Issue 67
Published May 05, 2021

This week we have new GhostBSD (+ hotfix) and 6.9 OpenBSD. We also have a look at all the news and tutorials from the BSD world.

Releases

OpenBSD 6.9 released: This is the 50th release. As in the previous releases, 6.9 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system:

  • New/extended platforms
  • Various kernel improvements
  • SMP Improvements
  • Direct Rendering Manager
  • VMM/VMD improvements
  • Various new userland features
  • Various bugfixes and tweaks in userland
  • Improved hardware support and driver bugfixes
  • New or improved network hardware support
  • Installer and upgrade improvements
  • Security improvements
  • Routing daemons and other userland network improvements

GhostBSD 21.04.27 ISO’s are now available: New release is out. Here are some of the changes:

  • GhostBSD is now based on FreeBSD 13.0-STABLE
  • Devmatch and Devd are now fully functional
  • Touch screen support
  • Network configuration is done by devd
  • Network service supports starting unique devices
  • OpenZFS 2.0

Hotfix GhostBSD 21.05.01 ISO’s are now available: It was reported that when using the partition editor to install GhostBSD was resulting in errors. ISO with fixes is out.

BSDSec

OpenBSD Errata: May 4, 2021 (vmd) : Errata patch for vmd has been released for OpenBSD 6.9. vmd guests can trigger excessive log messages on the host by sending certain network packets. 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

On Updating QEMU’s bsd-user fork: bsd-user is a ‘user mode’ emulation tool. It emulates FreeBSD’s system calls on FreeBSD well, and $OTHER-BSD system calls elsewhere to varying degrees of success. It’s primary mission has been to build FreeBSD packages using user-mode emulation to speed the process over using system mode. It speeds things up because the compilers and other huge CPU hogs can be built natively.

In Other BSDs for 2021/05/01: BSD-related news from last week.

KDE Plasma Wayland on FreeBSD: What works, what not and where do we move?

Registration Open for the June 2021 FreeBSD Developer Summit : The event will consist of virtual, half day sessions, taking place June 9-11, 2021. It’s free to attend, but they ask that you register with the eventbrite system to gain access to the meeting room. In addition to developer discussion sessions, they will also have vendor talks.

Tutorials

Deep Diving Into the Strengths of FreeBSD: Still doubting whether to use FreeBSD for your next project? Let’s talk about the wonders of the BSD route.

Wayland on FreeBSD with AMDGPU : Steps of one user explaining how they switched their main workstation – FreeBSD 13, nVidia GT730, KDE Plasma – over to KDE Plasma Wayland.

OpenBSD 6.9 packages using IPFS: OpenBSD 6.9 has been released so let’s try fetching packages and base sets for 6.9 amd64 over IPFS.

NetBSD VM on bhyve (on TrueNAS): TrueNAS Core allows running VMs using bhyve, which is FreeBSD’s hypervisor. NetBSD is not an officially supported OS, at least according to the guest OS chooser in the TrueNAS web UI. But since the release of NetBSD 9 a while ago, things have become far simpler than they used to be – with a caveat.

FreeBSD arm64 Performance – Getting more out of your FreeBSD Deployment : With the release of FreeBSD 13, arm64 has been elevated to Tier 1 status. FreeBSD support for arm64 has grown steadily since the architecture was incorporated in 2015 based on work supported by the community, ARM and Marvell (then Cavium). Learn about processor performance, hardware factors, and Big.Little in this article.

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