Quentin Thébault

Introduction

Occupation: Founding partner @ Defenso - Cyberdefence engineering

FreeBSD & me

Background

I have been using FreeBSD as a personal VM on a shared Proxmox server for a decade or so after getting stuck in a package dependency issue with Debian's apt and deciding to look for something else.

In 2024 my laptop motherboard gave up on me, the replacement came with a new and empty TPM and I didn't have Bitlocker recovery keys. So instead of installing Windows again I switched to FreeBSD as a base OS for my laptop.

I also migrated the Proxmox server to FreeBSD and bhyve that year.

Projects

My main current project is a multi-environment workstation à la QubesOS, where all components, be it bhyve instances or GUI clients (VNC. RDP) run in jails with minimum hardware access, and on separate VTs.

bhyve works out of the box. But GUIs in jails required some work. X.org is a no-go because it basically requires /dev/mem. Instead, I am working on making Wayland compositors work with only seatd as a fd broker and no devfs access.

Related contributions

In progress

drm-kmod
- Add a minor type sysctl. PR #482
libdrm
- Get device information from sysctl when /dev/pci is not available. MR #467
- Get minor type from sysctl using the drm-kmod patch when available and devfs is not. MR #468

Completed

bhyve
- cbc6f7e - bhyve: add UNIX domain socket support to rfb
- Also some work on adding support for ng_device(4), which required adding kevent to it, but I'm not using it yet.
seatd
- 9d1f83e - seatd: use client->session instead of seat->cur_vt in seat_remove_client
  - Fixed a bug when the client closed during a VT switch.
- 4bcdc81 - seatd: restore VT_AUTO mode in vt_close
libinput
- 4c7f7b1e - evdev: verify fd via cached devnum on FreeBSD
libudev-devd
- 67875bc - udev-dev: Enumerate evdev devices via kern.evdev.input sysctls
- 05ee8f5 - evdev: get devnum through sysctl when available
- ebbe00f - udev-dev: enumerate DRM primary nodes via hw.dri sysctl in jails
kernel
- 746c374 - evdev: add devnum sysctl

And mostly for fun:

4b862c7 - splash: add shutdown splash

Main tools

Base

zfs
jails
bhyve
pf

Ports

iocage - https://github.com/freebsd/iocage (Moved there in 2024 after a change in maintainership. It is well alive and welcoming contributions!)
FreeRDP - https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP

Contact

Email: <quentin.thebault AT defenso DOT fr>