Congratulations to the successful students and their FreeBSD Project
mentors for participating in another productive Google Summer of Code.
This program encourages students to contribute to an open source
project over the summer break with generous funding from Google. We
have had a total of over 50 successful students working on FreeBSD as
part of this program in 2005, 2006, and 2007. These student projects
included security research, improved installation tools, filesystems
work, new utilities, and more. Many of the students have continued
working on their FreeBSD projects even after the official close of the
program. We have gained many new FreeBSD committers from previous
summer of code projects already, and more are in the process.
Information about the student projects is available from our Summer of
Code wiki (http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2007) and all of the
code is checked into Perforce. A summary of each individual project
is provided at http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/summerofcode-2007.html
and the text is included below.
Please join me in congratulating these students and thanking them for
their significant contributions to FreeBSD this summer.
Regards,
- Murray Stokely
Robert Watson
(FreeBSD Summer of Code Organizers)
2007 Student Projects :
* Project: GNOME front-end to freebsd-update(8)
Student: Andrew Turner
Mentor: Joe Marcus Clarke
Summary:
The FreeBSD update front-end is a GTK+ interface to
freebsd-update. It is split into a GUI to allow system
administrators to select the binary patches to update or
rollback and a back-end that communicates with
freebsd-update. Development of both parts has moved to Berlios
at http://developer.berlios.de/projects/facund/.
Ready to enter CVS: The back-end is not yet ready to enter CVS,
but a port is being made for the front-end
* Project: Multicast DNS responder (BSD-licensed)
Student: Fredrik Lindberg
Mentor: Bruce M. Simpson
Summary:
Multicast DNS (mDNS) is a part of Zero Configuration Networking
(Zeroconf) and provides the ability to address hosts using
DNS-like names without the need of an existing (unicast),
managed DNS server.
The Multicast DNS responder (mdnsd), is more or less feature
complete and is currently in a bug fixing and testing phase. A
few more features are planned, most notably mdns proxy
support. The daemon performs multicast dns queries on behalf of
clients and acts as a unified cache to all clients. Provides the
ability to announce its own mdns records onto the network.
The daemons abilities are exposed to clients through libmdns, it
provides an API to do mDNS queries and to add/remove/list
records and view/flush cache. Two consumers exists, one console
based basic debugging and administrative utility (mdns) which
simply provides whatever libmdns provides and a NSS module
(nss_mdns) which integrates mDNS lookups with the systems name
lookup routines.
Ready to enter CVS: after testing and reviewing
* Project: Unified ports / package system database backend
Student: Garrett Cooper
Mentor: Kirill Ponomarew
Summary:
This project revised FreeBSD's package tools
(/usr/src/usr.sbin/pkg_install) to use Berkeley DB files for
storing information held in /var/db/pkg/*, and use Hash table
structures. It also aims to devise a frontend for dealing with
package and ports installation and management and insert
virtuals into ports infrastructure to support modular components
functionality, for dealing with ports installed components vs
base installed components (OpenSSL, OpenSSH, Kerberos).
Ready to enter CVS: not determined yet
* Project: Super Tunnel Daemon
Student: Matus Harvan
Mentor: Max Laier
Summary:
The project implements the Super Tunnel Daemon, a tunneling
daemon using plugins for different encapsulations and
automagically selecting the best encapsulation in each
environment. When the environment changes, the user should not
notice the transition to a different encapsulation except for a
small delay. Connections established within the tunnel shall
seamlessly migrate to a different encapsulation. In this way,
mobility is supported as well, even to the extent of changing
between different physical network interfaces, e.g. disabling
the wireless interface and plugging in an ethernet cable. New
encapsulations can easily be added in the future using the
plugin interface.
The daemon and several plugins have been written. The daemon now
has multi-user support, i.e., one server supports multiple
clients. Plugins implemented so far are UDP, TCP, ICMP,
DNS. There are also sys patches allowing it to listen on all
unused UDP and TCP ports as well as processing ICMP echo
requests in the user space.
Missing features:
o more plugins (HTTP, SSH,...)
o config file format and parsing
o and some more...
More details are available at http://wiki.freebsd.org/mtund
Ready to enter CVS: not determined yet
* Project: Rewriting lockmgr(9)
Student: Attilio Rao
Mentor: Jeff Roberson
Summary:
This project involved rewriting the lockmgr syncronization
primitive since recent efforts (in particular sun4v porting)
evicted that this is a strong bottleneck for fs workloads (due
to its spreadness in VFS land). One of the main goal of the
rewriting was offering a more customed interface, trimming all
unused (and possibily bugged) features of lockmgr and offering a
more intelligent interface (that would help a lot in debugging
and lock assertions).
Ready to enter CVS: not determined yet
* Project: Apple's MacBook on FreeBSD
Student: Rui Paulo
Mentor: Andre Oppermann
Summary:
Apple's MacBook computers are nicely designed and have neat
features that other laptops don't. While Mac OS X is a nice
operating system, UNIX folks (like me) would prefer to run other
operating systems like FreeBSD. This project brings bug fixes
and new drivers to FreeBSD that help running this OS on this
platform.
Ready to enter CVS: some parts committed already
* Project: Security regression tests
Student: Zhouyi ZHOU
Mentor: Robert Watson
Summary:
This project involved testing the correctness of FreeBSD
Mandatory Access Control Framework including correctly passing
the security label from userland to kernel and non-bypassibility
of Mandatory Access Control Hooks. Specific contributions
include:
1. A pair of pseudo ethernet drivers used for testing network
related hooks. To avoid the packet go through the lo interface,
the IP address in the packet is twisted in the driver.
2. A framework for logging Mandatory Access Control hooks
which is called during a period of time.
o In kernel, every non-null label is got externalized
into human readable string and recorded in a tail queue together
with the name of hook that got called and possible flags or
modes (etc. VREAD/VWRITE for mac_check_vnode_open hook). There
is a thread much like audit subsystem's audit_worker logging the
queue into a userspace file. The userland program use open,
ioctl and close the /dev/mactest node to trigger and stop the
logging. The logging file is truncated to zero every time the
logging mechanism is triggered.
o In userland, a bison based parsing tool is used to
parse the logged file and reconstruct the record chain which
will be compared with testsuite supplied configuration file to
examine if expected hooks is got called and the
label/flags/modes are correct. The testsuite mainly follows
src/tools/regression/fstest, modified to adapt to test Mandatory
Access Control Framework and include tests for signals
3. The test cases about mandatory access control hooks for
fifo, link, mdconfig, netinet, open, pipe, rename, rmdir,
signal, symlink, sysvshm and truncate are written. Two security
vulnerabilities where found during the test case writing.
Ready to enter CVS: not determined yet
* Project: GVinum Enhancements
Student: Ulf Lilleengen
Mentor: Lukas Ertl
Summary:
The project schedule was a bit changed in the start, because
there were some rewriting of some internal parts of gvinum. Much
of the time went to adapt the rest of gvinum to this new
event-based system. This rewrite made gvinum less vulnerable to
race bugs, and made it much easier for a developer to reason
about the code.
Improvements were made to the rebuild and syncing process of
volumes, so that one could still use the volume (e.g. have it
mounted) while rebuilding or syncing gvinum plexes.
The growing of striped volumes (includes RAID-5) in the
background was also implemented. Perhaps most important, is that
most important gvinum features were implemented, and many bugs
were fixed. A lot of testing has been done to make gvinum more
robust.
Ready to enter CVS: yes
* Project: TCP/IP regression test suite
Student: Nanjun Li
Mentor: George V. Neville-Neil
Summary:
The project was about a testing suite for any host's
perform-ability in TCP/IP networks. N. Li implemented it on a
FreeBSD machine using libpcap (a library of BSD Packet Filter)
to sniff frames on MAC layer, decode them into human-readable
format, and send crafted ones to examinate if the target host
follows RFC793's requirements.
Ready to enter CVS: not determined yet
* Project: Avoiding syscall overhead
Student: Jesper Brix Rosenkilde
Mentor: Scott Long
Summary:
In FreeBSD the setproctitle call is implemented with a sysctl,
this has the unfortunate side effect that this simple call locks
the Giant-lock. As this call is a simple matter of setting a
value, it could be better implemented with shared memory between
the kernel and user-space.
