Developer Otto Moerbeek (otto@) has been working on support to boot from FFS2. He writes in with the below article, to give us a little insight into the challenges he faced while working on this.

FFS2 filesystem support has been in OpenBSD for quite a while. FFS2 has a few advantages above FFS1: large partition support, 64-bit timestamps, faster newfs(8) and faster fsck(8), but it is only used for large (> 1TB) filesystems at the moment. The only drawback is that its meta-data overhead is a bit larger than FFS1 because of 64-bit instead of 32-bit blocknumbers and timestamps.

I decided that it was time to start using FFS2 in as many places as possible, and that includes booting from it. Booting is an area where there are quite large differences between the various platforms OpenBSD supports. The boot code interacts with the platform-specific firmware and the bootstrap process uses different vendor-specific mechanisms.

I had the pleasure of sitting with Bob Beck at EuroBSDCon 2018 in Bucharest and asking him some questions about the OpenBSD Project, its approaches and some of his favourite aspects of the Operating System and its projects. Bob patiently outlines the hows and whys of his involvement in the BSD project.

Tom and Bob conduct a post-mortem on a training course on LibTLS Bob Delivered (excellently) in EuroBSDCon & BSDCAN. Bob discusses what online services he used in class for training students on LibTLS and why it can be a very effective teaching aid.

Bob modestly plays down his ability to churn out LibTLS Developers. Bob also gives guidance on the approaches to contributing to the project.

Bob reveals the code he least likes working on and why.

Bob lets us know what he really thinks about documentation and its value to the community.

Bob outlines an example of applying lessons learned from one bug to inform audits looking for similar bugs elsewhere in the OS and the software ecosystem that it supports.

I enjoyed making the interview with Bob who answered the questions with a remarkable combination of purpose and humour.

Bob thanks again for your time, and putting up with my interruptions and jokes :)

We have a new p2k19 report from Rafael Sadowski (rsadowski@), who writes:

My first OpenBSD hackathon

When p2k19 was announced, I was quite happy that it was located in Bucharest. A quick check of flight connections, showed that there is a direct connection from Hannover. Without a second thought or planning a vacation, I booked the round trip. I guess I was the first person to put his name under the list.

Ken Westerback (krw@) kindly wrote in with a report from last month's a2k20 hackathon in Hobart, Australia:

tl;dr -- excellent coffee fuelled lots of hacking in Hobart

I started my journey to Hobart via Sydney in a state of some anxiety. Air Canada's continuing reservation system troubles meant it was unclear until the last minute whether I would arrive in Sydney rested or frazelled. In the end all went well and I arrived at dtucker@'s place after a good sleep. After a pleasant evening with Darren, we caught our flight to Hobart the next morning without trouble. We found tedu@ had been on the same flight, despite not spotting him during boarding.

Ken Westerback [krw@ when wearing his OpenBSD hat] wrote us with this update about the OpenBSD Foundation's work:

As the OpenBSD Foundation begins to prepare the 2020 fundraising campaign we would like to thank all the contributors to our 2019 campaign.

Video recordings from FOSDEM 2020 are now available.

The OpenBSD presentations were:

• Giovanni Bechis (giovanni@) - OpenSMTPD over the clouds, the story of an HA setup
• Florian Obser (florian@) - unwind(8), A privilege-separated, validating DNS recursive nameserver for every laptop

(These are also listed in the usual place.)

Fresh in from u2k20 is this report from Tracey Emery, who visited the hackathon in Uckermark, Germany after getting invited by Stefan Sperling (stsp@):

Stefan Sperling and I started a discussion in November about a CGI program, which would work in httpd(8), use the Game of Trees library along with the kcgi library by Kristaps Dzonsons, to display repository information in a browser. I was getting frustrated with working on my own project and was looking for something else to hack on. So, I told Stefan that I'd take a crack at Gotweb.

The first report from the just concluded u2k20 hackathon comes from Alexandr Nedvedicky (sashan@), who writes:

How to read a commit message (a.k.a. thank you Thomas for u2k20)

Commit messages just capture the brief summary of changes. Believe it or not, there is a story behind every single commit you may find in a project history. Especially if you read there a short phrase 'discussed with many' or 'input by many'. In cases like this you can always bet the story is not short.

An update has now been committed to the -stable branch for the latest firefox version, and the package is available for updating!

Previously, solene@ wrote:
Dear OpenBSD users, due to Firefox being too complicated to package (thanks to cbindgen and rust dependencies) on the stable branch (as this would require testing all rust consumers), the 6.6-stable branch won't receive updates for www/mozilla-firefox, so it will remain vulnerable to MFSA2020-03 and vulnerabilities that may appear after.