Brad Davis
2009-May-09 19:43 UTC
[FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD Status Reports January - March, 2009
FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report
Introduction
Since the last Status Reports there has been interesting progress in
FreeBSD Development. FreeBSD 7.2 was released just a few days ago. Some
of the highlights include: Support for superpages in the FreeBSD
Virtual Memory subsystem. The FreeBSD Kernel Virtual Address space has
been increased to 6GB on amd64. An updated jail(8) subsystem that
supports multi-IPv4/IPv6/noIP and much more. Lots of FreeBSD Developers
are in Ottawa, Canada attending the FreeBSD Developer Summit that is
before BSDCan. BSDCan officially starts tomorrow and should cover lots
of interesting topics, see the BSDCan Website for more information.
Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! We hope you enjoy
reading.
__________________________________________________________________
Projects
* Clang replacing GCC in the base system
* Device mmap() Extensions
* OpenBSM
* Release Engineering
* Sysinfo - a set of scripts which document your system
* TrustedBSD MAC Framework in GENERIC
* VFS/NFS DTrace Probes
* VirtualBox on FreeBSD
FreeBSD Team Reports
* FreeBSD BugBusting Team
Architectures
* FreeBSD/powerpc G5 Support
* FreeBSD/sparc64 UltraSPARC III support
Documentation
* Dutch Documentation Project
* German Documentation Project
* Hungarian Documentation Project
Google Summer of Code
* BSD-licensed text-processing tools
__________________________________________________________________
BSD-licensed text-processing tools
URL:
http://perforce.freebsd.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/
soc2008/gabor_textproc
Contact: G?bor K?vesd?n <gabor@FreeBSD.org>
Currently, grep is finished and is only waiting for a portbuild test.
It is known to be more or less feature complete, while it is much
smaller than the GNU version.
As for sort, there has been some progress with the complete rewrite and
it is lacking few options. Performance is to be measured, as well.
Open tasks:
1. Test grep on pointyhat.
2. Complete sort with the missing features.
3. Do performance measurements for sort and look for possible
optimization opportunities.
4. Test sort on pointyhat.
__________________________________________________________________
Clang replacing GCC in the base system
URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/BuildingFreeBSDWithClang
URL: http://git.hoeg.nl/?p=llvm-bmake
URL: http://clang.llvm.org/
Contact: Ed Schouten <ed@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Roman Divacky <rdivacky@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Pawel Worach <pawel.worach@gmail.com>
The last 3-4 months we've been working together with the LLVM
developers to discuss any bugs and issues we are experiencing with
their Clang compiler frontend. The FreeBSD project is looking at the
possibility to replace GCC with Clang as a system compiler. It can
compile 99% of the FreeBSD world and can compile booting kernel on
i386/amd64 but it still contains bugs and its C++ support is still
immature.
Ed is maintaining a patchset for the FreeBSD sources to replace cc(1)
by a Clang binary and bootstrap almost all sources with the Clang
compiler.
The LLVM developers are very helpful fixing most of the bugs we've
reported (over 100). Unfortunately we are currently blocked on some bug
reports that prevent us from building libc, libm, libcrypto and various
CDDL libraries with Clang but the FreeBSD kernel itself compiles and
boots.
Open tasks:
1. Testing Clang with compilation of various applications and
reporting bugs.
2. Testing the llvm-bmake branch to find more bugs.
3. Arranging an experimental ports build.
__________________________________________________________________
Device mmap() Extensions
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/pat/
Contact: John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
GPU device drivers are increasingly requiring more sophisticated
support for mapping objects into both userland and the kernel. For
example, memory used for textures often needs to be mapped
Write-Combining rather than Write-Back. I have recently created three
patches to provide several extensions.
The first patch allows device drivers to use a different VM object to
back specific mmap() calls instead of always using the device pager.
The second patch introduces a new VM object type that can map an
arbitrary set of physical address ranges. This can be used to let
userland mmap PCI BARs, etc. The third patch allows memory mappings to
use different caching modes (e.g. Write-Combining or Uncacheable).
Together I believe these patches provide the remaining pieces needed
for an Nvidia amd64 driver. They will also be useful for future Xorg
DRM support as well. The current set of patches can be safely merged
back to 7.x as well.
Currently I am waiting for review and feedback from several folks. I am
hopeful that these patches will be in HEAD soon, prior to the 8.0
freeze.
__________________________________________________________________
Dutch Documentation Project
URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/DutchDocumentationProject
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/nl/
URL:
http://p4web.freebsd.org/@md=d&cd=//&c=pFl@//depot/projects/docproj_nl/
?ac=83
Contact: Remko Lodder <remko@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ren? Ladan <rene@FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project is an ongoing project to
translate FreeBSD Documentation into the Dutch language.
The translation of the Handbook was completed last January. It is kept
up-to-date with the English version. Furthermore five articles and the
flyer have been translated.
Some initial work has been done to translate the website, but most
likely more translators are needed to fully realize it.
Open tasks:
1. Recruit more translators.
2. Keep the translations up-to-date with the English versions.
3. Finish the translation of the FAQ.
4. Translate more articles and maybe some books.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD BugBusting Team
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/support.html#gnats
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/BugBusting
URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~linimon/studies/prs/
URL:
http://people.freebsd.org/~linimon/studies/prs/recommended_prs.html
Contact: Mark Linimon <bugmeister@>
Contact: Remko Lodder <bugmeister@>
We continue to classify PRs as they arrive, with 'tags' corresponding
to the kernel subsystem, or man page references for userland PRs. These
tags, in turn, produce lists of PRs sorted both by tag and by manpage
Mark Linimon (linimon@) has created special reports for the Release
Engineering Team to help focus on regressions and other areas of
interest relating to the release of FreeBSD 7.2 in the coming weeks.
This is a refinement of the 'customized reports for developers'
announced in the last status report.
A full list of all the automatically generated reports is also
available. Any recommendations for reports which do not currently exist
but which would be beneficial are welcomed.
Mark Linimon also continues attempting to define the general problem
and investigating possible new work flow models, and will be presenting
on the subject at BSDCan.
The list of PRs recommended for committer evaluation by the BugBusting
team continues to receive new additions. This list contains PRs, mostly
with patches, that the BugBusting team feel are probably ready to be
committed as-is, or are probably trivially resolved in the hands of a
committer with knowledge of the particular subsystem. All committers
are invited to take a look at this list whenever they have a spare 5
minutes and wish to close a PR.
Since the last status report, the number of open bugs continued to
hover around the 5600 mark, although has began to rise with the 7.2
ports freeze.
As always, more help is appreciated, and committers and non-committers
alike are invited to join us on #freebsd-bugbusters on EFnet and help
close stale PRs or commit patches from valid PRs.
Open tasks:
1. Try to find ways to get more committers helping us with closing PRs
that the team has already analyzed.
2. Think of some way for committers to only view PRs that have been in
some way 'vetted' or 'confirmed'.
3. Generate more publicity for what we've already got in place, and
for what we intend to do next.
4. Define new categories, classifications, and states for PRs, that
will better match our work flow (in progress).
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/powerpc G5 Support
Contact: Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org>
FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT now has support for PowerPC CPUs operating in the
64-bit bridge mode. This includes the PowerPC 970 (G5) as well as the
POWER3 and POWER4. Currently only Apple systems are known to work.
Open tasks:
1. IBM systems currently are not supported due to missing northbridge
support.
2. Software fan control on SMU-based Apple G5 systems (G5 iMac, later
Powermac G5) is not available.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/sparc64 UltraSPARC III support
Contact: Marius Strobl <marius@FreeBSD.org>
Like announced in the previous status report, support for
sun4u-machines based on UltraSPARC III and beyond has been MFC'ed to
stable/7 (the last missing piece was r190297) and thus will be present
in the upcoming 7.2-RELEASE and can be already tested with 7.2-RC1.
Additionally, as of r191076 machfb(4) has been fixed to work with
UltraSPARC III and beyond, that fix unfortunately did not make it into
7.2-RC1 but will be in the final version. The X.Org 7.4 and Firefox
ports as well as some other gecko-based ones like Seamonkey once again
have been fixed to also work and package on sparc64, including on
UltraSPARC III and UltraSPARC IIIi based machines equipped with cards
driven by creator(4) or machfb(4). The driver for the Sun
Cassini/Cassini+ as well as National Semiconductor DP83065 Saturn
Gigabit NICs found on-board for example in Fire V440 and as add-on
cards is coming along nicely, the last thing which needs to be
implemented before it can hit CURRENT is support for jumbo frames.
__________________________________________________________________
German Documentation Project
URL: https://doc.bsdgroup.de
Contact: Johann Kois <jkois@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Martin Wilke <miwi@FreeBSD.org>
In February 2009 the German version of the FreeBSD Developer's handbook
went online. Additionally we managed to update large areas of the FAQ
thanks to the contributions of Benedict Reuschling.
The website (at least the areas we see as relevant for a translation)
is translated and updated constantly.
More volunteers are always welcome of course, as there is still plenty
of work to be done.
Open tasks:
1. Update the existing documentation set (especially the handbook).
2. Read the translations. Check for problems/mistakes. Send feedback.
__________________________________________________________________
Hungarian Documentation Project
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/hu
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/hu
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/HungarianDocumentationProject
URL:
http://p4web.freebsd.org/@md=d&cd=//depot/projects/docproj_hu/&c=aXw@//
depot/projects/docproj_hu/?ac=83
Contact: G?bor K?vesd?n <gabor@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: G?bor P?li <pgj@FreeBSD.org>
We are proud to announce that the FreeBSD Hungarian web pages have been
extended by the following items:
* Project news entries, staring from 2009 (HTML, RSS, RDF)
* Press releases, starting from 2008 (HTML, RSS)
* Events, starting from 2009 (HTML, RSS)
* Security advisories (HTML, RSS)
We are still hoping that having the FDP Primer translated will
encourage others to help our work. Feel free to contribute, every
submitted line of translation or feedback is appreciated and is highly
welcome. For more information on how to contribute, please read the
project's introduction (in Hungarian).
Open tasks:
1. Translate news entries, press releases.
2. Translate Release Notes for -CURRENT and 8.X.
3. Translate articles.
4. Translate web pages.
5. Read the translations, send feedback.
__________________________________________________________________
OpenBSM
URL: http://www.openbsm.org/
Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: TrustedBSD audit mailing list
<trustedbsd-audit@TrustedBSD.org>
The TrustedBSD Project has now released OpenBSM 1.1, the second
production release of the OpenBSM code base. OpenBSM 1.1 has been
merged to FreeBSD 8-CURRENT, and will be merged to 7-STABLE before
FreeBSD 7.3. Major changes since OpenBSM 1.0 include:
* Trail files now include the host where the trail is generated.
Crash recovery has been improved. Trail expiration based on size
and date is now supported; by default trail files will be expired
after 10MB of trails. The default individual trail limit is now
2MB.
* Mac OS X Snow Leopard is now a fully supported platform; launchd(8)
can now be used to launchd auditd(8). Command line tools and
libraries are now supported on Mac OS X Leopard.
* Extended header tokens are now supported, allowing audit trails to
be tagged with a host identifier. IPv6 addresses are now supported
in subject tokens. BSM token and record types have been further
synchronized to OpenSolaris; support for many new system calls has
been added. Local errors and socket types are mapped to and from
BSM values.
Since the last test release, OpenBSM 1.1 beta 1, 32/64-bit
compatibility has been fixed for the auditon(2) system call. A default
"expire-after" of 10MB is now set in audit_control(5). Local
fcntl(2)
arguments are now mapped to wire BSM versions using new APIs. The
audit_submit(3) man page has been fixed. A new audit event class has
been added for post-login authentication and access control events.
Open tasks:
1. Migrate to sbufs in token-encoding.
2. Support for auditing NFS RPCs.
__________________________________________________________________
Release Engineering
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/
Contact: Release Engineering Team <re@FreeBSD.org>
The Release Engineering Team (with lots of help from lots of other
people) released FreeBSD 7.2 on May 4th, 2009. During this period we
have also begun reminding developers of the upcoming FreeBSD 8.0
release cycle which is scheduled to begin in early June 2009 with
release targeted at early September 2009.
__________________________________________________________________
Sysinfo - a set of scripts which document your system
URL:
http://danger.rulez.sk/index.php/2009/04/14/sysinfo-a-set-of-scripts-wh
ich-document-your-freebsd-system/
URL: https://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?p=19321
Contact: Daniel Gerzo <danger@FreeBSD.org>
Sysinfo a shell script which purpose is to automatically gather system
information and document hardware and software configuration of the
given host system. The goal is to provide a system operator with
descriptive information about an unknown FreeBSD installation.
It consists of several modules (also shell scripts), thus is easily
extensible and provides an easy way to inspect overall system
configuration.
It has been written as part of my Bachelor thesis and its development
is a work in progress. Therefore, I would appreciate if you could
provide me with some feedback as I will defend my thesis soon. Your
feedback is welcome at the forums , or alternatively you can send me a
private email.
The tool itself can now be installed using the Ports tree from the
sysutils/sysinfo port.
Open tasks:
1. Receive additional feedback.
2. Perform more testing.
3. Extend and improve the tool.
__________________________________________________________________
TrustedBSD MAC Framework in GENERIC
URL: http://www.trustedBSD.org/mac.html
Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: TrustedBSD discussion mailing list
<trustedbsd-discuss@TrustedBSD.org>
There is on-going work to allow "options MAC" to be included in the
GENERIC kernel for 8.0. This primarily consists of performance work to
reduce overhead when policies are used, and eliminate when none are
configured. Work to date includes:
* The MAC Framework now detects which object types are labeled by
policies, and MAC label storage is not allocated when it won't be
used.
* Add MAC Framework DTrace probes so allow more easy analysis of MAC
Framework and policy interactions.
* Eliminate mutex-protected reference count used to prevent module
unload during entry point invocation, and replace with an sx lock
and an rwlock, respectively for long-sleepable and short-sleepable
entry points, significantly lowering the overhead of entering the
MAC Framework. If no dynamic policies are loaded, no locking
overhead is taken.
Open tasks:
1. Move to rmlocks for non-sleepable entry points to reduce cache line
thrashing under load.
2. Macroize invocation of MAC Framework entry points from the kernel,
and perform caller-side determination of whether MAC is enabled in
order to avoid additional function call overhead in the caller path
if MAC is disabled.
__________________________________________________________________
VFS/NFS DTrace Probes
Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
A new DTrace provider, dtnfsclient, has been added to the FreeBSD 8.x
kernel, and will be merged to 7.x before 7.3. The following probes are
available:
* nfsclient:{nfs2,nfs3}:{procname}:start - NFSv2 and NFSv3 RPC start
probes
* nfsclient:{nfs2,nfs3}:{procname}:done - NFSv2 and NFSv3 RPC done
probes
* nfsclient:accesscache:: - NFS access cache flush/hit/miss/load
probes
* nfsclient:attrcache:: - NFS attribute cache flush/hit/miss/done
In addition, a number of VFS probes have been added:
* vfs:vop:{vopname}:entry - VOP entry probe
* vfs:vop:{vopname}:return - VOP return probe
* vfs:namei:lookup:entry - VFS name lookup entry probe
* vfs:namei:lookup:return - VFS name lookup return probe
* vfs:namecache:*:* - VFS namecache
enter/enter_negative/fullpath_enter/fullpath_hit/fullpath_miss/full
path_return/lookup_hit/lookup_hit_negative/lookup_miss/purge/purge_
negative/purgevfs/zap/zap_negative probes
These probes make it much easier to trace NFS and VFS events.
Open tasks:
1. Add VFSOP tracing.
2. Add RPC-layer tracing, such as RPC retransmits.
3. Provide decoded NFS RPCs in order to expose transaction IDs and
file handles.
__________________________________________________________________
VirtualBox on FreeBSD
URL: http://miwi.bsdcrew.de/2009/05/virtualbox-on-freebsd/
URL:
http://miwi.bsdcrew.de/2009/05/virtualbox-on-freebsd-first-screenshots/
URL: http://vbox.innotek.de/pipermail/vbox-dev/2009-May/001369.html
Contact: Beat Gaetzi <beat@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Bernhard Froehlich <decke@bluelife.at>
Contact: Dennis Herrmann <dhn@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Martin Wilke <miwi@FreeBSD.org>
After the first mail from Alexander Eichner on the vbox-dev
mailinglist, we started the work on a VirtualBox port. 6 Days was
needed to get VirtualBox to start with over 20 patches. We'd like to
say thanks to Alexander Eichner, all the VirtualBox Developers, Gustau
Perez and Ulf Lilleengen. If you like to play with the current port you
can checkout the port here. Please do not ping us about any problems,
we know about a lot and are still working to get them all solved before
we do an official call for testing.
Open tasks:
1. Fix kernel crashes on 7.2-RELEASE.
2. Code cleanup.
3. Fix errors on AMD64.
4. Fix user/permission problems.