FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report, April-June 2013
Introduction
This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between April and June,
2013. This is the second of four reports planned for 2013.
The last three months have been very active for the FreeBSD developer
community, including events such as BSDCan and the FreeBSD Developer
Summit collocated with it (covered in a separate report, see the BSDCan
Developer Summit Special) and BSD-Day 2013. It has also seen
improvements from the top to the bottom of the FreeBSD system. Desktop
users will be pleased to note work on improving the state of AMD GPUs
and making the console interaction with kernel mode setting -- required
for recent xorg drivers -- cleaner and from continued work to make
binary packages easier to use. Developers will note continued
improvements to our toolchain, with a new debugger being prepared for
integration. Server users will benefit from various improvements to
virtualization support and scalability in the kernel. Of course, the
FreeBSD system is nothing without applications to run atop it, and this
quarter has seen some tireless work by members of the ports team to
ensure that users have a wide choice of desktop and development
environments, with highlights from the GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and Haskell
teams in this report.
Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! This report
contains 33 entries and we hope you enjoy reading it.
The deadline for submissions covering between July and September, 2013
is October 7th, 2013.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Team Reports
* FreeBSD Core Team
* FreeBSD Postmaster Team
* FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
* FreeBSD Security Team
Projects
* PC-BSD
* Virtual Private Systems
Kernel
* AMD GPU Kernel Mode-setting Support
* Improved TCP SYN Cookies
* Multi-threaded Pagedaemon
* Native iSCSI Stack
* Newcons Reboot
* Realtek RTL8188CU/RTL8192CU USB Wireless Driver
* SDIO Driver
* V4L2 Update in the Linuxulator
* Wireless Networking Improvements
* Xen Support Improvements
* ZFS TRIM and Enhanced BIO_DELETE Support
Architectures
* Intel IOMMU (VT-d, DMAR) Support
* Superpages for ARMv7
Userland Programs
* bsdconfig(8) and sysrc(8)
* bsnmpd(1) Support in hastd(8)
* Capsicum
* LLDB Debugger Port
Ports
* FreeBSD Haskell Ports
* GNOME/FreeBSD
* KDE/FreeBSD
* Xfce/FreeBSD
* xorg on FreeBSD
Documentation
* Upgrading the Documentation Set to DocBook 5.0
Events
* BSD-Day 2013
Google Summer of Code
* New Capsicum Features
* Qt and GTK+ Frontends for pkg(8)
Miscellaneous
* The FreeBSD Foundation
__________________________________________________________________
AMD GPU Kernel Mode-setting Support
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/AMD_GPU
Contact: Jean-S?bastien P?dron <dumbbell at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib at FreeBSD.org>
Due to non-FreeBSD-related activities from April to end of June, the
project progressed slowly:
* Some important problems in TTM were fixed and several others are
being worked out. Applications affected by these bugs are
non-linear video editing software (which do not use Xv to preview
the video) or "screen" of VirtualBox, for instance.
* Regarding the locking issue with OpenGL, no work has been done yet.
glxgears works but some modern desktop environments or WebGL demos
hang. Once TTM bugs described above are fixed, this is the next
target.
* Patches to Mesa to make it build out-of-the-box were submitted
upstream. As of writing, some were committed but not all of them.
Additionally, as result of a joint work with Jonathan Gray (of
OpenBSD), Mesa should work on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and hopefully on
other BSD flavors without additional patches.
Several users tested the driver. Andriy Gapon, Jonathan Gray, and Mark
Kettenis (of OpenBSD) submitted patches. kyzh kindly donated several
discrete cards from different series. A big thanks to all those
contributors!
The driver is still not stable enough for a wider call for testers.
Open tasks:
1. Write instructions for the wiki to explain how to test the driver.
__________________________________________________________________
BSD-Day 2013
URL: http://bsdday.eu/2013
URL: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJJHfhjb5TOjB-sHRwJBGWd8XA7nc1gk_
URL:
https://picasaweb.google.com/116452848880746560170/BSDDay2013?authkey=Gv1sRgCNvIoMWoxNTRYw
Contact: G?bor P?li <pgj at FreeBSD.org>
The BSD-Day is a now recurring excuse for BSD developers and users to
meet up in person, share some beers and talk about what they are
working on these days. There was a detour this year to visit the
beautiful city of Naples of Italy, the home of pizza. Fortunately, the
event has again gained support from numerous and generous sponsors,
such as The FreeBSD Foundation, the EMC Corporation, iXsystems,
FreeBSDMall, BSD Magazine, and many others which enabled us to cover
the costs of travel and accommodation for the speakers. We are really
grateful for this.
