BSD Now Allan Jude

FreeBSD 13.0 Full Desktop Experience, FreeBSD on ARM64 in the Cloud, Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace, Inferno is open source as well, NetBSD hits donation milestone, grep returns (standard input) on FreeBSD, Random Programming Challenge, OpenBSD Adds Support for Coordinated Mars Time (MTC) and more


NOTES


This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap


Headlines

FreeBSD 13.0 – Full Desktop Experience


With the release of FreeBSD 13.0 on the horizon, I wanted to see how it shapes up on my Lenovo T450 laptop. Previous major releases on this laptop, using it as a workstation, felt very rough around the edges but with 13, it feels like the developers got it right.




FreeBSD on ARM64 in the Cloud

Until the end of June, Amazon AWS is offering free ARM64 Graviton instances, learn how to try out FreeBSD to ARMv8 in the cloud





Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace!


The releases below represent the historical releases of Plan 9. The two versions of 4th Edition represent the initial release and the final version available from Bell Labs as it was updated and patched. All historical releases of Plan 9 have been re-released under the terms of the MIT license.



Inferno is open source as well
***
## News Roundup
### Hitting donation milestone, financial report for 2020
We nearly hit our 2020 donation milestone set after the release of 9.0 of $50,000.
***



grep returns (standard input) on FreeBSD


I was dealing with a bizarre error with grep(1) on FreeBSD, and it soon infected my macOS and NetBSD machines too. It was driving me crazy!




Random Programming Challenge



This better not be an April Fools Joke… I want to see this actually implemented. I’ll donate $100 to the first BSD that actually implements this for real. Who’s with me?


OpenBSD Adds Support for Coordinated Mars Time (MTC)



To make sure that OpenBSD can be used elsewhere than just earth, this diff introduces Coordinated Mars Time (MTC), the Mars equivalent of earth’s Universal Time (UTC).
OpenZFS had a good one too



Tarsnap


This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.


Feedback/Questions


Brandon - router

Lawrence - Is BSD for me

miguel - printing






Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
***

Customizing the FreeBSD Kernel, OpenBSD/loongson on the Lemote Fuloong, how ZFS on Linux brings up pools and filesystems at boot under systemd, LLDB: FreeBSD Legacy Process Plugin Removed, FreshBSD 2021, gmid, Danschmid’s Poudriere Guide in english, and more


NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap


Headlines

Customizing the FreeBSD Kernel


Learn more about customizing the build of the FreeBSD kernel and its loadable modules




OpenBSD/loongson on the Lemote Fuloong

In my article about running OpenBSD/loongson on the Lemote Yeeloong back in 2016, I mentioned looking for a Fuloong. All hope seemed lost until the Summer of 2017, when a fellow OpenBSD developer was contacted by a generous user (Thanks again, Lars!) offering to donate two Lemote Fuloong machines, and I was lucky enough to get one of those units.





News Roundup

How ZFS on Linux brings up pools and filesystems at boot under systemd


On Solaris and Illumos, how ZFS pools and filesystems were brought up at boot was always a partial mystery to me (and it seemed to involve the kernel knowing a lot about /etc/zfs/zpool.cache). On Linux, additional software RAID arrays are brought up mostly through udev rules, which has its own complications. For a long time I had the general impression that ZFS on Linux also worked through udev rules to recognize vdev components, much like software RAID. However, this turns out to not be the case and the modern ZFS on Linux boot process is quite straightforward on systemd systems.




LLDB: FreeBSD Legacy Process Plugin Removed

During the past month we’ve successfully removed the legacy FreeBSD plugin and continued improving the new one. We have prepared an implementation of hardware breakpoint and watchpoint support for FreeBSD/AArch64, and iterated over all tests that currently fail on that platform. Therefore, we have concluded the second milestone.




FreshBSD 2021

6 weeks ago I created a branch for a significant rework of FreshBSD. Nearly 300 commits later, and just a week shy of our 15th anniversary, the result is what you’re looking at now. I hope you like it.




gmid is a gemini server for unixes.



