Issue 32
Published August 12, 2020

This week we look at how hardware is supported across BSDs. Then we take a look at the rest of BSD world with latest SAs, releases, news and tutorials.

Hardware support in BSD is not so bad

In this article the author has estimated the status of PCI hardware support in the latest versions of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD systems with the help of lists of supported device IDs extracted from kernel sources taking into account popularity of devices.

It still might be a bit misleading, as we don't know when they started to be supported, as we still have a lot of modern hardware unsupported.

Releases

BSD Router Project 1.97: Based on a FreeBSD 12.1-STABLE (r363822), it fixes some missing Ethernet NIC modules (Chelsio Ethernet VF driver and Ethernet QLogic 3200 series). This version adds some new packages - Mellanox Firmware tools (lite version), WireGuard, vim-tiny, mrtparse (MRT format data parser), nrpe3 (Nagios client including nagios-plugins), frr7-pythontools (helper script to help reload frr). New features: load of Intel microcodes by default; update to 12.1-STABLE. Bug fixes: add Chelsio Ethernet VF driver (ifcxgbev); add missing ifqlxgb.ko for Ethernet QLogic 3200 series; correctly disabling ICMP redirect by default. New packages: Mellanox firmware tools (lite version); WireGuard; vim-tiny and more.

GhostBSD 20.08.04 Now Available: This release comes with kernel, OS and software application updates. We updated the MATE desktop to 1.24.0. A new interesting feature is the boot environment backup before updates.

BSDSec

New FreeBSD Security Advisories and Errata noticies

OpenBSD also got some errata:

As always, it's worth following BSDSec. RSS feed and Twitter account available.

News

LLVM 10.0.0 imported into OpenBSD -current: Patrick Wildt (patrick@) upgraded -current to version 10.0.0 of LLVM including clang, lld and lldb..

FreeBSD Foundation Q2 2020 Status Update: Written as part of the FreeBSD Project’s 2nd Quarter 2020 Status Report, check out the highlights of what have been done to help FreeBSD last quarter, including: COVID-19 Impact on the Foundation, Partnerships and Commercial User Support, Partnerships and Commercial User Support, OS Improvements, University of Waterloo Co-op, Continuous Integration and Quality Assurance, Supporting FreeBSD Infrastructure, FreeBSD Advocacy and Education, Foundation Board Meeting and Legal/FreeBSD IP.

There are some new reports from NetBSD and GSoC:

Tutorials

How to install a Wireguard VPN client in a FreeBSD jail: WireGuard is an open-source software application and communication protocol that implements VPN to create secure point-to-point connections in routed or bridged mode. It was initially developed for Linux but now ported to FreeBSD and other operating systems. This page explains how to install and set up WireGuard clients on the FreeBSD system, including jail.

NetBSD on the NanoPi NEO2: The NanoPi NEO2 from FriendlyARM has been serving the post author well since 2018, being their test machine for OpenBSD/arm64 related things. As NetBSD/evbarm finally gained support for AArch64 in NetBSD 9.0, released back in February, they decided to give it a try on this device. The board only has 512MB of RAM, and this is where NetBSD really shines.

Scripted Configuration (Screencast): This is a demonstration of using rset(1) for basic configuration management, as well as more complex data-driven systems orchestration.

How to try FuguIta: FuguIta is OpenBSD based live CD. Learn how to create FuguIta LiveDVD, LiveUSB and how to boot it.

USB audio devices on FreeBSD: Hardware support and configuration for USB audio devices, such as the Behringer UMC22 sound card, on FreeBSD.

Installing a jitsi server: A very detailed explanation of how to set up Jitsi on FreeBSD and how the various packages interact.

More

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now has interview with Warner Losh about Unix history, the 2.11-BSD restoration project, the Unix heritage society, proper booting, and what devmatch is.

The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to providing summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems. The latest is from 2020-08-10.

In Other BSDs for 2020/08/08 is out, too.

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Stay home and stay safe!