Similarly to the previous years, the whole event started with a dinner
in the downtown (somewhere around the Irish Pub) on Friday which
suddenly turned into a do-it-yourself pizza-fest. Then it was followed
by the Saturday event at the Institute of Biostructures and Bioimaging.
There we had a lot of attendees for the associated BSDA exam in the
morning -- 8 persons. The event itself had many interesting topics as
well, for example moving MCLinker into the BSD world, organization and
culture of the FreeBSD Project, the new callout(9) framework, building
and testing ports with Poudriere and Tinderbox, FreeBSD in the embedded
space, or building reliable VPN networks with OpenBSD. See the links in
the report for more.
__________________________________________________________________
bsdconfig(8) and sysrc(8)
URL: http://druidbsd.sourceforge.net/
Contact: Devin Teske <dteske at FreeBSD.org>
New utilities have been introduced in FreeBSD base system: bsdconfig(8)
and sysrc(8). bsdconfig(8) is a replacement for the post-install
abilities of deprecated sysinstall(8), while sysrc(8) is a robust
utility for managing rc.conf(5) from the command line without a text
editor.
__________________________________________________________________
bsnmpd(1) Support in hastd(8)
Contact: Mikolaj Golub <trociny at FreeBSD.org>
A hastd(8) module for bsnmpd(1) has been committed to FreeBSD head and
merged to the stable/8 and stable/9 branches recently. This module
makes it possible to monitor and manage hastd(8) via the SNMP protocol.
__________________________________________________________________
Capsicum
URL: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/
URL: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/cl-capsicum-discuss
Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Capsicum Mailing List <cl-capsicum-discuss at lists.cam.ac.uk>
Capsicum, a lightweight OS capability and sandboxing framework, is
being actively worked on. In the last few months the following tasks
have been completed:
* Committed Capsicum overhaul to FreeBSD head (r247602). This allows
to use capability rights in more places, simplifies kernel code and
implements ability to limit ioctl(2) and fcntl(2) system calls.
* hastd(8) is now using Capsicum for sandboxing, as whitelisting
ioctls is possible (r248297).
* auditdistd(8) is now using Capsicum for sandboxing, as it is now
possible to setup append-only restriction on file descriptor
(available in Perforce).
* Implemented connectat(2) and bindat(2) system calls for UNIX domain
sockets that are allowed in capability mode (r247667).
* Implemented chflagsat(2) system call (r248599).
* Revised the Casper daemon for application capabilities.
* Implemented libcapsicum for application capabilities.
* Implemented various Casper services to be able to use more
functionality within a sandbox: system.dns, system.pwd, system.grp,
system.random, system.filesystem, system.socket, system.sysctl.
* Implemented Capsicum sandboxing for kdump(1) (from r251073 to
r251167). The version in Perforce also supports sandboxing for the
-r flag, using Casper services.
* Implemented Capsicum sandboxing for dhclient(8) (from r252612 to
r252697).
* Implemented Capsicum sandboxing for tcpdump(8) (available in
Perforce).
* Implemented Capsicum sandboxing for libmagic(3) (available in
Perforce).
* Implemented the libnv library for name/value pairs handling in the
hope of wider adaptation across FreeBSD.
For Capsicum-based sandboxing in the FreeBSD base system, the commits
referenced above and the provided code aim to serve as examples. We
would like to see more FreeBSD tools to be sandboxed -- every tool that
can parse data from untrusted sources, for example. This requires deep
understanding of how the tool in question works, not necessarily only
Capsicum.
This work is being sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Get involved, make the Internet finally(!) a secure place. Contact
us at the cl-capsicum-discuss mailing list, where we can provide
guidelines on how to do sandboxing properly. The fame is there,
waiting.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Core Team
Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <core at FreeBSD.org>
In the second quarter of 2013, the Core Team approved a new Security
Officer, Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav and his deputy, Xin Li. The Core Team
acknowledges Simon Nielsen, the outgoing Security Officer, for his work
in the role. Peter Wemm took the lead on the reorganization and
administration of the FreeBSD cluster, and with the Core Team's
approval, Glen Barber and Ryan Steinmetz were welcomed to the cluster
administration team.
Based on the recommendation and experiences of Martin Wilke, the Core
Team also supported establishing a liaison role between port managers
and release engineers in order to improve their communication,
especially for preparing releases. The Core Team welcomes Bryan Drewery
to this role.
Following up on the request from Eitan Adler, the Core Team agreed to
remove CVS from the base system, which was soon followed by importing a
lightweight version of Subversion tools, implemented by Peter Wemm.
