79: Just Add QEMU

Coming up this time on the show, we'll be talking to Sean Bruno. He's been using poudriere and QEMU to cross compile binary packages, and has some interesting stories to tell about it. We've also got answers to viewer-submitted questions and all this week's news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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AsiaBSDCon 2015 schedule

Almost immediately after we finished recording an episode last week, the 2015 AsiaBSDCon schedule went up
This year's conference will be between 12-15 March at the Tokyo University of Science in Japan
The first and second days are for tutorials, as well as the developer summit and vendor summit
Days four and five are the main event with the presentations, which Kris and Allan both made the cut for once again
Not counting the ones that have yet to be revealed (as of the day we're recording this), there will be thirty-six different talks in all - four BSD-neutral, four NetBSD, six OpenBSD and twenty-two FreeBSD
Summaries of all the presentations are on the timetable page if you scroll down a bit ***

FreeBSD foundation updates and more

The FreeBSD foundation has posted a number of things this week, the first of which is their February 2015 status update
It provides some updates on the funded projects, including PCI express hotplugging and FreeBSD on the POWER8 platform
There's a FOSDEM recap and another update of their fundraising goal for 2015
They also have two new blog posts: a trip report from SCALE13x and a featured "FreeBSD in the trenches" article about how a small typo caused a lot of ZFS chaos in the cluster
"Then panic ensued. The machine didn't panic -- I did." ***

OpenBSD improves browser security

No matter what OS you run on your desktop, the most likely entry point for an exploit these days is almost certainly the web browser
Ted Unangst writes in to the OpenBSD misc list to introduce a new project he's working on, simply titled "improving browser security"
He gives some background on the W^X memory protection in the base system, but also mentions that some applications in ports don't adhere to it
For it to be enforced globally instead of just recommended, at least one browser (or specifically, one JIT engine) needs to be fixed to use it
"A system that is 'all W^X except where it's not' is the same as a system that's not W^X. We've worked hard to provide a secure foundation for programs; we'd like to see them take advantage of it."
The work is being supported by the Published on 10 years, 9 months ago