Fresh from the just concluded hackathon in Ljubjlana comes our next report from Florian Obser (florian@) who writes:

Sometimes you have to roll the hard six.

I have been trying to bolt a standard OpenBSD parse.y based config file onto rtadvd(8) for about a year now. I could not do it. The code base is just too weird. There are other bugs lurking as well and I have a hard time fixing them.

Next in from Ljubljana is Matthieu Herrb (matthieu@):

I spent the first day and a half chasing an issue that many people have been experiencing: the first X start after an install or upgrade from a snapshot was slow. The direct cause of this is well-known: it's the fontconfig library (used by all applications that do font rendering) that re-builds its font cache (~/.cache/fontconfig/) because of newly installed fonts.

Except that normally, OpenBSD X sets ship a pre-computed, system-wide cache (/var/cache/fontconfig/) that should avoid this. So what is the problem ?

Before winning the football world cup, the french were writing their hackathon reports. Here's the one from Antoine Jacoutot (ajacoutot@):

g2k18 was my third General Hackathon in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I love it there, it's a great place to host such an event: perfect location (city center), beautiful city, cheap yet very nice food etc.

My goal for the week was to remove a few items from my overgrowing TODO list.

The g2k18 hackathon has just concluded, and already we have our first report. Marc Espie (espie@) wrote in:

So I came into Ljublana running. Specifically, I've been working on a lot of ports infrastructure stuff recently.

• update-plist at g2k18
• the infamous cups bug fix a bit later
• and now tags.

In a change which is bound to be welcomed widely, -current has gained "auto-join" for Wi-Fi networks. Peter Hessler (phessler@) has been working on this for quite some time and he wrote about it in his p2k18 hackathon report. He has committed the work from the g2k18 hackathon in Ljubljana:

CVSROOT:	/cvs
Module name:	src
Changes by:	phessler@cvs.openbsd.org	2018/07/11 14:18:09

Modified files:
	sbin/ifconfig  : ifconfig.8 ifconfig.c 
	sys/net80211   : ieee80211_ioctl.c ieee80211_ioctl.h 
	                 ieee80211_node.c ieee80211_node.h 
	                 ieee80211_var.h 

Log message:
Introduce 'auto-join' to the wifi 802.11 stack.

This allows a system to remember which ESSIDs it wants to connect to, any
relevant security configuration, and switch to it when the network we are
currently connected to is no longer available.

In this post, Paul Smith shows how to reduce buffer bloat and improve interactive traffic latencies.

Long time ago, Daniel Hartmeier wrote a nice piece on how to prioritize ACKs and small packets using ALTQ in PF to sustain download speeds on (mostly) assymetric links, but since then PF and queuing has undergone quite a few changes.

To see an example on how the new rulesets should look, and how to score more internet points on speed tests, head over to his article.

Reyk Floeter (reyk@) has committed support for simple request rewrites to httpd(8)/ httpd.conf(5) [in -current]:

CVSROOT:        /cvs
Module name:    src
Changes by:     r...@cvs.openbsd.org    2018/06/20 10:43:05

Modified files:
        usr.sbin/httpd : config.c httpd.conf.5 httpd.h parse.y 
                         server_http.c 

Log message:
Add support for simple one-off internal rewrites.

For example:

location match "/page/(%d+)/.*" {
request rewrite "/static/index.php?id=%1&$QUERY_STRING"
}

Requested by many.

Ok benno@

As part of ongoing mitigations against CPU vulnerabilities, -current has gained a new sysctl, "hw.smt", to control Simultaneous Multi Threading (SMT). This is disabled by default (only on Intel® CPUs, for now).

There have been more developments in the continuing work mitigating against (Intel®, and potentially other) CPU vulnerabilities…

Philip Guenther (guenther@) committed the following: