FreeBSD is a free, open-source and UNIX-like operating system. Though relatively unknown, it’s a performing and powerful work-horse, capable of coping with massive work-loads whilest remaining fast, ultra-stable and rock-solid. Blogging about FreeBSD and operating systems based on this versatile, safe and secure OS, I want to generate more interest in FreeBSD and its dependants. If you need a reliable, rock-solid and performing system for either your desktop or servers, consider FreeBSD!
A report by the Washington Post claims China is equipping all of its government and military PCs with a version of the Kylin operating system to make hacking attempts by foreign intelligence services more difficult. The information about the highly secure operating system was made public during a US China Economic and Security Review Commission hearing in late April. In addition to the secure operating system, the computers will also contain a special microprocessor to prevent attacks.
This security-focused and hardened Kylin is based on FreeBSD:
The Kylin(Chinese page link) operating system was developed by China’s University of Science and Technology for National Defence, and although it appears the system is claimed to be proprietary, an analysis of the code(Chinese page link) in the kernel indicates that it is in fact a hardened version of FreeBSD 5.3.
I’ve been running this FreeBSD news blog for exactly 2 years today. FreeBSD and operating systems have developed and evolved a lot since then; reporting and writing about these have been enjoyable.
Many thanks to everybody who’s notified and emailed me about stories, and those that have left comments. If you can think of any ways that this blog can be improved, please let me know.
Running this blog costs money (hosting fees etc) and time. If you like this website and you are a regular visitor, why not consider making a donation to encourage me to carry on and set up some other BSD related services? (Donations received so far as of this post: 10 GBP pounds).
PC-BSD Software has now made an XFCE PBI available. PC-BSD comes with KDE4 pre-installed, but if you prefer a lightweight window manager, this one is for you.
Another interesting PBI is the Thin Client Server. This PBI installs dhcpd and configures PC-BSD as a Thin Client Server. Clients connected to the servers NIC, will be able to network boot via DHCPD & PXE, and then be brought to a KDM login screen. For more details about this PBI, please read through our Thin Client Wiki
The presentation at AsiaBSDCon 2009 is focused on explaining theoretical approaches and pratical aspect of the locking support in the FreeBSD kernel. The locking KPI as well as underlying mechanisms and interactions with the scheduler will be analized and discussed deeply. Typical locking strategies and some edge cases will also be shown along with a detailed explanation about how to debug locking problems (deadlocks and races primirally).
At The Aerospace Corporation, we run a large FreeBSD based computing cluster to support engineering applications. These applications come in all shapes, sizes, and qualities of implementation. To support them and our diverse userbase we have been searching for ways to isolate jobs from one another in ways that are more effective than Unix time sharing and more fine grained than allocating whole nodes to jobs. In this paper we discuss the problem space and our efforts so far. These efforts include implementation of partial file systems virtualization and CPU isolation using CPU sets.
In this paper we describe usage of FreeBSD operating system for IPv6 Multicast routing platform in SOI-Asia Project. SOI-Asia project is platform to deliver realtime lecture via UniDirectional Link of satellite to several countries in Asia. Because of limited bandwidth in satellite, we use IPv6 multicast to deliver material of lecture and realtime video and audio lecture. We also describe human resources development of operational aspect of the project in several countries in Asia.
FreeBSD has a reputation for its rock-solid reliability, and top-notch performance in the server world, but is noticeably absent when it comes to the vast market of desktop computing.
Why is this? FreeBSD offers many, if not almost all of the same open-source packages and software that can be found in the more popular Linux desktop distributions, yet even with the speed and reliability FreeBSD offers, a relative few number of users are deploying it on their desktops. In this presentation we will take a look at some of the reasons why FreeBSD has not been as widely adopted in the desktop market as it has on the server side. Several of the desktop weaknesses of FreeBSD will be shown, along with how we are trying to fix these short-comings through a desktopcentric version of FreeBSD, known as PCBSD. We will also take a look at the package management system employed by all open-source operating systems alike, and some of the pitfalls it brings, which may hinder widespread desktop adoption.
BSDTalk has a 38 minutes interview with some FreeBSD developers at last weeks BSDCan 2009: Robert Watson, Brooks Davis, Hiroki Sato, Philip Paeps, and George V. Neville-Neil. They talk about the recent FreeBSD 7.2 release, and what is coming for 8.
Mail system for distributed network. Presentation held by Andrey Zakharchenko at AsiaBSDCon2009:
Sometimes it is necessary to organize a mail domain for large and geographically distributed network, which may consist of independent subnets with their own separate Internet connections (and some of those connections may be not very good, or not very fast, or not very cheap). But users of the network need mail system, and it should be fast, convenient, and reliable.
In this paper some ways of distributed mail domain implementation are discussed, and a new one is introduced. The new method allows us to implement distributed mail system fast and convenient for end users, convenient for administrators, using network traffic sparingly, and reliable enough (at least without single point of failure).
Kristaps Dzonsons’ presentation: Deprecating groff for BSD manual display, AsiaBSDCon2009:
There are few GPL-licensed utilities remaining in BSD base installations, most of them written in C++. groff, GNU’s roff text-processing language implementation, claims a significant share of this count. Why does groff still persist in base? Although its text-processing features have been mostly usurped by LaTeX, groff persists in order to render Unix manual pages. In this paper, we introduce mdocml, a compiler for mdoc documents. mdocml replaces a very specific function of groff — namely, that of rendering mdoc documents for one or more output devices. It’s our intention, in contributing this tool, to deprecate groff as the default utility for Unix manual page display; by doing so, and presuming that manual display is the primary usage of groff, we intend to decouple BSD base installations from another GPL and C++ tool.
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