Wednesday, August 28, 2013

BSDNow Video Podcast Launches Today

BSD Now is a new weekly video podcast which airs every Wednesday at 14:00 Eastern time. It is hosted by Allan Jude, who provides streaming for BSD conferences, and Kris Moore, lead developer of the PC-BSD Project. This podcast will cover news and an extensive series of tutorials and interviews with various people from all areas of the BSD community.

The first podcast will feature an interview with Peter Hessler of the OpenBSD Project. The podcasts can be streamed live or accessed at a later date from the archives.

Monday, August 26, 2013

FreeBSD 9.2-RC3 Now Available

FreeBSD 9.2-RC3 has been announced. Refer to the announcement for the checksums for each file.

The second release candidate builds of the 9.2-RELEASE release cycle are now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures.

ISO images and, for architectures that support it, the memory stick images
are available here.

If you notice problems you can report them through the normal GNATS PR system or here on the -stable mailing list.

If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing system use "releng/9.2".

Please be aware that cvsup and CVS are both deprecated, and are not supported methods of updating the src/ tree.

Changes between -RC2 and -RC3 include:

  • Fix an integer overflow in computing the size of a temporary buffer, which can result in a buffer which is too small for the requested operation.  (FreeBSD-SA-13:09.ip_multicast)
  • Revert fixes and improvements to sendfile(2), which uncovered a bug in the NFS implementation that in turn can cause deadlocks.
  • Default net.inet.tcp.experimental.initcwnd10 to off.

# freebsd-update upgrade -r 9.2-RC3

During this process, FreeBSD Update may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.

# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install

It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example, FreeBSD 8.x.  Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat8x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted into the new userland:

# shutdown -r now

Friday, August 16, 2013

FreeBSD 9.2-RC2 Available

FreeBSD 9.2-RC2 has been announced. Refer to the announcement for the checksums for each file.

The second release candidate builds of the 9.2-RELEASE release cycle are now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures.

ISO images and, for architectures that support it, the memory stick images
are available here.

If you notice problems you can report them through the normal GNATS PR system or here on the -stable mailing list.

If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing system use "releng/9.2".

Please be aware that cvsup and CVS are both deprecated, and are not supported methods of updating the src/ tree.

Changes between -RC1 and -RC2 include:
  • Fix a boot issue caused by some GPT partitioning tools.
  • Fix a regression that caused some PCI disk controllers disappearing during boot.
  • Fix the FTP path used to fetch distribution packages when installing from the bootonly.iso.
  • Fix a regression in sendmail that caused problems between the resolver and Microsoft DNS servers with AAAA lookups.
  • Disable MSIs with Adaptec 2230S and 2820SA (aac(4)).
  • Update FTP mirror list used by bsdinstall(8) and bsdconfig(8).
  • Fix panics caused by early interrupts in igb(4).
  • Fix panics when downing or unloading the mlx(4) driver.

# freebsd-update upgrade -r 9.2-RC2

During this process, FreeBSD Update may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.

# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install

It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example, FreeBSD 8.x.  Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat8x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted into the new userland:

# shutdown -r now

Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:

# freebsd-update install

Thursday, August 15, 2013

vBSDCon: Registration Open, Hacker Lounge, Doc Sprints

Verisign is hosting a new biennial BSD conference (vBSDCon) in Dulles, VA from October 25-27. The conference, formatted to resemble the unConference concept, will bring together members of the BSD community for a series of roundtable discussions, educational sessions, best practice conversations, and exclusive networking opportunities.

In addition to the schedule of talks, the event will host a nightly hacker lounge for developers as well as nightly doc sprints. If you are interested in learning how to contribute to BSD documentation, drop by the doc sprint room where doc committers will be available to get you started. The BSDA certification exam will also be available on Saturday evening.

Registration is now open. The fee is only $75 and includes the welcome dinner on Friday as well as breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snacks on Saturday and Sunday.

Monday, August 5, 2013

Call for Testers: VMware vmxnet3 Ethernet Driver

Bryan Venteicher has posted a CFT (call for testers) for the vmxnet3 driver. If you're using VMware on FreeBSD, consider testing the driver and providing your feedback. Bryan writes:

I've ported the OpenBSD vmxnet3 ethernet driver to FreeBSD. I did a lot of cleanup, bug fixes, new features, etc (+2000 new lines) along the way so there is not much of a resemblance left.

The driver is in good enough shape I'd like additional testers. A patch against -CURRENT is here. Alternatively, the driver and a Makefile is here; this should compile at least as far back as 9.1. I can look at 8-STABLE if there is interest.

Obviously, besides reports of 'it works', I'm interested performance vs the emulated e1000, and (for those using it) the VMware tools vmxnet3 driver. Hopefully it is no worse :)

The drivers supports most VMXNET3 features - IPv4/IPv6 checksum offload, TSO, LRO, VLAN tag offload. AFAIK, the only notable missing feature is multiqueue; 3/4 of the code needed is already in the driver, but I don't have time to do final bit of work.

Most of the development was done on QEMU 1.5, but also tested on VMware Fusion and VMware ESXi.




FreeBSD 9.2-RC1 Now Available

Glen Barber has announced the availability of the first release candidate for FreeBSD 9.2. Refer to the announcement for the checksums for each file.

The first release candidate builds of the 9.2-RELEASE release cycle are now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures.

ISO images and, for architectures that support it, the memory stick images
are available here.

If you notice problems you can report them through the normal GNATS PR system or here on the -stable mailing list.

If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing system use "releng/9.2".

Please be aware that cvsup and CVS are both deprecated, and are not supported methods of updating the src/ tree.

Changes between -BETA2 and -RC1 include:
  • Expand the list of devices claimed by cxgbe(4).
  • Fix a panic in the racct code when munlock(2) is called with incorrect values.
  • Remove ctl(4) from GENERIC.  ctladm(8) now automatically loads the corresponding  module as necessary.  This reduces the default memory footprint and allows FreeBSD to work on i386 machines with 128 MB of RAM out of the box.
  • Fix zfs send -D hang after processing requiring a CTRL+C to interrupt.
The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of amd64 and i386 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases.  Systems running earlier FreeBSD releases can upgrade as follows:

# freebsd-update upgrade -r 9.2-RC1

During this process, FreeBSD Update may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.

# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install

It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example, FreeBSD 8.x.  Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat8x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted into the new userland:

# shutdown -r now

Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:

# freebsd-update install