Isabell Long
2013-Mar-04 13:54 UTC
[FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report, October-December 2012.
FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report, October-December 2012.
Introduction
This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between October and
December 2012. This is the last of four reports planned for 2012.
Highlights from this status report include a very successful EuroBSDCon
2012 conference and associated FreeBSD Developer Summit, both held in
Warsaw, Poland. Other highlights are several projects related to the
FreeBSD port to the ARM architecture, extending support for platforms,
boards and CPUs, improvements to the performance of the pf(4) firewall,
and a new native iSCSI target.
Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! This report
contains 27 entries and we hope you enjoy reading it.
The deadline for submissions covering the period between January and
March 2013 is April 21st, 2013.
__________________________________________________________________
Projects
* BHyVe
* Native iSCSI Target
* NFS Version 4
* pxe_http -- booting FreeBSD from apache
* UEFI
* Unprivileged install and image creation
Userland Programs
* BSD-licenced patch(1)
* bsdconfig(8)
FreeBSD Team Reports
* FreeBSD Core Team
* FreeBSD Documentation Engineering
* FreeBSD Foundation
* Postmaster
Kernel
* AMD GPUs kernel-modesetting support
* Common Flash Interface (CFI) driver improvements
* SMP-Friendly pf(4)
* Unmapped I/O
Documentation
* The FreeBSD Japanese Documentation Project
Architectures
* Compiler improvements for FreeBSD/ARMv6
* FreeBSD on AARCH64
* FreeBSD on BeagleBone
* FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi
Ports
* FreeBSD Haskell Ports
* KDE/FreeBSD
* Ports Collection
* Xfce
Miscellaneous
* EuroBSDcon 2012
* FreeBSD Developer Summit, Warsaw
__________________________________________________________________
AMD GPUs kernel-modesetting support
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/AMD_GPU
URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~kib/misc/ttm.1.patch
Contact: Alexander Kabaev <kan at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Jean-S?bastien P?dron <dumbbell at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib at FreeBSD.org>
Jean-S?bastien P?dron started to port the AMD GPUs driver from Linux to
FreeBSD 10-CURRENT in January 2013. This work is based on a previous
effort by Alexander Kabaev. Konstantin Belousov provided the initial
port of the TTM memory manager.
As of this writing, the driver is building but the tested device fails
to attach.
Status updates will be posted to the FreeBSD wiki.
__________________________________________________________________
BHyVe
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/BHyVe
URL: http://www.bhyve.org/
Contact: Neel Natu <neel at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Peter Grehan <grehan at FreeBSD.org>
BHyVe is a type-2 hypervisor for FreeBSD/amd64 hosts with Intel VT-x
and EPT CPU support. The bhyve project branch was merged into CURRENT
on Jan 18. Work is progressing on performance, ease of use, AMD SVM
support, and being able to run non-FreeBSD operating systems.
Open tasks:
1. 1. Booting Linux/*BSD/Windows
2. 2. Moving the codebase to a more modular design consisting of a
small base and loadable modules
3. 3. Various hypervisor features such as suspend/resume/live
migration/sparse disk support
__________________________________________________________________
BSD-licenced patch(1)
URL: http://code.google.com/p/bsd-patch/
Contact: Pedro Giffuni <pfg at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Gabor Kovesdan <gabor at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Xin Li <delphij at FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD has been using for a while a very old version of GNU patch that
is partially under the GPLv2. The original GNU patch utility is based
on an initial implementation by Larry Wall that was not actually
copyleft. OpenBSD did many enhancements to an older non-copyleft
version of patch, this version was later adopted and further refined by
DragonFlyBSD and NetBSD but there was no centralized development of the
tool and FreeBSD kept working independently. In less than a week we
took the version in DragonFlyBSD and adapted the FreeBSD enhancements
to make it behave nearer to the version used natively in FreeBSD. Most
of the work was done by Pedro Giffuni, adapting patches from sepotvin@
and ed@, and additional contributions were done by Christoph Mallon,
Gabor Kovesdan and Xin Li. As a result of this we now have a new
version of patch committed in head/usr.bin/patch that you can try by
using WITH_BSD_PATCH in your builds. The new patch(1) doesn't support
the FreeBSD-specific -I and -S options which don't seem necessary. In
GNU patch -I actually means 'ignore whitespaces' and we now support
it
too.
Open tasks:
1. Testing. A lot more testing.
__________________________________________________________________
bsdconfig(8)
URL: http://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/base/head/usr.sbin/bsdconfig/
URL: http://freshports.org/sysutils/bsdconfig/
URL: http://druidbsd.sf.net/download/bsdconfig/
Contact: Devin Teske <dteske at FreeBSD.org>
bsdconfig(8) is actively being developed in HEAD under the
WITH_BSDCONFIG build-requirement. Snapshots are occasionally taken and
made available through the ports system to make testing on 9.0-RELEASE
or higher easier on the testers. Currently HEAD is far beyond the
version 0.7.3 sitting in ports. Upcoming changes will push this to
version 0.8 bringing in the necessary frameworks required for in-depth
package management and distribution maintenance (read: one step closer
to full 1.0 release).
__________________________________________________________________
Common Flash Interface (CFI) driver improvements
Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks at FreeBSD.org>
The Common Flash Interface provides a common programming interface for
a wide range of NOR flash devices commonly found in embedded systems. I
have developed a number of improvements to the cfi(4) device when used
on Intel StrataFlash parts. Unnecessary erase cycles are now avoided,
devices that require single word writes only write changed words, and
multi-word writes are supported for Intel and Sharp devices.
Additionally the timeout code has been reworked and no longer imposes
unneeded latency on operations taking less than 100us. With all of
these changes streaming write speed has improved by more than an order
of magnitude. Once these changes are reviewed they will be committed to
HEAD.
This work was sponsored by DARPA and AFRL.
__________________________________________________________________
Compiler improvements for FreeBSD/ARMv6
Contact: Andrew Turner <andrew at FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD/ARM architecture is now supported by the in-tree clang
compiler. ARM EABI support is now available for both clang and gcc
along with the older and less documented OABI. There are several
outstanding issues, once they are fixed EABI will be made default.
Open tasks:
1. Test EABI builds
2. Fix exception handling for EABI
3. Test clang builds
4. Get clang to work natively on EABI-based ARM system. Currently it
works only as cross-compiler for ARM EABI.
__________________________________________________________________
EuroBSDcon 2012
URL: http://2012.eurobsdcon.org/
URL: http://www.youtube.com/user/eurobsdcon
Contact: EuroBSDcon Organizers <oc-2012 at eurobsdcon.org>
Contact: Gabor Pali <pgj at FreeBSD.org>
The 11th European BSD Conference took place in Warsaw, Poland at the
Warsaw University of Technology with a large number of visitors. It
started up with two tracks of tutorials, featuring FreeNAS, pfSense,
DTrace, PF, development of NetBSD drivers, and an overall introduction
to the FreeBSD operating system given by Kirk McKusick. There we also
had opening and closing keynotes, supplemented with 22 talks on
different topics related to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeNAS and
PC-BSD: BHyVe, configuration management with puppet, improvements in
the OpenBSD cryptographic framework, tuning ZFS, server load balancing
in DNS, running FreeBSD on embedded systems, e.g MIPS and ARM, and
challenges in identity management and authentication.
The conference also had a dedicated track presented by the attendees of
the FreeBSD developer summit and open to all, where one could learn
more about what is happening currently in the Project: results of
Google Summer of Code 2012, architectural changes in the FreeBSD
documentation tree, ILNP, advancements in package building and
development of pkg(8), and a status report on the USB stack.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Core Team
Contact: Core Team <core at FreeBSD.org>
In the fourth quarter, the Core Team granted access for 7 new
committers, and took 1 commit bit in for safekeeping.
The Core Team oversaw the response to the security incident in November
in cooperation with the security team, port managers, and cluster
administrators. For more information on the fallouts and response see
the official announcement. As a result, 9.1-RELEASE was delayed until
late December and was released with a limited set of binary packages.
The Core Team continues to work with developers to rebuild, review, and
restore the package building infrastructure along with redports/QAT.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Developer Summit, Warsaw
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/201210DevSummit
Contact: Gabor Pali <pgj at FreeBSD.org>
We had 53 FreeBSD developers and invited guests attending the FreeBSD
Developer Summit organized as part of EuroBSDcon 2012 in Warsaw, Poland
at the Warsaw University of Technology. This year EuroBSDcon organizers
again offered us their generous support in helping with keeping the
event running smooth, helping with registrations, renting the venue,
and providing food for keeping attendees satisfied and happy.
The Warsaw developer summit spanned over 3 days and had 9 working
groups on various topics. We improved last year's layout inherited from
the Canadian summits because it has worked well earlier but could use
some further refinements. On both the first and second days, we ran the
working groups, ranging from the standard matters, discussing issues
with the USB stack, the compiler toolchain, the Ports Collection, or
the documentation to some experimental ones, e.g. arranging an
operating systems course focusing on FreeBSD. In addition to this,
similarly to last year, one of the working groups was about gathering
vendors to present their ideas and engage in discussion with the
developers on their needs from the Project. Finally, on the third day,
there were a number of exciting work-in-progress reports given in a
dedicated Developer Summit track at the main conference.
Photos and slides for the most of the talks are available on the home
page of the summit.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Documentation Engineering
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/internal/doceng.html
Contact: Glen Barber <gjb at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Marc Fonvieille <blackend at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: G?bor K?vesd?n <gabor at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Hiroki Sato <hrs at FreeBSD.org>
The translations/, projects/ and user/ directories of the doc
repository have been opened with the announced policies in effect.
These branches are now actively used for translations work, editing the
upcoming printed version of the Handbook, and some doc infrastructure
improvements.
The next phase of the infrastructure improvements is in progress. It
will migrate to real XML tools (with the exception of Jade) for
validation and rendering. At the same time, the DocBook schema will be
updated to 4.5.
After long discussions, Google Analytics has been enabled on
FreeBSD.org webpages but access to statistical data has to be solicited
from the Documentation Engineering Team on an individual and one time
basis.
Since July, we have added two doc committers and one translator.
Open tasks:
1. Help the ongoing work on printed edition of the Handbook.
2. Finish the migration to XML tools.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Foundation
Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb at FreeBSDFoundation.org>
A strong year-end fundraising campaign led to the raising $770,000 in
2012. Thank you to everyone who made a donation to support FreeBSD!
We published our year-end newsletter that highlighted everything we did
to support the FreeBSD Project and community during the second half of
the year.
We were a Gold Sponsor for EuroBSDCon. We also attended the conference
and developer summit. Erwin Lansing organized and chaired the Ports and
Package Summit and Vendor Summit at EuroBSDCon 2012. We attended
MeetBSD developer summit November 2012.
George Neville-Neil organized and the Foundation sponsored the Bay Area
Vendor Summit November 2012. We were represented at LISA.
Kirk McKusick taught a tutorial and gave a keynote at EuroBSDCon 2012,
and Justin Gibbs gave a talk at ZFS Day, October 2012.
We talked to DNS server software vendors and participated in
discussions on our DNS implementation, specifically with regard to
DNSSEC validation, at CENTR Tech September 2012 (Amsterdam, the
Netherlands) and EuroBSDCon.
We visited companies to discuss their FreeBSD use and to help
facilitate collaboration with the Project.
Robert Watson published ACM Queue and Communications of the ACM: A
decade of OS access-control extensibility and Kirk McKusick published
ACM Queue and Communications of the ACM: Disks from the Perspective of
a File System.
We negotiated/supervised Foundation funded projects: porting FreeBSD to
the Efika ARM platform, Capsicum Component Framework, Native iSCSI
Target implementation, and EUFI.
We negotiated/supervised/funded hardware needs in FreeBSD co-location
centers.
Many board members provided support for recovery efforts following the
security compromise of FreeBSD.org systems in late 2012.
We completed negotiation and provided legal counsel for the new website
privacy policy for the FreeBSD Project.
We are now an industrial partner in the Cambridge/Imperial/Edinburgh
EPSRC REMS project on the Rigorous Engineering of Mainstream Systems.
We coordinated the Foundation's discussion of Jira/Java; conclusion,
will continue to be supportive of OpenJDK and not restart proprietary
JDK support.
We implemented a donor management database to help with our fundraising
efforts. We also began working on automating the donation process.
We started the Faces of FreeBSD Series where we share the story of a
Foundation grant recipient periodically. This allows us to spotlight
people who received Foundation funding to work on development projects,
run conferences, travel to conferences, and advocate for FreeBSD.
We hired two technical staff members.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Haskell Ports
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Haskell
URL: https://github.com/FreeBSD-haskell/FreeBSD-haskell/
Contact: G?bor P?LI <pgj at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ashish SHUKLA <ashish at FreeBSD.org>
We are proud to announce that the FreeBSD Haskell Team has updated the
Haskell Platform to 2012.4.0.0, GHC to 7.4.2 as well as updated
existing ports to their latest stable versions. All Haskell ports are
also updated to use new OPTIONS framework, and now, building with
dynamic libraries (DYNAMIC) is on by default. GHC also uses GCC 4.6 and
binutils 2.22 from ports. We also added a number of new Haskell ports,
and their count in FreeBSD Ports tree is now 368.
Open tasks:
1. Test GHC to work with clang/LLVM.
2. Commit pending Haskell ports to the FreeBSD Ports tree.
3. Add more ports to the Ports Collection.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on AARCH64
URL: https://github.com/zxombie/aarch64-freebsd-sandbox
URL:
http://www.arm.com/products/tools/models/fast-models/foundation-model.p
hp
Contact: Andrew Turner <andrew at FreeBSD.org>
Work has started on porting FreeBSD to AARCH64, ARM's new 64-bit
architecture, using the ARMv8 Foundation Model software. GCC and
binutils have been ported to FreeBSD and work started on kernel
initialization, including MMU setup.
Open tasks:
1. Get the MMU working
2. Get system register documentation from ARM
3. Port clang AArch64 to FreeBSD
4. Bring the code into a FreeBSD project branch
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on BeagleBone
Contact: Tim Kientzle <kientzle at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Oleksandr Tymoshenko <gonzo at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Damjan Marion <dmarion at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Brett Wynkoop <wynkoop at wynn.com>
FreeBSD on BeagleBone is benefiting from the general work on ARM
stability being done by many people, and is proving to be a nice
testbed for our ARMv7 support. All ongoing work is happening now
directly in -CURRENT and we expect it to be in pretty good shape by the
time 10.0 ships.
The network driver is now pretty stable; the system should be useful as
a small network device.
Occasional system snapshots are being built and advertised for people
to test. Ask on freebsd-arm@ if you'd like to try the newest one.
Open tasks:
1. We need someone to finish the USB driver. Ask if you'd like to take
this over.
2. MMCSD performance is still rather poor.
3. There's been discussion of how to improve the GPIO configuration
and pinmux handling to simplify hardware experimentation. If we had
more people to help build drivers, we could start supporting some
of the BeagleBone capes.
4. Mostly we just need people to use it and report any issues they
encounter.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi
Contact: Oleksandr Tymoshenko <gonzo at FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD is running on Raspberry Pi and supports the following
peripherals:
* USB controller
* SDHC controller
* Network
* Framebuffer (HDMI and composite)
* GPIO
* VCHI interface
Videocore tests (OpenGL, video decoding, audio, display access) work
with current VCHI driver implementation.
Open tasks:
1. Add DMA mode support to USB driver. Some proof-of-concept code is
done but more work required to finish it.
2. Re-implement VCHI driver with more FreeBSD-friendly locking.
3. Implement more drivers: SPI, PWM, audio.
__________________________________________________________________
Google Summer of Code 2013
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/summerofcode.html
URL:
http://google-opensource.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/flip-bits-not-burgers-g
oogle-summer-of.html
URL: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2013
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code
Contact: FreeBSD Summer of Code Administrators <soc-admins at
FreeBSD.org>
Since 2005 Google has run its yearly Summer of Code program, in which
Google awards stipends to students who successfully complete projects
with participating Open Source organisations. FreeBSD has participated
in GSoC every year since its inception, and with the announcement that
Google will once again run the program in 2013 hopes to participate
once more.
