Benjamin Kaduk
2017-Feb-14 04:20 UTC
FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Fourth Quarter 2016
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512
FreeBSD Project Quarterly Status Report - 4th Quarter 2016
Another year has passed (and another has gotten well underway, while we
worked to assemble this report). Over the past two years that I have
been part of the monthly@ team that assembles these reports, it has
been enlightening to watch the individual entries pass through my emacs
and/or vim. These reports give me a picture of what is going on with
FreeBSD that I could not get just from reading commit mail; I hope that
is also true for our readers.
This quarter brings the usual mix of continuations of many stalwart
projects and entires of new participants, as well as the return of some
items after a few quarters' hiatus. Enjoy and be enlightened!
--Benjamin Kaduk
__________________________________________________________________
The deadline for submissions covering the period from January to March
2017 is April 7, 2017.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Team Reports
* FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
* Ports Collection
* The FreeBSD Core Team
* The FreeBSD Foundation
Projects
* Ceph on FreeBSD
* OpenBSM
* Sysctl Exporter for Prometheus
* The Graphics Stack on FreeBSD
Kernel
* FreeBSD on Hyper-V and Azure
* I2C, GPIO, and SPI Support for MinnowBoard
Architectures
* FreeBSD on ARM Boards
* FreeBSD/arm64
* FreeBSD/EC2
Userland Programs
* libarchive
* Reproducible Builds in FreeBSD
* Updates to GDB
* Using LLVM's LLD Linker as FreeBSD's System Linker
Ports
* GCC (GNU Compiler Collection)
* LXQt on FreeBSD
* Mono
* Wine
* Xfce on FreeBSD
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Team Reports
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
Links
FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE Announcement
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/11.0R/announce.html
FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE Release Notes
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/11.0R/relnotes.html
FreeBSD Development Snapshots
URL: http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/
Contact: FreeBSD Release Engineering Team <re at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is responsible for setting and
publishing release schedules for official project releases of FreeBSD,
announcing code freezes, and maintaining the respective branches, among
other things.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team in concert with the FreeBSD
Security Team finalized FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE. FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE was
announced on October 10, 2016, roughly four weeks after the original
schedule.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team would like to specifically thank
Colin Percival and all members of the FreeBSD Security Team for their
extra diligence in ensuring that user-facing upgrade paths were
properly addressed and documented.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
Ports Collection
Links
About FreeBSD Ports
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
Contributing to Ports
URL:
https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing/ports-contributing.html
FreeBSD Ports Monitoring
URL: http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/index.html
Ports Management Team
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/portmgr/index.html
FreeBSD portmgr on Twitter (@FreeBSD_portmgr)
URL: https://twitter.com/FreeBSD_portmgr/
FreeBSD Ports Management Team on Facebook
URL: https://www.facebook.com/portmgr
FreeBSD Ports Management Team on Google+
URL: https://plus.google.com/communities/108335846196454338383
Contact: Ren? Ladan <portmgr-secretary at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: FreeBSD Ports Management Team <portmgr at FreeBSD.org>
The Ports Tree has reached the marker of 27,000 ports, with the PR
count risen slightly to around 2,250. Of these PRs, 572 are unassigned.
The last quarter saw 6871 commits by 176 committers. The number of open
and the number of unassigned PRs both increased lightly since last
quarter.
Two commit bits were taken in for safe keeping in the last quarter: jmg
after 19 months of inactivity, and edwin at his own request. We
welcomed three new committers: Nikolai Lifanov (lifanov), Jason Bacon,
and Mikhail Pchelin (misha).
On the management side, adamw and feld were elected as new portmgr
members, and rene was promoted to full member. feld is already involved
in ports-secteam.
On the infrastructure side, two new USES (lxqt and varnish) were
introduced. Some default versions were also updated: varnish 4 (new),
GCC 4.8 to 4.9, Perl 5.20 to 5.24, and Python 3.4 to 3.5. Two major
ports reached their end-of-life at December 31st and were removed: Perl
5.18 and Linux Fedora 10 (the default is Linux CentOS 6). Because
FreeBSD 9.3, 10.1, and 10.2 also reached end-of-life, support for those
versions was removed from the Ports Tree.
Some major ports were updated to their latest versions: pkg to 1.9.4,
Firefox to 50.1.0, Firefox-esr to 45.6.0, Chromium to 54.0.2840.100,
and Ruby to 2.1.10 / 2.2.6 / 2.3.3. www/node was updated to version 7;
version 6 was split off as www/node6 for long-term support.
Behind the scenes, antoine ran 39 exp-runs to verify package updates,
framework changes, and changes to the base system. bdrewery installed
new package builders and added builds for FreeBSD 11 for mips, mips64,
and armv6. He also improved the balancing, monitoring, automation of
the package builders.
Open tasks:
1. If you have some spare time, please take up a PR for testing and
committing.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Core Team
Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <core at FreeBSD.org>
The major concern for Core during the last quarter of 2016 has been
about maintaining the effectiveness of secteam. The team is primarily
in need of better project management, both to improve communication
generally and to allow the other team members to concentrate on the
technical aspects of handling vulnerabilities.
To that end, there has been agreement in principle for either the
FreeBSD Foundation or one of the companies that are major FreeBSD users
to employ someone specifically in this role.
Core confirmed that the new support model would go into effect with
11.0-RELEASE despite the postponement of the switch to a packaged base
release mechanism. For details of the new support model, please follow
the links from the security page of the FreeBSD website.
