Open Source

While we were busy with other things, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) is continuing the work on bringing the clang option to clean return addresses off the stack, as reported upon earlier, to OpenBSD/arm64.

Theo posted an early version of the code to tech@, saying

List:       openbsd-tech
Subject:    arm64 -fret-clean attempt
From:       "Theo de Raadt" <deraadt () openbsd ! org>
Date:       2024-07-02 5:50:45

I've been trying to write -fret-clean for arm64.

On a return-stack architecture like amd64, the callee has to clean up the
word on the stack upon return.

arm64, like some other risc architectures, is a link-register architecture.
In this case, the return address is saved in some temporary location by
the caller, who loads it into the link register before returning.  Before
that moment, the caller has to clean it up.

Read more…

Active committers to the project have elected your twelfth FreeBSD Core Team. For details, refer to the official announcement.

 When NeXT still existed and the black hardware was a thing, Steve Jobs made the announcement that OPENSTEP would be created and that the object model, not the operating system and not the hardware, was the important thing.

This is a concept that Apple has forgotten.  With it’s push towards Apple Silicon and a walled-garden, Apple has committed itself to the same pitfall that NeXT fell into.  NeXT lacked the infrastructure to handle OPENSTEP running on multiple kinds of hardware, but the object model on different OSes was successful… this is evident in OPENSTEP1.1 for Solaris and OPENSTEP for NT.

GNUstep attempts to reach the same goal, but provides the APIs that are available with Cocoa.   The object model IS the important thing and this is why GNUstep is so important.  It breaks the walled garden and makes it possible for users to run their apps and tools on other operating systems.  GNUstep HASN’T forgotten and we believe this is a core concept that Apple has left behind.

Another month, another report from the Redox team. The Rust-based operating system saw another active month, including getting a whole bunch of new funding deals for specific features, such as adding UNIX-style signals to Redox, as well as the further development of Termion, a Redox project that is “a pure Rust, bindless library for low-level handling, manipulating and reading information about terminals”. Furthermore, the default user interface Orbital got a small makeover with new colours and a new default wallpaper, and there’s the usual documentation and website improvements. More substantial are doubling the performance of RedoxFS by improving the speed of block reads and writes, and changes in how the xHCI drivers works to drastically reduce CPU usage. The PCI/PCIe and x86 VirtIO drivers has also been improved, and you can now do userspace debugging using the GNU Debugger from outside the VM. There’s a lot more, so head on over to read the whole thing.