BSDCon '03 Nearly Here (OpenBSD 3.4, Too)

robotdreams writes "Once again BSDCon showcases the BSD community's long history of innovative research, open exchange of ideas, and collaborative work. Tutorials this year feature: an intensive code walkthrough of the new FreeBSD 5.x release, debugging kernel problems on live systems, advanced BSD system and network security, and FreeBSD's new GEOM disk I/O subsystem." Since BSDCon runs from September 8th through 12th, you're probably either already going or out of luck ;) On the other hand, you're still early for OpenBSD 3.4, now taking pre-orders -- details below.

An anonymous reader writes "Pre-orders for the OpenBSD project's latest release, 3.4, are now being taken. This release will ship around November 1st. Significant enhancements have been made in this release, including i386 switch to ELF executable format, further W^X improvements for i386, ld.so on ELF platforms now loads libraries in a random order for greater resistance to attacks, inclusion of a static bounds checker to the compiler for basic checks on functions which accept buffers and sizes, strcpy/strcat function audit to replace with safer strlcpy/strlcat, ProPolice stack protection in the kernel, further manual page cleanups, large number of bug fixes and optimizations to the packet filter (PF) including packet tagging, stateful TCP normalization, passive OS detection, SYN proxy, and adaptive state timeouts, and many other improvements to the rest of the system.

Order a CD from the OpenBSD store. Ordering a CD helps support the project, as a bonus you get cool stickers, artwork, and an audio track!"

The same reader sent links to more information on this release, including new features, and the changelog between 3.3 and 3.4.

Comments

Technical sessions start Sept 10

[cperciva]

The technical sessions start on September 10th, so there's still lots of time to register and book plane tickets.

Speaking of the 10th... I'd better start working on my slides.

Soothing break

[Mr. Darl McBride]

We'd like to interrupt this BSD story for a bit of pro-BSD propaganda.

Tell me you don't want BSD on your laptop now.

Further persuasion available here. This is definitely +1 Interesting material to any heterosexual male. Mod me down if you are the sendmail author or otherwise uninterested.

Re:removing some utilities

[Tirel]

Theo has said many times before that they will only use GNU tools if there's nothing to replace them with. Infact, the good folks at @openbsd have been looking into replacing gcc with tunDRA (with little success atm) simply because of the GNU licence.

Basically, GNU licenced programs are only there if really necessary.

Re:FreeBSD filesystem

[Mr. Darl McBride]

So anyway, how does FreeBSD's filesystem stack up against Linux?

FreeBSD chose to address this problem by making fsck capable of running in the background. fsck cooperates with the kernel, checking all files/inodes, and when a file is requested that has not yet been checked, the file operation is held while that check is moved to the front of the unique "moustache ride-ordered" queue.

Journaling without sacrificing performance and clean algorithms simply isn't possible, and corruption is still possible on a journaling filesystem with out-of-order writes as done by many kinds of cache-enabled drives and controllers, leading to a false sense of security when fsck is bypassed. FreeBSD's approach catches every situation, and guarantees an intact filesystem on every boot.

Re:FreeBSD filesystem

[Mr. Darl McBride]

This could be incorporated in Linux, if that's what you mean. It would be a pretty major undertaking, however. This operates with hooks at the filesystem layer and the block device layer both, which means that for every filesystem implementing this, a path needs to be made through it. This would touch not only the INode queue system (which would be good, as the Moustache ride-ordered queue mentioned above is more efficient), but also the Async Network And Loopback probe since this would have to permeate 2.4's proc-based /dev filesystem, and the penal sheath bits of the thread dispatcher in order to allow a filesystem to halt the process requesting fsck-limited activity.

This could well be a good phd project for someone who wants to work on a thesis project that gives back to the community, and would surely secure them a job at Oracle or one of the other Big Data Storage Management companies.

Re:removing some utilities

[nyteroot]

. . .their work may be locked down and stolen by a corporation [at] any time.

Ah! Such enlightening insight into the world of open source licensing!
..yeah, right.

My dear sir, you are utterly incorrect. Were some corporation to "lock down" their source code (and I can only assume that by "lock down" you mean to re-release under a proprietary license) they would only be assuring that their version of the software would be utterly disregarded by the entire computer community, because (pay attention here) the free version would not somehow magically cease to exist! So on the one hand you would have the free, latest version. On the other hand, you would have the not-free, catching-up version. Gee, tough choice.

Now what the BSD license does allow is for some company to take some or all of the source and reuse it elsewhere, under a proprietary license if they so wish, without giving anything back to the Free software community. Whether or not this is necessarily a bad thing is a philosophical matter. However, your assertion that a company could "lock down" the OpenBSD code is completely and utterly incorrect.

Re:Soon?

[nyteroot]

I would like to see much more articles on using *BSD for the regular consumers

Why, god. Why is it that an OS must be usable "on the desktop", "by mom", or by "the regular consumers" in order for it to be considered "good"? First we had Linux, and then they mom-ified Linux. Now you want them to mom-ify *BSD too? Fuck that shit!

There are server OSs. There are desktop OSs. Any attempt at combination is bound to fail miserably at one or the other and quite likely both.

Re:FreeBSD filesystem

[realdpk]

If ext2 is so reliable, why does it, by default, insist that I must fsck after X days or Y mounts?

DragonFly at BSDCon

[m.dillon]

I will be attending BSDCon this coming week and will be setting up a BoF session on DragonFly as well as doing a quicky summary WIP (Work In Progress) talk. Some extremely interesting work is being done in DragonFly as well as in other BSD's (FreeBSD-5, OpenBSD, and so forth). But the conference is not for the weak of heart. If all you care about is the next K00l music UI don't bother to come {EVIL GRIN}.

OpenBSD Journal is dying (not a troll)

[evilviper]

deadly.org, which was previously the premiere place for OpenBSDers to learn and communicate has now disabled comments completely. Comments, 90% from intelligent and informed users, happened to be the highlight of the site, but now it's all over because the admins are very unhappy about a pair of trolls, and aren't willing to do anything anti-troll. instead, they shut the door completely.

So, I wonder if anyone here knows of another site that will take-over? BSD-specific, with knowledgable users, and plenty of comments... BSDforums has a large number of factors working against it, keeping it from becomming anything really good, so rule that one out.

The BSD section here at /. has EVERYTHING working against it... VERY infrequent stories, few commenters, even fewer informed commentors, and nearly as many trolls as BSDers.

Any suggestions?

They want it to be "stolen"...

[anthonyrcalgary]

I've never quite understood how the BSD people can think they've got freedom when their work may be locked down and stolen by a corporation any time.

You don't understand the BSD license. It's impossible to steal something that's given freely. BSD has been such a seminal influence precisely because the code can be "stolen". That's the intent.

Besides, AT&T did try to steal (in the "you can't use it anymore" sense of the word) BSD's code. They lost.

If he thinks separating from the protection granted by GPL will further the survivability of OpenBSD, he's seriously mistaken.

BSD predates the GPL.