Core requested the removal of the misc/jive port, on the grounds that
it had no function other than to turn text into an offensively racist
parody. This proved controversial, with many seeing this as a first
step in bowdlerizing the entire ports tree. That is certainly not
Core's intention. Core's aim here is to help secure the future of the
FreeBSD project by making it welcoming to all contributors, regardless
of ethnicity, gender, sexuality or other improper bases for
discrimintation. While misc/jive may once have been seen as harmless
fun, today the implicit approval implied by having it in the ports tree
sends a message at odds with the project's aims.
The Marketing team and the associated marketing at FreeBSD.org mailing
list were wound up, due to lack of activity. Messages to
marketing at FreeBSD.org will be forwarded to the FreeBSD Foundation's
marketing team instead.
Core member Allan Jude, who was already the clusteradm liason, became a
full member of clusteradm.
An emergency correction to the 11.0 release notes was authorised, as it
was giving the misleading impression that 802.11n wireless support had
only just been added, and this misapprehension was being repeated in
the press. In reality, FreeBSD has had 802.11n support for many years,
and the announcement should have said that support had been added to
many additional device drivers.
Discussions about a proposal to improve Unicode support are on-going.
FreeBSD is already standards conformant, but the propsal is to switch
to a __STDC_ISO_10646_ implementation, similar to what Linux glibc
currently uses. Opinions are divided on the technical merits of the new
approach.
There were the usual quota of queries about licensing and other legal
matters:
* Plans to create a GPLv3 overlay for the base system were shelved in
the light of faster than expected progress at enabling building the
world using an external toolchain.
* The trademarks page on the website was updated to show the current
owners of a number of trademarks in their approved form.
* In the absence of a tool to extract and summarize all of the
relevant information, the obligation in the BSD license that
"Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the
distribution." is fulfilled by providing a tarball of the system
sources with their embedded copyright statements.
* The European Court of Justice's "Right to be Forgotten"
only
applies to search engines, and the FreeBSD project is not one of
those, so it need not take any action.
* Core is following closely discussions within the LLVM project
regarding a change of license which, if implemented, might require
an audit of the entire ports tree to discover all packages that
contain binaries linked against libc++ and ensure that they are
licensed compatibly with LLVM. However, indications are that the
LLVM project will not adopt such changes.
* The "Open Source Exception" in the firmware license means that
committing a "binary blob" driver for the Nvidia Jetson TK1
XHCI
device is acceptable.
During this quarter four new commit bits were awarded. Please welcome
Dexuan Cui, David Bright, Konrad Witaszczyk, and Piotr Stefaniak. We
were sorry to see Edwin Lansing hang up his commit bits and step down
from portmgr.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Foundation
Links
FreeBSD Foundation Website
URL: https://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/
Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb at FreeBSDFoundation.org>
The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated
to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community
worldwide. Funding comes from individual and corporate donations and is
used to fund and manage software development projects, conferences and
developer summits, and provide travel grants to FreeBSD contributors.
The Foundation purchases and supports hardware to improve and maintain
FreeBSD infrastructure; publishes marketing material to promote,
educate, and advocate for the FreeBSD Project; facilitates
collaboration between commercial vendors and FreeBSD developers; and
finally, represents the FreeBSD Project in executing contracts, license
agreements, and other legal arrangements that require a recognized
legal entity.
Here are some highlights of what we did to help FreeBSD last quarter:
Fundraising Efforts
Our work is 100% funded by your donations. We raised $1,527,540 in 2016
from 1471 donors! Thank you to everyone who made a donation to help us
continue our efforts in 2017 to support the FreeBSD Project and
community worldwide! You can make a donation here to our 2017
fundraising campaign: https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/donate/.
OS Improvements
The Foundation improves the FreeBSD operating system by employing our
technical staff to maintain and improve critical kernel subsystems, add
features and functionality, and fix problems. This also includes
funding separate project grants like the arm64 port, blacklistd access
control daemon, and integration of VIMAGE support, to make sure that
FreeBSD remains a viable solution for research, education, computing,
products and more.
Large projects supported last year include:
* arm64 port
* VIMAGE Integration
* Toolchain work
* blacklistd access control daemon
The Foundation team worked on a technology roadmap for 2017-2018 during
our board meeting in November.
Staff and board members continued hosting bi-weekly conference calls to
facilitate efforts for individuals to collaborate on different
technologies.
You can find out more about the support we provided by reading
individual updates from Ed Maste, Konstatin Belousov, and Edward
Napierala in this report.
Release Engineering
The Foundation provides a full-time staff member to lead the release
engineering efforts. This has provided timely and reliable releases
over the last few years.
Last quarter, our full-time staff member worked with the FreeBSD
Release Engineering and Security Teams to finalize 11.0-RELEASE. He
also added support for the powerpcspe architecture to the 12-CURRENT
snapshot builds, and continued work on packaging the base system with
pkg(8). He also continued producing 10-STABLE, 11-STABLE, and
12-CURRENT development snapshot builds throughout the quarter.
You can find out more about the support we provided to the Release
Engineering Team by reading their status update in this report.
Supporting FreeBSD Infrastructure
The Foundation provides hardware and support to improve the FreeBSD
infrastructure. This year, we purchased the following hardware to
improve the build, continuous integration, and platform processes:
* A server to reduce the build time from over an hour to 20 minutes
for the continuous integration process. You can find out more
information here: https://ci.FreeBSD.org/ .
* Two ThunderX servers for native package builds for the
FreeBSD/arm64 architecture.
* Two servers to improve release engineering builds.
* Four servers to improve package builds.
* Four servers as build slaves to increase the number of builds in
the continuous integration process.
