Brad Davis
2008-Aug-20 15:48 UTC
The FreeBSD Status Reports for the Second Quarter of 2008
The FreeBSD Status Reports for the Second Quarter of 2008 are now
available at:
http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2008-04-2008-06.html
For convenience I have included them below as well.
Regards,
Brad Davis
-------------------------------
FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report
Introduction
This Status Report covers FreeBSD related projects between April and
June 2008. During this period The FreeBSD Foundation has released their
July Newsletter.
Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! We hope you enjoy
reading.
__________________________________________________________________
Google Summer of Code
* Layer2 filtering
* Porting BSD-licensed text-processing tools from OpenBSD
Projects
* Build cluster
* finstall
* FreeBSD Bugbusting Team
* Graphics support for the boot loader
* USB
FreeBSD Architecture
* ARM/Marvell port
The Ports Collection
* Ports Collection
* Qt/KDE4 Status Report
Documentation
* FreeBSD FAQ Renovation
* The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project
* The FreeBSD Hungarian Documentation Project
* The FreeBSD Spanish Documentation Project
__________________________________________________________________
ARM/Marvell port
URL:
http://p4web.freebsd.org/@md=d&cd=//depot/projects/arm/src/sys/arm/orio
n/&c=0h4@//depot/projects/arm/src/sys/arm/orion/?ac=83
Contact: Rafal Jaworowski <raj@semihalf.com>
Contact: Bartlomiej Sieka <tur@semihalf.com>
After the last couple of months of intensive development going on
towards FreeBSD support for Marvell System-on-Chip devices, we have
FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT running on the following systems:
* Orion (already available in Perforce):
* 88F5281
* 88F5181
* 88F5182
Kirkwood - 88F6281
Discovery - MV78100
The above families of SOCs are built around CPU cores compliant with
ARMv5TE instruction set architecture definition. They share a number of
integrated peripherals, for most of which we already have operational
and stable drivers:
* UART
* EHCI USB 2.0
* Ethernet
* IDMA (general purpose DMA engine)
* XOR
* TWSI (I2C)
* Timers, watchdog, RTC
* GPIO
* Interrupt controller
* L1, L2 cache
High level functional summary:
* Production Quality
* Error-free Operation
* Multiuser
* Self-hosted kernel/world builds
* NFS- or USB-mounted root filesystem
The code is partially available (Orion in Perforce), other variants
will also be integrated with Perforce/SVN soon.
Open tasks:
1. Drivers that are In-progress: PCI and PCIE.
__________________________________________________________________
Build cluster
Contact: Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org>
For the past couple of months I have been working on generalizing the
package build cluster to allow it to host other batch and interactive
jobs. Currently we make an inefficient use of build machines because
various projects have dedicated machines that are either underloaded or
overloaded for their particular tasks. The goal is to provide a
framework for combining all of these machine resources into a single
cluster that can be shared by many users, reducing dead time and
allowing distributed build tasks to take advantage of extra build
resources when available. Developers will be able to obtain on-demand
interactive access to a jail running on any of the available
architectures, with root access. Similarly, batch jobs will specify
their resource requirements and be dispatched to run on a suitable
machine in the cluster. Current status: The job queue manager is
working and is now being used to map package builds to machines.
Various package build scripts have been rewritten to use it instead of
the previous build scheduler. The generic job dispatcher is being
prototyped and will be validated with several existing services such as
INDEX builds. Various support services like ZFS snapshot replication
have been written.
__________________________________________________________________
finstall
URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/finstall
URL: http://www.sf.net/projects/finstall
Contact: Ivan Voras <ivoras@freebsd.org>
Between the last report and this one, the project has yielded a LiveCD
installer for i386 containing FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. The project was
presented at BSDCan 2008. The development is progressing slowly due to
the lack of free time. I'm looking for funding that will allow me more
involvement in the project. The big item currently in development is
documentation and description of the protocol used between the
front-end and the back-end, which will result in more robustness in the
implementation and could support third-party clients. This sub-project
is near completion. The project is currently hosted at SourceForge to
allow contribution from non-FreeBSD developers.
Open tasks:
1. Partition editor.
2. Package selection.
__________________________________________________________________
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/pr_manpage_index.html
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~linimon/studies/prs/pr_tag_index.html
URL:
http://people.freebsd.org/~linimon/studies/prs/prs_possibly_committed.h
tml
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~linimon/studies/prs/well_known_prs.html
URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/JeremyChadwick/Commonly_reported_issues
Contact: Ceri Davies <bugmeister@>
Contact: Remko Lodder <bugmeister@>
Contact: Mark Linimon <bugmeister@>
We have granted Bruce Cran (bruce@) direct access to GNATS and Volker
Werth (vwe@) has been released from mentorship. We appreciate their
help!
We had a third bugathon in June, which resulted in the closing of a
number of bugs and the investigation/classification of several others.
We are still trying to find ways to get more committers helping us with
closing PRs that the team has already analyzed.
We continue to make good progress in categorizing PRs as they arrive
with 'tags' that correspond to manpages. (Special thanks go to Dylan
Cochran for the help.) 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.
Mark Linimon summarized the good technical suggestions from the
bugathons so far this year to the wiki. As a part of this, he
rearranged the wiki pages, so if you have not seen them for a while,
please see BugBusting. In particular, the Resources page is much more
complete.
Jeremy Chadwick (koitsu@) is now maintaining a page that summarizes
some of the commonly reported issues. This complements some of the
reports, above, but includes a great deal more information, including
how-tos.
The overall PR count has been holding at around 5300 since the last
release.
Open tasks:
1. Think of some way for committers to only view PRs that have been in
some way 'vetted' or 'confirmed'.
2. Generate more publicity for what we've already got in place, and
for what we intend to do next.
3. Define new categories, classifications, and states for PRs, that
will better match our workflow.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD FAQ Renovation
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en/books/faq/
URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/faq-renewal
Contact: G?bor P?li <pgj@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Manolis Kiagias <manolis@FreeBSD.org>
An extensive work on renovating the FreeBSD FAQ has been started to
support its Greek and Hungarian translations. Further improvements and
content changes are still possible, we hope other committers will help
us to keep the FAQ updated and tuned further.
We have launched a renewal proposal to collect and organize the ideas
around a more interactive, accurate, open for comments, consistent
across several views etc. FAQ document. We would like to experiment
with methods to implement the goals mentioned before, and help is more
than welcome.
Open tasks:
1. Review the renovated FAQ.
2. Add more question and answers to the FAQ.
3. Refine the FAQ renewal proposal.
__________________________________________________________________
Graphics support for the boot loader
URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/OliverFromme/BootLoader
Contact: Oliver Fromme <olli@freebsd.org>
This project aims to implement graphics support for FreeBSD's boot
loader. It will replace the existing ASCII menu. (Note that the ASCII
menu will still be available when graphics mode cannot be used, such as
on serial console or on unsupported hardware.)
For a more detailed description and screen shots please refer to the
project's Wiki URL above.
Progress is slow (due to lack of time) but steady. The code currently
lives in the Perforce repository. I'll try to prepare a first public
CFT as soon as possible.
Open tasks:
1. Implement a platform switch.
2. Implement "themes" support (in FORTH).
3. Documentation.
__________________________________________________________________
Layer2 filtering
URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/GlebKurtsov/Improving_layer2_filtering
URL: http://blogs.freebsdish.org/gleb/
Contact: Gleb Kurtsou <gk@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Andrew Thompson <thompsa@FreeBSD.org>
Project aims to improve layer2 filtering in ipfw and pf. So far
following project goals are achieved: pfil framework is extended to
handle ethernet packets, ipfw layer2 filtering is greatly simplified,
added l2filter and l2tag per interface flags. Both ipfw and pf
firewalls support filtering by ethernet addresses, support stateful
filtering with ethernet addresses and firewall's lookup tables are
extended to contain ethernet addresses.
