115: Controlling the Transmissions

Controlling the Transmissions

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We have a fresh quarterly status report from the FreeBSD project. Once again it almost merits an entire show, but we will try to hit all the highlights.
Bhyve - Porting of the Intel edk2 UEFI firmware, allowing Windows in headless mode, and Illumos support. Also porting to ARM has begun!
Improved Support for Acer C720 ChromeBooks
High Availability Clustering in CTL (Cam Target Layer)
Root Remounting (Similar to pivot_root in Linux). This work allows using “reboot -r” to do a fast-reboot, with a partial shutdown, kill all processes, and re-mount rootfs and boot. Especially useful for booting from mfs or similar then transitioning to iscsi or some other backing storage
OpenCL Support in Mesa, as well as kernel progress on the i915 driver
Improved support for UEFI FrameBuffer on a bunch of recent MacBook Pro and other Macs, in addition to improvements to “vt” framebuffer driver for high resolution displays.
ZFS support for UEFI Boot (Needs testing, but used in PC-BSD for a couple months now), and importing new features from IllumOS (resumable send, receive prefetch, replication checksumming, 50% less ram required for L2ARC, better prefetch)
DTrace SDT probes added to TCP code, to replace the old TCPDEBUG kernel option. Recompiling the kernel is no longer required to debug TCP, just use DTrace
Ongoing work to bring us a native port/package of GitLab ***

We have a public call for testing for FreeBSD users of Meteor by Tom Freudenberg
The included link includes all the details on how to currently get meteor boot-strapped on your box and bring up the server
So far the reports are positive, many users reporting that it is running on their 10.2 systems / jails just fine.
Just a day ago the original porter mentioned that OpenBSD is ready to go for testing using the prepared dev bundle. ***

Speaking of OpenBSD, we have an update from Mike Larkin about the status of the OpenBSD native hypervisor vmm(4).
His twitter post included the output from a successful VM bootup of OpenBSD 5.8-current, all the way to multi-user
While the code hasn’t been committed (yet) we will keep you informed when it lands so you too can begin playing with it. ***