Brad Davis
2009-Jan-29 17:14 UTC
[FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report for October - December 2008
Introduction
This quarter included some very exciting work including the release of
FreeBSD 6.4 and the much anticipated release of FreeBSD 7.1. We also
launched our own official FreeBSD Forums. The first Bugathon of the
year will be held this weekend, see below for more information and how
to participate.
Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! We hope you enjoy
reading.
__________________________________________________________________
Projects
* BSD# Project
* FreeBSD Bugathons
* FreeBSD BugBusting Team
* The FreeBSD Foundation Status Report
* VuXML generator
FreeBSD Team Reports
* Ports Collection
* Release Engineering
Kernel
* HDA sound driver (snd_hda)
* Multi-IPv4/v6/no-IP jails
* Network Stack Virtualization
* PmcTools
* SD/MMC subsystem
Architectures
* FreeBSD/powerpc for AMCC/IBM PPC440/460
* FreeBSD/sparc64 UltraSPARC III support
Documentation
* The FreeBSD Greek Documentation Project
* The FreeBSD Hungarian Documentation Project
Miscellaneous
* BSD-licensed grep
* The FreeBSD Forums
* YouTube Channel for BSD
__________________________________________________________________
BSD# Project
URL: http://code.google.com/p/bsd-sharp/
URL: http://www.mono-project.org/
Contact: Phillip Neumann <pneumann@gmail.com>
Contact: Romain Tarti?re <romain@blogreen.org>
The BSD# Project is devoted to porting the Mono .NET framework and
applications to the FreeBSD operating system.
Because of a lack of time, Mono stalled at version 1.2.5 for more than
one year in the FreeBSD ports tree. However, things have moved and the
BSD# Team is proud to announce that the Mono ports are about to be
updated to 2.0.1. Ports depending on Mono will also be updated to the
latest available version at the same occasion.
While the ports will be updated really soon now that FreeBSD 7.1 has
been released, impatient people can download and merge the BSD# ports
in their FreeBSD tree right now following the instructions provided on
the BSD# Project's page.
Open tasks:
1. Test and send feedback.
2. Port Mono applications to FreeBSD.
3. Build a debug live-image of FreeBSD so that Mono hackers without a
FreeBSD box can help us fixing bugs more efficiency.
__________________________________________________________________
BSD-licensed grep
URL:
http://p4web.FreeBSD.org/@md=d&cd=//depot/projects/soc2008/gabor_textpr
oc/&c=vqZ@//depot/projects/soc2008/gabor_textproc/grep/?ac=83
Contact: G?bor K?vesd?n <gabor@FreeBSD.org>
Some bugs have been fixed in the buffering and binary file detection
parts of grep. Due to the differences between the GNU regexp library
and our libc regexp implementation, I switched to the GNU library so
that we can maintain an acceptable level of compatibility. The desired
option would be to drop both GNU grep and the GNU regexp library, but
unfortunately we cannot just do that because of these
incompatibilities. Accordingly, the first step should be replacing grep
and then we should review and optimize our regexp library. With this
decision, BSD grep has acquired a higher level of compatibility and now
seems to be much more useful.
Open tasks:
1. Make a tinderbox run with BSD grep and fix possible bugs.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Bugathons
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/BugBusting
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/BugBusting/Resources
URL: http://bugs.FreeBSD.org
URL:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/query-pr-summary.cgi?responsible=freebsd-net
Contact: <bugbusters@FreeBSD.org>
Last year, we didn't have many Bugathons - this year is planned to be
different!
The BugBusting team is trying to improve bug handling and thus we'll
start a new experiment. In the past our Bugathons were general
Bugathons with no special topic set. Instead, starting in 2009 we'll
try to hold a series of Bugathons that concentrate on special interest
areas.
Our next Bugathon will be held from 2009-01-30 to 2009-02-01 (Fri-Sun).
