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 70 successful students working on FreeBSD as
part of this program from 2005 through 2008. 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 nearly a dozen new FreeBSD committers from
previous summer of code projects already, and more are in the process
of formally joining the project.
Information about the student projects is available from our Summer of
Code wiki (http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2008) and all of the
code is checked into Perforce. A summary of each individual project
by the students themselves is provided on the wiki and the text is included
below.
Please join us 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)
2008 Student Projects :
1. Implementation of MPLS on FreeBSD
2. TCP/IP regression test suite (tcptest)
3. Porting Open Solaris Dtrace Toolkit to FreeBSD
4. Adding .db support to pkg_tools --> pkg_improved
5. Porting BSD-licensed text-processing tools from OpenBSD
6. Multibyte collation support
7. VM Algorithm Improvement
8. TCP anomaly detector
9. FreeBSD auditing system testing
10. Dynamic memory allocation for dirhash in UFS2
11. Reference implementation of the SNTP client
12. NFSv4 ACLs
13. Enhancing FreeBSD's Libarchive
14. Allowing for parallel builds in the FreeBSD Ports Collection
15. Ports license auditing infrastructure
16. Improving layer2 filtering
17. Porting FreeBSD to Efika (PPC bring up)
18. Audit Firewall Events from Kernel
19. ShinyBSD
* Project: Implementation of MPLS in FreeBSD
Student: Ryan French
Mentor: Andre Oppermann
Summary:
MPLS is a networking protocol used for routing information
quickly and efficiently. It is used extensively in the internet's
backbone networks. Over the course of the program, code has been
ported to FreeBSD from the OpendBSD/NetBSD operating
systems. Basic functionality of sending and receiving packets was
the main goal of the project, but unfortunately this was not
acheived. It is very close to having this functionality, but
there are a ffew minor bugs preventing the code from integrating
fully with the FreeBSD networking stack.
This project will continue to be worked on until sending,
receiving, label swapping, tunnels, and the LDP daemon has been
successfully implemented.
Ready to enter CVS/SVN: No.
* Project: TCP/IP regression test suite (tcptest)
Student: Victor Hugo Bilouro
Mentor: George V. Neville-Neil
Summary:
As a testing tool, it can perform regression, protocol
conformance, and fuzz tests. The tool may also be employed as an
aid to protocol developers and both testing and debugging of
firewalls/routers.
It's built on top of PCS(Packet Construction Set) "PCS is a set
of Python modules and objects that make building network protocol
code easier for the protocol developer. PCS enables testing at
OSI layers 3, 4, and 5. "
Tcptest mainly is a python module and one script for each test
covered (more then one per script often) The module count with
methods acting as fasteners, doing things like (a)three way
handshake, (b)active/passive close and (c)several createXX and
assertXX, where XX=(ip, tcp, rst, urg, fin, syn, psh, so on...)
As the tests are being created, the number of 'fasteners' are
growing, turning each moment easier to create new tests.
Use of small tests. So we can cover a wide range of traffics,
events and transitions predetermined separately. The development
would be like a protocol, but without covering all possible
events and transitions, only traffic previously
determined. Instead of targeting a TCP Finite State Machine (FSM)
like the implementation of TCP/IP protocols, the development will
be based towards flow of packets, where traffic is composed of
packets that are sent and received in a previously registered
way.
Links:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/VictorBilouro/TCP-IP_regression_test_suite
(project wiki)
http://perforce.freebsd.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/soc2008/bilouro_tcptest/src
(freebsd repository)
http://code.google.com/p/tcptest/ (source code download)
http://bilouro.com/tcptest (source code documentation)
http://pcs.sf.net - Packet Construction Set
* Project: Porting Open Solaris Dtrace Toolkit to FreeBSD
Student: Liqun Li
Mentor: John Birrell
Summary:
Sun Open Solaris Dtrace is pretty useful feature.Users can find
performance bottlenecks with Dtrace in real production
environment. Since many probes implemented in Open Solaris are
not supported in FreeBSD. so when we port Dtrace Toolkit to
FreeBSD, main job is to find whether this probe is supported by
FreeBSD, if so, find it; if not, develop one to support this
function. This summer, at first, I went throught all DTK script
commands, found some of them work directly. But most do
not. Under my mentor John Birrell careful help, I retrieved the
respective system variables FreeBSD kernel, and ended up making
system/uname.d work. In addition, I tried to make sar-c.d work
under FreeBSD. Since we need to investigate into Son Open Solaris
Kernel to find how Open Solaris defines the probe and what probes
it needs, this work is realy time consuming, not done yet. From
this project, I got to know much about FreeBSD kernel and Dtrace
probes. I found kernel hacking/coding pretty interesting.
