February saw a few changes in HardenedBSD. The majority of my time was spent chasing down the kernel crash in HardenedBSD 15-STABLE that has been plaguing our users. I worked on narrowing down to a three-day window during which a commit was made that causes the crash.
As I write this, I'm narrowing that down further to the specific commit. I'm hoping to have this resolved this month. If I find and fix the problem this week, I will create new builds for folks to use. Otherwise, the next scheduled regular quarterly build is for 01 Apr 2026.
I appreciate everyone's patience on this. This has been a tricky bug (at times, it fit the description of a "heisenbug"). My spare time is limited (I have a rather large amount of tasks/obligations in everyday ${LIFE} right now), so it has naturally taken a long while to get to this point.
While inbetween clients at my dayjob, I have been granted the opportunity to research meshtastic and other mesh networking projects. I'm getting a lot closer in my censorship- and surveillance-resistant mesh network proof-of-concept. I'm now at the point where I need to port Linux-specific code to HardenedBSD. I'm hoping to get normal tcp/ip packets flowing through Reticulum nodes on the inside of six months. This project, announced in partnership with Protectli one-and-a-half years ago[1], is starting to move along at a nice pace. I will have more to share on that by the next status report.
On Saturday, 28 Feb 2026, I had given my local Hackers N' Hops chapter a little show & tell of Meshtastic, Reticulum, and HardenedBSD. I met with a bunch of really cool hacckers there, and demoed two Reticulum RNodes backed by Reticulum instances on two HardenedBSD laptops. I demoed an exec-over-meshtastic Python script I wrote the day prior. The script is available on Radicle as rad:z44pvAJS7SiQf2CGtpn8hY44GDMyu.
Speaking of Radicle, I plan to migrate some of my personal repos away from our self-hosted GitLab and onto the Radicle network. With time, I'm hoping to migrate us completely towards Radicle. Now would be a good time for those who want to contribute to HardenedBSD to start playing around and experimenting with Radicle.
In src:
- Contributor "gmg" hardened the kernel crashdump interface.
- Opt zlib kernel module into -ftrivial-var-auto-init=zero.
- bsdinstall(8): Align us more closely with FreeBSD.
In ports:
- net-p2p/reticulum was updated to 1.1.3_2
- Disable PaX PAGEEXEC and PaX NOEXEC for science/zotero
- Bring in candidate patch to fix dns/unbound
- Hook hardenedbsd/ctrl into the build
- 0x1eef added a new port: hardenedbsd/ctrl
- Bump ports-mgmt/pkg to 3.5.1_1
- 0x1eef updated a port: portzap v2.1.1
- 0x1eef updated a port: sourcezap v2.1.1
Once I have figured out what's going on with the 15-STABLE panic and have a proper fix in place, I plan to quickly switch gears towards hbsdfw. I haven't produced a working hbsdfw build in a long time, and it's far past due. After that, I plan to switch right back to the Reticulum research and development.
I'll make sure to keep the community informed of the 15-STABLE findings and fixes.
