The 5.9 festivities are starting earlier than usual this time around, with the songs being available before the OS! Accompanying the release media are the following tracks:"Doctor W^X" (mp3 | ogg)"Systemagic (Anniversary Edition)" (mp3 | ogg | lyrics)Seasoned OpenBSD users may notice that the second song is a reprisal of "Systemagic" from way back in the 3.1 release days.Enjoy the tunes! If you're an audio snob like a couple of us here at Undeadly, the uncompressed lossless versions can be found on the 5.9 CD set as always.
As noted by Bernard Spil, the OpenSSL bugs disclosed on 2016-03-01 have very little impact on LibreSSL, especially on OpenBSD. However, we will briefly mention the two high-profile issues:LibreSSL (on any platform) is not affected by DROWN. Support for SSLv2 was flensed out quite a while ago.Cachebleed is local-only, and requires a lot effort to get. This is thought to be very difficult to exploit on OpenBSD due to many of the normal mitigations on an OpenBSD system. Other systems without such mitigations may not be so lucky.
There are no doubt many eyes on OpenBSD's continuing network SMP renovation. Hrvoje Popovski writes in to tell us about some performance testing he's been doing:
The list of accepted talks for this year's BSDCan conference has been announced, with the following OpenBSD-related ones being accepted:Reyk Floeter (reyk@), An OpenFlow Implementation for OpenBSDPeter Hessler (phessler@), Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) Implementation and Support in OpenBSDPeter Hansteen, Building the Network You Need with PF, the OpenBSD Packet FilterMike Belopuhov (mikeb@), Implementation of Xen PVHVM Drivers in OpenBSDAntoine Jacoutot (ajacoutot@), OpenBSD rc.d(8)Aaron Poffenberger, OpenSMTPD for the Real WorldHenning Brauer (henning@), Running an ISP on OpenBSDSebastian Benoit (benno@), Open Source RoutingThe event will be held on June 8-11th at the University of Ottawa in Canada.
Mark Kettenis (kettenis@) posted to tech@ asking Firefox users and others to test a patch that changes the threadsafe malloc(3) strategy from spinlocks to mutexes. Mark writes,
This is the most serious bug you'll hear about this week: the issues identified and fixed in OpenSSH are dubbed CVE-2016-0777 and CVE-2016-0778.An early heads up came from Theo de Raadt in this mailing list posting.Until you are able to patch affected systems, the recommended workaround is to use
Robert Nagy (robert@) has integrated quite a few patches to the OpenBSD port of the Chromium browser since its addition to the tree, but the latest one is quite significant. In his recent commit, pledge(2) support has been added.Read more...
Desktop users can feel just a bit safer now, as Alexandre Ratchov (ratchov@) has introduced some initial privilege separation to sndiod(1).Read more...
Two OpenBSD developers gave presentations at this year's Hackfest security conference in Quebec. The videos of both are now online for your viewing pleasure:"Kernel W^X Improvements In OpenBSD" by Mike Larkin (mlarkin@) (slides)"Pledge: A New Security Technology in OpenBSD" by Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) (slides)
The long-anticipated native OpenBSD amd64 and i386 hypervisor vmm(4) has been committed, with userland tools, to the public CVS repository. If you've been following source changes closely, you probably noticed the series of commits like this one from Mike Larkin (mlarkin@), supplemented with one by Reyk Floeter (reyk@). In an announcement and overview sent to tech@, Mike writes:
Many moons ago, OpenBGPd was extensively used throughout the networking world as a Route Server. However, over the years, many have stopped using it and have migrated away to other implementations. Recently, I have been getting more involved with the networking community, so I decided to ask "why?"Read more...
Nicholas Marriott (nicm@) has replaced the aging version of less(1) in the OpenBSD base system with a more modern fork from illumos founder Garrett D'Amore.Read more...
Mike Larkin (mlarkin@) is making progress on vmm(4), the upcoming OpenBSD-native hypervisor. He shared a status update today on Twitter, showcasing a VM booting to multiuser login.Read more...
Polish BSD news site beastie.pl has been conducting interviews with various OpenBSD developers for the 20th anniversary. Each one covers some background info on the interviewee, how and why they got into OpenBSD and what they're looking forward to. The series has just concluded, and you can find the complete list here:Read more...
Polish BSD news site beastie.pl has been conducting interviews with various OpenBSD developers for the 20th anniversary. Each one covers some background info on the interviewee, how and why they got into OpenBSD and what they're looking forward to. The series has just concluded, and you can find the complete list here:Read more...
After recent discussions of revisiting W^X support in Mozilla Firefox, David Coppa (dcoppa@) has flipped the switch to enable it for OpenBSD users running -current.Read more...
On this week'sepisodeofBSDNow,the hosts interview OpenBSD's Brandon Mercer (bmercer@) about how and why he became an OpenBSD developer, the unfortunate state of IT in the health care industry and how OpenBSD has a part to play in fixing that, and his insights into how OpenBSD's 1-year support cycle can help you to 'clean out your fridge' for better overall tech results.As always, they have a roundup of the week's odds and ends in the world of BSD.[Video|HD Video|MP3 Audio|OGG Audio|Torrent]
As noted in a previous story, the new pledge(2) privilege restriction syscall (formerly known as tame(2)) has been inserted into large swathes of the base system. Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) asked tech readers to look closely for any failures:
As mentioned in a previous article, the OpenSMTPD code has seen its first independent audit, which lead to a series of errata and commits. Now main OpenSMTPD developer Gilles Chehade (gilles@) posted a summary of the audit and recent events to the misc@opensmptd.org mailing list, with discussion of the bugs found and some forward-looking statements:
This year's EuroBSDCon in Stockholm, Sweden was a quite successful conference with approximately 250 attendees and a fairly strong showing of OpenBSD developers presenting:
OpenSMTPD has bumped its version number a couple times in the last few days, and there's been some confusion about the included security fixes. This post will bring you up to speed on what's affected and what's not.Read more...
After recently publishing theslidesfrom his talk on the subject,Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has justmailedthe masses, letting us know where we are withtame(2):