Google have not yet opened the application period for mentoring
organisations, but once it does FreeBSD plans to apply. Assuming that
we are successful in our application to participate, we will publish a
large list of ideas for possible projects shortly after. Students may
then apply to do one of those projects, or suggest their own idea for a
project. After the application period, FreeBSD will discover how many
student slots we have been allocated, at which point successful
students will take some time to plan their project, gather required
information and discuss their plans with their mentors, before having
around 12 weeks to develop their code.
In the eight years of FreeBSD's participation in Google Summer of Code,
approximately 150 students have successfully complete projects with us,
covering a wide spread of areas of both the source and ports trees. Of
these, 22 students continued participating with FreeBSD and
subsequently became full FreeBSD committers, many later going on to
mentor Summer of Code students themselves.
Whether FreeBSD has been successful in being selected to be a
participating organisation in Google Summer of Code 2013 should be
announced in early April.
__________________________________________________________________
KDE/FreeBSD
URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org
URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org/area51.php
Contact: KDE FreeBSD <kde at FreeBSD.org>
The KDE/FreeBSD team have continued to improve the experience of KDE
software and Qt under FreeBSD. The latest round of improvements
include:
* Fix handling of Removable property in solid engine
* Fix management of backlight with UPower (requires acpi_video(4))
* Installing spell-checking dictionaries with a dependency of
KDE-locale ports
The team has also made many releases and upstreamed many fixes and
patches. The latest round of releases include:
* KDE SC: 4.9.2 (area51)
* PyQt: 4.9.5 (area51); SIP: 4.14 (area51)
* KDevelop: 4.4.0, 4.4.1 (area51); KDevPlatform: 1.4.0, 1.4.1
(area51)
* Calligra: 2.5.3, 2.5.4 (area51)
* CMake: 2.8.10.1
* Many smaller ports
The team is always looking for more testers and porters so please
contact us at kde at FreeBSD.org and visit our home page at
http://FreeBSD.kde.org.
Open tasks:
1. Updating out-of-date ports, see PortScout for a list
__________________________________________________________________
Native iSCSI Target
Contact: Edward Tomasz Napieral/a <trasz at FreeBSD.org>
During the October-December time period, the Native iSCSI Target
project progressed to the working prototype stage. Most of this time
was spent writing kernel-based part, an iSCSI frontend to the CAM
Target Layer. The frontend handles iSCSI Full Feature phase after
ctld(8) hands off the connection. The istgt-derived code in ctld(8) was
rewritten from scratch; now it's much shorter and more readable. The
ctladm(8) utility gained iSCSI-specific subcommands to handle tasks
such as listing iSCSI sessions or forcing disconnection. The target
works correctly with the FreeBSD initiator.
__________________________________________________________________
NFS Version 4
Contact: Rick Macklem <rmacklem at FreeBSD.org>
The NFSv4.1 client, including support for pNFS for the Files Layout
only, has now been committed to head/current. Work on NFSv4.1 server
support has just been started and will hopefully be ready for
head/current this summer. The client side disk caching of delegated
files is progressing and the code is under projects/nfsv4-packrats in
the subversion repository. Someone is working on server side referrals
and, as such, I hope this might make it into 10.0 as well.
__________________________________________________________________
Ports Collection
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
URL:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing-ports/
URL: http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/index.html
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/portmgr/index.html
URL: http://blogs.FreeBSDish.org/portmgr/
URL: http://www.twitter.com/freebsd_portmgr/
URL: http://www.facebook.com/portmgr
Contact: Thomas Abthorpe <portmgr-secretary at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Port Management Team <portmgr at FreeBSD.org>
The ports tree crossed the threshold of 24,000 ports, while the PR
count still is close to 1600.
In Q4 we added five new committers and took in two commit bits for safe
keeping.
In the tradition of recruiting new portmgr@ at conferences, we added
Bernhard Froehlich to our ranks. He is the one responsible for
redports.org
Pav Lucistnik stepped down from his role on portmgr, he was one of our
principles doing -exp runs and well known for sending failmails.
