Last week was busy one for OpenBSD and FreeBSD. There are new releases for both and bunch of SAs. Plus the rest of BSD world with the latest releases, news, tutorials and security announcements.

Releases

FreeBSD 11.4-BETA2 Available: ISO images for the amd64, armv6, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures are available on most of FreeBSD mirror sites.

The OpenBSD project has released OpenBSD 6.7, marking the 48th release of operating system. These are some highlights of the improvements in the present release:

• For new installs on nearly all architectures the default file system is now FFS2, sporting 64-bit timestamps and block counters
• There are numerous SMP improvements, including unlocking of several system calls
• Hardware support in all architectures is much improved and expanded, with a number of new drivers including the iwx(4) driver for new Intel WiFi devices as well as significant expansion of arm64 and armv7 hardware support.
• Enabled rpki-client(8), to support Origin Validation in BGP-speaking routers in the base install.
• New versions of programs and subsystems maintained as part of OpenBSD but widely reused elsewhere (LibreSSL 3.1.1, OpenSSH 8.3, OpenSMTPD 6.7.0)

BSDSec

This week was really busy with Security Advisories and Errata notices both for FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

• FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-20:16.cryptodev
• FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-20:15.cryptodev
• FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-20:13.libalias
• FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-20:14.sctp
• FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-20:12.libalias
• FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-20:10.build
• FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-20:09.igb
• FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-20:08.tzdata
• OpenBSD Errata: May 13th, 2020 (wscons)
• OpenBSD Errata: May 22nd, 2020 (ssh)

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

News

tcplay(8) in DragonFly jumped from 2.0 to 3.3. This will be most relevant to you if you encrypt your disks.

You can now use newsyslog(8) to rotate logs being written by daemon(8) in DragonFly.

Martin Ivanov has completed his multiboot + DragonFly tutorial. You can read his users@ post on it now, though it should show up in dragonflybsd.org documentation soon.

TrueOS development ceased. Does anyone remember PC-BSD, the FreeBSD-based distribution aimed at desktop users? After being acquired by iXsystems and renamed to TrueOS, the graphical installer was removed in 2018 because TrueOS served more as a base for iXsystems’ other offerings, such as FreeNAS, And now, development has been halted entirely.

The FreeBSD Project is once again participating as a mentoring organization in the Google Season of Docs program. The goal of the program is to bring open source and technical writers together. Technical writers spend three months working closely with open source communities to bring their expertise to the project’s documentation. The list of available tasks and contact information is available on the FreeBSD wiki.

OpenZFS 0.8.4 is out as the latest update to this leading open-source ZFS file-system base for Linux and FreeBSD and coming together as well for macOS. OpenZFS 0.8.4 has a number of bug fixes, better AES-GCM performance, init script updates, enhancements to the systemd mount generator, and other miscellaneous changes.

First seed for OpenBSD/powerpc64 planted. In a set of commits to the tree on Saturday, Mark Kettenis (kettenis@) added the early beginnings of support for the 64-bit PowerPC platform. As support for additional hardware platforms brings opportunities to find (and fix) bugs on other, more established environments, this is definitely an interesting development. Of course it is still currently very much in its infancy, so don’t drag out your POWER9 systems just yet, unless you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and get some diffs submitted.

Communauté française autour d’OpenBSD: There’s a new French OpenBSD community.

rpki-client 6.7 has just been released and will be available in the rpki-client directory of any OpenBSD mirror soon. rpki-client is a FREE, easy-to-use implementation of the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) for Relying Parties (RP) to facilitate validation of the Route Origin of a BGP announcement.

Tutorials

In a post to the ports@ mailing list, Landry Breuil (landry@) shared some of his notes on using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests. He made a few enhancements for OpenBSD Journal.

Backup and Restore on NetBSD. Putting together the bits and pieces of a backup and restore concept, while not being rocket science, always seems to be a little bit ungrateful. Most Admin Handbooks handle this topic only within few pages. After replacing old Mac Mini’s OS by NetBSD, author tried to implement an automated backup, allowing them to handle it similarly to the time machine backups they’ve been using before.

Thinking about trying out OpenBSD on Surface Go 2? Someone did.

More

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about 5x if_bridge Performance Improvement, How Unix Won, Understanding VLAN Configuration on FreeBSD, Using bhyve PCI passthrough on OmniOS, TrueNAS 11.3-U2 Available, 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 2020-05-18.

In Other BSDs for 2020/05/16 is out, too.

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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Stay home and stay safe!