There were src commit bits issued for 3 new developers and 1 existing
committer received extension in this quarter.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Haskell Ports
URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/Haskell
URL: https://github.com/freebsd-haskell/ports/
URL: http://haskell.inf.elte.hu/packages/
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 2013.2.0.0, GHC to 7.6.3, as well as updated
existing ports to their latest stable versions. In this update, we
provided experimental support for LLVM-based code generation (disabled
by default) to Haskell ports. We also added a number of new ports,
which brings their count in the FreeBSD Ports Collection to 402, and
now Haskell ports play nicer with portmaster(8)-based upgrades.
In cooperation with Konstantin Belousov and Dimitry Andric, we have
managed to unbreak the build of GHC on 32-bit 10.x systems, so we have
packages for 10.x again. However, it turned out that this bug (in
thread signal delivery) can also affect the building process for other
platforms as well, which explains some of the strange build breakages
our users experienced in the past.
We have also learned that there is ongoing work in the GHC upstream
which will allow us to provide support for building with Clang natively
once GHC 7.8 becomes part of the Haskell Platform.
Open tasks:
1. Test experimental Clang/LLVM code generation support to enable it
by default.
2. Commit pending Haskell ports to the ports tree.
3. Port more (popular) Cabal packages.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Postmaster Team
Contact: FreeBSD Postmaster Team <postmaster at FreeBSD.org>
In the second quarter of 2013, the FreeBSD Postmaster Team has
implemented the following items that may be interest of the general
public:
* With help from clusteradm, found that unbound (the resolver used on
mx1 and mx2) is configured to perform DNSSEC validation which
implies that if a signed zone fails validation, unbound refuses to
use the information. This had caused one person to be unable to
exchange email with FreeBSD.org until the zone signatures were
refreshed.
* Created the freebsd-dtrace mailing list, requested by George
Neville-Neil.
* Resurrected the freebsd-testing mailing list, requested by Garrett
Cooper.
* Created the freebsd-tex mailing list, requested by Hiroki Sato.
* In response to another comment that our message rejection message
was unclear in the case that greylisting was the reason, re-worded
that message.
* Augmented the allowable MIME types for secteam with the following
to permit sending encrypted messages:
+ application/pgp-encrypted
+ application/pkcs7-encrypted
+ application/x-pkcs7-encrypted
+ multipart/encrypted
* Began replacing freebsd-mozilla with freebsd-gecko.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.4R/errata.html
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.2R/schedule.html
Contact: FreeBSD Release Engineering Team <re at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE cycle completed on June 7, 2013, approximately
two months behind the original schedule. Please be sure to read the
Errata Notices for any post-release issues discovered after
8.4-RELEASE.
The FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE process will begin July 6, 2013. Unless any
critical issues arise, FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE is expected to be available
late August or early September.
Users tracking the FreeBSD 9.X branch are encouraged to test the -BETA
and -RC builds whenever possible, and provide feedback and report
issues to the freebsd-stable mailing list.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Security Team
Contact: FreeBSD Security Team <secteam at FreeBSD.org>
On April 15th Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav and Xin Li took over as security
officers for the FreeBSD Project, and the team welcomed Qing Li back to
the team in June. This report briefly summarizes the work of the
Security Team from April until the end of June.
The Security Team has released the following advisories:
* FreeBSD-SA-13:05.nfsserver: Insufficient input validation in the
NFS server (nfsd(8)), reported by Adam Nowacki.
* FreeBSD-SA-13:06.mmap: Privilege escalation via mmap(), reported by
Konstantin Belousov.
The Security Team has contributed to the following errata notices:
* FreeBSD-EN-13:02.vtnet: Frames are not properly forwarded to
vtnet(4) when two or more MAC addresses are configured on QEMU
1.4.0 and later in 8.4-RELEASE, reported by Julian Stecklina.
* FreeBSD-EN-13:01.fxp: Initialization of fxp(4) network interfaces
results in an infinite loop with dhclient(8) in 8.4-RELEASE,
reported by Michael L. Squires.
Per the request of Baptiste Daroussin, the Security Team has also
reviewed the source code of Poudriere, the port build and test system
which is planned to be used for producing pkg(8) ("new-style")
packages
on the FreeBSD cluster.
__________________________________________________________________
GNOME/FreeBSD
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome/
Contact: FreeBSD GNOME Team <gnome at FreeBSD.org>
The GNOME 3.6 work is moving along slowly but steadily. Almost all the
GNOME 3 desktop ports were updated to their corresponding 3.6 versions.
A big challenge was taken by getting the webkit-gtk3 port updated to
2.0.3. Currently programs using webkit-gtk3 crash on launch. It is hard
to find the causes as the debug build of webkit-gtk either runs out of
memory or disk space on the developement system used.
Open tasks:
1. Update the FreeBSD GNOME website with recent changes in the ports
tree, add new items in preparation for GNOME 3 and Mate, etc.
