Episode Details

OpenBSD 6.2 is here, style arguments, a second round of viewer interview questions, how to set CPU affinity for FreeBSD jails, containers on FreeNAS & more!

Headlines

OpenBSD 6.2 Released

• OpenBSD continues their six month release cadence with the release of 6.2, the 44th release
• On a disappointing note, the song for 6.2 will not be released until December
• Highlights:

Improved hardware support on modern platforms including ARM64/ARMv7 and octeon, while amd64 users will appreciate additional support for the Intel Kaby Lake video cards.
Network stack improvements include extensive SMPization improvements and a new FQ-CoDel queueing discipline, as well as enhanced WiFi support in general and improvements to iwn(4), iwm(4) and anthn(4) drivers.
Improvements in vmm(4)/vmd include VM migration, as well as various compatibility and performance improvements.
Security enhancements including a new freezero(3) function, further pledge(2)ing of base system programs and conversion of several daemons to the fork+exec model.
Trapsleds, KARL, and random linking for libcrypto and ld.so, dramatically increase security by making it harder to find helpful ROP gadgets, and by creating a unique order of objects per-boot.
A unique kernel is now created by the installer to boot from after install/upgrade.
The base system compiler on the amd64 and i386 platforms has switched to clang(1).
New versions of OpenSSH, OpenSMTPd, LibreSSL and mandoc are also included.
The kernel no longer handles IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (RFC 4862), allowing cleanup and simplification of the IPv6 network stack.
Improved IPv6 checks for IPsec policies and made them consistent with IPv4.
Enabled the use of per-CPU caches in the network packet allocators.
Improved UTF-8 line editing support for ksh(1) Emacs and Vi input mode.
breaking change for nvme(4) users with GPT: If you are booting from an nvme(4) drive with a GPT disk layout, you are affected by an off-by-one in the driver with the consequence that the sector count in your partition table may be incorrect. The only way to fix this is to re-initialize the partition table. Backup your data to another disk before you upgrade. In the new bsd.rd, drop to a shell and re-initialize the GPT:
fdisk -iy -g -b 960 sdN

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Why we argue: style

I've been thinking about why we argue about code, and how we might transform vehement differences of opinion into active forces for good.
My thoughts spring from a very specific context. Ten or twelve times a year I go to an arbitrary business and spend three or more days teaching a course in object-oriented design. I'm an outsider, but for a few days these business let me in on their secrets.
Here's what I've noticed. In some places, folks are generally happy. Programmers get along. They feel as if they are all "in this together." At businesses like this I spend most of my time actually teaching object-oriented design.
Other places, folks are surprisingly miserable. There's a lot of discord, and the programmers have devolved into competing "camps." In these situations the course rapidly morphs away from OO Design and into wide-ranging group discussions about how to resolve deeply embedded conflicts.
Tolstoy famously said that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This is known as the Anna Karenina Principle, and describes situations in which success depends on meeting all of a number of criteria. The only way to be happy is to succeed at every one of them. Unhappiness, unfortunately, can be achieved by any combination of failure. Thus, all happy businesses are similar, but unh