Episode Details

This week on BSDNow, we’ve got voting news for you (No not that election), a closer look at

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Headlines

ARIN 38 involvement, vote!

• Isaac (.Ike) Levy, one of our interview guests from earlier this year, is running for a seat on the 15 person ARIN Advisory Council
• His goal is to represent the entire *BSD community at this important body that makes decisions about how IP addresses are allocated and managed
• Biographies and statements for all of the candidates are available here
• The election ends Friday October 28th
• If elected, Ike will be looking for input from the community ***

LibreSSL not just available but default (DragonFlyBSD)

• DragonFly has become the latest BSD to join the growing LibreSSL family. As mentioned a few weeks back, they were in the process of wiring it up as a replacement for OpenSSL.
• With this latest commit, you can now build the entire base and OpenSSL isn’t built at all.
• Congrats, and hopefully more BSDs (and Linux) jump on the bandwagon Compat_43 is gone
• RiP 4.3 Compat support.. Well for DragonFly anyway.
• This commit finally puts out to pasture the 4.3 support, which has been disabled by default in DragonFly for almost 5 years now.
• This is a nice cleanup of their tree, removing more than a thousand lines of code and some of the old cruft still lingering from 4.3. ***

Create your first FreeBSD kernel module

• This is an interesting tutorial from Abdelhadi Khiati, who is currently a master's student in AI and robotics

I have been lucky enough to participate in Google Summer of Code with the FreeBSD foundation. I was amazed by the community surrounding it which was noob friendly and very helpful (Thank you FreeBSD <3)

I wanted to make a starting tutorial for people to write a simple module for kernel before diving inside more complicated kernel shizzle

The kernel module that we will be working on is a simple event handler for the kernel. It will be composed of 2 parts, the event handling function, and the module declaration

The module event handler is a function that handles different events for the module. Like the module being loaded, unloaded or on system shutdown

Now that we have the events handling function ready. We need to declare the moduledata_t to be able to use it inside DECLARE_MODULE macro and load it into the kernel. It has the module name and a pointer to the event handling function

Lastly, we need to declare the module using the DECLARE_MODULE macro. Which has the following structure:

~~
DECLARE_MODULE(name, moduledata_t data, sub, order);
~~

name: The module name that will be used in the SYSINIT() call to identify the module.
data: The moduledata_t structure that we already presented.
sub : Since we are using a driver here so