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.

Hi dear readers,

Writing this blog post while the MacBook update to Catalina (thanks now the linker seems to be back to normal was sort of broken when I tried to work on radare2), I kind of looked around of worthy projects I stumbled across ...
- uvwasi another implementation of providing low level features to the web ... which, from start, is pretty portable since under the hood it is using libuv ... It is pretty much a draft at this stage, but it feels already pretty promising, the API is well written, clear and knowing its author (a famous nodejs contributor), it won't disappoint !
- webapp.rs ; if you are into Rust and since many people ask how it compares to Ruby on Rails, Python./Django ... in the web's world, here a nice example of how a pure rust framework would look like. Something to keep an eye on I might say !

In my side, I pushed further into AFL++ which is way more fast moving process than the AFL project (no criticism, each project has its own priorities), to provide, with other contributors, a better BSD and macOS support, Linux remaining the main platform. Also, I went back to LLVM a little, while before I focused more on sanitisers and static code analysis, I went on parallelism and OpenMP to improve the FreeBSD support which is already my second change in this area, here to enable the thread affinity support, FreeBSD being perfectly able performing this, it was time to repair this "inequality" :-) ... Apart of this, all changes I made here and there, for instance memcached released its 1.15.19 version with a slightly better FreeBSD support (privileges feature here obviously capsicum) and many little commits to radare2, in preparation for the awaited 4.0.0 version. Wish you well, even though the weather is kinda of sneeze triggering at the moment :-)

LLVM 8 import starting

Hi folks, following up the now rc3 tagged of LLVM 8.0.0, Dimitry Andric had decided to import it in the base system already. Indeed, generally the 3rd or so release candidate already reflects the final release ; the changes, at this stage, usually occurs more into the documentations for example, it is pretty safe as is ... Curious as always, I personally already planned to recompile the whole system as I write to benefit all the improvements I mentioned over the last months.

While at LLVM ; like many other "githubers", I go through other people projects and one particularly attracted my attention, if you are interested into LLVM IR generation, there is this Java-7 compatible compiler even though it requires a particular environment to build it all and even if you do not have direct professional or personal usage per se ; it can be somewhat an interesting subject of study. About php, the awaited new feature, which is the JIT support, is still under review as I write, despite it is Dmitry Stogov behind the keyboard it needs to take time to fix and improve as it is tested ... but ... it might be for soon !

Personally, these last days I have been pushing few improvements to radare to report better arm and mips ELF binaries sections or also more specifically adding OpenBSD sections. Also, I have been pushing a tiny update to the NSS library, which "powers" Firefox for example, to support the new getentropy call from FreeBSD 12 which had been merged ; another slightly more important code will be reviewed.The jemalloc project had entered into the release candidate phase thus my little contribution to improve the profiling for FreeBSD won t be into the soon 5.2 release as I pushed a bit too late :-) but that is very understandable ; they need to be careful as it undergoes stress tests and so on.

Do we say register or registry ? I ll look into my super page ...

Hi folks,

More than 4 years now I contribute (seriously) to various FOSS projects and remembering how and why ... I have primarly prioritised contributions to other people/organisation projects rather than my own, especially the ones which I think are useful, meaningful for a whole lot of people. Personal projects are nice to some degree, but I would get bored rapidly and feel too "complacent" if I did that only. But, saying that ... I'm absolutely not willing to convince anyone to agree :-) everyone has its own journey.

So to the point ... these last days I have been focusing on porting or more precisely trying to equal features with Linux. For example now redis can dump backtrace and its registers on BSD and ported to FreeBSD RedisSearch (was easy enough I admit), php might start to support huge pages functionality (from Zend engine POV) already merged, I m trying at the moment to port it in the opcache module as well. radare as usual right after its release the usual contributors started to fix various places, now the FreeBSD package had been updated today. OpenBSD ought to follow soon-ish.

Time changes ... or changes time

Hi folks,

Reading this past PR when we can see finally Kamil is moving on. Whoever takes over, there is quite a legacy ! Without him, the NetBSD support into LLVM would not be where it is now that's for sure (not counting his contributions to NetBSD itself). Thanks for the numerous reviews since last year ;-)

Also quick reminder, on Thursday our little noisy discussion about ZFS in Dublin 2 ... Seemingly there is an additional talk/introduction about OpenBSD ... nice.

These days, it has been more radare than anything else, to the project itself also trying to update BSD packages (the OpenBSD's version should be merged today or so ... while I write, the two maintainers agreed it was really time to do so, it was very old version).

