Linux Action News 212

Coming up on the show this week, we’ve got an interview with Brendan Gregg of Netflix. He’s got a lot to say about performance tuning and benchmarks & even some pretty funny stories about how people have done them incorrectly. As always, this week’s news & answers to your emails, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

Thanks to:

Direct Download:

RSS Feeds:

– Show Notes: –

Headlines

Even more BSD presentation videos

More videos from this year’s MeetBSD and OpenZFS devsummit were uploaded since last week
Robert Ryan, At the Heart of the Digital Economy
FreeNAS & ZFS, The Indestructible Duo – Except for the Hard Drives
Richard Yao, libzfs_core and ioctl stabilization
OpenZFS, Company lightning talks
OpenZFS, Hackathon Presentation and Awards
Pavel Zakharov, Fast File Cloning
Rick Reed, Half a billion unsuspecting FreeBSD users
Alex Reece & Matt Ahrens, Device Removal
Chris Side, Channel Programs
David Maxwell, The Unix command pipeline
Be sure to check out the giant list of videos from last week’s episode if you haven’t seen them already

NetBSD on a Cobalt Qube 2

The Cobalt Qube was a very expensive networking appliance around 2000
In 2014, you can apparently get one of these MIPS-based machines for about forty bucks
This blog post details getting NetBSD installed and set up on the rare relic of our networking past
If you’re an old-time fan of RISC or MIPS CPUs, this’ll be a treat for you
Lots of great pictures of the hardware too

OpenBSD vs. AFL

In their never-ending security audit, some OpenBSD developers have been hitting various parts of the tree with a fuzzer
If you’re not familiar, fuzzing is a semi-automated way to test programs for crashes and potential security problems
The program being subjected to torture gets all sorts of random and invalid input, in the hopes of uncovering overflows and other bugs
American Fuzzy Lop, in particular, has provided some interesting results across various open source projects recently
So far, it’s fixed some NULL pointer dereferences in OpenSSH, various crashes in tcpdump and mandoc and a few other things
AFL has an impressive list of CVEs (vulnerabilities) that it’s helped developers discover and fix
It also made its way into OpenBSD ports, FreeBSD ports and NetBSD’s pkgsrc very recently, so you can try it out for yourself

GNOME 3 hits the FreeBSD ports tree

While you’ve been able to run GNOME 3 on PC-BSD and OpenBSD for a while, it hasn’t actually hit the FreeBSD ports tree.. until now
Due to systemd dependencies and the upstream developers not really being interested in non-Linux OSes, it took a considerable amount of effort to port
Now you can play with GNOME 3 and all its goodies (as well as Cinnamon 2.2, which this also brings in) on vanilla FreeBSD
Be sure to check the commit message and /usr/ports/UPDATING if you’re upgrading from GNOME 2
You might also want to go back and listen to our interview with Joe Marcus Clark about GNOME’s portability

Interview – Brendan Gregg – bgregg@netflix.com / @brendangregg

Performance tuning, benchmarks, debugging

News Roundup

DragonFlyBSD 4.0 released

A new major version of DragonFly, 4.0.1, was just recently announced
This version includes support for Haswell GPUs, lots of SMP improvements (including some in PF) and support for up to 256 CPUs
It’s also the first release to drop support for i386, so it joins PCBSD in the 64 bit-only club
Check the release notes for all the details, including networking and kernel improvements, as well as some crypto changes

Can we talk about FreeBSD vs Linux

Hackernews had a recent thread about discussing Linux vs BSD, and the trolls stayed away for once
Rather than rehashing why one is “better” than the other, it was focused on explaining some of the differences between ecosystems and communities
If you’re one of the many people who watch our show just out of curiosity about the BSD world, this might be a good thread to read
Someone in the comments even gave bsdnow.tv a mention as a good resource to learn, thanks guy

OpenBSD IPSEC tunnel guide

If you’ve ever wanted to connect two networks with OpenBSD gateways, this is the article for you
It shows how to set up an IPSEC tunnel between destinations, how to lock it down and how to access all the machines on the other network just like they were on your LAN
The article also explains some of the basics of IPSEC if you’re not familiar with all the terminology, so this isn’t just for experts
Though the article itself is a few years old, it mostly still applies to the latest stuff today
All the tools used are in the OpenBSD base system, so that’s pretty handy too

DragonFly starts work on IPFW2

DragonFlyBSD, much like FreeBSD, comes with more than one firewall you can use
Now it looks like you’re going to have yet another choice, as someone is working on a fork of IPFW (which is actually already in its second version, so it should be “IPFW3”)
Not a whole lot is known yet; it’s still in heavy development, but there’s a brief roadmap page with some planned additions
The guy who’s working on this has already agreed to come on the show for an interview, but we’re going to give him a chance to get some more work done first
Expect that sometime next year, once he’s made some progress

Feedback/Questions

All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
Michael Lucas’ new book, “FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials” is on sale now, check it out if you want to learn about FreeBSD’s disk subsystems
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv – don’t be shy, we’d love to hear what you have to say
Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (19:00 UTC)
We’ve got a fun idea for the holidays this year: just like we ask during the interviews, we want to hear how all the viewers and listeners first got into BSD. Email us your story, either written or a video version, and we’ll read and play some of them for the Christmas episode. You’ve got until December 17th to send them in (that’s when we’re prerecording)

The post 8,000,000 Mogofoo-ops | BSD Now 65 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

iops – Jupiter Broadcasting

Linux Action News 212

All Good Things | TechSNAP 430

RAID Reality Check | TechSNAP 428

It’s All About IOPS | TechSNAP 415

Everyday ZFS | TechSNAP 401