Open tasks:
1. Implement ARP filtering options in IPFW.
__________________________________________________________________
Porting BSD-licensed text-processing tools from OpenBSD
URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/G%C3%A1borSoC2008
URL:
http://p4web.freebsd.org/@md=d&cd=//&c=Kqj@//depot/projects/soc2008/gab
or_textproc/?ac=83
Contact: G?bor K?vesd?n <gabor@FreeBSD.org>
The grep utility is ready for a thorough test on the portbuild cluster.
It is almost compatible with GNU grep, but there are differences in the
regex handling at the level of the regex libraries of GNU and the base
system one, thus a better compatibility is very hard to implement.
Some progress has been made on diff, but some important options are
still missing. The sort utility seems to be very problematic in the
aspect of the wide character support by design, thus it was given a
lower priority.
Open tasks:
1. Finish the incomplete options of diff and optimize it.
2. Investigate about the opportunities to fix sort.
__________________________________________________________________
Ports Collection
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/ports/
URL:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing-ports/
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~fenner/portsurvey/
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>
The ports count has jumped to over 19,000. The PR count has been
holding steady at around 900.
KDE has been updated to 4.1. Special thanks go to Martin Wilke for a
great deal of pre-testing.
GNOME has been updated three times, first to 2.22.1 and then to 2.22.2
and 2.22.3.
Other notable updates are automake, gettext, libtool, and m4.
Florent Thoumie has been working on some updates to the pkg_* tools.
Ion-Mihai Tetcu has set up a tinderbox with several purposes: first, to
quickly try to build packages as changes are committed; secondly, to
build them with a non-standard set of environment variables; and
thirdly, to build older packages with the non- standard set of
environment variables. As a result of all this work, and work by
various committers, we are much closer to building packages corrected
in the NOPORTDOCS case.
Kris Kennaway has done a substantial rewrite of the package building
tools, including moving as a default to ZFS, which allows quick cloning
of src and ports directories. It is now much easier to manage and
monitor the builds. Work on this is continuing. See the commits to
Tools/portbuild/scripts for more information. (Work is ongoing to
update the Package Building article.) Related work has involved
cleaning up some of the ports infrastructure; in particular, the INDEX
builds are now much faster.
We have been able to do many -exp runs since the last report, including
those for bsd.cmake.mk, autotools update, CC environment passing, the
KDE 4.1 pre-integration and post-integration checks, lockmgr changes,
tty changes, and others.
Although a number of PRs have been closed, we are still at 57 portmgr
PRs, the same as the last report.
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. RELENG_5 has reached
the end of its supported life.
We have added 4 new committers since the last report.
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 4,000
unmaintained ports (see, for instance, the list on portsmon). 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.
__________________________________________________________________
Qt/KDE4 Status Report
URL: http://freebsd.kde.org
Contact: Martin Wilke <miwi@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: FreeBSD KDE Team <kde@FreeBSD.org>
Qt4 has been updated to 4.4.1 in our test repository. We ran into some
runtime problems with Qt 4.4.0, so it was never committed it to the
ports tree. Most of the problems have been fixed in 4.4.1 and we plan
to commit it in a few days.
At the moment, the KDE 4.1 ports are ready for testing before they are
committed to the FreeBSD ports tree. We have already had the first Call
for Public Testing on July 17th, 2008 with KDE 4.1 beta2. The feedback
has been positive so far. If you want to help to test them to speed up
the process, please visit the Wiki page and provide feedback.
We plan to have it all committed by the middle of August.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project
URL: http://www.freebsd-nl.org
URL: http://www.evilcoder.org/freebsd_nl/
Contact: Remko Lodder <remko@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Rene Ladan <r.c.ladan@gmail.com>
The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project is an ongoing project to
translate the FreeBSD Documentation resources to the Dutch language.
The project is currently progressing very well in translating the
FreeBSD Handbook to the Dutch language, the last chapter is being
translated by the project members.
Recent achievements include the translation of the Jails chapter, and
the Virtualization chapter, as well as progression on the Advanced
Networking chapter. Rene Ladan is a keyplayer in that region.
We also started with the FAQ translation, which is another major target
which we should be reaching at some point.
If you care to helpout with the translation(s) and/or want to know
something about it, please do not hesitate to contact us, we are glad
to help where possible.
Open tasks:
1. Finish the Handbook translation.
2. Finish the FAQ translation.
3. Finish the Website translation.
4. Keep the projects in sync with the English version(s).
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Hungarian Documentation Project
URL: http://FreeBSD.org/hu
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/hu_HU.ISO8859-2/
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 Handbook has been finally
committed to the doc repository. The translation of the FreeBSD FAQ has
also been started, however, the original document needed to be brought
up to date first. Two other article translations has been added,
compiz-fusion and linux-users.
Our Perforce depot was reorganized for the better layout, giving
newcomers more space to play. The checkupdate script written by
Giorgos Keramidas, a new tool for checking translations has been
adopted to help the project's work.
Open tasks:
1. Translate release notes for -CURRENT and 7.X.
2. Translate more articles.
3. Translate books/fdp-primer.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Spanish Documentation Project
URL: http://FreeBSD.org/es
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/es_ES.ISO8859-1/
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SpanishDocumentationProject
URL:
http://p4web.freebsd.org/@md=d&cd=//depot/projects/docproj_es/&c=S1s@//
depot/projects/docproj_es/?ac=83
Contact: Jos? Vicente Carrasco Vay? <carvay@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: G?bor K?vesd?n <gabor@FreeBSD.org>
We have not made any significant progress in this period. We definitely
need more active translators to progress with the translation project.
Open tasks:
1. Complete renovation of the Spanish web site.
2. Update Handbook translation.
3. Translate release notes for -CURRENT and 7.X.
__________________________________________________________________
USB
URL:
http://p4web.freebsd.org/@md=d&cd=//depot/projects/usb/src/sys/dev/usb2
/&c=oDu@//depot/projects/usb/src/sys/dev/usb2/?ac=83
URL:
http://p4web.freebsd.org/@md=d&cd=//&cdf=//depot/projects/usb/src/sys/d
ev/usb2/core/README.TXT&c=Vfw@//depot/projects/usb/src/sys/dev/usb2/cor
e/README.TXT?ac=64&rev1=2
Contact: Hans Petter Sirevaag Selasky <hselasky@freebsd.org>
During the last three months there has been a number of changes. Most
notably all global USB symbols have been renamed to "usb2_" to
allow
for co-existence with the old USB stack. Also there is now a completely
new and reworked UGEN driver which allows multiple drivers to hook onto
the same USB device. No more need to unload any kernel drivers. For
example it is now possible to have a userland Mouse driver stealing
half of the mouse events at the same time "ums" is loaded. The only
disadvantage is that your mouse cursor will move slower on the screen.
This is maybe not the most common use-case, but it illustrates that
kernel USB drivers are no longer locking out other USB userland
drivers. A new userland libusb is in the works for FreeBSD. The USB
stack now also has support for independent USB BUS, USB Device, and USB
Interface permissions. That means you can more easily give USB
permissions to USB device drivers at either USB BUS, USB Device or USB
Interface level. All USB modules have now been grouped into functional
categories: usb2_bluetooth, usb2_ndis, usb2_controller, usb2_quirk,
usb2_core, usb2_serial, usb2_ethernet, usb2_sound, usb2_image,
usb2_storage, usb2_input, usb2_template, usb2_misc, and usb2_wlan.
Ideas and comments with regard to the new USB API are welcome on the
FreeBSD-USB Mailing List.
__________________________________________________________________