FreeBSD Advocacy and Education
A large part of our efforts are dedicated to advocating for the
Project. This includes promoting work being done by others with
FreeBSD; producing advocacy literature to teach people about FreeBSD
and help make the path to starting using FreeBSD or contributing to the
Project easier; and attending and getting other FreeBSD contributors to
volunteer to run FreeBSD events, staff FreeBSD tables, and give FreeBSD
presentations.
Here is a list highlighting some of the advocacy and education work we
did last year:
* Attended and/or sponsored 24 events around the world
* Provided 15 Travel Grants to developers
* Created new and updated marketing literature including:
+ Updated FreeBSD 10 Brochure
+ New TeachBSD postcard to spread the word about the program
+ Google Summer of Code flyer
+ FreeBSD 11 Brochure
+ Updated Recruiting Flyer
+ Updated Get Involved Flyer
+ FreeBSD as a Platform for Research Flyer
* Created a series of FreeBSD How-to Guides:
+ Installing FreeBSD with VirtualBox (Mac/Windows)
+ Installing a Desktop Environment on FreeBSD
+ Installing FreeBSD for Raspberry Pi
+ Installing PC-BSD as a Primary Operating System
+ FreeBSD Setup Tips
* Acquired New Testimonials:
+ Accelerations Systems
+ NeoSmart Technologies
+ Chelsio Communications
+ Crescent River Port Pilots' Association
+ IXC
+ Stormshield
* Updated the FreeBSD Project and Foundation Branding:
+ New FreeBSD Foundation website and logo
+ Updated Brand Assets page to include more information about
the FreeBSD Project and FreeBSD Foundation logos.
We published our September/October and November/December Journal issues
at https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/journal/ .
We also published monthly newsletters to highlight work being done to
support FreeBSD, tell you about upcoming events, and provide other
information to keep you in the loop of what we are doing to support the
FreeBSD Project and community:
https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/news-and-events/newsletter/ .
Conferences and Events
The FreeBSD Foundation sponsors many conferences, events, and summits
around the globe. These events can be BSD-related, open source, or
technology events geared towards underrepresented groups.
We support the FreeBSD-focused events to help provide a venue for
sharing knowledge, to work together on projects, and to facilitate
collaboration between developers and commercial users. This all helps
provide a healthy ecosystem. We support the non-FreeBSD events to
promote and raise awareness of FreeBSD, to increase the use of FreeBSD
in different applications, and to recruit more contributors to the
Project.
We also sponsored or attended the following events last quarter:
* Ohio LinuxFest, October, Columbus, Ohio
* Grace Hopper 2016, October, Houston, TX
* COSC 2016, October, Beijing, China
* Bay Area FreeBSD Vendor and Devoloper's Summit and MeetBSD 2016,
November, Berkely, CA
* USENIX LISA '16, December, Boston, MA
* OSC 2016, December, Beijing, China
Get the whole list of conferences we supported in 2016 at:
https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/blog/recap-of-2016-advocacy-efforts/ .
Legal/FreeBSD IP
The Foundation owns the FreeBSD trademarks, and it is our
responsibility to protect them. We continued to review requests and
grant permission to use the trademarks. We also provided legal support
for the core team to investigate the status of certain patents.
FreeBSD Community Engagement
Anne Dickison, our Marketing Director, has been overseeing the efforts
to rewrite the Project's Code of Conduct to help make this a safe,
inclusive, and welcoming community. The updated Code of Conduct and
Report Guidelines are going through the final review process, and will
be handed off to the Core Team for approval in Q1 2017.
Go to http://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org to find out how we support
FreeBSD and how we can help you!
__________________________________________________________________
Projects
Ceph on FreeBSD
Links
Ceph Main Site
URL: http://ceph.com
Main Repository
URL: https://github.com/ceph/ceph
My FreeBSD Fork
URL: https://github.com/wjwithagen/ceph/tree/wip.FreeBSD
Contact: Willem Jan Withagen <wjw at digiware.nl>
Ceph is a distributed object store and file system designed to provide
excellent performance, reliability and scalability:
* Object Storage
Ceph provides seamless access to objects using native language
bindings or radosgw, a REST interface that is compatible with
applications written for S3 and Swift.
* Block Storage
Ceph's RADOS Block Device (RBD) provides access to block device
images that are striped and replicated across the entire storage
cluster.
* File System
Ceph provides a POSIX-compliant network file system that aims for
high performance, large data storage, and maximum compatibility
with legacy applications.
I started looking into Ceph because the HAST solution with CARP and
ggate did not really do what I was looking for. But I aim to run a Ceph
storage cluster of storage nodes that are running ZFS. User stations
would be running bhyve on RBD disks that are stored in Ceph.
The FreeBSD build of Ceph includes most of the tools Ceph provides.
Note that the RBD-dependent items will not work, since FreeBSD does not
have RBD (yet).
The most notable progress since the last report:
* RBD is actually buildable and can be used to manage RADOS BLOCK
DEVICEs.
* All tests run to completion for the current selection of tools,
though the neded (minor) patches have yet to be pulled into HEAD.
* Cmake is now the only way of building Ceph.
* The threading/polling code has been reworked for the simple socket
code. It now uses a self-pipe, instead of using an odd
shutdown()-signaling Linux feature.
* The EventKqueue code was modified to work around the "feature"
that
starting threads destroys the kqueue handles. The code was just
finshed, so it is not yet submitted to the main repository.
* We investigated differences between FreeBSD and Linux for
SO_REUSEADDR and SO_REUSEPORT. Fortunately, the code is only used
during testing, so disabling these features only delays progress in
the tests.
* A jenkins instances is regularly testing both ceph/ceph/master and
wjwithagen/ceph/wip.FreeBSD, so there is regular verification of
buildability and the tests:
http://cephdev.digiware.nl:8180/jenkins/ .
Build Prerequisites
Compiling and building Ceph is tested on 12-CURRENT with its clang
3.9.0, but 11-RELEASE will probably also work, given experience with
clang 3.7.0 from 11-CURRENT. Interestingly, when 12-CURRENT had clang
3.8.0, that did not work as well as either 3.7.0 or 3.9.0. The clang
3.4 present in 10-STABLE does not have the required capabilities to
compile everything.
The following setup will get things running for FreeBSD:
1. Install bash and link it in /bin
2. It is no longer necessary to add a definition of ENODATA to
/usr/include/errno.h
3. Clone the github repo (http://github.com/wjwithagen/ceph.git) and
checkout the "wip.FreeBSD" branch
4. Run ./do_FreeBSD.sh to start the build.
The old build method using automake is no longer used; see the
README.FreeBSD for more details.
Parts not (yet) included:
* KRBD: Kernel Rados Block Devices is implemented in the Linux
kernel, but not in the FreeBSD kernel. Perhaps ggated could be used
as a template since it does some of the same things as KRBD, just
between 2 disks. It also has a userspace counterpart, which could
ease development.
* BlueStore: FreeBSD and Linux have different AIO APIs, and that
incompatibility needs to be resolved somehow. Additionally, there
is discussion in FreeBSD about aio_cancel not working for all
devicetypes.
* CephFS: Cython tries to access an internal field in struct dirent,
which does not compile.
* Tests that verify the correct working of the above are also
excluded from the testset.
Open tasks:
1. Run integration tests to see if the FreeBSD daemons will work with
a Linux Ceph platform.
2. Compile and test the user space RBD (Rados Block Device). This
currently works, but testing has been limitted.
3. Investigate and see if an in-kernel RBD device could be developed
akin to FreeBSD's ggate.
4. Investigate the keystore, which could be embedded in the kernel on
Linux, and currently prevents building CephFS and some other
components. The first question whether it is really required, or if
only KRBD require it.
5. Scheduler information is not used at the moment, because the
schedulers work rather differently between FreeBSD and Linux. But
at a certain point in time, this would need some attention in
src/common/Thread.cc.
6. Integrate the FreeBSD /etc/rc.d initscripts in the Ceph stack. This
helps with testing, but also enables running Ceph on production
machines.
7. Build a testcluster and start running some of the teuthology
integration tests on it.
8. Design a virtual disk implementation that can be used with bhyve
and attached to an RBD image.
__________________________________________________________________
OpenBSM
Links
OpenBSM: Open Source Basic Security Module (BSM) Audit Implementation
URL: http://www.openbsm.org
OpenBSM on GitHub
URL: https://github.com/openbsm/openbsm
FreeBSD Audit Handbook Chapter
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/audit.html
OpenBSM 1.2 alpha 5 announcement
URL:
https://lists.FreeBSD.org/pipermail/trustedbsd-announce/2016-December/000008.html
DARPA CADETS project
URL: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/cadets/
Contact: Christian Brueffer <brueffer at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: TrustedBSD Audit Mailing Mist <trustedbsd-audit at
TrustedBSD.org>
OpenBSM is a BSD-licensed implementation of Sun's Basic Security Module
(BSM) API and file format. It is the user-space side of the CAPP Audit
implementations in FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Additionally, the audit trail
processing tools are expected to work on Linux.
This quarter saw increased development activity, fueled by the DARPA
CADETS project, resulting in the release of OpenBSM 1.2 alpha 5. Among
this release's changes are the ability to specify the kernel's
maximum
audit queue length, sandboxing support for auditreduce(1) and
praudit(1) on FreeBSD and other systems that support Capsicum, as well
as the addition of event identifiers for more FreeBSD system calls. The
complete list of changes is documented in the NEWS file on GitHub. The
new release will be merged into FreeBSD HEAD and the supported STABLE
branches shortly.
This project was sponsored by DARPA/AFRL (in part).
Open tasks:
1. Test the new release on different versions of FreeBSD, Mac OS X,
and Linux. In particular, testing on the latest versions of Mac OS
X would be greatly appreciated.
2. Fix problems that have been reported via GitHub and the FreeBSD bug
tracker.
3. Implement the features mentioned in the TODO list on GitHub.
__________________________________________________________________
Sysctl Exporter for Prometheus
Links
The Prometheus Project
URL: https://prometheus.io/
Node Exporter
URL: https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter
Sysctl Exporter
URL:
https://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/base/head/usr.sbin/prometheus_sysctl_exporter/
Contact: Ed Schouten <ed at FreeBSD.org>
Prometheus is an Open Source monitoring system that was originally
built at SoundCloud in 2012. Since 2016, this project is part of the
Cloud Native Computing Foundation, together with other projects like
Kubernetes.
Prometheus scrapes its targets by periodically sending HTTP GET
requests. Targets then respond by sending key-value pairs of metrics
and their sample value. Prometheus has a query language, PromQL, that
can be used to aggregate sample values and specify alerting conditions.
Tools like Grafana can be used to create fancy dashboards using such
queries.
The Prometheus project provides a utility called node_exporter that
gathers basic system metrics and serves them over HTTP. This utility
tends to be rather complex, as it has to extract metrics from many
different sources. On Linux, files in /proc have no uniform format,
meaning that for every kernel framework a custom collector needs to be
written.
