The gaming industry, outside of console and mobile games, is mainly focused on three operating systems: Windows, GNU/Linux, and macOS. This leaves FreeBSD with a library mostly restricted to open-source native games. These restrictions may decrease the interest of new and current gaming users for FreeBSD as their main OS as they are accustomed to having access to a wider variety of games (as is the case for GNU/Linux ). Today, thanks to a handful of contributors and through the use of Linuxulator or Wine FreeBSD users have the necessary tools to enjoy gaming :) Firstly, the port of Steam, which allows us to run both GNU/Linux games on FreeBSD under a chroot, and the multiple ports of wine, wine-devel, and wine-proton, which will enable us to play Windows games under FreeBSD. Secondly In addition to these ports, the upstreaming first approach with Wine allowed us to quickly update the Wine version available after a release. This talk will shed a light on the available compatibility tools and how we can leverage these tools to improve the gaming experience on FreeBSD.
Links to the mentioned project: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/linux-emulation/ https://www.winehq.org/ https://github.com/shkhln/linuxulator-steam-utils https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine https://github.com/shkhln/libc6-shim
FreeBSD has first tier level support in Valgrind. Valgrind on illumos works fairly well. They are both supported "out of the box" in upstream Valgrind.
The other BSDs are not in the picture, which is a shame since there aren't too many fundamental differences between the BSDs.
This talk will be about what needs to be done in order to be able to get Valgrind up and running on DragonFly/Net/Open BSD. I'd like it to be both a source of information for anyone that would like to work on Valgrind and also a source of motivation.
This isn't a promise that I will have the time to do this development work!
Talk that I gave at Fosdem 2022 (video only, during Covid) https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/valgrind_freebsd/
Here is the upstream Valgrind web site https://valgrind.org/
And the upstream git repo https://sourceware.org/git/valgrind.git
Here is a repo that I used when I was adding arm64 support to FreeBSD Valgrind https://github.com/paulfloyd/freebsdarm64_valgrind
NetBSD 11 introduces a new MICROVM kernel that can boot in QEMU in about 10 ms, thanks to PVH support, MMIO VirtIO devices, and various low-level optimisations. Building on this foundation, we created smolBSD, a meta-OS and microVM generator that assembles tiny, versatile and fully isolated services using the MICROVM kernel plus selected pieces from NetBSD and pkgsrc. Recent work by Pierre “khorben” Pronchery enables even faster startup by embedding the root filesystem as an initrd-style RAMdisk. This talk presents smolBSD’s design, capabilities, and how it enables ultra-fast, minimal, and reproducible micro-services.
The OpenSolaris Operatingsystem came with one Component that always fascinated me and I am using extensively to package the OpenIndiana Operating System. This talk shows IPS History (why it was created and how) What it currently can do. The Concepts used (Repositories, Packages, FMRI, Facets, Variants, and Manifests, History) and what you can do with them and what IPS does with them. And why Self-Assembly is a major factor in that. As last section I will also talk about porting IPS to rust and Improvements we can make thanks to 10 years of technology advancement since it's Original creation. https://github.com/openindiana/ https://github.com/OpenIndiana/pkg5
Swift is a general-purpose programming language often associated with app development for the Apple ecosystem. Over the years, Swift has extended its reach and is now a cross-platform language with support for Linux, Windows, and more recently, Android. Now, we are bringing Swift to FreeBSD and there are truly devils in the details. How do you start porting a language to a new environment? How do you debug issues before you have a working debugger? This is the story of how we overcame challenges like these while porting Swift to FreeBSD.
It is no secret that certain applications, such as firewalls, routers, and hardened web services, perform best on BSD systems. Yet Linux dominates cloud infrastructure, forcing users to either port these applications or run them as full BSD virtual machines, each requiring special handling and management. This talk presents urunc, a container runtime for unikernels and single-application kernels that enables BSD workloads to run efficiently in Linux environments. urunc executes BSD applications in tiny microVMs and software-based sandboxes while integrating them seamlessly with existing Linux container platforms. This allows Kubernetes and similar systems to manage BSD workloads alongside Linux containers without extra effort or special handling. A live demo will walk through building, packaging, and deploying BSD applications with urunc, with initial performance metrics on startup time and network throughput, showing that BSD applications remain practical even in BSD-“hostile” environments.
In this talk I will:
* introduce the unusual I/O needs of databases and PostgreSQL's new I/O architecture and direction
* show how PostgreSQL works on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and illumos today
* compare those systems' available support for native asynchronous I/O with Windows and Linux
* speculate on the pathways that need to be drilled through their kernels to achieve the state of the art
* speculate on the API design constraints and options I see
* discuss OpenZFS's exciting new direct I/O and block cloning features and their relevance to PostgreSQL
* show-and-tell some experimental patches for full-featured direct I/O on FreeBSD's UFS
* show-and-tell some experimental patches for PostgreSQL with FreeBSD's native AIO and kqueue
My goal is to provide a database hacker's take on the I/O concerns that "go together" and explain how and why they are linked. It is written for a cross-project kernel and file system hacker audience, a rare opportunity provided by this FOSDEM devroom. The presentation begins with a high-level problem space overview, before diving down to user space, VFS and device levels to discuss the options as I see them. It includes some exploratory patches developed over the past few years of working full time on PostgreSQL I/O, porting and testing on ~10 operating systems, and hacking on FreeBSD for fun and education.
It is a 25 minute talk, broken up into 5 subtopics consisting of 5 one-minute slides, and the pace will be fast:
gotwebd is the web interface for browsing Git repositories provided as part of Game of Trees—a project grown out of the OpenBSD community whose goal is to develop a new version control system that relies on prior art, takes what makes Git's design great, leaves out the parts that make Git hard for us to use, and invents new parts for an end result that serves our needs.
Other than the most obvious features, such as browsing repositories, reading commit logs, and inspecting diffs, gotwebd has a few unique features.
First, the privsep design and the use of sandboxing techniques on different operating systems; then the built-in SSH "web" authentication for access control, which also serves as protection against relentless AI scraping; and finally, the ability to directly serve static web content from a Git repository without the need for CI or external hosting.
In this talk, we'll walk through the design of gotwebd, its evolution over time, and present its unique features in detail.
We live in a age where internet is a requirement for our every day routines, whether it is to work from home, keep in contact with our family or our own leisure. It is a common to hear about how some company we trusted with our data has been hacked, and all our data is now floating around the internet. Many of us take steps to increase the security of our laptops, and our mobile phones. Some of us reject the use of SAAS services (such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Discord etc) and host our own, either on our own hardware or hardware rented in the cloud.
Unfortunately, this often leads us to assume that our local network is secure, thinking only about the security of our services and not the connectivity to them. Many routers issued to consumers by an ISP or bought often miss security patches (YMMV) and often reach EOL within a very short lifespan. It is also not uncommon for these routers to have their own custom configuration format, which is device specific, making migration to new hardware more difficult.
Introducing OpenBSD, "free, functional and secure"! Any old hardware could become a router, that Raspberry Pi you have lying around? That old desktop you do not use anymore? OpenBSD comes with all the software you need for a router (and more!) within the base system.
Join me, and lets discuss how to keep your network secure, and give you more control over your network.