Not too long ago, support for direct IO landed in OpenZFS after years of discussions and reviews. We truly live in the future where we can finally reject complicated caching and fully embrace the unbuffered conversations with our disks. Or can we really?
Those of you who know a bit about ZFS know that the ARC is actually pretty important (without one ZFS would historically stand for zzz 😴...
Abstract—This talk introduces the work to create a commercial desktop operating system based on FreeBSD. Since FreeBSD has a friendly license, it is one of the best options to create an operating system with unique features from scratch. To create such operating systems based on FreeBSD, particularly for commercial desktops, there are two major aspects need be considered: firstly, how to...
I'm typing this in my Xuake Wayland Compositor on OpenBSD.
I started this journey on the NetBSD 9.99.x branch and ended up having to dig into the guts of wscons, mesa, libdrm, the kernel drm subsystem, the AMDGPU driver and more. I have a couple of very small, but hard fought patches in the NetBSD kernel. It's not over yet, either. I still have a few bugs around the compositor shutdown...
Testing an operating system is not easy. FreeBSD project uses Kyua testing framework and has continuously made efforts to add more test cases. They are mostly written in shell scripts or some lightweight programming languages. Writing and maintaining complex test cases is still challenging.
This talk introduces TTCN-3, Testing and Test Control Notation version 3. This is a...
Confidential computing is a family of techniques to enhance security
and confidentiality for data in use. One technical approach is strong
isolation for virtual machines.
AMDs Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) offers several feature sets
for isolation of guest virtual machines from an non-trusted host hypervisor
and operating system. These feature sets include memory...
A few years ago, we decided to migrate many of our servers (and many of those of our clients) from Linux to the BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD - depending on the specific services. In this presentation, I will discuss the reasons behind our decision, the technical and organizational challenges we faced, the tangible benefits we have experienced, and why we believe this migration is...
Join our panel of ZFS experts over lunch as they field questions from the audience about ZFS, new features, best practices, and everything else related to storage.
If you deploy ZFS, or are considering doing so, you should join us.
In this talk, I'd like to present how I took EndBASIC and built a NetBSD-based embedded device that boots into this interpreter in just a few seconds.
EndBASIC is a side project of mine that implements a retro-looking BASIC environment. Up until now, this featured a web interface and a desktop interface -- but I wanted to offer a prebuilt image for the Raspberry Pi that booted...
KASAN is a kernel sanitizer commonly combined with fuzzing techniques to detect memory corruption bugs, some of which could lead to security compromise. Currently, FreeBSD's KASAN can only detect a subset of temporal safety vulnerabilities due to the lack of a delayed freeing mechanism of freed items. Furthermore, the effectiveness of detecting spatial safety vulnerabilities is also limited...
Automating My FreeBSD Lab: From Setup to Daily Use with Ansible & Salt
Abstract
Managing multiple FreeBSD machines can be time-consuming, but automation makes it effortless. In this talk, I will demonstrate how I use Ansible to set up my FreeBSD lab and Salt to maintain and scale it across multiple machines—including how I configured a second FreeBSD laptop with just SSH...
