FreeBSD Resources

certner_conference_report By Olivier Certner Last September, I had the pleasure of traveling to the city of Coimbra, Portugal, where the annual European technical conference on BSD systems, EuroBSDCon, took place. Although I had already been to Portugal a few times, in the Douro valley near Porto, in Porto itself, or in Lisboa, I had never […]

Git_Experience_Practical_ports By Benedict Reuschling Version control has been around for a long time. Having a way to keep a certain version of a file in a state where it is retrieved is the start of our journey. After all, that’s what backup software is for. Some people use version control systems (VCS) that way, but […]

MarApril24_letters By Michael W Lucas Oh, bloviating BSD-er, I work for a wonderful small company with smart, kind leaders that let the IT group do its job. We’ve built all our infrastructure according to carefully designed plans that scale to meet our needs. Our network is meticulously segmented to isolate risky services from vital data, […]

Welcome to the March/April issue of the FreeBSD Journal! This issue is all about development, whether of FreeBSD itself or using FreeBSD as a platform for developing other software. We open with a practical guide to FreeBSD kernel development from Navdeep Parhar. Navdeep describes a flexible and robust setup featuring virtual machines and the use […]

ZFS Images From Scratch, or makefs -t zfs By Mark Johnston For a long time, the FreeBSD project has made virtual machine (VM) disk images available on its download site: just go to https://download.freebsd.org/snapshots/VM-IMAGES to find a selection of pre-built images for download. These come in a variety of formats recognized by common hypervisors such as QEMU, […]

jones By Tom Jones Panic is a truly wonderful word! It succinctly describes an incredibly complex emotional event. We can say “the soldiers panicked,” and we know how a battle went. We can use it to give weight to a small oversight, and it explains what exactly went though our mind when we stepped onto […]

KDE CI and FreeBSD By Ben Cooksley C ontinuous Integration (CI) is something KDE has worked on improving now for some years, with the first implementation of CI for KDE software starting back in August 2011. Since then, the system has evolved substantially, picking up support not only for multiple versions of Qt (the toolkit […]

FreeBSD Kernel Development Workflow By Navdeep Parhar The kernel is like any other software and is developed with the typical workflow of clone, edit, build, test, debug, commit. But unlike userspace software, kernel development necessarily involves repeated reboots (and lockups, and panics) and is inconvenient without a dedicated test system. This article describes a practical […]

Events Calendar 2024 Events Calendar By Anne Dickison BSD Evnets taking place through May 2024 Please send details of any FreeBSD related events or events that are of interest for FreeBSD users which are not listed here to freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org. SCALE 21X March 14-17, 2024 Pasadena, CA SCaLE is the largest community-run open-source and free software […]

FreeBSD Foundation 2023 Recap FreeBSD Foundation 2023 Recap By Deb Goodkin I am sitting here amazed at how quickly 2023 flew by, but I’m also looking forward to kicking off the new year with rejuvenated energy to take on an exciting array of opportunities for FreeBSD. I hope you had a chance to slow down […]

10 Years of the FreeBSD Journal 10 Years of the FreeBSD Journal A Crossword by Tom Jones A decade ago, we unveiled the inaugural issue, spotlighting the release of FreeBSD 10.0 and featuring discussions on pivotal topics such as the transition to clang as the base system C and C++ compiler, and ZFS. Over the […]

Monitor Your Hosts with Zabbix Practical Ports: Monitor Your Hosts with Zabbix By Benedict Reuschling I’d like to know what’s going on, especially on the servers and machines that I am responsible for. Monitoring those systems has become a good practice for me. There are simply too many to check on a daily basis, and […]

Letter from the Foundation Letter from the Foundation Welcome to the January/February edition of the FreeBSD Journal! A decade ago, we unveiled the inaugural issue, spotlighting the release of FreeBSD 10.0 and featuring discussions on pivotal topics such as the transition to clang as the base system C and C++ compiler, and ZFS. Over the […]

Make Your Own VPN —FreeBSD, Wireguard, IPv6 and Ad-blocking Included Make Your Own VPN —FreeBSD, Wireguard, IPv6 and Ad-blocking Included By Stefano Marinelli Note: This article assumes a setup based on FreeBSD. If you prefer a version based on OpenBSD, it is available here. VPNs are a fundamental tool for securely connecting to your own servers and […]

BATMAN: the Better Approach to Mobile Ad-hoc Networks BATMAN: the Better Approach to Mobile Ad-hoc Networks Aymeric Wibo In the expansive realm of network protocols, one stands out as a versatile and resilient contender: BATMAN, the Better Approach to Mobile Ad-hoc Networks. Through the airwaves of large cities, BATMAN allows devices to seamlessly communicate over […]

FreeBSD Interface API (IfAPI) FreeBSD Interface API (IfAPI) By Justin Hibbits As some may be aware, Juniper uses its own custom network stack with FreeBSD—forked long ago—so it only superficially resembles the current FreeBSD network stack. There is state in the current FreeBSD stack that doesn’t exist in Junos, and vise-versa. The Why and How […]

SR-IOV is a First Class FreeBSD Feature SR-IOV is a First Class FreeBSD Feature A detailed walkthrough of how to setup hardware-driven virtualization using SR-IOV capable devices in FreeBSD. By Mark McBride One of my favorite hardware features is called Single-Root Input/Output Virtualization (SR-IOV). It makes a single physical device appear like multiple similar devices […]

if_ovpn or OpenVPN if_ovpn or OpenVPN By Kristof Provost Today1, you’re going to be reading2 about OpenVPN’s DCO. Initially developed by James Yonan, OpenVPN saw its first release on May 13, 2001. It supports many common platforms (such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Dragonfly, AIX, …) and a few less common ones (macOS, Linux, Windows) as well. […]

Updates on TCP  in FreeBSD 14 Updates on TCP  in FreeBSD 14 It’s been about 3 ½ years since I last reported on the area of the FreeBSD project I focus on, namely, the TCP protocol implementation. For those who don’t know, FreeBSD doesn’t feature only one TCP stack, but multiple ones with development occurring dominantly […]

RACK and Alternate TCP Stacks for FreeBSD RACK and Alternate TCP Stacks for FreeBSD By Randall Stewart and Michael TÜxen In 2017 changes were made to the TCP stack in FreeBSD, allowing the coexistence of multiple TCP stacks. This way, the existing TCP stack could be left untouched and allow innovation at the cost of […]

DTrace, or Dynamic Tracing, is a performance analysis and troubleshooting tool included by default with FreeBSD. DTrace can help locate performance bottlenecks in production systems and can be used to patch live running instructions. In addition to diagnosing performance problems, DTrace can help investigate and debug unexpected behavior in both the FreeBSD kernel and userland […]

Events Calendar 2024 Events Calendar By Anne Dickison BSD Evnets taking place through March 2024 Please send details of any FreeBSD related events or events that are of interest for FreeBSD users which are not listed here to freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org. State of Open Con 2024 February 6-7, 2024 London, UK SOOCon24 is the UK’s Open Technology […]

We Get Letters By Michael W Lucas The .0 Release is a Metaphorical Tire Change The Journal received a tsunami of letters this month. Once we composted the complaints about the We Get Letters columnist, that left two. Yes, your complaints are composted. This is a highly responsible publication, so I insist that all derogatory […]

Foundation Letter Letter from the Foundation A New Release is On the Way! Welcome to the September/October issue. As I write this, FreeBSD is putting the finishing touches on its next major release: 14.0. Stay tuned, as articles in the November/December issue will cover many of 14.0’s exciting new features. In the meantime, the current […]