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 :-)

Go, go, go ... again

Hi folks,

While leaf trees are falling, some other things are doing the same, sometimes in a slower pace :-)
For example the free doom3 client finally started to branch a new release after more than 2 years. At the time, it was very easy to port to OpenBSD but at least it is upstream directly. Also, golang's project has started to notify about release notes for the future 1.12 version, including my getrandom contribution. But the two releases per year really fits in here so major changes have time to go in ...

These days, I am doing a bit of DragonFlyBSD support here and there, radare previously, llvm a little, a mini patch for haproxy today ... and so on. I am not moving on from one OS to another :-) but just trying to do some "catching ups" so some oses are not (too) behind the others ... At the moment it is the 5.2.2 release while I write, and still amazed each time I dive into what so few contributors are able to accomplish, even though I might regret some lack features here and there (no sandboxing feature for example) ... overall, it still stands up well on its own.

LMMS for now will move forward its, already, 8th Release Candidate while I write (I discussed, with the lead developer, the 1.2.0 release back in early 2017). Hopefully this project will reach its final release in some weeks, while maybe accepting a certain "level of imperfection" (closed source and paying solutions were not perfect too when I used them) ... Audio softwares for advanced users or professionals are complex machinery with more possibility of subtle bugs and there is the 3rd party plugins support system which make the situation even more "weightened" ... so this puts things a bit in perspective. So all for the best :-) because I think this software deserves a good reputation.

Better later than never

Hi folks,

Here is the first (indirect) OpenBSD ports contribution post 6.4 release, so finally pypy changes had been merged. Also another late merge this time for LLVM 7.0.1 as I promised in the last EuroBSDCon to the attendees my fix for X-ray tooling had been backported.

Speaking of conferences, there is the last MeetBSD which took place in California and seemingly had been a great success reading some people reports :-) the Mariusz Zaborski's talk was surely a great one but also two from last EuroBSDCon like Kamil's talk or "What (not) to Monitor" from Andrew Fengler. Seemingly the next "important" BSD event will be the AsiaBSDCon one. We shall see ;-)

Apart of this, few small fixes here and there, also awaiting new sdb release to fix a longtime issue. At last, Haproxy 1.9 release should occur soon-ish. Seems a very much expected one ;-)

Autumn's releases

Hi folks,

Soon it is Christmas, but before that there are couple of releases worth to mention :

- Haproxy 1.8.0 which represents a tremendous amount of work (HTTP2 is the most noticeable new feature). But since there are so many additions, this is not a release for the "fainted hearts", thus I m not advising for everybody but only to people ready to face bugs and to help to make precise reports. Otherwise I would recommend waiting Q1 2018 at least. Also to mention W. Tarreau had spent ~15 years working in Haproxy project apparently ... that s quite a commitment :-)

- PHP 7.2.0 ... lot of bug fixes (since 7.0 they really take things seriously, the code quality had increased noticeably) and enough nice new features.

For which I made my shares of pull requests ... There also numerous projects to which I contributed ... Cassandra c++ driver ... mod security/mod_defender ... mariadb ... h2o ... and even more tiny pull requests here and there ... I did a bit a pause with video games (I still look strongly at barony though mainly) and try to port to *BSD what can be :-)

Seemingly OpenBSD is going to (finally) support TLS (for Thread Local Storage) natively :-) lot of softs I contribute to needs this and using gcc from ports with emulated TLS is just a "band aid" at the moment (not counting the C++14 and > projects )... We can count on @kettenis to provide it for 6.3 :-)

libnginx and other things into FreeBSD

Hi folks,

Awhile ago I was mentioning I sliced a subset of nginx into a library targeted for FreeBSD ... It is available thus you can easily create a runtime memory allocator from it if desired just bear in mind nginx pools != apr pools ;-)

Other professional topic, haproxy and haproxy-devel ports contains update of the new DeviceAtlas enterprise C api version (2.1.2_2) hopefully gentoo will have the update in a reasonable timeframe.

This week end will be back to more personal usual things :-)

End of year ...

Hi folks,

Not a lot of news for this end of year, I hope you all enjoy your moments ;-)

As, least, there is the promised release of OpenSpades (to remind, there was no release since 2014), the 0.1.0 version here which among all the numerous changes, contains the little work I had done to make it workable under OpenBSD. I may try to make a package, we will see ;-)

Also another small change I try to push for the game OpenRCT2, for making it compilable and workable under FreeBSD (unfortunately not possible to do the same for OpenBSD, for the moment).

That s pretty much all, Haproxy since the 1.7 had a "rough" start but things are getting better and probably will have a really good version for early 2017.

At last, there is possibly a little surprise from me for 2017 ;-) ... we ll see.

Happy new year in advance !

Another little update

Hi folks,

Finally OpenBSD was able to attract a big funder, Smartisan, very good new which filled quite a gap ;-) Mainly this fundings are helpful for supporting developers, Hackathons to say the least ...

