FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - April-June, 2011
Introduction
This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between April and June
2011. It is the second of the four reports planned for 2011. Since this
quarter, the work is being focused on the next major version of
FreeBSD, 9.0, which is to be released in September.
Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! This report
contains 36 entries and we hope you enjoy reading it.
Please note that the deadline for submissions covering the period
between July and September 2011 is October 15th, 2011.
__________________________________________________________________
Projects
* Clang replacing GCC in the base system
* Fix clang warnings
* libarchive, bsdtar, bsdcpio
* ZFS pool version 28
FreeBSD Team Reports
* ArabBSD
* The FreeBSD Foundation
Network Infrastructure
* DIstributed Firewall and Flow-shaper Using Statistical Evidence
(DIFFUSE)
* FreeBSD IPv6-only Support
* IPv6 RA Handling Improvements
* netmap
* New ipfw features
* TCP User Timeout Option (UTO)
Kernel
* Intel GPU Driver
* OpenAFS port
* Overhaul of the mii(4)-subsystem
* Status Report for NFS
Documentation
* FreeBSD June 6th, 2011 Doc Sprint
* The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project
* The FreeBSD Japanese Documentation Project
Architectures
* FreeBSD on the Sony Playstation 3
* FreeBSD/arm on Marvell Armada XP
* FreeBSD/powerpc on AppliedMicro APM86290
* FreeBSD/powerpc64 on IBM pSeries machines
* FreeBSD/sparc64
Ports
* Chromium
* FreeBSD Haskell Ports
* KDE-FreeBSD
* libvirt networking port
* Portbuilder
* Ports Collection
Miscellaneous
* bsd_day(2011)
Google Summer of Code
* Capsicum adaptation and core libraries
* Disk device error counters
* Google Summer of Code
* nvi-iconv
* Replacing the Regular Expression Code
__________________________________________________________________
ArabBSD
URL: https://sites.google.com/site/arabbsd/
Contact: Mohammed Farrag <mfarrag@FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD Awareness, Handbook Translation and FreeBSD Kernel Development
Summer Course.
Open tasks:
1. FreeBSD Kernel Development Summer Course.
__________________________________________________________________
bsd_day(2011)
URL: http://bsdday.eu/2011
Contact: Martin Matuska <mm@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: G?bor P?li <pgj@FreeBSD.org>
The purpose of this one-day event is to gather Central European
developers of today's open-source BSD systems to popularize their work
and their organizations, and to meet each other in the real life. We
would also like to motivate potential future developers and users,
especially undergraduate university students to work with BSD systems.
This year's BSD-Day will be held in Bratislava, Slovakia at Slovak
University of Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and
Information Technology on November 5, 2011.
Everybody is welcome!
Open tasks:
1. Apply. We are looking for you!
__________________________________________________________________
Capsicum adaptation and core libraries
URL: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SOC2011IlyaBakulin
Contact: Ilya Bakulin <kibab@FreeBSD.org>
Some applications from the base system received sandboxing support,
current task is to adapt lightweight resolver daemon for using it in
sandboxes -- this fixes problems with applications that need to convert
IP addresses into domain names while in sandbox.
Open tasks:
1. Add sandboxing to even more applications in the base system.
2. Help Jonathan Anderson and Robert Watson to merge FreeBSD-Capsicum
into FreeBSD-HEAD.
__________________________________________________________________
Chromium
URL: http://www.chromium.org/Home
URL: http://trillian.chruetertee.org/chromium
Contact: Chromium on FreeBSD Team <chromium@FreeBSD.org>
During the last quarter we have been keeping the Chromium browser up to
date, with new major releases being imported into the Ports Collection
the same day as the upstream release. As time passes by, more patches
are incorporated or otherwise became obsolete by virtue of upstream
code cleanups. Version 13 is already available from the Chru?tertee
repository, with 70 patches less than version 12.
__________________________________________________________________
Clang replacing GCC in the base system
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/BuildingFreeBSDWithClang
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/PortsAndClang
Contact: Dimitry Andric <dim@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Roman Divacky <rdivacky@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Pawel Worach <pawel.worach@gmail.com>
We imported newer snapshot of clang/llvm. This features quite a lot of
goodies. Most notably there's a new register allocator that brings much
better runtime performance. If you did a performance evaluation of
clang/llvm in the past now it's the time to rerun it with the new
register allocator!
There was some progress on Mips and PowerPC in addition to the usual
influx of improvements on ARM, i386 and amd64. We've managed to get
clang compiled arm kernel booting. ARM world is blocked by FreeBSD
using old ARM ABI.
We got a buildbot that periodically builds clang/llvm on FreeBSD and
FreeBSD (amd64 and i386) using clang/llvm, including booting the
resulting image.
We ran a few ports exp runs and got many ports bugs fixed so right now
we're able to build more than 15000 ports with clang. We expect this
number to grow rapidly as the problems are mostly trivial.
Open tasks:
1. Fix your ports.
2. Performance evaluate the new clang/llvm.
3. Fix clang warnings in src.
4. Implement proper support for cross compiling.
__________________________________________________________________
Disk device error counters
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Disk%20device%20error%20counters
Contact: Oleksandr Dudinskyi <dudinskyj@gmail.com>
Currently, I work on schedule, I printed the information of disk error
in utility iostat option -E. While only displays five types of errors.
Further analysis will give me the opportunity to identify other types
of disk errors.
Open tasks:
1. Search other type of error and the place of their registration.
2. Maybe find a better place registration of errors than xpt_done().
__________________________________________________________________
DIstributed Firewall and Flow-shaper Using Statistical Evidence (DIFFUSE)
URL: http://caia.swin.edu.au/urp/diffuse/
URL: http://caia.swin.edu.au/urp/diffuse/downloads.html
Contact: Sebastian Zander <szander@swin.edu.au>
Contact: Grenville Armitage <garmitage@swin.edu.au>
DIFFUSE is a system enabling FreeBSD's IPFW firewall subsystem to
classify IP traffic based on statistical traffic properties.
With DIFFUSE, IPFW computes statistics (such as packet lengths or
inter-packet time intervals) for observed flows, and uses ML (machine
learning) to classify flows into classes. In addition to traditional
packet inspection rules, IPFW rules may now also be expressed in terms
of traffic statistics or classes identified by ML classification. This
can be helpful when direct packet inspection is problematic (perhaps
for administrative reasons, or because port numbers do not reliably
identify applications).
DIFFUSE also enables one instance of IPFW to send flow information and
classes to other IPFW instances, which then can act on such traffic
(e.g. prioritise, accept, deny, etc.) according to its class. This
allows for distributed architectures, where classification at one
location in your network is used to control fire-walling or
rate-shaping actions at other locations.
The DIFFUSE prototype is a set of patches for FreeBSD-CURRENT that can
be downloaded from the project's web site. The web site also contains a
more comprehensive introduction, as well as links to related work and
documentation.
In July 2011, we released DIFFUSE v0.4. This release contains a number
of bug fixes and new features. Most notably we improved the
functionality of the tools used for training classification models, and
performing offline analysis.
DIFFUSE v0.4 is the last release, as the DIFFUSE project has concluded.
However, we may release bug fixes in the future if necessary.
__________________________________________________________________
Fix clang warnings
Contact: Ben Laurie <benl@FreeBSD.org>
In order to assist with the process of moving away from gcc, while I
learn the ropes of being a contributor, I am systematically fixing
clang warnings, so we can turn on -Werror again.
Down from > 42,000 warnings at the end of May to < 9,000 warnings now.
Open tasks:
1. Always happy if someone else finds and fixes a warning!
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Haskell Ports
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Haskell
URL: https://github.com/freebsd-haskell/freebsd-haskell/
URL: http://haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-haskell/
Contact: G?bor J?nos P?LI <pgj@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ashish SHUKLA <ashish@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Giuseppe Pilichi <jacula@FreeBSD.org>
We are proud to announce that the FreeBSD Haskell Team has committed
Haskell Platform 2011.2.0.1 to the FreeBSD Ports Collection, as well as
updated existing ports to their latest stable versions. Apart from the
ports officially available there, many ports (Snap web framework,
Leksah, and their dependencies) are still waiting to be added. Any
users who like to get early access to them, please refer to the
instructions at our development repository.
Open tasks:
1. Update Haskell Platform (along with GHC) to 2011.4.0.0 as soon as
it gets out.
2. Add more ports to the Ports Collection.
3. Create a port for Happstack.
4. Create a port for gitit.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD IPv6-only Support
URL:
http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/project%20announcements.shtml#Bjoern
URL:
http://www.ixsystems.com/ix/media/freebsd-foundation-and-ixsystems-anno
unce-ipv6-only-testing-versions-of-freebsd-and-pc-bsd
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ipv6/ipv6only.html
URL: http://www.pcbsd.org/IPv6
Contact: Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz@FreeBSD.org>
As a follow-up work to the no-IP kernel, a FreeBSD IPv6-only prototype
kernel was build beginning of 2010. This work was now carried on and
merged to mainstream FreeBSD and will be part of the upcoming
9.0-RELEASE allowing for custom no-IPv4 kernels to be built. In
addition IPv6 installation and configuration support for FreeBSD and
PC-BSD were improved.
An IPv6-only kernel and continued efforts to build world without IPv4,
like FreeBSD had supported compiling out IPv6 for a long time, will
allow easier IPv6 validation work to happen. This will not only help
FreeBSD or FreeBSD-derived commercial product builders but we are also
hoping to motivate other Open Source projects to test their software
for IPv6-readiness on FreeBSD or PC-BSD.
We have provided and will continue to provide IPv6-only snapshots for
FreeBSD. In IPv6-only PC-BSD snapshots have been released to provide a
great Open Source desktop environment to test GUI applications for
IPv6-readiness as well.
I would like to thank the FreeBSD Foundation and iXsystems for their
support of the project, as well as George Neville-Neil for providing
review and Kris Moore for helping on the PC-BSD integration and
building and providing the PC-BSD snapshots.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD June 6th, 2011 Doc Sprint
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/DocSprints
URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~bcr/doc/sprints/20110606-final.html
URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~linimon/annotated_prs.docsprint.html
URL: http://openhelpconference.com/
Contact: Benedict Reuschling <bcr@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Dru Lavigne <dru@FreeBSD.org>
On June 6, the FreeBSD documentation project held a doc sprint where a
number of documentation issues were discussed. The sprint took place
primarily in IRC channel #bsddocs on EFNet. Notes were taken in an
Etherpad document where all participants could concurrently edit them
in an easy to use interface. Parallel to the discussion, a number of
doc problem reports have been closed. There are still some doc PRs that
have been identified that could also be closed, because their original
issue was already committed but the PR is still open. This needs to be
investigated on a case by case basis.
Dru Lavigne brought in her experiences from the Open Help conference
that she was attending during the sprint. It would be good to have some
FreeBSD documentation people at a future Open Help conference to
exchange ideas with other open source documentation projects and how
they go about doing their work.
The primary discussion focused on the issues that have been talked
about at the documentation working group at BSDCan's DevSummit in May.
Subjects like converting the documentation repository from CVS to SVN,
the move from DocBook SGML to XML-based documentation as well as other
formats like RST (re-restructured text), and publication efforts of the
handbook in electronic and dead-tree form were thoroughly debated.
Overall participation was good, but we would like to have more
documentation folks to participate in future sprints. The next sprint
is planned before EuroBSDCon 2011 and will be announced in time so that
interested people can set aside some time for it. We also plan to
include different time zones so that we can have more input from
various areas. We hope to establish these kind of sprints on a regular
basis to deal with documentation issues that affect the whole
community.
Thanks to everyone who participated and helped bring some of the issues
we talked about forward.
Open tasks:
1. Schedule the next documentation sprint before the next EuroBSDCon
and include different timezones.
2. Work on the todo items identified during the sprint.
3. Resolve open documentation problem reports identified to be fixed,
but still open for some reason.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on the Sony Playstation 3
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/ps3/
Contact: Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org>
The FreeBSD Playstation 3 port is now fairly mature and will be
included in the 9.0 release, starting with BETA2. Most internal
devices, including the USB ports, bluetooth, ethernet, and SATA devices
are now supported, and the operating system can be installed to and
boot from the internal hard disk.
There are several remaining pieces to the port (Wireless, Sound, X11,
and the SPUs), which may be interesting projects for those interested
in non-PC architectures.
Open tasks:
1. Built-in wireless. The 802.11 wireless interface on the Playstation
3 is multiplexed through the wired ethernet MAC and is currently
unsupported.
2. The sound hardware is not currently supported.
3. The framebuffer driver does not currently support X11. This would
involve writing a simple X11 framebuffer driver to connect to
syscons.
4. The synergistic processing units (SPUs) on the Cell processor are
not supported yet. They present an interesting model of
heterogeneous computing, more suited for full treatment by a
UNIX-type kernel than GPGPU computing: each SPU has a concept of
user and supervisor mode, as well as interrupts, and can share MMU
context with the main CPU cores. As such, they in principle can
support a full UNIX process model.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/arm on Marvell Armada XP
Contact: Grzegorz Bernacki <gjb@semihalf.com>
Contact: Rafal Jaworowski <raj@semihalf.com>
Marvell Armada XP is a complete system-on-chip solution based on Sheeva
embedded CPU. These devices integrate up to four ARMv6/v7 compliant
Sheeva CPU cores with shared L2 cache. This work is extending
FreeBSD/arm infrastructure towards support for recent ARM architecture
variations along with a basic set of device drivers for integrated
peripherials. Current FreeBSD suppport for Armada XP includes:
* Booting via U-Boot bootloader
* ARMv6/v7 support
*
+ Reworked CPU indentification scheme
+ New cache identification scheme
+ Support for PIPT caches
+ Reworked PMAP for ARMv6/v7 features
* Serial console support (UART)
* Interrupt controller
* Integrated timers
* USB driver attachment
* Ethernet controller driver
Next steps:
* L2 cache support
* SMP support
* PCI-Express and SATA drivers
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/powerpc on AppliedMicro APM86290
Contact: Grzegorz Bernacki <gjb@semihalf.com>
Contact: Rafal Jaworowski <raj@semihalf.com>
The APM86290 system-on-chip device is a member of AppliedMicro's
PACKETpro family of embedded processors. The chip includes two Power
Architecture PPC465 processor cores, which are compliant with Book-E
specification of the architecture, and a number of integrated
peripherals. This work is extending current Book-E support in FreeBSD
towards PPC4xx processors variation along with device drivers for
integrated peripherials. Current FreeBSD APM86290 support includes:
* Booting via U-Boot bootloader
* Support for PPC465 core
* L1 cache
* Serial console (UART)
Next steps:
* Interrupt controller
* EHCI USB driver attachment
* Ethernet controller
* Queue Manager/Traffic Manager
* L2 cache support
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/powerpc64 on IBM pSeries machines
URL: svn://svn.FreeBSD.org/base/projects/pseries/
Contact: Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Andreas Tobler <andreast@FreeBSD.org>
The goal of this project is to make FreeBSD running on PAPR compliant
machines like the IBM pSeries family.
Currently we can boot a POWER7 emulation under a recent qemu snapshot.
The boot process stops when trying to find a PIC.
The same applies for an IntelliStation-285. (POWER5+).
Open tasks:
1. Implement interrupt controller.
2. PCI bus scanning.
3. Drivers, drivers, drivers.
4. Improve memory management.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/sparc64
Contact: Marius Strobl <marius@FreeBSD.org>
* The iommu(4) driver has been changed to take advantage of the
streaming buffers of the host-PCI and host-SBus bridges if present,
which in at least some configurations results in a modest
performance improvement due to the caching of DMA transactions. As
a prerequisite, the bus_dma(9) usage of all drivers compiled as
part of the sparc64 GENERIC kernel has been reviewed and fixed and
in case of sound(4) and sym(4) at least worked around as necessary
in order to be able to use the streaming buffers.
Support for this will be merged back to 8-STABLE prior to
8.3-RELEASE.
* Following the update of the in-tree binutils to 2.17.50, which now
for the first time include support for GNUTLS on sparc64 in the
base, support for TLS relocations on sparc64 was added to rtld(1)
and enabled in the base GCC and malloc(3).
* Support and a workaround necessary for Sun Fire V890 equipped with
UltraSPARC-IV was added.
Support for these will be merged back to 8-STABLE prior to
8.3-RELEASE.
* The schizo(4) driver has been updated to also support the XMITS
Fireplane/Safari to PCI-X bridges and a workaround for
Casinni/Skyhawk combinations has been added. Chances are that the
latter solves the crashes seen when using the the on-board Casinni
NICs of Sun Fire V480 equipped with centerplanes other than
501-6780 or 501-6790.
These changes have been merged back to 8-STABLE and will be part of
8.3-RELEASE.
* As part of the largeSMP project which had the goal of supporting
more than 32 CPU cores in FreeBSD several parts of the sparc64
specific code had to be adapted mainly in the assembler bits but as
a result now also supports more than 32 CPU cores.
* On machines where we do not need to lock the kernel TSB into the
dTLB and thus may basically use the entire 64-bit kernel address
space, i.e. on machines equipped with UltraSPARC-III+ and greater
CPUs, the kernel virtual memory was increased to not be limited by
VM_KMEM_SIZE_MAX and VM_KMEM_SIZE_SCALE decreased to 1 allowing
kernel to use more memory as for example useful for ZFS.
These changes will be merged back to 8-STABLE prior to 8.3-RELEASE.
* The shortcut taken in the code responsible for flushing user
mappings from the TLBs of UltraSPARC-III and greater CPUs turned
out to not scale well on MP-systems with more than 8 CPU cores and
thus was re-written. As a result it now scales up to at least
16-way machines.
These changes will be merged back to 8-STABLE prior to 8.3-RELEASE.
__________________________________________________________________
Google Summer of Code
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2011
Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
We are happy to be participating in our 7th Google Summer of Code.
After the mid-term evaluation we have 15 projects working towards the
final evaluation. You can see the latest status on student's individual
wiki pages or by subscribing to the soc-status mailing list.
__________________________________________________________________
Intel GPU Driver
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Intel_GPU
Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib@FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored project to port the Linux kernel-mode
driver for Intel GPU progressed to the point where some machines can
use Xorg with ddx driver from the git head and latest Mesa. On my test
machine I was able to run uhexen2 and ioquake3.
Nonetheless, the driver is still in the early stages of debugging. Read
the wiki page for more details, guidelines on installation and initial
bug analysis.
Main efforts right now are directed on getting the required VM changes
into the base system, ideally before 9.0 is released.
__________________________________________________________________
IPv6 RA Handling Improvements
Contact: Hiroki Sato <hrs@FreeBSD.org>
ICMPv6 Router Advertisement (RA) message is a part of IPv6 Neighbor
Discovery Protocol in RFC 4861 and takes an important role in IPv6
basic functionality. FreeBSD supports it in the kernel, and the
rtadvd(8) and rtsold(8) programs derived from KAME project handle it in
userland.
This small project aims to improve the current RA handling by removing
limitations and adding new functionality found in the latest RFCs.
Changes committed are as follows:
* FreeBSD now supports RA receiving even if
net.inet6.ip6.forwarding=1 and enabling/disabling the receiving in
a per-interface basis. The traditional "host" and
"router" node
model in IPv6 RFCs is translated into a concept of "RA-receiving
interfaces" and "RA-sending interfaces" in FreeBSD 9.0 or
later,
not depending only on system-wide IP forwarding capability. This is
useful for a system with multiple IPv6-capable interfaces (such as
a customer-edge router) which require SLAAC (Stateless Address
Autoconfiguration) feature described in RFC 4862.
* The rtadvd(8) and rtsold(8) programs now support IPv6 Router
Advertisement Options for DNS Configuration in RFC 6106. This
enables updating /etc/resolv.conf by using RAs.
* The rtadvd(8) daemon now supports dynamically-added/removed
interfaces. Although it was needed that all of RA-sending
interfaces exist before the daemon was invoked, the new version no
longer requires it. When a new interface arrived, it will be
configured on the fly.
* The rtadvctl(8) utility has been added. This displays RA-sending
status on each interface and provides a way to control the daemon.
This utility makes system administration much easier.
All of the changes described above have already been committed to
9-CURRENT and a part of them will be merged to 8-STABLE.
__________________________________________________________________
KDE-FreeBSD
URL: FreeBSD.kde.org
URL:
http://dot.kde.org/2011/06/29/platform-frameworks-kde-hackers-meet-swit
zerland
URL:
http://blogs.FreeBSDish.org/avilla/2011/06/14/call-for-tests-kde-pim-4-
6-0
URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org/area51.php
Contact: KDE FreeBSD <kde-freebsd@kde.org>
Alberto Villa and Raphael Kubo da Costa went to Randa, Switzerland, to
attend, respectively, the KDE Multimedia/Kdenlive sprint and the
Platform 11 sprint. The sprints afforded them the opportunity to form
closer bonds with the upstream KDE community, to learn about the future
of Qt and KDE and make sure FreeBSD's needs are taken into account. For
more information see the article "From Platform to Frameworks -- KDE
hackers meet in Switzerland" at dot.kde.org.
The KDE on FreeBSD team have continued to improve the experience of KDE
and Qt under FreeBSD. The latest round of improvements include:
* Qt supports Clang as a compiler
The team has also made many releases and upstreamed many fixes and
patches. The latest round of releases include:
* Qt: 4.7.3
* KDE: 4.6.3; 4.6.4; 4.6.5
* Amarok: 2.4.1
* Digikam (and KIPI-plugins): 1.9.0
Further testing is requested for KDE PIM 4.6.0 and Calligra 2.3.72
before the ports are committed. To test the ports please visit Alberto
Villa's call for test and area51.
The team is always looking for more testers and porters so please visit
us at kde-freebsd@kde.org and our homepage.
Open tasks:
1. Testing KDE PIM 4.6.0.
__________________________________________________________________
libarchive, bsdtar, bsdcpio
URL: http://code.google.com/p/libarchive
Contact: Tim Kientzle <tim@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Michihiro Nakajima <ggcueroad@gmail.com>
Libarchive, bsdtar and bsdcpio in 9-CURRENT have been updated to
version 2.8.4 (thanks to mm@FreeBSD.org) and bsdtar now supports
extracting XAR and RPM archive formats.
There is ongoing development in trunk with many improvements including
support for new formats both on the read (e.g. cab, lha, rar) and write
parts (e.g. iso9660, xar).
__________________________________________________________________
libvirt networking port
URL: http://www.libvirt.org/
Contact: Jason Helfman <jhelfman@experts-exchange.com>
Contact: Daniel P. Berrange <berrange@redhat.com>
Libvirt, a Toolkit to interact with virtualization capabilities, has
been ported to FreeBSD, however the networking capabilities have been
disabled as they are incompatible with FreeBSD. Libvirt currently
supports connecting to many types of hypervisors, however it can be a
far more useful tool if the networking capabilities were ported to
FreeBSD.
In contacting Daniel P. Berrange, he was kind enough to advise on what
is required to port networking of libvirt to FreeBSD. His response is
paraphrased below:
There are two aspects to networking in libvirt:
* The virtual network driver (in src/network/bridge_driver.c) uses
the Linux kernel's native 'bridge' functionality to provide
an
isolated, or routed, or NATed network connection to guests. There
is a bridge device on the host created, and guest TAP devices are
added to it. There is no physical ethernet device added to the
bridge, and iptables is used to control whether the host OS routes
traffic to/from the bridge & physical LAN.
Porting bridge and bridge control functionality to FreeBSD would
need to be done, and how to nat/routed/isolated guest configs and
write a compatible version of bridge_driver.c for FreeBSD.
* The host interface driver (in src/inteface/netcf_driver.c) uses the
netcf library to manage configuration of host network interfaces to
do things like bonding, vlans, bridging and controlling the
interfaces availability. The core job is to port netcf to work with
FreeBSD. A netcf backend that understands FreeBSD's networking
configuration files and calls appropriate tools to bring interfaces
online/offline would need to be created.
Both these jobs are pretty much independent, so can easily be done in
parallel.
Open tasks:
1. Port bridge network driver for libvirt.
2. Port netcf driver for libvirt.
__________________________________________________________________
netmap
URL: http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/
Contact: Luigi Rizzo <rizzo@iet.unipi.it>
netmap is a novel framework to achieve wire-speed packet processing in
FreeBSD, while retaining the safety and richness of features provided
by the user space environment, and using only standard system calls.
