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BSD: OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD
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Binshdev ☛ How to perform common FreeBSD tasks on OpenBSD
I'm a bit of a ThinkPad freak, and since i386 will no longer be supported in the next 15.x release of FreeBSD, I've decided to move my 32-bit machines to OpenBSD. I have quite a few of those laying around, including the X41, X41 tablet, X60, T60, R50e, and G40. They are still quite usable for lightweight tasks like email, IRC, document editing, configuring networking equipment with the built-in serial port, remotely managing other machines, etc.
This post will serve as reminder for myself on some of the most common tasks I do on FreeBSD, with the equivalent OpenBSD commands. What I consider to be "common tasks" are things like updating/upgrading the operating system, port/package management, configuring wired/wireless networking, setting up a graphical environment, mounting external drives, etc.
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NetBSD ☛ Google Summer of Code 2025 Reports: Asynchronous I/O Framework
The goal is to improve the capabilities of asynchronous IO within NetBSD. Originally the project espoused a model that pinned a single worker thread to each process. That thread would iterate over pending jobs and complete blocking IO. From this, the logical next step was to support an arbitrary number of worker threads. Each process now has a pool of workers recycled from a freelist, and jobs are grouped per-file so that we do not thrash multiple threads on the same vnode which would inevitably lock. This grouping also opens the door for future optimisations in concurrency. The guiding principle is to keep submission cheap, coalesce work sensibly, and only spawn threads when the kernel would otherwise block.
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Adriaan de Groot ☛ KDE Plasma 6 Wayland on FreeBSD
This year, 2025, the KDE Community held its yearly conference in Berlin, Germany. On the way I reinstalled FreeBSD on my Frame.work 13 laptop in another attempt to get KDE Plasma 6 Wayland working. Short story: yes, KDE Plasma 6 Wayland on FreeBSD works.
This time I followed the instructions from thesaigoneer on Codeberg. It did not feel different from any previous attempt of mine. However, it did work instead of hang, so that’s an important difference.