Podcast Episode Details

88: Below the Clouds

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This time on the show, we'll be talking with Ed Schouten about CloudABI. It's a new application binary interface with a strong focus on isolation and restricted capabilities. As always, all this week's BSD news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

FreeBSD quarterly status report

• The FreeBSD team has posted a report of the activities that went on between January and March of this year
• As usual, it's broken down into separate reports from the various teams in the project (ports, kernel, virtualization, etc)
• The ports team continuing battling the flood of PRs, closing quite a lot of them and boasting nearly 7,000 commits this quarter
• The core team and cluster admins dealt with the accidental deletion of the Bugzilla database, and are making plans for an improved backup strategy within the project going forward
• FreeBSD's future release support model was also finalized and published in February, which should be a big improvement for both users and the release team
• Some topics are still being discussed internally, mainly MFCing ZFS ARC responsiveness patches to the 10 branch and deciding whether to maintain or abandon C89 support in the kernel code
• Lots of activity is happening in bhyve, some of which we've covered recently, and a number of improvements were made this quarter
• Clang, LLVM and LLDB have been updated to the 3.6.0 branch in -CURRENT
• Work to get FreeBSD booting natively on the POWER8 CPU architecture is also still in progress, but it does boot in KVM for the time being
• The project to replace forth in the bootloader with lua is in its final stages, and can be used on x86 already
• ASLR work is still being done by the HardenedBSD guys, and their next aim is position-independent executable
• The report also touches on multipath TCP support, the new automounter, opaque ifnet, pkgng updates, secureboot (which should be in 10.2-RELEASE), GNOME and KDE on FreeBSD, PCIe hotplugging, nested kernel support and more
• Also of note: work is going on to make ARM a Tier 1 platform in the upcoming 11.0-RELEASE (and support for more ARM boards is still being added, including ARM64) ***

OpenBSD 5.7 released

• OpenBSD has formally released another new version, complete with the giant changelog we've come to expect
• In the hardware department, 5.7 features many driver improvements and fixes, as well as support for some new things: USB 3.0 controllers, newer Intel and Atheros wireless cards and some additional 10gbit NICs
• If you're using one of the Soekris boards, there's even a new driver to manipulate the GPIO and LEDs on them - this has some fun possibilities
• Some new security improvements include: SipHash being sprinkled in some areas to protect hashing functions, big Published on 10 years, 7 months ago