The NanoPi NEO2 from FriendlyARM has been serving the post author well since 2018, being their test machine for OpenBSD/arm64 related things. As NetBSD/evbarm finally gained support for AArch64 in NetBSD 9.0, released back in February, they decided to give it a try on this device. The board only has 512MB of RAM, and this is where NetBSD really shines.
Architecture-specific notes on running OpenBSD as a QEMU guest, with working command lines for amd64, arm64, armv7, i386, riscv64, and sparc64, and failure points for alpha, hppa, landisk, loongson, luna88k, macppc, octeon, and powerpc64.
In this video author explores how to enable vscode "Remote SSH" to connect to a FreeBSD machine, showing three different ways to achieve this.
This week's roundup covers FreeBSD 15.1-RC3, OpenBSD updating clang/lld to 22.1.6 and adding boot-time relinking for httpd and smtpd, NetBSD's GSoC 2026 contributors, an analysis of a compromised pfSense firewall, using object storage with OpenZFS and SeaweedFS, and more.
The third release candidate build for the FreeBSD 15.1 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv7, aarch64, powerpc64, powerpc64le, and riscv64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.
The NetBSD Foundation’s 2026 AGM covers progress on NetBSD 11.0 (now at RC5), the CVS-to-Git/Mercurial migration, and infrastructure challenges like LLM scraping and hardware aging. Highlights include five Google Summer of Code projects, CNA onboarding for security advisories, and plans to streamline release cycles. The full IRC log details team updates from core, admins, releng, and security.
Author details how to cache Mastodon with nginx on FreeBSD while handling content negotiation correctly, covering cache keys for HTML/ActivityPub/JSON variants, bypass rules for private traffic, and TTL strategies for assets, media, and dynamic pages. The guide includes production-tested configurations for thundering-herd protection, failover, and logging to verify cache behavior.
OpenBSD now randomizes the link order of httpd and smtpd at boot, extending the anti-exploit measure already used by sshd. Theo de Raadt’s commits split smtpd into six privsep binaries for finer-grained relinking and add a generalized RELINK mechanism in bsd.prog.mk to simplify future adoption. The changes are available in snapshots for testing.
fatgid exploit details, why ZFS excels for multi-user media production, and a guide to hosting a private pkg repo behind mutual TLS for secure BSD package distribution.
The FreeBSD community hosted its first regional hackathon in Frankfurt, Germany, from April 24–26, 2026, drawing 25 participants from across Europe, including experienced committers and newcomers. Held at a sponsored Innovation Lab, the event featured intensive hacking sessions and yielded key contributions, such as closing 120 bugs, implementing Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) functionality, and completing a German translation of the Sylve tool. The hackathon also facilitated networking and informal discussions during a sponsored barbecue lunch, with organizers expressing plans to repeat the event in future years due to its success.
The FreeBSD Foundation announced that travel grant applications are now open for EuroBSDCon 2026, taking place September 9–13, 2026, in Brussels, Belgium. Application deadline: July 7, 2026.