Episode 290

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March 21st, 2019

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About this Episode

FreeBSD on Cavium ThunderX, looking at NetBSD as an OpenBSD user, taking time-stamped notes in vim, OpenBSD 6.5 has been tagged, FreeBSD and NetBSD in GSoC 2019, SecBSD: an UNIX-like OS for Hackers, and more.

##Headlines
###ARM’d and dangerous: FreeBSD on Cavium ThunderX (aarch64)

While I don’t remember for how many years I’ve had an interest in CPU architectures that could be an alternative to AMD64, I know pretty well when I started proposing to test 64-bit ARM at work. It was shortly after the disaster named Spectre / Meltdown that I first dug out server-class ARM hardware and asked whether we should get one such server and run some tests with it.
While the answer wasn’t a clear “no” it also wasn’t exactly “yes”. I tried again a few times over the course of 2018 and each time I presented some more points why I thought it might be a good thing to test this. But still I wasn’t able to get a positive answer. Finally in January 2019 year I got a definitive answer – and it was “yes, go ahead”! The fact that Amazon had just presented their Graviton ARM Processor may have helped the decision.

###Looking at NetBSD from an OpenBSD user perspective

I use to use NetBSD quite a lot. From 2.0 to 6.99. But for some reasons, I stopped using it about 2012, in favor of OpenBSD. Reading on the new 8 release, I wanted to see if all the things I didn’t like on NetBSD were gone. Here is a personal Pros / Cons list. No Troll, hopefully. Just trying to be objective.

  • What I liked (pros)
  • Things I didn’t like (cons)
  • Conclusion

So that was it. I didn’t spend more than 30 minutes of it. But I didn’t want to spend more time on it. I did stop using NetBSD because of the need to compile each and every packages ; it was in the early days of pkgin. I also didn’t like the way system maintenance was to be done. OpenBSD’s 6-months release seemed far more easy to manage. I still think NetBSD is a great OS. But I believe you have to spent more time on it than you would have to do with OpenBSD.
That said, I’ll keep using my Puffy OS.

##News Roundup
###Using Vim to take time-stamped notes

I frequently find myself needing to take time-stamped notes. Specifically, I’ll be in a call, meeting, or interview and need to take notes that show how long it’s been since the meeting started.
My first thought was that there’s be a plugin to add time stamps, but a quick search didn’t turn anything up. However, I little digging did turn up the fact that vim has the built-in ability to tell time.
This means that writing a bit of vimscript to insert a time stamp is pretty easy. After a bit of fiddling, I came up with something that serves my needs, and I decided it might be useful enough to others to be worth sharing.

###OpenBSD 6.5-beta has been tagged

It’s that time of year again; Theo (deraadt@) has just tagged 6.5-beta. A good reminder for us all run an extra test install and see if your favorite port still works as you expect.

CVSROOT: /cvs
Module name: src
Changes by: deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org 2019/02/26 15:24:41

Modified files:
etc/root : root.mail
share/mk : sys.mk
sys/conf : newvers.sh
sys/sys : ktrace.h param.h
usr.bin/signify: signify.1
sys/arch/macppc/stand/tbxidata: bsd.tbxi

Log message:
crank to 6.5-beta

###The NetBSD Foundation participating in Google Summer of Code 2019

For the 4th year in a row and for the 13th time The NetBSD Foundation will participate in Google Summer of Code 2019!
If you are a student and would like to learn more about Google Summer of Code please go to the Google Summer of Code homepage.
You can find a list of projects in Google Summer of Code project proposals in the wiki.
Do not hesitate to get in touch with us via #netbsd-code IRC channel on Freenode and via NetBSD mailing lists!

###SecBSD: an UNIX-like OS for Hackers

SecBSD is an UNIX-like operating system focused on computer security based on OpenBSD. Designed for security testing, hacking and vulnerability assessment, it uses full disk encryption and ProtonVPN + OpenVPN by default.
A security BSD enviroment for security researchers, penetration testers, bug hunters and cybersecurity experts. Developed by Dark Intelligence Team for private use and will be public release coming soon.

##Beastie Bits

##Feedback/Questions

  • Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv