FreeBSD

Ask a FreeBSD kernel what one of its settings does and it answers in a sentence. It does so for 15,065 of its 15,416 settings, because since 1995 the explanation has been written into the same line of source as the setting itself. Technical Beauty Scope.

The machine that serves this blog keeps five ways back from its last upgrade, and four of them were laid without anybody asking. A Debian server, after the same morning, would keep two kernels. Lean Software.

In January 2019 a Linux kernel developer told a ZFS user, on the kernel's own mailing list, to switch to FreeBSD. He meant it as a dismissal. This piece takes it as advice and checks whether it holds. Like for Like.

J’ai décidé de plus laisser mon serveur web directement ouvert sur internet et de tout faire passer via un reverse proxy nginx (qui était déjà mon serveur web). Tant qu’à faire, comme le serveur ne servira qu’à cela, j’en ai profité pour partir sur un freebsd 15 pour ne plus tout avoir sous Debian.

The standard asks ls for 26 switches. This machine gives it 44, and the GNU tree gives it 60. Every single one of them had a reason. Lean Software.

A system call on this machine costs fifty-two nanoseconds. The same call in a Linux guest on the very same processor costs eight hundred and sixteen. Neither number is about the kernel type, and that is the finding. The Bench Marker.

At the end of last year I wrote about jailexec, my Ansible connection plugin that manages FreeBSD jails by SSHing to the jail host and running everything through jexec. That article has a section called Security Design. It proudly explains the two-stage file transfer: upload to a temporary location on the host, then move it into the jail with privilege escalation.

Last month while sitting in a cafe, my friend Andrew showed me an article about a quirky new E Ink device that was launching (we're both huge fans of the technology). It was cheap enough to be impulse purchase material, so I went to order it. And on the checkout page, something happened which has literally never happened to me... ever... I saw a "you might also like" style sales pitch, and the product was actually so compelling that I bought it 😱 The company was basically nerd sniping me.

ZFS configuration decisions can affect storage performance for years, and some cannot be changed without rebuilding the pool. Learn how to identify and fix common misconfigurations involving ashift, recordsize, vdev layout, dedup, and pool capacity.

Desktop AMIs ‘designed to behave as much like Windows as possible’ now available as an on ramp for new users

Six actions make up the entire rule language that decides what my machines show in /dev, and not one of them can execute anything. The other answer to the same problem grew a technique number in the ATT&CK catalogue. Unix Universe.

A 67-kilobyte program in the base system will send your mail. The invoice is for the part where somebody agrees to accept it. Lean Software.

This whole thing started because of Stefano and his blog. His guide to installing Void Linux on an encrypted ZFS root with hibernation support was the thing that got me curious enough to actually try it — and, as these things go, curiosity turned into an afternoon spent repartitioning a laptop I use every day. My setup below is simpler than his (no LUKS-encrypted swap, no hibernation), because I just wanted ZFS-on-root dual-booted alongside my existing FreeBSD/GhostBSD/OpenBSD rEFInd menu, but the bones of the approach — and the credit for pointing me at zfsbootmenu in the first place — are his.

FreeBSD is free to license, but production upgrades carry operational costs. Learn how upgrade best practices can reduce those costs and how LTS can bridge the gap when a production fleet cannot migrate before EOL.

extrace is a nice little tool that allows to monitor program starts in FreeBSD. If you are trying to track down which programs are executed on your system, extrace is for you.

The standard answer to brute force costs a hundred megabytes of interpreter and twenty-seven regular expressions, to work out something the daemon already knew. There are three other answers, and two of them were running before I installed anything. The Bench Marker.

This post describes how to export metrics from bhyve based virtual machines and Jails managed by Sylve on FreeBSD by my Prometheus exporter. The focus is on collecting reliable data from the host system without relying on tooling that was primarily designed for Linux hypervisors or assumes the existence of hypervisor level counters.

The BSD news will continue until morale improves. (...) Baptiste Daroussin, creator of pkg and poudriere, is working on a service manager for FreeBSD called rcd.

FreeBSD 13 reached end of life on April 30, 2026, but many production systems still depend on it. Here’s why upgrading is harder than it looks, what staying on 13 means, and how teams can manage the transition

When you have a number of old ZFS snapshots to destroy, it can be useful to see if you can delete a complete range.