On FreeBSD the sitiuation is better, as the data exported through
sysctl is already structured in such a way that it can easily be
translated to Prometheus' metrics format. The goal of this project is
thus to provide a generic exporter for the entire sysctl tree. Not only
does this prevent unnecessary bloat and indirection, it may also make
the life of a kernel developer a lot easier. One can easily use
Prometheus to graph the occurrence of an event over time by
(temporarily) adding a counter to the kernel.
An initial version of the sysctl exporter has been integrated into the
FreeBSD base system in December. It can be run through inetd by
uncommenting the example provided in inetd.conf. Unfortunately, this
exporter cannot be merged back to FreeBSD 10.x/11.x, as it depends on
KBI-breaking changes to sysctl(9).
Open tasks:
1. Are you using Prometheus or are you interested in using it? Be sure
to give both Prometheus and this sysctl exporter a try!
2. It would be nice if we created a set of useful alerting rules and
placed those in /usr/share/examples. For example, how can one use
this exporter to monitor the state of GEOM-based RAID arrays? Is
such information even exported through sysctl?
3. Prometheus uses a rather clever format for exporting histograms.
Histograms are useful for expressing the amount of time taken to
complete certain events (for example, disk operations). Would it be
possible to add histograms as native data types to sysctl? If so,
is there any chance they can be implemented without picking up any
kernel locks?
__________________________________________________________________
The Graphics Stack on FreeBSD
Links
Graphics Stack Roadmap and Supported Hardware Matrix
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Graphics
GitHub Repository
URL: https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics
Ports Development Repository
URL: https://github.com/FreeBSD/freebsd-ports-graphics
Fork of libudevd-devd Shim
URL: https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/libudev-devd
Graphics Team Blog
URL: https://planet.FreeBSD.org/graphics
Contact: FreeBSD Graphics Team <FreeBSD-x11 at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Matthew Macy <mmacy at nextbsd.org>
Good progress on graphics support was made during the weeks around
Christmas and the new year with the import of Linux 4.9's DRM for i915
and amdgpu into the drm-next branch of the github repository. The
amdgpu KMS driver is already somewhat usable, with a few major known
issues remaining. It now supports GPUs as far back as Southern Islands
and up to Polaris. The 4.9 update also appears to have fixed a
regression in i915 that was introduced by the 4.8 merge late this past
summer. The drm-next branch now supports the Intel integrated graphics
unit up to Kaby Lake CPUs. To facilitate out-of-the-box support on
CURRENT, most of the branch-local VM changes were reverted and the
graphics fault routines converted to use pg_populate. This new
interface is the source of a couple of regressions causing panics on
i915 and severe artifacts with amdgpu on integrated GPUs. Mark Johnston
(markj@) has volunteered to analyze these issues. Please show your
support and encouragement to Mark for helping to move this project
towards the finish line.
The xserver-mesa-next-udev branch was created for the ports development
repository, and holds Mesa 13.0 and fixes for newer AMD GPUs. It uses a
fork of the libudev-devd shim, also bringing Mesa closer to the Linux
upstream. I plan to keep updating drm and amdgpu (for use on my desktop
and potentially longer term for GPGPU computations) as well as work
with Mark to address the existing bugs in i915 (assuming that two new
porters are approved). However, the Linux i915 developers seem to
aggressively explore the space of possible implementations and use of
Linux internal APIs, making it prohibitively time consuming to track
upstream. I am helping someone to learn the ropes of how to replay a
subset of changes from a Linux release into FreeBSD in the hope that he
will take over the mantle of drm-next i915 maintainer. Assuming the
issues listed above are addressed, a port of the linuxkpi, DRM, and KMS
drivers for use on standard amd64 CURRENT installations is planned.
Together with upgrades to the relevant graphics ports, this will
provide experimental support for new AMD and Intel GPUs.
__________________________________________________________________
Kernel
FreeBSD on Hyper-V and Azure
Links
FreeBSD Virtual Machines on Microsoft Hyper-V
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/HyperV
Supported Linux and FreeBSD Virtual Machines for Hyper-V on Windows
URL: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn531030.aspx
Contact: Sepherosa Ziehau <sepherosa at gmail.com>
Contact: Hongjiang Zhang <honzhan at microsoft.com>
Contact: Dexuan Cui <decui at microsoft.com>
Contact: Kylie Liang <kyliel at microsoft.com>
This project provides native virtualized interfaces for FreeBSD systems
running on Hyper-V virtualization, improving on the performance of
traditional emulated evices.
Per-ring polling, multi-packet RNDIS messages, and system RSS
integration have been implemented, further optimizing the throughput
and latency of the Hyper-V network driver.
Live virtual machine backup is implemented (for now, only for UFS),
after the VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service), which it depends on, was
implemented.
PCIe pass-through is implemented, and the patches to implement NIC
SR-IOV are being reviewed on Phabricator.
vDSO support for speeding up gettimeofday(2) is now implemented.
The FreeBSD 11.0 image on Azure
(https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/partners/microsoft/FreeBSD110/)
is now available, in addition to the existing 10.3 image.
We fixed an issue where SCSI disks would sometimes fail to attach,
resolving bug 215171 ([Hyper-V] Fail to attach SCSI disk from LUN 8 on
Win2008R2/Win2012/Win2012R2).
This project was sponsored by Microsoft.
