str_repeat('David Carlier',...)

 Hi folks,

Little addendum since the last time, finally starting to appear more than once in the PHP news .

As I write, number of commits are above 130 :-), trying to bring ideas and suggestions whenever I can.

Also, finally redis had accepted a new feature of mine to mark a socket for network filtering purpose.

I dived into the mesh allocator from plasma-umass which is known to have a higher tolerance with memory fragmentation than most of other allocators.

How are you ?

... Fine I hope since the last time :-)

As I write, there is the template for the last 2019 FreeBSD Quarterly status report. At the moment, the most noticeable part is this presentation, which would introduce all FreeBSD's benefits to people who want to give a thorough try, to get a good feel of the system ... Pretty good initiative !

In my side, I ve been involved in some of the usual projects I look into. memcached, redis, v8 and afl++ most of the time ; for V8 I have happily upstreamed the most important part of the nodejs FreeBSD port patches as promised in a previous post ... About AFL++, there will be, you can count on this, a lot of changes since the last release (radamsa mutator is a major one for instance and a much better Android support ... I invite you to have a look at the changelog to get a feel of...), most of them are general (build and bug fixes) and some other are operating systems ... again, with hexcoder, I ve been focusing on *BSD systems making sure everybody in a equal feet ... should be a matter of days before it happens as I write ... Apart of this, still involved in NodeJS code reviews, I also pushed my own change for DragonflyBSD ready for the next major release then ...
Next major open source event, will be the FOSDEM 2020 edition and it will be a first time personally as both attendee and speaker :-)
In the meantime, I wish you good winter holidays in advance if you have any :-)

Patience is a nice virtue

Hi folks,

While I rewatched the Millennium trilogy in between FreeBSD source rebuilds and remembering how I appreciated Rapace portrayed the emotionally restrained and troubled nature of the character, I finally got some confirmation for contributions back from 2018's autumn. For instance, memcached finally merged in one shot two of them related to FreeBSD I mentioned at the time ... the super page support making this OS equal to Linux in this area ... and also using basic capsicum capabilities for the "sandbox mode" (aka drop privileges here).
Also finally redis, after a well deserved long pause, started to accept merging again including the BSD build fix. Since both projects are used in my day job, that comes to handy :-) Professionally speaking, I updated the HAPoxy DeviceAtlas module this week in order to fit better the future 2.0 version requirements.
Once my system is fully up to date, I will see which projects I can help out within the weekend, we shall see ...
Noteworthy if you re interested in LMMS status, there is this topic here you can overwatch, giving good overview what is going to happen...  Also for broader plugins support there is this one. In the meantime I wish you all a great weekend !

Out of memory or not ... this is the question !!

Hi folks,

Not questioning here your memorisation capacities here :-) even though in our modern days we have so much informations to integrate ... nevertheless this week had seen a long waited release of the famous memory allocator jemalloc, 5.2.0 for instance. As you read the changelog, you can feel the months of development. I personally appreciate the possibility to disable the dl library usage, the rework of malloc/free fast path but above all trasz and jasone (even just the continuous integration work alone is already a great achievement) had done a great job on improving the FreeBSD support so thanks to both ! My only little modest contribution for this release was to enable unit tests on FreeBSD, Ed Maste was needing this at some point but nevertheless it is always nice to increase balance b/w operating systems whenever we can. Another nice memory allocator I mentioned a bit few months ago, rpmalloc, still evolves over time, after having improved slightly the BSD support I have been pushing little change this week .

Before my memory fails me, radare had finally gotten its 3.4.x release (hufflepuff) with as usual a lot of internal rewrites, bug fixes and new features. Couple of pull requests I have pushed in the previous week, we shall see if some will be merged ...

Also, OpenBSD will have soon its 6.5 release and on the mailing list we can see time to time this kind of messages ... It has happened in the past and most of the time the poster has a good point but this is more the way the message is conveyed ; but in this case I have to agree with other OpenBSD people, updating redis from 4 to 5 so close to the release is too risky, there are users and also enterprises using this os, there is a good chance some packages would break as the redis project is pretty active that I can guarantee ... Do not forget it is an open source project with people doing this in their spare time ;-) do not let the anger gets the best of you.

6.5 on its way

Hi dear folks,

For those who (dare to) use OpenBSD, here is a draft of the summary of the changelog for the next 6.5 version. Notably, finally the mips64 architecture got clang as arm64 and x86 (that is great) :-) there is further more network stack improvements, started with unlocking them previously by mpie@... A bit soon to get all the benefits but we can already have a raw idea. For the third party packages, in my side apart of radare I did not update my own packages I maintain, basically nmap undergoes a lengthy development and bug fixes since the last release, hopefully this project won't face more difficulties as they did in the past. openal might get an update before the next release but that will be it. Somehow, I have the feeling the next OpenBSD 6.6., as a whole, will be a more important game changer ... but we will see ; maybe I will be totally wrong.

Finally, radare2 got its awaited 3.2 release (specifically 3.2.1, 3.2.0 lasted only couple of hours :-)) and despite its nickname it really happened I promise :-) A lot of efforts had been done to fix various build (meson and the autotools-like one), and the usual dev of the visual department had fixed his share of bugs. In the end, all the FreeBSD improvements are available, somehow whoever want to update the FreeBSD port, I would advise to wait proper cutter update as it is aligned to radare releasing ... which should happen not too far from now (usually). OpenBSD port is not affected by such things, so if Edd Barrett does not do, I may take care of it. For next, I have more innovative plans for this software as, for example, adding web authentication for the embedded server which will be reviewed in due time.


Apart of that, I had "planted couple of seeds" since weeks and expect some code reviews in various projects, like redis, some project maintainers might be still in holidays after all. At last, I got questions these last days, yes FreeBSD has end of life and are a bit shorter than used to be and yes you might need to update the last version of your current release if you expect security fixes and updates. FreeBSD might be judged as oses for hobbyists :-) but it is serious as many other projects and used by companies too.

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.

LLVM I missed you

Hi folks,

About one month left before the usual Xmas craziness, even though with the time go in my side it starts to be less and less about toys and moving towards more meaningful gifts (thankfully) :-)

So since the last time, I started to go back a bit to LLVM especially the sanitizers. It might not be the same level of "breakthrough" compared to last year, I might say feature/operating system wise it's more fair now but there is still interesting code to do ;-) For now I try to add more specific functions to be intercepted at least for the next couple of days, the set*buf family functions is already merged.

the redis's lead developer had finally merged my little DragonFlyBSD build fix, a tiny fix into h2o to make sure the mem secure feature stands by its word (one the reasons I decided to be involved in LLVM last year was because of the great usage of libFuzzer in h2o). radare2, as always, might be close to a next release even though there still rewriting to do and as usual fixes. PHP now has advertised their last RC6 today and some PR start to be unfolded and merged ... We ll see.

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.