Issue 138
Published February 01, 2023

Looking for a FreeBSD job? There’re some in + all the latest news from the BSD commmunity.

Releases

OPNsense 23.1: 23.1, nicknamed “Quintessential Quail”, features Unbound DNS statistics with a blocklist rewrite in Python, improved WAN SLAAC operability, firewall alias BGP ASN type support, PHP 8.1, assorted FreeBSD networking updates, MVC/API pages for packet capture/virtual IPs/IPsec connection management, IPsec configuration file migration to swanctl.conf, new sslh plugin, ddclient custom backend support (including Azure), WireGuard kernel module plugin variant as the new default plus much more.

BSDSec

No security announcements.

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

News

DiscoBSD - 2.11BSD-based UNIX-like Operating System for STM32 and PIC32 Microcontrollers: DiscoBSD is a 2.11BSD-based UNIX-like operating system for microcontrollers, with a focus on high portability to memory constrained devices without a memory management unit. This microcontroller-focused operating system is the continuation of RetroBSD, a 2.11BSD-based OS targeting only the MIPS-based PIC32MX7. DiscoBSD is multi-platform, as it also supports Arm Cortex-M4 STM32F4 devices. Source code to the system is freely available under a BSD-like license.

Hiring: FreeBSD OS Developer: Klara Inc. is looking for a FreeBSD Operating System Developer to join their growing team of Open Source Specialists. In this role you will be working as part of a FreeBSD team to design and build new features and fix bugs in FreeBSD. Their team is building new key features for FreeBSD and contributing bug fixes and improvements that make life easier for all users of the operating system. The ideal candidate will have experience working with Open Source Operating Systems projects in either the kernel, user space or ports areas. The ideal candidate also has an interest in team work, and specifically being able to involve and engage with other developers to make changes which lead to the best result for the users. As a FreeBSD OS Developer, you will work directly with their customers to design and implement improvements and enhancements to FreeBSD. In this role you will have the opportunity to build the future of FreeBSD.

New Open Position: FreeBSD Userland Software Developer: Are you a versatile problem-solver with a knack for operating system development? Do you thrive working in an open source development environment with a diverse team? If so, the FreeBSD Foundation is searching for a software developer with varied interests and skills and a passion to perfect the user experience on FreeBSD.

BSD Now 491: Catch the Spammers : Dragonfly BSD 6.4 is out, Running OpenZFS – Choosing Between FreeBSD and Linux, OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems ebook leaks, catching 71% spam, crazy unix shell prompts, Linux Binary Compatibility: Ubuntu on FreeBSD, Reproducible Builds Summit Venice 2022, and more.

FreeBSD Status Report - Fourth Quarter 2022: The New Year has started and here is the last status report of 2022, including 34 reports. You will also notice that for the first time a new category has been introduced: the Cloud category. Here’s an extensive list of topics covered: FreeBSD Team Reports, FreeBSD Core Team, FreeBSD Foundation, FreeBSD Release Engineering Team, Cluster Administration Team, Continuous Integration, Ports Collection, Status reports: New workflow • Projects, Console screen reader infrastructure, Vessel - Integrated Application Containers for FreeBSD, Enable the NFS server to run in a vnet prison, Pytest support for the FreeBSD testing framework • Userland, Base System OpenSSH Update • Kernel, Enabling Snapshots on Filesystems Using Journaled Soft Updates, Wireless updates, Netlink on FreeBSD, Adding basic CTF support to ddb • Architectures, CheriBSD 22.12 release, FreeBSD/riscv64 Improvements, go on FreeBSD riscv64, FreeBSD/ARM64 on Xen • Cloud, FreeBSD on Microsoft HyperV and Azure, FreeBSD as a Tier 1 cloud-init Platform, OpenStack on FreeBSD • Documentation, Documentation Engineering Team, FreeBSD Presentations and Papers • Ports, FreshPorts - help wanted, PortsDB: Program that imports the ports tree into an SQLite database, KDE on FreeBSD, Xfce on FreeBSD, Pantheon desktop on FreeBSD, Budgie desktop on FreeBSD, GCC on FreeBSD, Another milestone for biology ports • Third Party Projects, Containers and FreeBSD: Pot, Potluck and Potman.

Modern Web Browser Recommendations For OpenBSD?: OpenBSD on a Thinkpad X230, what browsers would you recommend? This post links to Reddit discussion when OP says: > installed Firefox via ‘pkg_add’. I noticed though that it gets a little hot at times, and YouTube kind of spazzes out with codec errors from time to time for some reason without any additional Firefox plugins installed. What modern browser options exist for OpenBSD that run well? Is there Chromium, or Librewolf etc?

Tutorials

Coding new ioctls to produce screendumps from the console: Screenshots are easy if you’re running the X Window system or perhaps working within a virtual machine, but what about those times when you need to capture some console output straight from real hardware?

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