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Open source projects thrive because of the community built around them. However, non-coding contributions are frequently overlooked and under appreciated.
Let’s examine how non-developer contributors enhance user experience, improve bug reporting, and influence feature requests, all while becoming advocates and evangelists for your open source project.
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FreeBSD has its own high-performance hypervisor called “bhyve”. Much like the Linux kernel’s KVM hypervisor, bhyve enables the creation and maintenance of virtual machines—aka “guests”—which run at near-native speed alongside the host operating system. Although bhyve got a later start than Linux KVM, in most ways it has caught up with its primary rival—and in some ways surpassed it.
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FreeBSD 13 adds new support for a netgraph backend for virtual network devices under bhyve. Netgraph is a modular networking framework that allows for arbitrary stacking of protocols and transports, along with filtering, tunneling, redirection, inspection, injection and more—fast and feature-rich, netgraph is to networking what the geom layer is to disks and storage. This article provides a basic recipe to demonstrate some common netgraph syntax and use-cases.Why might you want to run CURRENT? If you have a large modified code base, or are building a product based on FreeBSD, CURRENT gives you a look into the future of FreeBSD. Running CURRENT will help you understand changes that are happening in the FreeBSD Operating System and it gives you an opportunity to see how your stack performs with new features.
In this article we will show how to build a CURRENT system with the debugging features disabled, and perform some benchmarks to test the impact debugging features have on performance.
The FreeBSD Operating System introduces new features in CURRENT, its main development branch. Snapshots of CURRENT are made available as installer images weekly.
Why might you want to run CURRENT? If you have a large modified code base, or are building a product based on FreeBSD, CURRENT gives you a look into the future of FreeBSD. Running CURRENT will help you understand changes that are happening in the FreeBSD Operating System and it gives you an opportunity to see how your stack performs with new features.
In this article we will show how to build a CURRENT system with the debugging features disabled, and perform some benchmarks to test the impact debugging features have on performance.
The time of the CLI might seem over given the plethora of UIs these days, however, any experienced sysadmin knows just how necessary a powerful CLI like the FreeBSD shell can be. In FreeBSD 14, the default root shell is changing, and in this article we talk about the background and motivations for this change and what implications and advantages this change brings.
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Building your own NAS isn’t just about having the right storage configuration. It starts with the right hardware, the right OS setup, and finally going through the right choice for your storage – OpenZFS. In this edition of our 4-part article series on how to build your own NAS we discuss about fine tuning your FreeBSD OS for excellent NAS performance.
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OpenZFS privilege delegation is an extremely powerful tool that enables system administrators to carefully provide unprivileged users the ability to manage ZFS datasets and zvols at an extremely precise level —with much finer control than would be possible with generic security tools like sudo or doas.
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Let’s talk about building your own NAS on FreeBSD. The first step – researching hardware. When it comes to researching NAS hardware, it’s easy to get lost in the dizzying array of technologies, vendor datasheets touting performance and reliability stats.
While we can’t tell you what hardware to buy in an article, we can discuss some of the factors to consider as you research which hardware best meets your storage requirements.
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Beginning with version 13.0, FreeBSD supports the long-anticipated OpenZFS native encryption. If you’ve used FreeBSD’s GELI encryption in the past, you may wonder if switching to OpenZFS native encryption makes sense.
Check out the differences between GELI encryption and OpenZFS native encryption, and the main benefits of native encryption, let’s take a look at how to create an encrypted database and reroot to an encrypted database.
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Since its first release for the i386 processor in 1993, FreeBSD has been ported to run on a wide array of different CPU architectures and platforms. In this article, we will look at the youngest of these architectures on which FreeBSD currently runs: the RISC-V instruction set architecture.
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RISC-V is a relatively new chip architecture that is quickly making its way in the tech world and is proving to be quite a rival for the existing well-known architectures.
Today, we will look at the history of RISC-V and how it differs from the other offerings.
With the release of FreeBSD 13, arm64 has been elevated to Tier 1 status. FreeBSD support for arm64 has grown steadily since the architecture was incorporated in 2015 based on work supported by the community, ARM and Marvell (then Cavium). Learn about processor performance, hardware factors, and Big.Little in our latest article.
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FreeBSD/arm64 is the FreeBSD port to the 64-bit ARM architecture, also known as AArch64 or ARMv8. All supported FreeBSD releases include support for ARMv8 and there are many packages and ports (3rd party applications) available to support the software you normally deploy with FreeBSD.
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Beginning with version 13.0, FreeBSD supports the long-anticipated OpenZFS native encryption. If you’ve used FreeBSD’s GELI encryption in the past, you may wonder if switching to OpenZFS native encryption makes sense.
Check out the differences between GELI encryption and OpenZFS native encryption, and the main benefits of native encryption, let’s take a look at how to create an encrypted database and reroot to an encrypted database.
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As an administrator, you may often need to limit the amount of system resources an individual uses. FreeBSD provides several methods to do just that. The rctl command can be used to provide an effective method for controlling resource limits or it can be used to set resource constraints on processes and jails. Find out how to configure and enforce your limits.
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Early on, developers working on Unix created a set of ideals that acted as a roadmap for the programs they wrote. They didn’t always follow these ideals, but they set the tone for the Unix project. Keep programs simple, design programs to work together, test early and often – are only some of these ideals. To this day, the Unix Philosophy impacts many projects.
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Why would you use the sharenfs property for NFS configuration and how to do so? FreeBSD’s built-in integration of OpenZFS and NFS makes it easy for any administrator to configure and manage NFS shares. By using OpenZFS’ sharenfs property, managing NFS shares can be added to your arsenal of scripts and procedures for monitoring and maintaining the data stored on OpenZFS filesystems.
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