With netmap, it takes as little as 70 clock cycles to move one packet
between the user program and the wire. As an example, a single core
running at 900MHz can generate the 14.8Mpps that saturate a 10GigE
interface. This is a 5-10x improvement over the use of a standard
device driver. netmap is implemented with a relatively small kernel
device driver (less than 2000 lines of code), plus individual network
card patches (300-500 lines each; currently supported are Intel 1 and
10 Gbit cards, and RealTek 1 Gbit cards). No special user libraries are
needed, although we have a small libpcap-over-netmap which enables the
use of existing applications on top of the new API with no source or
binary modifications. The netmap home page contains a more detailed
description of the project, source code, papers and slides.
__________________________________________________________________
New ipfw features
URL: http://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/base?view=revision&revision=223666
Contact: Vadim Goncharov <vadim_nuclight@mail.ru>
The ipfw(4) packet filter now supports call and return rule actions.
When a packet matches a rule with the call action, the rule number is
saved in the internal stack and rules processing continues from the
first rule with specified number (similar to skipto action, but
backward jumps are allowed). If later a rule with return action is
encountered, the processing returns to the first rule with number
greater than the number saved in the internal stack. This makes it
possible to organize "subroutines" with rules, e.g. to call one
subroutine several times from different places in the ruleset. For more
details, see ipfw(8).
__________________________________________________________________
nvi-iconv
URL:
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/zy/1
URL: https://github.com/lichray/nvi2
Contact: Zhihao Yuan <lichray@gmail.com>
This project creates a multibyte aware nvi fork. While most of the
userland tools in the FreeBSD base system support multibyte encodings,
there is no pure-licensed nvi fork comes with sufficient multibyte
encoding (both Unicode and non-Unicode) support prior to this.
Currently, functionally, the new nvi is ready for testing. The
description is at https://github.com/lichray/nvi2/wiki (the patch is
deprecated). I will commit a new one latter.
The features dropped from nvi-1.79 are:
* Perl and Tcl interpreter supports;
* The whole Perl/Tcl/Tk scripting framework;
* A third-party gtags support.
and the features adopted from nvi-1.81.6 includes:
* Multibyte encoding supports (wchar_t + libiconv + libncursesw);
* fileencoding and inputencoding options;
* Undocumented :vsplit command, which vertically splits the screen.
Many known bugs, incomplete code from nvi-devel are fixed. However, I
find a serious memory leaking (via valgrind) in the nvi-devel iconv
framework. This requires a careful review.
Open tasks:
1. Reviews the iconv part and fixes the memory leak.
2. Ex scripts for testing. But it seems that I have no experience on
that...
3. File encoding detection. My plan it to detect UTF-16 BOM first,
then UTF-8. If all fails, uses locale. UTF-8 BOM is not supported
by iconv, and we need to discuss whether we should support it in
the editor.
__________________________________________________________________
OpenAFS port
URL: http://openafs.org
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/afs
Contact: Benjamin Kaduk <kaduk@mit.edu>
Contact: Derrick Brashear <shadow@gmail.com>
AFS is a distributed network filesystem that originated from the Andrew
Project at Carnegie-Mellon University. Since our last report, upstream
OpenAFS has updated to a 1.6.0pre6 release candidate, which is
available in the FreeBSD Ports Collection. We still expect the upcoming
1.6.0 release to be usable for regular client workloads (though not
heavy load). We have also made progress on integration with the
bsd.kmod.mk kernel-module-building infrastructure, with a working
prototype implementation. Further cleanup and testing is needed before
it is ready to be committed.
There are several known outstanding issues that are being worked on,
but detailed bug reports are welcome at port-freebsd@openafs.org.
Open tasks:
1. Update VFS locking to allow the use of disk-based client caches as
well as memory-based caches.
2. Track down races and deadlocks that may appear under load.
3. Integrate with the bsd.kmod.mk kernel-module build infrastructure.
4. Eliminate a moderate memory leak from the kernel module.
5. PAG (Process Authentication Group) support is not functional.
__________________________________________________________________
Overhaul of the mii(4)-subsystem
Contact: Marius Strobl <marius@FreeBSD.org>
The mii(4)-subsystem has been overhauled and fixes and enhancements
from NetBSD/OpenBSD since mii(4) originally has been ported over have
been merged. As a result a lot of code duplication and hacks have been
removed from the PHY drivers and we are now able again to share the
miidevs file with NetBSD. Due to KPI breakages the majority of this
work will not be merged back into 8-STABLE and earlier.
Additionally shorthand aliases for common media+option combinations as
announced by mii(4) have been added to the ifmedia code so that now one
can actually supply the media strings found in the dmesg output to
ifconfig(8). Support for this will be merged back to 8-STABLE prior to
8.3-RELEASE.
__________________________________________________________________
Portbuilder
URL: https://github.com/DragonSA/portbuilder
URL: https://github.com/DragonSA/portbuilder/blob/0.1.3/README
URL: https://github.com/DragonSA/portbuilder/blob/0.1.3/TODO
Contact: David Naylor <naylor.b.david@gmail.com>
I would like to introduce a project that has been in the works for the
last 3 years. From the projects README:
A concurrent ports building tool. Although FreeBSD ports supports
building a single port using multiple jobs (via MAKE_JOBS), it cannot
build multiple ports concurrently. This tool accomplishes just that.
Some of its key features:
* Concurrent port building
* Load control
* Top like UI
* Persistent builds (by default)
Portbuilder originally used threads to control each port at each stage
of the build however the required locks resulting in deadlocks, and
some ports would not build correctly. To resolve those issues a rewrite
was done to use only a single thread, making all locking code
redundant. Thanks to the use of kqueue(2) the overhead of managing
concurrent port builds is minimal. Further work to reduce that overhead
is underway.
Portbuilder is installable from ports under ports-mgmt/portbuilder, see
the README for usage details. Please note that this is considered BETA
quality, that the feature set and API are expected to change, and that
portbuilder may crash or fail to behave properly.
Open tasks:
1. Wiki page.
2. Testing.
3. See TODO.
__________________________________________________________________
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://blogs.FreeBSDish.org/portmgr/
URL: http://www.twitter.com/freebsd_portmgr/
URL: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=135441496471197
URL:
http://FreeBSDFoundation.blogspot.com/2011/06/bsdcan-trip-report-baptis
te-daroussin.html
URL:
http://FreeBSDFoundation.blogspot.com/2011/06/bsdcan-trip-report-julien
-laffaye.html
URL:
http://FreeBSDFoundation.blogspot.com/2011/06/bsdcan-trip-report-thomas
-abthorpe.html
URL: http://blogs.FreeBSDish.org/portmgr/2011/05/26/thankyoufoundation/
Contact: Thomas Abthorpe <portmgr-secretary@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Port Management Team <portmgr@FreeBSD.org>
The ports tree slowly moves up closer to 23,000. The PR count still
remains at about 1100.
In Q2 we added 3 new committers, took in 2 commit bits for safe
keeping, and added a new member to portmgr.
The Ports Management team have been running -exp runs on an ongoing
basis, verifying how base system updates may affect the ports tree, as
well as providing QA runs for major ports updates. Of note, -exp runs
were done for:
* ports/154044, -exp run to update x11-toolkits/open-motif
* ports/155269, -exp run to fix problem with base/ports ncurses
* ports/155215, -exp run to update gmake, completed by linimon
* ports/156575, -exp run to generate a subset of ports in INDEX
* ports/155983, -exp run to reroot md5 in /sbin
* ports/139116, -exp run to call target "install-rc-script"
before
"post-install"
* ports/155510, -exp run to remove support for pre 7.X
* ports/156533, -exp run to patch bsd.apache.mk
* ports/152498, -exp run to improve USERS/GROUPS handling
* flz has been performing clang -exp runs
* erwin performed -exp run for perl 5.12.4 update
* pav performed multiple -exp runs for gtk3
Open tasks:
1. Looking for help getting ports to build with clang.
2. Looking for help fixing ports broken on CURRENT. (List needs
updating, too)
3. Looking for help with Tier-2 architectures. (List needs updating,
too)
4. Most ports PRs are assigned, we now need to focus on testing,
committing, and closing.
__________________________________________________________________
Replacing the Regular Expression Code
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/G%C3%A1borSoC2011
Contact: G?bor K?vesd?n <gabor@FreeBSD.org>
The current regular expression code in libc is quite outdated and does
not support wide characters. There are various open source regular
expression libraries but replacing the code is not a simple task
because there are quite many considerations and requirements. The best
candidate is TRE, which is a BSD-licensed, supports wide and multibyte
characters, conforms to POSIX and it performs well compared to another
available alternatives, so the work has been started with TRE. Apart
from the replacement, the plan is to implement heuristical matching,
which will speed up the pattern matching significantly. Besides, grep
and diff in the base system have been using the GNU regex code, which
has a more permissive syntax. It is desired to have a single regex
engine in the base system, so the GNU syntax has to be implemented (as
an optional feature), as well.
So far, a fast string matching algorithm has been added, which is a
variant of the Turbo Boyer-Moore algorithm. It has been slightly tuned
to support not only literal patterns but patterns containing $^.
symbols. This algorithm is used automatically when the pattern makes it
possible.
Besides, heuristic matching has also been implemented. If the fast
matcher cannot be applied directly, it parses the pattern and separates
the fixed-length prefix and suffix of the pattern. Then it can be used
to locate the possibly matching regions of the text, using a more
efficient algorithm than the full regex NFA and the latter only has to
be applied to the narrow context that has been located.
Open tasks:
1. Implement GNU regex syntax.
2. Add test suite GNU-specific behavior and also add some tests for
locale-specific behavior.
3. Test and review the code. Contact the author and check if these
improvements can be added to the upstream code so that more people
can benefit from this.
__________________________________________________________________
Status Report for NFS
Contact: Rick Macklem <rmacklem@FreeBSD.org>
The new NFS client and server are no longer considered experimental and
will most likely be the default for FreeBSD 9.0. Included is support
for NFSv4.0 as well as NFSv3 and NFSv2. The NFSv4.0 support was tested
at a recent NFSv4 Interoperability Bakeathon held at CITI of the
University of Michigan. Also tested at the Bakeathon was a basic client
implementation of NFSv4.1 which will soon be available as a test patch
against the FreeBSD 9.0 kernel sources. If you are interested in
testing NFSv4.1, stay tuned to the freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.org mailing list.
zkirsch@FreeBSD.org and friends will be taking on a majority of the
NFSv4 server work while I concentrate on the client, with hopes that
the NFSv4.1 support will mature over the next year or so.
I will also be making a patch for an experimental aggressive client
side on-disk caching mechanism for NFSv4 I call Packrats available. An
announcement about this will be made on freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.org as well.
__________________________________________________________________
TCP User Timeout Option (UTO)
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/CatalinNicutar/TCPUTO
URL:
http://p4web.FreeBSD.org/@md=d&cd=//depot/projects/soc2011/&dw=u&c=kml@
//depot/projects/soc2011/cnicutar_tcputo_8/?ac=83
Contact: Catalin Nicutar <cnicutar@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Bjoern Zeeb <bz@FreeBSD.org>
The goal of the User Timeout option is to allow an application to tweak
the time TCP waits for acknowledgements. Using UTO, an application can
choose the exact time it is willing to wait for data to be
acknowledged. Also, an application can suggest to its peer the time it
should wait before dropping the connection (the peer may or may not
allow this).
As an example, a SSH client can request a large timeout (4 hours) for a
connection. After some time the client is disconnected, reconnecting 2
hours later (with the same IP). Due to UTO, the connection should still
be alive and any lost data should be retransmitted.
Current testing is done on TCP over IPv4. Timeouts can be limited by
global sysctls and an application can choose how to send or accept
timeout values via socket options. In addition to regression tests,
support has been added to telnet, ssh and netcat.
Open tasks:
1. Regression tests for TCP over IPv6.
2. Add support to more userland applications.
3. Implement strategies and regression tests to handle and simulate
DoS scenarios.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/DutchDocumentationProject
URL:
http://p4db.FreeBSD.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/docp
roj_nl
Contact: Remko Lodder <remko@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ren? Ladan <rene@FreeBSD.org>
During the last period most work went into keeping the Handbook up to
date; it is currently up-to-date except for a section on network
servers. Other areas being worked on are the FAQ and the web site. The
latter two are still a work-in-progress.
Open tasks:
1. Volunteers! The best part is that you do not need to be an expert
on FreeBSD nor the Dutch language to join, just some enthusiasm and
spare time.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Foundation
URL: www.FreeBSDFoundation.org
Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb@FreeBSDFoundation.org>
We were a proud sponsor of BSDCan. We also sponsored 6 developers to
attend the conference. And, we brought in over $1,000 in donations! The
Foundation was also represented at FlourishConf in Chicago, IL and
SouthEast LinuxFest in Spartanburg, SC.
We acquired a non-exclusive copyright license to the libcxxrt C++
runtime software from PathScale.
Sponsored a project to create an IPv6-only version of FreeBSD and
PC-BSD.
We're pleased announce the addition of Ed Maste to our Board of
Directors. Ed has been involved with FreeBSD since 2003. And, has been
a committer since 2005. Ed leads the OS team at Sandvine and is
responsible for a number of developers who bring enhancements from
FreeBSD into Sandvine's OS and contribute their own changes back to
FreeBSD.
We continued our work on infrastructure projects to beef up hardware
for package-building, network-testing, etc. This includes purchasing
equipment as well as managing equipment donations. In fact we just
placed an order for a 80-core server for SMP performance work.
Stop by and visit with us at Ohio LinuxFest, Columbus, OH, on September
10.
The work above, as well as many other tasks we do for the project,
couldn't be done without donations. Please help us by making a donation
or asking your company to make a donation. We would be happy to send
marketing literature to you or your company. Find out how to make a
donation at http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/donate/.
Find out more up-to-date Foundation news by reading our blog and
Facebook page.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Japanese Documentation Project
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ja/
URL: http://www.jp.FreeBSD.org/doc-jp/
Contact: Hiroki Sato <hrs@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ryusuke Suzuki <ryusuke@FreeBSD.org>
The www/ja and doc/ja_JP.eucJP/books/handbook subtrees have constantly
been updated. During this period, many part of out-dated contents in
the www/ja subtree were updated to the latest versions in the English
counterpart. Thus most of the files in the subtree are already
synchronized with www/en at this moment, and this updating work will be
finished within this year.
For FreeBSD Handbook, translation work for the kernelconfig section was
just started. In addition, we are planning to translate the upcoming
release announcement because it is also important for Japanese people.
Open tasks:
1. Further translation work for outdated and/or non-translated
documents in both doc/ja_JP.eucJP and www/ja.
__________________________________________________________________
ZFS pool version 28
Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Martin Matuska <mm@FreeBSD.org>
ZFS pool version 28 has been merged into 8-STABLE as of June 6, 2011.
In addition, several bugfixes and improvements from the Illumos project
have been imported.
Open tasks:
1. Investigation of ZFS problem reports.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Project. All rights reserved.