BSD Forums writes "Kernel programming sometimes feels like a dark art where application programmers should never venture, but sometimes it's the right way to solve a problem. (Oh, and it's also very interesting.) One of the easiest places to start is by adding a new system call to a kernel. Kevin Lo explains how and why, with the OpenBSD kernel in this OnLamp article."

Dan writes "The NetBSD security team has formally announced 4 security advisories and fixes for the following advisories: NetBSD-SA2003-014 Insufficient argument checking in sysctl(2); NetBSD-SA2003-015 Remote and local vulnerabilities in XFree86 font libraries; NetBSD-SA2003-016 Sendmail - another prescan() bug CAN-2003-0694; NetBSD-SA2003-017 OpenSSL multiple vulnerability. There is an integer overflow in the XFree86 font libraries, which could lead to potential privilege escalation and/or remote code execution. Sendmail advisory involves a prescan() bug in sendmail packages prior to 8.12.10. OpenSSL had multiple vulnerabilities, they were found by tests performed by NISCC. Finally, insufficient argument checking in sysctl(2) which could be exploited."

edhall cut-and-pastes "After a six-month hiatus, a new FreeBSD Status Report has just been issued, along with a promise to resume its bi-monthly publication. As the report itself makes obvious, a lot has happened over the last six months. Progress has been happening along many fronts; those groups making reports include: [snip] These are, of course, just the projects that remembered to send in a report -- there are many more ongoing efforts than listed here; see this page for a fuller but not necessarily complete list (you'll note that there are status reports for projects not listed there, such as the AMD64 port)."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Eng. Team's Murray Stokely says that the FreeBSD team has resolved many of the issues brought up with the first release candidate and made FreeBSD RC2 ISO available for testing. They are especially interested in hearing from people who can deploy this on heavily loaded systems."

weebl writes "Thursday October 9th at 6:00PM PDT (9PM EDT/1AM GMT) SlashNET's #forum channel will be hosting a Q&A session with Matthew Dillon of the DragonFly BSD Project. This is your opportunity to ask about DragonFly BSD, BSD in general, or any other questions you might have for him. DragonFly BSD was first announced this past July." If you can't make it to the forum, SlashNET will have a bot running earlier in the day for question submissions, and logs available afterward.

jschauma writes "Starting Monday, October 6th, 2003, the NetBSD Packages Collection will be frozen in order to stabilize pkgsrc on the various supported platforms. As Alistair Crooks explains in his message to the tech-pkg mailing list, this freeze is done so that the pkgsrc team can shake out bugs, fix broken packages and close pkgsrc related problem reports. If you want to help out, you can take a look at the PR database and submit patches."

BSD Forums writes "This OnLamp article by Miod Vallat describes how the m88k-specific backend of the GNU C compiler, gcc, was fixed, from the discovery and analysis of the problems to the real fixing work. Since it started with almost zero gcc internals knowledge, it should be understandable by anyone able to read C code, and proves that diving into gcc is not as hard as one could imagine."

shking writes "Theo has pre-released the OpenBSD 3.4 song. It was written, arranged & recorded by Ty Semaka and Jonathan Lewis of the Plaid Tongued Devils. You can find the new song at www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html. Enjoy."

wumpus188 writes "FreeBSD Release Eng. Team's Murray Stokely announces the availability of first release candidate for FreeBSD 4.9 (RC1). He is requesting everyone to download and test, including helping with finding bugs. As indicated in the Release Engineering Team's testing agenda, more testing should be done with PAE systems to test device compatibility and performance. In particular, active systems with 12 gigs of RAM or more should be thoroughly tested to make sure the various memory allocation algorithms in the kernel still scale properly."

Dan writes "Quinton Dolan is in the final stages of porting the NVidia Linux nForce MCP network driver to FreeBSD-5.1. He is looking for users/developers with access to this hardware for testing help. The driver currently appears to be stable on his hardware (an MSI K7N420 Pro), although he hasn't done much stress testing, nor does he have access to an nForce2 based motherboard to test."

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Poul-Henning Kamp is in the process of adding ref-counting and locking to dev_t, and would very much prefer if this step is completed soon before 5-STABLE gets branched. He says that all this will be transparent to the majority of device drivers, as the refcounting will happen in the make_dev() and destroy_dev() family of calls and normal drivers need not know more about it."

BSD Forums writes "The ever increasing mobility of computers has made protection of data on digital storage media an important requirement in a number of applications and situations. GBDE is a strong cryptographic facility for denying unauthorised access to data stored on a 'cold' disk for decades and longer. GBDE operates on the disk(-partition) level allowing any type of file system or database to be protected. A significant focus has been put on the practical aspects in order to make it possible to deploy GBDE in the real world. FreeBSD's Poul-Henning Kamp says in an email to freebsd-current that he has uploaded this paper and slides which he presented at BSDcon 2003, California, USA."

BSD Forums writes "Anyone who has worked with any BSD knows that the base operating system doesn't include many programs that most people use in day-to-day work. Unless you only need vi and ssh, you must install additional software to make your palmtop useful and comfortable. OnLamp's Michael Lucas says that if you're running a palmtop -- or, indeed, any sort of small hardware with NetBSD installed -- you'll probably want to expand the system."

PowerMacDaddy writes "In an ongoing effort to keep the FreeBSD core of OS X open source, Apple has updated Darwin to 6.7 and 6.8, which corresponds to the OS X 10.2.7 and 10.2.8 updates, respectively. Source code is available."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engg. Team's Murray Stokely has put together a FreeBSD 4.9-BETA ISO image for i386 with the latest package build provided by portmgr@. If you haven't yet given 4.9PRE a try, hopefully this will encourage you to do so!"

ltwally writes "The guys over at LittleWhiteDog have a how-to on securing FreeBSD. Topics range from the basics to custom kernels, blowfish encryption, smtp, and custom firewall scripts. Definitely worth a look if you're running a FreeBSD box, or are interested in *nix security in general."

Dan writes "On September 16th 2003, the KDE Project released KDE 3.1.4. KDE 3.1.4 is a maintenance release which provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug tracking system and two vulnerabilities in KDM. Ports have been committed, binary packages for FreeBSD are available, including 4-STABLE, 5-RELEASE, check KDE on FreeBSD or your favorite mirror."

Dan writes "The anticipated GCC3.3.1 switch on NetBSD has happened for some of the popular platforms. NetBSD's Matthew Green announced that he has switched the alpha, i386, sparc and sparc64 ports to use GCC 3.3.1 as the default system compiler. At the same time, NetBSD's Matt Thomas announced that the arm ports(acorn26, acorn32, cats, and shark) have been switched over as well."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long would like to get a new poll on the stability and readiness of 4.9. The belief is that the last of the PAE-induced instability was resolved on August 31. Is anyone still experiencing unusual crashes, corruption, etc, on a system that is running with up-to-date sources? Now is the time to speak up and get the problems resolved. Scott is also requesting help with testing. In response to this, we are adding our own poll. Please vote and add comments as appropriate to help Scott."

BSD Forums writes "One of FreeBSD's biggest benefits is its ports collection. It seems like magic, but a little maintenance can make it work even better for your system. Dru Lavigne explains how to keep your ports collection clean and how to customize individual ports."