2. Merge Glib 2.36, GTK+ 3.8 and related ports back to the Ports
Collection.
3. Continue work on GNOME 3.6, fix bugs and write code for missing
features.
4. Complete the port of MATE.
__________________________________________________________________
Improved TCP SYN Cookies
URL: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=28838+0+current/freebsd-net
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/syncookie-20130708.diff
Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre at FreeBSD.org>
We have had a SYN cookie implementation for quite some time now but it
has some limitations with current realities for window scaling and SACK
encoding the in the few available bits.
This patch updates and improves SYN cookies mainly by:
1. Encoding of MSS, WSCALE (window scaling) and SACK into the ISN
(initial sequence number) without the use of timestamp bits.
2. Switching to the very fast and cryptographically strong SipHash-2-4
hash MAC algorithm to protect the SYN cookie against forgery.
The common parameters used on TCP sessions have changed quite a bit
since SYN cookies were invented some 17 years ago. Today we have a lot
more bandwidth which makes use of window scaling almost mandatory. Also
SACK has become standard as it makes recovering from packet loss much
more efficient.
The original SYN cookies method only stored an indexed MSS value in the
cookie. This obviously is not sufficient any more and breaks in the
presence of WSCALE. WSCALE information is only exchanged during SYN and
SYN-ACK. If we cannot keep track of it then we severely underestimate
the available send or receive window, compounded with the fact that
with large window scaling the window size information on the TCP
segment header would be even lower numerically.
A number of years back, SYN cookies were extended to store the
additional state in the TCP timestamp fields, if available on a
connection. It has been adopted by Linux as well. While timestamps are
common among the BSD, Linux and other Unix systems, Windows never
enabled them by default, thus they are not present for the vast
majority of clients seen on the Internet.
The new improvement in this patch moves all necessary information into
the ISN again, removing the need for timestamps. Both the MSS and send
WSCALE are stored in 3 bit indexed form together with a single bit for
SACK. While we cannot represent all possible MSS and WSCALE values in
only 3 bits each (both are 16-bit fields in the TCP header), it turns
out that is not actually necessary.
These improvements allow one to run with SYN cookies only on
Internet-facing servers. However while SYN cookies are calculated and
sent all the time, they are only used when the syn cache overflows due
to attacks or overload. In that case though, you can rest assured that
no significant degradation in TCP connection setup happens any more and
that even Windows clients can make use of window scaling and SACK.
Open tasks:
1. Additional testing on busy servers.
__________________________________________________________________
Intel IOMMU (VT-d, DMAR) Support
URL:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/intelligent-systems/intel-technology/vt-directed-io-spec.html
URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/2013-May/014368.html
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~kib/misc/dmar.1.patch
Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib at FreeBSD.org>
Intel VT-d is a set of extensions that were originally designed to
allow virtualizing devices. It allows safe access to physical devices
from virtual machines and can also be used for better isolation and
performance increases. A VT-d driver was developed that implements the
busdma(9) interface using the DMA Remap units (DMARs) found in current
Intel chipsets. The driver provides reliability and security
improvements for the system by facilitating restricted access to main
memory from busmastering devices.
It also eliminates bounce buffering (copying) by allocating remapped
regions that satisfy a device's access limitations.
With additional work to define a suitable interface the VT-d driver
will also provide PCI pass-through functionality for hypervisors.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Implement workarounds for chipset errata.
2. Commit to HEAD after additional testing.
3. Rebalance MSI/MSI-X using interrupt remapping unit, also required
for x2APIC use on big machines.
4. Integrate with the Intel GPU MMU and handle Ironlake and
SandyBridge errata for the GFXVTd unit.
5. Provide an interface for VMM (hypervisors).
6. Consider implementing a driver for AMD's IOMMU.
__________________________________________________________________
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 has continued to improve the experience of KDE
software and Qt under FreeBSD. During this quarter, the team has kept
most of the KDE and Qt ports up-to-date, working on the following
releases:
* KDE SC: 4.10.2, 4.10.3, 4.10.4
* Qt: 5.0.2 (area51)
* PyQt: 4.10.2; QScintilla 2.7.2; SIP: 4.14.7
* KDevelop: 4.5.1
* Calligra: 2.6.2
* CMake: 2.8.11.1
* Digikam (and KIPI-plugins): 3.1.0, 3.2.0
* KDE Telepathy: 0.6.0, 0.6.1
As a result -- according to PortScout -- kde@ has 473 ports (up from
431), of which 98.73% are up-to-date (up from 93.5%). iXsystems Inc.
continues to provided a machine for the team to build packages and to
test updates. iXsystems Inc. has been providing the KDE/FreeBSD Team
with support for quite a long time and we are very grateful for that.
This quarter, we would also like to thank Steve Wills (swills@) for
providing access to another machine so that we can do our work even
faster.
While a great deal of the team's efforts are focused towards packaging
released code, we also take a proactive stand in making sure future
versions of the software we port is also going to work well on FreeBSD.
This involves being in close contact with upstream, raising awareness
of FreeBSD as an active project and also sending actual patches that
most of the time benefit many other operating systems besides FreeBSD
itself. In this regard, we have been dedicating a lot of time making
sure both clang and libc++ are fully supported in KDE and Qt. Not only
has this resulted in many patches being sent to these projects, but the
exposure to these large code bases have been beneficial to the
Clang-on-FreeBSD project as well. Dimitry Andric (dim@) has been of
great help as a point of contact for all the issues we have faced.
As usual, the team is always looking for more testers and porters so
please contact us and visit our home page. It would be especially
useful to have more helping hands on tasks such as getting rid of the
dependency on the defunct HAL project and providing integration with
KDE's Bluedevil Bluetooth interface.
Open tasks:
1. Update out-of-date ports, see PortScout for a list.
2. Work on KDE 4.11 and Qt 5.
3. Make sure the whole KDE stack (including Qt) builds and works
correctly with clang and libc++.
4. Remove the dependency on HAL.
__________________________________________________________________
LLDB Debugger Port
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/lldb
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at FreeBSD.org>
LLDB is the the debugger project in the LLVM family. It supports the
Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD platforms, but the latter has recently
suffered under a lack of maintenance.
After cleaning bit rot in LLDB's FreeBSD support, it again builds and
can be used for basic debugging of single-threaded applications. The
test suite also runs to completion, although it experiences a large
number of failures.
Ed Maste has been granted an LLDB commit bit, and is now committing
ongoing bug fixes and development directly to the upstream repository.
There is a significant amount of work still to be done, with one goal
being the incorporation of lldb into the base system.
This project is sponsored by DARPA/AFRL in collaboration with SRI
International and the University of Cambridge.
Open tasks:
1. Add support for multithreaded processes.
2. Fix watchpoints.
3. Add support for remote debuging (gdbserver / debugserver).
4. Add support for core files.
5. Add support for kernel debugging.
6. Verify i386 and ARM architectures.
7. Implement MIPS target support.
8. Verify cross-debugging.
9. Investigate and fix test suite failures.
10. Prepare lldb for incorporation into the base system.
__________________________________________________________________
Multi-threaded Pagedaemon
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~kib/misc/pagedaemon-numa.1.patch
Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib at FreeBSD.org>
This project aims to improve scalability of the virtual memory
subsystem. Based on a prototype change from Jeff Roberson, per-domain
page queues and per-domain pagedaemon working threads have been
implemented to enable this. At the moment, the domains coincide with
the NUMA proximity domains, but this is not neccessary and could be
improved with further separation to allow more parallelism in the
pagedaemon.
The patch is relatively simple, with the most delicate parts being the
page laundry and OOM logic, which requires coordination between all
pagedaemon threads to prevent false triggering.
Testing on diverse workloads and on real multi-socket machines is
required.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Debug on multi-domain NUMA machine.
2. Test, get review and commit.
__________________________________________________________________
Native iSCSI Stack
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Native%20iSCSI%20target
Contact: Edward Tomasz Napiera?a <trasz at FreeBSD.org>
The native kernel iSCSI target and initiator project progressed well
over the April to June period. The primary focus was to introduce
support for iSER (iSCSI over RDMA) in both the initiator and the
target. Prerequisite for this was merging some common parts together
and implementing a workaround for the lack of iSER support in
userspace. Apart from that, there were a myriad of smaller
improvements. Such as creating more user-friendly administration
utilities, for example iscsictl(8) which displays SCSI device nodes for
each iSCSI session. This frees the user from getting the same
information through camcontrol(8). There are also improvements in
logging and manual pages.
Once the iSER support becomes stable, the work will focus on
performance optimizations. The plan is to commit both the new initiator
and target in August to allow shipping them in 10.0. The project will
continue with implementing support for software iWARP stack (useful
mostly for testing and development), SCSI passthrough and various other
improvements.
This project is being sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Performance optimization.
2. Merge to FreeBSD head.
__________________________________________________________________
New Capsicum Features
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2013/CapsicumFeatures
Contact: Mariusz Zaborski <oshogbo at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at FreeBSD.org>
Capsicum is a lightweight OS capability and sandboxing framework
implemented in FreeBSD. This is still a new technology, so there is a
lot of space for improvements. Thanks to the Google Summer of Code
program and Pawel Jakub Dawidek for volunteering as mentor, Mariusz
will have the chance to work on this project in the summer.
