This is a week of MidnightBSD: new release, mports history and BastilleBSD port. Plus other releases, security announcements, news and tutorials.

Releases

MidnightBSD 2.0.5: New release tagged in git. Fixes: pam security issue. Updates: mport 2.0.5 tzdata 2021a Now uses sysrc for firstboot script.

Development Release: FreeBSD 13.0-BETA4: The fourth beta snapshot of FreeBSD 13.0 is now available for download and testing. This is an unplanned release which means that the final build of FreeBSD 13.0 has been rescheduled to arrive a week later than originally envisaged, on 30 March. “The fourth BETA build of the 13.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available. A summary of changes since 13.0-BETA3 includes: a possible race between jailremove(2) and fork(2) had been fixed; an issue with the pf(4) osfp configuration had been fixed; an update to the ena(4) driver had been added; a bug fix to flex(1) had been addressed; fixes for FreeBSD-SA-21:06.xen and FreeBSD-SA-21:03.pamlogin_access had been addressed; a fix to ZFS to address a potential system crash if scrubbing after removing a slog device had been addressed; other miscellaneous fixes.”

BSDSec

FreeBSD Errata notices and Security advisories:

• FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-21:07.caroot
• FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-21:06.microcode
• FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-21:03.pam_login_access
• FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-21:08.freebsd-update
• FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-21:05.jail_chdir
• FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-21:06.xen
• FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-21:04.jail_remove

OpenBSD Errata: February 24th, 2021 (pffrag): Errata patches for the kernel have been released for OpenBSD 6.7 and 6.8. A sequence of overlapping IPv4 fragments could crash the kernel in pf due to an assertion. 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

Tracing the History of ARM and FreeBSD: FreeBSD developers started working on support for 32-bit ARM chips during FreeBSD 6.0. (For reference, this was 4 years before the Raspberry Pi was introduced.) The support for 32-bit ARM was officially added to the kernel in FreeBSD 7.0 in February of 2008. Support for 64-bit ARM processors was added a few years later in FreeBSD 11 in October 2016.

A comparison between mports and FreeBSD ports: MidnightBSD mports started as a refactor of the FreeBSD ports with some influence from OpenBSD many years ago. Read the post to learn more about what’s still similar and what has changed over years.

This issue of BSD Weekly was brought to you by BSDSec.

resolvd(8) - daemon to handle nameserver configuration: Florian Obser (florian@) imported resolvd(8), a daemon for handling nameserver configuration.

Tutorials

BastilleBSD on MidnightBSD: MidnightBSD has recently added a new port, mports/sysutils/bastille that allows you to manage containers. This is a port of a project that originally targetted FreeBSD, but also works on HardenedBSD.

Side-loading FreeBSD versions using Boot Environments: Or upgrading a FreeBSD box the dirty way. This is very much a “works on my machine” approach but it should get you 90% of the way to dealing with your own. Expect annoying breakages and minor fixes along the way.

More

As always, there are more sources of BSD goodness. Latest BSD Now talks about Follow-up about FreeBSD jail advantages, Install Prometheus, Node Exporter and Grafana, Calibrate your touch-screen on OpenBSD, OPNsense 21.1 Marvelous Meerkat Released, NomadBSD 1.4-RC1, Lets all shed a Tear for 386, find mostly doesn’t need xargs today on modern Unixes, OpenBSD KDE Status Report, 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 2021/03/01.

In Other BSDs for 2021/02/27 is out, too.

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