We'll try to handle as many network related bugs as we can. Our plan is
to try to work through all network related PRs still open in GNATS.
We need a number of maintainers in the area of networking (drivers,
chipsets, protocols, userland processes) to attend and committers
willing to commit fixes and improvements. Of course, we also need users
and administrators with special interest in network related items to be
with us to sort out things. Every helping hand, everyone able to debug
and analyze things is welcome.
If you're interested in getting networking stuff improved, join us to
make the upcoming releases of 7.2 and 8.0 the best ever FreeBSD
releases.
Join us on IRC: EFnet #FreeBSD-bugbusters from Friday 2009-01-30 to
Sunday 2009-02-01. Don't miss this event!
The next Bugathon (TBA) will have topics in different special interest
areas.
Open tasks:
1. Feel free to ask questions! You can reach the BugBusting team at
bugbusters@FreeBSD.org. Be there! Work with us! Join the team - be
a part!
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD BugBusting Team
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/support.html#gnats
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/BugBusting
URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~linimon/studies/prs/
Contact: Remko Lodder <bugmeister@>
Contact: Mark Linimon <bugmeister@>
We will be having our next Bugathon on 2009-01-30 to 2009-02-01 (see
this entry).
At the recent DevSummit in Strasbourg, the participants spent half a
day working through the current "recommended PRs" list. The list
was
divided up into sections by date, and each table was assigned one
section to work through. Not only were a good number of fixes committed
and their PRs closed, but the src developers were brought up to speed
on the triage work that the BugBusting team has been doing (see below).
We hope to build on this momentum in the future. In addition, many new
ideas for improved report pages were discussed.
We continue to make good progress in categorizing PRs as they arrive
with 'tags' that correspond to manpages. As a result, we now have
created some prototype reports that allow browsing the database by
manpage.
In addition, another new report, oriented towards PR submitters,
summarizes the most commonly reported issues. Many of these issues
persist because they are difficult to fix. Before filing a PR, you may
want to check through this list.
As well, we now have a more active set of volunteers who are willing to
help users with reported problems of the form "xyz does not seem to
work". These types of reports are now being handled much better than in
the past.
One of those volunteers, Bruce Cran (brucec@), has now been released
from mentorship.
Mark Linimon (linimon@) continues to work on more new prototype
reports, including:
* New PRs in the past day, week, month.
* PRs with regressions.
* A way for developers to create their own customized reports.
The commonly reported issues summary page, previously maintained by
Jeremy Chadwick, has been moved to a new location.
The overall PR count jumped to over 5600 during the 6.4/7.1 release
cycle, but has come down a bit.
Open tasks:
1. Try to find ways to get more committers helping us with closing PRs
that the team has already analyzed.
2. Think of some way for committers to only view PRs that have been in
some way 'vetted' or 'confirmed'.
3. Generate more publicity for what we've already got in place, and
for what we intend to do next.
4. Define new categories, classifications, and states for PRs, that
will better match our workflow.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/powerpc for AMCC/IBM PPC440/460
Contact: Rafal Jaworowski <raj@semihalf.com>
This work is bringing support for another Book-E style PowerPC
implementation (PPC440/460 core) embedded in a wide range of
system-on-chip devices. Current state highlights:
* Locore kernel initialisation
* TLB handling
* Console (UART)
* Interrupts controller (UIC)
* USB controller (OHCI, EHCI)
* Multi user operation
The CPU layer (kernel start-up, TLB handling) is derived from existing
E500 support. Eventually the code will be re-factored so that the
common logic is shared between processor variations and only the
lowest-level routines are provided separately. A number of drivers for
peripherals integrated on the chip needs to be written (Ethernet,
PCI/PCI-Express, crypto engines, SATA, I2C, SPI, GPIO and others).
