Episode Details

This week on BSDNow, Allan is back in down from Europe! We’ll get to hear some of his wrap-up and get caught up on the latest BSD

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Headlines

FreeBSD Quarterly Report

• This quarterly status report starts with a rather interesting introduction by Warren Block
• ASLR
• Porting CEPH to FreeBSD
• RCTL I/O Rate Limiting
• The Graphics Stack on FreeBSD (Haswell is in, work is progressing on the next update)
• CAM I/O Scheduler
• NFS Server updates, working around the 16 group limit, and implementing pNFS, allowing NFS to scale beyond a single server
• Static Analysis of the FreeBSD Kernel with PVS Studio
• PCI-express HotPlug
• GitLab Port committed!
• WITH_FAST_DEPEND and other improvements to the FreeBSD build system
• Lots of other interesting stuff ***

A Prog By Any Other Name

• Ted Unangst looks at what goes into the name of a program
• “Sometimes two similar programs are really the same program with two names. For example, grep and egrep are two commands that perform very similar functions and are therefore implemented as a single program. Running ls -i and observing the inode number of each file will reveal that there is only one file. Calling the program egrep is a shorthand for -E and does the same thing.”
• So BSD provides __progname in libc, so a program can tell what its name is
• But, what if it has more than one name?
• “In fact, every program has three names: its name in the filesystem, the name it has been invoked with, and whatever it believes its own name to be.”
• Of course it is not that easy.
• “there’s another set of choices for each name, the full path and the basename”
• “It’s even possible on some systems for argv[0] to be NULL.”
• He then goes on to rename doas (the OpenBSD light replacement for sudo) to banana and discuss what happens
• “On that note, another possible bug is to realize that syslog by default uses progname. A user may be able to evade log monitoring by invoking doas with a different name. (Just fixed.)”
• Another interesting article from our friend Ted ***

FreeBSD and NetBSD Google Summer of Code projects have been announced

• Some FreeBSD highlights:
  • Add SCSI passthrough to CTL (share an optical drive via iSCSI)
  • Add USB target mode driver based on CTL (share a USB device via iSCSI)
  • API to link created /dev entries to sysctl nodes
  • Implement Ethernet Ring Protection Switching (ERPS)
  • HD Audio device model in userspace for bhyve
• Some NetBSD highlights:
  • Implement Ext4fs support in ReadOnly mode
  • NPF and blacklistd web interface
  • Port U-Boot so it can be compiled on NetBSD
  • Split debug symbols for pkgsrc builds ***

libressl - more vague priomises

• We haven’t had a Ted U