OpenBSD Journal

A new p2k17 hackathon report has arrived, this one from Florian Obser, who writes:

Landry Breuil (landry@) sent in our next report from the recent ports hackathon:

The next p2k17 report comes from Anthony J. Bentley (bentley@):

The next p2k17 report comes from Sebastian Reitenbach (sebastian@):

The latest hackathon report to come in today came from Christian Weisgerber (naddy@):

The p2k17 hackathon reports keep flowing in, here's one from Jeremy Evans (jeremy@):

Here is a new p2k17 hackathon report from Paul Irofti (pirofti@), who writes:

A new p2k17 hackathon report is in, from Marc Espie, who writes:

The p2k17 hackathon has concluded, and we have our first report.Matthias Kilian (kili@) wrote in:

In amessage to tech@,Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) wrote:

A few days ahead of the date hinted at by the work-in-progress release page, OpenBSD 6.2 was released today, October 9th 2017.Notable changes in this release are as always numerous, and include:Read more…

Robert Nagy (robert@) wrote in with a fascinating story of hunting down arecent problem with ports:

TheEvents and Paperspage of theOpenBSD websitehas been updated to includelinksfor the recently-concludedEuroBSDcon 2017.Rather than reproduce the links here, we suggest readers head over tothe authoritative source.Video recordings of individual presentations are not available at the time of writing,but may be found when themulti-session room recordingsare up.Update:Events and Papersnow has links to individual videos, and aplaylistis available.(Thanks Mevene and espie!)

The next hackathon reports comes from Ken Westerback (krw@), who writes:

After a few quiet days, here is a new t2k17 hackathon report, from Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse. Jasper writes,

Kenneth R Westerback (krw@ when wearing hisdeveloper hat) wrote in to let us know:

The flak reports by Ted Unangst (tedu@) continue withpart 627.Update: Part 628Update: Part 629

Hrvoje Popovski directed our attention to a new blog post from mpi@ discussing one improvements in the performance of the networking stack.

The next t2k17 hackathon report comes from first time hackathon participant Aaron Bieber, who writes:

Next up in our series of t2k17 hackathon reports is this one from Philip Guenther:

Our next hackathon report comes from Andrew Hewus Fresh, who writes:

The next t2k17 report comes from Martin Pieuchot (mpi@) who writes

The t2k17 hackathon reports keep trickling in. Here's the one from Ian Sutton, who writes:

I slacked so much that even portroachstopped mailing the outdated ports I maintained as it noticed how pointless itwas :-)Read more...

I slacked so much that even portroachstopped mailing the outdated ports I maintained as it noticed how pointless itwas :-)Read more…

It almost went unnoticed due to the 6.2-beta announcement, but Antoine Jacoutot (ajacoutot@) just commited a very useful update to syspatch. In this commit, the groundwork is done for having syspatch update only the kernel object files that have changed. Due to KARL, the scheme to relink the kernel for each reboot, it makes sense to save space and bandwidth that way.The commit message reads:Read more…

It almost went unnoticed due to the 6.2-beta announcement, but Antoine Jacoutot (ajacoutot@) just commited a very useful update to syspatch. In this commit, the groundwork is done for having syspatch update only the kernel object files that have changed. Due to KARL, the scheme to relink the kernel for each reboot, it makes sense to save space and bandwidth that way.The commit message reads:Read more...

Theo has just committed the diff that marks the end of the development cycle and the beginning of the testing phase for the upcoming 6.2 release:

Theo has just committed the diff that marks the end of the development cycle and the beginning of the testing phase for the upcoming 6.2 release:

The second report from the just completed t2k17 hackathoncomes from Ted Unangst (tedu@), who writes:

In a message to the tech mailling list, Theo de Raadt(deraadt@) offered a preview of the next big thing in exploit mitigation, dubbed RETGUARD:

In a message to the tech mailling list, Theo de Raadt(deraadt@) offered a preview of the next big thing in exploit mitigation, dubbed RETGUARD:

As there have been no reports of functional bugs since the last beta, and the primary goal of the work was achieved long ago, the (main) Undeadly server is to be upgraded.The upgrade, which is expected to involve downtime of no more than one hour, is scheduled for next Tuesday, 2017-08-22 07:00 UTC.Changes since the last public beta include:

As there have been no reports of functional bugs since the last beta, and the primary goal of the work was achieved long ago, the (main) Undeadly server is to be upgraded.The upgrade, which is expected to involve downtime of no more than one hour, is scheduled for next Tuesday, 2017-08-22 07:00 UTC.Changes since the last public beta include:

The second report from the just completed t2k17 hackathoncomes from Ted Unangst (tedu@), who writes:

News from the OpenBSD Foundation: The Foundation has this year's first Iridium donor.The official statement from the foundation, via director Ken Westerback reads,

News from the OpenBSD Foundation: The Foundation has this year's first Iridium donor.The official statement from the foundation, via director Ken Westerback reads,

The first report from the just completed t2k17 hackathon comes from Bob Beck, who writes:

The first report from the just completed t2k17 hackathon comes from Bob Beck, who writes:

https://beta.undeadly.org/ has received an update. The most significant changes include:

In response to the DEF CON presentation by Ilja van Sprundel,a large set of kernel patches have been released (for OpenBSD 6.0 and 6.1).These important patches should be applied ASAP!From the announce@ mailing list:

Ingo Schwarze (schwarze@) writes in saying:

With this commit, the default compiler for (-current base system on the) amd64 and i386 platforms has been changed to clang(1):

The flak reports by Ted Unangst (tedu@) continue with part 624.Update - part 625

As we see from the commit message, new developer Pratik Vyas (pd@) adds the ability to do paused VM migrations for VMM.Mike Larkin also writes on Twitter:

Over at his blog, Undeadly co-editor Peter Hansteen describes the experience of installing OpenBSD-current on a new laptop.The article, OpenBSD and the modern laptop, goes into some detail on the install procedure, and hits only minor snags even when using modern and recent additions such as UEFI boot.The conclusion is that OpenBSD is well suited for laptop and desktop use, and things tend to just work.On the other hand, we strongly suggest Peter posted the article before the contents of his home directory had actually been completely transferred. He's such a packrat.

As you may have heard (and as was mentioned in an earlier article), on recent OpenBSD snapshots we have KARL, which means that the kernel is relinked so each boot comes with a new kernel where all .o files are linked in random order and with random offsets. Theo de Raadt summarized the status in a message to the tech@ mailing list, subject kernel relinking as follows:

TL;DR - A modernised version of Undeadly is available for testing at <https://beta.undeadly.org/>.Broken features of the current site have been fixed, removed, or replaced.The new software supports - and, where appropriate, requires - HTTPS. Testing, contributions, and constructive feedback would be appreciated.An effort to modernise the Undeadly software was initiated in response to the article Undeadly and HTTPS.This has resulted in substantially reworked software which is now available for public testing.Note that this is not the completely new system which is (arguably) needed.Read more...

Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) provided some history on the insecurity of TIOCSTI [simulate typed input on terminal], with a proposal to disable it on OpenBSD:

The OpenBSD presence at the just concluded BSDCan was quite strong, and here is the first trip report, from Phillipp Buehler: