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 ;-)

PHP enters soon into Release Candidate hammering

 Hi folks,

Hopefully you re still hanging there wherever you are, I see still the number of readers remain more or less the same compared to the usual :-)

For all C++ developers, pros and/or enthusiasts, I would recommend reading this blog post about C++20 approval from Herb Sutter which comes from a long way and open source compilers have been supported early on the features, giving time to start to get used to them (modules, constexpr extended very much so (IMO), co-routines, ...). Good, news considering the situation ; and the next step, C++23, is still on track for sometime in 2021 which is pretty important one about last possible changes proposals.

In my side, I've been still on Haiku pretty much, for instance PHP 8 will enter soon into the RC time, before the end of this month hopefully, I have already pushed enough code to make it workable in this platform, I usually use the already packaged pcre2 package rather than the version shipped with the php regex extension which does not build because of the JIT (build fixed since, but not released yet and even less ported to the pcre2 repository). A lot of changes even tough sadly couple of interesting ones will have to be done after (8.1 or future 9.0) ... nevertheless you PHP developers I invite you to read the UPGRADING note to migrate from the 7.x versions (e.g. errors thrown as exceptions).

I took another bite at Barony to port it to Haiku. Due to its low usage of platform specificities, it had been pretty straightforward. However, a change of license had become necessary, but seems all devs/contributors have agreed to. Other than that, I did also some NetBSD related contributions here and there (radare2, rpmalloc). I appreciate this os more than in the past, I appreciate what it becomes with the time goes. At last, a bit for Illumos based oses, still my liking for underdogs talking :-)

Wish you well, see you the next time ;-)

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.

BSD can be narcissistic too

Hi folks,

Couple of updates since the last time, I have began to port the radare's self plugin for the BSD, starting with FreeBSD then next should be OpenBSD and finishing with our dear friend NetBSD so time for them to have some introspection if you will ;-) Will try to make it available for the next major release at least.

Also tried a bit redis recently, fixing FreeBSD build. similarly a little build fix for clangd (aka clang Daemon) a settings server for editors. It is just a matter of making people aware of BSD specificities, as usual, and  generally they are pretty open to this idea ; in the long run it ends up positively in the vast majority of the cases, at least in my personal experience ...

Going through, as mentioned in a previous post, the next FreeBSD quarterly report, one of them states than some FreeBSD and Intel people are organising a sort of team to be able to provide a better Intel support at large and security matters as well. Seems the Spectre/Meltdown issues brought a positive outcomes after all.

Countdown ...

Hi again,

Here you can see how many days left before OpenBSD decides to bump the versioning here ... Noted also that even though it is disabled wisely for now because of the tree lock, lldb had been imported. On OpenBSD it can debug a simple core dump, but can't attach to a process. But that is already a lot (and there is gdb from the ports too) ! so awaiting the tree unlock in the following weeks ... So great work from the small OpenBSD source team (as usual, but they never disappoint).

Noted as well BSDMag has been inactive for couple of months (at least in appearance), no new issue since the last time, hope all is fine over there in Poland ...

In a personal level not too much since, only I did a very little contribution to lugaru (was the opportunity to see I miss C++ some days :-)) also not visible yet but takes a bit into NetBSD world (I mean more than usual) as I do not necessarily like to limit my world and like to discover strengths from other perspectives.

From LLVM point of view, after Esan for FreeBSD is completely merged (frontend bit), I ll have a bit of Darwin work (possibly), we ll see.

6 years later ...

... after my arrival in Dublin I just realised how things went now starting autumn cleaning, throwing old things ... I did not think I would still be here :-)

So about news, OpenBSD 6.4 is expected in one month but might occur earlier now since couple of releases the usual pace had been broken ... Anyway the page already exist if you are curious. As usual, this release will be a breakthrough for better or worse depends how you see things :-)

In a more personal level, I started "serious" changes into LLVM 8, ported CFI (and merged) for FreeBSD and NetBSD, hopefully esan will follow soon-ish for FreeBSD (only for now). I m trying to back port for the soon 7.0.1 version my previous llvm xray fix ... we shall see.

Barony 3.2.2 had been committed into the FreeBSD ports tree and soon should follow OpenBSD. I did the same for pkgsrc (WIP) as well.

And also other little contributions here and there not yet committed which I ll mention in due time.

Happy beginning of autumn ;-)

BSDMag ... as promised

Hi folks,

Short update in this beginning of June, finally my article went out in time.
No surprise it is all about LLVM sanitizers in BSD :-) As always, this is the current and future state before the next 7.0 release, highlighting tedious kamil's work for NetBSD, various individuals for FreeBSD and so on ...

I hope you'll enjoy the reading ;-)

2016's news

Hi folks and Happy new Year,

First of all,  this is the Best of 2015 ... No worries, it is not a musical compilation ... We would not waste your promising 2016 begin :-) but more likely the BSDMag's best issues from various authors, topics (for system administrators, developers ...). I hope you ll really like it !

Second thing, during the last months I moved more towards OpenBSD and even got the maintainership of the nmap port. Still FreeBSD is one my daily drivers of course ;-)

That's all for the moment and wish you a fruitful 2016's year !

50th post already ...

Hi folks,

The new BSDMag issue finally landed.

There is a nice introduction to NetBSD, another article about Xen on FreeBSD, TrueNAS, an original article about the GUI evolution through the software engineering history then my article about various development tools on FreeBSD for various programming languages / frameworks.

So that's already one year of writing and it is a worthy experience apart of the personal exposure ; indeed that greatly improved my english in general and the technical one in particular so that serves me professionally speaking as well !

Hope you'll enjoy the reading before entering in the Xmas/End of Year's "craziness" ;-)

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.

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 ;-)

Introduction about rumpkernel

Hi folks,

There it is the new BSDMag issue alongside with a complete article about using sudo, my article about using rumpkernel in a Xen context. I had this topic in mind since quite lot of months and that was still totally unknown to me until recently. I did not spend the time I expected to in first place but if it produces enough attraction, I may talk about it again in the future ;-)

Ah, also short note, nginx and DeviceAtlas APIs work well in this environment (some folks before me tested already nginx alone like here) so if you prefer using all of this in this secure environment, there is no issue ;-)

Kore again

Hi folks,

Following my previous post about testing Kore, I did some changes in the code to make it workable for NetBSD and DragonflyBSD and sent those changes to Joris Vink.
Those changes are merged now smoothly.

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.