"The great majority of OpenBSD developers are from outside the United States, and I would guess that most of us prefer not to visit the US now thanks to the murderous foreign policy, authoritarian domestic surveillance, and invasive border control. You'll find few of us there. Personally I've been refusing invitations to go to, or even transit through the United States for about 6 years."
"When you buy from Apple, you do not get what you paid for. Instead you get exactly what you got suckered into buying."
"I just imported ix(4), a driver for the Intel 82598EB 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters. It is based on Intel's ixgbe FreeBSD driver, with many local changes for OpenBSD.
"The driver is fully-operational and survived some long-time tests, had to work on borrowed hardware from another company since Intel didn't provide us any cards. It is currently not sure how to maintain the driver in the future without having cards in the project. John Ronciak from Intel told me told me that they don't have more cards to give away. It is purely a business case issue; a lot of customer have asked for FreeBSD, they got two cards, but nobody asked for an OpenBSD driver. He told me that they're doing the right for their customers. But of course I could still buy them on the open market."
"Development is really fast right now, because of the hackathon in Edmonton. We are testing as much as we can before we commit, but as always during these hackathon processes we really depend on our user community -- to track our changes and help spot the occasional bug we accidentally introduce. We are developing really fast and hard; please help us by testing really fast and hard too."
Constantine Murenin offered a history of the OpenBSD hardware sensors framework during his talk at BSDCan 2008, describing how it was originally based on a port from NetBSD, then evolved and was eventually ported to all the BSDs. He also discussed his own involvement with the framework, having ported it from OpenBSD to FreeBSD as a Summer of Code project, and how his port was merged into DragonFly BSD. At the end of the talk, there were some interesting ecxhanges between Constantine and Poul-Henning Kamp, the latter explaining why he'd had the code backed out of FreeBSD and why he continues to oppose it being merged back in.
"If you can't use strcpy and strlcpy correctly, then you should not be a programmer."
"The OpenBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has completed arrangements with the University of Alberta in Edmonton to host the 2008 Annual OpenBSD Developer's Conference (C2K8 Hackathon) from June 7 to June 15, 2008," stated an announcement by the OpenBSD Foundation, continuing:
"The facility support from the University of Alberta Computer Science Department will provide C2K8 the best facilities yet for the annual OpenBSD Developer Conference. C2K8 will be the 10th annual event of its kind. Previous hackathons have produced tools such as the PF firewall, OpenBGP, relayd and spamd, as well as innumerable critical improvements to OpenBSD, OpenSSH, and related projects.
"This year, the OpenBSD Foundation will disburse approximately $15,000 to support C2K8, enabling more than 50 OpenBSD developers from around the world to attend this important event. The Foundation thanks all who have generously donated the resources to make C2K8 possible."
Leslie Hawthorn, a Program Manager in Google's Open Source team, gave a talk at BSDCAN 2008 on Google's ongoing Summer of Code project. She started by explaining what the open source team does, including enforcing license compliance, hosting over 700,000 open source projects with Google Code, academic research, funding open source development, and community outreach including the sponsorship of conferences such as BSDCan. She went on to discuss how she got started running the project after its initial launch in 2005.
Having sponsored four summer of code's now, Leslie noted that Google has had over 1,500 "graduates" and over 2,000 mentors involved, coming from over 98 countries and working with over 175 open source projects. By the end of the currently in progress 2008 Summer of Code, the project will have provided over 10 million US dollars in funding, generating over 6 million lines of code.
"I think people are placing too much blame on valgrind. valgrind doesn't tell you 'Delete this line of code.' It says 'You are using uninitialized memory here.' The correct fix is to initialize the memory, not delete the line of code. It's not about trusting or not trusting the tool; it's about responding correctly."
KernelTrap is excited to be able to offer live coverage of this year's BSDCan 2008 in Ottawa, Canada on May 16th and 17th. The two day conference takes place at the University of Ottawa, and was organized for the fifth consecutive year by Dan Langille who has also made it possible for me to attend and cover the event on KernelTrap. I spoke with Dan to get some background information on the conference, and learn about some of the upcoming highlights.
The event's webpage explains:
"BSDCan, a BSD conference held in Ottawa, Canada, has quickly established itself as the technical conference for people working on and with 4.4BSD based operating systems and related projects. The organizers have found a fantastic formula that appeals to a wide range of people from extreme novices to advanced developers."
"We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.3," began OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt. "This is our 23rd release on CD-ROM (and 24th via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of more than ten years with only two remote holes in the default install." He added, "as in our previous releases, 4.3 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system". Four platforms were listed as new or extended, including: sparc64 gained SMP support, "this should work on all supported systems, with the exception of the Sun Enterprise 10000"; hppa K-class servers are now supported; mvme88k gained SMP support on a couple of systems, and support for the 88110 processor was added. Numerous drivers were listed as new or improved, including a huge list of network drivers:
"The bge(4) driver now supports BCM5906/BCM5906M 10/100 and BCM5755 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet devices; the cas(4) driver now supports Cassini+ 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet devices; the em(4) driver now supports ICH9 10/100 and 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet devices; the gem(4) driver now supports the onboard 1000base-SX interface on the Sun Fire V880 server; the ixgb(4) driver now supports the Sun 10Gb PCI-X Ethernet devices; the msk(4) driver now supports Yukon FE+ 10/100 and Yukon Supreme 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet devices; the nfe(4) driver now supports MCP73, MCP77 and MCP79 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet devices; the ral(4) driver now supports RT2800 based wireless network devices; the cmpci(4) driver now supports CMI8768 based audio adapters; the it(4) driver now supports ITE IT8705F/8712F/8716F/8718F/8726F and SiS SiS950 ICs; new bwi(4) driver for the Broadcom AirForce IEEE 802.11b/g wireless network device; new et(4) driver for the Agere/LSI ET1310 10/100/Gigabit Ethernet device; new etphy(4) driver for the Agere/LSI ET1011 TruePHY Gigabit Ethernet PHY; new iwn(4) driver for the Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN IEEE 802.11a/b/g/Draft-N wireless network device; new upgt(4) driver for the Conexant/Intersil PrismGT SoftMAC USB IEEE 802.11b/g wireless network device."
A more complete list of changes can be found here. ONLamp also recently posted an interview titled, "Puffy and the Cryptonauts: What's New in OpenBSD 4.3". Theo noted, "profits from CD sales are the primary income source for the OpenBSD project -- in essence selling these CD-ROM units ensures that OpenBSD will continue to make another release six months from now."
"Quite honestly poll() is a better select(), even if it came out of AT&T."
"In concrete terms, this adds support for WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK protocols, both in station and hostap modes."
"Twice a year I get to release the song & lyrics, and write a little commentary on something the project dealt with other [than] the release. Hope you guys enjoy," said OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt, including a link to the latest OpenBSD song. The OpenBSD project maintains a six month release cycle, with the upcoming 4.3 release officially scheduled for May 1st, 2008. Each release includes a song relevant to issues faced by the project during the past six months. The song for the upcoming 4.3 release is titled, "Home to Hypocrisy", with scathing references to some recent postings on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list by Free Software Foundation creator Richard Stallman. In his commentary, Theo explained, "we release our software in ways that are maximally free. We remove all restrictions on use and distribution, but leave a requirement to be known as the authors." He continued, describing the recent confrontation on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list:
"We have a development sub-tree called 'ports'. Our 'ports' tree builds software that is 'found on the net' into packages that OpenBSD users can use more easily. A scaffold of Makefiles and scripts automatically fetch these pieces of software, apply patches as required by OpenBSD, and then build them into nice neat little tarballs. [...] Richard felt that this 'ports tree' of ours made OpenBSD non-free. He came to our mailing lists and lectured to us specifically, yet he said nothing to the many other vendors who do the same; many of them donate to the FSF and perhaps that has something to do with it. Meanwhile, Richard has personally made sure that all the official GNU software -- including Emacs -- compiles and runs on Windows.
"That man is a false leader. He is a hypocrite. There may be some people who listen to him. But we don't listen to people who do not follow their own stupid rules."
"It is kind of strange to us to have Sun suddenly be the perfect example of openness."
