This week we ask: Could telemetry be good for BSD? We also take a look at the rest of BSD world with latest SAs, releases, news and tutorials.
Is telemetry good?
What are the benefits of anonymous telemetry, and how can it help solve the problem of imperfect hardware support?
On the other hand, isn’t the same telemetry why we don’t want to use OSes like Windows?
Releases
MidnightBSD 1.2 out: This is a security and bug fix release.
BSDSec
OpenBSD Errata: August 25th, 2020 (xserverlen): Errata patches for Xorg have been released for OpenBSD 6.6 and 6.7. Various X server extensions had deficient input validation. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.
OpenBSD Errata: August 25th, 2020 (xinitom): Errata patches for libX11 have been released for OpenBSD 6.6 and 6.7. An integer overflow in libX11 could lead to a double free. Additionally, fix a regression in ximcp. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility.
As always, it’s worth following BSDSec. RSS feed and Twitter account available.
News
If you have an AMD processor, support for the System Management Network and CPU temperature readings are now available in DragonFly as amdsmn(4) and amdtemp(4).
LibreSSL 3.2.1 Released: This is the second development release from the 3.2.x series, which will eventually be part of OpenBSD 6.8.
FreeBSD merges OpenZFS support in to HEAD: The primary benefit is maintaining a completely shared code base with the community allowing FreeBSD to receive new features sooner and with less effort. It is advised to not do ‘zpool upgrade’ or creating indispensable pools using new features until this change has had a month+ to soak.
Tutorials
FreeBSD Sound: ALSA & Qt: Sound in FreeBSD is somewhat complicated because of the various portability and compatibility shims. One might happen if you plug in a USB sound card: while the kernel and some applications might detect it just fine, other applications might not. There’s a way to fix this, though.
Bringing zpool checkpoints to a FreeBSD bootloader: Almost two years ago this blog author wrote a blog post about checkpoints in ZFS. They didn’t hide that they were a big fan of them. That said, after those two years, they still feel that there are underappreciated features in the ZFS world, so they decided to do something about that.
Wifi USB’s - OpenSUSE vs GhostBSD, FreeBSD & NomadBSD: Youtuber found some random USB Wifi devices, so they thought they would test them on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed to show them working then test them on GhostBSD, FreeBSD and NomadBSD. How many worked, and how many didn’t?
More
As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks aboutFreeBSD Qt WebEngine GPU Acceleration, the grind of FreeBSD’s wireless stack, thoughts on overlooking Illumos’s syseventadm, when Unix learned to reboot, New EXT2/3/4 File-System driver in DragonflyBSD, 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 2020-08-24.
In Other BSDs for 2020/08/22 is out, too.
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Thanks for reading and see you next week! Stay home and stay safe!