The work on sandboxing the rwho(1) and rwhod(8) utilities was completed
recently. There is also a plan to implement two new modules for Casper.
Casper is a daemon to provide services for applications using
Capsicum's capability mode. Some experimentation with implementing two
new capability rights is in progress, so is porting one more program to
use the existing features of the Capsicum framework.
Open tasks:
1. system.unix -- a Casper module provides connect and listen on Unix
domain socket.
2. system.udp -- a Casper module enabling connect, listen, send, and
receive of UDP packets.
3. Implementing sandboxing for fetch(1).
4. Introduce new capability rights: CAP_SEND_RIGHTS and
CAP_RECV_RIGHTS.
__________________________________________________________________
Newcons Reboot
Contact: Aleksandr Rybalko <ray at FreeBSD.org>
The purpose of the Newcons project is to provide a new interface for
console and video output to graphic devices. This will allow simple
drivers access the console and terminal mode early, and framebuffer
access for xorg. Drivers will not need embedded font bitmaps, color
maps, or mouse cursor bitmaps, as the whole infrastructure will be
provided by the vt(4) Newcons driver.
As the project includes Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) integration, one of
the goals is support for modern Xorg releases, allowing the kernel to
switch back to virtual terminal mode after graphics mode or resolution
used with xorg changes.
There are a lot of changes involved in the project. Main tasks include:
* Core functionality (almost done).
* Mouse support.
* KMS (kernel mode setting) support.
* USB keyboard support.
* Splash screen support (partially working).
* Driver support.
* vidcontrol(1) support.
The first deliverables of the project, including moused(8), ukbd(4),
and KMS support are expected to arrive around the middle or end of
August 2013. The whole project is expected to complete in November
2013.
This project is being sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Many thanks to Ed Schouten who started Newcons project and did most of
the work.
Open tasks:
1. Provide different flavors of hardware for testing the
implementation. Do not hesitate to volunteer when a call for
testing is announced.
__________________________________________________________________
PC-BSD
URL: http://www.pcbsd.org
Contact: Kris Moore <kmoore at FreeBSD.org>
Progress on moving PC-BSD & TrueOS to a "rolling release" is
happening
quickly. We have implemented our own package repository, fully based on
pkg(8), which is updated twice monthly, and are now hosting dedicated
freebsd-update(8) systems. In addition to the 9.1-RELEASE ISO images,
we have begun to create a 9-STABLE branch as well, using
freebsd-update(8) to push out the latest world and kernel binaries on a
monthly basis.
We are currently working on an implementation of ZFS Boot Environments
for desktops and servers. These users to install updates or
experimental versions in separate ZFS clones and select the one to run
at boot time, providing an easy way of testing upgrades before
deployment.
__________________________________________________________________
Qt and GTK+ Frontends for pkg(8)
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2013/pkgQtGtk
Contact: Justin Muniz <jmuniz at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Eitan Adler <eadler at FreeBSD.org>
This project is part of Google Summer of Code. Work has only just
begun, and the code is in its infancy. The Subversion repository holds
experimental code that is actively being developed. Development should
be concluded before the end of September, and the project will enter
the maintenance phase of its life cycle.
Open tasks:
1. Work with Matt Windsor to create a pkg(8) backend for PackageKit.
2. Extend PackageKit's Qt frontend to offer more functionality through
pkg(8).
3. Extend PackageKit's GKT+ frontend to offer more functionality
through pkg(8).
__________________________________________________________________
Realtek RTL8188CU/RTL8192CU USB Wireless Driver
Contact: Rui Paulo <rpaulo at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Kevin Lo <kevlo at FreeBSD.org>
The urtwn(4) driver was imported from OpenBSD. This is a driver for
very small Realtek USB WiFi cards which are pretty inexpensive and can
do 802.11n at the maximum theoretical speed of 150 Mbps. They make a
good addition to embedded systems such as the Raspberry Pi and the
BeagleBone. The driver requires firmware that is available in the
FreeBSD Ports Collection (net/urtwn-firmware-kmod). Note that 802.11n
is not yet supported.
__________________________________________________________________
SDIO Driver
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/SDIO
URL: https://github.com/kibab/freebsd/tree/kibab-dplug
Contact: Ilya Bakulin <ilya at bakulin.de>
SDIO is an interface designed as an extension for the existing SD card
standard, to allow connecting different peripherals to the host with
the standard SD controller. Peripherals currently sold at the general
market include WLAN/BT modules, cameras, fingerprint readers, barcode
scanners. The driver is implemented as an extension to the existing MMC
bus, adding a lot of new SDIO-specific bus methods. Getting information
about the card works, including querying all the supported I/O
functions. Simple byte transfers and multi-byte reads work.