Ready to enter SVN/CVS: not decided
* Project: Adding .db support to pkg_tools --> pkg_improved
Student: Anders Nore
Mentor: Florent Thoumie
Summary:
This project is a replication of the pkg_install tools with
several new features and speed improvements due to the caching of
some package-information to a B-Tree Berkeley DB file. Some of
the new features is the adding of installtime to the installed
packages +CONTENTS file, human-readable size-output in
pkg_info(1), progress indication to pkg_add's remote
option. Installtime range searches with pkg_info(1) and
pkg_delete(1) similar to that of version search is now available
using the -M option.
A new tool pkg_convert(1), caches some parts of the existing
/var/db/pkg/ flat database into a Berkeley DB file, and the tools
check for this file and uses it for speed improvements if it's
available and updates it according to pkg_{add|delete}'s. You can
also use pkg_convert(1) to view the entries in the cache. The
tools will give you an indication if the database is corrupt, and
it's fully recoverable by using pkg_convert(1).
Two bugs in the existing pkg_tools have also been discovered and
fixed, everything is ofcourse backwards-compatible with the
older/original pkg_install tools.
* Project: Porting BSD-licensed text-processing tools from OpenBSD
Student: G?bor K?vesd?n
Mentor: Max Khon
Summary:
At the moment, BSD grep seems to be ready and highly compatible
with the GNU version. However, there are differences in the regex
handling, which is a result of the different interpretations,
that the different regex libraries use and thus it is not really
possible to fix at the level of grep. As for diff, some progress
has been made, but some important features are still missing. The
sort utility seemed to be badly constructed concerning the wide
character support and the overall implementation. Because of
these difficulties, the efforts were prioritized for grep and
diff. Probably sort needs a complete rewrite or at least an
extreme amount of modifications.
Ready to enter CVS/SVN: If we can accept the regex differencies
in grep, it is ready to enter SVN after some thorough testing. As
for diff and sort, they can be installed via the Ports
Collection.
* Project: Multibyte collation support
Student: Konrad Jankowski
Mentor: Diomidis Spinellis
Summary:
Collation is what allows for current language/encoding correct
sorting/ordering of strings. This project aimed to add proper
collation in UTF-8 encodings for all languages for FreeBSD. This
summer I have accomplished:
+ imported data from the Unicode Consortium: POSIX locale files
and regression test data
+ written converter scripts to extract collation data from this
files
+ ported Apple's version of colldef (which is our version, but
much extended by them)
+ extended the colldef even more, to work on collation data from
the Unicode Consortium
+ added some performance improvements, the biggest one not used
by default now (no time to test yet) - reading the charmap only
once for all languages
+ ported Apple version of strcoll, wcscoll, strxfrm, wcsxfrm and
locale/collate.c, taking out xlocale (rationale on wiki)
+ Written regression test scripts. It appeared that Apple's code
doesn't full Unicode Collation Algorithm - the part which deals
with expansions. It is needed for half of languages to pass the
more advanced regression tests.
+ for last few days I'm working on implementing expansions, I'll
not rest until they work
+ I wasn't able to start writing manpages and create a megapatch
agains HEAD, I'll do that when the algorithm is 100% correct for
all the languages.
Current informatin will be available on my wiki:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/KonradJankowski/Collation
Ready to enter SVS/CVS: After finishing expansion support and cleanup.
* Project: VM Algorithm Improvement
Student: Mayur Shardul
Mentor: Jeff Roberson
Summary:
A new data structure, viz. radix tree, was implemented and used
for management of the resident pages. The objective is efficient
use of memory and faster performance. The biggest challenge was
to service insert requests on the data structure without
blocking. Because of this constraint the memory allocation
failures were not acceptable, to solve the problem the required
memory was allocated at the boot time. Both the data structures
were used in parallel to check the correctness and we also
benchmarked the data structures and found that radix trees gave
much better performance over splay trees.
Ready to enter SVS/CVS: We will investigate some more approaches
to handle allocation failures before the new data structure goes
in CVS.
* Project: TCP anomaly detector
Student: Rui Paulo
Mentor: Andre Oppermann
Summary:
The TCP Anomaly Detector (tcpad, for short) project went
reasonably well. I'm currently tracking some bugs and lowering
the number of false positives.
tcpad tries to monitor your TCP connections and detect
non-conformant hosts. It does this by sniffing packets on the
wire and creating, what I would like to call, a virtual TCP stack
on each end. When an error is detected, tcpad creates a pcap file
with all the packets exchanged between the two hosts and the
state of each virtual TCP stack.
tcpad is still being developed, so expect it to "detect" dozens
of "problems" after running for some minutes.
I was a bit late developing results because the SoC began before
my exams did (I was still having classes), but now, that "damage"
is partly fixed. ;-) Overall, this SoC was a really interesting
learning experience. I must say that my TCP knowledge has
increased a few points. :-)
Andre Oppermann is my mentor. I blogged a bit about this project
at http://blogs.freebsdish.org/rpaulo/ . The wiki page is at
http://wiki.freebsd.org/RuiPaulo/TCPAnomaly .
Ready to enter SVS/CVS: No.
* Project: FreeBSD auditing system testing
Student: Vincenzo Iozzo
Mentor: Attilio Rao
Summary:
The project was focused on testing the audit system. The first
part of the project consisted of writing a patch for
/dev/auditpipe in order to preselect events by process' pid. The
second half was focused on creating a testing framework for
audit. Some auxiliary functions and modules were written. what's
missing: - More abstraction in the framework - More tests for
events
* Project: Dynamic memory allocation for dirhash in UFS2
Student: Nick Barkas
Mentor: David Malone
Summary:
Modified dirhash code in perforce is now able to free up memory
used by older dirhashes when the VM system invokes vm_lowmem
events. This will allow the default dirhash_maxmem value to be
increased, improving performance on large directory lookups when
there is memory to spare on they system. There are versions of
the low memory event handling code for both -CURRENT and
7-STABLE. A number of tests have been run showing the new event
handler seems to work properly.
I intend to do further testing and benchmarking to find the best
default values to use for vfs.ufs.dirhash_reclaimage (the number
of seconds a dirhash can sit unused before the dirhash low
memeory event handler will unconditionally delete it) and the
minimum percentage of memory that will be freed upon vm_lowmem
events even if there are not enough hashes older than
dirhash_reclaimage (currently this is hard coded to 10%). I would
also like to add some code to choose a reasonable new default
vfs.ufs.dirhash_maxmem value based upon the amount of memory in
the system, set automatically at boot time and tunable via
sysctl. Once these tweaks have been made I plan to ask for
testing from more users to shake out any bugs or potential
workloads where the new code may hurt overall performance.
Current details about status are on the wiki here:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/DirhashDynamicMemory
* Project: Reference implementation of the SNTP client
Student: Johannes Maximilian K?hn
Mentor: Harlan Stenn
Summary:
A reference implementation of the SNTP client based on the latest
ntpv4 document. SNTP is a lightweight client that enables admins
to synchronize with NTP servers. SNTP's networking code is
written protocol independent and should work with almost any
protocol like IPv4 or IPv6. SNTP supports MD5 authentication to
verify the authencity of the queried server.
Ready to enter CVS: Not determined yet.
