lewiz writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering have announced that the code freeze in preparation for 4.9-RELEASE (scheduled for 29th September) will begin on 25th August. Also 4.9-RC is tentatively scheduled for 12th September. A full list of dates can be found on the Release Process page."

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Gordon Tetlow has committed his enhancements to enable users to build /bin and /sbin dynamically linked on FreeBSD. His reason to do this is two-fold. One is to give better support for PAM and NSS in the base system. The second is to save some disk space. Currently (on his x86 box), /bin and /sbin are 32 MB. With a dynamically linked root (and some pruning of some binaries), the /bin, /lib, and /sbin come out to 6.1 MB. This should be great for people with 2.x and 3.x era root partitions that are only about 50 MB. Gordon says that there will be a performance hit associated with this. He did a quick measurement at boot and his boot time (from invocation of /etc/rc to the login prompt) went from 12 seconds with a static root to 15 seconds with a dynamic root."

BSD Forums writes "KGI, or Kernel Graphics Interface, provides a framework that allows full 3D accellerated video card drivers to compile on different platforms without any modification to the drivers themselves. At the moment of writing, the Linux target is rather stable, and the core is being ported to FreeBSD and OpenBSD. In (Free)BSD implementation, the board entity is a full FreeBSD device driver, respecting the newbus interfaces, connected to the PCI core and responsible for dispatching the resources to the KGI underlying clock, ramdac and chipset drivers (as they exist in the Linux implementation). The board driver probe/attach routines detect the chipset, prepare the kgi display information and call the kgim functions to powerup the KGI drivers."

BSD Forums writes "The Unix permissions model has worked for decades due to its flexible simplicity. It's not the only approach, though. FreeBSD 5.0 supports Access Control Lists, which allow for more flexible permissions. Daniel Harris explains what ACLs can make easier."

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Kris Kennaway says that the following FreeBSD ports are scheduled for removal on November 7 if they are still broken at that time and no PRs have been submitted to fix them. If you are interested in saving these ports, please send your patches to the maintainer. If the maintainer is unresponsive or the port has no maintainer, then please submit them via send-pr."

DrCarbonite (Jeff Martin) writes "I've used OpenBSD in the past, and benefitted from its extensive online documentation. Sometimes an off-line reference is useful (i.e. required), and Absolute OpenBSD fills this void." Read on for the rest of Martin's review, as well as a more critical one from Marius Aamodt Eriksen.

Dan writes "FreeBSD security team has released two new advisories. The first advisory entitled "Insufficient range checking of signal numbers" could allow a malicious local user to use this vulnerability as a local denial-of-service attack. The second advisory "Kernel memory disclosure via ibcs2" could allow a malicious user to call the iBCS2 version of statfs(2) with an arbitrarily large length parameter, causing the kernel to return a large portion of kernel memory containing sensitive information."

BSD Forums writes "One of FreeBSD's biggest benefits is its ports collection. You can go years without learning more than just make install clean, but there are dozens of features built into the ports tools. OnLamp's Dru Lavigne demonstrates several of these tricks to simplify your life."

Dan writes "Matthew Green says that the gcc3 update on NetBSD is going well. They are almost ready to switch several platforms including i386, sparc, sparc64, arm, mipsel, alpha. Mipseb and m68k are almost done. Sets lists need to be updated and building more kernels with gcc3.3 are the things still pending."

Dan writes "Soeren Schmidt announces the availability of the first preview release of ATAng drivers for FreeBSD. Before these rather radical changes to the ATA driver hits the tree, here is the opportunity to test them out, give useful feedback and for the depending subsytems to adjust to the new ways of things (burncd & atapicam are good examples). These drivers provide the framework for supporting new ATA controllers that have facilities for chaining commands and HW XOR's etc. These changes also facilitate merge of ATA and ATAPI code, as well make full use of fx Promise's new chips."

flynn_nrg writes "WifiBSD is a minimalistic version of FreeBSD based on the 5.x branch. WifiBSD is aimed for wireless routers running on embedded devices such as boards from soekris.com. In addition to the wi driver WifiBSD includes support for Atheros's 802.11b/g and 802.11a/b/g Wireless LAN Chipsets. The latest version of WifiBSD can be found here."

