VNET is the name of a technique to virtualize the network stack. It changes global resources, most notably variables, into per network stack resources and handles them in the context of the correct instance. VNET is enabled by default in GENERIC kernels on all architectures except 32-bit ARM. DPCPU is a dynamic per-CPU memory allocator which can instantiate one instance of a global variable with each CPU in the system. Dynamically allocated per-CPU variables can be defined with custom names and types. DPCPU is always enabled. After FreeBSD 13.1 was released, the contributed LLVM components (LLVM, clang, compiler-rt, libc++, libunwind, lld, lldb and openmp) were upgraded to upstream version 14.0.5. The new version of lld, the llvm linker, got additional optimizations for arm64 in the form of so-called relocation relaxations. These relaxations are fine for regular userland applications, as the dynamic linker can handle the optimized relocations. However, due to the way the VNET and DPCPU features are implemented, the optimized relocations can cause panics if they are used in kernel modules. On arm64 systems, loading kernel modules that use VNET or DPCPU features can cause panics. A known example is the WireGuard kernel module, if_wg(4).
Hetzner introduced its Ampere Altra powered arm64-based cloud servers earlier this year, making it possible to easily run OpenBSD/arm64 on their platform. The only caveat for now is that the viogpu(4) driver is required, which was committed by jcs@ in April 2023 and thus only available in snapshots. It will first appear in OpenBSD 7.4.
Errata patches for npppd have been released for OpenBSD 7.2 and 7.3. Binary updates for the amd64, arm64 and i386 platform are available via the syspatch utility.
EuroBSDCon 2023 has now ended, and slides for many of the OpenBSD developer presentations are now available in the usual place.Video of the presentations can be expected somewhat later.
On the Loss and Preservation of Knowledge, Unix Recovery Legend, Useful Unix commands for data science, Tarsnap outage post-mortem, OpenBSD 7.3 on a twenty year old IBM ThinkPad R31, and more.
Can you really do 3D printing from OpenBSD? Cue suspenseful music whilst I formulate my answer, which is: Yes.
HardenedBSD 14-STABLE is now officially a thing. Haven't seen any changelog, yet. Installers are at https://installers.hardenedbsd.org/pub/14-stable/ and package builder at https://hbsd-pkg-14-stable-01.hardenedbsd.org/index.html.
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 or BSD systems.
The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature, The shell and its crappy handling of whitespace, Theo de Raadt on Zenbleed, OPNsense 23.7 released, illumos gets a new C compiler, fixing Thinkpad X1 WIFI on FreeBSD, and more.
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 or BSD systems.
IPv6 fragments may bypass firewall rules written on the assumption all fragments have been reassembled and, as a result, be forwarded or processed by the host.
Several certificates were added to the bundle after the latest release of FreeBSD 13.2. TLS connections using the missing root certificates as a trust anchor would not be trusted causing an error.
The code which allocated the hot-plug interrupt did not allocate MSI-X vectors properly. When attaching to devices which support only MSI-X messages, the interrupt would not be allocated. PCIe hot-plug would fail to work for certain devices. In particular, this affects certain Amazon EC2 instance types which require functional hot-plug support in order to attach network devices.
freebsd-update incorrectly deleted files in /etc/ in the event the file to be updated matched the new release and was different than the old release. This has not been an issue previously because the $FreeBSD$ tag expansion from subversion virtually guaranteed the existing file was going to be different from the new release. With the conversion to git in the 13.x releases, $FreeBSD$ is no longer expanded, making it much more likely that a file would find this issue.