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A security update for PC-BSD 7.1.1 has been released today. This update fixes a potential privilege escalation attack withdevfs /…

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A small update to the PBI Builder software, version 2.4, has been released today. This version adds a few new…

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m0n0wall 1.236 corrects a security issue in the DHCP client and
includes some captive portal fixes from the 1.3b branch.

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Reader tail.man points out this press release from Debian which says that the port of the Debian system to the FreeBSD kernel will be given equal footing alongside Debian’s several other release ports, starting with the release of Squeeze. Excerpting from this release: “The kFreeBSD architectures for the AMD64/Intel EM64T and i386 processor architectures are now release architectures. Severe bugs on these architectures will be considered release critical the same way as bugs on other architectures like armel or i386 are. If a particular package does not build or work properly on such an architecture this problem is considered release-critical. Debian’s main motivation for the inclusion of the FreeBSD kernel into the official release process is the opportunity to offer to its users a broader choice of kernels and also include a kernel that provides features such as jails, the OpenBSD Packet Filter and support for NDIS drivers in the mainline kernel with full support.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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An anonymous reader writes “Phoronix has brought benchmarks comparing the FreeBSD 8.0-RC and Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6 operating systems. FreeBSD rather ends up taking a wallop to Ubuntu Linux, but there are a few areas where FreeBSD 8 ran well. They also posted benchmarks comparing this near-final FreeBSD 8.0 build to that of FreeBSD 7.2 to show performance improvements there but with a few regressions.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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electrostaticcarrot writes “DragonFly — that fourth major BSD — has had its 2.4 release. The ‘most invasive change’ is the addition and usage of a DevFS for /dev; building on this, drives are now also recognized by serial number (along with /etc/devtab for aliases) as listed in /dev/serno. This is also the first release with a x86-64 ISO, stable but with limited pkgsrc support. Other larger changes include a ported and feature-extended (with full hotplug and port multiplier support) AHCI driver (and SILI driver based on it) originally taken from OpenBSD, major NFS changes, and HAMMER updates. A pkgsrc GIT mirror has also been set up and put in use to make future pkgsrc updates quicker and smoother. Here are two of the mirrors.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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XMM exceptions are not correctly handled resulting in a kernel panic.

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Gilles Chehade (gilles@) commented on one of his own commits on the source-changes mailing list asking users of OpenSMTPD to submit information about any issues detected after the recent separation of virtual domains and aliases resolution code and instructions how to best make the transition.

Please see below for the comment:
Read more…

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Some time ago, there was a huge MIDI-related commit from Alexandre Ratchov (ratchov@). He has summarized his work in a new installment of OpenBSD Journal’s developer blog.

MIDI is for electronic musical instruments what Ethernet is for
computers. It is a slow (3125 bytes/s) unidirectional point-to-point
serial link between keyboards, synthesizers, hardware multitrackers and
so on. MIDI is aimed to allow one piece of equipment to control another one, possibly
making all of them cooperate on the same (typically music-related)
project. For instance, MIDI keyboards can send notes to
play to a synthesizer in real-time; or a hardware multitracker can send clock ticks
to a drum machine to stay in sync. The protocol is real-time, which
simply means that messages have to be executed as soon as they are
received, there are no timestamps involved.

Please read on for the rest of Alexandre’s story:
Read more…

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Robert Nagy (robert@) wrote a quick note to the ports@ and tech@ mailing lists about the p2k9 hackathon that is currently in progress:

From: Robert Nagy 
To: tech@openbsd.org
Cc: ports@openbsd.org
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:56:00 +0200
Subject: Thank you for making p2k9 possible!

Hello

p2k9 (the ports hackathon in Budapest) is on since Friday. People
are working on different things like GNOME, GCC4, BluRay support or
even ACPI.

I would like to thank everyone who donated money to the project because
the individual donors made it possible to organize this event.
So ... BIG THANKS GOES TO OUR USERS, to people supporting the project
even at these times.

I'd also like to thank NIIF and Sun Microsystems Hungary for lending
us a nice hackroom and hardware for the hackathon.

The results of the hackathon can already be seen by the massive amount of commits to the ports tree of the last few days. Events like these developers get together to work on parts of the tree together really help to make lots of progress in a short amount of time. So, thanks to all those guys in Budapest who are working hard to get us those easily installable third party software packages !

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