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May-June 2004 Status Report
Introduction
This installment of the Bi-Monthly Status Report is a few days late,
but I'm pleased to say that it is chocked full of over 30 articles.
May and June were yet again busy months; the Netperf project passed
major milestones and can now be run with the debug.mpsafenet tunable
turned on from sources in CVS. The ARM, MIPS, and PPC ports saw quite
a bit of progress, as did several other SMPng and Netgraph projects.
FreeBSD 5.3 is just around the corner, so don't hesitate to grab a
snapshot and test the progress!
On a more serious note, it's very important to remember that code
freeze for FreeBSD 5.3 will happen on August 15, 2004. This is only a
few weeks away and there is still a lot to do. The TODO list for the
release can be found at . If you are looking for a way to contribute
to the release, this TODO list has several items that are in urgent
and in need of attention. Testing is also very important. The tree has
had some stability stability problems in the past few weeks, but there
are work-arounds that should allow everyone to continue testing and
using FreeBSD. We absolutely must have FreeBSD 5.3 be a rock-solid
release, so every little bit of contributed effort helps!
Thanks,
Scott Long
* Bluetooth stack for FreeBSD (Netgraph implementation)
* ALTQ import
* Buf Junta project
* CAM Lockdown
* Cronyx Adapters Drivers
* EuroBSDCon 2004 registration now open
* FreeBSD Brazilian Documentation Project
* FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project
* FreeBSD Handbook, 3rd Edition, Volume II: Administrator Guide
* FreeBSD ports monitoring system
* FreeBSD profile.sh
* FreeBSD/arm
* FreeBSD/MIPS Status Report
* HP Network Scanjet 5
* i386 Interrupt Code & PCI Interrupt Routing
* Improved Multibyte/Wide Character Support
* IPFilter Upgraded to 3.4.35
* KDE on FreeBSD
* kgi4BSD
* Low-overhead performance monitoring for FreeBSD
* Network interface naming changes
* Network Stack Locking
* Packet Filter - pf
* PowerPC Port
* Project Mini-Evil
* SMPng Status Report
* Sync protocols (Netgraph and SPPP)
* TTY subsystem realignment
* Various GEOM classes and geom(8) utility
* VuXML and portaudit
Bluetooth stack for FreeBSD (Netgraph implementation)
Contact: Maksim Yevmenkin <m_evmenkin@yahoo.com>
Bluetooth code was marked as non-i386 specific. It is now possible to
build it on all supported platforms. Please help with testing. Other
then this there was not much progress during last few months. I've
been very busy with Real Life.
_________________________________________________________________
ALTQ import
URL: http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/kjc/kjc/software.html#ALTQ
URL: http://www.rofug.ro/projects/freebsd-altq/
URL: http://kerneltrap.org/node.php?id=505
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~mlaier/ALTQ_driver/
Contact: Max Laier <mlaier@FreeBSD.org>
The ALTQ framework is part of KAME for more than 4 years and has been
adopted by Net- and OpenBSD since more than 3 years. It provides means
of managing outgoing packets to do QoS and bandwidth limitations.
OpenBSD developed a different way to interact with ALTQ using pf,
which was adopted by KAME as the "default for everyday use".
The Romanian FreeBSD Users Group has had a project to work towards
integration of ALTQ into FreeBSD, which provided a very good starting
point for the final import. The import only provides the "pf mode"
configuration and classification API as the older ALTQ3 API does not
suit to our SMP approach.
A reworked configuration API (decoupled from pf) is in the making as
are additional driver modifications. Both should be done before
5-STABLE is branched, although additional drivers can be imported
during the lifetime of 5-STABLE as well.
_________________________________________________________________
Buf Junta project
Contact: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@FreeBSD.org>
The buf-junta project is underway, I am trying to bisect the code such
that we get a struct bufobj which is the handle and method carrier for
a buffer-cache object. All vnodes contain a bufobj, but as filesystems
get migrated to GEOM backing, bufobj's will exist which do not have an
associated vnode. The work is ongoing.
_________________________________________________________________
CAM Lockdown
Contact: Scott Long <scottl@freebsd.org>
Not much coding has taken place on this lately, with the recent focus
being on refining the design. We are currently investigating per-CPU
completion queues and threads in order to reduce locks and increase
concurrency. Also reviewing the BSD/OS CAM lockdown to see what ideas
can be shared. Work should hopefully puck back up in late July.
Development is taking place in the FreeBSD Perforce repository under
the //depot/projects/scottl-camlock/... branch for now.
_________________________________________________________________
Cronyx Adapters Drivers
URL: http://www.cronyx.ru/hardware/wan.html
Contact: Roman Kurakin <rik@FreeBSD.org>
cp(4) driver for Cronyx Tau-PCI was added. Cronyx Tau-PCI is family of
synchronous WAN adapters with various set of interfaces such as V.35,
RS-232, RS-530(449), X.21, E1, E3, T3, STS-1. This is a third family
of Cronyx adapters that is supported by FreeBSD now. Now all three
drivers cx(4), ctau(4) and cp(4) are on both major branches (HEAD and
RELENG_4).
Busdma conversion was recently finished. Current work is concentrated
on locking both for adapters drivers and for sppp (see my other report
for additional information).
_________________________________________________________________
EuroBSDCon 2004 registration now open
URL: http://www.eurobsdcon2004.de/
Contact: Patrick M. Hausen <hausen@punkt.de>
Registration for EuroBSDCon 2004 taking place in Karlsruhe, Germany,
from Oct. 29th to 31st has just opened. An early bird discount will be
offered to all registering until Aug. 15th. Please see the conference
website for details.
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Brazilian Documentation Project
URL: http://doc.fugspbr.org
URL: http://lists.fugspbr.org/listinfo.cgi/doc-fugspbr.org
URL: http://developer.berlios.de/projects/doc-br/
Contact: DOC-BR Discussion List <doc@fugspbr.org>
The FreeBSD Brazilian Documentation Project is an effort of the
Brazilian FreeBSD Users Group (FUG-BR) to translate the available
documentation to pt_BR. We are proud to announce that we've finished
the Handbook and FDP Primer translation and they are being revised.
Both should be integrated to the FreeBSD CVS repository shortly.
There are many other articles being translated and their status can be
checked at our website. If you want to help please create an account
at BerliOS, since our CVS repository is being hosted there, and
contact us through our mailing list. Any help is welcome!
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project
URL: http://www.evilcoder.org/freebsd_html
URL: http://www.evilcoder.org/freebsd/handbook.tbz
URL: http://www.evilcoder.org/freebsd/html.tbz
Contact: Remko Lodder <remko@elvandar.org>
The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation project is a ongoing project
translating the FreeBSD handbook {and others} to the dutch language.
We are still on the look for translators and people that are willing
to check the current html documentation. If you are interested,
contact me at the email address shown above. We currently are reading
for some checkups and then insert the first documents into the
documentation tree.
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Handbook, 3rd Edition, Volume II: Administrator Guide
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/docproj/handbook3.html
Contact: Murray Stokely <murray@FreeBSD.org>
The Third Edition of the FreeBSD Handbook has been split into two
volumes. The first volume, the User Guide, has been published. Work is
progressing on the second volume. The following chapters are included
in the second volume : advanced-networking, network-servers, config,
boot, cutting-edge, disks, l10n, mac, mail, ppp-and-slip, security,
serialcomms, users, vinum, eresources, bibliography, mirrors. Please
see the Task List for information about what work remains to be done.
In addition to technical and grammatical review, a number of HTML
output assumptions in the document need to be corrected.
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD ports monitoring system
URL: http://portsmon.firepipe.net/index.html
Contact: Mark Linimon <linimon_at_lonesome_dot_com>
The system continues to function well. The accuracy of the automatic
classification algorithm has been improved by assigning a higher
priority to port names found in pieces of Makefiles.
Several bugs had to be fixed due to the transition from bento to
pointyhat. For about two weeks the URLs to the build errors were
wrong. This has now been corrected (but note that some of the
pointyhat summary pages themselves still show the broken links.)
