Issue 102
Published February 09, 2022

FreeBSD erratas plus the latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

Releases

No releases.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:07.la57: Recent Intel x86-64 CPUs support 5-level paging, extending the size of the virtual address space to 57 bits. The extension is enabled by setting a bit known as LA57 in a control register, and switching to 5-level paging during boot. LA57 support was tested on and is functional within QEMU, but fails on physical hardware.The kernel fails to boot on Intel CPUs that support LA57.

FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:08.i386 : The FreeBSD/i386 port supports running FreeBSD on 32-bit Intel and AMD CPUs. On the i386 platform, the operating system kernel is responsible for invalidating per-CPU TLBs (translation lookaside buffer) when virtual memory mappings are updated. The patch which was released as EN-22:04.pcid introduced a regression affecting FreeBSD 12.2 and 12.3. This regression introduced a bug in the i386 platform’s TLB invalidation logic. The regression causes kernel panics under multi-core CPU load.

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News

RAID-Z Expansion Feature for ZFS Goes Live: The Foundation sponsored feature reflows existing data to rewrite it onto a new arrangement of disks thereby freeing space at the end of the logical RAID-Z group. The feature reflows existing data, essentially rewriting it onto a new arrangement of disks – meaning the original group plus a newly added disk. In so doing, a new adjacent chunk of free space is created at the end of the logical RAID-Z group and thus at the end of each physical disk.

FreeBSD 13.1 Release Process: The release schedule for FreeBSD 13.1 has been released.

BSD Now 440: BSD Inside Zone: GhostBSD 22.01 is available, Packet Scheduling with Dummynet and FreeBSD, Inside zone installation, Why the FreeBSD Desktop and my Linux Rant, How to install Gnome on OpenBSD, The important Unix idea of the “virtual filesystem switch”, and more.

Tutorials

Poudriere on FreeBSD: A tutorial on how to setup and use Poudriere package build system on FreeBSD.

Modern inetd in FreeBSD: The inetd ‘super-server’ is a special application that ties incoming network connections to locally-run commands. While it is not a common part of deployments today, it still has potential to be useful in production environments, and definitely has a place in the future of FreeBSD.

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