FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report, January-March 2014
This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between January and March
2014. This is the first of four reports planned for 2014.
Note that there is an HTML version available at
http://www.FreeBSD.org/news/status/report-2014-01-2014-03.html
Introduction
The first quarter of 2014 was, again, a hectic and productive time for
FreeBSD. The Ports team released their landmark first quarterly
"stable" branch. FreeBSD continues to grow on the ARM architecture,
now
running on an ARM-based ChromeBook. SMP is now possible on multi-core
ARM systems. bhyve, the native FreeBSD hypervisor, continues to
improve. An integral test suite is taking shape, and the Jenkins
Continuous Integration system has been implemented. FreeBSD patches to
GCC are being "forward-ported", and LLDB, the Clang/LLVM debugger
is
being ported. Desktop use has also seen improvements, with work on
Gnome, KDE, Xfce, KMS video drivers, X.org, and vt, the new console
driver which supports KMS and Unicode. Linux and Wine binary
compatibility layers have been improved. UEFI booting support has been
merged to head. The FreeBSD Foundation continues to assist in moving
FreeBSD forward, sponsoring conferences and meetings and numerous
development projects. And these are only some of the things that
happened! Read on for even more.
Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! This report
contains 41 entries and we hope you enjoy reading it.
The deadline for submissions covering between April and June 2014 is
July 7th, 2014.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Team Reports
* FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team
* FreeBSD Core Team
* FreeBSD Documentation Engineering Team
* FreeBSD Port Management Team
* FreeBSD Postmaster Team
* FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
Projects
* Jenkins Continuous Integration for FreeBSD
* ZFSguru
Kernel
* ASLR and PIE
* Intel GPU Driver Update
* Native iSCSI Stack
* New Automounter
* PCI SR-IOV Infrastructure
* SDIO Driver
* UEFI Boot
* Updated vt(4) System Console
Architectures
* bhyve
* FreeBSD Host Support for OpenStack and OpenContrail
* FreeBSD on Chromebook
* FreeBSD/arm64
* FreeBSD/armv6hf
* SMP on Multi-Core ARM Systems
Userland Programs
* auditdistd(8)
* External Toolchain Improvements
* Forward Port FreeBSD GCC
* FreeBSD Test Suite
* LLDB Debugger Port
Ports
* Chromium
* FreeBSD Ada Ports
* GCC in the Ports Collection
* GNOME/FreeBSD
* KDE/FreeBSD
* libvirt/bhyve Support
* OpenAFS on FreeBSD
* The Graphics Stack on FreeBSD
* Using CentOS 6.5 as Linux Base
* Wine/FreeBSD
* Xfce/FreeBSD
Documentation
* ZFS Chapter of the Handbook
Miscellaneous
* FreeBSD Participating in Summer of Code 2014
* The FreeBSD Foundation
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team
Contact: FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team <admins@>
The FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team consists of the people
responsible for administering the machines that the project relies on
for its distributed work and communications to be synchronised. In this
quarter, the team has worked on the following:
* Assimilated master email configurations into a single source
control repository.
* Moved the FreeBSD web server CGI services to a new location
(sponsored).
* Further enhanced upon our internal monitoring utilities.
* Added a Russian pkg(8) mirror, hosted by Yandex.
* Moved the FreeBSD Foundation web services to a new server
(sponsored).
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Core Team
Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <core at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Core Team constitutes the project's "Board of
Directors",
responsible for deciding the project's overall goals and direction as
well as managing specific areas of the FreeBSD project landscape.
The first quarter of 2014 was very active for the Core Team. John
Baldwin and David Chisnall kept coordinating the work required for
providing a newer version of X.Org for 9.x and 10.x systems. Now that
vt(4), a successor to syscons(4) that offers a KMS-enabled console, has
been merged to both stable/9 and stable/10, an alternative pkg(8)
repository is in preparation for wider testing of vt(4) and the new
X.Org version. In addition to that, John Baldwin published the policy
on licenses for new files and files with non-standard licenses. Thanks
to the efforts of Gavin Atkinson, FreeBSD has again made it into the
Google Summer of Code program, for the tenth time. David Chisnall
reported that both libc++ and libstdc++ can now be built, as all of the
standards-compliant implementations of the required numerical functions
have been added.
The Core Team conducted an annual review among the Project teams and
hats, where team members had to declare whether they wished to continue
their service. As a result, Florian Smeets replaced David Wolfskill in
the lead role of the Postmaster Team, and Glen Barber assumed the head
Release Engineer position from Ken Smith. The Core Team congratulates
Florian and Glen, and thanks David and Ken for their long-standing
work.
The Core Team approved chartering the Ports Security Team, which is
established to maintain security updates for the ported applications.
In coordination with the Port Management Team, pkg_tools was eventually
deprecated and tagged with an End-of-Life date, in order to clear the
way for pkg(8). The Port Management Team also requested a way to make
it possible to track userland ABI and KBI changes reliably for the
Ports Collection. Ideally this can be achieved by increasing the value
of __FreeBSD_version on each fix, therefore the corresponding
discussion concluded in freezing the ABI note tag for releases in order
to keep the size of binary patches for freebsd-update(8) low. A related
Errata Notice is about to be published soon.
Only a single commit bit was taken for safekeeping. We did not have new
committers to the src/ repository in this quarter.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Documentation Engineering Team
URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-doc/2014-February/023265.html
Contact: FreeBSD Documentation Engineering Team <doceng at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Documentation Engineering Team is responsible for defining
and following up on the documentation goals for the committers in the
Documentation project. The team is pleased to announce a new member --
Warren Block. In early March, the FreeBSD Documentation Engineering
Team members assumed responsibility for the FreeBSD Webmaster Team.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Port Management Team
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/portmgr
URL: http://plus.google.com/communities/108335846196454338383
Contact: Thomas Abthorpe <portmgr-secretary at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Frederic Culot <culot at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: FreeBSD Port Management Team <portmgr at FreeBSD.org>
The role of the FreeBSD Port Management Team is to ensure that the
FreeBSD Ports Developer community provides a ports collection that is
functional, stable, up-to-date and full-featured. It is also to
coordinate among the committers and developers who work on it.
The ports tree slowly approaches the 25,000 ports threshold, while the
PR count exceeds 1,800. In the first quarter, we added four new
committers, took in three commit bits for safe keeping, and reinstated
one commit bit.
In January, the longest serving port manager, Joe Marcus Clarke,
stepped down from his active duties on the team. At a similar time
Ion-Mihai Tetcu also stepped down from his duties. Fortunately, as a
result of the first portmgr-lurkers intake, we were able to replace
them with Mathieu Arnold and Antoine Brodin.
Commencing March 1, the second intake of portmgr-lurkers started active
duty on portmgr for a four month duration. The next two candidates are
Alexey Dokuchaev and Frederic Culot.
This quarter also saw the release of the first quarterly branch, namely
2014Q1. This branch is intended to provide a stable and high-quality
ports tree, with patches related to security fixes as well as packaging
and runtime fixes being backported from head.
Ongoing maintenance goes into redports.org, including QAT runs and
ports and security updates.
Open tasks:
1. As previously noted, many PRs continue to languish. We would like
to see committers dedicate themselves to closing as many as
possible.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Postmaster Team
Contact: FreeBSD Postmaster Team <postmaster at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Postmaster Team is responsible for mail being correctly
delivered to the committers' email addresses, ensuring that the mailing
lists work, and should take measures against possible disruptions of
project mail services, such as having troll-, spam- and virus-filters.
In the first quarter of 2014, the team has implemented these items that
may be interest of the general public:
* Continued a discussion on current and possible future mail and spam
filtering.
* Discovered more of what needs to be done for a new year (with
respect to email archives), did what we could, and recorded the
steps for next time.
* Added Kubilay Kocak to donations, requested by Pietro Cerutti.
* Added Warren Block to doceng.
* Made sure portmgr receives bounces for pkg-fallout messages.
* Created a jenkins-admin mail alias.
* Enabled Mailman password reminder emails again.
* Discovered that all Mailman cron jobs were disabled in November
during upgrades. Enabled those again. This caused problems like
digests not being sent.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/9.3R/schedule.html
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/9.3R/todo.html
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.
In early January, the team became aware of several last-minute
showstopper issues in FreeBSD 10.0, which led to an extension in the
final release builds. FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE was announced on January 20,
two months behind the original schedule.
The schedule for the FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE cycle has been written and
posted to the website, and the release cycle will begin early May.
There is ongoing work to integrate support for embedded architectures
as part of the release build process. At this time, support exists for
a number of ARM kernels, in particular the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone,
and WandBoard.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
Jenkins Continuous Integration for FreeBSD
URL: https://jenkins.FreeBSD.org
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Jenkins#Jenkins_for_FreeBSD_status
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Jenkins#Presentations_and_Working_Groups
URL:
http://empt1e.blogspot.ru/2014/03/using-jenkins-libvirt-slave-plugin-with.html
URL: http://jenkins-ci.org/
URL: http://www.ansible.com/
Contact: Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Jenkins Administrators <jenkins-admin at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: FreeBSD Testing <freebsd-testing at FreeBSD.org>
Jenkins is a framework used by many companies and open source projects
for Continuous Integration (CI). CI allows developers to commit code to
a Source Code Management (SCM) system such as Subversion, and then have
automated programs check out, build, and test the code. Jenkins is
implemented in the Java language.
Ed Maste reviewed some CI work that Craig Rodrigues had done for the
FreeNAS project with Jenkins, and encouraged him to set up something
similar for the FreeBSD Project. With the help of the FreeBSD Cluster
Administration Team, he set up a FreeBSD machine running two bhyve
virtual machines, jenkins-9.FreeBSD.org and jenkins-10.FreeBSD.org. He
set up software builds of head and several stable branches on these
machines. The status of these builds is visible on a web interface
accessible at jenkins.FreeBSD.org. When any of the builds fail, emails
are sent to freebsd-current or freebsd-stable. Emails are also sent
directly to the list of people who recently committed code to
Subversion since the last successful build.
As part of the Jenkins setup, Craig Rodrigues encountered problems with
running Java on FreeBSD 9.2 and FreeBSD 10.0. Both problems stemmed
from changes to the FreeBSD Virtual Memory (VM) subsystem. On FreeBSD
9.2-RELEASE, running Jenkins under Java would cause the kernel to
panic. This was a known problem, and fixed in 9.2.-RELEASE-p3. On
FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE, Java processes would randomly crash. Disabling
the vm.pmap.pcid_enabled sysctl(3) variable seemed to fix the problem.
In kern/187238, Henrik Gulbrandsen submitted fixes to the FreeBSD VM to
address this problem. Konstantin Belousov committed the fixes to head,
where they are being tested now.
During the setup of the bhyve VMs which run Jenkins processes, Craig
Rodrigues wrote scripts to start bhyve VMs from the rc.d bootup
scripts, which were then published at GitHub.
On February 19, 2014, Craig Rodrigues notified the FreeBSD developers
that Jenkins was running in the FreeBSD cluster, and that they could
look at the web interface to see the status of builds.
On March 13, 2014, Craig Rodrigues gave a presentation of the Jenkins
work at the Bay Area FreeBSD User Group (BAFUG) in Mountain View,
California, USA. Video of the presentation was recorded and put online
by iXsystems.
Craig Rodrigues assembled a team of volunteers, jenkins-admin, to help
maintain jenkins.FreeBSD.org and expand the use of Jenkins CI used in
the FreeBSD cluster. jenkins-admin consists of the following people
working in the following areas:
* R. Tyler Croy is both a FreeBSD developer and a Jenkins developer.
He will be working on fixing bugs in Jenkins specific to FreeBSD.
He is first looking at fixing the libpam4j library which is used by
Jenkins to interface with the PAM system for user authentication.
The released version of libpam4j does not currently work on
FreeBSD.
* Li-Wen Hsu maintains the devel/jenkins port. He set up a Jenkins
build which runs the scan-build static analyzer which is part of
LLVM.
* Steven Kreuzer has experience administering Jenkins systems. He set
up several builds on jenkins.FreeBSD.org, including a Jenkins build
of the FreeBSD documentation. He is looking into using Ansible for
automatic provisioning of VMs running Jenkins in the FreeBSD
cluster.
* Craig Rodrigues will be running a Continuous Testing working group
at the FreeBSD Devsummit in Ottawa on May 15, 2014. He will also
give a Jenkins presentation on May 17, 2014. He is interested in
working with Julio Merino to integrate Jenkins and Kyua. They have
exchanged some emails about this on the freebsd-testing list.
* Steve Wills maintains the devel/jenkins-lts port. He has
implemented several builds at jenkins.FreeBSD.org which detect
commits to the FreeBSD ports repository, and then build the ports
tree using Poudri?re.
At the end of March, Roman Bogorodskiy reported to jenkins-admin that
he has successfully run the Jenkins libvirt plugin with his libvirt
modifications to integrate with bhyve. He provided a link to a blog
posting where he described his experience.
This project is sponsored by iXsystems, Inc.
Open tasks:
1. Obtain certificates for LDAP and web servers, to replace
self-signed certificates.
2. Set up more Jenkins builds of the FreeBSD base repository on
different branches and with different configurations.
3. Set up more Jenkins builds of the FreeBSD ports repository on
different FreeBSD versions.
4. Integrate with Kyua, so that Jenkins can run Kyua tests and report
the results directly in the native Jenkins web UI where test
results are reported.
5. Write scripts which can take a Jenkins build of FreeBSD, and boot
the results in a bhyve VM or on real hardware.
6. Fix libpam4j on FreeBSD.
7. Continuous Testing working group at Devsummit on May 15, 2014
8. Jenkins presentation at BSDCan on May 17, 2014
__________________________________________________________________
ZFSguru
URL: http://zfsguru.com/
Contact: Jason Edwards <sub.mesa at gmail.com>
ZFSguru is a multifunctional server appliance with a strong emphasis on
storage. It wants to deliver all the great BSD and ZFS technology to a
wider audience, while at the same time pleasing more advanced users as
well with unique features and customization.
A "vanilla" ZFSguru installation comes with only Samba and a
web-interface setup, but can be extended easily by installing addons
called "services" to add functionality as desired. This prevents
users
from running programs they do not need and do not want. Advanced users
can still use ZFSguru as they would a normal FreeBSD installation with
a 100% ZFS setup ("Root-on-ZFS"). ZFSguru does not strip away
anything,
and uses a GENERIC-like kernel with only some additional settings added
like InfiniBand networking, Device Polling and AltQ. This means you can
use a ZFSguru installation as you would use a FreeBSD installation.
In the first month of 2014, ZFSguru has released beta9 version of the
web interface. This release brings vastly improved support for Samba
and NFS configuration. In particular, it adds a convenient
drag-and-drop interface for Samba permissions. This allows novice users
to configure access to shares in various configurations. It allows both
control and usability, with no manual being necessary in order to
operate it. This is the ZFSguru style.
New system versions have been released, based on FreeBSD 9.2, 10.0, and
head. The experimental head version has vt(4) and X.org 7.12.4 and the
Intel/Radeon KMS graphics drivers. That is, the latest and greatest of
FreeBSD graphics development. The ZFSguru project plans to release
stable/10 builds in the near future which also have the MFCed patches
for vt(4), the KMS-enabled system console with Unicode support. Please
see the vt(4) entry for more information.
Support for ZFS version 5000 is now universal across 9.2, 10.0 and head
builds. LZ4 compression is the key feature for ZFS version 5000.
Otherwise users are advised to keep their pool versions as is, to be as
compatible as you can with as many ZFS platforms as possible. Only
upgrade the pool as you desire its functionality, forfeiting the
compatibility with older storage platforms.
Open tasks:
1. ZFSguru beta10 will increase the compatibility of newly added Samba
functionality with non-Gecko browsers. It will also fix some minor
bugs as well as speed up some pages by having a redesigned remote
database system called GuruDB.
2. ZFSguru beta11 will add the one major feature still missing in
ZFSguru: the Migration Manager. This allows users to maintain a
file with all the configuration of their ZFSguru installation. It
can be used like a firmware -- restoring the machine to the exact
state and configuration of the snapshot configuration. It allows
users to maintain a backup of their ZFSguru configuration and
allows upgrading to a newer ZFSguru system version without any
hassle.
3. Automated system builds should bring more system image releases.
4. New website with new forum and new login system.
5. Developer website with GitLab setup, allowing bug reports, code
contributions, wiki, and wall messages. Note that GitLab has also
been provided as a ZFSguru service, for those interested in trying
GitLab.
__________________________________________________________________
ASLR and PIE
URL:
http://0xfeedface.org/blog/lattera/2014-04-03/awesome-freebsd-aslr-progress
URL: https://github.com/lattera/freebsd/tree/soldierx/lattera/aslr
URL: https://github.com/opntr/opBSD/tree/op/stable/10-aslr
Contact: Shawn Webb <lattera at gmail.com>
Contact: Oliv?r Pint?r <oliver.pntr at gmail.com>
Address space layout randomization (ASLR) is a computer security
technique involved in protection from buffer overflow attacks. In order
to prevent an attacker from reliably jumping to a particular exploited
function in memory, ASLR involves randomly arranging the positions of
key data areas of a program, including the base of the executable and
the positions of the stack, heap, and libraries, in a process' address
space.
We have added ASLR support to all architectures. As the primary
developers behind this feature have the most access to amd64, the focus
of development is on the amd64 architecture. Other architectures, such
as ARM, have known bugs with our current ASLR implementation and we are
working hard to fix them. We added support for Position-Independent
Executables (PIEs) in a number of applications in base.
Open tasks:
1. Shawn has access to a Raspberry Pi (RPI). PIE is 90% broken. Debug
and fix major issues on the RPI. The existing NX stack protections
are not obeyed on RPI. Properly implemented ASLR requires a NX
stack.
2. Shawn will be receiving a sparc64 box on April 6, 2014. He will
test ASLR on sparc64, identifying and fixing any bugs that pop up.
3. Oliv?r has identified one or more bugs with the Linuxulator. He
will be looking into that and fixing those.
4. Shawn will be cleaning up code and adding support for PIE to more
applications in base. He will also add PIE support to the ports
framework for general consumption.
5. Shawn will be giving a presentation regarding ASLR at BSDCan 2014.
__________________________________________________________________
Intel GPU Driver Update
Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib at FreeBSD.org>
The project to update the Intel graphics chipset driver (i915kms) to a
recent snapshot of the Linux upstream code continues. Progress was
delayed by external circumstances, but it is hoped to reach a useful
milestone in the near future.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
Native iSCSI Stack
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Native%20iSCSI%20target
Contact: Edward Tomasz Napieral/a <trasz at FreeBSD.org>
The new FreeBSD in-kernel iSCSI stack was functionally complete in
FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE, but ongoing enhancements and bug fixes are being
committed to FreeBSD head, with a plan to merge them back to stable/10
in time for FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE.
Many issues have been resolved, including very slow operation with data
digests enabled, bugs in persistent reservations which impacted Hyper-V
Failover Cluster, and a negotiation problem affecting Dell Equallogic
users.
There have also been numerous enhancements, such as support for
redirections, which are necessary for some High Availability setups,
and the ability to modify session parameters in the iscsictl utility.
Previously it was necessary to remove the session and add it again.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
New Automounter
Contact: Edward Tomasz Napieral/a <trasz at FreeBSD.org>
The automount project is nearing the functional prototype stage, and a
call for testing is expected in the next month. The userspace portion
consists of the automountd(8) daemon, which is designed to be fully
compatible with its counterparts in OS X, Solaris, and Linux, and which
is nearly complete. Work on the kernel component continues.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
PCI SR-IOV Infrastructure
URL: https://github.com/rysto32/freebsd/tree/iov_ixgbe
Contact: Ryan Stone <rstone at FreeBSD.org>
PCI Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) is an optional part of the
PCIe standard that provides hardware acceleration for the
virtualization of PCIe devices. When SR-IOV is in use, a function in a
PCI device (known as a Physical Function, or PF) will present multiple
Virtual PCI Functions (VF) on the PCI bus. These VFs are fully
independent PCI devices that have access to the resources of the PF.
For example, on a network interface card, VFs could transmit and
receive packets independent of the PF.
The most obvious use case for SR-IOV is virtualization. A hypervisor
like bhyve could instantiate a VF for every VM and use PCI passthrough
to assign the VFs to the VMs. This would allow multiple VMs to share
access to the PCI device without having to do any expensive
communication with the hypervisor, greatly increasing performance of
performing I/O from a VM.
There are two parts to this project. The first is implementing an API
in the PCI subsystem for creating VFs and configuring standard PCI
features like BARs. The second part is updating individual drivers for
PCI devices that support SR-IOV to configure their VFs. For example, a
network interface driver will typically have to assign a MAC address to
a VF and configure the interface to route packets destined for that MAC
address to the VF.
At this point only SR-IOV support for the ixgbe(4) driver is planned.
The PCI subsystem API is designed to be generic and should support
SR-IOV on any device, but fairly extensive driver work is necessary to
support SR-IOV, which is currently not planned due to lack of time and
hardware.
At present, ixgbe(4) is able to create VFs and the ixgbevf driver is
able to pass traffic. There is still a fair amount of work to support
VLAN tags, multicast addresses, and other features on the VFs. Also,
the VF configuration needs to be better integrated with the PF
initialization path to ensure that resets of the PF do not interrupt
operation of the VFs.
This project is sponsored by Sandvine, Inc.
__________________________________________________________________
SDIO Driver
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/SDIO
URL: https://github.com/kibab/freebsd/tree/mmccam
Contact: Ilya Bakulin <ilya at bakulin.de>
SDIO is an interface designed as an extension of the existing SD card
standard, allowing connection of different peripherals to the host with
the standard SD controller. Peripherals currently sold on the general
market include WLAN/BT modules, cameras, fingerprint readers, and
barcode scanners. The FreeBSD driver is implemented as an extension to
the existing MMC bus, adding a lot of new SDIO-specific bus methods. A
prototype of the driver for the Marvell SDIO WLAN/BT (Avastar 88W8787)
module is also being developed, using the existing Linux driver as a
reference.
SDIO card detection and initialization already work; most needed bus
methods are implemented and tested.
The WiFi driver is able to load firmware onto the card and initialize
it. Migration of the MMC stack to the new locking model is necessary in
order to work with SDIO cards effectively. The FreeBSD CAM
implementation is believed to be a good choice. There is ongoing work
to implement an MMC transport for CAM.
Open tasks:
1. SDIO stack: finish CAM migration. The XPT layer is almost ready.
What is missing is a SIM module, for which a modified version of
the SDHCI controller driver will be used, and a peripheral module,
where porting the mmcsd(4) driver is required.
2. Marvell SDIO WiFi: connect it to the FreeBSD network stack, write
the code to implement required functions, such as sending and
receiving data, network scanning and so on.
__________________________________________________________________
UEFI Boot
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/UEFI
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at FreeBSD.org>
The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) provides boot- and
run-time services for x86 computers, and is a replacement for the
legacy BIOS. This project will adapt the FreeBSD loader and kernel boot
process for compatibility with UEFI firmware, found on contemporary
servers, desktops, and laptops.
Starting with Rui Paulo's i386 EFI loader, Benno Rice developed a
working proof-of-concept amd64 loader in 2013 under sponsorship from
the FreeBSD Foundation. After refinement, that work has now been merged
from the projects/uefi Subversion branch into FreeBSD head. The project
includes the infrastructure to build a UEFI-enabled loader, and the
kernel-side changes to parse metadata provided by the loader.
A number of integration tasks remain, with a plan to have UEFI
installation and boot support merged to stable/10 in time for FreeBSD
10.1-RELEASE.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Document manual installation, including dual-boot configurations.
2. Implement chain-loading from UFS/ZFS file systems.
3. Integrate UEFI configuration with the FreeBSD installer.
4. Support secure boot.
__________________________________________________________________
Updated vt(4) System Console
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Newcons
Contact: Aleksandr Rybalko <ray at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ed Schouten <ed at FreeBSD.org>
vt(4) is a modern replacement for the existing, quite old, virtual
terminal emulator called syscons(4). Initially motivated by the lack of
Unicode support and infrastructural issues in syscons(4), the project
was later expanded to cover the new requirement to support Kernel Mode
Setting (KMS).
The project is now in head, stable/10 and stable/9 branches. Hence,
vt(4) can be tested by using the VT kernel configuration (i386 and
amd64) or by replacing two lines in the GENERIC kernel configuration
file:
device sc
device vga
with the following ones:
device vt
device vt_vga
Or, to use for UEFI testing, add the following lines instead:
device vt
device vt_efifb
Major highlights:
* Unicode support.
* Double-width character support for CJK characters.
* xterm(1)-like terminal emulation.
* Support for Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) drivers (i915kms, radeonkms).
* Support for different fonts per terminal window.
* Simplified drivers.
Brief status of supported architectures and hardware:
* amd64 (VGA/i915kms/radeonkms) -- works.
* ARM framebuffer -- works.
* i386 (VGA/i915kms/radeonkms) -- works.
* IA64 -- untested.
* MIPS -- untested.
* PPC and PPC64 -- work, but without X.Org yet.
* SPARC -- works on certain hardware (e.g., Ultra 5).
* vesa(4) -- in progress.
* i386/amd64 nVidia driver -- not supported. VGA should be used (VESA
planned).
* Xbox framebuffer driver -- will be deleted as unused.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Create sub-directories for vt(4) under /usr/share/ to store key
maps and fonts.
2. Implement the remaining features supported by vidcontrol(1).
3. Write the vt(4) manual page. (This is in progress.)
4. Support direct handling of keyboard by the kbd device (without
kbdmux(4)).
5. CJK fonts. (This is in progress).
6. Address performance issues on some architectures.
7. Switch to vt(4) by default.
__________________________________________________________________
bhyve
URL: http://www.bhyve.org/
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTOiSyu0-MA
Contact: Peter Grehan <grehan at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Neel Natu <neel at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Tycho Nightingale <tychon at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Allan Jude <freebsd at allanjude.com>
bhyve is a Type-1 hypervisor that runs on the FreeBSD platform. It
currently only runs FreeBSD (9.x or later) and Linux guests; current
development efforts aim at widening support for other x86 64-bit
operating systems. After a great deal of work by all involved, bhyve
was shipped as part of FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE. Increased interest in
bhyve and the first usable versions have provided great feedback and
many bug reports.
A number of important improvements have been made to bhyve this
quarter:
* Optionally ignore accesses to unimplemented MSRs
* Support soft power-off via the ACPI S5 state for bhyve guests
* Graceful shutdown via ACPI on SIGTERM
* Fix an issue with virtio-blk devices on Linux guests with more than
4GB of RAM
* Increase the block-layer backend maximum requests to match AHCI
command queue depth
* Add SMBIOS support
* Improve support for nmdm, opening the tty non-blocking
* Add HPET device emulation
* Implement the "Virtual Interrupt Delivery" and "Posted
Interrupt
Processing" VT-x features on newer Intel CPUs
* Add support for booting FreeBSD/i386 guests
* Add virtualized XSAVE support for features like AVX
* Add Support for booting from ZFS with bhyveload
Open tasks:
1. Improve documentation.
2. Write Handbook chapter for bhyve.
3. Merge fixes and features back to stable/10.
4. Support for booting with UEFI instead of userspace loaders.
5. CSM BIOS boot support for FreeBSD (which has no UEFI support
currently).
6. Add support for virtio-scsi.
7. Improve virtio-net, add offload features, support multiple queues.
8. Implement Intel 82580 and e1000 NIC emulation.
9. Netmap support.
10. Flexible networking backend: wanproxy, vhost-net.
11. Improve resource accounting.
12. Move to a single process model, instead of bhyveload and bhyve.
13. Support running bhyve as non-root.
14. Add filters for popular VM file formats (VMDK, VHD, QCOW2).
15. Implement an abstraction layer for video (no X11 or SDL in base
system).
16. Support for VNC as a video output.
17. Implement USB and Sound.
18. Suspend/resume support.
19. Live Migration.
20. Nested VT-x support (bhyve in bhyve).
21. Support for other architectures (ARM, MIPS, PPC).
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Host Support for OpenStack and OpenContrail
URL: http://www.openstack.org/
URL: http://www.opencontrail.org/
URL: https://github.com/Semihalf/openstack-devstack
URL: https://github.com/Semihalf/openstack-nova
URL: https://github.com/Semihalf/contrail-vrouter
URL: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/freebsd-compute-node
Contact: Grzegorz Bernacki <gjb at semihalf.com>
Contact: Micha? Dubiel <md at semihalf.com>
Contact: Dominik Ermel <der at semihalf.com>
Contact: Rafa? Jaworowski <raj at semihalf.com>
OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of
compute, storage, and networking resources in a data center.
OpenContrail is a network virtualization (SDN) solution comprising a
network controller, virtual router, and analytics engine, which can be
integrated with cloud orchestration systems like OpenStack or
CloudStack.
The goal of this work is to make FreeBSD a fully supported compute host
for OpenStack using OpenContrail virtualized networking. The main areas
of development are:
* Libvirt hypervisor driver for bhyve.
* Support for bhyve (via the libvirt compute driver) and the FreeBSD
platform in overall in nova-compute.
* Port OpenContrail vRouter (forwarding plane kernel module) to
FreeBSD.
* Port OpenContrail Agent (network controller node) to FreeBSD.
* Integration, performance optimization.
The current state of development allows for a working demo of OpenStack
with compute node component running on a FreeBSD host:
* The native bhyve hypervisor is driven by a nova-compute component
for spawning guest instances using libvirt and a nova-network
component for providing simple networking using bridges between
guest VMs.
* QEMU might also be used instead of bhyve this way.
* The main goal on the networking side is to use the OpenContrail
solution, compliant with the modern OpenStack networking API
("neutron").
Also, an initial port of the OpenContrail vRouter kernel module has
been completed. It successfully handles all networking on the host.
This project is sponsored by Juniper Networks.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on Chromebook
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/Chromebook
Contact: Ruslan Bukin <br at FreeBSD.org>
One model of Chromebook is an ARMv7 Cortex-A15 personal computer
powered by a Samsung Exynos 5 Dual System-on-Chip. As of the current
status of this project, such laptops can be booted with FreeBSD from
USB flash -- it works stably (including SMP) and it can build
third-party applications. The display and keyboard work.
Thanks to Peter Grehan for providing hardware.
Open tasks:
1. Implement keyboard polling mode.
2. Add support for the upcoming second generation of Chromebook.
3. Write SD, SATA drivers.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/arm64
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/projects/arm64/
URL: https://github.com/zxombie/aarch64-freebsd-sandbox
Contact: Andrew Turner <andrew at FreeBSD.org>
Arm64 is the name of the in-progress port of FreeBSD to the ARMv8 CPU
when it is in AArch64 mode. Until recently, all ARM CPU designs were
32-bit only. With the introduction of the ARMv8 architecture, ARM has
added a new 64-bit mode. This new mode has been named AArch64.
Progress has been good on getting FreeBSD to build and run on the ARM
Foundation model. FreeBSD is able to be built for this architecture,
however, it requires a number of external tools including objdump(1)
and ld(1). These tools are provided by an external copy of binutils
until replacements can be written.
FreeBSD will run the early boot on the Foundation model. The loader has
been ported to the AArch64 UEFI environment and can load and run the
kernel. The kernel is able to create the initial page tables to be able
to run from virtual memory. It can then execute C code to parse the
memory map provided by the loader. This is as far as the kernel
currently boots.
This work is now happening in the FreeBSD Subversion repository in a
project branch, see the links.
Open tasks:
1. Implement an initial pmap(9) layer.
2. Write the missing machine-dependent code.
3. Test on real hardware.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/armv6hf
Contact: Andrew Turner <andrew at FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD has been updated to allow it to use the VFP variant of the ARM
EABI ABI. The VFP unit is the ARM hardware to perform floating-point
operations. This changes the ABI to improve the performance of code
that uses floating-point operations. By default, FreeBSD already uses
the ARM EABI on all releases from 10.0.
This is important for FreeBSD/arm users running code with
floating-point operations on ARMv6 or ARMv7 SoC systems. It removes the
need for the slow software floating-point support in libc. This is
mostly compatible with the existing ABI, with the exception of how
floating-point values are passed into functions. Because no
floating-point values are passed to the kernel, the armv6 and armv6hf
kernels will work with either userland.
As part of this change, some support functions have been updated to use
the VFP unit when available. The existing armv6 target architecture
will be kept for cases where the SoC lacks a VFP unit, or existing
binaries that are incompatible with the new ABI.
Open tasks:
1. Testing.
2. More testing.
__________________________________________________________________
SMP on Multi-Core ARM Systems
URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arm/2014-April/007886.html
Contact: Ian Lepore <ian at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Olivier Houchard <cognet at ci0.org>
Contact: Wojciech Macek <wma at semihalf.com>
FreeBSD now supports Symmetrical MultiProcessing (SMP) on a variety of
ARM multi-core systems. The effort to bring SMP to ARM has been
underway for quite some time, but a major push by the FreeBSD ARM
developer community over the past two months has resulted in robust
production-ready SMP support.
An ever-growing number of ARM-based development boards and small
low-power computer systems are available with multi-core processors.
FreeBSD is now able to make good use of all that computing power,
making such systems more attractive to both end users and vendors
looking to create products based on similar designs.
As of r264138 in FreeBSD head, SMP is now enabled by default in the
configuration files for all currently-supported systems that have
multi-core processors. This includes systems based on the following
processor families:
* Allwinner A20
* Freescale i.MX6
* Marvell Armada XP
* Samsung Exynos 5
* Texas Instruments OMAP4
We plan to merge this work to stable/10 in time for 10.1-RELEASE.
This project is sponsored by Microsemi, Inc., and Semihalf sp.j.
__________________________________________________________________
auditdistd(8)
Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at FreeBSD.org>
The auditdistd(8) daemon is responsible for distributing audit trail
files over TCP/IP networks securely and reliably.
The daemon now supports client-side certificates, which can be used to
automatically configure the receiver side -- the directory name for
received trail files is determined based on the commonName field in
client's certificate. There is no need any more to add every sender to
the receiver's configuration file.
The sender's functionality was extended to allow sending audit trail
files to multiple receivers.
Complete Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) support is now implemented,
including full certificate chain verification, Certificate Revocation
Lists (CRL) verification at every level and support for multiple
Certificate Authority (CA) certificates.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
External Toolchain Improvements
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/ExternalToolchain
Contact: Warner Losh <imp at FreeBSD.org>
Building on the work that Brooks Davis did to enable external Clang
toolchains, this project hopes to generalize that to GCC, as well as
support different versions of these compilers simultaneously for the
FreeBSD base system and the kernel. We also hope get to the point that
a port can be cross-compiled entirely from scratch with no initial
binary artifacts.
Open tasks:
1. Setup Subversion project repository.
2. Fix issues with differences of interpretation of the -B argument
between GCC and Clang.
3. Support building the entire tree based only on xdev-built
compilers.
4. Support building the entire tree based only on ports-built GCC
compilers.
5. Support full bootstrapping of FreeBSD to new platforms.
__________________________________________________________________
Forward Port FreeBSD GCC
Contact: Warner Losh <imp at FreeBSD.org>
Not all of the FreeBSD changes to GCC have been reflected upstream. A
large amount of the platform support as well as a couple of minor
improvements like the kernel formatting checker need to be forward
ported (and if possible, moved upstream into GCC).
We will be targeting the FreeBSD ports tree lang/gcc* ports for these
efforts to (optionally) include them in these builds. Some variation
from normal builds may be required due to bootstrapping issues when
combined with the external toolchain enhancements project.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Test Suite
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/TestSuite
URL: http://kyua1.nyi.FreeBSD.org/
URL:
http://julipedia.meroh.net/2014/01/freebsd-test-suite-goals-and-planning.html
URL:
https://drive.google.com/a/meroh.net/#folders/0B08g-X1kPkSYNmlEdTB5RjlFbkk
Contact: Julio Merino <jmmv at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Test Suite project aims to equip FreeBSD with a
comprehensive collection of tests that are easy to run out of the box
and during the development of the system. The test suite is installed
into /usr/tests/ and the kyua(1) command-line tool (devel/kyua in the
Ports Collection) is used to run them. See the project page for more
details.
Since the last status report, we have been hard at work polishing the
framework in many different areas. The highlights are:
* A roadmap for the project has been prepared and published, see
links.
* Many tests have been added to the test suite thanks to the work of
various developers and, in particular, a good bunch of old tests
from src/tools/regression/ have been incorporated into the new test
suite. As of this writing, there are 509 test cases continuously
running.
* The testing infrastructure in the stable/10 branch has been synced
to head. It should now be possible to seamlessly MFC changes to the
stable branch along with their tests, if any.
* The testing cluster, which only issued amd64 builds, has been
extended to perform i386 builds as well. Additionally, a canary
machine has been put in place so that changes to the cluster
configuration can be properly validated before deployment.
* A tutorial on Kyua and the FreeBSD Test Suite was given at
AsiaBSDCon 2014. The tutorial materials are available for public
consumption, please consult the links.
* Both Kyua's and ATF's upstream sites have been moved to GitHub,
mostly due to the discontinuation of file downloads in Google Code.
Open tasks:
1. Enable the build of the test suite by default.
2. Add alerting for failed or missing test runs from the testing
cluster.
3. Add bhyve support to the testing cluster for faster turnaround
times.
4. Simplify and improve Kyua HTML reports. In particular, reports will
be coalesced into single HTML files for easier management and will
include more useful details for debugging. Such details are the
revision at which the system was built, the date and duration of
the whole run, or the list of installed packages, to mention a few
examples.
5. Add JUnit XML output to Kyua for better integration with Jenkins.
This work is actively ongoing and should be ready for prime time at
BSDCan 2014.
__________________________________________________________________
LLDB Debugger Port
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/lldb
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at FreeBSD.org>
LLDB is the debugger project associated with Clang/LLVM. It supports
the Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD platforms, with ongoing work on
Windows. It builds on existing components in the larger LLVM project,
for example using Clang's expression parser and LLVM's disassembler.
The majority of work since the last status update has been on bugfixes
and implementation of the remaining functionality missing on FreeBSD.
Most of these improvements are now in the LLDB snapshot in the base
system, which has been updated to upstream Subversion revision r202189.
Some highlights of the new update include:
* Improvements to the remote GDB protocol client.
* Bug fixes for big-endian targets.
* Initial support for libdispatch (GCD) queues in the debuggee.
* Add "step-avoid-libraries" setting.
* IO subsystem improvements (including initial work on a curses GUI).
* Support hardware watchpoints.
* Improved unwinding through hand-written assembly functions.
* Handle DW_TAG_unspecified_parameters for variadic functions.
* Fix Ctrl+C interrupting a running inferior process.
* Various bug fixes for memory leaks, LLDB segfaults, the C++
demangler, ELF core files, DWARF debug info, and others.
LLDB is currently not yet built by default and may be enabled by adding
WITH_LLDB= to src.conf(5). A port will be made available for those who
wish to track ongoing development more closely.
This project is sponsored by DARP/AFRL, SRI International, and
University of Cambridge.
Open tasks:
1. Add support for remote debugging (gdbserver-compatible
debugserver).
2. Add support for local and core file kernel debugging.
3. Implement, fix or test support on all non-amd64 architectures.
4. Verify cross-debugging.
5. Investigate and fix test suite failures.
6. Package LLDB as a port.
7. Enable by default in the base system for working architectures.
__________________________________________________________________
Chromium
URL: http://www.chromium.org/Home
URL: https://github.com/gliaskos/freebsd-chromium
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Chromium
Contact: Chromium on FreeBSD Team <freebsd-chromium at FreeBSD.org>
Chromium is the open source web browser project from which Google
Chrome draws its source code. The browsers share the majority of code
and features, though there are some minor differences in features and
they have different licensing. Over the last four years, the Chromium
team has been busy with porting Chromium to FreeBSD. This involves
patching the browser so that it runs on FreeBSD, tracking and
documenting security updates, and merging patches back upstream.
While there are already several browsers available for FreeBSD,
advantages of Chromium are:
* Quick response from upstream to security issues, resulting in
approximately bi-weekly updates.
* A testbed for security features of FreeBSD, like Capsicum. While
support for this capability and sandbox framework is currently not
included in the browser, a proof-of-concept implementation for an
early version of Chromium was realized within a single weekend.
George Liaskos and Ren? Ladan are currently busy with submitting the
remaining patches specific to FreeBSD back upstream. Apart from making
future updates easier, it sometimes also improves the overall code
quality.
Jonathan Anderson recently updated the Capsicum patches for Chromium
and is talking to upstream about them.
Open tasks:
1. Advocate FreeBSD. While patches are getting accepted by both humans
and bots, it is not an official platform so attitude varies from
developer to developer. While Ren? Ladan thinks it is a bit early,
it might be fruitful to investigate what is required to make
FreeBSD (and possibly OpenBSD) an official platform in terms of
both hardware and procedures.
2. If you feel comfortable with large source trees, you can try to
build the Git version of Chromium on FreeBSD. If you are also
comfortable with signing Google's Contributor License Agreement,
you can join in testing and submitting patches upstream.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Ada Ports
URL: http://www.dragonlace.net/
URL: http://www.spark-2014.org/about/
Contact: John Marino <marino at FreeBSD.org>
Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, wide-spectrum, and
object-oriented high-level computer programming language, extended from
Pascal and other languages, originally targeted at embedded and
real-time systems. The number of Ada ports in the collection has grown
significantly since the last report six months ago. There are almost 50
Ada-related ports now, with new ones getting added all the time.
The previous plan was to move from the GCC 4.7-based GNAT compiler to a
GCC 4.8-based one, but finally GCC 4.8 was skipped and now a GCC
4.9-based GNAT is the standard Ada compiler, which fully supports the
new ISO standard, Ada 2012. Moving to a newer compiler allowed several
important ports like PolyOrb and GPRBuild to be upgraded to the latest
available versions. In fact, almost every Ada port is currently at its
most recent upstream version.
For non-Windows-based Ada development, FreeBSD and DragonFly are now
undisputed as the go-to platforms. The other candidates are Debian and
Fedora, but there are few Ada softwares on those platforms that are not
also in the FreeBSD ports tree, and the FreeBSD versions are much
newer. The Ports Collection also features software not found anywhere
else such as the USAFA's Ironsides DNS server, libsparkcrypto,
matreshka, GNATDroid (Android cross-compiler) and several developer
libraries.
A desired addition to the Ada ports will be SPARK 2014 (see links),
which should cement FreeBSD as an option for professional,
safety-critical application development. This package should have its
first release by early summer.
__________________________________________________________________
GCC in the Ports Collection
URL: http://gcc.gnu.org/
Contact: Gerald Pfeifer <gerald at FreeBSD.org>
While the age old version of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) in the
base system is on its way out with FreeBSD 10 and later, there are many
users who want--and some platforms which need--to use GCC.
For that purpose there are various versions of GCC in the ports tree,
including lang/gcc46, lang/gcc47, lang/gcc48 and lang/gcc49 which track
upstream snapshots of the respective release branches, and more
importantly lang/gcc which serves as the canonical version of GCC and
is the default when a port requests USE_GCC=yes as well as for some
cases of USES=compiler.
With a lot of help from Christoph Moench-Tegeder who fixed many ports
and made a fair number respect CXXFLAGS, LDFLAGS and friends, we
managed to update the canonical version from GCC 4.6.4 to GCC 4.7.3.
Many of Christoph's fixes also benefit Clang and other modern
compilers.
For users of lang/gcc, this upgrade proved very smooth, and we
generally recommend using this port over version specific ones.
After ten years of service lang/gcc34 retired, as did lang/gcc44 after
half that timespan.
On a related note, with the help of John Marino, the license of the GCC
ports now properly reflects the combination of GPLv3 for the compiler
itself and GPLv3 with GCC Runtime Library Exception for the runtime.
The latter is the key in making it possible to use GCC for building and
distributing non-free software.
Open tasks:
1. Move lang/gcc from GCC 4.7 to GCC 4.8.
__________________________________________________________________
GNOME/FreeBSD
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/gnome
URL: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Jhbuild/FreeBSD
URL: https://github.com/jlmess77/mate-ports
URL: http://marcuscom.com/downloads/marcusmerge
Contact: FreeBSD GNOME Team <gnome at FreeBSD.org>
GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs
on top of a computer operating system. GNOME is part of the GNU Project
and can be used with various Unix-like operating systems, including
FreeBSD.
Preparations for merging GNOME 3 are moving forward. The work on the
documentation is falling behind a bit, but we got some solid feedback
on the rough work to keep this moving forward as well. In the meantime,
deprecation of ports that need the old GNOME 2 desktop ports has begun.
These ports will break when the GNOME desktop components are updated to
the GNOME 3 version.
Thanks to a combined effort by Ryan Lortie (GNOME developer), Ting-Wei
Lan (upstream contributor), and Koop Mast, we now have a
FreeBSD-powered JHbuild tinderbox. JHbuild is a build system that
allows building GNOME upstream code. Twice a day, it will attempt to
build Gnome components from a specific branch, usually the git master
branch, to catch compile issues. A positive side effect is that it lets
upstream know GNOME still lives on non-Linux systems. It also exposes
the GNOME code base to the Clang compiler and libc++. Since the start
of this project over a hundred issues have been fixed.
Gustau Perez has stepped up and put together a port set in the
"ports-experimental" tree of our development repository with GNOME
3.12. It was decided to polish GNOME 3.12. It will be merged when the
preparation work has (mostly) finished, and we are happy with the
stability of GNOME 3.12.
Gustau Perez also ported Cinnamon 2.0 to FreeBSD. It will appear in the
Ports Collection after GNOME 3 has been merged.
MATE 1.8 was released at the beginning of April, Eric Turgeon of
GhostBSD had volunteered to do that update for FreeBSD. Note that this
update is still based on GTK+, version 2. The GTK+ 3-based MATE is on
the roadmap for 1.10.
Open tasks:
1. Finish the work needed to be done before GNOME 3 can be merged at
all. Documentation work, port deprecation, and so on.
2. Finish porting of MATE 1.8.
3. Update Cairo to 1.12 in coordination with the Graphics Team.
__________________________________________________________________
KDE/FreeBSD
URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org/
URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org/area51.php
URL: http://portscout.freebsd.org/kde at freebsd.org.html
Contact: KDE/FreeBSD Team <kde at FreeBSD.org>
KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated
set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD,
Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and OS X systems. The KDE/FreeBSD Team have
continued to improve the experience of KDE software and Qt under
FreeBSD.
During this quarter, the team has kept most of the KDE and Qt ports
up-to-date, working on the following releases:
* KDE SC: 4.12.2, 4.12.3, and 4.12.4; Workspace: 4.11.6, 4.11.7, and
4.11.8
* Qt: 5.2.1
* KDevelop: 4.6.0
* Digikam (and KIPI-plugins): 3.5.0
As a result -- according to PortScout -- kde@ has 526 ports (up from
464), of which 98.86% are up-to-date (up from 88.15%). iXsystems
continues to provide a machine for the team to build packages and to
test updates. They have been providing the KDE/FreeBSD team with
support for quite a long time and we are very grateful for that.
A major change has been the deprecation of the KDE3 ports and the move
of the KDE4_PREFIX to LOCALBASE. Also, work on Qt5 continues to
maturity. Raphael Kubo da Costa has been working with upstream to
ensure Baloo (Nepomuk successor in KDE SC 4.13) compiles and runs on
non-Linux systems. His work not only benefits FreeBSD but other BSDs
and OS X.
As usual, the team is always looking for more testers and porters, so
please contact us and visit our home page (see links). It would be
especially useful to have more helping hands on tasks such as getting
rid of the dependency on the defunct HAL project and providing
integration with KDE's Bluedevil Bluetooth interface.
This project is sponsored by iXsystems, Inc.
Open tasks:
1. Update out-of-date ports, see PortScout for a list.
2. Work on Qt 5.
3. Make sure the whole KDE stack (including Qt) builds and works
correctly with Clang and libc++.
4. Remove the dependency on HAL.
__________________________________________________________________
libvirt/bhyve Support
URL: http://libvirt.org/drvbhyve.html
URL: http://libvirt.org/
URL: http://empt1e.blogspot.ru/search/label/libvirt
Contact: Roman Bogorodskiy <novel at FreeBSD.org>
Libvirt is a virtualization library providing a common API for various
hypervisors (Qemu/KVM, Xen, LXC, and others), and also a popular
library used by a number of projects. Libvirt 1.2.2, released on March,
2014, was the first release to include bhyve support. Enabling bhyve
support allows consumers to use bhyve in libvirt-ready applications
without major efforts.
Currently, libvirt supports almost all essential features of bhyve,
such as Virtual Machine lifecycle (start, stop), bridged networking,
and virtio/SATA driver support. The work continues to implement more
API calls and to cover more of features offered by bhyve.
Open tasks:
1. FreeBSD port of netcf is needed for adding interface driver support
to libvirt.
__________________________________________________________________
OpenAFS on FreeBSD
URL: http://openafs.org/
Contact: Benjamin Kaduk <bjk at FreeBSD.org>
AFS is a distributed network filesystem that originated from the Andrew
Project at Carnegie-Mellon University. OpenAFS is an open-source
implementation of the AFS protocol derived from IBM AFS, which was
released under the IBM Public License. OpenAFS on FreeBSD (the
net/openafs port) is suitable for light use, but is not yet production
ready.
We got a chance to pick up this porting project after some hiatus.
Recent work focused on investigating the bugs preventing the use of a
disk cache for caching file data. An internal "lookupname"
abstraction
was intended to return an unlocked, referenced vnode, but instead
returned a locked, referenced vnode, leading to various failure modes
depending on the number of kernel debugging options enabled.
Open tasks:
1. Track down an issue involving incorrect reference counts on the AFS
root vnode that cause warnings on shutdown.
2. Audit the locking in all the vnode operations code -- it is
expected that there remain some incorrectly locked areas, though
none that present visible issues under light load.
__________________________________________________________________
The Graphics Stack on FreeBSD
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/WITH_NEW_XORG
URL: http://trillian.chruetertee.ch/ports/browser/trunk
Contact: FreeBSD Graphics Team <graphics-team at FreeBSD.org>
On the kernel side, the Radeon KMS driver was merged in stable/9 and
will be available in FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE. Now both the 9.x and 10.x
branches share the same support for Intel and AMD GPUs.
The next big tasks are the updates of the DRM generic code and the i915
driver. Both are making good progress and the DRM update should
hopefully be ready for wider testing during April. An update of the
Radeon driver is on the to-do list, but nothing is scheduled yet.
On the ports tree and packages side, the update to Cairo 1.12 mentioned
in the last quarterly report is ready to be committed, as people who
tested it either reported improvements or no regressions. As a
reminder, the switch from Cairo 1.10 to 1.12 causes display artifacts
with xf86-video-intel 2.7.1, but fixes similar problems with other
hardware/driver combinations. Furthermore, Cairo 1.12 is required by
Pango 1.36.0, GTK+ 3.10 and Firefox 27.0. A "Heads up" mail will be
posted to the freebsd-x11 mailing-list when this update goes live.
In the graphics stack's ports development tree, new Mesa ports are
being worked on. Those ports are required to support GLAMOR (the
GL-based 2D acceleration library used by Radeon HD 7000+ cards for
instance) and OpenCL (using the GPU to perform non-graphical
calculations). We were able to execute some "Hello World" OpenCL
programs and play with OpenCL in darktable, but there are some
compatibility issues between Clover (Mesa's libOpenCL implementation)
and Clang/libc++.
We are preparing an alternate pkg(8) repository with packages built
with WITH_NEW_XORG. The goal is to ease the usage of the KMS drivers
and move forward with the graphics stack updates. The main pkg(8)
repository will still use the default setting (WITH_NEW_XORG set on
head, but not on the stable branches).
This will pave the way to the deprecation ofWITH_NEW_XORG and the
removal of the older stack. The current plan is to do this after
10.0-RELEASE End-of-Life, scheduled on January 31st, 2015. By that
time, the only supported releases will be 8.4-RELEASE, 9.3-RELEASE and
10.1-RELEASE. FreeBSD 9.3 and 10.1 will be fully equipped to work with
the newer stack. Unfortunately, FreeBSD 8.x misses the required kernel
DRM infrastructure: supporting X.Org here cripples progress on the
graphics stack and, once WITH_NEW_XORG is gone, we will not support 8.x
as a desktop any more. Therefore, please upgrade to 9.3 or 10.1 when
they are available.
Open tasks:
1. See the "Graphics" and "WITH_NEW_XORG" wiki pages for
up-to-date
information.
__________________________________________________________________
Using CentOS 6.5 as Linux Base
URL: http://github.com/xmj/linux-ports
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/187786
Contact: Johannes Meixner <xmj at chaot.net>
The Linux emulation layer relies on a Linux base distribution along
with Linux ports of relevant non-base software. Fedora 10 was imported
in 2006, and it shows -- current Linux software like Skype 4, Sublime
Text 2, or even modern games fail to run with the provided libraries.
CentOS 6.5 was released in December 2013 and will be supported until
2017, making it an ideal basis for an update to the ports
infrastructure. Built upon the work of Carlos Jacobo Puga Medina, all
ports using Linux have been updated to work with either Fedora 10 or
CentOS 6.5.
The goal of this project is to make CentOS 6.5 the default Linux
distribution, so that FreeBSD users can enjoy running modern Linux
binaries without having to resort to virtualization ? la VirtualBox, or
even dual-booting.
This project is sponsored by Goldener Grund O?.
Open tasks:
1. Clean up Mk/bsd.linux-*.mk and fix errors detected in ports/187786.
2. Revert making c6 the default (in the git repository).
3. Testing.
4. Review patches and import into the ports tree (any help
appreciated).
5. Make c6 the default (after sufficient testing) within the ports
tree.
__________________________________________________________________
Wine/FreeBSD
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Wine
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/i386-Wine
URL: http://www.winehq.org/
Contact: Gerald Pfeifer <gerald at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: David Naylor <dbn at FreeBSD.org>
Wine is a free and open source software application that aims to allow
applications designed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like
operating systems, such as FreeBSD. The Wine project has been in
maintenance mode this quarter and has updated the ports for the
following versions:
* Stable releases: 1.6.2
* Development releases: 1.7.9 through 1.7.15
The ports have packages built for amd64, available through the ports
emulators/i386-wine and emulators/i386-wine-devel.
Open tasks:
1. See the "Open Tasks" and "Known Problems" sections on
the Wine wiki
page.
2. FreeBSD/amd64 integration, consult the i386-Wine wiki page for the
details.
3. Port WoW64 (supporting Windows 32-bit and 64-bit from the same
port) and Wine64.
__________________________________________________________________
Xfce/FreeBSD
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Xfce
URL: https://svn.redports.org/olivierd/xfce4/
URL: https://people.freebsd.org/~olivierd/xfce-core-unstable.html
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=183690
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. The Xfce team continues
to keep each piece of the Xfce Desktop up to date.
The latest commits concerned:
* Applications:
- Midori (0.5.7)
- xfburn (0.5.0)
- xfce4-parole (0.5.4)
- xfce4-taskmanager (1.0.1)
- xfce4-tumbler (0.1.30)
* Panel plugins:
- xfce4-clipman-plugin (1.2.5)
- xfce4-equake-plugin (1.3.4)
- xfce4-wavelan-plugin (0.5.11)
- xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin (1.3.2)
We also follow development of core components (available in your
repository). See the links for documentation on how to upgrade those
libraries.
* garcon (0.3.0)
* libxfce4menu (4.11.1)
* libxfce4util (4.11.0)
* xfce4-appfinder (4.11.0)
* xfce4-desktop (4.11.4)
* xfce4-dev-tools (4.11.0)
* xfce4-panel (4.11.0)
* xfce4-parole (0.6.0)
* xfce4-settings (4.11.2)
* xfce4-session (4.11.0)
* xfce4-wm (4.11.1)
* xfce4-xkb-plugin (0.7.0)
Open tasks:
1. Add support of DragonFly for xfce4-taskmanger.
2. Finish replacing Tango icon theme with GNOME, in order to close
ports/183690 (see links, Midori remains to be fixed).
__________________________________________________________________
ZFS Chapter of the Handbook
URL: http://www.allanjude.com/zfs_handbook/zfs.html
URL: http://www.allanjude.com/talks/AsiaBSDCon_2014_-_WIP_-_ZFS_Handbook.pdf
Contact: Allan Jude <freebsd at allanjude.com>
Contact: Benedict Reuschling <bcr at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Warren Block <wblock at FreeBSD.org>
ZFS is one of the premier features of FreeBSD. The current
documentation in the Handbook and elsewhere online is severely lacking.
Much of the original documentation from Sun and Oracle has disappeared,
moved, or is about the proprietary version of ZFS.
New users have many questions about ZFS and yet there exists a great
deal more bad advice about ZFS than proper documentation. The current
ZFS chapter of the FreeBSD Handbook starts off with the required steps
to configure an i386 machine to run ZFS. This is more likely to scare
off a new user than to educate them about how to properly use ZFS.
At BSDCan 2013, the process of writing an entirely new chapter of the
Handbook on ZFS was started. Currently this chapter consists of
approximately 16,000 words covering all subcommands of the zpool(8) and
zfs(8) utilities, delegation, tuning and a section devoted to
definitions and explanations of the terms and features of ZFS.
The remaining section is the FAQ, to help users address the most common
problems they might run into with ZFS. It would be useful to hear
experiences, questions, misconceptions, gotchas, stumbling blocks, and
suggestions for the FAQ section from other users. Also, it would be
good to have a use cases section that highlights some of the cases
where ZFS provides advantages over traditional file systems.
Please send suggestions to the freebsd-doc mailing list.
This project is sponsored by ScaleEngine, Inc.
Open tasks:
1. Technical review by Matt Ahrens (co-creator of ZFS).
2. Improve delegation section.
3. Improve tuning section, add new sysctls added in head.
4. Add section on jails and the jailed property.
5. Add FAQ section.
6. Add "Use Cases" section.
7. General editing and review.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Participating in Summer of Code 2014
URL: http://gsoc.FreeBSD.org/
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2014
Contact: Gavin Atkinson <gavin at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Glen Barber <gjb at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Wojciech Koszek <wkoszek at FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD is pleased to have been accepted as a participating
organization in Google's Summer of Code 2014. This will be the tenth
time we have participated in the program, having been selected to
participate every year since its introduction.
This year, the administrators made a special attempt to spread the word
about Summer of Code around universities, including making contact with
around 350 mainly Polish, British, African and American universities to
advertise the Summer of Code program, with a particular focus on
FreeBSD's participation. We made contact with both technical
departments and student societies. Posters were produced in several
languages, and FreeBSD committers and users were encouraged to
distribute these posters around their local universities.
FreeBSD received a total of 39 proposals from students, and were
subsequently granted 15 slots from Google. We are now facing the
unpleasant challenge of trying to decide which of the 39 proposals to
select, taking into account the quality, desirability and feasibility
of each proposal, as well as ensuring we will be able to provide an
excellent mentoring experience to each selected student. All mentors
have volunteered to mentor, and we pair students with mentors primarily
based on the prospective mentor's areas of expertise, interest in the
project, also taking into account the desire to pair students up with
mentors in similar time zones in order to improve the student
experience. The final list of accepted students is expected to be
announced on the 21st April.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Foundation
URL: http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/
URL: http://freebsdjournal.com/
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. Most of the funding is used to support FreeBSD development
projects, conferences and developer summits, purchase equipment to grow
and improve the FreeBSD infrastructure, and provide legal support for
the Project.
We published the first issue of the FreeBSD Journal, our new on-line
FreeBSD magazine. The positive feedback from both the FreeBSD and
outside communities has been incredible. This quarter we began work on
articles and promotion for the second issue. We also started working on
a dynamic version of the magazine that can be read in many web browsers
including those that run on FreeBSD.
This year we are earmarking more funding towards FreeBSD advocacy and
education. You will see more literature, white papers, articles, and so
on to help promote FreeBSD.
The Foundation held a board meeting in Berkeley, California, in
January. We discussed longer term strategy and planning for the year.
We put together our 2014 budget with a plan of raising at least
$1,000,000 and spending $900,000.
Two Foundation funded projects were completed. The first, co-sponsored
by Google, integrated the Casper daemon into FreeBSD. The second was
auditdistd(8) improvements for the FreeBSD cluster.
Work continued on these Foundation-sponsored projects: Intel graphics
driver update by Konstantin Belousov, UEFI boot support for amd64 by Ed
Maste, autofs automounter and in-kernel iSCSI stack enhancements and
bug fixes by Edward Tomasz Napierala, and updated vt(4) system console
by Aleksandr Rybalko. A more detailed project update for each of the
above projects can be found within this quarterly status report.
We were a Gold Sponsor for NYCBSDCon 2014 in New York, February 8,
which was attended by several board members. We were represented at
SCALE in Los Angeles, February 22-23, and ICANN in Singapore, March
22-25.
We were a sponsor for AsiaBSDCon in Tokyo, March 15-16. Board member
Hiroki Sato was the conference organizer. Board members Kirk McKusick
and George V. Neville-Neil taught tutorials and Kirk gave a keynote.
Board member Dru Lavigne manned the foundation table and spoke at one
of the sessions.
We became a Gold+ sponsor for BSDCan 2014, May 16-17 and have started
reaching out to vendors to attend the developer summit that runs in the
two days before BSDCan.
Board members George, Kirk, and Robert Watson pushed to finish the
final draft of the next edition of their book "The Design and
Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System".
ITWire editor Sam Varghese published an interview with Kirk and
Foundation technical manager Ed Maste about the status of secure boot
on FreeBSD.
The FreeBSD Logo is now officially a registered trademark to represent
the FreeBSD operating system. We are working to expand the registration
beyond just the FreeBSD operating system, but currently still have to
use the "TM" symbol when using it on apparel and other
non-operating-system items. We continued reviewing requests and
granting permission to use FreeBSD trademarks.
After finishing the 10.0-RELEASE, Foundation system administrator and
release engineer Glen Barber began work on adding support for
FreeBSD/arm image builds as part of the release build process. As a
result of this work, FreeBSD/arm images are produced as part of the
weekly development snapshot builds, and are available from any of the
FreeBSD FTP mirrors. Supported kernel configurations currently include
BEAGLEBONE, RPI-B, PANDABOARD, WANDBOARD-QUAD, and ZEDBOARD.
George visited six large FreeBSD users in the Bay Area in February.
These meetings are conducted to help facilitate collaboration between
FreeBSD customers and the FreeBSD Project. It is an opportunity to
exchange information on what the customers are doing and what is being
worked on in the Project. It is also an opportunity to try to connect
customers with the appropriate FreeBSD developers who may be working on
areas of FreeBSD that interest these customers.
__________________________________________________________________
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