A glimpse into 2020

When you read this, the old year will be over (well, depending on the time zone you live in). If we’re lucky, this might be the year to get our hands on the first affordable RISC-V hardware that can actually run a Unix-like operating system. It should definitely be the year to get interesting devices like the ARM64-based PinePhone. And it also means that Python 2 is finally dead.

Speaking about that: For me 2019 has been a pretty busy year. On this blog I wrote about quite some different topics, among them my first attempt at writing something programming-related as I tried to teach myself a little bit of Python. If I had to name an overall theme, I’d say that the past year was the year of hardware architectures. I didn’t plan this, but that’s what’s happened. But I don’t actually want to look back in this post. On the contrary! But speaking of dead things also kind of fits into the next topic (more than I like…)!

FreeBSD on SPARC64

The next post that I plan to write will be about FreeBSD on the SPARC64 architecture. What I did not know when I decided on that is that it is more or less a doomed architecture when it comes to FreeBSD. SPARC64 is in grave danger – people expect support for it to be dropped before FreeBSD 13.0 is released!

The reason is that it is one of the architectures that still need the old GCC 4.2 (yes, from 2007!) toolchain – and that old cruft finally has to go. And while everybody agrees that this is a completely sensible thing to do, SPARC64 doesn’t seem to have as many friends among the FreeBSD developers to make the transition to something newer. A few people are trying to get something done (I’m also tinkering and trying to help), but it’s far from a save bet that it’ll succeed.

IMHO it would be a real shame to see FreeBSD on SPARC64 die. If it does survive, I’ll definitely try to help with QA. Can you help? If so: Please do! I’ll give more details on what the current status is and where the problems are in my January post.

FreeBSD on ARM64

I plan on writing another post about the current status on FreeBSD on ARM64. The topic of making it a Tier 1 architecture has recently been brought up again and I’d like to join the discussion about that rather sooner than later. If it wasn’t for the very unpleasant situation with SPARC64, this would actually be my next post.

Progress has been made on the networking issues on the Cavium ThunderX servers and I’ll also take a look again at the PineBook. Most likely I’ll also buy a PinePhone and/or one of their Tablets. If I do, you will find a review here.

Orchestration and Configuration Management with SaltStack

I wanted to write about this topic for a while, but now I’ve at last started to set aside the hardware that I need for the project. Several years ago (gosh…) I wrote a little comparison of Puppet, Chef, Salt and Ansible. After a general introduction I might update and publish this as well.

But that will only be the start of a series of posts introducing Salt. There will be a slight focus on FreeBSD, but in general it will show off how to work with various operating systems and distributions. We’ll start with Salt-SSH using Remote Execution Modules, talk about targeting and get to know grains. Then we’ll progress to the state system, pillar data and so on before switching to the master-minion model.

I’m looking forward to this one. If anybody has any ideas – just tell me, I’m open to suggestions on what to cover.

HardenedBSD

While I ran this derivative of FreeBSD for a couple of weeks on spare hardware (until I needed that for something else), I just didn’t find the time to write about my experience with it, yet. I liked it, though, and plan on re-visiting the OS. And when I do, you’ll read about it here for sure.

The project is currently being re-structured. So I’ll wait with this topic for a while longer. Might happen in the second half of the year (time flies by much too fast, anyway).

E-Mail

For years now I’ve been putting this one off. In fact I’ve started digging a bit into the topic twice. Two times I got distracted with other topics. Maybe third time is the charm?

To help making this more likely, I registered a domain (with a pretty bad pun in German) in December. Maybe now that I pay money, I’ll actually live up to the plan to “do moar with mail”. I’ll be using BSD technology where possible. So expect that the mailing stuff will involve OpenSMTPd.

illumos

This one is really a time issue. I’m still very much interested in the heritage of OpenSolaris and would like to do some more things with it. However I have no idea when I’ll find the time to do a dedicated illumos project. But there will definitely be some illumos involved with one of the other topics. You guess which one! 😉

Ravenports

The Ravenports project is still as fascinating to me as it was when I discovered it. I really wish I could dedicate more time to porting and helping to bring things forward (there’s still quite a lot of ports missing that I’d like to have and use).

While things are going well in general and ports are being updated really, really fast most of the time, big changes are rare right now. But big changes are what it makes sense to write about. And while there are some noteworthy things that I can think of, I’m still waiting for something else to land. Once that happens I will dedicate another post to Raven.

Linux vs. FreeBSD

I recently needed to setup a new Linux machine for a customer. Usually my co-workers do that, since I volunteered to take care of our BSD machines. That installation left me totally puzzled. Has the Debian installer become worse – or does my memory fail me and it has always been so bad (and I didn’t notice when I was into Linux only)?

Since then I thought about a few things. The conclusion is that I really love FreeBSD. It’s not perfect (well, nothing is), but there are so many areas where it’s much, much more comfortable to work with (can you say iptables or mdadm? Yuck!). And there is a lot more beauty and even technical genius if you take a closer look and compare things.

Yes, Linux in much more advanced in many areas. But that’s not much of a surprise given how much more manpower goes into that system. But it is a little miracle how the BSDs with their much lower manpower continue to deliver excellent operating systems on par with or even superior to Linux when it comes to sanity of use. Thank you, *BSD!

Happy new year!

So that’s what I have on my mind right now (I’m not out of ideas, but these are the topics that are on the top of my “would like to write about” list currently). Which of these topics will I be able to deliver and which will I miss? Time will tell. Feel free to comment and tell me what interests you the most.

Happy new year to all of my readers!