Released Oct 16, 2023.

after some unusual rough days for the netbsd-10 branch last week, we now have a state that is building fine again and all tests look as expected. We also made great progress on the icky DRM/KMS issues and overal stability.

The tricky pullups are done (thanks to everyone who helped with it), and package builds are going - so now it looks like we will be able to switch from BETA to release candidate state soonish.

See https://wiki.netbsd.org/releng/netbsd-10/

for the current list of bad bugs we are facing and the amount we dealt with already. Quite a lot of the DRM/KMS releated ones are in feedback state and have just been pinged - hopefully more of them will be closed soonish.

Realistically this is close to as good as we will get the branch for a 10.0 release - so we are now looking at a release date very early in october.

The FreeBSD foundation has made significant progress in contacting commercial FBSD users. They also wish for FreeBSD to have better tier 1 cloud support, and better documentation on Azure (the latter sponsored by Microsoft, may be good or bad).

Netflix (out of all companies) sponsors FreeBSD support of LinuxBoot, which is a boot firmware, that in fact, boots Linux (in case you didn't know). The FBSD developers currently need help with the following things (taken directly from site):

• loader.kboot(8) needs to be written. It should document how to use loader.kboot, how to create images, and the use cases that work today.
• Finish amd64 support.
• The current elf arch-specific metadata code is copied from efi. Unifying the kboot and efi copies is needed. While they are mostly the same, sharing is complicated by remaining compile-time differences. In addition, the build infrastructure makes sharing awkward.
• It would be nice to add riscv64 support.
• PowerPC testing (it has been untested since the refactoring started).
• Creating a script to repackage EDK-II image (say, from QEMU) as a linux-boot image with a Linux kernel built on FreeBSD for CI testing.
• Testing it from the coreboot LinuxBoot.

The Custer Administration Team has seemingly been successfull at finding mirrors (companies have provided hardware, however it has not been specified whether they are mirrors on the site), however, they still require a full mirror site with 5 servers within Europe specifically.

With the Honeyguide Group sponsoring, the FBSD team plans to make jails more akin to Docker images. Pot will be the FBSD equivalent of Dockerhub. This will be great for the development of FBSD, since Docker is a must-have feature for many developers.

Wazuh is an open source platform, which is used for threat prevention, detection, and response. The main goal is to make FreeBSD more visible as a cybersecurity platform. You can contribute if you wish.

All in all, many developments are being made in FBSD, and I think it may interest you to take a look.

The BSDs have made quite a few innovations over the years. Many of them have not only made it to Linux, they have made it to Windows and MacOS as well. You might find this page on OpenBSD's website quite interesting! :)

• NetBSD-SA2023-006 KDC-spoofing in pam_krb5
• NetBSD-SA2023-005 su(1) bypass via pam_ksu(8)
• NetBSD-SA2023-004 procfs environ exposure
• NetBSD-SA2023-003 Structure padding memory disclosures
• NetBSD-SA2023-002 Various compatibility syscall memory access issues
• NetBSD-SA2023-001 Multiple buffer overflows in USB drivers-----

Synopsis

Do you think BSD, or Linux is better? Which of the BSDs do you think are the best?

Let's start a war!

This is the FreeBSD status report for the first quarter. It describes many operating system improvements, along with efforts on promoting FBSD. The FreeBSD foundation sponsors many events, which include tech conventions. Currently, the cluster administration team are looking for new mirror sites; If you know anyone, or are someone, who could host such sites, within certain countries, they wish to get in touch. The teams at FreeBSD also need help with various other things, such as translation, Freshports, and general feedback/patches.

I want to see your thoughts below. I think the discussion will be quite interesting! :)