A report was added to show only PRs in the 'feedback' state, so that
committers can focus on maintainer and/or responsible timeouts. (As a
reminder, the policy is 2 weeks). Another report on 'ports that are in
ports/MOVED, but still exist' has also been added to the Anomalies
page. Sometimes these are actual errors but not always.
Here are my latest observations about the trends in ports PRs:
* We were (very briefly) down to 650 ports PRs. From looking at the
graphs, this appears to be the lowest number since 2001. This is
despite the fact that between the two time periods the number of
ports had increased 70%.
* We have made a little bit of progress on the number of PRs which
apply to existing ports and have been assigned to a FreeBSD
committer, from 400 to around 350. This is partly due to some
committers going through the database, putting old PRs into the
'feedback' state, and then later invoking the 'maintainer
timeout'
rule mentioned above. (In some cases the PRs are now too old to
still apply, and those are just closed.)
* A few maintainers are currently responsible for one-third of those
350. Please, if you feel that you are over committed, consider
asking for new volunteers to maintain these ports.
* In terms of build errors, there is some new breakage from the
preliminary testing with gcc3.4, which is even stricter with
respect to the code it will accept than was gcc3.3. Many of these
errors are shown as 'unknown' by the classification script. I
have
submitted a patch to fix this.
* The majority of the build errors are still due to compilation
problems, primarily from the gcc upgrades. Since FreeBSD tends to
be at the forefront of gcc adaptation, this is to be expected, but
IMHO we should really try to fix as many of these as possible
before 5.3 is released.
* The next highest number of build errors are caused by code that
does not build on our 64-bit architectures due to the assumption
that "all the world's a PC". Here is the entire list; the
individual bars are clickable.
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD profile.sh
URL: https://projects.fsck.ch/profile/
Contact: Tobias Roth <ports@fsck.ch>
FreeBSD profile.sh is an enhancement to the FreeBSD 5 rcng boot
system, targeted at laptops. One can configure multiple network
environments (eg, home, work, university). After this initial
configuration, the laptop detects automatically in what environment it
is started and configures itself accordingly. Not only network
settings, but almost everything from under /etc can be configured per
environment. It is also possible to suspend the machine in one
environment and wake it up in a different one, and reconfiguration
will happen automatically.
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/arm
Contact: Olivier Houchard <cognet@FreeBSD.org>
Not much to report, Xscale support is in progress, and should boot at
least single user really soon on an Intel IQ31244
Evaluation board.
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/MIPS Status Report
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/mips/
URL: http://www.mdstud.chalmers.se/~md1gavan/mips64emul/
Contact: Juli Mallett <jmallett@FreeBSD.org>
In the past two months, opportunities to perform a good chunk of work
on FreeBSD/MIPS have arisen and significant issues with context
switching, clocks, interrupts, and kernel virtual memory have been
resolved. A number of issues with caches were fixed, however those are
far from complete and at last check, there were issues when running
cached which would prevent booting sometimes. Due to toolchain issues
in progress, current kernels are no longer bootable on real hardware.
A 64-bit MIPS emulator has arisen giving the ability to test and debug
in an emulator, and much testing has taken place in it. It has been
added to the FreeBSD ports tree, and the port will be actively
tracking the main codebase as possible. In general, FreeBSD/MIPS
kernels should run fine in it.
Before toolchain and cache issues, the first kernel threads would run,
busses and some devices would attach, and the system would boot to a
mountroot prompt.
_________________________________________________________________
HP Network Scanjet 5
URL: http://berklix.com/scanjet/
Contact: Julian Stacey <jhs@FreeBSD.org>
HP Network Scanjet 5 can unobtrusively run FreeBSD inside the scanner.
