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.

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.