BSD Weekly - Issue 27

Published July 08, 2020

Main topic of this week is new Core Team of FreeBSD and newly announced Core Team Office Hours. Then we take a look at the rest of BSD world with latest releases, news and tutorials.

Core Team Office Hours

FreeBSD recently held an election for its governing body called the Core Team (results in News section).

The newly elected Core Team would like to invite you to a virtual town hall meeting. They’ll be holding two sessions, one timed well for Europe and the Americas; the other timed well for Asia, Africa and India. Sessions will be held at 1800 UTC on July 7, 2020 and 0200 UTC on July 8, 2020. See https://wiki.freebsd.org/OfficeHours for details on how to join either a live stream to watch, or an interactive meeting to participate. A link to this agenda (and any updates) will be there as well.

They’ll be discussing the chosen topics and taking general questions at the end. They’ll have a moderator who will help call on people in the meeting to ask questions (or to offer comments) as well as relay relevant questions from IRC.

Releases

The release of NomadBSD 1.3.2 is now available, base system has been upgraded to FreeBSD 12.1-p6. Many new utils has been added, like brightness_listener, load_iichid, volumecontrol and more. NomadBSD is a persistent live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD.

TrueNAS 12 Beta 1 Released With Much Improved ZFS, Better AMD Ryzen CPU Support: As what was formerly FreeNAS, the first beta of TrueNAS CORE 12.0 is available for testing of this BSD-based operating system for NAS devices and other storage setups. The TrueNAS 12.0 Beta 1 both for the CORE and Enterprise editions includes much improved ZFS support with now relying upon the code that’s going to be released as OpenZFS 2.0, support for ZFS async copy-on-write, native ZFS dataset encryption, ZFS user quota capabilities, and more. In addition to much improved ZFS support there is also better hardware support with improved AMD Ryzen support as well as expanded network card coverage being two areas. TrueNAS 12.0 Beta 1 also brings a wide variety of performance improvements, support for fusion pools, API keys for scripted control of TrueNAS, and other changes.

OPNsense 20.1.8 released: OPNsense was delayed while they chased a race condition in the updates back to an issue with the latest FreeBSD package manager updates. For now they reverted to our current version but all relevant third party packages have been updated as updates became available over the last weeks, e.g. cURL and Python, and hostapd / wpa_supplicant amongst others.

BSDSec

Seems to be none.

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

News

First powerpc64 snapshots available for OpenBSD: Since we reported the first bits of powerpc64 support going into the tree on 16 May, work has progressed at a steady pace, resulting in snapshots now being available for this platform. So, if you have a POWER8 system idling around, go to your nearest mirror and fetch a snapshot. Keep in mind that as this is still very early days, very little handholding is available - you are basically on your own.

FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE Now Available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace, located at https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/thefreebsdfoundation.freebsd-12_1 Please provide feedback and report issues to the freebsd-cloud@ mailing list: https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-cloud. This work is sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation, with technical assistance from Microsoft.

The FreeBSD Project is pleased to announce the completion of the 2020 Core Team election. Active committers to the project have elected your Eleventh FreeBSD Core Team.

Baptiste Daroussin (bapt)
Ed Maste (emaste)
George V. Neville-Neil (gnn)
Hiroki Sato (hrs)
Kyle Evans (kevans)
Mark Johnston (markj)
Scott Long (scottl)
Sean Chittenden (seanc)
Warner Losh (imp)

Let’s extend our gratitude to the outgoing Core Team members for their service over the past two years (some cases, many more).

Thanks to Daniel Fojt, awk(1) has jumped from the 2012 version in DragonFly, to the 2020 version.

Tutorials

If you happen to have an APU2, here’s some tips on the boot process for DragonFly.

Simple ipfw NAT for bhyve virtual machines and vnet jails: Author of this post had a hard time figuring out ipfw in-kernel NAT from guides, so instead here they present the simplest set of commands they could find to set up a NAT and a little explanation to help you debug when it doesn’t work.

Prometheus - Auto-deploying Consul and Exporters using Saltstack Part 4: FreeBSD: This is the fourth part in my ongoing series on using SaltStack to deploy Consul and Prometheus Exporters, enabling Prometheus to discover machines and services to monitor.

7 Days Of BSD Challenge: Youtube videos series from Linux Lounge about using FreeBSD on a laptop.

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about OpenBSD 6.7 on PC Engines, NetBSD code study, DRM Update on OpenBSD, Booting FreeBSD on HPE Microserver SATA port, 3 ways to multiboot, 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 2020-07-06.

In Other BSDs for 2020/07/04 is out, too.

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