Blog
Blog:2026/09/28
⇒ Unexpected Announcement
Sometimes, the narrative tension artificially created by certain fictional characters’ inability to express themselves fascinates me…
⇒ The InWin IW-MS04 mini 4-bay case looks interesting
I’m a fan of the HP(E) ProLiant MicroServer line, and still have a Gen 8 kicking around for NetBSD testing. I call it my Companion Cube. But its limitations and quirky boot behaviour do have me looking for another tiny machine with four bays I can eventually upgrade into. I was also thinking of building a server for Clara to be able to tinker with.
⇒ Every Read on QNX Is a Message
On the system in your car, opening a file is not a jump into the kernel. It is a letter to another process, and you wait for the reply. That arrangement costs something on every single call, and the bill has been public since 1993. Unix Universe.
⇒ How a missing kernel flag broke FIPS-certified containers in managed Kubernetes
A customer building a FedRAMP-compliant deployment found that Ubuntu Pro 22.04 FIPS container images were silently failing on standard, mainline Linux kernels, the kind used by managed Kubernetes environments such as AWS EKS and Fargate. The fix required a patch that preserved FIPS compliance without triggering months of recertification. This post explains what happened, why it matters for anyone running FIPS workloads in containerized cloud environments, and what Canonical changed as a result.
⇒ Creating a private 5G network
Private 5G networks are dedicated cellular systems delivering ultra-reliable low-latency communication, massive IoT connectivity, and customized security for enterprises undergoing digital transformation. Private 5G subsumes advantages of both public and non-public networks, offering unified connectivity, optimized services, and customized security within a defined area. Private 5G empowers enterprises to control and secure their own information, optimize networks for exclusive requirements, and flexibly reconfigure infrastructure as business objectives evolve.
Blog:2026/09/29
⇒ Installing Ubuntu 26.04 Server in an OpenBSD vmm(4) VM
I wanted to run Ubuntu 26.04 Server inside an OpenBSD vmm(4) guest. OpenBSD’s VM console is serial only, and the Ubuntu Server ISO does not boot correctly on a serial console out of the box. This post shows how to rebuild the Ubuntu ISO with the right kernel and GRUB options so it installs cleanly through vmctl console.
⇒ What about ThinkCentre M710q, M720q and *BSD
Thanks to being subscribed to self-hosting and homelab feeds, I yet again was trapped by compulsive buying and collector’s impulse while browsing the local refurb marketplaces. This may end now. Until then, here’s a quick look at ThinkCentre M710q and M720q on various BSD systems.
⇒ Jailbreaking Magit Commit
Apologies in advance that I couldn’t think of a properly descriptive title, but at least it sounds catchy… Now that I have your attention ;) Most of my development occurs within FreeBSD jails, as a security measure against you-know-what that’s all the rage these days. The secured environment naturally must never have a git identity or SSH keys which would give any form of access to impersonate me or do something destructive.
⇒ What FreeBSD Charges at the Boundary
A system call on this machine costs fifty-two nanoseconds. The same call in a Linux guest on the very same processor costs eight hundred and sixteen. Neither number is about the kernel type, and that is the finding. The Bench Marker.
⇒ Branch Target Reuse, BTR: New Spectre V2 Attack Targeting JIT Compilers
It’s been a while since any new Spectre vulnerabilities have come to light but that’s changing today. The embargo has now lifted on BTR, Branch Target Reuse as a new Spectre-V2 attack affecting just-in-time (JIT) compilers.
⇒ Upgrade your desktop: Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS is now available
Whether you’re a first-time Linux user, experienced developer, academic researcher, or enterprise administrator, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Resolute Raccoon is the best way to benefit from the latest advancements in the Linux ecosystem on a stable foundation.
⇒ FreeBSD Kernel Frame Unwinding with DWARF CFI
Final piece for FreeBSD kernel debugging with LLDB
⇒ Reduce the duration of Solaris SRU updates using JomaSoft VDCF
A typical Solaris SRU update on a system with a few zones takes several minutes.
