This article discusses the common challenges and best practices for supporting FreeBSD in production environments. Key points include the importance of planning for upgrades, ensuring reproducible builds, implementing comprehensive monitoring, addressing hardware compatibility issues, and avoiding misconfigured ZFS deployments. The article emphasizes the need for disciplined engineering practices, strategic upgrades, and proper integration of FreeBSD with modern monitoring tools. Additionally, it highlights the significance of engaging with the FreeBSD community for driver support and maintaining a structured approach to patch management and security responses. The article concludes by stressing the importance of planning, visibility, and discipline in successfully running FreeBSD in production.
GhostBSD: From Usability to Struggle and Renewal, Why You Can’t Trust AI to Tune ZFS, Introducing bpflogd(8): capture packets via BPF to log files, What I'd do as a College Freshman in 2025, FreeBSD and KDE Plasma generations, Improvements to the FreeBSD CI/CD systems, FreeBSD as a Workstation, and more.
The NetBSD Foundation will hold its 2025 Annual General Meeting on May 17th at 21:00 UTC in the netbsd-agm channel on irc.libera.chat. The event will include presentations about NetBSD, followed by a moderated Q&A session. The tentative agenda covers various topics such as foundation administrivia, technical direction, project servers, and publicity. A full transcript will be recorded for those unable to attend.
The ERSPAN collection driver, erspan(4), created by David Gwynne, has been committed to OpenBSD -current. ERSPAN is a GRE protocol used for network packet capture, implemented as an Ethernet tunnel interface. It reuses BPF infrastructure, allowing it to send packets and act as a collector. The tool is now available for testing and feedback from -current users, with development continuing in-tree.
This article discusses the common challenges and best practices for supporting FreeBSD in production environments. Key points include the importance of planning for upgrades, ensuring reproducible builds, implementing comprehensive monitoring, addressing hardware compatibility issues, and avoiding misconfigured ZFS deployments. The article emphasizes the need for disciplined engineering practices, strategic upgrades, and proper integration of FreeBSD with modern monitoring tools. Additionally, it highlights the significance of engaging with the FreeBSD community for driver support and maintaining a structured approach to patch management and security responses. The article concludes by stressing the importance of planning, visibility, and discipline in successfully running FreeBSD in production.
This article discusses cross-compiling for OpenBSD arm64, presenting two scenarios: using the Linaro ARM/AArch64 toolchain and setting up an OpenBSD-specific environment. The Linaro toolchain, available in ports, is the standard GCC toolchain for cross-compilation to ARM targets. The OpenBSD-specific environment involves building a toolchain from source, which is unsupported but can be achieved with some adjustments. The article provides step-by-step instructions for both scenarios, including setting environment variables, building the toolchain, and testing the environment. It also mentions the use of Aarch64 as an llvm/lld platform on OpenBSD.
FreeBSD 14.3, set to release soon, will bring significant improvements to Wi-Fi support, particularly for laptop users. This update addresses the long-standing issue of slow Wi-Fi speeds and outdated standards, offering a modern, high-speed Wi-Fi experience. Users eager to experience these enhancements can build the upcoming 14.3 kernel and use it on their existing FreeBSD 14.2 base. The process involves ensuring the latest firmware is installed, cloning the FreeBSD source code, switching to the stable/14 branch, and compiling the kernel. While the process is straightforward, users should be aware that they are dealing with pre-release software and may encounter issues. Additionally, users with graphics drivers may need to rebuild those to match the new kernel version.
Quick instructions to set up Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) on NetBSD using Open Quantum Safe and BoringSSL.
The article discusses the history and development of the BSD Fast FileSystem, also known as UFS, which was created by Marshall Kirk McKusick in the early 1980s. It highlights the significance of UFS as it remains the default file system in several BSD-based operating systems, including NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD (alongside ZFS). The article references a 2007 survey by McKusick that outlines the improvements made to BSD file systems, many of which have been incorporated into other file systems. The content is noted for its historical relevance and ongoing impact on modern file systems.
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/BSD/Linux systems.
The annotated tag v6.4.2 for DragonFly BSD has been created, replacing v6.4.1. Key updates include fixes for virtio block devices, improvements to fdisk(8), and a kernel fix addressing panic and user process corruption.
The second BETA build for the FreeBSD 14.3 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv6, armv7, aarch64, and riscv64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.
The NetBSD Foundation is participating in Google Summer of Code 2025 with three projects: Enhancing Support for NAT64 Protocol Translation in NetBSD, Asynchronous I/O Framework, and Using bubblewrap to add sandboxing to NetBSD. The community bonding period will last for 3 weeks, during which mentors and contributors will familiarize themselves with the code and adjust deliverables.
Alexander Bluhm has committed changes to optimize parallel TCP input by caching the socket lock, reducing contention. This update improves performance by 12% to 22% with 10 parallel TCP streams and up to 100% with a single stream. The changes involve temporarily moving TCP packets to a per-thread queue, processing them under a shared lock, and reducing socket lock contention. This enhancement builds on previous work and contributes to significant performance gains in TCP processing.
OpenBSD 7.7, ZFS Orchestration Tools – Part 2: Replication, Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good, Graphed and measured: running TCP input in parallel, Introducing an OpenBSD LLDP daemon, Hardware discovery: ACPI & Device Tree, The 2025 FreeBSD Community Survey is Here, and more.
Upstreaming FreeBSD changes is a strategic choice for commercial products, as it reduces technical debt, streamlines upgrades, and ensures long-term sustainability. By contributing to the upstream project, teams can lower upgrade friction, simplify security audits, and share maintenance efforts with the community. This approach also improves developer productivity and reduces the risk of regressions. Common barriers to upstreaming, such as perceived slowdowns or code quality concerns, can be overcome with incremental contributions and collaboration with maintainers.
The bpflogd(8) tool has been introduced into OpenBSD, offering enhanced packet logging capabilities. Unlike pflogd(8), it supports logging on any BPF interface and multiple interfaces simultaneously. It uses libevent for non-blocking operations and captures full packets by default. This tool aims to assist in debugging network issues by logging packets from multiple sources. Developers are encouraging user feedback on its performance and usability.