For a long while now I've been complaining that usernames and passwords aren't enough. With ssh(1) you've also got keys and other variants, however the recent addition of AuthenticationMethods in sshd(8) really is a thing of beauty! What AuthenticationMethods allows you to do is specify a list, or multiple lists of chained authentication methods that must all be successful in order to authenticate the user. Read more...

I had an abbreviated trip to Toronto, only being able to participate in the first four days of t2k13. I had originally planned to rework amd64 and i386 MTRRs since the way they are presently handled is difficult to understand, and I could not convince myself that they were even being handled properly in the first place. I was looking at MTRRs before the hackathon anyway, since I was trying to track down a reboot issue in hibernate resume, and MTRRs seemed like a possible suspect.

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As a starter, I cleaned up some code in the IPv4 and IPv6 network stack. A hackathon is a great time to work as the other developers are around. You get fast OKs and can ask questions while doing the review. So I also looked into rtadvd, UTF-8 locale support, pf, IPv4 checksum calculation and IPv4 source routing. Read more...

I found the work that mlarkin@ and deraadt@ have done on hibernate to be quite interesting. Unfortunately during their initial work on i386 and amd64 I was focused on different topics and I kind of lost the train on that one.

No matter, I decided to join in on the hibernate effort and Loongson seemed like the perfect architecture for that. I already added suspend support for it a few years ago so hibernation would be the next logical step.

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t2k13 had three phases for me:

1) time_t

As many of know, UNIX represents timestamps as a count of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. That's what is stored in the time_t type which is used in many kernel and library APIs, either directly or as part of many structures such as timeval, timespec, and stat.

Currently, OpenBSD defines time_t to be a signed 32bit type. Well, the maximum positive signed 32bit number is only 2147483647, which as a time_t represents 2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC. That's less than 25 years away, so it's certainly time to get cracking on fixing it.
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Prior to t2k13, I had the luck to give a talk at BSDCan in Ottawa about Mozilla on OpenBSD, where I also found henning@, beck@, reyk@ and Peter Hansteen, along with some other friends from the FreeBSD/Dragonfly/NetBSD crowd. This was a really nice event with interesting talks (bhyve anyone ?), and I look forward to come back there next year.

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For the Toronto hackathon, my goals were to commit some M's that had been accumulating in my tree for months and to work on some new hardware drivers for better operation of OpenBSD on newer Apple MacBooks.

I sat at a table with Philip Guenther (guenther@), Ted Unangst (tedu@), and Matthew Dempsky (matthew@). Over the course of a week, I overheard more about threads, silly POSIX standards, and Chinese web hackers than I ever wanted to know. Read more...

Next up in the t2k13 reports is Bob Beck (beck@). Bob has been with the project for a very long time, with lots of deep knowledge on the buffer cache, an area he worked on during this hackahton:

Well, I'm now back from the t2k13 hackathon in Toronto.

Interestingly, the only commit I actually made during the hackathon was to ports - something I rarely do - but I took a few minutes and extended the torture test suite to include a parallel core dumper Theo and I have been using extensively to abuse uvm, the scheduler and the IO midlayer.

Having said that most of the value I got from the hackathon was time to work with krw@ stabilizing the last bits of bugs in the amd64 buffer flipper diff (currently posted to tech@) which I now expect to go in once the tree stabilizes after the hackathon. I also had some really good discussions with tedu@ and guenther@ about several aspects of things, including the possibility of using the midlayer to add support for devices like sd cards that support trim along with an optimization to support tossing buffers we know the filesystem is no longer ineterested in - Something I am looking at as we speak in another window.... So hopefully users can see some payoff from this soon. Read more...

I spent most of this hackathon working on locale support.

The list of available locales in OpenBSD used to be defined by names of directories within the /usr/share/locale directory. If users tried to configure a locale that didn't have a name corresponding to a directory in /usr/share/locale, the setlocale(3) call would fail. This resulted in numerous requests from users to add their favourite languages and countries to this directory.

Adding new entries to the directory has a cost. It uses up some disk space on the filesystem, even if the locale isn't used. Also, submitted patches to add locale names have to be processed by developers and sometimes discussed at length. Read more...

None of the other folks who work on ssh could make it to t2k13, so it wasn't a good time for large changes. Instead, I spent time investigating some bug reports, small patches and pulling the recent changes from OpenBSD into Portable OpenSSH. This included:

* a switch of ssh, sshd and ssh-agent to use clock_gettime(2) with CLOCK_MONOTONIC for timers such as ServerAliveInterval, ClientAliveInterval and the recently added time based rekeying in RekeyLimit as suggested by markus@. Read more...

Next up in our line of hackathon reports is Brandon Mercer (bmercer@). Brandon is a relatively new addition to the team, focusing mainly on the arm port:

In the weeks leading up to the hackathon there was a lot of work going on in the beagle port. We wanted to get things tested and into the tree so that by the time the hackathon rolled around we could be cleaning things up and focusing on getting some snapshots put together. On the first day I was able to do a make build and make release and got some sets to look at. It was fairly satisfying to have them sitting there, however we still needed a working ramdisk with ethernet and a good way to install. There had been lots of emails and discussion going on about the best way to do this and after a quick talk with Theo it all became clear how to proceed. I hacked up the miniroot and got it in so the other arm guys could start working with it. Read more...

Since I came to Canada for BSDcan already and used the week after to hike, I didn't have a jetlag to fight at the hackathon and made good progress.

First, there's the checksum diff, which was already finished - negotiated the commit details and timeframe with Theo. Diff is at http://bulabula.org/diffs/cksum.diff, will go in a good week. Read more...

From Michael W. Lucas, a fresh report from the recent hackathon in Toronto (and the last stop for that book before it reaches its new home): In Terry Pratchett's novel "Going Postal," there's a scene where Very Serious People in somber clothes quietly discuss a financial problem that threatens to wreck the business world. Calculations are made, words are exchanged, hands are shook, and the world turns for another day.

That's kind of what an OpenBSD hackathon is like. Except with goofy T-shirts.

I went to the Toronto hackathon to get the very first copy of Absolute OpenBSD signed by a roomful of OpenBSD developers. Upon finding the Great Hall of Computing at the University of Toronto, my first thought was "this can't be the place." I saw shadows of seated people through the walls, but there wasn't any noise. Were the walls soundproof? Was there a professor pontificating at the front of the room? Read more...

Ted Unangst (tedu@) was the first developer to write in with his report from the hackathon in Toronto. Find his story below:

I spent most of the hackathon working on a few SMP and thread related issues. One problem is that over time we've accumulated lots of different kinds of locks, and some work and some don't, leading to confusion. The obvious solution then is to introduce a new kind of lock that you do understand.

http://xkcd.com/927/ Read more...

Taking on espie's dated call on doing something cool with databases/sqlports port, and with his own initial work through databases/ports-readmes port, I've decided to fork ports-readmes, and create some very simple web-site to mirror the content generated.

Introducing http://ports.su/ .

The web-site is completely static, and all the pages get regenerated daily by downloading a fresh copy of the sqlports package from the snapshots, and running the forked ports-readmes.