- A typical Solaris SRU update on a system with a few zones takes several minutes.
Blog:2026/09/30
⇒ Eclipse Foundation Launches the Sovereign AI Foundation
New vendor-neutral initiative brings together an initial community of 17 organisations to connect industry needs with open source AI projects and turn shared expertise into practical guidance for greater choice and control.
⇒ OpenSSF Newsletter – September 2026
September brings a commitment to sustainable package registries, practical Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) guidance, new community security work, and three conversations on AI, regulation, and dependency risk. Join us in Prague for OpenSSF Community Day Europe on October 6.
⇒ The Forty-Four Switches on ls
The standard asks ls for 26 switches. This machine gives it 44, and the GNU tree gives it 60. Every single one of them had a reason. Lean Software.
⇒ cp: -r or -R?
A question like this recently came up again. I once dug it up, but only posted it in some “forum” a decade ago, and I think it’s worth saving this little bit of trivia from digital nirvana.
⇒ Realtime transaction fraud detection – with an LLM?
Conversational AI with a chatbot is great for drafting emails or debugging code, but it’s less ideal for real-time application middleware. If you’re trying to inspect a financial transaction for potential fraud in the middle of a checkout loop, you don’t need an LLM to write you an essay about why a credit card transaction looks suspicious – you just need a probability score, and you need it as fast as possible.
⇒ OpenBSD Developers Reject uutils Coreutils Port Over Licensing and Compatibility Concerns
A proposed port of the Rust-based uutils coreutils reimplementation sparked heated debate on the OpenBSD mailing list, with project founder Theo de Raadt and senior developers rejecting it as unnecessary duplication that introduces behavioral incompatibilities with the base system.
Blog:2026/10/01
⇒ October 2026 Program
This article presents the program for the coming month, while summarizing my activities as an author from the previous month. It recaps the articles published and discusses my current and future projects.
⇒ EuroBSDCon 2026 in Brussels, Belgium: travel notes after the conference
I am back from EuroBSDCon and finished going through my inbox… It is time to write a blog post and share my experience!
⇒ The Review That Stopped at the Cover
A number went up on Tuesday, and within the hour three people asked for it to come down. Between them they had read the headline and the teaser, and one had got as far as the picture. The number has since been measured four more ways, by their programme and their protocol, and the order has not moved. IT Philosophy.
⇒ Android™ belongs in your CI/CD pipeline
How on-demand Android environments turn validation into a repeatable pipeline stage
Blog:2026/10/02
⇒ FreeBSD Release Cycles and Enterprise Requirements: Why LTS Matters
FreeBSD’s release cadence works well for many environments, but enterprise systems and products often operate on much longer lifecycles. This article examines how long-term support addresses the gap between FreeBSD’s support window and the security, hardware, and migration requirements of production environments.
⇒ Big Tech ruined the cloud, so we’re renaming ours
From ever-increasing subscription prices to outages and data harvesting: we don’t like what the cloud has come to represent. So we’re redefining what an online service should be: private, optional, and free from lock-in or walled gardens.
⇒ Choosing a Journaling File System
A journaling file system is a special type of file system that maintains a tracking file, called a journal.
⇒ Wayland Has Won, But It Hasn’t Replaced Everything X11 Did
Wayland has won the Linux desktop, but remote access, automation and accessibility can still be harder than under X11.
⇒ kTLS Sends the File Without Copying It
One line of configuration, two kernels, and a payout that differs by a factor of two. The reason has a date on it, and the date is 1998. Technical Beauty Scope.
⇒ Headers Up! What’s New in httpd and relayd
As I mentioned in my Dead Software Walking: The ongoing evolution of relayd(8) and httpd(8) post, development of relayd(8) and httpd(8) was revived.
- https://rsadowski.de/posts/2026/update-relayd-and-httpd/
- https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20261004115249
⇒ Confidential computing in the real world: finding your use case
Confidential computing is essential when an organization needs to process sensitive data on infrastructure where the operators should not have access to it. You might have seen this requirement before: it appears commonly in public cloud deployments (where organizations want to prevent the cloud vendor seeing data), but also when hospitals evaluate proprietary AI models on premises (to keep patient info from being seen by IT managers) or when businesses analyse data together without disclosing their underlying records.
Blog:2026/10/03
⇒ We View Consumer Data as Toxic Waste
Obscura VPN splits your identity from your browsing across two independent companies so neither can see both. Founder Carl Dong on trust, QUIC, reproducible builds, and why the no-logs promise stopped being enough.
⇒ Self-Hosted AI: Qwen 3.8 on a Rented Blackwell at 150 Tokens per Second
For a long time, “self-hosted AI” meant one of two things to me. Either a small model on a laptop, slow enough to make coffee between answers, or a lot of money spent on a GPU that then spends most of its life idling under my desk.
⇒ LinuxTV – Debian-based Linux distribution designed for televisions
LinuxTV is a Debian-based Linux distribution designed for computers connected to a television. Rather than booting into a conventional desktop environment, it starts with a fullscreen launcher intended to be viewed and controlled from across a room.
- https://www.linuxlinks.com/linuxtv-debian-based-linux-distribution-televisions/
- https://github.com/guruswarupa/LinuxTV
⇒ Google Summer of Code 2026 Reports: Improving and Stabilizing the racoon2 IKE Daemon in NetBSD
racoon2 is a system to exchange and install security parameters for IPsec. It consists of an IKEv1/IKEv2 key exchange daemon, a security policy management daemon, and a Kerberos-based key exchange daemon. The project lives at zoulasc/racoon2 and is being modernized so that it can serve as a reliable L2TP/IPsec or IKEv2 VPN server on NetBSD and Linux for built-in Windows, iOS and Android VPN clients.
⇒ The Amazing Work By Valve’s Timur Kristóf On Improving Old AMD GPUs On Linux
Over the past year Timur Kristóf of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team has made multiple very nice improvements to the AMDGPU kernel driver for enhancing support for old (GCN 1.0/1.1 era from a decade ago) graphics cards so that they can better handle Linux gaming and other tasks. This week in Toronto, Kristóf presented on this AMDGPU work that he initially began as a kernel driver development exercise after initially spending years in user-space focused on the Mesa 3D driver code.
Blog:2026/10/04
⇒ DigitalOcean Quietly Ends Open Source Credits Program
Some project maintainers have received emails that they will no longer get any more free credits from Digital Ocean.
⇒ Deshittification Part 4: The Factory Reset Consent Trap
In Part 1 of this series, I laid out the foundational OpenBSD and Unbound architecture used to reclaim network sovereignty from an LG Smart TV. In Part 2, we saw how the OS holds the App Store hostage. In Part 3, I documented a stateful TCP kill switch that actively terminates Netflix streams if telemetry is blocked.
⇒ I think I’m done with the Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pis are like iPads and other tablets for me: I like the idea of them, but then I get them and immediately regret it. Then sufficient time passes, I forget, and I think huh, that might be cool. Rinse, and repeat.
⇒ Roma Splat by G-Lock
Demozoo keeps a line on the Italian Bad Boys that reads like an epitaph: no releases since 1995, the group is considered disbanded. In June 2026 the page needed editing. Bytes of Art.
⇒ Adventures in FreeBSD Bringup on an RK3588 (Part 2)
Last week I started the journey of FreeBSD bringup on an RK3588 board. As a quick recap, the vendor U-Boot image that came with the board was pretty old and didn’t have support for UEFI. Given that FreeBSD’s existing RockPro image has an EFI image which I’d like to be able to “just boot,” I grabbed the mainline Armbian “edge” image for the board and was able to get fairly deep in the kernel process with just this.
⇒ Siemens Abruptly Takes Down OpenRadioss, But a Fork is Already Live
Another reminder of why open source saves software from being lost forever.
⇒ FreeBSD Foundationals: rc.d - The Service Framework That Fits in Your Head
The previous article followed FreeBSD from power-on through the loader and the kernel, and stopped at a box in the diagram that just said rc(8) scripts. That box is where your machine actually becomes useful: networking comes up, filesystems get mounted, jails start, and every daemon you care about gets launched. This article opens that box.
⇒ DOS: Determining system uptime
For next Advent of Code, I’m loosely planning to use some old Windows, probably NT4 (I wanted to go with 2000 first, but that’s a bit slow on my old box, and 95/98 are a bit unstable; NT4 might hit the sweet spot?). What was missing in my toolchest for that OS was a small program to print the system’s uptime – just like uptime on Unix. The only way I knew was to do net statistics server | more and then do the math in your head, but that’s a bit cumbersome.
⇒ Repairing a Baofeng Programming Cable
I’ve been recently increasingly interested in amateur radio and (since I’m yet to receive my license) I wanted to engage in the hobby in a way I actually could, that is to say, snoop in on other people’s conversations in the aether.
Conference|Interview|Opinion|Talk|Podcast
Conf:2026/09/29
⇒ CRA Tech Talk, 09/07/2026
Conf:2026/10/01
⇒ BSD Now—683: GeFS (GeFUS)
This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap and the BSDNow Patreon
⇒ UNIX Social Camp — CR #4 (Capacity Reload)
Software
Soft:2026/09/28
⇒ GhostBSD is Replacing MATE With a New Desktop Named After a Typo
Eric Turgeon has shown off a new desktop environment that would ship with custom components in GhostBSD.
⇒ Shotcut 26.9 Video Editor Brings UI Improvements, Automatic Audio Ducking
Following the earlier Shotcut 26.9 beta at the beginning of September, the open-source developers behind the open-source non-linear video editor are out with the Shotcut 26.9 stable release.
Soft:2026/09/29
⇒ Meta Releases OpenZL 0.3 With Decompression Speed 144% Faster Than Zstd
Just shy of one year ago Meta announced OpenZL as a format-ware compression framework focused on delivering both high compression ratios and high speed compression/decompression. OpenZL has continued making more optimizations and out today is OpenZL v0.3 and advertising some huge gains over Zstandard (Zstd) that is also worked on by Meta engineers…
Soft:2026/09/30
⇒ KDE turns 30 with Plasma 6.8, but the X11 session isn’t invited
Plus, Klassik recreates the KDE 3 desktop experience on Qt 6
⇒ Microsoft Has Made WSL Containers Available to Everyone
Previously in public preview, it now offers new commands, Consommé networking, and Intune registry controls.
Soft:2026/10/01
⇒ YT-DLP is Being Treated as a Piracy Tool By The IFPI
yt-dlp has over 195,000 stars on GitHub, supports thousands of platforms, and is actively maintained by a global developer community. Unfortunately, the IFPI would like to see it on the EU’s piracy watchlist.
⇒ KosmicKrisp Achieves Vulkan 1.4 Conformance on Apple Silicon
KosmicKrisp, LunarG’s Mesa Vulkan driver for Apple silicon, has passed the Vulkan 1.4 Conformance Test Suite (CTS) and is now a Khronos-conformant Vulkan 1.4 implementation. The Vulkan 1.4-conformant version of KosmicKrisp is available for download via the Vulkan SDK.
- https://www.lunarg.com/kosmickrisp-achieves-vulkan-1-4-conformance-on-apple-silicon/
- https://www.phoronix.com/news/KosmicKrisp-Vulkan-1.4-2026
⇒ OpenBGPD 9.3 released
In another hint that a new OpenBSD release is close, the OpenBGPD project has announced a new release of its software, version 9.3:
⇒ Samba 4.23.13 Available for Download
This is the latest stable release of the Samba 4.23 release series.
Soft:2026/10/03
⇒ Wine 11.19 released with Wayland Colour Management, Unicode upgrades, DNS query cache
The Wine 11.19 release is now available for this open source Windows compatibility layer, bringing an assortment of new features and fixes.