Those who miss their Unix at work can have a FreeBSD box, un-noticed &
un-challenged by blinkered managers who block any non Microsoft PC in
the building. http://berklix.com/scanjet/
_________________________________________________________________
i386 Interrupt Code & PCI Interrupt Routing
Contact: John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
Support for programming the polarity and trigger mode of interrupt
sources at runtime was added. This includes a mini-driver for the ELCR
register used to control the configuration for ISA and EISA
interrupts. The atpic driver reprograms the ELCR as necessary, while
the apic driver reprograms the interrupt pin associated with an
interrupt source as necessary. The information about which
configuration to use mostly comes from ACPI. However, non-ACPI systems
also force any ISA interrupts used to route PCI interrupts to use
active-low polarity and level trigger.
Support for suspend and resume on i386 was also slightly improved.
Suspend and resume support was added to the ELCR, $PIR, and apic
drivers.
The ACPI PCI-PCI bridge driver was fixed to fall back to the PCI-PCI
bridge swizzle method for routing interrupts when a routing table was
not provided by the BIOS.
Mixed mode can now be disabled or enabled at boot time via a loader
tunable.
_________________________________________________________________
Improved Multibyte/Wide Character Support
Contact: Tim Robbins <tjr@FreeBSD.org>
Many more text-processing utilities in the FreeBSD base system have
been updated to work with multibyte characters, including comm, cut,
expand, fold, join, paste, unexpand, and uniq. New versions of GNU
grep and GNU sort (from coreutils) have been imported, together with
multibyte support patches from developers at IBM and Red Hat.
Future work will focus on modifying the regular expression functions
to work with multibyte characters, improving performance of the C
library routines, and updating the remaining utilities (sed and tr are
two important ones still remaining).
_________________________________________________________________
IPFilter Upgraded to 3.4.35
URL: http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~avalon/ip-filter.html
Contact: Darren Reed <darrenr@FreeBSD.org>
IPFilter has been upgraded in both FreeBSD-current and 4-STABLE (post
4.10) from version 3.4.31 to 3.4.35.
_________________________________________________________________
KDE on FreeBSD
URL: http://freebsd.kde.org
Contact: Michael Nottebrock <lofi@FreeBSD.org>
The work on converting the build switches/OPTIONS currently present in
the ports of the main KDE modules into separate ports in order to make
packages available for the software/features they provide is
progressing. Porting of KOffice 1.3.2 are nearly completed. The
swedish FreeBSD snapshot server , operated and maintained by members
of the KDE/FreeBSD team, is back up and running at full steam.
Additional amd64 hardware has been added and amd64 snapshots will be
available soon.
_________________________________________________________________
kgi4BSD
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/~nsouch/kgi4BSD
Contact: Nicholas Souchu <nsouch@FreeBSD.org>
KGI is going slowly but surely. The port of the KGI/Linux accel to
FreeBSD is in progress. It's no more than a double buffering API for
graphic command passing to the HW engine.
Most of the work in the past months was about console management and
more especially dual head console. Otherwise a new driver building
tree is now ready to compile Linux and FreeBSD drivers in the same
tree.
Documentation about KGI design is in progress.
_________________________________________________________________
Low-overhead performance monitoring for FreeBSD
URL:
Contact: Joseph Koshy <jkoshy@FreeBSD.org>
The current design attempts to support both per-process and
system-wide statistical profiling and per-process "virtual"
performance counters. The userland API libpmc(3) is somewhat stable
now, but the kernel module's design is being redone to handle MP
better. Initial development is targeting the AMD Athlon CPUs, but the
intent is to support all the CPUs that FreeBSD runs on.
An early prototype is available under Perforce [under
//depot/user/jkoshy/projects/pmc/].
_________________________________________________________________
Network interface naming changes
Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks@FreeBSD.org>
An enhanced network interface cloning API has been committed. It
allows interfaces to support more complex names then the current name#
style. This functionality has been used to enable interesting cloners
like auto-configuring vlan interfaces. Other features include locking
of cloner structures and the ability of drivers to reject destroy
requests.
Work on userland support for this functionality is ongoing.