__________________________________________________________________
I2C, GPIO, and SPI Support for MinnowBoard
Links
Blog Post
URL: https://kernelnomicon.org/?p=767
MinnowBoard Website
URL: https://www.minnowboard.org
Contact: Oleksandr Tymoshenko <gonzo at FreeBSD.org>
The MinnowBoard is an Atom-based x86 board (Intel E38xx Series SoC) in
a maker-friendly form-factor: it provides convenient access to pins
that can be used to connect peripherals using one of the standard
buses: GPIO, SPI, or I2C. These buses are more common in the ARM/MIPS
world than in x86, so while FreeBSD was able to boot just fine, it
lacked support for these buses on the MinnowBoard.
As of r310645, HEAD support all three buses via the ig4(4), bytgpio(4),
and intelspi drivers. The ig4(4) and bytgpio(4) changes were backported
to 11-STABLE; intelspi will be MFCed in couple of weeks.
__________________________________________________________________
Architectures
FreeBSD on ARM Boards
Links
FreeBSD on Allwinner (Sunxi) Systems
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD/arm/Allwinner
FreeBSD Commit Adding Support for IR Interfaces
URL: https://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/base?view=revision&revision=307984
Contact: Ganbold Tsagaankhuu <ganbold at FreeBSD.org>
The changes necessary to support the Allwinner Consumer IR interface in
FreeBSD have been committed. The receive (RX) side is supported now and
the driver is using the evdev framework. It was tested on the
Cubieboard2 (A20 SoC) using lirc with dfrobot's simple IR remote
controller.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/arm64
Links
FreeBSD arm64 Wiki Page
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/arm64
Contact: Andrew Turner <andrew at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Oleksandr Tymoshenko <gonzo at FreeBSD.org>
Support for accessing floating-point registers from the kernel has been
added. This uses the same KPI as i386 and amd64. This will allow for
handling places where the floating-point state may be modified, for
example when calling into UEFI.
Support for the optional ARMv8 AES instructions was added to the
kernel. This makes use of the ability to store and restore the floating
point state. Tests have shown a significant improvement in AES
performance on ThunderX hardware.
The Cortex Strings memcpy and memmove functions have been imported into
the kernel. These are optimised implementations of these common
functions.
FreeBSD now boots on the SoftIron Overdrive 3000 using ACPI. The needed
changes for this have been submitted to phabricator for review. This
includes booting with SMP enabled, and all currently supported devices.
Support for the Raspberry Pi 3 has been committed. Most devices work,
with the exception of WiFi and Bluetooth, as these are attached via an
as-yet unsupported SDIO bus.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation, and ABT Systems
Ltd.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/EC2
Contact: Colin Percival <cperciva at FreeBSD.org>
This report covers work since the last FreeBSD/EC2 status report
(2015Q1).
FreeBSD/EC2 is now part of the regular FreeBSD release build, with
snapshots and releases being automatically uploaded and copied to all
available regions. Due to legal restrictions, this does not currently
include the GovCloud or China (Beijing) regions; anyone wishing to use
FreeBSD in those regions is encouraged to contact the author.
The AWS Marketplace reports that approximately 800 users are running
roughly 2000 FreeBSD EC2 instances. This does not count the likely
significantly larger number of EC2 instances launched directly through
the EC2 API and Console, but at least places a lower bound on usage.
FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE shipped with support for the "enhanced
networking"
capabilities of EC2 C3, C4, R3, I2, D2, and M4 (excluding m4.16xlarge)
instances. This provides significantly higher network performance than
the virtual networking available on older EC2 instances and with older
versions of FreeBSD.
FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE and later also use indirect segment disk I/Os,
which yield approximately 20% higher throughput with equal or lower
latency, and support the 128-vCPU x1.32xlarge instance type.
FreeBSD now supports the Amazon Simple Systems Manager service ("run
command").
Open tasks:
1. Complete a pending reorganization of the accounts used for
FreeBSD/EC2 releases.
2. Support "second generation enhanced networking" via the new
Elastic
Network Adapter found in P2, R4, X1, and m4.16xlarge instances.
3. Provide tools for improved functionality via the Simple Systems
Manager service: listing installed packages, checking for updates,
adding/removing users, [your favourite sysadmin task goes here].
4. Add support for EC2's IPv6 networking to the default FreeBSD/EC2
configuration.
5. Continue ongoing interoperability testing between FreeBSD's NFS
client and the Amazon Elastic File System (NFS-as-a-service).
__________________________________________________________________
Userland Programs
libarchive
Links
Official Libarchive Homepage
URL: http://www.libarchive.org
Libarchive on GitHub
URL: https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive
Contact: Tim Kientzle <kientzle at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Martin Matuska <mm at FreeBSD.org>
Libarchive is a BSD-licensed archive and compression library originally
developed as part of FreeBSD. It supports a wide variety of input and
output formats and also includes three command-line tools: bsdcat,
bsdcpio and bsdtar. The FreeBSD tar and cpio utilities are taken
directly from Libarchive, and many other important utilities like ar,
unzip, and the pkg package manager make use of libarchive's functions.
Libarchive development in 2016 has been focusing on bug fixes and code
cleanup, including fixing several critical security issues. Automated
testing with Travis CI and Jenkins has been introduced and libarchive
has been added to the Google OSS-Fuzz project. Fuzzing helped detect
several hidden problems like buffer overflows and memory leaks.
Over the last few months, NFSv4 ACL support for the pax and restricted
pax (the default for bsdtar) formats has been completed and merged to
FreeBSD-CURRENT. NFSv4 ACL entries can now be stored to and restored
from tar archives.
Open tasks:
1. More extensive CI testing with FreeBSD on different platforms and
releases. Currently only 11.0-RELEASE-amd64 gets tested via an
automated Jenkins job.