* Project: NFSv4 ACLs
Student: Edward Tomasz Napierala
Mentor: Robert Watson
Summary:
The aim of my GSoC project was to implement NFSv4 ACLs in a
similar way POSIX.1e ACLs are supported. That was done by
extending user utilities (setfacl(1)/getfacl(1)), libc API and
adding neccessary kernel stuff, for ACL storage and enforcement
on both UFS and ZFS. Regression tests were implemented to ensure
correct operation. Semantics is supposed to be identical to the
one in SunOS. There is also a wrapper (distributed separately)
that implements SunOS-compatible acl(2)/facl(2) API, to make
porting applications like Samba easier.
Ready to enter CVS: not yet
* Project: Enhancing FreeBSD's Libarchive
Student: Anselm Strauss
Mentor: Tim Kientzle
Summary:
The idea was to work on some missing parts of Libarchive. Despite
the many goals, only few of them could be implemented. So far the
project contributed a ZIP writer with tests. It supports basic
functionality, except compression, ZIP64 and some fancy features
of the ZIP specification. Work will now continue free from
GSOC. It will include finishing the ZIP writer, and working a bit
on the other goals, like PAX frontend, and others.
Ready to enter CVS: not yet
* Project: Allowing for parallel builds in the FreeBSD Ports Collection
Student: David Forsythe
Mentor: Mark Linimon
Summary:
This project added locks to targets taken from bsd.port.mk that
could perform conflicting operations if multiple builds were
running at the same time. First, fake-pkg was modified to obtain
a lock over PKG_DBDIR to prevent clobbering of the database in
case more than one port tries to register at a time. Next, a lock
called BASE_LOCK was added for every port to obtain at the
beginning of a build. This lock is located in a ports directory,
and prevents any port from being built by multiple make
processes. Locks were then added for other sensitive targets, and
the pkg_install tools were modified to honor locks on PKG_DBDIR.
Once these locks were added, a new variable, FAKE_J, to take
advantage of makes -j flag. This allows make to fork multiple
processes to handle dependencies and fetching, without passing
the -j flag onto the actual build of a port.
Ready to enter SVN/CVS: Probably not.
* Project: Ports license auditing infrastructure
Student: Alejandro Pulver
Mentor: Brooks Davis
Summary:
This project is about adding license support to the Ports
Collection, so ports with certain licenses can be identified. The
ports makefile part is functional (may need some adjustements
though): definition of licenses by port, notions of permissions
(sell and redistribute, for distfiles and packages) replacing
NO_{PACKAGE,CDROM} and RESTRICTED, configuration (one-time, and
saved; with checksum in case the license changes),
verbose/diagnostic output of the internal processing logic (how
it is accepted or rejected, if by the user, by default or by
saved configuration), registration of license information and
license itself in the package (so that both packages and ports
can be searched for properties such as license types or
restrictions), and more can be easily added to the current code.
The license database (a list of them and their properties) was
going to be mirrored from FOSSology: a tool to analyze software
licenses. We're working on getting FOSSology to automatically
classify ports (I've sent suggestions and patches to the
developers, who accepted them and provided very good support). So
for the moment it's not usable (at least licenses/properties are
defined manually, and each port is marked manually to indicate
its license).
I'll continue working on the FOSSology's port, and on the missing
features such as multiple licenses support (AND, OR, etc). For
more information see the wiki page: Ports license auditing
infrastructure
Ready to enter SVN/CVS: not yet
* Project: Improving layer2 filtering
Student: Gleb Kurtsou
Mentor: Andrew Thompson
Summary:
Project aimed to improve layer2 filtering in ipfw and pf. All of
the project goals are achieved: pfil framework is extended to
handle ethernet packets, ipfw layer2 filtering is greatly
simplified, added l2filter and l2tag per interface flags. Both
ipfw and pf firewalls support filtering by ethernet addresses,
support stateful filtering with ethernet addresses and firewall's
lookup tables are extended to contain ethernet addresses.
ipfw was extended to perform arp packet filtering: arp-op,
src-arp and dst-arp options added.
