Droso

In a few weeks, I’ll be heading to the FOSDEM conference in Brussels again this year. I’ll spend most of my time at the FreeBSD booth for the FreeBSD Foundation, so if you’re there drop by to say hi, discuss the Foundation’s work, pick up a Foundation flyer, check out the swag, or make a donation. There will also be a BSD DevRoom where there will be some interesting presentations and discussions that I might attend. Remember, FOSDEM is free to attend. Hope to see you there!

This weekend I had the pleasure of attending the third edition of the BSD community day at the NLLGG meeting in Utrecht, the Netherlands. I was happy to see that there were at least as many, if not more, attendees at the BSD track as the general track.

The BSD track featured 4 interesting talks. Rene Laden opened the day with a talk on porting ROS (Robot Operating System) to FreeBSD, detailing some of the difficulties of getting the core bits working, which already are in ports and some ideas and plans for future work. Ed Schouten was next with an update on integrating the clang compiler into FreeBSD. A lot of work has already been done here, but still more to come. The third talk by Paul Schenkeveld had some very interesting ideas of how to combine nanoBSD‘s image building features with ZFS snapshots as generalized way to upgrade software on servers, while minimizing downtown and providing an easy rollback when the upgrade doesn’t go as expected. The day ended with Otto Moerbeek’s overview of some of the security features in OpenBSD, with special focus on privilege separation in and between processes.

A big thanks to NLLGG for hosting the event, I certainly both enjoyed the day and learned some new things. We’ll see each other again next year at EuroBSDCon.

While the snow falls outside and the holidays approaching fast, it is time for the FreeBSD Foundations yearly End-of-Year fundraising campaign. This year again brought an impressive list of accomplishments by the Foundation, to mention a few:

• Provided $100,000 in grants for projects that improve FreeBSD in the areas of:
  – DTrace support
  – High availability storage
  – Enhanced SNMP reporting
  – Virtualization and resource partitioning
  – Embedded device support
  – Networking stack improvements
• Allocated $50,000 for equipment to enhance FreeBSD project infrastructure.
• Sponsored 8 FreeBSD related conferences.
• Funded 16 travel grants giving increased community and developer access to conferences.
• Provided legal support to the FreeBSD project.

We are fortunate to already have reached half of this years fund-raising goal of $350,000, so please consider a donation, no matter how large or small, to help us reach that goal and help us continue supporting the FreeBSD community through next year as well.

Read the full letter by Justin Gibbs, President of the FreeBSD Foundation.

Last night, I committed a large update to the ports tree that deprecated MD5 checksums based on the work by Doug Barton and Rene Laden in ports/149657. For a long time we’ve had both MD5 and SHA256 checksums in the distinfo file, even though having multiple checksumming algorithms does not add any additional security. From today, MD5 checksums are no longer generated, but existing checksums will silently be ignored. For now, we won’t be doing large sweeps through the tree removing MD5, but let them slowly disappear when individual ports are updated, to avoid the churn on the cvs repository, mirrors, and package build infrastructure such large sweeps will cause.
The ports framework internals were also updated to reflect this change by renaming the MD5_FILE macro to DISTINFO_FILE. A lot of thanks to Dough and Rene!

In a few days, I’ll be heading off for another yearly EuroBSDCon, this year in Karlsruhe, Germany. Unfortunately, I will have to leave on Sunday, but on Saturday you might find me at the FreeBSD Foundation booth in the booth area where we’ll have Foundation brochures and swag. Please drop by to give feedback, ask questions, and/or make a donation. Hope to see you there!