2. As every commit to libarchive may influence the build process of
FreeBSD ports, the ability to trigger a (semi-)automated exp-run
for the ports tree would be great.
__________________________________________________________________
Reproducible Builds in FreeBSD
Links
Base System Reproducible Builds Wiki Page
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/ReproducibleBuilds
Ports Reproducible Builds Wiki Page
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/PortsReproducibleBuilds
Reproducible Builds Website
URL: https://reproducible-builds.org/
Contact: Baptiste Daroussin <bapt at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at FreeBSD.org>
Reproducible builds are a set of software development practices which
create a verifiable path from human readable source code to the binary
code used by computers. A build is reproducible if given the same
source code, build environment and build instructions, any party can
recreate bit-for-bit identical copies of all specified artifacts.
Baptiste Daroussin and Ed Maste attended the second Reproducible Builds
Summit last December, in Berin. We discussed issues of common interest
to operating system providers, including other BSDs and Linux
distributions.
Following the summit, changes were committed to the FreeBSD base system
to address outstanding sources of non-reproducibility. It is now
possible to build the FreeBSD base system (kernel and userland)
completely reproducibly, although it currently requires a few
non-default settings.
Approximately 80% of the ports tree builds reproducibly, with a few
work-in-progress patches. Now that the base system can be built
reproducibly, focus will move on to the ports tree.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation, and The Linux
Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Integrate FreeBSD ports builds into the reprodcible-builds.org
continuous integration infrastructure.
2. Integrate reproducible build patches into the ports tree.
3. Investigate sources of non-reproducibility in individual ports.
__________________________________________________________________
Updates to GDB
Contact: John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Luca Pizzamiglio <luca.pizzamiglio at gmail.com>
The devel/gdb port has been updated to GDB 7.12.
7.12 includes additional fixes related to tracing vfork()s. Some of
these fixes depend on changes to ptrace() in the kernel to report a new
ptrace stop when the parent of a vfork() resumes.
Support for FreeBSD/mips userland binaries has been committed upstream.
These patches, along with support for debugging FreeBSD/mips kernels,
should be added to the port soon.
Open tasks:
1. Figure out why the powerpc kgdb targets are not able to unwind the
stack past the initial frame.
2. Add support for more platforms (arm, aarch64) to upstream gdb for
both userland and kgdb.
3. Add support for debugging powerpc vector registers.
4. Add support for $_siginfo.
5. Implement 'info proc' commands.
6. Implement 'info os' commands.
7. Debug gdb hangs related to the 'kill' command.
__________________________________________________________________
Using LLVM's LLD Linker as FreeBSD's System Linker
Links
FreeBSD LLD Wiki Page
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/LLD
FreeBSD/LLD Tracking PR (LLVM Bugzilla)
URL: http://llvm.org/pr23214
Contact: Rafael Esp?ndola <rafael.espindola at gmail.com>
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at FreeBSD.org>
LLD is the linker in the LLVM family of projects. It is a
high-performance linker that supports the ELF, COFF and Mach-O object
formats. It aims to be compatible with the common linkers used for each
file format. For ELF this is the GNU Binary File Descriptor (BFD) ld
and GNU gold. However, LLD's authors are not constrained by strict
compatibility where it would hamper performance or desired
functionality.
LLD developers made significant progress over the last quarter. With
changes committed to both LLD and FreeBSD we reached a major milestone:
it is now possible to link the entire FreeBSD/amd64 base system (kernel
and userland) with LLD.
Now that the base system links with LLD, we have started investigating
linking applications in the ports tree with LLD. Through this process
we are identifying limitations or bugs in both LLD and a number of
FreeBSD ports. With a few work-in-progress patches we can link
approximately 95% of the ports collection with LLD on amd64.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Fix libtool to detect LLD and pass the same command line arguments
as for GNU ld and gold.
2. Investigate the remaining amd64 port build failures.
3. Investigate and improve LLD on arm64, i386, arm, and other
non-amd64 architectures.
4. Extensive testing.
__________________________________________________________________
Ports
GCC (GNU Compiler Collection)
Links
GCC Home Page
URL: https://gcc.gnu.org
Contact: Gerald Pfeifer <gerald at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Andreas Tobler <andreast at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Antoine Brodin <antoine at FreeBSD.org>
Long awaited, the update to GCC 4.9 as the default version of GCC in
the Ports Collection (lang/gcc port, USE_GCC=yes in Makefiles) has
arrived, an update from GCC 4.8. This brings quite a number of
improvements; see https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.9/changes.html for details.
lang/gcc49 has moved to the GCC 4.9.4 release which marks the closure
of the GCC 4.9 branch and release series.
(Yes, this means we should rather get the next version upgrade for
lang/gcc in place soon. That update per se is straightforward, but any
help in addressing the fallout of broken ports would be great -- please
let us know if you want to help!)
lang/gcc6 has been updated first to GCC 6.2 and then GCC 6.3, bringing
a fair number of fixes, and should now be suitable for production use.
Open tasks:
1. Update lang/gcc (and hence USE_GCC=yes) to GCC 5.
2. Support for AArch64.
__________________________________________________________________
LXQt on FreeBSD
Links
LXQt Project
URL: http://lxqt.org/
FreeBSD LXQt Project
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/LXQt
LXQt Development Repository
URL: https://www.assembla.com/spaces/lxqt/subversion/source
Contact: Olivier Duchateau <olivierd at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Jesper Schmitz Mouridsen <jesper at schmitz.computer>
LXQt is the Qt port of and the upcoming version of LXDE, the
Lightweight Desktop Environment. It is the product of a merge between
the LXDE-Qt and Razor-qt projects.
The porting effort remains very much a work in progress: LXQt requires
some components of Plasma 5, the new major KDE workspace.
We imported some core components (it was necessary to update to
x11/qterminal 0.7.0):
* devel/lxqt-build-tools
* devel/liblxqt
* devel/qtxdg
* x11/libfm-qt
Standalone applications:
* graphics/lximage-qt
* x11-fm/pcmanfm-qt
We also have updates for:
* x11/qterminal 0.7.1
* x11-toolkits/qtermwidget 0.7.1
* Updating the Porter's Handbook for LXQt support
(https://bugs.FreeBSD.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=215650)
Open tasks:
1. Improve support in sysutils/lxqt-admin (especially date and time
settings).
__________________________________________________________________
Mono
Links
Mono Homepage
URL: http://www.mono-project.com/
.NET Core Homepage
URL: https://github.com/dotnet/core
Mono Project Page
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Mono
Contact: Mono on FreeBSD team <mono at FreeBSD.org>
During the last quarter, many ports within the mono project have been
updated:
* Mono: 4.6.2.7
* MonoDevelop: 6.1.1.15, 6.1.2.44
* FSharp: 4.0.1.20
USES=mono has been extended to allow for easier use of Nuget packages.
This extension has been used adopted by FSharp, MonoDevelop and OpenRA.
Work has started on porting Microsoft's open-sourced .NET Core. Thanks
to the work of another team, the native components of coreclr and
corefx already support FreeBSD, however, there is further work required
in bootstrapping the build process and compiling the managed code.
Open tasks:
1. Port .NET Core.
2. Test patches for Mono.
__________________________________________________________________
Wine
Links
Wine Homepage
URL: https://www.winehq.org/
Project Page
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Wine
Contact: Gerald Pfeifer <gerald at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: David Naylor <dbn at FreeBSD.org>
The stable version of Wine (aka emulators/wine) has seen three
maintenance releases in the last half year, and Xinerama support (in
case you have more than one screen) and GNUTLS (helpful for Evernote or
World of Warcraft, for example) are now active by default.
The development version (aka emulators/wine-devel) has seen steady
progress and reached the RC phase of Wine 2.0. We are looking forward
to a new major release soon that combines the progress of a year of
active development with the stability of a release.
Open tasks:
1. Port WoW64
__________________________________________________________________
Xfce on FreeBSD
Links
FreeBSD Xfce Project
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Xfce
FreeBSD Xfce Repository
URL: https://www.assembla.com/spaces/xfce4/subversion/source
Contact: FreeBSD Xfce Team <xfce at FreeBSD.org>
Xfce is a free software desktop environment for Unix and Unix-like
platforms such as FreeBSD. It aims to be fast and lightweight, while
still being visually appealing and easy to use.
During this quarter, the team has kept these applications up-to-date:
* audio/xfce4-mpc-plugin 0.5.0 (committed in devel repository)
* deskutils/xfce4-notifyd 0.3.4
* graphics/ristretto 0.8.1
* sysutils/xfce4-diskperf-plugin 2.6.0
* sysutils/xfce4-battery-plugin 1.1.0 (committed in devel repository)
* sysutils/xfce4-fsguard-plugin 1.1.0 (committed in devel repository)
* sysutils/xfce4-netload-plugin 1.3.0 (committed in devel repository)
* sysutils/xfce4-systemload-plugin 1.2.0 (committed in devel
repository)
* sysutils/xfce4-wavelan-plugin 0.6.0 (committed in devel repository)
* x11/xfce4-clipman-plugin 1.4.1
* x11/xfce4-conf 4.12.1
* x11/xfce4-dashboard 0.6.1
* x11/xfce4-terminal 0.8.2
* x11/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin 1.6.2
* x11-clocks/xfce4-datetime-plugin 0.7.0 (committed in devel
repository)
* x11-wm/xfce4-panel 4.12.1
* www/xfce4-smartbookmark-plugin 0.5.0 (committed in devel
repository)
We also follow the unstable releases (available in our experimental
repository) of:
* sysutils/xfce4-settings 4.13.0 (it requires Gtk+ > 3.20)
* x11/libexo 0.11.2
* x11/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin 2.0.3
Open tasks:
1. Apply the changes discussed in D8416 (simplify the MASTER_SITES
macro in port Makefiles).
2. Commit the stable panel plugins.
__________________________________________________________________
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2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Vpv4
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On 14.02.2017 05:20 Benjamin Kaduk wrote:> Core requested the removal of the misc/jive port, on the grounds that > it had no function other than to turn text into an offensively racist > parody. This proved controversial, with many seeing this as a first > step in bowdlerizing the entire ports tree. That is certainly not > Core's intention. Core's aim here is to help secure the future of the > FreeBSD project by making it welcoming to all contributors, regardless > of ethnicity, gender, sexuality or other improper bases for > discrimintation. While misc/jive may once have been seen as harmless > fun, today the implicit approval implied by having it in the ports tree > sends a message at odds with the project's aims.Am I dreaming? Has this "disease" finally reached my beloved FreeBSD after all this years? In my opinion it is just not Cores business making decisions besides the technical and organizational aspect. As long as any port has a handful of users and someone is willing to support it, its existence in the tree is justified. And basically I don't care if there is a port in the tree, where little harmless kittens are being shot at. Thank you Core! You made my day! K. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 819 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: <http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20170214/9d1e6beb/attachment.sig>