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/sparc64 UltraSPARC III support
URL:
http://people.FreeBSD.org/~marius/8.0-20090111-SNAP-sparc64-disc1.iso.g
z
Contact: Marius Strobl <marius@FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT now has basic support for sun4u-machines based on
UltraSPARC III and beyond. This is still a work in progress though due
to the diversity of these machines, hardware errata and bugs in machine
independent parts of FreeBSD showing up. A install image with the
latest code which in comparison to the official snapshot 200812
contains more dcons(4) fixes, an isp(4) working with 10160 and 12160 on
sparc64, an endian-clean mpt(4) as needed for the on-board controller
found in Fire V440, workarounds needed for Fire V880 and a fix for
machines with more than 8GB of RAM (tested with 16GB) are available at
the above URL. Known working machines so far are:
* Blade 1000
* Blade 1500
* Blade 2000
* Fire 280R
* Fire V210
* Fire V440 (except for the on-board NICs)
* Fire V880
* Netra 20/Netra T4
The stability of FreeBSD on these machines is en par with that on
pre-USIII-based sun4u-machines. Machines similar to the ones above like
for example Fire V240 should also just work with all essential on-board
devices, i.e. serial console, ATA/SCSI controller and NIC, being
supported. So far the intention is to MFC this code in time for FreeBSD
7.2.
Open tasks:
1. Apart from serial devices, only cards supported by creator(4) are
currently usable as console, i.e. not even machfb(4) works in
sun4u-machines based on UltraSPARC III or beyond at this point (it
will trigger a RED state exception, which should not be that hard
to fix though), let alone XVR graphics cards.
2. A driver for the Sun Cassini/Cassini+ as well as National
Semiconductor DP83065 Saturn Gigabit NICs found on-board for
example in Fire V440 and as add-on cards is under development but
still needs some work.
3. There is no driver for controlling the fans in machines based on
the Excalibur board, yet. This means that Blade 1000/2000 are not
very usable as workstations so far due to the noise caused by the
fans permanently running at full speed.
4. There is no support for host-to-PCI-Express or host-to-PCI-X
bridges so far, at least for the latter due to lack of access to
such machines. Adding support for the XMITS PCI-X bridges to the
existing schizo(4) should be rather straightforward, PCI-Express
will require a new driver and probably some additional tweaking
though.
__________________________________________________________________
HDA sound driver (snd_hda)
Contact: Alexander Motin <mav@FreeBSD.org>
snd_hda(4) audio driver was significantly improved to provide better
functionality according to High Definition Audio (HDA) and Universal
Audio Architecture (UAA) specifications.
According to HDA specification, driver now supports multiple codecs per
HDA bus and multiple audio functional groups per codec.
According to UAA specification, driver now implements idea of multiple
logical audio devices per audio functional group. It means, that
depending on specific system needs, single audio codec may provide
several independent functions. For example, main multichannel output,
headset input/output and digital SPDIF/HDMI audio input/output. Each of
these functions are provided as separate pcm devices and can be used
independently.
Comparing to ALSA and OSS HDA drivers which are heavily tuned to
support each specific codec in every specific system, this driver uses
advanced codec tracing logic which allows it to support most of
existing HDA codecs and systems without any special tuning, using only
information provided by system and codec itself. This also allows user
to widely reconfigure logical audio devices in his system for his own
needs, just by specifying wanted audio connectors usage in
device.hints.
Also new driver implements SPDIF/HDMI digital audio, suspend/resume and
initial parts of multichannel support.
Open tasks:
1. Implement input-to-output audio bypass tracing for codecs where
bypass signal is not taken from main input mixer.
2. Improve amplifiers control logic for cases where one signal can be
controlled in several points.
3. Implement multichannel playback, that required significant sound(4)
modifications.
__________________________________________________________________
Multi-IPv4/v6/no-IP jails
URL: http://sources.zabbadoz.net/FreeBSD/jail.html
URL:
http://p4web.FreeBSD.org/@md=d&cd=//depot/user/bz/jail/&rc=s&c=kmz@//de
pot/user/bz/jail/?ac=43&mx=50
Contact: Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz@FreeBSD.org>
The multi-IPv4/v6/no-IP jails project patch has finally been committed
to FreeBSD-CURRENT at the end of November.