A prototype of the driver for Marvell SDIO WLAN/BT module is also being
developed, using the existing Linux driver as a reference.
Open tasks:
1. Extend MMC bus interface with more SDIO-specific bus methods to
allow child drivers to perform multi-byte in/out transfers.
2. Write firmware loading code for the prototype of the WLAN driver.
Further work on the WLAN driver should probably be done as a
separate project.
3. Implement detach path. It has not been tested yet because the
DreamPlug hardware available does not have an external SDIO-capable
slot.
__________________________________________________________________
Superpages for ARMv7
URL:
http://static.usenix.org/events/osdi02/tech/full_papers/navarro/navarro.pdf
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/ARMSuperpages
URL: https://github.com/semihalf-bodek-zbigniew/freebsd-arm-superpages.git
Contact: Zbigniew Bodek <zbb at semihalf.com>
Contact: Grzegorz Bernacki <gjb at semihalf.com>
Contact: Rafa? Jaworowski <raj at semihalf.com>
The ARM architecture is becoming more and more prevalent, with
increasing usage beyond the mobile and embedded space. Among the more
interesting industry trends emerging in the recent months, there has
been the concept of "ARM server". Some top-tier companies, e.g.
Dell
and HP, have already started to develop such systems.
Key to success of FreeBSD in these new areas is dealing with the
sophisticated features of the platform, for example adding support for
superpages.
The objective of this project is to enable FreeBSD/arm to utilize
superpages which would allow efficient use of TLB translations (by
enlarging TLB coverage), leading to improved performance in many
applications and scalability. This is intended to work on ARMv7-based
processors, however compatibility with ARMv6 will be preserved.
The following steps have been made since the last status report:
* Implement pmap_copy() to support fork() system calls.
* Support for multiple page sizes.
* Implement superpage creation, promotion, demotion, and eviction
mechanisms.
* Implement PV entry management for superpages.
* Partially integrate code to the head branch.
Next steps:
* Test and benchmark.
* Complete integration into FreeBSD head.
This project is jointly sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation and
Semihalf.
Open tasks:
1. Start utilizing superpages on ARMv6/v7.
2. Find bugs and debug.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Foundation
URL: http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/
Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb at FreeBSDFoundation.org>
We started the quarter with our "Raise a Million -- Spend a
Million"
Spring Fundraiser. This was the first of three major fundraisers
scheduled for the year. We were pleased to have raised $365,291 by the
end of the campaign -- May 31. Last year, by the same time, we had
raised only $56,196. We have started this year off with a much better
fundraising strategy. We want to send a big thank you to everyone out
there that has made a donation in 2013. Your early donations have made
a significant impact on our fundraising endeavors so far this year.
Some things we accomplished this last quarter are:
* Attended BSDCan in Ottawa, Texas LinuxFest in Austin, SouthEast
LinuxFest in Charlotte, and ICANN 46 meeting in Beijing.
* We were a Gold Sponsor for BSDCan 2013 and sponsored 7 developers
to attend the conference.
* We signed up to be a Platinum Sponsor for EuroBSDCon 2013.
* We sponsored 1 developer to attend OpenHelp.
* Recognized Mark Linimon, Simon L. B. Nielsen, Bjoern A. Zeeb, and
Ken Smith, at BSDCan, for their significant contributions to
FreeBSD. We also recognized Dan Langille for his tireless effort of
putting on BSDCan for 10 years.
* We sponsored the developer and vendor summits at BSDCan, with 100
and 30 attendees respectively.
* We sponsored BSD-Day 2013 that was held in Naples, Italy on April 6.
* We held our annual board meeting in Ottawa.
* We sponsored the following projects: Capsicum, ARM Superpages,
iSCSI, Page Queue Locking, Input/Output Memory Management Unit,
Documentation project infrastructure, and writing white papers.
* We hired Edward Tomasz Napieral/a as the second member of our
technical staff to work on FreeBSD projects full-time.
* We hired Ed Maste as Director of Project Development.
* With our continued support of building out the FreeBSD
infrastructure, we purchased high-end servers for the Sentex Lab to
be used with the latest 40 Gbps Ethernet cards from Chelsio to do
performance testing and analysis, smaller servers for firewalls for
NYI and ISC, and cables to connect our Juniper switches together
into a bigger Juniper switch we purchased for NYI.
__________________________________________________________________
Upgrading the Documentation Set to DocBook 5.0
Contact: G?bor K?vesd?n <gabor at FreeBSD.org>
The Documentation Project has been using old versions of markup
standards until recently when we switched to a real XML toolchain and
DocBook 4.5. However, we still depend on obsolete technologies -- DSSSL
and Jade. DocBook 5.0 provides cleaner markup and some nice new
features.