Danschmid’s Poudriere Guide now in english

The ports system is one of FreeBSD's greatest advantages for users who want flexibility and control over their software. It enables administrators to easily create and manage source-based installations using a system that is robust and predictable.




Tarsnap


This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.




Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
***
Special Guest: Tom Jones.

FreeBSD Network Troubleshooting, The State of FreeBSD, dhcpleased, bhyve for Calamares Development, EFS automount and ebsnvme-id, Old Usenix pictures, and more.


NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap


Headlines

FreeBSD Network Troubleshooting


FreeBSD has a full set of debugging features, and the network stack is able to report a ton of information. So much that it can be hard to figure out what is relevant and what is not.




The State of FreeBSD

License to thrill: Ahead of v13.0, the FreeBSD team talks about Linux and the completed toolchain project that changes everything





News Roundup

dhcpleased(8) - DHCP client daemon


With the following commit, Florian Obser (florian@) imported dhcpleased(8), DHCP daemon to acquire IPv4 address leases from servers, plus dhcpleasectl(8), a utility to control the daemon:




bhyve for Calamares Development

bhyve (pronounced “bee hive”) is a hypervisor for BSD systems (and Illumos / openSolaris). It is geared towards server workloads, but does support desktop-oriented operation as well. I spent some time wayyyy back in November wrestling with it in order to replace VirtualBox for Calamares testing on FreeBSD. The “golden hint” as far as I’m concerned came from Karen Bruner and now I have a functioning Calamares test-ground that is more useful than before.
“Calamares is a free and open-source independent and distro-agnostic system installer for Linux distributions.“




Some new FreeBSD/EC2 features: EFS automount and ebsnvme-id

As my regular readers will be aware, I've been working on and gradually improving FreeBSD/EC2 for many years. Recently I've added two new features, which are available in the weekly HEAD and 12-STABLE snapshots and will appear in releases starting from 12.2-RELEASE.




Old Usenix pictures



Beastie Bits

[https://2021.eurobsdcon.org/](CFP is open until May 26th, 2021)

EuroBSDcon is the European technical conference for users and developers of BSD-based systems. The conference is scheduled to take place September 16-19 2021 in Vienna, Austria or as an all-online event if COVID-19 developments dictate. The tutorials will be held on Thursday and Friday to registered participants and the talks are presented to conference attendees on Saturday and Sunday.
The Call for Talk and Presentation proposals period will close on May 26th, 2021. Prospective speakers will be notified of acceptance or otherwise by June 1st, 2021.




[https://campgnd.com/](CFP is open until 2021-04-15)

campgndd will be held May 28th, 29th and 30th 2021, from wherever you happen to be.
We're looking for submissions on anything you're enthusiastic and excited about. If you enjoy it, the odds are we will too! You don't need to be an expert to propose anything.
Some example of things we are looking for are:
Talks
Walkthroughs
Music


From the Desk of Michael Lucas…

New Release: Only Footnotes
I’ve lost count of the number of people who have told me that they purchase my books only for the footnotes. That’s okay. I don’t care why people buy my books, only that they do buy them. Nevertheless, I am a businessman living under capitalism and feel compelled to respond to my market.
Allow me to present my latest release: Only Footnotes, a handsome hardcover-only compilation of decades of footnotes. From the back cover:
-----
Only Footnotes. Because that’s why you read his books.
Academics hate footnotes. Michael W Lucas loves them. What he does with them wouldn’t pass academic muster, but that doesn’t mean the reader should skip them. The footnotes are the best part! Why not read only the footnotes, and skip all that other junk?
After literal minutes of effort, Only Footnotes collects every single footnote from all of Lucas’ books to date.* Recycle those cumbersome treatises stuffed with irrelevant facts! No more flipping through

Tracing the History of ARM and FreeBSD, Make ‘less’ more friendly, NomadBSD 1.4 Release, Create an Ubuntu Linux jail on FreeBSD 12.2, OPNsense 21.1.2 released, Midnight BSD and BastilleBSD, and more.


NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap


Headlines

Tracing the History of ARM and FreeBSD


When we think of computers, we generally think of laptops and desktops. Each one of these systems is powered by an Intel or AMD chip based on the x86 architecture. It might feel like you spend all day interacting with these kinds of systems, but you would be wrong.




Unix Tip: Make ‘less’ more friendly

You probably know about less: it is a standard tool that allows scrolling up and down in documents that do not fit on a single screen. Less has a very handy feature, which can be turned on by invoking it with the -i flag. This causes less to ignore case when searching. For example, ‘udf’ will find ‘udf’, ‘UDF’, ‘UdF’, and any other combination of upper-case and lower-case. If you’re used to searching in a web browser, this is probably what you want. But less is even more clever than that. If your search pattern contains upper-case letters, the ignore-case feature will be disabled. So if you’re looking for ‘QXml’, you will not be bothered by matches for the lower-case ‘qxml’. (This is equivalent to ignorecase + smartcase in vim.)





News Roundup

NomadBSD 1.4 Release


Version 1.4 of NomadBSD, a persistent live system for USB flash drives based on FreeBSD and featuring a graphical user interface built around Openbox, has been released: “We are pleased to present the release of NomadBSD 1.4.




Create an Ubuntu Linux jail on FreeBSD 12.2



OPNsense 21.1.2 released

Work has so far been focused on the firmware update process to ensure its safety around edge cases and recovery methods for the worst case. To that end 21.1.3 will likely receive the full revamp including API and GUI changes for a swift transition after thorough testing of the changes now available in the development package of this release.




Midnight BSD and BastilleBSD

We recently added a new port, mports/sysutils/bastille that allows you to manage containers. This is a port of a project that originally targetted FreeBSD, but also works on HardenedBSD.





Tarsnap


This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.


Feedback/Questions


Brad - monitoring with Grafana
Dennis - a few questions
Paul - FreeBSD 13





Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
***

Onboard Scheduler for the Mars 2020 Rover, Practical Guide to Storage of Large Amounts of Microscopy Data, OpenBSD guest with bhyve - OmniOS, NextCloud on OpenBSD, MySQL Transactions - the physical side, TrueNAS 12.0-U2.1 is released, HardenedBSD 2021 State of the Hardened Union, and more


NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap


Headlines

Prototyping an Onboard Scheduler for the Mars 2020 Rover


The mars rover runs VxWorks, which is based on BSD, and uses the FreeBSD networking stack. While there has been a lot of type about the little helicopter that was inside the rover running Linux, the rover itself runs BSD.
***
### Practical Guide to Storage of Large Amounts of Microscopy Data
> Biological imaging tools continue to increase in speed, scale, and resolution, often resulting in the collection of gigabytes or even terabytes of data in a single experiment. In comparison, the ability of research laboratories to store and manage this data is lagging greatly. This leads to limits on the collection of valuable data and slows data analysis and research progress. Here we review common ways researchers store data and outline the drawbacks and benefits of each method. We also offer a blueprint and budget estimation for a currently deployed data server used to store large datasets from zebrafish brain activity experiments using light-sheet microscopy. Data storage strategy should be carefully considered and different options compared when designing imaging experiments.
***
## News Roundup
### OpenBSD guest with bhyve - OmniOS
> Today I will be creating a OpenBSD guest via bhyve on OmniOS. I will also be adding a Pass Through Ethernet Controller so I can have a multi-homed guest that will serve as a firewall/router.
> This post will cover setting up bhyve on OmniOS, so it will also be a good introduction to bhyve. As well, I look into OpenBSD’s uEFI boot loader so if you have had trouble with this, then you are in the right place.
***
### NextCloud on OpenBSD
> NextCloud and OpenBSD are complimentary to one another. NextCloud is an awesome, secure and private alternative for propietary platforms, whereas OpenBSD forms the most secure and solid foundation to serve it on. Setting it up in the best way isn’t hard, especially using this step by step tutorial.