But I also had my little take into memcached to improve a bit the FreeBSD support, hopefully some will land into the next release.

After that, I am waiting patiently php master "unlocks" (maybe after RC5) so new features will get merged.

Last post pre-EuroBSDCon

Hi folks,

September and its usual accelerating "things-being-made" pace, some events were/are occurring since the last time.

As previously planned LLVM 7.0 is finally released and announced. With so many new items (llvm-mca/exegesis and so on) I am so surprised my small contributions are mentioned :-) Thanks to the resilience of the testers it s done and behind. Starts to be available in some systems, for the Mac users you would have to wait a little bit to see whether in Homebrew (will happen shortly though, PR seems accepted) or simply as final binaries (just got uploaded) ... even more patient to see it landed in Xcode (most likely next year) :-) FreeBSD taking his time to import it as a package (still RC3 when I write) but since the differences are mainly about documentations ... it is pretty safe to still use this version.

Also, nginx/njs had accepted my little contribution, a basic sandbox mode, and released a new 0.2.4 version just this week here. It is always nice to be able to make a difference in such popular softwares :-)

Still contribute to radare2, more about fixing these days, to be able to have a more solid version than 2.9.0. Speaking of this, one of my old fixes got a CVE identifier here.

PHP 7.3 had really entered its RC phase now on master it s the future 7.4 and will start to think to provide few ideas (at least a small percentage of them) I kept wrapped until now.

After the incoming EuroBSDCon, LLVM 8 development with other usual folks like kamil or vitalybuka and so on will finally really start as there is still things (but exciting) ahead of us :-)

For now ... see you in Bucharest (for who is masochist enough for :-P)

Rainy end of summer updates

Hi folks,

Hopefully you are enjoying the last sun rays batch !

Couple of updates ... For LLVM normally the 7th release was expected for the 5th of September but is postponed obviously ... there will be first a RC3 just to fix the last blockers and hopefully still a release within the month ... We shall see. Speaking of the 7th, FreeBSD is importing it at slow pace and was decided to make it available for releases post 12 due to releases dates colliding. For now the only new sanitizer enabled compared to LLVM 6 is Msan (and for amd64 only for now). Finally, maybe OpenBSD will have this version before FreeBSD :-) well ... at this stage it s just a wild guess.
After this, for LLVM 8, I start to push changes here and there, porting CFI from compiler-rt to FreeBSD and NetBSD.

After that, Barony underwent a hotfix, versioned 3.2.1 but still need some further fixes. I had personally fixed two issues which are both merged. It is very pleasant, in an user point of view, there is still significant game and content updates (and not sold as DLC).

Also, radare really has a fast pace for releasing version, since the last time a lot bug fixes from various sources. I fixed mostly memory leaks and couple of workflow breakages. Now aiming for 3.0 ...

At last, PHP 7.3 finally enter its RC phase, it is pretty already solid at this stage even though i would not recommend for production :-) since the last time I finally did the fixed map fix only for FreeBSD, postponing the Linux version for 7.4 or after, waiting 4.18 kernels distributions being available widely.

Peak of the summer

Hi folks,

Hopefully you're enjoying the summer wherever it occurs :-)

Few updates since the last time, php7.3 will now use getrandom to have stronger randomness for random_* family functions. And speaking of randomness, finally nginx unit accepted my first patch :-)

Apart of this came back to static code analysis for LLVM a little, again string family functions checking while LLVM release freeze is approaching. Otherwise, the usual, fixing radare2 and couple of video games.

Also first time getting involved into programming language specs discussion targeted mainly for low resources machines but already multiplatform, Windows included, P# (not to be confused with the .NET one) while I fix few virtual machines bugs or adding few new functions. It is under active development ; we'll see how it goes ...

Some few events are scheduled for in some months but will keep you posted in due time as usual ;-)

Another spring update

Hi folks,

Since the last time, not much in term of amount of updates but, since the 22th of May, I became a legit LLVM contributor with commit access, feeling the rise of responsibility coming with it :-). Starting to commit my own work, first a fix for the static code analysis part of C string functions and a little msan test fix. Baby steps if you will ... One day, when more confident, will start to review and commit other people work if necessary.

Apart of this, the usual ... either fixing softwares/libraries for FreeBSD or OpenBSD, lastly with radare2 toolset (get praised by many people involved into security and gave a try myself recently ... reputation well deserved), nvi2 most of them used both personally and professionally ...

Also, trying to push barony into freebsd ports tree, it seems to get some interest ... it s a matter of a committer taking care of it now ... we ll see how it goes. I wish turningwheel having more gamers from it, they deserve it.