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BSD: EuroBSDCon and FreeBSD Leftovers
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FreeBSD ☛ EuroBSDCon 2026 Travel Grant Open
The Travel Grant Application for EuroBSDCon 2026 is now open. The Foundation can help you attend EuroBSDCon through our travel grant program. Travel grants are available to FreeBSD developers and advocates who need assistance with travel expenses for attending conferences related to FreeBSD development. Applications are due July 7, 2026. Find out more and apply today.
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Bruno Croci ☛ FreeBSD ate my ram!
Last month I posted about my journey migrating my site server from an old Ubuntu server to FreeBSD. Some people on Hacker News noticed that, when I showed the fastfetch result, I said I was confused with the RAM usage compared to btop and commented that fastfetch is probably more correct. I decided to enter that rabbit hole and try to understand why reporting free or used memory in a modern operating system is more complicated than it seems.
Another user shared Linux ate my RAM, which provide a quick explanation for the same effect on Linux. And if you want a quick answer for FreeBSD too: the usage sometimes look off because the OS will cache everything it can from the disk into the RAM to improve overall performance, but that cache is volatile and will be freed in case it needs more memory. If you want a slightly longer answer, keep reading.
But just a quick disclaimer before: I am not an expert in operating systems internals, especially FreeBSD. This is a writeup of weeks of research in this field on my free time. If you find anything that’s particularly wrong, please comment it: sharing (knowledge) is caring!
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Alexander Deplov ☛ The FreeBSD Music Collection
Context: I recently upgraded my server from FreeBSD 14 to 15.1-RELEASE-p1, which went smoothly. To make the song I used old melody that I had before, modified it 19 times in Suno to tweak the voice, melody, rhythm, lyrics, and voice accents. Then, I polished it in Ableton Live 12 and combined the best parts of different tracks and lyrics into one song.