FreeBSD Project released it’s last report for 2020, GhostBSD has a new release + OpenBSD Errata, news and tutorials from BSD world.
FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Fourth Quarter 2020
This report covers FreeBSD related projects for the period between October and December, and is the fourth of four planned reports for 2020.
This quarter had quite a lot of work done, including but certainly not limited to, in areas relating to everything from multiple architectures such as x86, aarch64, riscv, and ppc64 for both base and ports, over kernel changes such as vectored aio, routing lookups and multipathing, an alternative random(4) implementation, zstd integration for kernel dumps, log compression, zfs and preparations for pkg(8), along with wifi changes, changes to the toolchain like the new elfctl utility, and all the way to big changes like the git migration and moving the documentation from DocBook to Hugo/AsciiDoctor, as well as many other things.
Releases
GhostBSD 21.01.15: This new ISO comes with a clean-up of packages that include removing LibreOffice and Telegram from the default selection. We did this to bring the zfs RW live file systems to run without problem on 4GB of ram machine. We also removed the UFS full disk option from the installer. Users can still use custom partitions to setup UFS partition, but we discourage it. We also fixed the Next button’s restriction in the custom partition related to some bug that people reported. We also fix the missing default locale setup and added the default setup for Linux Steam, not to forget this ISO includes kernel, userland and numerous application updates.
BSDSec
OpenBSD Errata: January 13th, 2021 (carp): Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.8. Use of bpf(4) on a carp interface could result in a use after free error. Binary updates for the amd64, i386, and arm64 platforms are available via the syspatch utility. As these affect the kernel, a reboot will be needed after patching.
As always, it’s worth following BSDSec. RSS feed and Twitter account available.
News
This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by CBSD - a management layer written for the FreeBSD jail(8) subsystem, bhyve and Xen.
Preliminary OpenBSD Support Added to OBS Studio: OpenBSD developer Vadim Zhukov (zhukov@) has added preliminary OpenBSD support to Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) Studio release 26.1.0 and later. The changes come as part of an ongoing collaboration between the upstream OBS project and OpenBSD developers. Note that this is still a WIP and it hasn’t been submitted to the ports mailing list or committed to the ports tree.
Tutorials
Exploring Swap on FreeBSD: On modern Unix-like systems such as FreeBSD, “swapping” refers to the activity of paging out the contents of memory to a disk and then paging it back in on demand. The page-out activity occurs in response to a lack of free memory in the system: the kernel tries to identify pages of memory that probably will not be accessed in the near future, and copies their contents to a disk for safekeeping until they are needed again. When an application attempts to access memory that has been swapped out, it blocks while the kernel fetches that saved memory from the swap disk, and then resumes execution as if nothing had happened.
Bastille port redirection and persistence: Redirecting ports from the host system to individual containers is simple with the “rdr” sub-command. This redirection can also be accomplished with the use of templates to automate the process.
Accented characters using a US keyboard layout on OpenBSD: Does your laptop ship with an International US layout keyboarda and you can’t accents with the default Xenocara configuration? Let’s see how to fix this.
More
As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about History of FreeBSD: Early Days of FreeBSD, mesh VPN using OpenBSD and WireGuard, FreeBSD Foundation Sponsors LLDB Improvements, Host your Cryptpad web office suite with OpenBSD, 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 2021/01/18.
In Other BSDs for 2021/01/16 is out, too.
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