MySQL Transactions - the physical side


So you talk to a database, doing transactions. What happens actually, behind the scenes? Let’s have a look.




TrueNAS 12.0-U2.1 is released



HardenedBSD 2021 State of the Hardened Union - NYCBUG - 2021-04-07




Beastie Bits


FreeBSD Journal: Case Studies
***
###Tarsnap
This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.


Feedback/Questions


Al - BusyNAS

Jeff - ZFS and NFS on FreeBSD

Michael - remote unlock for encrypted systems



Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

Lessons learned from a 27 years old UNIX book, Finally dRAID, Setting up a Signal Proxy using FreeBSD, Annotate your PDF files on OpenBSD, Things You Should Do Now, Just: More unixy than Make, and more


NOTES
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap


Headlines

Lessons learned from a 27 years old UNIX book


One of the Amazon reviewers of "Sun Performance and Tuning: Java and the Internet" gave it 3/5 stars. While still a nice introduction, the book by Adrian Cockcroft has become dated — claimed Roland in 2003, which believe it or not was 18 years ago...




dRAID, Finally!

Admins will often use wide RAID stripes to maximize usable storage given a number of spindles. RAID-Z deployments with large stripe widths, ten or larger, are subject to poor resilver performance for a number of reasons. Resilvering a full vdev means reading from every healthy disk and continuously writing to the new spare. This will saturate the replacement disk with writes while scattering seeks over the rest of the vdev. For 14 wide RAID-Z2 vdevs using 12TB spindles, rebuilds can take weeks. Resilver I/O activity is deprioritized when the system has not been idle for a minimum period. Full zpools get fragmented and require additional I/O’s to recalculate data during reslivering. A pool can degenerate into a never ending cycle of rebuilds or loss of the pool Aka: the Death Spiral.




News Roundup

Setting up a Signal Proxy using FreeBSD

With the events that the private messaging app Signal has been blocked in Iran, Signal has come up with an “proxy” solution akin to Tor’s Bridges, and have given instructions on how to do it.
For people who prefer FreeBSD over Linux like myself, we obviously can’t run Docker, which is what Signal’s instructions focus on.
Fortunately, the Docker image is just a fancy wrapper around nginx, and the configs can be ported to any OS. Here, I’ll show you how to set up a Signal Proxy on FreeBSD.





Annotate your PDF files on OpenBSD


On my journey to leave macOS, I regularly look to mimic some of the features I use. Namely, annotating (or signing) PDF files is a really simple task using Preview. I couldn’t do it on OpenBSD using Zathura, Xpdf etc. But there is a software in the ports that can achieve this: Xournal.
Xournal is “an application for notetaking, sketching, keeping a journal using a stylus“. And now that my touchscreen is calibrated, highlighting can even be done with the fingers :)





Things You Should Do Now


Describes things you should do now when building software, because the cost to do them increases over time and eventually becomes prohibitive or impossible.




Just: A command runner. More unixy than Make because it does even less.

I think it's in the do-one-thing-well spirit of Unix, because it's just a command runner, no build system at all. Just has a bunch of nice features:




Can be invoked from any subdirectory
Arguments can be passed from the command line
Static error checking that catches syntax errors and typos
Excellent error messages with source context
The ability to list recipes from the command line
Recipes can be written in any language
Works on Linux, macOS, and Windows
And much more!



Just doesn't replace Make, or any other build system, but it does replace reverse-searching your command history, telling colleagues the weird flags they need to pass to do the thing, and forgetting how to run old projects.





Tarsnap


This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.


Feedback/Questions


Marc - Confused about Snapshots
Dan’s gist: https://gist.github.com/dlangille/3140e60a816226ed75365ba8af185085
Pete - A Question
Rick - ZFS Idea





Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@b