

These past months I ve been into custom memory allocators (from jemalloc to the microsoft ones while not forgetting rpmalloc), diving more into PHP (finally above the 100 commits now :-)), still some rust as much as possible, various fuzzers and went back a bit to video games/engines in-between notably yquake2.

See you next year hopefully, wish you well in the meantime :-)

Light in the end of the funnel

 Hi folks,

Hopefully wherever you are, things are getting better !

These last weeks, the months spent learning rust start to pay off and I decided to take a &[...] in couple of projects in github, especially the libc's to be able to make C code interacting with rust. Been focusing on BSD (as usual), a bit of Darwin and Haiku, some of my PR had been merged as I write. Other than that couple of memory allocators crates (snmalloc, rpmalloc wrappers)  It is definitively a great language !

Other than that, as usual been contributing to some projects I look after yquake2, php (the last thing occurring is trying to bring FreeBSD into the Continous Integration's workflow), openssl a little, swoole, mariadb, snmalloc ...

Looking forward to be out more with the restrictions easing and the nicer weather :-) wish you all well in the meantime.

Light in the other end of the tunnel ?

 Hi folks,

I hope you are all fine ... but as you all know, there is a shred of hope :-)

Long time I did not write but I still contributed here and there as usual to projects I already mentioned, some few are new.

From Barony to the usual custom memory allocators (jemalloc particularly welcomed few BSD changes), redis, memcached, minetest ... PHP 8 is scheduled to be released around the 26th. Speaking of PHP, xdebug finally accepted my fixes from months months ago :-) The vast majority of the overall contributions had been merged or at least accepted.

For first time, I did few changes in OpenSSL for BSD systems and Haiku.

Outside of contributions, the recent release of the Mac M1 line has a good chance to interest me, professionally speaking primarily, with its iOs and Intel compatibility layer. We shall see.

Nothing too special apart of this, during this lockdown, I took the opportunity to go back to one of my teenage hobby and went to (re)record this little piece :-)

Fingers crossed things will go better in 2021, in the meantime I wish you all well ;-)

Belgian chronicles

Hi over there !

The vast majority of all of you know that the FOSDEM 2020 had just ended this day. Not only it was full of interesting talks, but also an anniversary, the 20th !

There were indeed IoT related talks, databases, Linux ... talks for everyone and every profile ... sysadmins, devops and pure developers ... I spent time personally the saturday with Ada, the first language I ever learnt ... pretty much enjoyed the robotics topic, also the Ada keystore to protect sensitive data ... Was hard not to say more but I had to change building to give a chance to other interesting talks :-) The following day, most of the time was in the BSD room, looking at the various NetBSD and FreeBSD talks (apologies to Giovanni Becchis I missed his talk...). I have to admit, the NetBSD ones were entertaining notably this one, pretty accessible and giving new highlight to this BSD flavor and putting down some cliches in the process ... I gave mine just after the FreeBSD foundation presentation ; I admit I did less well than in AsiaBSDCon last year but hopefully will be usable enough for curious people.


Apart of this, lot of moons passed since the last post, as usual did little contributions here and there, most notably memcached, some general changes, some other specific to FreeBSD ... They re all available since the 1.5.21 (now the 1.5.22 just released today). radare2 and AFL++ received some fixes and improvements over the course of the time too. For the latter the 2.60 version is existing since a certain time now but the next 2.61 will have real significant changes (and fixes notably for unicorn, qemu modes and so on ...). Still, I do PR reviews for NodeJS, it is moving fast as always but the v8 changes alone and the related nodejs api ones are, alone, interesting enough to keep track for the courageous willing to build from source.

How are you ?

... Fine I hope since the last time :-)

As I write, there is the template for the last 2019 FreeBSD Quarterly status report. At the moment, the most noticeable part is this presentation, which would introduce all FreeBSD's benefits to people who want to give a thorough try, to get a good feel of the system ... Pretty good initiative !

In my side, I ve been involved in some of the usual projects I look into. memcached, redis, v8 and afl++ most of the time ; for V8 I have happily upstreamed the most important part of the nodejs FreeBSD port patches as promised in a previous post ... About AFL++, there will be, you can count on this, a lot of changes since the last release (radamsa mutator is a major one for instance and a much better Android support ... I invite you to have a look at the changelog to get a feel of...), most of them are general (build and bug fixes) and some other are operating systems ... again, with hexcoder, I ve been focusing on *BSD systems making sure everybody in a equal feet ... should be a matter of days before it happens as I write ... Apart of this, still involved in NodeJS code reviews, I also pushed my own change for DragonflyBSD ready for the next major release then ...
Next major open source event, will be the FOSDEM 2020 edition and it will be a first time personally as both attendee and speaker :-)
In the meantime, I wish you good winter holidays in advance if you have any :-)

Autumn falls, time for changes

Hi dear readers,

I am glad to say now LLVM had fully moved to the git workflow since the last post ! For now there is the next logical remaining concern which is do we handle Pull requests and bug tracking as it is now and do we move fully to GitHub ? We shall see how it goes, it is not so obvious to go in one direction or another, Phabricator having nice code commenting feature for example but hard to maintain over time in another hand (Phabricator for LLVM is actually a fork). Either way, it is already nice to be where we are...

