98: Our Code is Your Code

Coming up this time on the show, we'll be talking with the CTO of Xinuos, David Meyer, about their adoption of FreeBSD. We also discuss the BSD license model for businesses and the benefits of contributing changes back.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Enabling FreeBSD on AArch64

One of the things the FreeBSD foundation has been dumping money into lately is ARM64 support, but we haven't heard too much about it - this article should change that
Since it's on a mainstream ARM site, the article begins with a bit of FreeBSD history, leading up to the current work on ARM64
There's also a summary of some of the ARM work done at this year's BSDCan, including details about running it on the Cavium ThunderX platform (which has 48 cores)
As of just a couple months ago, dtrace is even working on this new architecture
Come 11.0-RELEASE, the plan is for ARM64 to get the same "tier 1" treatment as X86, which would imply binary updates for base and ports - something Raspberry Pi users often complain about not having ***

OpenBSD's tcpdump detailed

Most people are probably familiar with tcpdump, a very useful packet sniffing and capturing utility that's included in all the main BSD base systems
This video guide is specifically about the version in OpenBSD, which has gone through some major changes (it's pretty much a fork with no version number anymore)
Unlike on the other platforms, OpenBSD's tcpdump will always run in a chroot as an unprivileged user - this has saved it from a number of high-profile exploits
It also has support for the "pf.os" system, allowing you to filter out operating system fingerprints in the packet captures
There's also PF (and pflog) integration, letting you see which line in your ruleset triggered a specific match
Being able to run tcpdump directly on your router is pretty awesome for troubleshooting ***

More FreeBSD foundation at BSDCan