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cyberpunk 8 hours ago

This is from April 28th, it was patched in 15.0R-p7.

itsthefrank 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

-p8 is the current patch level for 15.0-RELEASE so if people have been keeping on top of patching this is already two reboots in the past.

loeg 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just yesterday, cperciva was bragging about the FreeBSD approach to security: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48056853 You can certainly argue the response here was well-coordinated, but having an LPE in a nearly 50-year old core syscall like execve() isn't ideal from a security perspective. (That is: security response isn't the entire picture; culture and bug surface matter too.)

broken-kebab 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Or in other words, the response is well-coordinated so cperciva's bragging is justified, isn't it?

cperciva 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Indeed, I was thinking about this precise issue when I made the point that corresponding issues get handled much better in FreeBSD than in Linux.

tptacek 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He was talking about managing disclosure and patch flow, and you're just taking it as an opportunity to dunk on him.

6 hours ago | parent [-]
[deleted]
yjftsjthsd-h 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think cperciva may have been a touch overenthusiastic, but surely this is in fact proving his point? His claim was, as you note before trying to ignore it, about coordination. When one of the recent Linux LPEs broke, the fix wasn't in distro packages yet; there was a vulnerability that users couldn't practically do anything about. This is an LPE that is fixed in the binaries that have already shipped. If I was playing cheerleader, this is exactly the case I'd use to argue that FreeBSD being a single unified system is a win and that its approach to handing security problems is very on top of things.

bch 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Its like rain on your wedding day - not actually ironic, just unfortunate.

stackghost 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A not-insignificant chunk of the userbase of the various BSDs is there because they were turned off of Linux after controversial things like Gnome 3, systemd being shoved down users' throats despite being a broken mess, wayland (though nobody was as arrogant about wayland as Poettering was about systemd), etc.

All that to say, the BSD userbase as a sizeable subset that are there for countercultural reasons, rather than technical. These are the people who buy into, say, OpenBSD's vaunted security reputation, or believe that "linux bad because reasons", so you're always going to get people in here bragging, because "not using linux" has become part of their identity.

I run a mix of FreeBSD and Linux on my personal devices. The ground truth is that FreeBSD is yet another unix-like OS written in C, and thus not immune from the types of bugs that stem from that lineage. None of the BSD distros are materially more secure or better than a properly-configured and patched Linux.

applfanboysbgon 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The person 'bragging' was not a countercultural user, but rather the FreeBSD engineering lead. They were, however, talking about FreeBSD's response to security vulnerabilities, in contrast to Linux's response.

> thus not immune from the types of bugs that stem from that lineage

They never claimed that FreeBSD didn't have vulnerabilities. I honestly have no idea why grandparent decided to bring up their comment when it exactly validates what the person they were criticising says. GP admits the response to the vulnerability was well-coordinated. The response to security vulnerabilities was the exact, and only, subject of the post they're calling out.

7 hours ago | parent [-]
[deleted]
wolvoleo 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wouldn't call it countercultural. And Wayland actually runs on freebsd these days.

I use Linux as well but I really like FreeBSD for a number of technical reasons. Like the ports collection, the jails, the first-class citizen ZFS.

And Gnome 3 doesn't really have anything to do with Linux. It is also available for FreeBSD if you want it (I don't, I hate the minimalist opinionated design style so I use KDE, also on Linux).

But I use Linux on servers where I run docker for example. It's not about "not using linux".

skydhash 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> And Gnome 3 doesn't really have anything to do with Linux.

There's a very hard push on getting Gnome 3 aligned to systemd. Gnome is actually my preferred DE on Linux when I choose to use one. But compatibility with Unix systems is becoming harder every day.

wolvoleo 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes even KDE recently introduced a new display manager that is completely tied to systemd. For that reason it's not supported on FreeBSD. But sddm still works of course. But it is a worrying precedent.

From the gnome team this was to be expected because they are beholden to RedHat/IBM and the other big distros who push systemd heavily. But from the KDE team I didn't.

I've stopped my monthly KDE donations for this reason. Just to send a message that this isn't ok.

icedchai 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I also use a mix. I moved to FreeBSD initially after a rough period w/Linux in the late 90's. Today, my FreeBSD machines are all VMs running on Linux hosts!

cyberpunk 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Hah I'm your mirror version -- my linux machines are all VMs running on FreeBSD hosts!

icedchai 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Is bhyve working well for you? Maybe I'll try that in my next rev of my home lab.

wolvoleo 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh you use bhyve?

I've tried to use it but I dound it pretty difficult for systems that need a GUI. Maybe I should revisit.

cyberpunk 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Yep, most of my linuxes are headless -- but I do have a VM which I pass a graphics card through to for games and ai stuff though -- works really well (as long as you don't reboot the VM, it has a hard time attaching to the gfx card the second time for some reason, not looked into it much)

sysutils/vm-bhyve makes it quite friendly.

I wouldn't use it for work, though, just personal. Work is all enterprisey kubernetes stuff.

Edit: there is a 'proxmox-like' for FreeBSD out [0] -- I did try it on a couple machines and couldn't get the network working, but consoles seemed to work.. Kinda.

0: https://sylve.io

wolvoleo 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Ah I don't really have a second GPU to dedicate to it though. A virtual console like in VMware or QEMU/KVM would be great. Thanks for the heads-up about sylve! I'll check it out.

For me it's all personal too. For work we still use VMWare a lot.