Latest roundup of news from the BSD world.
Releases
OPNsense 21.7.5 released: FreeBSD security advisories and an issue with Intel-based ixgbe driver with “ifconfig -v” stalls keep this release rolling. Also note that OpenSSH was updated to version 8.8 which deprecates ssh-rsa usage which is mainly an issue for client access from the OPNsense system to the outside and can be amended as per the suggestions in the respective release notes.
BSDSec
No security announcements.
As always, it’s worth following BSDSec. RSS feed and Twitter account available.
News
FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Third Quarter 2021: This report covers FreeBSD related projects for the period between July and September, and is the third of four planned reports for 2021, and contains 42 entries. The third quarter of 2021 was quite active in lots of different areas, so the report covers a bunch of interesting work including but not limited to boot performance, compile-time analysis, hole-punching support, various drivers, ZFS raidz expansion, an update to the sound mixer, and many more.
Valuable News – 2021/11/15: The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems.
GhotBSD 0nline Meetup: GhotBSD online meetups consist of open discussions on GhostBSD, OpenZFS, FreeBSD, and questions and answers. Everyone can suggest a subject of discussion. There will be no official presentations until the group is more established. When: Saturday, Dec 11, 2021, 8:30 EST Where: https://meet.jit.si/GhostBSD_Meet
BSD Now 428: OpenBSD Part 1: How it all started, Explaining top(1) on FreeBSD, Measuring power efficiency of a CPU frequency scheduler on OpenBSD, CultBSD, a whole lot of BSD bits, and more.
OpenBSD Webzine ISSUE #4: TL;DR - xterm mouse support disabled - four errata for 7.0-stable - wayland makes its way into the ports tree - lots of hardware setup news
Chimera Linux: a Linux distribution based on FreeBSD userland and LLVM: This project is still very early in its development, but it’s an interesting premise. It’s developed by Daniel Kolesa, who also contributes a lot to Void Linux, most notably the excellent POWER/PowerPC port of that excellent distribution.
FreeBSD Documentation: Papers We Love To Read: A lot of great papers have been written throughout the history of FreeBSD. For most of the features you see today in a modern FreeBSD Operating System there is a corresponding paper that was written during its development or after its inclusion to document its addition. Today, we’re looking at two of our favourite papers, trying to highlight their contribution to the FreeBSD Operating System.
Tutorials
What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD Part 3: That packet filter: This series aims to highlight the project’s signature security features and development practices — razor-sharp focus on correct and secure code coupled with continuing code audit — as well as the project’s role as a source of innovation in security practices and an ‘upstream’ source for numerous widely-used components such as OpenSSH, PF, LibreSSL and others. Part 1 focused on the history, Part 2 focused on usage and user experience, and this final part will looks at that packet filter (PF).
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