Returning readers are likely aware that OpenBSD in its OpenBSD/amd64 and OpenBSD/i386 varieties comes with virtualization built in, brought to you by the vmm(4) subsystem.
Earlier this week the OpenBSD foundation received its first Silver donation from an individual contributor. Thank you John Carmack for the very generous contribution! The support will ensure that many important projects are moving forward and continue making impact.
EuroBSDcon 2018is now over, and slides for OpenBSD-related presentations are now availablefrom theusual place.As always, there's some great reading there (especially for those of uswho were unable to attend the conference).Unfortunately, there will not be any video this year.
In ashortseriesofcommits,Carlos Cardenas (ccardenas@) added support forqcow2image support to vmd(8).[This builds on anearlier commitadding support for pluggable disk backends.]The code was written by Ori Bernstein, who posted his diffs (thread 1, thread 2) to the tech@openbsd.org mailing list in August.Read more…
Anton Lindqvist (anton@) gave a talk atBSD Users Stockholm Meetup #3 on the kernel coverage tracing kit he committed recently.Slidesare now available via theOpenBSD Events and Papers page.The slides contain a list of bugs found and fixed as a result of this work.See also:kcov(4)
In aseriesofcommits,Todd Mortimer (mortimer@) has added RETGUARDfor the arm64 platform.We previously reported theaddition of RETGUARD for amd64.Read more…
Patrick Wildt (patrick@) has been experimenting with small I2C and SPI-connected displays, and withthis commit, it was enabled for armv7 and arm64 platforms as ssdfb(4) in -current.Read more…
For the g2k18 Ljubljana hackathon, i decided to try and get ridof as many small userland tasks as possible.Lots of them have been piling up over time.Read more…
Philip Guenther (guenther@)and Bryan Steele (brynet@)have added more mitigations against speculative executionCPU vulnerabilitieson the amd64 platform.Read more…
rad(8) [as described in the g2k18 hackathonreport byFlorian Obser (florian@)]is now the only IPv6router advertisement daemon in -current, following the removal ofrtadvd(8).Advice on making the transition has beenadded to current.html
In a change which is bound to be welcomed widely, -current has gained"auto-join" for Wi-Fi networks.Peter Hessler (phessler@) has been working on this for quite some time and he wrote about it in his p2k18 hackathon report. He has committedthe work from the g2k18 hackathon in Ljubljana:
As part of ongoing mitigations against CPU vulnerabilities,-current has gained a new sysctl, "hw.smt",to control Simultaneous Multi Threading (SMT).This is disabled by default (only on Intel® CPUs, for now).Read more…
There have been more developments in the continuing work mitigatingagainst (Intel®, and potentially other) CPU vulnerabilities…Philip Guenther (guenther@)committed the following:Read more…
Earlier this month, Philip Guenther (guenther@)committed(to amd64 -current) a change from lazy to semi-eager FPU switchingto mitigate against rumored FPU state leakagein Intel® CPUs.Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) discussed this in hisBSDCan 2018session.Using information disclosed in Theo's talk,Colin Percivaldeveloped a proof-of-concept exploit in around 5 hours.This seems to have prompted an early end to an embargo(in which OpenBSD was not involved), and theofficial announcementof the vulnerability.
BSDCan 2018has concluded, and materials for (some of) the OpenBSD-related tutorials andtalks can be found inthe usual place.Highlights includethe unveiling of unveil(),hinted at by Bob Beck (beck@) in hisp2k18 report,and"Speculating about Intel", by Theo de Raadt (deraadt@). [An unofficial video of the latter presentation isavailable.]At the time of writing,officialvideo recordings are not yet available.
Todd Mortimer (mortimer@) hascommitted"RETGUARD" for clang (for amd64).This is a new anti-ROPsecurity mechanism, which uses random per-function cookiesto protect return addresses on the stack.Read more…