While we re into LLVM, I have spent little time, during the svn to git transition, to add basic OpenBSD support for the OpenMP api, knowing this os cannot support the cpu affinity part.
Still spending time also with the NodeJS community, aside of the usual review, I try to push upstream some FreeBSD patches from the related port to diminish its "technical debt", for instance here, more specifically, the v8 engine changes regarding the ARM architecture support and this one too. Also the trap handling for FreeBSD I had been ported had been merged recently. Will try to persist in this area, ideally removing all the port patches ... we will see.

dormando, main maintainer of memcached, is more active these last months I believe and had created a new release containing one changes I ve made again for FreeBSD, one about the Dtrace support, the other which was to rewrite the chunk of slabs allocation to be a bit more generic might land a bit later.

AFLplusplus underwent a lot of changes since the last release, mainly by hexcoder and vanhauser-thc. I did some of my own mainly in the multi os support area and few new features too. Following this, I proposed nicely to Gerard Pfeifer, the maintainer of gcc ports in FreeBSD to enable plugin support so the AFL gcc fast mode can be finally built ;-) and he equally nicely accepted it for now only gcc10 but will be back ported to lower versions in the near future.

9.0 is finally out !

Hi people here and there !
As the title suggests, LLVM 9 has finally made it after couple of more Release Candidates than envisioned but glad it is finally behind now. As you can see, it is now available here ; a bit of patience before it lands and replace release candidates in your preferred os/distribution :-)

So, EuroBSDCon 2019 had finally began I personally look forward to recorded videos, the "Porting Robot Operating System (ROS) to FreeBSD" in particular and also the other about the Rust programming language for curiosity ...

Following my nomination into the NodeJS membership, I enjoyed quite reviewing a certain amount of Pull Requests, in general of great qualities coming from first time contributors to "old timers" :-), rather than contributing directly (except libuv, which is a strong dependency), mostly in order to prepare the future 13.x branch. I can say the environment, ambiance is generally peaceful, respectful and the community is pretty diverse which I appreciate a lot.

Apart of these, I mostly focused on improving FreeBSD or macOS support in radare, HAProxy even AFLplusplus the nice little fork of Google AFL ;  a bit of varnish-cache in between. Wish you well for this next autumn :-)

I will be connecting the nodes...

Hi folks,

Hopefully not too sad as we are closer and closer to the end of the nice vacations time :-) but still nice weather enough I might say.
Following up a previous post, PHP goes on internal code cleanup on some sort which is making more strict in a sense some errors treated in the past as benign now will be raised. I totally agree personally with this mindset, as PHP needs to be more believable in the enterprise's context while all others web technologies are progressing, so definitely thumbs up !
Regarding FreeBSD, the usual status report will come up ;  still time to tell what you were able to accomplish in any area, I will be looking at it with good interest !
Apart of this, the next LLVM release, the 9th, will come not too far in the future as I write (sometime next week I believe), now we are all trying to fix last issues and start completing the documentation ... A lot of water went under the bridge since the 8th for sure, apart of what I already mentioned in past posts (again great job of the CheriBSD contributor who fixed address sanitiser ;-)), I personally reviewed little PRs of Ed Maste and pushed two little contributions into sanitisers area, one detecting if ASLR for PIE binaries had been enabled (dim@ requested me to back port it for the 9.x release and as he himself pushes this version to FreeBSD -current ; you ought to see sooner or later), the other using large pages for shadow mappings for both Linux and now FreeBSD ..
Also today, I have been interviewed ... to get on board of NodeJS collaborators :-) took couple dozen of minutes but went pretty well and Rich Trott is pretty welcoming folk :-) In the meantime I had contributed a little bit to node fibers (here a little introduction to Fiber concept for who is not used to), varnish cache ... and again to the Microsoft projects ... mimalloc and snmalloc both revolving around macOs support's expansion.

Ireland ... countryside

Hi folks,

Hopefully you re still enjoying relatively sunny weather, recently I have been visiting other parts of Ireland and most of the time the network was pretty feeble. Nevermind, that was the opportunity as well to be off open source contributions for a while ;-)

In the meantime, PHP is undergoing a thorough clean up for the future 8 major release, which manifest through those PR  ... Those kind of tasks are rarely interesting technically speaking but are necessary if the project in question wants to maintain a certain consistency. Indeed, some of PHP extensions were using modern coding while some others were a bit behind so here is the opportunity to make things a bit square ... To remain in language's realm here a little related discussion to FreeBSD and .NET technologies. This is the most pragmatic approach I believe and that surely works fine ; ideally the kqueue's approach instead would be beneficial also for performance matters.

In the LLVM realms, couple of little but interesting changes, here the getrandom interception ... I think it can be pretty easily made available for FreeBSD as well ... otherwise some planned improvements for clang frontend warnings  (personally interested by this particular bit). Little dream of mine if this GitHub project would be ported at least to major unixes first (if this is ever possible...) :-) but would require to rewrite DirectX layers to SDL as usual ... lot of work.

In the next couple of days, I will be back a bit on LLVM and little other ongoing little tasks I putted to a rest, in the meantime I wish you well :-)

No ... I m not falling in love with Microsoft

but I have to admit they have interesting open source projects :-) True they have great interest supporting FreeBSD, that's a given ; but that is a great benefit regardless I think ... While mimalloc has a well deserved "summer time", I started to look somewhere else in the meantime and stumbled upon snmalloc, which sounded promising especially in multithread context, just looking at the description.

Benchmarking this is always very tricky, always depends on the nature of the software you override memory allocation with, you can always come up with a conclusion while your close neighbour would shake your shoulder and showing you a very contradictory output in his side ...

Nevertheless, I gave a try with several professional and personal projects of mine and what I notice usually is ... snmalloc performs a bit better than hoard but below mimalloc (still remarkable from the rest of the "pack"), with single thread applications. However, snmalloc is above the latter in multi thread context. More generally, my tests displayed they all perform better than the Linux's system allocator in the vast majority of the case. I usually played with hoard but the development is sort of frozen since a while (diehard from the same author is a nice toy to study by the way) or jemalloc before ; but those new players give nice extra choices to look at. As a result of my appreciation, I just pushed a basic openbsd support proposal :-)

This week had been a nice surprise to see American Fuzzy Lop "resurrected" on github in the official google account. Indeed, there was not much activities since the well known 2.52b version. For sure, libFuzzer from LLVM is great but like always, it is better to have multiple screwdrivers around you and I kinda like the sense of humour of this software, if you look carefully while it runs you will understand :-) but the results are very serious, its reputation is well deserved. Now trying to bring improvements ideas for BSD and mac I had since long months ; we will see.

Apart of this, LLVM 9, the first Apache2 licensed version, should occur end of August ... September maybe if more bugs are found. One noticeable thing in FreeBSD's side, for the future LLVM 10, there is a possible interesting fix ongoing from a famous CHERIBSD contributor, hopefully will make it soon-ish and I think it really deserves to be backported to the 9's line. Redis had merged my little FreeBSD support improvement, nodejs as well accepted my tiny OpenBSD build fix.

As American Fuzzy Lop would say "We're done here. Have a nice day !"

Web technologies

Hi folks,

Still overseeing other folks carrying the entertainment part of the BSD, @thfr, the more and more famous OpenBSD contributor, just brought not less than the Vulkan api few days ago. To the point there is even a Phoronix article (I agree with Bryan Steele on this, there is some misunderstanding here and there but overall having these on the website brings attention to it ... not all bad). So logically, games compatible with start to get their entries in the tree too ... vkQuake, the vulkan counterpart/portage of the old OpenGL version ... some others are planned most of them starting with the convenient vk prefix. That alone brings an unexpected change in the OpenBSD's landscape to say the least :-) congratulations.

In parallel, a relatively recent GitHub project attracted my attention, Mimalloc from ... Microsoft :-) well ... no worries, you do not have to cross yourself before reading the source code and all of that, it is pretty good quality code and compatible with all BSD :-) I was impressed by the performance to be honest with few internal tests, professional and personal, maybe less in multi thread contexts though, I still prefer jemalloc for this ... but not bad at all for a start :-)

Apart of this, I still went on openjdk journey, by implementing the UseLargePages support on FreeBSD, most of the time pages of 2mb on most of architectures ... It is an option for a reason as true it might brings relative performance gains but it is mainly for java application using large objects. Otherwise it would be more waste than anything else ... And also just last weekend I thought it would be a little nice idea to support FreeBSD's SO_USER_COOKIE socket option and seems it s been approved ... we shall see once he comes back and eventually cherry pick all of these for openjdk 12! In parallel, I had my first bite into nodejs by fixing openbsd build and also trying to port Linux only, for now, large page option support on FreeBSD. They are approved so might be merged in a near future, And ... to my surprise I have been granted commit access to botan project :-) so I just pushed a small change to take in account the new mmap flag which was committed just few days ago in current. Happy beginning of summer ;-)

End of the marathon

Finally pleased to announce LMMS got its long awaited 1.2.0 release ... The summary reflects perfectly the long work undergone for the last couple of years. Indeed, being of the few real portable audio platform software, not just the "big three" but also the *BSD ; enough complex to please advanced users while being understandable for hungry learners ; it is worth to be highlighted ... Happy to see they were able to freeze the code in decent time while looking forward the future features (awaiting personally the Microwave synthesiser being merged). Time to update the related ports ;-)

Noted that Thomas Debesse still pushes his efforts towards Xonotic and related projects. I am glad there is someone taking care of these, he seems to have the persistence to go through :-)

In my side, I still update slowly the openjdk repository for FreeBSD, filling the missing feature gap with other platforms ; still have few further plans we shall, hopefully the vast majority will make it.
Just remembered that gcc ports a subset of compiler runtime library from LLVM and spotted that my writable/executable page request detection exist now on the 8 and 9th branches ... also the Mac OS base compiler had been updated and supports this feature too.

Patience is a nice virtue

Hi folks,

While I rewatched the Millennium trilogy in between FreeBSD source rebuilds and remembering how I appreciated Rapace portrayed the emotionally restrained and troubled nature of the character, I finally got some confirmation for contributions back from 2018's autumn. For instance, memcached finally merged in one shot two of them related to FreeBSD I mentioned at the time ... the super page support making this OS equal to Linux in this area ... and also using basic capsicum capabilities for the "sandbox mode" (aka drop privileges here).
Also finally redis, after a well deserved long pause, started to accept merging again including the BSD build fix. Since both projects are used in my day job, that comes to handy :-) Professionally speaking, I updated the HAPoxy DeviceAtlas module this week in order to fit better the future 2.0 version requirements.
Once my system is fully up to date, I will see which projects I can help out within the weekend, we shall see ...
Noteworthy if you re interested in LMMS status, there is this topic here you can overwatch, giving good overview what is going to happen...  Also for broader plugins support there is this one. In the meantime I wish you all a great weekend !

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.

Android NDK ... how is it ?

Hi folks,

As mentioned in a previous post, I do quite some Android NDK development these days. And since you are accessing the low level of the Android system, you would just expect, more or less, "Linux for smartphones". Which is true ... to some extents ! First, if we are talking only about the kernel, you have somehow to accept it will be only a subset and some of the features are accessible only from a specific Android version and also dependent obviously to the current security level of the smartphone (rooted or not, SELinux activated etc) ... For example while in Linux you can easily bind a thread to a cpu it is less straightforward to do so on Android (we can still bind a process to a cpu) ... The kernel performance measurement api which allows to measure the number of instructions for a given workload, while existing in Android too, barely allow to measure generally a process ; but not per cpu ... Some C function wrappers functions might not exist until late from an api SDK level "point of view" (ie functions to loop through network interfaces for example but fortunately there are possibilities via the lower level interface ;-)) otherwise, for security reasons, you will generally not access most of hardware in a low level manner like the camera device, but only through the official NDK API provided.

In another hand, the libc is completely different, it is not the famous glibc nor the musl-libc but one called "bionic", which takes a lot from the OpenBSD one (feature-wise ... as it is mainly C++) like the memory allocator (a bit different and more fit to Android needs though), the presence of safe strings API like strlcpy/strlcat and so on ... which I appreciate for its practicality and security goals ... and remove a dependency I usually use under Linux which is the famous libbsd ...

Even though Android is not my primary world, I appreciate most of the aspects of the development despite the sometime frustrating but challenging limitations. Make me think I would appreciate a similar "ensemble" and widely available under FreeBSD, for example, which should be just awesome under the arm architectures ;-)

Apart of these, "same old same old" you might say :-) I continue to push little improvements for php and FreeBSD support not yet merged but seems accepted by the main maintainers like giving more FreeBSD specific options when developing with sockets like setting a cookie to be able to trace it from DTrace ... memcached,  the lead developer had promised he will look into shortly into my existing features proposal, so fingers crossed. Also got my first very little FreeBSD contribution ,among the two, merged for this year. Also I mentioned I try to contribute to a video game in order to make it work under FreeBSD. For who follows me on GitHub it is not a secret but otherwise it is xray the engine behind "STALKER the Call of Pripyat". This time I proceed step by step to avoid enormous, "code regression makers" and hard to review changes, one of them is already merged the second still in review. We will see how far it goes :-)

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...