This week learn more about FreeBSD and their hardware support processes. Then, as always, we cover all the rest of BSD world with the latest news and tutorials.

POWER to the People: Making FreeBSD a First Class Citizen on POWER

The power and promise of all open source software is freedom. Another way to express freedom is choice — choice of platforms, deployment models, stacks, configurations, etc.

The FreeBSD Foundation is dedicated to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide. But, what does this mean, exactly, you may wonder. The truth is it means many different things, but in all cases the Foundation acts to expand freedom and choice so that FreeBSD users have the power to serve their varied compute needs.

This blog tells the story of one specific way the Foundation helps a member of the community provide greater hardware choice for all FreeBSD users.

Releases

FreeNAS 11.3-U1: This is the first maintenance release of 11.3 with nearly one hundred fixes and improvements for both FreeNAS and the upcoming TrueNAS 11.3 release train. You’ll find numerous improvements to the snapshot, replication, and directory service features, improved support for encrypted pools, an update to Samba to address CVE-2019-14907, and many other visual or help text refinements throughout the UI.

TrueNAS 11.3 represents another major advancement in the quality and functionality of the leading Open Storage platform. TN 11.3 supports the very popular API and Web UI improvements of the previous FreeNAS release. It also introduces easy-setup wizards, major replication improvements, and over 1400 other improvements from TrueNAS 11.2-U8!

GhostBSD 20.02 Now Available: A custom ZFS partition editor has been added, and t is possible to install GhostBSD with ZFS on the same disk containing Windows, Linux, or Mac OSX partitions. The system has been updated to 1201512. The Update Station application has multiple improvements, and numerous software applications have been updated.

DragonFlyBSD 5.8 is another big step forward for the operating system and their first release of 2020. DragonFlyBSD 5.8 brings performance improvements to TMPFS, updated Intel and Linux DRM graphics drivers including for AMD Radeon hardware, FSCK support for their modern HAMMER2 file-system, DSynth is getting into order, AMD Zen 2 support improvements, and other work. DragonFlyBSD 5.8 release images can be obtained from their mirrors.

BSDSec

There were none SA this week, but it’s always worth following BSDSec.

News

Due to increasing risk of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Japan, AsiaBSDCon’s organizing team has decided to cancel the conference which was planned March 19-22 2020. For registration fees, they will accept cancel requests and 50% refund.

In the last couple of months, a few new desktop BSD have been announced. There is HyperbolaBSD which was Hyperbola GNU/Linux previously. Another new entry in the BSD world is FuryBSD. “FuryBSD is a back to basics lightweight desktop distribution based on stock FreeBSD.” It is basically FreeBSD with a desktop environment pre-configured and several apps preinstalled. The goal is to quickly get a FreeBSD-based system running on your computer. Read more of from itsfoss.com’s review.

u2f/fido support has been just committed in NetBSD -current. You need to cvs update, recompile the kernel and rebuild userland to get the new packages. Read how to set this up in the message.

ZFSonLinux is now OpenZFS. OpenZFS is an advanced file system and volume manager which was originally developed for Solaris and is now maintained by the OpenZFS community. Because it will contain the ZFS source code for both Linux and FreeBSD, we will rename the “ZFSonLinux” code repository to “OpenZFS”.

Microsoft is changing the security defaults for Active Directory to eliminate some security vulnerabilities in its protocols. These new security defaults may disrupt existing FreeNAS/TrueNAS deployments once Windows systems are updated. The Windows updates may appear sometime in March 2020; no official date has been announced as of yet. FreeNAS and TrueNAS users should update to version 11.3 (or 11.2-U8) to avoid potential disruption of their networks when updating to the latest versions of Windows software after March 1, 2020. Version 11.3 has been released and version 11.2-U8 will be available in early March.

a2k20 Hackathon Reports (OpenBSD’s hackathon in Hobart, Australia):

• Ken Westerback wrote a report on xhci(4), dhclient(8), and scsi
• Rafael Sadowski on KDE+Qt5 progress and more

2020 FreeBSD Community day, co-located with FOSS-north 2020, will take place in Gothenburg, Sweden, March 29. . This is a public event intended for developers and anyone with an interest in FreeBSD, or who is looking to learn more about FreeBSD and the FreeBSD project. The idea is to have a good mix of interesting FreeBSD talks, discussions and to use the day as a way to show off FreeBSD to people interested in the Project. It will also be a chance for attendees to meet developers and to try FreeBSD. No pre-registration is required.

Tutorials

How to Configure DHCP When Using VLANs in OPNsense: When you are new to creating VLANs on your network, you may wonder about the necessary steps in order to create a properly functioning VLAN. If you set up OPNsense with one WAN and one LAN interface, it is kind enough to set up a basic configuration for the LAN interface with DHCP enabled and a single firewall rule that allows access to the Internet. You can consider this configuration to be a “flat” network, which means that every device is on the same network and can communicate.

The situation with Go on OpenBSD: If you stick to supported OpenBSD versions, upgrading your machines as older OpenBSD releases fall out of support (as the OpenBSD people want you to do), you should not have any problems with your own Go programs. The latest Go release will support the currently supported OpenBSD versions (as long as OpenBSD remains a supported platform for Go), and the Go 1.0 compatibility guarantee means that you can always rebuild your current Go programs with newer versions of Go. You might have problems with compiled binaries that you don’t want to rebuild, but the understanding is that this is the case for OpenBSD in general; it doesn’t guarantee a stable ABI even for C programs (cf). If you use OpenBSD, you have to be prepared to rebuild your code after OpenBSD upgrades regardless of what language it’s written in.

This video tutorial is an install of Enlightenment 0.22.4, and Slim with a few configs on FreeBSD 12.1.

More

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Meet FuryBSD, NetBSD 9.0 has been released, OpenBSD Foundation 2019 campaign wrapup, a retrospective on OmniOS ZFS-based NFS fileservers, NetBSD Fundraising 2020 goal, OpenSSH 8.2 released, and more.

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 2020-03-02.

In Other BSDs for 2020/02/29 is out, too.

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Thanks for reading and see you next week!