The fourth BETA build of the 10.4-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

 
 

• LLVM 5.0.0 Release

  This release is the result of the community's work over the past six months, including: C++17 support, co-routines, improved optimizations, new compiler warnings, many bug fixes, and more.

• LLVM 5.0 Released With C++17 Support, Ryzen Scheduler, AMDGPU Vega & Much More

  After delays pushed its release back by about one month, LLVM 5.0 was just released a few minutes ago along with its associated sub-projects like the Clang 5.0 C/C++ compiler.

  LLVM 5.0 features a number of improvements to the ARM and MIPS targets, greater support for the POWER ISA 3.0 in the PowerPC target, the initial AMD Ryzen (znver1) scheduler support (already improved in LLVM 6.0 SVN), support for Intel Goldmont CPUs, greater AVX-512 support, improved Silvermont/Sandybridge/Jaguar schedulers, and initial Radeon Vega (GFX9) support within the AMDGPU target.

• Android NDK r16: Developers Should Start Using LLVM's libc++ With GCC On The Way Out

  Google has announced the availability today of the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) Release 16. This release is worth mentioning in that Google is now encouraging developers to start using libc++ as their C++ standard library.

  Moving forward, Google will only be supporting LLVM's libc++ as the C++ standard library and not supporting other STLs. The Android platform has already been using libc++ since Lollipop and now they are looking to get more application developers using this STL.

• Google publishes its documentation style guide for developers

  Documentation is often an afterthought — especially for open-source projects. That can make it harder for newcomers to join a project, for example, and sometimes badly written documentation is worse than having no documentation at all. To help developers write better documentation, Google this week opened up its own developer-documentation style guide.

• Trying Out FreeBSD/TrueOS On The Xeon Scalable + Tyan GT24E-B7106 Platform

  While we have tested a number of Linux distributions on Intel's new Xeon Scalable platform, here are some initial BSD tests using two Xeon Gold 6138 processors with the Tyan GT24E-B7106 1U barebones server.

• FreeBSD Developers Tackle AMD Zen/Ryzen Temperature Monitoring Before Linux

  While Linux users of AMD's new Zen-based Ryzen/Threadripper/Epyc processors are still waiting for thermal driver support to hit the mainline Linux kernel, FreeBSD developers have already managed to produce the Zen "Family 17h" CPU thermal monitoring support on their own.

  From this FreeBSD bug report, developers have managed to get the AMD CPU temperature monitoring working for Zen processors under Linux with their existing temperature driver.

• Trip Report: FreeBSD in China at COPU and LinuxCon

  In May of 2017, we were invited to give a talk about FreeBSD at COPU’s (China Open Source Promotional Unit) Open Source China, Open Source World Summit, which took place June 21-22, in Beijing. This was a tremendous opportunity to talk about the advantages of FreeBSD to the open source leaders and organizations interested in open source. I was honored to represent the Project and Foundation and give the presentation “FreeBSD Advantages and Applications”.

• A return-oriented programming defense from OpenBSD

  Stack-smashing attacks have a long history; they featured, for example, as a core part of the Morris worm back in 1988. Restrictions on executing code on the stack have, to a great extent, put an end to such simple attacks, but that does not mean that stack-smashing attacks are no longer a threat. Return-oriented programming (ROP) has become a common technique for compromising systems via a stack-smashing vulnerability. There are various schemes out there for defeating ROP attacks, but a mechanism called "RETGUARD" that is being implemented in OpenBSD is notable for its relative simplicity.

This first beta of the development of GhostBSD 11.1 release is ready for testing. All MATE and XFCE image is available with i386 and amd64 architectures. We hope to see a lot of people helping to test this next release.