_________________________________________________________________
Network Stack Locking
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/smp/
URL: http://www.watson.org/~robert/freebsd/netperf/
Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
This project is aimed at converting the FreeBSD network stack from
running under the single Giant kernel lock to permitting it to run in
a fully parallel manner on multiple CPUs (i.e., a fully threaded
network stack). This will improve performance/latency through
reentrancy and preemption on single-processor machines, and also on
multi-processor machines by permitting real parallelism in the
processing of network traffic. As of FreeBSD 5.2, it was possible to
run low level network functions, as well as the IP filtering and
forwarding plane, without the Giant lock, as well as "process to
completion" in the interrupt handler. This permitted both inbound and
outbound traffic to run in parallel across multiple interfaces and
CPUs.
Work continues to improve the maturity and completeness of the locking
(and performance) of the network stack for 5.3. The network stack
development branch has been updated to the latest CVS HEAD, as well as
the following and more. Many but not all of these changes have been
merged to the FreeBSD CVS tree as of the writing of this report.
Complete details and more minor changes are documented in the README
file on the netperf web page.
* Addition of hard-coded WITNESS lock orders for socket-related
locks, route locks, interface locks, file descriptor locks, SLIP,
and PCB locks for various protocols (UDP, TCP, UNIX domain
sockets). (Merged)
* Modifed MAC Framework to use inpcbs as the source for mbuf labels
rather than reaching up to the socket layer, avoiding the
additional acquisition of socket locks. Locked access to so_label
and so_peerlabel using the socket lock throughout; assert socket
lock in the MAC Framework where depended on. MAC Framework now
makes a copy of the socket label before externalizing to prevent a
copyout while holding the label lock (and potentially seeing an
inconsistent label). (Merged)
* Extensive annotation of locking state throughout the network
stack, especially relating to sockets.
* Several locking fixes for ng_base.c, the basic Netgraph
infrastructure. (Merged)
* Global accept filter list locking, especially during registration.
(Partially merged)
* Revise locking in socket state transition helpers, such as
soisconnecting(), soisconnected(), etc, to simplify lock handling.
(Merged)
* Fix bugs in netatalk DDP locking, merge all netatalk locking to
CVS. (Merged)
* soref() socket locking assertions and associated fixes. (Merged)
* Fifofs now uses its own mutex instead of the vnode interlock to
synchronize fifo operations, avoiding lock order issues with
socket buffer locking. (Merged)
* Cleanup of locking related to file descriptor close and Giant
requirements. Experimentation with reducing locking here.
* Review and fix several instances of socket locking in the TCP
code. (Merged)
* NFS server locking merged to FreeBSD CVS. (Merged)
* Accept locking merged to rwatson_netperf, and to FreeBSD CVS. A
new global mutex, accept_mtx, now protects all socket related
accept queue and state fields (SS_COMP, SS_INCOMP), and flags
relating to accept are moved from the generic so_state field to
so_qstate. accept1() rearranged, as with sonewconn() as a result,
and a file descriptor leak fixed. Close a variety of races in
socket referencing during accept. soabort() and other partially
connected socket related functions updated to take locking into
account. (Merged)
* Issue associated with non-atomic setting of SS_NBIO in fifofs
resolved by adding MSG_NBIO. (Merged)
* Several flags from so_state moved to sb_state so they can be
locked properly using the socket buffer mutex. (Merged)
* Socket locks are now not held over calls into the protocol
preventing many lock order issues between socket and protocol
locks, and avoiding a substantial amount of conditional locking.
(Merged)
* mbuma, the UMA-based mbuf allocator, is merged to CVS. This
reduces the kernel to one widely used memory allocator, improves
performance, and allows memory from mbufs to be reclaimed and
reused for other types of storage when pressure lowers. (Merged)
* sb_flags now properly locked. (Merged)
* Global MAC label ifnet lock introduced to protect labels on
network interfaces. (Merged)
* Rewrites of parts of soreceive() and sosend() to improve MP safety
merged to CVS, including modifications to make sure socket buffer
cache state is consistent when locks are released.