Details and usage examples are on my blog:
http://blogs.freebsdish.org/gleb/
Ready to enter CVS: Not yet, diff is submitted to freebsd-net@
for public review.
* Project: Porting FreeBSD to Efika (PPC bring up)
Student: Przemek Witaszczyk (vi0@)
Mentor: Rafal Jaworowski (raj@)
Summary:
The main aim of the project is to port FreeBSD operating system
to MPC5200B evaluation board. Among subleading tasks, there were
objectives such as making kernel proceed to device drivers
initialization, modelling newbus hierarchy of devices, writing
the programmable interrupt controller driver, writing the PCI
driver. The ultimate goal is reaching multiuser mode.
As for now, half of the project is realized. After solving a few
difficult problems at the basic level (binary interface issues
with entry point to the SmartFirmware on the device), the boot
procedure reaches the device drivers initialization stage, and
hits the PIC driver init. At this point, the driver skeleton is
constructed and is called. The driver uses ofwbus bus driver
which intermediates between the openfirmware and the FreeBSD
newbus devices hierarchy. After completing the PIC driver, I'll
be in the position to write the remaining drivers for peripherals
integrated on the MPC5200B chip using the newbus architecture.
I am determined to continue the work on the project after the
formal GSoC end date in order to bring at least the interrupt
controller driver to operation..
More info available at project's wiki :
http://wiki.freebsd.org/PrzemekWitaszczyk and at my GSoC 2008
blog: http://bitbay.blogspot.com/
Ready to enter SVN: not yet, at least PIC driver required.
* Project: Audit Firewall Events from Kernel
Student: Diego Giagio (diego@)
Mentor: Christian Peron (csjp@)
Summary:
This project is part of TrustedBSD project and aims to provide
auditing support to security-related events generated by various
firewall implementations on FreeBSD such as IPFW, PF and
IPFILTER.
Currently both administrative events (such as add/remove rules)
and network events (such as network connection establishment) are
being audited on IPFW. This means that all IPFW security-related
events are already being audited the way we planned it
to. Although PF and IPFILTER auditing support aren't yet
finished, all the hard infrastructure work needed to implement
that is already committed.
The next step is basically finish implementing PF and IPFILTER's
auditing support. On the IPFW side, my research showed that the
way it handles statefull connections (even before my work) needs
improvement. I will also work on this. I will keep working on
this project in order to polish every rough edge we might
find. Once this is finished, I'll probably begin working on other
interesting TrustedBSD projects.
More information can be found here:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/DiegoGiagio/Audit_Firewall_Events_from_Kernel
Ready to enter SVN: Not determined yet, perhaps parts of it.
* Project: Create a tiny operating system from FreeBSD
Student: James Harrison
Mentor: Warner Losh (bsdimp@)
Summary:
This project was a success and a failure at the same time. I
started work imagining that I would be creating, genuinely
creating, a new tiny operating system from FreeBSD. This was to
be a worthy goal, a challenging goal, and overall a fun goal. I
imagined it would involve making a bunch of shell scripts for
stripping out various parts of the OS, integrate a custom kernel,
and bob's your mother's brother, everything's done. This was even
reflected in the name of the project; it's the same approach as
TinyBSD, so I called mine ShinyBSD as a kind of homage.
Instead, I gained respect for TinyBSD, which is a fantastic
tool. A truly, truly, fantastic tool. Ultimately, with just a few
tweaks, it could do exactly what I needed it to do; building a
small OS has been completed for some time.
The second portion was to cross compile and boot an arm device. I
had more hardware issues than you can shake a large stick at, so
though I can verify that I was working hard on cross compiling, I
cannot verify that the cross compiled product I had made sense as
a bootable image. I've started configuring qemu now to see if I
can verify via that. In discussion with my mentor, I believe a
profitable method of applying my knowedge post-GSOC is to get a
Makefile prepared for TinyBSD that cross compiles out of the box.
Ready to enter SVN: Not yet, though when the Makefile is complete
it would be good to offer it up for inclusion in base.