This project proposes a scheme to securely share process
specific data between the kernel and a user-space process. This
is done by having each process allocate a special memory page,
in which the kernel and user-space process can share data. This
will give the security needed, as the VM-system will make sure
that no outside processes can fiddle with a process' data. As
everything is going on in user-space, there is no concern about
a rogue process could write inside the kernel memory. There is
still a locking concern, which will be addressed either by
locking the entire page, or micro-locking each data field on the
page.
A suggestion by Howard Su is a multi page scheme, where a
read/write page is used for things like get/setproctitle and a
read-only page for things like getpid. And maybe a system wide
read-only page for things like getdomain, gethostname etc.
Ready to enter CVS: not determined yet
* Project: Port OpenBSD's sysctl Hardware Sensors framework
Student: Constantine A. Murenin
Mentor: Shteryana Shopova
Summary:
The GSoC2007/cnst-sensors project was about porting the sysctl
hw.sensors framework from OpenBSD to FreeBSD. The project was
successfully completed, and is pending final review and
integration into the CVS tree.
The sensors framework provides a unified interface for storing,
registering and accessing information about hardware monitoring
sensors. Sensor types include, but are not limited to,
temperature, voltage, fan RPM, time offset and logical drive
status. In the OpenBSD base system, the framework spans
sensor_attach(9), sysctl(3), sysctl(8), systat(1), sensorsd(8),
ntpd(8), and more than 50 drivers, ranging from I2C temperature
sensors and Super I/O hardware monitors to ipmi(4) and RAID
controllers. Several third-party tools are also available, for
example, a plug-in for Nagios and ports/sysutils/symon.
As a part of this project, all major parts of the framework were
ported, including sysctl, systat and sensorsd. Some drivers for
most popular Super I/O Hardware Monitors were ported, too:
it(4), supporting most contemporary ITE Tech Super I/O, and
lm(4), supporting most contemporary Winbond Super I/O. Moreover,
some existing FreeBSD drivers were modified to use the new
framework, for example, coretemp(4).
Ready to enter CVS: after more testing and review
* Project: Distributed audit daemon
Student: Alexey Mikhailov
Mentor: Bjoern A. Zeeb
Summary:
The basic idea of this project was to implement secure and
reliable log file shipping to remote hosts. While the
implementation focuses on audit logs, the goal was to build
tools that will make it possible to perform distributed logging
for any application by using a simple API and linking with a
shared library. The audit logs served as a testbed, other logs
can be adopted.
Ready to enter CVS: not determined yet
* Project: Generic input device layer
Student: Maxim Zhuravlev
Mentor: Philip Paeps
Summary:
Originally selected to design and implement a common way to
retrieve and process data from input devices, the project
resulted in a code base of a bigger and more generic project --
Enhanced NewBus. The following features are introduced by now:
basic functional devices support, filter drivers and NewBus
input/output subsystem. Functional devices (ex. demuxing,
muxing, terminals) are supposed to coordinate real devices. Each
device is handled by a stack of drivers (low-level and
filters). Filter drivers are to simplify code reuse. The NewBus
input/output subsystem is designed to push io requests through
the NewBus graph.
Ready to enter CVS: not determined yet
* Project: bus_alloc_resources() Code Update
Student: Christopher Davis
Mentor: Warner Losh
Summary:
Currently, many devices in FreeBSD's source tree use the
excessively verbose methods of resource allocation and
deallocation. Numerous calls to bus_alloc_resource() or
bus_alloc_resource_any() are used to allocate resources, and
subsequently, multiple calls to bus_release_resource() are used
to free the resources after an error in allocation or when the
device is detached.
Recently, however, the bus_alloc_resources() and
bus_release_resources() functions have been added. These simple
wrappers around bus_alloc_resource_any() and
bus_release_resource() both operate on the same resource
description, so that much of the repetition once needed to
allocate and free resources can be mitigated.
This project updated driver source code where necessary using
the new functions to make the code related to allocation and
deallocation simpler and clearer, while making other refinements
as needed. Approximately 40 drivers were updated during SoC,
although testing is still needed. There are likely 25 or more
other drivers that could be updated as well, and these are
listed on the wiki.
