#Tag
Full BSDCan 2025 video playlist(s) available https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250912124932 #openbsd #bsdcan #videos #conference #talks #development #freesoftware #libresoftware
Full BSDCan 2025 video playlist(s) available https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250912124932 #openbsd #bsdcan #videos #conference #talks #development #freesoftware #libresoftware
Did you know all the BSDCan 2025 videos have now been released?
There are two complete playlists for each of the distribution channels: Peertube and Youtube. Thank you to the SDF for hosting Toobnix and giving us a good Peertube home to host the BSDCan videos.
Peertube - Toobnix, by the good people of sdf.org
https://toobnix.org/w/p/7xSAyg6QNPPBM38zkmWPLy
Youtube -
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeF8ZihVdpFe4u2cwVY8GgxjoFICIYyfY
Did you know all the BSDCan 2025 videos have now been released?
There are two complete playlists for each of the distribution channels: Peertube and Youtube. Thank you to the SDF for hosting Toobnix and giving us a good Peertube home to host the BSDCan videos.
Peertube - Toobnix, by the good people of sdf.org
https://toobnix.org/w/p/7xSAyg6QNPPBM38zkmWPLy
Youtube -
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeF8ZihVdpFe4u2cwVY8GgxjoFICIYyfY
A new BSDCan video has been posted:
Enhancing Unix Education through Chaos Engineering and Gamification using FreeBSD by Andreas Kirchner, Benedict Reuschling
For more information, please visit:
https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/
- and -
https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/timetable/timetable-Enhancing-Unix-Education.html
A new BSDCan video has been posted:
Enhancing Unix Education through Chaos Engineering and Gamification using FreeBSD by Andreas Kirchner, Benedict Reuschling
For more information, please visit:
https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/
- and -
https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/timetable/timetable-Enhancing-Unix-Education.html
For today's #ThankYouTuesday, I want to give a huge shout-out to @bsdtv and the entire audio/video team at the BSD Conferences.
Their work is fantastic and often happens behind the scenes, but it's always top-notch and absolutely essential.
Thank you so much - and see you in Zagreb!
For today's #ThankYouTuesday, I want to give a huge shout-out to @bsdtv and the entire audio/video team at the BSD Conferences.
Their work is fantastic and often happens behind the scenes, but it's always top-notch and absolutely essential.
Thank you so much - and see you in Zagreb!
Today is Monday, 1st September. And September means one thing: EuroBSDCon!
23 days to go until EuroBSDCon 2025 in Zagreb!
I’m doing a little “advent calendar” for BSD fans: each day until the conference I’ll share one article from it-notes.dragas.net about FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD, ZFS, PF and more. The dedicated hashtag will be #EuroBSDConAdvent
Let’s start right away with "I Solve Problems" - my EuroBSDCon 2024 (and #BSDCan 2025) talk about migrating from Linux to BSDs:
https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/10/03/i-solve-problems-eurobsdcon/
If you’re coming to Zagreb, reply to this post - it would be nice to meet up with fellow BSD users!
#EuroBSDCon#BSD#FreeBSD#OpenBSD#NetBSD#DragonFlyBSD#ZFS#PF#RunBSD#EuroBSDConAdvent
A new BSDCan video has been posted:
Confidential Computing with OpenBSD -- The Next Step by Hans-Jörg Höxer
Confidential computing is a family of techniques to enhance security and confidentiality for data in use. One technical approach is strong isolation for virtual machines.
AMDs Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) offers several feature sets for isolation of guest virtual machines from an non-trusted host hypervisor and operating system. These feature sets include memory encryption, encryption of guest state including CPU registers and an attestation framework.
With OpenBSD 7.6 released in October 2024 we are now able to use the memory encryption features of AMD SEV to run OpenBSD as both
a confidential guest VM and
as a hypervisor providing a confidential execution environment.
Now, thanks to memory encryption the hypervisor is not able to peek into a guests memory and is not able to retrieve sensitive information. However, the state of the CPU registers used by the guest is still visible to the hypervisor.
Therefore, we implemented support of AMDs "Secure Encrypted Virtualization with State Encryption" (SEV-ES) for OpenBSD guests and hypervisor. With SEV-ES all CPU guest state is encrypted and hidden from the hypervisor.
In this talk we will explain the fundamentals of SEV and SEV-ES. Then we explore the challenges imposed by SEV-ES for both guest and hypervisor. Finally we will take a closer look into selected implementation details.
Hans-Jörg Höxer is employed at genua, a German firewall manufacturer, who is using OpenBSD as a secure and stable base for its products.
For more information, please visit:
https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/
- and -
https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/timetable/timetable-Confidential-Computing-with.html
A new BSDCan video has been posted:
Confidential Computing with OpenBSD -- The Next Step by Hans-Jörg Höxer
Confidential computing is a family of techniques to enhance security and confidentiality for data in use. One technical approach is strong isolation for virtual machines.
AMDs Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) offers several feature sets for isolation of guest virtual machines from an non-trusted host hypervisor and operating system. These feature sets include memory encryption, encryption of guest state including CPU registers and an attestation framework.
With OpenBSD 7.6 released in October 2024 we are now able to use the memory encryption features of AMD SEV to run OpenBSD as both
a confidential guest VM and
as a hypervisor providing a confidential execution environment.
Now, thanks to memory encryption the hypervisor is not able to peek into a guests memory and is not able to retrieve sensitive information. However, the state of the CPU registers used by the guest is still visible to the hypervisor.
Therefore, we implemented support of AMDs "Secure Encrypted Virtualization with State Encryption" (SEV-ES) for OpenBSD guests and hypervisor. With SEV-ES all CPU guest state is encrypted and hidden from the hypervisor.
In this talk we will explain the fundamentals of SEV and SEV-ES. Then we explore the challenges imposed by SEV-ES for both guest and hypervisor. Finally we will take a closer look into selected implementation details.
Hans-Jörg Höxer is employed at genua, a German firewall manufacturer, who is using OpenBSD as a secure and stable base for its products.
For more information, please visit:
https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/
- and -
https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/timetable/timetable-Confidential-Computing-with.html
A new BSDCan video has been posted:
An embedded "dev kit" for EndBASIC with NetBSD
by Julio Merino
In this talk, I'd like to present how I took EndBASIC and built a NetBSD-based embedded device that boots into this interpreter in just a few seconds.
EndBASIC is a side project of mine that implements a retro-looking BASIC environment. Up until now, this featured a web interface and a desktop interface -- but I wanted to offer a prebuilt image for the Raspberry Pi that booted almost-immediately and was resilient to reboots. You know, like the computers of the 1980s, because I believe such a simplified environment can help with learning the basics of programming.
For this project, I picked NetBSD as the core due to its great cross-building features and then implemented new backends for EndBASIC to leverage NetBSD's native features. In particular, I wrote a driver for NetBSD's wscons framebuffer to have graphics output without having to even start X11.
The result is that I can build a full disk image from my Linux development box for NetBSD, write it to an SD card, and have a Pi boot straight into EndBASIC in about 5 seconds.
What's more: the whole of EndBASIC is written in Rust, and cross-compiling it from Linux x86_64 to NetBSD aarch6 is challenging. I bridged this gap with qemu and automated the whole thing so that I can build images end-to-end without even looking. Having proper cross-build support would be desirable, and I'll cover that.
I can also cover the contributions that this project led to upstream NetBSD, which actually made me recover my account and come back to contributing.
I'm actively working on this project and, from now through June, things may change significantly and I might have new things to talk about and demonstrate. For example, I want to integrate with NetBSD's WiFi stack, or SPI to leverage a tiny LCD. But for now, that's what I can offer for this talk!
For more information, please visit:
https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/
- and -
https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/timetable/timetable-An-embedded-dev.html
A new BSDCan video has been posted:
An embedded "dev kit" for EndBASIC with NetBSD
by Julio Merino
In this talk, I'd like to present how I took EndBASIC and built a NetBSD-based embedded device that boots into this interpreter in just a few seconds.
EndBASIC is a side project of mine that implements a retro-looking BASIC environment. Up until now, this featured a web interface and a desktop interface -- but I wanted to offer a prebuilt image for the Raspberry Pi that booted almost-immediately and was resilient to reboots. You know, like the computers of the 1980s, because I believe such a simplified environment can help with learning the basics of programming.
