We recap FOSDEM 2019, FreeBSD Foundation January update, OPNsense 19.1 released, the hardware-assisted virtualization challenge, ZFS and GPL terror, ClonOS 19.01-RELEASE, and more.
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FOSDEM 2019 Recap

Allan and I were at FOSDEM 2019 in Brussels, Belgium over the weekend.
On the Friday before, we held a FreeBSD Devsummit in a hotel conference room, with 25 people attending. We talked about various topics of interest to the project. You can find the notes on the wiki page.
Saturday was the first day of FOSDEM. The FreeBSD Project had a table next to the Illumos Project again. A lot of people visited our table, asked questions, or just said “Hi, I watch BSDNow.tv every week”. We handed out a lot of stickers, pens, swag, and flyers. There was also a full day BSD devroom, with a variety of talks that were well attended.
In the main conference track, Allan held a talk explaining how the ZFS ARC works. A lot of people attended the talk and had more questions afterwards. Another well attended talk was by Jonathan Looney about Netflix and FreeBSD.
Sunday was another day in the same format, but no bsd devroom. A lot of people visited our table, developers and users alike. A lot of meeting and greeting went on.
Overall, FOSDEM was a great success with FreeBSD showing a lot of presence. Thanks to all the people who attended and talked to us. Special thanks to the people who helped out at the FreeBSD table and Rodrigo Osorio for running the BSD devroom again.

FreeBSD Foundation Update, January 2019

Dear FreeBSD Community Member,
Happy New Year! It’s always exciting starting the new year with ambitious plans to support FreeBSD in new and existing areas. We achieved our fundraising goal for 2018, so we plan on funding a lot of work this year! Though it’s the new year, this newsletter highlights some of the work we accomplished in December. We also put together a list of technologies and features we are considering supporting, and are looking for feedback on what users want to help inform our 2019 development plans. Our advocacy and education efforts are in full swing as we prepare for upcoming conferences including FOSDEM, SANOG33, and SCaLE.
Finally, we created a year-end video to talk about the work we did in 2018. That in itself was an endeavor, so please take a few minutes to watch it! We’re working on improving the methods we use to inform the community on the work we are doing to support the Project, and are always open to feedback. Now, sit back, grab a refreshing beverage, and enjoy our newsletter!
Happy reading!!
Deb


OPNsense 19.1 released

For more than four years now, OPNsense is driving innovation through modularising and hardening the open source firewall, with simple and reliable firmware upgrades, multi-language support, HardenedBSD security, fast adoption of upstream software updates as well as clear and stable 2-Clause BSD licensing.
The 19.1 release, nicknamed “Inspiring Iguana”, consists of a total of 620 individual changes since 18.7 came out 6 months ago, spread out over 12 intermediate releases including the recent release candidates. That is the average of 2 stable releases per month, security updates and important bug fixes included! If we had to pick a few highlights it would be: The firewall alias API is finally in place. The migration to HardenedBSD 11.2 has been completed. 2FA now works with a remote LDAP / local TOTP combination. And the OpenVPN client export was rewritten for full API support as well.



These are the most prominent changes since version 18.7:


fully functional firewall alias API


PIE firewall shaper support


firewall NAT rule logging support


2FA via LDAP-TOTP combination


WPAD / PAC and parent proxy support in the web proxy


P12 certificate export with custom passwords


Dpinger is now the default gateway monitor


ET Pro Telemetry edition plugin[2]


extended IPv6 DUID support


Dnsmasq DNSSEC support


OpenVPN client export API


Realtek NIC driver version 1.95


Hardened