BSD @ FOSDEM 2017: Encrypted Disks, Go, CloudABI

On Saturday at this year's FOSDEM conference there was a BSD developer room where various talks were had for European BSD fans.

For Phoronix BSD readers who weren't in attendance at this year's Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting, many of the PDF slides and videos have already been uploaded. When it comes to the BSD talks this year there was work presented on packaging Golang for pkgsrc, GELIBoot for booting FreeBSD from an encrypted disk, evolution on top of the BSD's, and CloudABI for FreeBSD.

Of the BSD sessions, the CloudABI for FreeBSD is the one I found most interesting from reading about the work. CloudABI is a "simplified POSIX-like runtime environment that is inspired by FreeBSD's Capsicum." The project site goes on to explain, "Nuxi CloudABI is a new runtime environment for Unix-like systems that addresses these issues by introducing the concept of dependency injection to full Unix applications. Instead of allowing applications to open arbitrary files on disk and connect to arbitrary systems on the network, you as a user exactly inject those resources that the application should access. This makes it possible to run even untrusted CloudABI programs directly on top of your operating system, without using any virtualisation, containers or additional security frameworks. CloudABI is a great tool for applying the principle of defence in depth to your software. It can be used to secure a wide variety of software, ranging from networked microservices written in Python to embedded programs written in C."

Those wishing to watch the videos (those uploaded so far) or the PDF slide decks for the BSD sessions can find the material via this page.