Episode Details

This week on BSDNow, Allan and I are back from AsiaBSDCon and we have an interview with Brad Davis about the new “Packaging Base” call-for-testing. We’ll be sharing our thoughts and stories on how the week

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AsiaBSDCon 2016 - Wrap-up

FreeBSD gets Haswell graphics support in time for 11.0-RELEASE

• The moment that many have been waiting for has finally arrived, support for Haswell graphics has been committed to FreeBSD -CURRENT
• The brings the DRM/i915 code up to date with Linux kernel 3.8.13
• Work has already started on updating to Linux kernel 3.9
• It is hoped that subsequent updates will be much easier, and much faster
• It does not appear to require setting the i915.preliminary_hw_support loader tunable ***

OpenBSD vmm/vmd Update

• For the third year running, bhyvecon was held last week, during the lead up to AsiaBSDCon
• Bhyvecon has expanded, and now covers all virtualization on BSDs
• There were presentations on bhyve, Xen Dom0 on FreeBSD, Xen DomU for OpenBSD, and OpenBSD’s vmm
• OpenBSD vmm started at the Brisbane 2015 hackathon in Australia
• Work continued through the summer and fall thanks to funding by the OpenBSD Foundation
• The presentation answered some outstanding questions, such as, why not just port bhyve?
• Initial focus is OpenBSD on OpenBSD
• Loader currently supports FreeBSD and NetBSD as well
• After the initial commits, other developers joined in to help with the work
• Reyk reworked the vmd and vmctl commands, to provide a better user interface
• Future plans:
  • Nested VMX
  • i386 support
  • AMD SVM support
  • Filesystem passthru
  • Live migration (with ZFS like command syntax)
• Other developers are working on related projects:
  • qemu interface: Allow qemu to be accelerated by the vmm backend, while providing emulated hardware, for legacy systems
  • KVM interface: Make vmm look like KVM, so existing tools like openstack “just work” ***

Interview - Brad Davis - brd@freebsd.org / @so14k

• Packaging Base

News Roundup

Packaging the base system with pkg(8)

• The official call for testing for FreeBSD’s pkg(8)’d base is out
• Users are requested to checkout the release-pkg branch, and build it as normal (buildworld, buildkernel)
• Instead of installworld, run: make packages
• This will produce a pkg repo in the /usr/obj directory
• The post to the mailing list includes an example pkg repo config file to point to those packages
• Run: pkg update -r FreeBSD-base
• This will read the metadata from the new repository
• Then run: pkg install -g 'FreeBSD-*'
• This will find all packages that start with ‘FreeBSD-’ and install them
• In the future, there will be meta packages, so you can just install FreeBSD-base and it will pull in other packages are dependencies
• Currently, there are