As an alternate solution to full network stack virtualization, this
work shall provide a lightweight solution for multi-IP virtualization.
The changes are even more important because of the emerging demand for
IPv6. Ideally this will be merged to FreeBSD 7 before 7.2-RELEASE and
stay in FreeBSD 8 for the transitional period to full network stack
virtualization.
Since the commit a few minor things have been fixed and work to address
most of the remaining old jails PRs has almost been finished. The
fallout from ports breakage has been handled with help from Erwin
Lansing from the PortMgr Team.
__________________________________________________________________
Network Stack Virtualization
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Image
URL:
http://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/project%20announcements.shtml#Bjoern
Contact: Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Marko Zec <zec@FreeBSD.org>
The network stack virtualization project aims at extending the FreeBSD
kernel to maintain multiple independent instances of networking state.
This allows for networking independence between jail-like environments,
each maintaining its own private network interfaces, IPv4 and IPv6
network and port address space, routing tables, IPSec configuration,
firewalls, and more.
During BSDCan 2007 an initial commit plan had been worked out. The
Developer Summit at Cambridge in August brought the first parts of
VImage into the kernel. Marko gave a summary and outlook at EuroBSDCon
in Strasbourg. From autumn until December all but the last step had
been committed by Marko.
Druing December Bjoern was able to work full time on VImage because of
FreeBSD Foundation funding. In addition to helping with reviews,
summarizing things on the Wiki, a virtual cross-over Ethernet-like
interface pair was developed to be able to bring networking to an
instances without the mandatory need of netgraph.
The next steps will be to bring in the most important last step giving
us multiple network stacks. After that all developers will be able to
help to find (and fix) bugs. Further subsystems not yet addressed will
need to be virtualized then. In addition to this Jamie Gritton's
management interface will be imported.
__________________________________________________________________
PmcTools
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/PmcTools
URL: http://code.google.com/p/pmctools/issues
Contact: Joseph Koshy <jkoshy@FreeBSD.org>
Support for Intel (TM) Atom/Core/Core2 family PMCs was added to
PmcTools. Bugs in the toolset were tracked down and fixed, and the ABI
between libpmc(3) and hwpmc(4) was reworked to hopefully be more future
proof.
__________________________________________________________________
Ports Collection
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
URL:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing-ports/
URL: http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/index.html
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/portmgr/index.html
URL: http://tinderbox.marcuscom.com
Contact: Mark Linimon <linimon@FreeBSD.org>
Most of the effort in the last quarter has been QA effort for
6.4-RELEASE and 7.1-RELEASE. Since that time, we have once again begun
work on experimental package runs.
The ports count has jumped to over 19,600. The PR count had jumped
during the freeze/slush cycle for release, but has now dropped back to
its usual count of around 900.
GNOME has been updated to 2.24.3.
KDE has been updated to 4.1.4.
X.Org has been updated to 7.4.
The following large changes are in the pipeline:
* Introduction of Perl 5.10.
We are currently building packages for amd64-6, amd64-7, amd64-8,
i386-6, i386-7, i386-8, sparc64-6, and sparc64-7. Several new i386 and
sparc64 machines have been added, which has helped speed up the builds.
We especially appreciate the loan of a number of sparc64 machines by
Gavin Atkinson.
We have added 5 new committers since the last report, and 2 older ones
have rejoined.
Open tasks:
1. Most of the remaining ports PRs are "existing port/PR assigned to
committer". Although the maintainer-timeout policy is helping to
keep the backlog down, we are going to need to do more to get the
ports in the shape they really need to be in.
