BSD Weekly - Issue 19

Published May 13, 2020

This week we take a look at NetBSD and FreeBSD projects accepted into Google Summer of Code. Then at the rest of BSD world with the latest releases, news, tutorials and security announcements.

Google Summer of Code 2020: NetBSD and FreeBSD projects

NetBSD team is very happy to announce The NetBSD Foundation Google Summer of Code 2020 projects:

Apurva Nandan - Benchmark NetBSD
Jain Naman - Curses library automated testing
Nikita Gillmann - Make system(3) and popen(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally
Ayushi Sharma - Enhance the syzkaller support for NetBSD
Aditya Vardhan Padala - Rumpkernel Syscall Fuzzing
Nisarg Joshi - Fuzzing the network stack of NetBSD in a rumpkernel environment
Jason High - Extending the functionality of the netpgp suite

The community bonding period - where students get in touch with mentors and community - started on May 4 and will go on until June 1. The coding period will be June 1 to August 24.

FreeBSD is partaking this year as well. Prominent FreeBSD developers are mentoring students to develop for NetFPGA, Network Configuration Libraries, eBPF XDP Hooks, audit(4) Kernel Dump Regression Testing, and Capsicumization of the base system.

Releases

DragonFly 5.8.1 is released, a bugfix update for 5.8.0. The release tag commit has the list of changes, or you can go right to the release page.

The first BETA build for the FreeBSD 11.4 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

BSDSec

We have new release - LibreSSL 3.1.1, which will be arriving in the LibreSSL directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon. This is the first stable release from the 3.1 series, which is included with OpenBSD 6.7. The LibreSSL project continues improvement of the codebase to reflect modern, safe programming practices.

OpenBSD Errata: May 10th, 2020 (ospfd). Errata patches for ospfd have been released for OpenBSD 6.5 and 6.6. ospfd could generate corrupt OSPF Router (Type 1) LSAs in certain situations. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.

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

News

HamBSD Development Log 2020-05-07: The HamBSD project aims to bring amateur packet radio to OpenBSD, including support for TCP/IP over AX.25 and APRS tracking/digipeating in the base system. Right now, work on HamBSD is still looking at improvements to aprsisd(8). Next steps:

Keep track of number of packets uploaded and downloaded
Add those statistics to station capabilities packet

NetBSD Core Team Changes. Matt Thomas (matt@) has served on the NetBSD core team for over ten years, and has made many contributions, including ELF functionality, being the long-time VAX maintainer, gcc contributor, the generic pmap, and also networking functionality, and platform bring-up over the years. Matt has stepped down from the NetBSD core team, and we thank him for his many, extensive contributions. Robert Elz (kre@), a long time BSD contributor, has kindly accepted the offer to join the core team, and help us out with the benefit of his experience and advice over many years. Amongst other things, Robert has been maintaining our shell, liaising with the Austin Group,and bringing it up to date with modern functionality.

My Experience as a FreeBSD Foundation Co-Op Student: Zhengyuan “Tiger” Gao joined the Foundation team in January as part of their continued work with the co-op program at University of Waterloo, Ontario. He shares his experience working with the FreeBSD Project.

WireGuard patchset for OpenBSD: In a post to tech@, Matt Dunwoodie announced the availability of a WireGuard® patchset for OpenBSD. From the WireGuard® point-of-view, this is an official patchset. WireGuard is a free and open-source software application and communication protocol that implements virtual private network techniques to create secure point-to-point connections in routed or bridged configurations.

TLSv1.3 server code enabled in LibreSSL in -current: Joel Sing (jsing@) enabled the TLSv1.3 server code (in LibreSSL) in -current. The client code was already enabled in -current (and will be in the 6.7 release).

Tutorials

Getting started with FreeBSD as a desktop operating system. FreeBSD is a great operating system, but, by design, it does not come with a desktop environment. Without installing additional software from FreeBSD’s ports and packages collection, FreeBSD is a command-line only experience. FreeBSD can be turned into a desktop operating system with any of a wide selection of desktop environments, but it takes time, effort, and following a lot of written instructions. FuryBSD solves that problem by providing a live desktop image that users can evaluate before installing. Currently, FuryBSD provides an Xfce image and a KDE image. Each of these images provides an installation of FreeBSD that has a desktop environment pre-installed.

FreeBSD 12.1 on a workstation: This tutorial explain how to get a graphical desktop using FreeBSD 12.1 and covers:

Intel graphics hardware support
Install MATE
Setting up the graphical interface
Power management

How to Create a Basic DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) Network in OPNsense: DMZ (demilitarized zone) is a segmented part of a network that is used to host all publicly accessible websites and services. The intention is to protect the internal network from external threats. It is an effective strategy to minimize public exposure of your critical assets as well as limit the damage caused when an intruder is able to penetrate your network.

ZFS 101—Understanding ZFS storage and performance: Learn to get the most out of your ZFS filesystem in new series on storage fundamentals.

List of useful FreeBSD Commands one users uses daily on their system.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Encrypted Crash Dumps in FreeBSD, Time on Unix, Improve ZVOL sync write performance with a taskq, central log host with syslog-ng, NetBSD Entropy overhaul, Setting Up NetBSD Kernel Dev Environment, 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 2020-05-11.

In Other BSDs for 2020/05/09 is out, too.

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