Episode Details

The wait is over, 11.0 of FreeBSD has (officially) launched. We’ll have coverage of this, plus a couple looks back at UNIX history, and a crowd-favorite guest today.

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Headlines

FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE Now Available

• FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE is now officially out.
• A last minute reroll to pickup OpenSSL updates and a number of other security fixes meant the release was a little behind schedule, and shipped as 11.0-RELEASE-p1, but the release is better for it
• Improved support for 802.11n and various wifi drivers
• Support for the AArch64 (arm64) architecture has been added.
• Native graphics support has been added to the bhyve(8) hypervisor.
• A new flag, “onifconsole” has been added to /etc/ttys. This allows the system to provide a login prompt via serial console if the device is an active kernel console, otherwise it is equivalent to off.
• The xz(1) utility has been updated to support multi-threaded compression.
• A number of kernel panics related to VNET have been fixed
• The IMAGACT_BINMISC kernel configuration option has been enabled by default, which enables application execution through emulators, such as QEMU via binmiscctl(8).
• The GENERIC kernel configuration has been updated to include the IPSEC option by default.
• The kern.osrelease and kern.osreldate are now configurable jail(8) parameters
• A new sysctl(8), kern.racct.enable, has been added, which when set to a non-zero value allows using rctl(8) with the GENERIC kernel. A new kernel configuration option, RACCT_DISABLED has also been added.
• The minimum (arc_min) and maximum (arc_max) values for the ZFS adaptive replacement cache can be modified at runtime.
• Changes to watch out for:
  • OpenSSH DSA key generation has been disabled by default. It is important to update OpenSSH keys prior to upgrading. Additionally, Protocol 1 support has been removed.
  • By default, the ifconfig(8) utility will set the default regulatory domain to FCC on wireless interfaces. As a result, newly created wireless interfaces with default settings will have less chance to violate country-specific regulations.
  • An issue was discovered with Amazon® EC2™ images which would cause the virtual machine to hang during boot when upgrading from previous FreeBSD versions. New EC2™ installations are not affected, but existing installations running earlier releases are advised to wait until the issue is resolved in an Errata Notice before upgrading. An Errata Notice to address this is planned following the release. ***

process listing consistency

• Ted Unangst asks: how consistent is the output of ps(1)?
• If processes are starting and exiting constantly, and you run ps(1), is the output guaranteed to reflect that exact moment in time, or might it include some processes that have gone away before ps(1) exited, and include some processes that did not exist when ps(1) was started?
• Ted provides a little example chicken/egg program to try to create such an inconsistency, so you can test out your OS
• On OpenBSD ps(1) was switched away from the reading kernel memory directly, and in