sockbuf_pushsync() added to guarantee consistency of cached
pointers. (Merged)
* UNIX domain socket locking revised to use a subsystem lock due to
inconsistencies in lock order and inconsistent coverage ofunpcb
fields. Cleanup of global variable locking in UNIX domain sockets,
Giant handling when entering VFS. All UNIX domain socket locking
merged to CVS. (Merged)
* netisr dispatch introduced in the routing code such that routing
socket message delivery is performed asynchronously from routing
events to avoid lock order issues. (Merged)
* IGMP and multicast locking merged to CVS. (Merged)
* Cleanup of lasting recursive Giant acquisition left over from
forwarding/bridging plane only locking. (Merged)
* ALTQ imported into the FreeBSD in a locked state. (Merged)
* Conditional locking in sbdrop(), sbdroprecord(), sbrelease(),
sbflush(), spappend(), sbappendstream(), sbappendrecord(),
sbinsertoob(), sbappendaddr(), sbappendcontrol() eliminated.
(Merged)
* Some cleanup of IP stack management ioctls and lock order issues.
(Merged)
* Cleanup and annotation of sorflush() use of a temporary stack held
socket buffer during flush. (Merged)
* Substantial cleanup of socket wakeup mechanisms to drop locks in
advance of wakeup, avoid holding locks over upcalls, and
assertions of proper lock state. (Merged)
* With the integration of revised ifnet cloning, cloning data
structures are now better locked. (Merged)
* Socket locking for portalfs. (Merged)
* Global so_global_mtx introduced to protect generation numbers and
socket counts. (Merged)
* KAME IPSEC and FAST_IPSEC now use rawcb_mtx to protect raw socket
list integration. More work required here. (Merged)
* Socket locking around SO_SNDLOWAT and SO_RCVLOWAT. (Merged)
* soreserve() and sbreserve() reformulation to improve locking and
consistency. Similar cleanup in the use of reservation functions
in tcp_mss(). (Merged)
* Locking cost reduction in sbappend*(). (Merged)
* Global locking for a number of Netgraph modules, including
ng_iface, ng_ppp, ng_socket, ng_pppoe, ng_frame_relay, ng_tty,
ng_eiface. (Merged)
* IPv6 inpcb locking. Resulting cleanup of inpcb locking assertions,
and enabling of inpcb locking assertions by default even with IPv6
compiled in.
* if_xl now MPSAFE. (Merged)
* soreceive() non-inline OOB support placed in its own function.
(Merged)
* NFS client socket locking. (Merged)
* SLIP now uses a asynchronous task queue to prevent Giant-free
entrance of the TTY code.
* E-mail sent to current@ providing Giant-free operation guidelines
and details.
_________________________________________________________________
Packet Filter - pf
URL: http://www.benzedrine.cx/pf.html
Contact: Max Laier <mlaier@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Daniel Hartmeier <dhartmei@FreeBSD.org>
We imported pf as of OpenBSD 3.5 stable on June, 17th which will be
the base for 5-STABLE pf (according to the current schedule). The most
important improvement in this release is the new interface handling
which makes it possible to write pf rule sets for hot-pluggable
devices and pseudo cloning devices, before they exist. The import of
the ALTQ framework enabled us to finally provide the related pf
functions as well.
Before 5-STABLE we will import some bug fixes from OpenBSD-current,
which have not been merged to their stable branch, as well as some
FreeBSD specific features. The planned ALTQ API make-over will also
affect pf.
We are (desperately) looking for non-manpage documentation for FreeBSD
pf and somebody to write it. Few things have changed so a port of the
excellent "PF FAQ" on the OpenBSD homepage should be fitting. There
are, however, a couple of points that need conversion. A simple
tutorial how to setup a NAT gateway with pf would also help. The
in-kernel NAT engine is very easy to use, we should tell people about
this alternative. This is even more true since the pf module now plugs
into GENERIC without modifications.
_________________________________________________________________
PowerPC Port
Contact: Peter Grehan <grehan@FreeBSD.org>
The port has been moving along steadily. There have been reports of
buildworld running natively. Works is almost complete on make release
so there will be bootable CD images in the near future.