2. Although we have added many maintainers, we still have over 4,700
unmaintained ports (see, for instance, the list on portsmon). (The
percentage hovers around 24%.) We are always looking for dedicated
volunteers to adopt at least a few unmaintained ports. As well, the
packages on amd64 and sparc64 lag behind i386, and we need more
testers for those.
__________________________________________________________________
Release Engineering
Contact: Release Engineering <re@>
Since the last status report both 7.1-RELEASE (5 January 2009) and
6.4-RELEASE (28 November 2008) have been released. Starting with
6.4-RELEASE, a new DVD ISO image called "dvd1" is provided for
amd64/i386. This image contains everything that is on the CDROM discs.
So "dvd1" can be used to do a full installation that includes a
basic
set of packages, it has all of the documentation for all supported
languages, and it can be used for booting into a "live CD-based
filesystem" and system rescue mode. 6.4-RELEASE was the last release of
the 6.X branch, we have currently no plan for any other 6.X release
since most of the developers are focused on 8-CURRENT and 7.X.
The long awaited 7.1-RELEASE is out since 5th of January. This release
process was far too long from everyone's point of view. Working on
another release (6.4-RELEASE) at the same time was not helping the
things, but we are aware of many problems that need to be worked on to
ease the whole release process. As a consequence, we are currently
working on a new plan for future 7.X (or 8.0) release. We plan to:
* Reduce the freeze period of ports tree, the freeze should occur
near the end of the release process during RC cycle
* Change the way showstoppers are handled and do not stop a release
process for non-important issues or lack of features.
Some work has also been done on the documentation build, we want to
provide a more flexible way to install docs (Handbook, FAQ, etc.) and
detach the release build to use instead ports (packages). This should
make release building easier on slow architectures. Hopefully this
switch will be done for 7.2-RELEASE or 8.0-RELEASE.
Regarding the time line, we still plan to release 8.0-RELEASE in
mid-June 2009. A time for the 7.2-RELEASE has not been set yet.
__________________________________________________________________
SD/MMC subsystem
Contact: Alexander Motin <mav@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: M. Warner Losh <imp@FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD mmc(4)/mmcsd(4) stack was improved to support all MMC/SD card
types existing now. Support was added for SD High Capacity (SDHC) cards
and MultiMediaCards (MMC) memory cards of normal (up to 2GB) and high
capacity. Support was also added for 4/8bits wide buses, High Speed
timings and multi-block transfers allows to reach speeds up to 25MB/s
(SD) and 52MB/s (MMC) depending on which card and controller was used.
Added SD Host Controller driver, sdhci(4), that implements support for
SD specification compatible PCI SD/MMC card readers to be used with
mmc(4)/mmcsd(4) stack. Driver supports PIO and DMA transfers, 1/4bits
buses, high speed timings, card insert/remove detection and write
protection.
Open tasks:
1. Many of the existing SD Host Controllers have undocumented
registers beyond SD specification. Some of them are unable to
detect the card without some additional initialization implemented.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Forums
URL: http://forums.FreeBSD.org/
Contact: FreeBSD Forums Admins <forum-admins@>
Contact: FreeBSD Forums Moderators <forum-moderators@>
The FreeBSD forums were publicly launched on November 16th, 2008 as a
complementary support channel to our great mailing lists.
There were almost 2000 new users registered in the first three days and
each day we receive about 20 new user registrations. After less than
three months after going public, we are now serving around 10,000 posts
in 1,500 threads. We have received very positive feedback from our
users, which we take as a good compensation for our efforts put into
this project.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Foundation Status Report
URL: http://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org
Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb@FreeBSDFoundation.org>
We ended the year raising over $282,000! We received 173 donations just
in December. We are very grateful to all the people who helped us come
very close to our 2008 goal.
Three projects were started that are being funded by the foundation.
They are Safe Removal of Active Disk Devices, Improvements to the
FreeBSD TCP Stack, and Network Stack Virtualization Projects. Click
here to find out more about the projects.
