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.

Revealing the inner power of LLVM

Dear folks,

Here a little important fact in the LLVM history is occurring ... Finally the move from SVN to Git is ongoing ! That sounds very little, but being fully in git rather than using git -> svn conversion tool (or still using svn repo on the side) will be more convenient, I think, as a committer. Appreciated !

Speaking on LLVM, I still try to push in the OpenMP "side of things", here porting simply to OpenBSD, planning DragonflyBSD for next. Hopefully, should be merged after the migration ...

Apart of this, the work been put into libuv had paid off and as a result the 1.33.1 version had been released since few days and being used into NodeJS master branch already, fixing some issues with lesser supported platforms from Haiku (always appreciated supporting this unique OS) to OpenBSD.

At least, I had the opportunity to visit the Facebook's HQ in Dublin, they were presenting their internal (but open sourced) technologies (Folly) and was intrigued why they would not just use the "almighty" Boost ensemble and the standard C++ library. It is mainly for high performance reason , somehow with the incoming C++20 features, it might become a bit less relevant, but their reasoning made sense. The video might be available on Youtube at some point for the curious. "Et voila" :-) for now the radare team is preparing the awaited 4.0.0 branch which is a major step forward, I myself dive into WebKit a little and other little things in the meantime. Until then, I wish you well !

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.

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 !"

Shy sun

Hi folks,

Hopefully you are enjoying the sun, wherever you are ; resting from all high tech things and job possibly :-)
For the rest of us, there are still things ongoing. Little hook here, I wanted to mention the fact Diablo 1 works fully now under OpenBSD, it has been mentioned a couple of times in Twitter and so on, but now the multiplayer works too :-) Congratulations for this ; it must have given lot of joy that's for sure. The next important event in the BSD work would be the vBSDCon the program should appear not long after I write this post ; I hope you will enjoy it hopefully it will recorded.

Following up on the web technologies post, openjdk 11 and 12 ports on FreeBSD; 11 on OpenBSD had been updated, reflecting work from primary battleblow, bsdkurt and a bit myself. As well, I spent most of the time between nodejs (large pages had been accepted and now I try to fix few glitches here and there before next major release), php 7.4 and the future 8 (as I write the 7.4 branch will be frozen pretty soon) fixing little common bugs and improving support for FreeBSD and macOs ; also trying for the first time contributing to the v8 javascript engine to have a sense of their mindset and pace, basically a tiny change for macOs and a more significant one for FreeBSD. Also got to know better the main maintainer of Microsoft mimalloc who is very responsive to say the least, for now two/three changes (large pages for macOs and trying to make it more reliable for Linux) from my part but a lot ongoing for Windows ; it just comes from the daily usage then improvement ideas pop up time to time and I am glad he is open to these when they make sense.
Now time to rebuild the whole FreeBSD current machine, in the meantime I'll continue watching the Artic which is to me a very nice, if not the best, performance from the danish actor. Wish you well ;-)

NodeJs on FreeBSD - part two

Hi folks,

Finally, the BSDMag's May issue is released , an interesting article about the famous unix PAM, ownCloud and the second part of NodeJS article, this time focusing on making native modules in C/C++. I hope it will give you the taste to make your owns !

NodeJs on FreeBSD - part one

Hi folks,

a new bsdmag issue here about NodeJs on FreeBSD, the first part is all about building nodes itself from source. Hope you'd enjoy reading this :-).