Episode Details

This week on the show, we will be interviewing GNN of the FreeBSD project to talk about the new TeachBSD initiative. That plus the latest BSD headlines, all coming your way right now!

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Headlines

FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE Announcement

• FreeBSD 10.3 has landed, with extended support until April 30, 2018
• This is likely to be the last extended support release, as starting with 11, the new support model will encourage upgrading to the latest minor version by ending support for the previous minor version approximately 2 months after each point release. The Major version / stable branch will still be supported for the same 5 year term. This will allow the FreeBSD project to move forward more quickly, while still providing the same level of long term support
• The UEFI boot loader is much improved, and now supports booting root-on-ZFS, and the beastie menu
• The beastie menu itself has been updated with support for ZFS Boot Environments
• The CAM Target Layer (CTL) now supports High Availability, allowing the construction of much more advanced storage systems
• The 64bit Linux Emulation Layer was backported
• Reroot support was added, allowing the system to boot off of a minimal image, such as a mfsroot and then reload all of userland from a different root file system (such as iSCSI, NFS, etc)
• The version of xz(1) has been updated to support multi-threaded compression
• sesutil(8) has been introduced, making it easier to manage large storage nodes
• Various ZFS updates
• As usual, a huge number of driver updates are also included ***

How to use OpenBSD with Libreboot: detailed instructions

• This tutorial covers installing OpenBSD on a Thinkpad X200 using Libreboot, a replacement for the traditional BIOS/firmware that comes from the manufacturer
• “Since 5.9, OpenBSD supports EFI boot mode, which means that it also have had to support framebuffer out of the box, so lack of proprietary VGA BIOS blob is no longer a problem and you can boot it with unmodified Libreboot binary release 20150518.”
• “In order to install OpenBSD on such a machine you will need someadditional preparations, since regular install59.fs won't work because bsd.rd doesn't have a framebuffer console.”
• A few extra steps are required to get it going, but they are outlined in the post
• This may be very interesting to those who prefer not to depend on binary blobs ***

Linking the FreeBSD base system with lld -- status update

• The FreeBSD Foundation’s Ed Maste provides an update on the LLVM mailing list about the progress of replacing the GNU linker with the lld in the FreeBSD base system
• “I'm pleased to report that I can now build a runnable FreeBSD system using lld as the linker (for buildworld), with a few workarounds and work-in-progress patches. I have not yet extensively tested the result but it is possible to login to the resulting system, and basic sanity tests I've tried are successful. Note that the kernel is still linked with ld.bfd.”
• Outstanding Issues
  • Symbol version support (PR