Ready to enter CVS: not determined yet
* Project: BSD bintools project (Part I)
Student: Kai Wang
Mentor: Joseph Koshy
Summary:
This project re-implemented part of the GNU binutils based on
the libelf and libarchive libraries. It will bring FreeBSD a BSD
Licensed toolchain for processing ELF binary files. The project
mainly concentrated on re-implementing the tools ar(1),
ranlib(1), objcopy(1), strip(1) and composing corresponding
manual pages.
Ready to enter CVS: not determined yet
* Project: Update of Linuxulator for Linux 2.6
Student: Roman Divacky
Mentor: Konstantin Belousov
Summary:
This is a continuation of the same project of the last
GSoC. While the last year the focus was to bring basic 2.6
compatibility to FreeBSD, this year was focused on bug fixing
and implementing epoll() and *at().
Ready to enter CVS: after a final review
* Project: FreeBSD 'safety net' IO logging utility
Student: Sonja Milicic
Mentor: Lukas Ertl
Summary:
Some administrative operations like filesystem or partition
table debugging/repair would benefit from an "Undo" function, so
they can be performed without putting vital data at risk. This
project's goal was to implement a module which plugs into the
GEOM framework and allows copy-on-write style logging of I/O
requests to one or more snapshot files, including the
possibility to rollback, replay or analyze their effects.
The core functionality of this module and a userland tool was
finished, but will need more testing/bug fixing.
Ready to enter CVS: not determined yet
* Project: Provide an audit log analysis tool
Student: Liu Dongmei
Mentor: Robert Watson
Summary:
A GUI audit log analysis tool which can display audit log in
tree view and list view and analyze audit log lively. It is
important to provide a intuitionistic and visualize audit log to
administrator. This program's intention is to provide a totally
GUI audit log display, filter and statistic, in addition provide
expandability when a new type of token added. The Glib library
is used as a basic platform abstraction library and GTK are used
to build AuditAnalyzer's GUI.
Ready to enter CVS: not determined yet
* Project: Improve the FreeBSD Ports Collection Infrastructure
Student: Gabor Kovesdan
Mentor: Andrew Pantyukhin
Summary:
This project used a new approach to reimplemented the DESTDIR
support. Additionally, the PERL support was refactored from
bsd.port.mk into its own file and enhanced to provide more
features.
Ready to enter CVS: already committed
* Project: http support for PXE
Student: Alexey Tarasov
Mentor: Ed Maste
Summary:
The goal of this project was to write extendable code wrappers
(as much as possible in C) to provided by PXE and UNDI APIs to
support downloading of files via TCP-based protocols in the
preboot environment. This allows to download and prepare the
booting of a FreeBSD kernel from a remote server via a direct
connection or a http proxy.
Ready to enter CVS: not determined yet
* Project: Graphical installer for FreeBSD (finstall)
Student: Ivan Voras
Mentor: Murray Stokely
Summary:
This project aims to create a user-friendly graphical installer
for FreeBSD & FreeBSD-derived systems. The project should yield
something usable for 7.x-RELEASE, but the intention is to keep
it as a "second" installer system during 7.x, alongside
sysinstall. In any case, sysinstall will be kept for
architectures not supported by finstall (e.g. currently all
except i386 and amd64).
Ready to enter CVS: not determined yet
* Project: Porting Linux KVM to FreeBSD
Student: Fabio Checconi
Mentor: Luigi Rizzo
Summary:
Linux KVM is a Virtual Machine Monitor, part of the Linux
kernel, that uses Intel VT-x or AMD-V extensions for x86
processors to create a full virtualization environment. This
project consists in porting Linux KVM to the FreeBSD kernel.
Since Linux KVM has a structure similar to that of a device
driver (actually, it is a device driver, from many points of
view) core kernel changes are not required to support it, so it
is an external loadable kernel module, exporting an interface
based on ioctl() calls to a device descriptor. Part of the
project was also the porting of the userspace client for that
interface, a modified qemu that uses KVM to execute its guests.
A project snapshot at the end of the Summer of Code is
available. It supports only AMD-V (SVM) on amd64, as this was
the hardware used during the development (adding support for
other platforms is in progress); it is still highly experimental
code, but it can boot FreeBSD guests.
For code, further details, and future developments, please refer
to: http://feanor.sssup.it/~fabio/soc07/
Ready to enter CVS: not determined yet