Twelve number does not bring bad luck usually ...

... as a proof FreeBSD got the release right in schedule :-) No surprise for the usual users, it had been advertised, retweeted million of times (if not billions) and so on ... but that is good to know all went well ... Here are well summarised the most important changes, apart of this, as a reminder, for who is interested in security/cryptography ... getrandom syscall had been ported from Linux (and its wrapper getentropy, with similar signature as the original openbsd implementation) had been added ; all of this by Conrad Meyer if I am not mistaken ... Then that means several user land software/libraries are using it, I have been ported in advance some during the last months, and still do ... In my side, I can count 3 little contributions in this FreeBSD release ... in the userland, 2 concerning libcasper and another was the top command line fix, also, in addition, a sort of indirect one when Conrad Meyer introduced Blake2 API which I just updated, at the time, to use better memory clearance  ; also contributed to more packages than the last time (radare, barony for example ...). My little truss command line fix had just been merged so too late for this release, anyway not being a real threatening issue it is understandable if it is not backported ;-)

Personally I did not feel much this 12th release, using only already -CURRENT like numerous people ;  but I have the feeling other will enjoy this pretty much which represent, as you can witness, a tremendous amount of work ...

Apart of this, I still continue my work on the future LLVM 8, today I ve committed a little change into the static code analysis department to detect possible wrong usage of explicit_bzero (and its older "sibling" bzero) and also still work on improving capsicum api interception in the sanitization part. I wish you all well in this relatively warm end of autumn ;-)

Further releases ...

... on this surprising hot autumn here in the emerald island.

Today, no real surprise, OpenBSD 6.4 is out, so before the 1st of November, here the "changelog". I think from now we can start to forget the old 1st May/1st November hardcoded dates :-)

radare2 finally got to 3.0.0 but there is a quick 3.0.1 "hotfix" version already scheduled (today or tomorrow). Also autumn is the sign of life coming down :-) so FreeBSD 10.4 End of Life is soon-ish albeit the date is not hardcoded yet. FreeBSD 11 and soon FreeBSD 12 have sufficiently new features and stability to be interesting, I personally appreciate the shorter lifetime of FreeBSD releases between major branches, compared to how it used to be ...

Months ago mentioned couple of times people reporting issues with Intel components. In a personal level, I started to move towards AMD and its Ryzen branding as a new OpenBSD machine. Some people might be more interested by ARM laptops instead. No disappointment so far, the extra power will serve me right for LLVM builds as well. You can find people who tested this sort of combo like qbit here. Also pypy will finally have a major bump version resulted from a patch I did quite a time ago (and which I almost forgot :-)).

Finally ...

Hi folks,

On this first of August, LLVM 7.0.0 had been created. For the next couple of weeks, that will be Release Candidates, bugs fixing and a bit of docs changes. It has been a nice ride being part of the release since December :-) FreeBSD already schedules its import in the base system for the 12.x release (OpenBSD will do the same most likely for 6.4 or 6.5 ...) which means having finally in addition msan, fuzzer and X-ray instrumentation among other things ...
Now thinking fully of the next 8.0.0 !!

Speaking of FreeBSD, my little fix for the top command line had been merged. This is a kind of subtle issue not noticeable in production when its plays with memory boundaries ...
Apart of this, some openbsd-gaming folks (thfr in fact :-) a great FNA game specialist it seems) pointed out a new open sourced video game Starrulers 2 when I fixed very little things so he can port it in due time ...

At last, as last year, there is EuroBSDCon, this time at the University of Politechnica of Bucharest with lot great tutorials and speeches.

FreeBSD 11

Hi folks,

Real followers of FreeBSD know already that despite FreeBSD 11 is not yet officially released, it is somehow available already for the impatients ;-) Well, speaking on this, due to the difference of pace with OpenBSD, the impression is pretty different. Indeed, I contributed in quite small amount back then circa 2014/2015 especially when I was into HardenedBSD (which I wish very good luck, no doubt they are successful), the difference with the now previous branch is quite enormous as you can see. In my side, I already look forward FreeBSD 12 :-) ...

For OpenBSD, a lot of work are done to push clang in base, mainly modifying the codebase to make it compilable with both gcc and clang, that might be all ready for 6.1 ? We ll see ... Apart of this, I continue my usual work, I plan to update jack(audio) and openal although other OpenBSD folks are very busy right now that might not happen too soon ;-) Ah and a small bunch of fixes were pushed to the next release of xserver, which I honestly did not expect to happen :-)