#freebsd

Secondary: "Tianve" - HP-250 G3 Kernel: 15.0-RELEASE-p10 Operating System: GhostBSD 26.1-R15.0p13 amd64 Desktop: LXQT 2.4.0 Windowmanager: XFWM4 Qt Version: 6.11.2 Graphics Platform: X11/xorg 7.7 https://bsd-hardware.info/?probe=77494a1526 #runbsd #freebsd #ghostbsd #unix #foss #lxqt #desktop #screenshot

#PortsLife #FreeBSD I spent another morning updating and patching a bunch of stuff. I have a couple of new interesting ports to share:

PatDiff: diffs for the discerning developer

• https://github.com/janestreet/patdiff textproc/patdiff is one of my favourite command line tools, your diffs never look so good and clean! Gorgeous output, written in #OCaml

markpdf / markterm: PDFs from markdown

• https://github.com/ralsina/markterm ported mainly because it provides a great markdown->PDF tool, with pagination support! I want this for simple invoice generation, and it was really quick to put a fake one together! Written in #Crystal.

The lovely fonts are from https://mbtype.com/

Valkyrie B for the table https://mbtype.com/fonts/valkyrie/sample.html Advocate 55 Wide Med for the headings https://mbtype.com/fonts/advocate/sample.html

DejaVu Sans for the body, public domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DejaVu_fonts from https://github.com/dejavu-fonts/dejavu-fonts

"The end goal is to standardise our platforms on AWS but this is not yet a decision made." Suuuuuure. #GetFediHired #HateThisJob #FreeBSD

TIL you can nullfs mount a #ZFS snapshot. This could be particularly useful for making sure jail root filesystems are absolutely 100% immutable: hbsd-current-02[shawn]:/home/shawn $ uname -a FreeBSD hbsd-current-02 16.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT #0 hardened/current/master-n196551-d4411c7c9cc3-dirty: Wed Sep 16 19:42:46 UTC 2026 shawn@hbsd-current-02:/usr/obj/usr/src/amd64.amd64/sys/HARDENEDBSD amd64 hbsd-current-02[shawn]:/home/shawn $ sudo mount -t nullfs /usr/ports/.zfs/snapshot/2026-07-24_before /mnt $ ls -l /usr/ports | head -n 5 total 3215 -rw-r--r-- 1 shawn shawn 149175 Oct 7 00:59 CHANGES -rw-r--r-- 1 shawn shawn 727 Apr 26 18:13 CONTRIBUTING.md -rw-r--r-- 1 shawn shawn 1412 Apr 26 18:13 COPYRIGHT -rw-r--r-- 1 shawn shawn 13370 Oct 1 18:46 GIDs hbsd-current-02[shawn]:/home/shawn $ mount | grep nullfs /usr/ports/.zfs/snapshot/2026-07-24_before on /mnt (nullfs, local) hbsd-current-02[shawn]:/home/shawn $ touch /mnt/blah touch: /mnt/blah: Read-only file system hbsd-current-02[shawn]:/home/shawn (1) $ echo ohai > /mnt/README zsh: read-only file system: /mnt/README #FreeBSD #HardenedBSD #infosec #OpenZFS

@FreeBSDFoundation@mastodon.social I wrote something. Consider #FreeBSD for your next big project in the cloud. https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/journal/browser-based-edition/production-deployments/cloud-operations-using-freebsd-compute/ RE: https://mastodon.social/@FreeBSDFoundation/117394092954747546

The Q3 2026 issue of the FreeBSD Journal is now available. This edition explores Production Deployments, with articles covering home lab consolidation, cloud operations using FreeBSD Compute, USB in user space, auditable credential-exposure checks, and more. Inside, you'll also find the Foundation Letter, a EuroBSDCon trip report, and the latest 2026 events calendar. 🔗 Read it here: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/journal/browser-based-edition/production-deployments/ #FreeBSD #FreeBSDJournal #OpenSource #SysAdmin

Input on *BSD? I need to start investigating more seriously. #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #BSD

If you need financial assistance to attend EuroBSDCon 2027, the Paul Schenkeveld Travel Grant https://eurobsdconfoundation.org/travel-grant.html may be for you. Apply before 2027-02-01 #eurobsdcon @EuroBSDCon@mastodon.bsd.cafe #bsd #openbsd #netbsd #freebsd

@astra_underscore@wetdry.world I've got #FreeBSD running on a Thinkpad x260, #OpenBSD on a x200, and #NetBSD running on a random hand-me-down dell laptop (although S3 suspend and charge thresholds don't work on that particular bit of hardware). If there's anything I can do to help, just holler!

