news
BSD Leftovers
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Audiocasts/Shows
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The BSD Now Podcast ☛ BSD Now 643: Unwrapping gifts
Upwrapping OpenZFS gifs, Propolice the OpenBSD Stack Protector, refreshing zpools, and the FreeBSD 15.0 release.
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Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization
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Miod Vallat ☛ When a driver challenges the kernel's assumptions
Unix-based systems have been around for more than 50 years now. Although the best design ideas still prevail to this day, the evolution of the computing industry has forced operating system designers to rethink the way they work, multiple times over time.
From a device driver point of view, the most important change was the change from fixed, compile-time hardware configuration, enumerated upon boot and never changing afterwards, to a more dynamic model, where devices can come and go: storage devices first, with the first hotplug-capable SCSI controllers in the first half of the 1990s, and complete devices shortly later, first with the introduction of the PCMCIA bus on laptops, then with USB and Firewire, which were not limited to laptops.
While PCMCIA support in open source operating systems had lingered for a few years before being integrated (both in Linux with "pcmcia-cs" and in FreeBSD with the "laptop package"), by the time USB support was being worked on, the required changes to accept/allow that devices may show up or disappear at any time had been completed and tested, and the kernel had no excuse not to cope with removable devices.
Today's story is the story of a device driver which caused some kernel assumptions to no longer stand, and the work done to remediate this situation, letting the kernel cope with the new world order.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Vincent Delft ☛ Streaming Hi-Fi Audio from FreeBSD NAS to OpenBSD Playback Machine Using MPD and sndio
In the world of open-source operating systems, OpenBSD and FreeBSD are renowned for their stability, security, and excellent audio support. This guide describes a clean, automated setup for streaming high-quality music from a FreeBSD-based NAS to an OpenBSD machine connected to a hi-fi DAC over optical fiber (S/PDIF). The solution uses Music Player Daemon (MPD) on the FreeBSD NAS as the music server and sndio for low-latency, high-fidelity remote audio output to the OpenBSD client.
The setup ensures that turning on the amplifier and DAC automatically prepares the OpenBSD audio system and starts playback on the NAS — all without manual intervention.
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