Plurrrr

Thu 17 Feb 2022

The FreeBSD Boot Process

Throughout this article we will study the FreeBSD boot process. FreeBSD’s boot process is very robust and well thought out, but it differs slightly depending on your system architecture, filesystem (UFS2 or ZFS), partitioning scheme (GPT or MBR), and whether the system boots under UEFI or legacy BIOS (also known as CSM).

Source: The FreeBSD Boot Process.

Debugging an ioctl Problem on OpenBSD

I was trying to use a V4L2 Ruby module on my OpenBSD laptop but ran into a problem where sending the V4L2 ioctls from this module would fail, while other V4L2 programs on OpenBSD worked fine.

Since I got a few questions recently about kernel development and debugging, I thought I’d write up how I finally tracked it down and fixed it. (Spoiler: it was not an OpenBSD problem.)

Source: Debugging an ioctl Problem on OpenBSD, an article by Joshua Stein.

T2 Mac security vulnerability means passwords can now be cracked

A company selling password-cracking tools says that a newly-discovered T2 Mac security vulnerability allows it to crack passwords on these machines, bypassing the lockouts.

The method used is far slower than conventional password-cracking tools, but although the total time needed could run into thousands of years, that could fall to as little as 10 hours when the Mac owner has used a more typical password…

Source: T2 Mac security vulnerability: Passwords can now be cracked, an article by Ben Lovejoy.