Thank you, @dch@bsd.network One of the peculiarities of littleFedi is that it was developed and tested first on the BSDs, then on illumos, and only later on Linux. The first public instance, my own @stefano@rpi0w.stefanomarinelli.it account, runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero W with NetBSD. I don’t think many social platforms have started out on NetBSD in recent years. #NetBSD #FreeBSD #littleFedi #Fediverse

I want to publicly thank @dch@bsd.network The FreeBSD port of littleFedi was already ready at release time, and it’s really well done. One of the peculiarities of littleFedi is that it was developed and tested first on the BSDs, then on illumos, and only later on Linux. The first public instance, my own @stefano@rpi0w.stefanomarinelli.it account, runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero W with NetBSD. I don’t think many social platforms have started out on NetBSD in recent years. #ThankYou #RunBSD #NetBSD #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #illumos #OwnYourData #Fediverse #littleFedi

Hey folks! I have written some travel notes from EuroBSDCon 2026, Brussels, Belgium: https://blog.NetBSD.org/tnf/entry/eurobsdcon_2026_in_brussels_belgium The conference was amazing and I had a lot of fun and learned a bunch! Thanks to everyone who made it possible! #EuroBSDCon2026 #EuroBSDCon #NetBSD #pkgsrc #FreeBSD #OpenBSD

HardenedBSD August / September 2026 Status Report by @lattera@bsd.network https://lobste.rs/s/roo5hm #freebsd #security https://hardenedbsd.org/article/shawn-webb/2026-09-27/hardenedbsd-august-september-2026-status-report

Discover the new FreeBSD EC2 desktop images. Easily launch a KDE graphical environment on AWS without manual configuration. Connect via RDP effortlessly. #FreeBSD #AmazonEC2 #KDE #CloudComputing #RDP https://dailytechnow.com/freebsd-ec2-desktop-images/

Is isolation in #OpenBSD with chroot + privsep + pledge/unveil as simple to do as it is in #FreeBSD Jails? How do you do it when you need to use the feature? #openbsd #bsd #jail #chroot #privsep #pledge #unveil

@jaypatelani@bsd.network I don't want to spoil the #retrocomputing fun, but for those new to the BSDs who do not have the context and might come away thinking that they should move from GUID partitioning, or even MBR-style partitioning with LBAs, to disk labels: The "BSD disklabel" is a partitioning scheme from 1988 that can destroy your GUID partitioning or boot loader if accidentally mis-used. #NetBSD, #OpenBSD, and #FreeBSD haven't agreed on disklabel partition types since IBM's JFS2. They don't agree on what the types for ZFS or HAMMER2 partitions are, for example. It is 32-bit, occasionally 16-bit, in some fields, and mostly has the old 2TiB size limits that the GUID system overcame with 64-bit addressing at the turn of this century. And the on-disk data structures are no longer even compatible as of OpenBSD discontinuing 'v0' in 2025 (with a somewhat optimistic note in the version control history that no-one has written that to disc since 2007). #disklabel #bsdlabel

@phlash@mastodon.me.uk I just gave the world a re-write of the boot chapter of the #FreeBSD Handbook that does away with bsdlabel and (finally!) uses gpart. https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/117326574782531292 I wonder whether we can get the FreeBSD Handbook people to embrace this. GEOM was a big new thing in FreeBSD in 2003. I see that the #NetBSD Guide suffers from the same disklabel-centrism, when it is closing in on 2 decades of having the gpt command. @jaypatelani@bsd.network#geom

I actually read the #FreeBSD Handbook's chapter on how FreeBSD bootstraps. It's stuck in 2010. I'm not kidding. There's stuff in there that changed in the FreeBSD 7.3 release notes. FreeBSD can boot on UEFI firmware nowadays, and directly from ZFS datasets. There's a gpart bootstrap command, and syscons does not use bright white for kernel messages any more. In the meantime, the Handbook is telling people how to accidentally destroy their MBR or GUID partition tables with bsdlabel. Do you think that we can get the Handbook people to catch up with the actual operating system, that is 16 years ahead? (-: https://github.com/jdebp/freebsd-doc/blob/main/documentation/content/en/books/handbook/boot/_index.adoc #UEFI #ZFS

@vmcall@infosec.exchange @hweissi@infosec.exchange @notbobbytables@infosec.exchange @lavados@infosec.exchange @isec_tugraz@infosec.exchange Unless someone beats me to it, I'm hoping to test on #FreeBSD now that it, too, has a native inotify implementation (only recently implemented). It'll take me a couple weeks to get to this, though, as I have a few other higher-priority tasks to clear off my plate.

With host-side SEV support, multi-core virtualization, and networking now functional in bhyve, the team is working on upstreaming the code to the main FreeBSD repository.

Future milestones include upgrading to newer SEV generations like SEV-ES for encrypted CPU register states and SEV-SNP for hardware memory integrity protection as well as updating the FreeBSD kernel to run seamlessly as an encrypted guest OS using memory C-bit handling and bounce buffers.

And for you, mere mortal, what does all of this actually mean? It means true cloud privacy without having to blindly trust anyone. Whether you're hosting sensitive customer data, financial workloads, or proprietary algorithms, confidential computing ensures that not even your cloud provider or a rogue admin with full root access can peek into your running memory.

By bringing AMD SEV to FreeBSD, top-tier, silicon-enforced protection stops being an exclusive enterprise luxury and becomes part of the open-source toolkit.

Bottom line: your data is finally locked down in transit, at rest, and right down to the hardware while in use.

#freebsd #openbsd #netbsd #bsd #EuroBSDCon2026