_________________________________________________________________
Project Mini-Evil
Contact: Scott Long <scottl@freebsd.org>
Project Mini-Evil is an attempt to extend Bill Paul's 'Project
Evil'
Windows NDIS wrapper layer to the SCSI MiniPort and StorePort layers.
While drivers exist for most storage controllers that are on the
market today, many companies are integrating software RAID into their
products but not providing any source code or design specs. Instead of
constantly reverse-engineering these raid layers and attempting to
shoehorn them into the ata-raid driver, Project Mini-Evil will run the
Windows drivers directly. It will hopefully also run most any
SCSI/ATA/RAID drivers that conform to the SCSI Miniport or Storeport
specification.
Work on this project is split between making the NDIS wrapper code
more general and implementing the new APIs. Development is taking
place in the FreeBSD Perforce repository under the
//depot/projects/sonofevil/... branch.
_________________________________________________________________
SMPng Status Report
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/smp/
Contact: John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: <smp@FreeBSD.org>
Not a lot happened on the SMPng front outside of the work on locking
the network stack (which is a large amount of work). The priorities of
the various software interrupt threads were corrected and locking for
taskqueues was improved. The return value of the sema_timedwait()
function was adjusted to be more consistent with cv_timedwait(). A
small fix was made to the sleepqueue code to shorten the amount of
time that a sleepqueue chain lock is held when waking up threads. Some
simple debug code for profiling the hash tables used in the sleep
queue and turnstile code was added. This will allow developers to
measure the impact of any tweaks to the hash table sizes or the hash
algorithm.
_________________________________________________________________
Sync protocols (Netgraph and SPPP)
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/~rik
Contact: Roman Kurakin <rik@FreeBSD.org>
Currently I work on two directions: if_spppfr.c and sppp locking (on
behalf of netperf). At the moment of writing this sppp locking is not
ready yet. But it would be ready in couple of days. Also you may find
as a part of this work some user space fixes for rwatson netperf code
(Only that I was able to catch while world compilation. If you know
some others let me know and I'll try to fix them too).
Since sppp code is quite big and state machine is very complicated, it
would be difficult to test all code paths. I will glad to get any help
in testing all this stuff. More tester more probability to test all
possible cases.
Work on FRF.12 (ng_frf12) is frozen since of low interest and lack of
time. Current state of stable code: support of FRF.12 End-to-End
fragmentation. Support of FRF.12 Interface (UNI and NNI) fragmentation
is not tested.
_________________________________________________________________
TTY subsystem realignment
Contact: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@FreeBSD.org>
An effort to get the tty subsystem out from under Giant has morphed
into an more general effort to eliminate a lot of code which have been
improperly copy & pasted into device drivers. In an ideal world, tty
drivers would never get near a cdevsw, but since some drivers are more
than just tty drivers (for instance sync) a more sensible compromise
must be reached. The work is ongoing.
_________________________________________________________________
Various GEOM classes and geom(8) utility
Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@FreeBSD.org>
I'm working on various GEOM classes. Some of them are already
committed and ready for use (GATE, CONCAT, STRIPE, LABEL, NOP). The
MIRROR class is finished in 90% and will be committed in very near
future. Next I want to work on RAID3 and RAID5 implementations.
Userland utility to control GEOM classes (geom(8)) is already in the
tree.
_________________________________________________________________
VuXML and portaudit
URL: http://www.vuxml.org
URL: http://vuxml.FreeBSD.org
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/ports/portaudit/
Contact: Tom Rhodes <trhodes@FreeBSD.org>
The portaudit utility is currently an add-on to FreeBSD designed to
give administrators and users a heads up with regards to security
vulnerabilities in third party software. The VuXML database keeps a
record of these security vulnerabilities along with internal security
holes. When installed, the portaudit utility periodically downloads a
database with known issues and checks all installed ports or packages
against it; should it find vulnerable software installed the
administrator or user is notified during the daily run output of the
periodic scripts.
These utilities are considered to be of production quality and
discussion is taking place over whether or not they should be included
as part of the base system. All ports committers are urged to add
entries when when a vulnerability is discovered; any questions may be
sent to eik@ or myself.
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