In the well publicised compromise, the pointyhat machines were broken
into and subsequently taken down, isolated and sanitised. As a
pre-emptive move redports/QAT were also taken down. Work is under way
to restore the services.
Mark Linimon began a from-scratch test install on one of his own spare
machines with the purpose of documenting all the missing steps from the
portbuild article. While doing so, he further overhauled the codebase
to both make it easier to install, and to further refactor it in light
of a security review (still ongoing at time of this writing). Once this
is complete, the next task will be to reinstall all existing machines
from scratch.
Open tasks:
1. Most ports PRs are assigned, we now need to focus on testing,
committing and closing.
__________________________________________________________________
Postmaster
Contact: David Wolfskill <postmaster at FreeBSD.org>
The postmaster team has expanded, with the addition of Florian Smeets
(flo at FreeBSD.org).
We have implemented a Mailman "handler" to drop duplicate messages
when
both copies are sent to the same list (under both the "long" (e.g.,
"freebsd-current") and "short" (e.g.,
"current") names).
We have created several new mailing lists:
* freebsd-course: educational course on FreeBSD
* freebsd-numerics: Discussions of high quality implementation of
libm functions.
* freebsd-snapshots: FreeBSD Development Snapshot Announcements
* freebsd-tcltk: FreeBSD-specific Tcl/Tk discussions
We have also removed old mailing lists:
* freebsd-binup
* freebsd-www (merged into freebsd-doc)
__________________________________________________________________
pxe_http -- booting FreeBSD from apache
URL: http://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/base/user/sbruno/pxe_http_head/
Contact: Sean Bruno <sbruno at FreeBSD.org>
Currently works with VirtualBox VMs and Apache 2.2 port.
Open tasks:
1. Lots and lots of compile warnings exist with clang and gcc. This
really needs to be investigated.
2. Better support for other webservers. Currently needs Apache to
work.
3. Needs another pass at basic documentation. Current documentation is
actually quite good from the original
4. Network stack needs audit. I'm not sure if the HTTP/TCP/UDP/IP code
is original or based on something else.
__________________________________________________________________
SMP-Friendly pf(4)
Contact: Gleb Smirnoff <glebius at FreeBSD.org>
The project is aimed at moving the pf(4) packet filter out of a single
mutex, as well as in general improving of the FreeBSD port. The project
has reached its main goal. The pf(4) is no longer covered by single
mutex and contention on network stack on pf(4) is now very low. The
code is production ready. The projects/pf branch had been merged to the
head branch and will be available in 10.0-RELEASE.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Japanese Documentation Project
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ja/
URL: http://www.jp.FreeBSD.org/doc-jp/
Contact: Hiroki Sato <hrs at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ryusuke Suzuki <ryusuke at FreeBSD.org>
The ja_JP.eucJP subtree has constantly been updated since the last
status report.
In FreeBSD Handbook, translation work of the "users" section has
been
completed. "linuxemu" and "serialcomms" were updated and
subsection
"Subversion mirror site" was newly added to "mirrors"
section.
Open tasks:
1. Further translation work of outdated documents in the ja_JP.eucJP
subtree.
__________________________________________________________________
UEFI
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/UEFI
URL: http://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/base/projects/uefi/
Contact: Benno Rice <benno at FreeBSD.org>
There is code in the projects/uefi branch that can build a working
64-bit loader for UEFI. This loader can load a kernel and boot to a
mountroot prompt on a serial console on a system with <= 1GB of RAM.
Full multiuser has not yet been tested. Work is progressing towards
having a working syscons. The issue preventing boot on systems with >
1GB of RAM has not yet been found. UEFI-compatible boot media can be
generated using in-tree tools, however there are issues with detecting
the CD filesystem and using it as the load default. The 64-bit UEFI
loader can load a 32-bit kernel but currently cannot hand over to it
due to a lack of code to switch to 32-bit mode. Further research is
required into Secure Boot.
