Hacker News: kevans91

New comment by kevans91 in "Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit"

kevans91 — Sun, 10 May 2026 03:43:26 +0000

While not receiving a response isn't ideal, I note that we actually have two secteams: secteam@ and ports-secteam@; something like luatex should go to the latter, but their level of activity has been kind of hit or miss in my experience. Curating security issues in ports is kind of hard due to the size of it and we probably more often than not end up getting hit with patching things a little after disclosure because of it.

New comment by kevans91 in "A year of funded FreeBSD development"

kevans91 — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 01:04:50 +0000

It's on the FreeBSD Foundation's roadmap: https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/issues/22

New comment by kevans91 in "OpenGrok: Fast and usable source code search and cross reference engine"

kevans91 — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 03:41:00 +0000

Illumos keeps the tradition alive: https://src.illumos.org/source/

New comment by kevans91 in "Reflections on Distrusting xz"

kevans91 — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 17:29:12 +0000

fwiw, characterizing Andres as a sysadmin isn't really the whole picture; he's a postgres developer that conducts benchmarking operations with some frequency (and he's quite good at what he does)... he's perhaps naturally a bit more sensitive to things like the cumulative effect of 500ms or so over a number of sshd invocations.

New comment by kevans91 in "The Case for Rust in the base system"

kevans91 — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 19:59:50 +0000

To be fair, for the vast majority of FreeBSD users flua is essentially nonexistent; it was pushed off into /usr/libexec and renamed so that it doesn't get used by consumers of base in such a way that it can't be updated.

New comment by kevans91 in "macOS Sonoma Broke Grep"

kevans91 — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 03:50:47 +0000

We (FreeBSD) should really reconcile our diff against OpenBSD and figure out what of the work I've done downstream makes sense and what doesn't. I'd imagine there's a healthy amount in both categories.

New comment by kevans91 in "MfsBSD: ISO file that create a working minimal installation of FreeBSD"

kevans91 — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 05:08:42 +0000

Also worth noting, while we're here, that there is a patch set from a GSoC project to integrate mfsBSD into the project's release(7) tooling:

- https://reviews.freebsd.org/D41704 - mfsBSD: Vendor import mfsBSD (mmatuska/mfsbsd@0da8061)

- https://reviews.freebsd.org/D41705 - release: Integrate mfsBSD image build targets into the release tool set

- https://reviews.freebsd.org/D41706 - release(7): Add entries for the new mfsBSD build targets

New comment by kevans91 in "FreeBSD replaces bubblesort with mergesort on SYSINTs"

kevans91 — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 16:20:28 +0000

Right, in this case specifically we're running off a limited bootstack allocated in the kernel's .bss (somewhere between 2 to 6 pages, generally); we won't finish initializing VM until shortly after this sort is done (in some of the SYSINITs that we're sorting).

New comment by kevans91 in "Advantages to running FreeBSD as a server operating system"

kevans91 — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 19:19:45 +0000

> [...] But if you use pkg, and the new point release added a syscall, you will have problems installing new packages (or upgrading) once the package builders update; I don't quite remember the timeline, but it's usually a few months after the point release. [...]

The previous release in the branch gets dropped after ~3 months, probably aligned to the end of the month that its EOL lands in; then pkg builders switch to the newer release in the branch.

New comment by kevans91 in "macOS command-line tools you might not know about"

kevans91 — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 15:34:56 +0000

Yes, this is great... I was given a Macbook with a Norweigan keyboard for testing a port of FreeBSD on it, and I quickly discovered that the keyboard layout remapping stuff available via the UI won't remap at least this one key to what I'd find on my US keyboard.

New comment by kevans91 in "Follow up to “I booted Linux 293k times”"

kevans91 — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 03:57:09 +0000

Race conditions in places like this are exceedingly hard to write reliable tests for. It may take one, two boots; dozens, or thousands, or you may just get insanely lucky and whatever arbitrary # boots you do to try and reproduce it was still simply not enough. It's hard to have any level of confidence, in many cases.

New comment by kevans91 in "Jails on FreeBSD"

kevans91 — Fri, 26 May 2023 19:43:14 +0000

iocage as well... I've been trying to sucker someone into writing a new jail manager in flua, since we have that in base. It hasn't worked yet.

New comment by kevans91 in "Bsdutils: Alternative to GNU coreutils using software from FreeBSD"

kevans91 — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 20:16:18 +0000

Not sure we have anyone that could really call themselves a maintainer for sed, but I am a FreeBSD committer that has put thought into this problem in the past.

New comment by kevans91 in "Bsdutils: Alternative to GNU coreutils using software from FreeBSD"

kevans91 — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 17:57:23 +0000

I'd like to change it in FreeBSD, but haven't really (yet) come up with a clever way to make it work without breaking years of scripts that may be using -i.

New comment by kevans91 in "WireGuard in FreeBSD"

kevans91 — Sat, 29 Oct 2022 18:53:49 +0000

It depends on how you were running before -- if you had the wireguard-kmod package, then yes, the only difference is that you don't have to install it manually. If you only had the wireguard-go pkg before, then see the other responses where you'll now be using the kernel implementation instead of userspace.

edit to note: we can't really provide wg-quick in base at the moment (uses bash-isms), so that still ends up needing installed manually if wg(8) isn't sufficient for your needs.

New comment by kevans91 in "The FreeBSD/Firecracker Platform"

kevans91 — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 16:11:40 +0000

Colin's done a lot of work in improving boot time on EC2 and in general, so I'm a little surprised he didn't actually mention the boot time in this article. In 2022Q1 he had boot time down to 8s (in EC2, IIRC); based on how cut down the FIRECRACKER config he added is and that there's no loader involvement, I don't think it'd be too surprising if he hits ~5-6s or less.

New comment by kevans91 in "We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)"

kevans91 — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 17:29:37 +0000

FWIW, I have no interest in making a similar change to bsdgrep and I can't imagine anyone else would be compelled to bother, either. I just don't see the value in removing these historical names that makes the hassle worth it.

New comment by kevans91 in "Netlink Added to FreeBSD – Unmodified Linux IP(8) Correctly Works"

kevans91 — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 03:08:18 +0000

IMO it was just a relatable example of a somewhat extensive user of netlink that demonstrates compatibility. Some folks may want to run it under the Linuxolator, which seems reasonable.

I only have limited knowledge about netlink, all coming from a devsummit presentation by Alexander, but it seems like an actually good generic kernel interface to have.

New comment by kevans91 in "The Case for the /usr Merge (2012)"

kevans91 — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 03:19:08 +0000

minor nit: /usr/local/bin as it comes from ports

New comment by kevans91 in "FreeBSD on the Framework Laptop"

kevans91 — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 23:39:41 +0000

I read that as "the hardware is failing but FreeBSD is still trucking right along"