For this project, I picked NetBSD as the core due to its great cross-building features and then implemented new backends for EndBASIC to leverage NetBSD's native features. In particular, I wrote a driver for NetBSD's wscons framebuffer to have graphics output without having to even start X11.
The result is that I can build a full disk image from my Linux development box for NetBSD, write it to an SD card, and have a Pi boot straight into EndBASIC in about 5 seconds.
What's more: the whole of EndBASIC is written in Rust, and cross-compiling it from Linux x86_64 to NetBSD aarch6 is challenging. I bridged this gap with qemu and automated the whole thing so that I can build images end-to-end without even looking. Having proper cross-build support would be desirable, and I'll cover that.
I can also cover the contributions that this project led to upstream NetBSD, which actually made me recover my account and come back to contributing.
I'm actively working on this project and, from now through June, things may change significantly and I might have new things to talk about and demonstrate. For example, I want to integrate with NetBSD's WiFi stack, or SPI to leverage a tiny LCD. But for now, that's what I can offer for this talk!
For more information, please visit:
https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/
- and -
https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/timetable/timetable-An-embedded-dev.html
A new BSDCan video has posted:
Improvements to FreeBSD KASAN By Zhuo Ying Jiang Li
KASAN is a kernel sanitizer commonly combined with fuzzing techniques to detect memory corruption bugs, some of which could lead to security compromise. Currently, FreeBSD's KASAN can only detect a subset of temporal safety vulnerabilities due to the lack of a delayed freeing mechanism of freed items. Furthermore, the effectiveness of detecting spatial safety vulnerabilities is also limited because FreeBSD's KASAN does not add redzone padding around UMA allocations.
In this talk, I will present my current work on improving the effectiveness of KASAN by extending it with a quarantining mechanism and injecting redzones around UMA allocations. The development was done on CheriBSD, a fork of FreeBSD with CHERI support, to explore the synergy between CHERI and KASAN. I plan to upstream the relevant improvements to FreeBSD.
A new BSDCan video has been posted:
Sleep on FreeBSD: A bedtime story about S0ix By Aymeric Wibo
One of the main things still missing in FreeBSD for it to be usable on modern laptops is the ability to go to sleep. In the past, this was done using ACPI S3, but newer laptops have removed this in favour of S0ix, leaving FreeBSD without support for suspend on those machines.
This talk aims to get the casual user familiar enough with the terms and concepts behind power management, such that they can understand what's going on, what's already possible, what can be done, and be able to narrow down power management issues they might encounter.
Full description
This talk will cover:
The background and history of power management on FreeBSD, from APM, to ACPI S3, and finally to s2idle/S0ix, and how to know whether or not a given laptop supports S3 or S0ix or both.
What the full suspend process looks like with modern standby, going into details like ACPI D-states & power resources, SPMC DSMs (acpi_spmc), the AMD SMU (system management unit, amdsmu), etc. and some of the challenges encountered.
Specifics about sleep on AMD, such as USB4 power management in the HCM (host connection manager) and GPIO controller interrupt servicing.
Cover debugging with residency counters, with the SMU on AMD, _LPI objects, and LPIT on Intel.
Niceties and potential future work, such as idleness determination, a powertop equivalent, a built in amd_s2idle.py equivalent (for debugging sleep issues), etc.
A new BSDCan Video has been posted:
porch(1): it's not what you expect(1) By Kyle Evans
In a world ruled by expect(1) and TCL, we discuss an alternative that was developed based on scripting with lua instead. porch(1) was developed with a language already available and used in FreeBSD base in mind, with the aim of TTY testing via pts(4).
The overall aim of this project is to provide a simple subset of expect(1) functionality specifically aimed at developer and sysadmin automation in another popular language with many niceties for scripted interaction.
In this talk, we'll specifically discuss:
The motivation for writing porch
The underlying design/philosophy (with diagrams to describe the model)
Bundled-in functionality beyond script execution
Practical samples used in FreeBSD today
--
The author has been a FreeBSD src committer since 2017, working on many parts of the tree and gradually introducing lua into the base system. His most recent exploits include improving base system boot environment management with bectl(8) and excursions into the tty layer.
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate