The Evolution of NetBSD
In 1969, the Defense Department started the ARPAnet. That same year, a Bell Labs hacker invented Unix. The ARPAnet evolved into the Internet, and one of the descendents of Unix is NetBSD.
Ken Thompson had been working on a time-sharing system for Bell Labs when the project was cancelled. Meanwhile, Dennis Ritchie had invented a new programming language called C. While operating systems had previously been written in machine code, these two realized that computers were powerful enough to allow an operating system to be written in C instead. This meant that an operating system could present the same capabilities on any hardware system. Programmers could use the same toolkits on different machines, instead of rewriting the toolkit each time a machine became obsolete. Thompson and Ritchie called this new operating system Unix. (Raymond 8-9)
Intel vulnerability could hit FreeBSD x64 systems
A recently discovered vulnerability that affects 64-bit FreeBSD systems running on Intel hardware could lead to exploitation of higher privileges by users that already have local system access. Intel adamantly claims that the vulnerability is a result of software implementation issues, rather than their processors.
The FreeBSD security advisory regarding this matter states the following about the impact:
“Successful exploitation of the problem can lead to local kernel privilege escalation, kernel data corruption and/or crash. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must be able to run code with user privileges on the target system.”
The FreeBSD Security Team goes on to advise that updating the system is the only resolution that will address the problem. Please note that it is necessary to reboot after this update as it involves patching the kernel.
FreeBSD 9.0 Released
The latest version of FreeBSD, version 9.0, has been released and boasts a great deal of new features. Highlights include (as seen from the FreeBSD release announcement page)
- A new installer, bsdinstall(8) has been added and is the installer used by the ISO images provided as part of this release
- The Fast Filesystem now supports softupdates journaling
- ZFS updated to version 28
- Updated ATA/SATA drivers support AHCI, moved into updated CAM framework
- Highly Available Storage (HAST) framework
- Kernel support for Capsicum Capability Mode, an experimental set of features for sandboxing support
- User-level DTrace
- The TCP/IP stack now supports pluggable congestion control framework and five congestion control algorithm implementations available
- NFS subsystem updated, new implementation supports NFSv4 in addition to NFSv3 and NFSv2
- High Performance SSH (HPN-SSH)
- Flattened device tree (FDT), simplifying FreeBSD configuration for embedded platforms
- The powerpc architecture now supports Sony Playstation 3
- The LLVM compiler infrastructure and clang have been imported
- Gnome version 2.32.1, KDE version 4.7.3