We were a sponsor for meetBSD. We provided a travel grant for a
developer to attend this conference. We also handed out a few limited
edition foundation vests for developer recognition.
Read our end-of-year newsletter, to find out what else we've done to
help The FreeBSD Project and community.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Greek Documentation Project
URL: http://www.FreeBSDgr.org
Contact: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Manolis Kiagias <manolis@FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Greek Documentation Project managed to complete a
significant amount of work during 2008. The first ten chapters of the
Handbook are now completely translated and kept in sync with the
English text. Work is also progressing nicely in the second part of The
Handbook, with many new translated chapters. At this pace, we hope to
have a complete Greek Handbook by 8.0-RELEASE.
More volunteers are always welcome of course, as there is still plenty
of work to be done.
Open tasks:
1. Complete the Greek translation of the Handbook (about ten chapters
remaining)
2. Complete the Greek translation of the FAQ (currently at around 40%)
3. Translate more documentation (articles) to Greek
4. Begin a Greek website on FreeBSD.org (volunteers needed)
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Hungarian Documentation Project
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/hu
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/hu
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/HungarianDocumentationProject
URL:
http://p4web.FreeBSD.org/@md=d&cd=//depot/projects/docproj_hu/&c=aXw@//
depot/projects/docproj_hu/?ac=83
Contact: G?bor K?vesd?n <gabor@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: G?bor P?li <pgj@FreeBSD.org>
Hungarian translation of the FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer for
New Contributors has been finished and now it is available both online
and for download.
We hope that having the FDP Primer translated will encourage people to
help our work. There is always place in our team, every submitted
translation or feedback is appreciated and very welcome.
Beside the continuous maintenance of the Hungarian documentation and
web pages, a new article translation has been added to the Hungarian
Documentation Set, CUPS.
Open tasks:
1. Read the translations, send feedback
2. Translate web pages
3. Translate articles
4. Translate release notes for -CURRENT and 7.X
__________________________________________________________________
VuXML generator
URL: http://www.credentia.cc/services/vuxml/
Contact: Mark Foster <mark@foster.cc>
VuXML generator ("wizard") is intended for end-users who want to
generate VuXML (XML) definitions. Users can just fill out an HTML form
& this removes some of the guesswork and the learning curve. The
resulting VuXML can be submitted via send-pr as-is for inclusion into
the portaudit database.
Open tasks:
1. Option to submit generated XML into a "review" queue somewhere
(thus eliminate the need for users to run send-pr at all)
2. Option to generate OVAL definition in addition to VuXML
3. Option to generate ready-to-run pr (e.g send-pr -f <outputfile>)
__________________________________________________________________
YouTube Channel for BSD
URL: http://www.youtube.com/bsdconferences
URL:
http://murrayFreeBSD.blogspot.com/2008/12/new-channel-on-youtube-for-bs
d.html
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/VideoProductionAndPublishing
Contact: Murray Stokely <murray@FreeBSD.org>
A new channel has been setup on YouTube explicitly for BSD conference
recordings. This channel does not have the normal 10 minute limit so
full high quality presentations from 30 minutes to nearly 2 hours have
been uploaded. So far over 23 videos are available from MeetBSD and
NYCBSDCon, with more from BSDCan and AsiaBSDCon coming soon.
We are currently looking for more videos from BSDCan, EuroBSDCon,
AsiaBSDCon, etc to upload to the channel. We also need help in creating
subtitles for each video in various languages. If you would like to
help out in generating subtitles for your language or if you have old
video content from one of the above BSD conferences please let us know.
Open tasks:
1. Adding subtitles in various languages to all of the technical
talks.
2. Finding more videos from previous conferences to upload.
3. Audio post-processing. If anyone has experience removing audio
artifacts from a video recording we would love to talk to you about
working some magic on raw footage we have before uploading it to
YouTube.
4. We could use additional tips for improved video recording and
post-processing added to our video production and publishing wiki.
__________________________________________________________________