Apart of this, Haproxy 1.7 went out today, a lot of nice features and fixes since 1.6, what I brought personally is mainly the increase of 5 to 12 arguments, the DeviceAtlas module benefits it and the lua module as well. Plus, this week I submitted a draft of pcre2 support for the now new 1.8 branch, we will see how it goes ...

Now I go back to OpenBSD matters, we ll see what outcomes will go out of it :-)

DeviceAtlas modules releases

Hi folks,

Who follows me knows that DeviceAtlas provides the C enterprise API here, and this API was successfully integrated into Haproxy codebase. In some older posts, I mentioned that I did couple of native modules for various programming languages circa end of 2015/beginning of 2016. I released one of them the Lua's with one example in github. Of course, these are just examples of integration and at least can give an idea how to use efficiently the API's features. Some others might follow in the near future, after some cleanups ;-)

Program of the week

Hi folks,

Several small updates since the last time. Indeed, nothing too major but a bunch of contributions here and there.

First of all, I contributed a little bit for the first time to php (7). No new features, just some fixes
this PR which is merged already and another one still pending but there is actually a lot of branching for the next 7.1 branch so a little patience is required ;) some people might think I might be insane to try to fix php but :) ... it s quite popular, used by most of my colleagues and myself too sometimes so that might be useful ;)

Also I try to make sure Haproxy compiles always on BSD hence this very recent patch for the very next future 1.7 release (for this autumn).

At last, was always curious how a video game is made in a technical point of view, I chose a simple (code wise) and old one ... Tremulous, which I forked and cleaned up quite a lot as first step. It is more for "self-education" than anything else but I have better understanding at least :) I have other plans for next after cleaning up, we ll see ;)

For next ...

Hi folks,

I ve written for BSDMag since November 2014 and really enjoyed it, talking about so many different topics. Thanks to BSDMag team for this opportunity. I, however, will step back slightly from it (I may write time to time we ll see) to focus better on several open source projects I am more involved in, related to OpenBSD mainly. Apparently, regarding BSDMag twitter account, I am more recognised for my article about Unikernels (which I enjoyed quite a lot at this time I admit, that was quite a story ... I remember I originally wanted to use haproxy but at this time as not compilable under NetBSD hence I committed one of my first patch for this amazing proxy server :-)). Well, I start to believe this is a kind of my death legacy :-P

Joking apart, now I m focused specifically on Ardour porting to OpenBSD :-)

Nearly the end of 2015, what have changed so far ?

Hi folks,

Since couple of months, at home I ve changed quite a few the OSes I use the most. While professionally, I still use mainly FreeBSD and Linux, at home I use more OpenBSD over FreeBSD, and I use also more NetBSD than before and use Linux only when I need to. Might be for many reasons, for the sake of diversification, in the case of OpenBSD I got more used to the "atmosphere" of the tech mailing list and kinda appreciate the innovative approach of NetBSD, hence I got more involved whenever I can, packaging systems included.

Also since a couple of weeks I work on a specific branch of Haproxy for OpenBSD. On Linux, Haproxy takes advantage, in tcp mode, (especially with modern kernel versions) of the popular splice syscall to transfer data between two sockets, which is effective as everything is done in kernel's side. There is a more or less similar solution on OpenBSD, sosplice which is usable in the userland side via setsockopt ; I try to see if it can take advantage of this feature. Indeed, a couple of tests were done with Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, despite Linux was in an older hardware it was noticeably faster. However, this OpenBSD branch is more a "proof of concept" than anything else, probably will never make its way to Haproxy but the performance increased slightly at least.

Haproxy, Nginx and other things

Hi folks,

Recently, two main events occured, first the Nginx's conference from last week in Los Angeles where Afilias (the company I am working for), among other speakers, gave a speech about the benefits of the Mobile detection for any web application. Plus, like others noticed as well, the future feature, Nginx module DSO handling, was shown. Tengine, the popular Nginx's fork, does provide it since quite some time so it has to be better ;-)

Otherwise, Haproxy should release the next 1.6 version pretty soon (circa October I believe, the new dev6 tag should be now ...) and I updated the DeviceAtlas module and submitted some few bug fixes. And I also maintain it officially ;-) the next move, once the 1.6 (or 1.6.1) version is done, then to push it to FreeBSD net/haproxy port (the net/haproxy-devel port already supports it)

That's pretty much all :-)

rumpkernel and Haproxy

Hi folks,

For my last article, I planned in first place to use Haproxy for the use case but unfortunately it does not compile on NetBSD >= 6.0 without changing the source code a bit ... Until today !

Indeed, Haproxy folks pushed my small patchset to 1.6 branch and backported it to the current 1.5 stable one today(so probably for the potential next 1.5.14 version ?). That might interest the current maintainer of NetBSD pkgsrc ;-)