Dan writes "Kris Kennaway believes that the french/med port has the honour of being the 9000'th in the FreeBSD ports collection. Congratulations to everyone who has helped to make the Ports Collection such a success over the past 9 years!"

Dan writes "For those of you running older versions of FreeBSD (prior to 4.7), FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke has an alternate fix for the recent port install problem people were seeing. This fix involves adding a new port, pkg_install, which is a snapshot of the -CURRENT pkg_install code. This port can change periodically as new pkg_* features are added that bsd.port.mk depends on. Joe is also looking for testers for this fix."

BSD Forums writes "Dustin Puryear attended the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC) this year in San Antonio, Texas and presents this report. USENIX offers attendees an interesting mix of papers and talks by academia, well-known industry professionals, and researchers working for companies across the world. What exactly did he really learn from this conference? He says research is as strong as ever within USENIX and open source communities. Samba is making significant progress with the ever emerging Active Directory networks. FreeBSD is emerging as one of the few key OSes of choice for web hosting. Finally, he says that Microsoft is competing for server business with their Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX products."

JoshRendlesham writes "Matt Dillon announced today on the freebsd-hackers mailing list the creation of the DragonFly BSD project. It seeks to build on the work of FreeBSD 4.x, including a rewrite of the packaging and distribution system, among other goals."

Dan writes "The Linuxtag in Karlsruhe is the biggest Linux event in Europe, and of course NetBSD was present there too! The event happened in two buildings, one for the conference, and one big exhibition area. A group of people from BSD and related projects have setup a joint booth to present NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD as well as OpenDarwin, OpenSSH and MirBSD. See Hubert Feyrer's full report for more details."

Echo|Fox writes "So much for *BSD is dying. The latest Netcraft survey shows over 2 million active sites, and almost 4 million active hostnames all running on FreeBSD. Combined with the report that 5 of the top 10 hosting companies in terms of reliability were FreeBSD based, it's been a very positive month *BSD wise. Perhaps the most interesting quote from the survey is: 'Indeed it [FreeBSD] is the only other operating system that is gaining, rather than losing share of the active sites found by the Web Server Survey.'"

securitas writes "Both eWEEK's review of FreeBSD 5.1 and ExtremeTech's BSD overview and roundup (single page) will be of interest to BSDers and anyone else who wants to explore their open source OS options. The review of FreeBSD 5.1 says it lacks the stability of v4.8 but adds features that some may find useful (for example, more processor architectures are supported) so it shouldn't be considered for critical deployments yet. And the BSD round-up speaks for itself."

CoolVibe writes "Finally, the officieal Nvidia drivers for FreeBSD have been updated to version 4365. The drivers are available at Nvidia's website. They are not in the ports yet, but that won't take very long. Also, this driver supports both STABLE and CURRENT officially. I am using them at the moment, and boy, these fix many problems I had with the older ones."

Dan writes "Marshall Vale writes on behalf of the MIT Kerberos team and several other parties interested in the availability of Kerberos authentication for the SSH protocol. Kerberos is a network authentication protocol. It is designed to provide strong authentication for client/server applications by using secret-key cryptography. Marshall says that Kerberos support within OpenSSH may be incomplete and needs more work. In particular, implementing draft-ietf-secsh-gsskeyex in addition to any other Kerberos mechanisms will better serve the needs of Kerberos community. Secondly, he says that they would like to reduce user confusion associated with all of the different options for Kerberos and SSH. He suggests adoption of the GSSAPI key exchange mechanism in the IETF draft (which uses Kerberos to authenticate both parties to each other), in order to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks."