• EXT4 With Linux 5.13 Looks Like It Will Support Casefolding With Encryption Enabled - Phoronix

  While EXT4 supports both case-folding for optional case insensitive filenames and does support file-system encryption, at the moment those features are mutually exclusive. But it looks like the upcoming Linux 5.13 kernel will allow casefolding and encryption to be active at the same time.

  Queued this week into the EXT4 file-system's "dev" tree was ext4: handle casefolding with encryption.

• SiFive FU740 PCIe Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.13 - Phoronix

  Arguably the most interesting RISC-V board announced to date is SiFive's HiFive Unmatched with the FU740 RISC-V SoC that features four U74-MC cores and one S7 embedded core. The HiFive Unmatched also has 16GB of RAM, USB 3.2 Gen 1, one PCI Express x16 slot (operating at x8 speeds), an NVMe slot, and Gigabit Ethernet. The upstream kernel support for the HiFive Unmatched and the FU740 SoC continues.

  With the Linux 5.12 cycle there was the start of mainlining SiFive FU740 SoC support and that work is continuing for the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle.

                 

• The state of toolchains in NetBSD

                   
  

                     

  While FreeBSD and OpenBSD both switched to using LLVM/Clang as their base system compiler, NetBSD picked a different path and remained with GCC and binutils regardless of the license change to GPLv3. However, it doesn't mean that the NetBSD project endorses this license, and the NetBSD Foundation's has issued a statement about its position on the subject.

                     

  Realistically, NetBSD is more or less tied to GCC, as it supports more architectures than the other BSDs, some of which will likely never be supported in LLVM.

                     

  As of NetBSD 9.1, the latest released version, all supported platforms have recent versions of GCC (7.5.0) and binutils (2.31.1) in the base system. Newer (and older!) versions of GCC can be installed via Pkgsrc, and the following packages are available, going all the way back to GCC 3.3.6: [...]

               

• Review: OpenBSD 6.8 on 8th Gen Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 13.3"

                   
  

                     

  10 days ago, I bought this X1 Carbon. I immediately installed OpenBSD on it. It took me a few days to settle in and make myself at home, but here are my impressions.

                     

  This was the smoothest experience I've had getting OpenBSD set up the way I like it. The Toshiba NB305 in 2011 was a close second, but the Acer I used between these two laptops required a lot more tweaking of both hardware and kernel to get it to feel like home.

The fifth RC build of the 13.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

Installation images are available for:

o 13.0-RC5 amd64 GENERIC
o 13.0-RC5 i386 GENERIC
o 13.0-RC5 powerpc GENERIC
o 13.0-RC5 powerpc64 GENERIC64
o 13.0-RC5 powerpc64le GENERIC64LE
o 13.0-RC5 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE
o 13.0-RC5 armv6 RPI-B
o 13.0-RC5 armv7 GENERICSD
o 13.0-RC5 aarch64 GENERIC
o 13.0-RC5 aarch64 RPI
o 13.0-RC5 aarch64 PINE64
o 13.0-RC5 aarch64 PINE64-LTS
o 13.0-RC5 aarch64 PINEBOOK
o 13.0-RC5 aarch64 ROCK64
o 13.0-RC5 aarch64 ROCKPRO64
o 13.0-RC5 riscv64 GENERIC
o 13.0-RC5 riscv64 GENERICSD

Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without
console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of
freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access.  Additionally,
the root user password is set to root.  It is strongly recommended
to change the password for both users after gaining access to the
system.

Installer images and memory stick images are available here:

    https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/13.0/

The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.

If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR
system or on the -stable mailing list.

If you would like to use Git to do a source based update of an existing
system, use the "releng/13.0" branch.

A summary of changes since 13.0-RC4 includes:

o COMPAT_FREEBSD32 fill/set dbregs/fpregs has been implemented for
  aarch64.

o Miscellaneous DTrace updates.

o An issue that could potentially affect some services to properly
  restart, notably Nginx, has been addressed.

o Miscellaneous networking fixes.

A list of changes since 12.2-RELEASE is available in the releng/13.0
release notes:

    https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/relnotes.html

Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be
updated on an ongoing basis as the 13.0-RELEASE cycle progresses.

=== Virtual Machine Disk Images ===

VM disk images are available for the amd64, i386, and aarch64
architectures.  Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL
(or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):

    https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/13.0-RC5/

The partition layout is:

    ~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)
    ~ 1 GB  - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)
    ~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)

The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image
formats.  The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB
respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.

Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI
loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the
virtual machine images.  See this page for more information:

    https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU

To boot the VM image, run:

    % qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt  \
	-bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \
	-drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \
	-device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \
	-device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \
	-netdev user,id=net0

Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.

BASIC-CI images can be found at:

    https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/CI-IMAGES/13.0-RC5/

Also: FreeBSD 13.0-RC5 Released Due To Lingering Bugs

The fourth RC build of the 13.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

Installation images are available for:

o 13.0-RC4 amd64 GENERIC
o 13.0-RC4 i386 GENERIC
o 13.0-RC4 powerpc GENERIC
o 13.0-RC4 powerpc64 GENERIC64
o 13.0-RC4 powerpc64le GENERIC64LE
o 13.0-RC4 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE
o 13.0-RC4 armv6 RPI-B
o 13.0-RC4 armv7 GENERICSD
o 13.0-RC4 aarch64 GENERIC
o 13.0-RC4 aarch64 RPI
o 13.0-RC4 aarch64 PINE64
o 13.0-RC4 aarch64 PINE64-LTS
o 13.0-RC4 aarch64 PINEBOOK
o 13.0-RC4 aarch64 ROCK64
o 13.0-RC4 aarch64 ROCKPRO64
o 13.0-RC4 riscv64 GENERIC
o 13.0-RC4 riscv64 GENERICSD

Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without
console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of
freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access.  Additionally,
the root user password is set to root.  It is strongly recommended
to change the password for both users after gaining access to the
system.

Installer images and memory stick images are available here:

    https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/13.0/

The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.

If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR
system or on the -stable mailing list.

If you would like to use Git to do a source based update of an existing
system, use the "releng/13.0" branch.

A summary of changes since 13.0-RC3 includes:

o A fix affecting scripted installations has been addressed.

o Several POWERPC fixes have been included.

o A memory leak in NETMAP_REQ_PORT_INFO_GET has been fixed.

o An issue with local-unbound and some IPv6 deployment has been fixed.

o Historical output range from random(9) has been restored to previous
  behavior.

o OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1k.

o A fix for validation of RDNSS options has been addressed.

o Other miscellaneous items have been addressed.

A list of changes since 12.2-RELEASE is available in the releng/13.0
release notes:

    https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/relnotes.html

Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be
updated on an ongoing basis as the 13.0-RELEASE cycle progresses.

=== Virtual Machine Disk Images ===

VM disk images are available for the amd64, i386, and aarch64
architectures.  Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL
(or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):

    https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/13.0-RC4/

The partition layout is:

    ~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)
    ~ 1 GB  - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)
    ~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)

The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image
formats.  The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB
respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.

Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI
loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the
virtual machine images.  See this page for more information:

    https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU

To boot the VM image, run:

    % qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt  \
	-bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \
	-drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \
	-device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \
	-device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \
	-netdev user,id=net0

Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.

Also: FreeBSD 13.0-RC4 Released With POWER Fixes, Other Bugs Addressed

At first glance, Matthew Macy seemed like a perfectly reasonable choice to port WireGuard into the FreeBSD kernel. WireGuard is an encrypted point-to-point tunneling protocol, part of what most people think of as a "VPN." FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system that powers everything from Cisco and Juniper routers to Netflix's network stack, and Macy had plenty of experience on its dev team, including work on multiple network drivers.
So when Jim Thompson, the CEO of Netgate, which makes FreeBSD-powered routers, decided it was time for FreeBSD to enjoy the same level of in-kernel WireGuard support that Linux does, he reached out to offer Macy a contract. Macy would port WireGuard into the FreeBSD kernel, where Netgate could then use it in the company's popular pfSense router distribution. The contract was offered without deadlines or milestones; Macy was simply to get the job done on his own schedule.

With Macy's level of experience—with kernel coding and network stacks in particular—the project looked like a slam dunk. But things went awry almost immediately. WireGuard founding developer Jason Donenfeld didn't hear about the project until it surfaced on a FreeBSD mailing list, and Macy didn't seem interested in Donenfeld's assistance when offered. After roughly nine months of part-time development, Macy committed his port—largely unreviewed and inadequately tested—directly into the HEAD section of FreeBSD's code repository, where it was scheduled for incorporation into FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE.

This unexpected commit raised the stakes for Donenfeld, whose project would ultimately be judged on the quality of any production release under the WireGuard name. Donenfeld identified numerous problems with Macy's code, but rather than object to the port's release, Donenfeld decided to fix the issues. He collaborated with FreeBSD developer Kyle Evans and with Matt Dunwoodie, an OpenBSD developer who had worked on WireGuard for that operating system. The three replaced almost all of Macy's code in a mad week-long sprint.