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Posted by
Soulskill
on Sunday May 11, @11:05AM
from the better-late-than-never dept.
from the better-late-than-never dept.
sproketboy writes with news that a developer named Marc Balmer has recently fixed a bug in a bit of BSD code which is roughly 25 years old. In addition to the OSnews summary, you can read Balmer's comments and a technical description of the bug.
"This code will not work as expected when seeking to the second entry of a block where the first has been deleted: seekdir() calls readdir() which happily skips the first entry (it has inode set to zero), and advance to the second entry. When the user now calls readdir() to read the directory entry to which he just seekdir()ed, he does not get the second entry but the third. Much to my surprise I not only found this problem in all other BSDs or BSD derived systems like Mac OS X, but also in very old BSD versions. I first checked 4.4BSD Lite 2, and Otto confirmed it is also in 4.2BSD. The bug has been around for roughly 25 years or more."
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- 212 comments
Posted by
timothy
on Thursday May 01, @11:54AM
from the deserves-more-praise dept.
from the deserves-more-praise dept.
An anonymous reader writes "OpenBSD 4.3 is now available! Released today, May 1, 2008, 4.3 introduces many new improvements and upgrades. The complete changelog is here. Torrents can be found here." As usual, this release is accompanied by a song.
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- 69 comments
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Apr 20, 2008 10:57 PM
from the to-the-other-side dept.
from the to-the-other-side dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Jeremy White from CodeWeavers has made the announcement that an experimental build of CrossOver Games is now available for PC-BSD users. However, this unsupported edition should also work on FreeBSD or DesktopBSD, allowing users to play Windows games on their desktop. The FreeBSD version of CrossOver Games can be downloaded here (registration required)." From the attached notes:
"Remember this is an experimental build! If you are on FreeBSD 6.x, you will need to apply a system patch from http://wiki.freebsd.org/Wine to enable wine to function properly. Users of FreeBSD 7.0 and higher do not need this patch."
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- 35 comments
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Apr 20, 2008 02:17 PM
from the devilish-wings-spread-wider dept.
from the devilish-wings-spread-wider dept.
Derkjan de Haan writes "I am glad to see progress is being made on the the ability of OpenSolaris to boot from a ZFS filesystem: 'This putback provides the ability to boot the Solaris Operating System from a ZFS root file system on both x86 and SPARC platforms. Full ZFS boot and install support will be available in a subsequent build. Because of the phased putback, we recommend waiting for the full boot and install support rather than attempting to use the ZFS boot features separately.'"
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- 50 comments
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Mar 06, 2008 09:40 AM
from the coulda-been-a-contender dept.
from the coulda-been-a-contender dept.
cecom writes "After major improvements in SMP support in FreeBSD 7.0, benchmarks show it performing 15% better than the latest Linux kernels (PDF, see slides 17 to 19) on 8 CPUs under PostgreSQL and MySQL. While a couple of benchmarks are not conclusive evidence, it can be assumed that FreeBSD will once again be a serious performance contender. Some posters on LWN have noted that the level of Linux performance could be related to the Completely Fair Scheduler, which was merged into the 2.6.23 Linux kernel."
Update: 03/06 21:32 GMT by KD : An anonymous reader sent in word that Linux kernel developer Nick Piggin reran the benchmark today and came to a different conclusion: In his benchmark Linux was faster than FreeBSD.
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- 288 comments
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Feb 27, 2008 08:31 PM
from the get-it-while-it's-hot dept.
from the get-it-while-it's-hot dept.
cperciva writes "The first release from the new 7-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, has been released. FreeBSD 7.0 brings with it many new features including support for ZFS, journaled filesystems, and SCTP, as well as dramatic improvements in performance and SMP scalability. In addition to being available from many FTP sites, ISO images can be downloaded via the BitTorrent tracker, or for users of earlier FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD Update can be used to perform a binary upgrade."
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- 229 comments
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Feb 26, 2008 06:40 PM
from the what-indeed dept.
from the what-indeed dept.
blackbearnh writes "FreeBSD is about to release the much-anticipated version 7, and as usual there's a comprehensive interview with over two dozen of the major contributors over at O'Reilly's ONLamp site. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed the developers to discuss all the details of FreeBSD 7.0: networking and SMP performance, SCTP support, the new IPSEC stack, virtualization, monitoring frameworks, ports, storage limits and a new journaling facility, what changed in the accounting file format, jemalloc(), ULE, and more."
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- 103 comments
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Feb 10, 2008 08:58 AM
from the random-acts-of-kndness dept.
from the random-acts-of-kndness dept.
snake-oil-security writes "Last fall Amit Klein found a serious weakness in the OpenBSD PRNG (pseudo-random number generator), which allows an attacker to predict the next DNS transaction ID. The same flavor of this PRNG is used in other places like the OpenBSD kernel network stack. Several other BSD operating systems copied the OpenBSD code for their own PRNG, so they're vulnerable too; Apple's Darwin-based Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server, and also NetBSD, FreeBSD, and DragonFlyBSD. All the above-mentioned vendors were contacted in November 2007. FreeBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFlyBSD committed a fix to their respective source code trees, Apple refused to provide any schedule for a fix, but OpenBSD decided not to fix it. OpenBSD's coordinator stated, in an email, that OpenBSD is completely uninterested in the problem and that the problem is completely irrelevant in the real world. This was highlighted recently when Amit Klein posted to the BugTraq list."
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- 196 comments
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Jan 18, 2008 10:02 PM
from the put-the-daemon-back-in-the-box dept.
from the put-the-daemon-back-in-the-box dept.
cperciva writes "FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE, the fourth release from the highly successful 6-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, has been released. In addition to being available from many FTP sites, ISO images can be downloaded via the BitTorrent tracker, or for users of earlier FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD Update can be used to perform a binary upgrade."
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- 100 comments
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Dec 19, 2007 01:59 PM
from the so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-stacks dept.
from the so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-stacks dept.
ci4 writes to tell us that NetBSD 4.0 has been released and has been dedicated to the memory of Jun-Ichiro "itojun" Hagino. "Itojun was a member of the KAME project, which provided IPv6 and IPsec support; he was also a member of the NetBSD core team (the technical management for the project), and one of the Security Officers. Due to Itojun's efforts, NetBSD was the first open source operating system with a production ready IPv6 networking stack, which was included in the base system before many people knew what IPv6 was. We are grateful to have known and worked with Itojun, and we know that he will be missed. This release is therefore dedicated, with thanks, to his memory."
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- 121 comments
