This week we look at the new release from MidnightBSD, FreeBSD advisories and latest news and tutorials from the BSD world.

Releases

MidnightBSD 2.0.7: A security update for MidnightBSD is now available in git, version 2.0.7. This update includes two security updates and a new version of our package manager, mport. The new version of the package manager no longer uses libdispatch / blocks and has a fix for a double free issue. You can also install the mport update from mports individually. The security fixes are around jails file/directory access and shared memory mappings which fail to get invalidated.

BSDSec

FreeBSD Security Advisories and Errata Noticies:

• FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-21:09.pf - pf(4) may fail to load filtering rules if they cause the default request_maxcount bound to be exceeded. Users that relied on loader.conf to increase the request_maxcount value could see their rules fail to load.
• FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-21:10.lldb - Attempts to use lldb’s print command (p alias) resulted in lldb aborting. Some common debugger functionality cannot be used.
• FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-21:08.vm - A particular case of memory sharing is mishandled in the virtual memory system. It is possible and legal to establish a relationship where multiple descendant processes share a mapping which shadows memory of an ancestor process. In this scenario, when one process modifies memory through such a mapping, the copy-on-write logic fails to invalidate other mappings of the source page. These stale mappings may remain even after the mapped pages have been reused for another purpose.
• FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-21:09.accept_filter - An unprivileged process can configure an accept filter on a listening socket.
• FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-21:10.jail_mount - Due to a race condition between lookup of ”..” and remounting a filesystem, a process running inside a jail might access filesystem hierarchy outside of jail.

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

News

The state of toolchains in NetBSD: While FreeBSD and OpenBSD both switched to using LLVM/Clang as their base system compiler, NetBSD picked a different path and remained with GCC and binutils regardless of the license change to GPLv3. However, it doesn’t mean that the NetBSD project endorses this license. Realistically, NetBSD is more or less tied to GCC, as it supports more architectures than the other BSDs, some of which will likely never be supported in LLVM.

FreeBSD/arm64 becoming Tier 1 in FreeBSD 13 : FreeBSD will promote arm64 to a Tier 1 architecture in FreeBSD 13. This means they will provide release images, binary packages, and security and errata updates. While they anticipate there will be minor issues with this first release, they believe the port is mature enough that they can be resolved during the life of FreeBSD 13.

Update on FreeBSD Foundation Investment in Linuxulator : Recognizing its importance, the FreeBSD Foundation eagerly approved two separate Grant applications from longtime FreeBSD contributor and community member Edward Tomasz Napierała in 2019 and 2020 to update and improve Linuxulator. They caught up with Edward working from his home in Cambridge, UK to learn more about his work.

BSD Now 397: Fresh BSD 2021 : Customizing the FreeBSD Kernel, OpenBSD/loongson on the Lemote Fuloong, how ZFS on Linux brings up pools and filesystems at boot under systemd, LLDB: FreeBSD Legacy Process Plugin Removed, FreshBSD 2021, gmid, Danschmid’s Poudriere Guide in english, and more

OpenZFS 2.1.0-rc2 Released With Bug Fixes: Headlining OpenZFS 2.1 is distributed spare RAID (dRAID) functionality. OpenZFS 2.1 is also introducing a new “compatibility” property for Zpool feature sets, a zpool_influxdb command was added, and a variety of other changes. With this release of OpenZFS 2.1.0-rc2 there are various bug fixes that landed. A random assortment of fixes made it into this second release candidate, some FreeBSD specific items, and some extra OpenZFS compatibility file sets.

Tutorials

Steam on FreeBSD: Steam is a gaming platform that sells and manages games on Windows and Linux. Since FreeBSD has some pretty good Linux emulation, it is possible – with some footnotes – to run Linux Steam Games on FreeBSD. This was already possible in 2016 but the tooling keeps being updated, so let’s take a look at how things work.

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