OpenBSD features that aren’t widely known and more.
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News
Valuable News – 2024/02/26: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems.
New code for SIGILL faults help identify misbranches: If you run recent OpenBSD on certain amd64 or aarch64 platforms, indirect branching to an “unexpected” location will crash your program, in order to prevent ROP attacks and similar ways to have your program execute code where it shouldn’t. The OpenBSD compiler will insert an extra instruction in all the places where a branch is supposed to land, and if it lands anywhere else, a CPU fault is raised and your program gets an “Illegal Instruction”. Previously, crashes of this kind have looked more or less like any other kind of fault where code is executing random data or from random locations, but since the kernel knows when this has happened, we can make it explicit that the fault is due to missing branch target instructions, which will help a lot when debugging.
BSD Now 547: IT Impostor Syndrome: Overcoming imposter syndrome in IT, A Practical Guide to GNU sed With Examples, Early computer art by Barbara Nessim, Don’t prefill config files, Trapping Spambots Based on Target Domain Only, You cannot cURL under pressure, and more.
Tutorials
Some OpenBSD features that aren’t widely known: In this blog post, you will learn about some OpenBSD features that can be useful, but not widespread. They often have a niche usage, but it’s important to know they exist to prevent you from reinventing the wheel.
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