Developer Otto Moerbeek (otto@) hasbeenworkingonsupporttobootfromFFS2. He writes in with the below article, to give us a little insight into the challenges he faced while working on this.
I had the pleasure ofsitting with Bob Beckat EuroBSDCon2018 in Bucharest and asking him some questions about theOpenBSD Project, its approaches and some of his favouriteaspects of the Operating System and its projects. Bobpatiently outlines the hows and whys of his involvementin the BSD project.Tom and Bob conduct a post-mortem on a training course onLibTLS Bob Delivered (excellently) in EuroBSDCon & BSDCAN.Bob discusses what online services he used in class fortraining students on LibTLS and why it can be a veryeffective teaching aid.Bob modestly plays down his ability to churn out LibTLS Developers.Bob also gives guidance on the approaches to contributing to the project.Bob reveals the code he least likes working on and why.Bob lets us know what he really thinks about documentation and its value to the community.Bob outlines an example of applying lessons learned from one bug to inform audits looking for similar bugs elsewhere in the OS and the software ecosystem that it supports.I enjoyed making the interview with Bob who answered thequestions with a remarkable combination of purpose and humour.Bob thanks again for your time, and putting up with myinterruptions and jokes :)
Fresh in from u2k20 is this report from Tracey Emery, who visited the hackathon in Uckermark, Germany after getting invited by Stefan Sperling (stsp@):
The EuroBSDCon channel at YouTube now has the EuroBSDCon 2019 videos online. One excellent way to start is with Patricia Aas' excellent keynote Embedded Ethics and just go on, but you could also go directly to the OpenBSD related talks:
A new OpenBSD store has been started, for those looking for OpenBSD swag now that the project no longer produces CDs. If you like the artwork that comes with the releases, this is a great way to support it. Quoting the about page:
In amessageto relevant mailing lists,Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) announced that theOpenBSD project's 47 release,OpenBSD 6.6,is now available frommirror sitesworldwide.Rather than reproducing here the full list of new features,we refer readers to the officialOpenBSD 6.6 page,and the detailedchangelog.Notable changes include but are not limited to:
In a move bound to be greeted with great enthusiasm, the newly-releasedPatch 012for OpenBSD 6.5 addssysupgrade(8)to the system.Readers are encouraged to show their appreciation bydonating!
EuroBSDcon 2019has concluded, and materials for the OpenBSD-related talks can be found inthe usual place.At the time of writing, official video recordings are not yet available,but the organisers assure us that they will be as soon as the editing is done.
Mark Kettenis (kettenis@) has recentlycommittedchangeswhich restore a certain amount ofstartx(1)/xinit(1)functionality for non-root users.The commit messages explain the situation:Read more…
In a very welcome development, Solene Rapenne (solene@) announced that binary package updates for the most popular platforms will be available for the latest OpenBSD release.The announcement reads:
David Gwynne (dlg@) has committed to -current another new network driver -an 802.1Q Two-Port MAC Relay driver,tpmr(4).Themain commit messageexplains the raison d'être:
On hisblog,Joshua Stein (jcs@) has written an[another!]excellent article on an involved investigation into a complex issue:the non-arrival of interrupts for certain touchpad devices.