__________________________________________________________________
Unmapped I/O
URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~kib/misc/unmapped.13.patch
Contact: Jeff Roberson <jeff at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib at FreeBSD.org>
A well-known performance problem of FreeBSD on large SMP hardware is
the need to invalidate TLB for all CPUs when instantiating and
destroying the VMIO buffers. Invalidation is performed by sending
inter-processor interrupt broadcast, which disrupts the execution path
of each CPU, and induces latency on the request itself. Since most I/O
requests processing require creation of the buffers to hold the data in
the kernel, TLB invalidation becomes an obstacle for I/O scalability on
many-CPU machines.
The work done for flushing the TLBs is especially meaningless since
most mappings created are not used for anything but copying the data
from the usermode to the kernel page cache forth and back. Most
architectures have already established facilities to perform such
copies using much faster techniques, for instance, the direct map on
amd64, or specially reserved per-CPU page frames or TLB entries on
other architectures.
Jeff Roberson unified the machine-specific parts of the busdma(9),
making a common set of low-level functions available on each
architecture. This was committed as r246713. The end result is that the
new types of the load functions can be added in the single,
machine-independent place. In particular, it is easy to modify the
drivers to accept the 'unmapped' bio requests, which lists the vm
pages
for the device dma engine, instead of the virtual address of the kernel
buffer.
Konstantin Belousov developed the changes for buffer cache which allow
the VMIO buffers to not map the referenced pages, and used the feature
for UFS. Per-architecture pmap_copy_pages(9) methods were added to
facilitate fast copying between user I/O buffers and pages of unmapped
buffers. The unmapped buffers create the unmapped bio requests for the
drivers, support for which was made possible by Jeff's patch.
Tests show that even on a small 4-core machine, the system time for
reading files on UFS is reduced by 30%.
Open tasks:
1. Test the patch, in particular, on non-x86 architectures.
__________________________________________________________________
Unprivileged install and image creation
Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks at FreeBSD.org>
In order to make it easier to build releases and embedded system disk
images I have been adding infrastructure to allow the install and
packaging stages to the FreeBSD build progress to run without root
privilege. To this end I have added two options to the toplevel build
system: The -DDB_FROM_SRC option allows the install to proceed when the
required set of passwd and group entires does not match the host
system. The -DNO_ROOT option causes files to be installed as the
running user and for metadata such as owner, group, suid bits, and file
flags to be logged in a ${DESTDIR}/METALOG file.
This work required the import of NetBSD's mtree and the addition of a
number of features from NetBSD to install. I have added all FreeBSD
features to NetBSD's mtree and imported it as nmtree. Before FreeBSD
10.0 is released I will replace our version. I have also added all
required features to install. Changes to makefs were required to parse
the contents of the METALOG file.
These new features required importing new versions of the pwcache(3)
and vis(3) APIs from NetBSD so those portions of libc.
In addition to modifying build infrastructure to use the new features
of mtree and install. I corrected a number of cases of files being
installed by programs other than install or being installed more than
once. A few known instances of duplicate directories in the output
exist, but the results are usable in some contexts.
I plan to MFC these changes as far back as the stable/8 branch to make
it possible to build all supported releases without root privilege.
This work was sponsored by DARPA and AFRL.
Open tasks:
1. Add support for -DNO_ROOT to src/release/Makefile so that releases
can be built without root privilege.
2. Create a tool to install partition tables and file system images in
disk image files without the use of mdctl, gpart, and dd.
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Xfce
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Xfce
Contact: <xfce at FreeBSD.org>
A major update has been made to Thunar (file manager for the Xfce
Desktop Environment).
1.6.x series introduce lots of improvements, most noticeably is tabs
support, and the performance has been improved.
Open tasks:
1. Try to fix HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) feature in Midori
with Vala 0.12.1 (works fine with Vala >= 0.14.x)
2. Replace libxfce4gui (deprecated and not maintained by upstream) by
libxfce4ui in order to enhance support for Xfce >= 4.10.
3. Test core and plugins (panel, Thunar) with GLib >= 4.32 (to replace
deprecated and removed functions introduced since GLib 2.30).
4. Fix gtk-xfce-engine with Gtk+ >= 3.6.
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