Episode Details

This week on the show, we interview author Michael W Lucas to discuss his new book in the FreeBSD

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Headlines

OpenBSD 5.9 Released early

• Finished ahead of schedule! OpenBSD 5.9 has officially landed
• We’ve been covering some of the ongoing changes as they landed in the tree, but with the official release it’s time to bring you the final list of the new hotness which landed.
• First up:
  • Pledge - Over 70%! Of the userland utilities have been converted to use it, and the best part, you probably didn’t even notice
  • UEFI - Laptops which are pre-locked down to boot UEFI only can now be installed and used - GPT support has also been greatly improved
  • ‘Less’ was replaced with a fork from Illumos, and has been further improved
  • Xen DomU support - OpenBSD now plays nice in the cloud
  • X11 - Broadwell and Bay Trail are now supported
  • Initial work on making the network stack better support SMP has been added, this is still ongoing, but things are starting to happen
  • 802.11N! Specifically for the iwn/iwm drivers
  • In addition to support for UTF-8, most other locales have been ripped out, leaving only C and UTF-8 left standing in the wake
  • All and all, sounds like a solid new release with plenty of new goodies to play with. Go grab a copy now! ***

New routing table code (ART) enabled in -current

• While OpenBSD 5.9 just landed, we also have some interesting work landing right now in -CURRENT as well. Specifically the new routing table code (ART) has landed:

“I just enabled ART in -current, it will be the default routing table backend in the next snapshots.
The plan is to squash the possible regressions with this new routing table backend then when we're confident enough, take its route lookup out of the KERNEL_LOCK(). Yes, this is one of the big steps for our network SMP improvements.
In order to make progress, we need your help to make sure this new backend works well on your setup. So please, go download the next snapshot and report back.
If you encounter any routing table regression, please make sure that you cannot reproduce it with your old kernel and include the output of # route -n show
for the 2 kernels as well as the dmesg in your report.
I know that simple dhclient(8) based setups work with ART, so please do not flood us too much. It's always great to know that things work, but it's also hard to keep focus ;)
Thank your very much for your support!”

• There you have it folks! If 5.9 is already too stale for you, time to move over to -CURRENT and give the new routing tables a whirl. ***

fractal cells - FreeBSD-based All-In-One solution for software development startups

• Fractal Cells is a suite that transforms a stock FreeBSD installation into an instant “Startup Software Development Platform”
• It Integrates ZFS, PostgreSQL, OpenSMTPD, NGINX, OpenVPN, Redmine, Jenkins, Zabbix, Gitlab, and Ansible, all under OpenLDAP common authentication
• The suite is available under the 2-clause BSD license
• Provides