The objective of this project is to upgrade the documentation set to
DocBook 5.0 and to find a way to properly render our sources without
using DSSSL, since the DSSSL stylesheets are discontinued and cannot
render DocBook 5.0. The documentation sources have already been
successfully transformed to DocBook 5.0 and updates to the rendering
process are under development. The common opinion among FreeBSD
developers is that Java is a heavy dependency that should be avoided.
This has suggested the transformation of DocBook sources to TeX and use
TeX as a rendering backend. There are two ways to do this; the sources
can be transformed either directly or through the XSL FO output
generated by the stylesheets provided for the DocBook Project. The
latter approach has been chosen as a preferred way since it better fits
the existing documentation infrastructure and provides easier
customization.
This project is generously funded by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Finish the implementation of the rendering process.
2. Integrate the rendering solution into the infrastructure.
3. Merge back changes to head.
__________________________________________________________________
V4L2 Update in the Linuxulator
Contact: Alexander Leidinger <netchild at FreeBSD.org>
The V4L2 support in the linuxulator was updated in FreeBSD head. This
lets Skype v4 display video.
Open tasks:
1. Find out why audio in Skype v4 stops working after some calls.
__________________________________________________________________
Virtual Private Systems
URL: http://www.7he.at/freebsd/vps/
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/projects/vps/
Contact: Klaus Ohrhallinger <k at 7he.at>
VPS for FreeBSD is an OS-level based virtualization implementation that
supports advanced features like live migration. It has been recently
imported into the Project's Subversion repository as a project branch.
The code is currently of alpha quality.
Open tasks:
1. Test with many different guest setups/applications. All feedback is
highly appreciated.
__________________________________________________________________
Wireless Networking Improvements
Contact: Adrian Chadd <adrian at FreeBSD.org>
Recently the FreeBSD wireless networking stack has received updates in
the following areas:
* Improved transmit locking in net80211(4) to eliminate a whole class
of subtle race conditions leading to out-of-order packets being
handed to the driver.
* Spectral scan (FFT) information is now available for the AR9280,
AR9285, AR9287 series NICs.
* Added support for AR93xx, AR94xx, AR95xx NICs -- hostap, adhoc and
station modes have been tested, including 3x3 stream support for
the those NICs where appropriate.
* Implemented ps-poll handling in hostap mode. This was required for
correct behaviour with stations that implement aggressive power
save.
* Added AR933x SoC support -- including all on-board peripherals --
the 8devices.com Carambola-2 board is now fully supported and will
run FreeBSD from NOR flash.
__________________________________________________________________
Xen Support Improvements
URL: http://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=people/royger/freebsd.git;a=summary
Contact: Justin T. Gibbs <gibbs at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Will Andrews <will at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Roger Pau Monn? <roger.pau at citrix.com>
FreeBSD Xen HVM can be further improved by using more PV interfaces
inside a HVM guest. So far the following items have been completed:
* Update Xen interface files. (Merged into head)
* Add support for the vector callback injection mechanism. This
replaces the PCI interrupt and provides a per-cpu callback, which
was not possible when using the PCI interrupt.
* Rework event channel implementation and use the same code paths for
both PV and PVHVM.
* Implement PV one-shot event timers and timecounters.
* Implement PV IPIs.
* Live migration support for PV timers and PV IPIs.
With this changes, FreeBSD will have a complete PVHVM port, this will
also set the ground for a future PVH port (when PVH support is merged
into Xen).
PVHVM allows a virtual machine that boots as a native guest to be able
to take full advantage of paravirtualized drivers, giving a performance
improvement in most I/O related tasks. PVH allows a guest to take
advantage of hardware assistance for memory management, but uses fully
paravirtualized events and boot procedure, which brings two significant
advantages beyond performance. The first is that domain 0 does not have
to run a QEMU instance for emulated boot for PVH guests, which is a
common reason for hosting providers to charge more for Windows and
other HVM guests. The second is that PVH domains can be used as domain
0, without requiring different pmap (memory management) code from the
conventional kernel. This will allow us to ship a single kernel binary
supporting bare metal hardware, running as a Xen unprivileged guest,
and eventually as Xen domain 0.
Further improvements on blkfront and netfront have also been commited:
* Fix netfront crash when detaching an interface.
* Enable netfront to specify a maximum TSO length limiting the
segment chain to what the Xen host side can handle after
defragmentation.
* Add barriers and flush support to blkfront.
Netfront changes have been merged to stable branches, blkfront changes
are only in head.
Open tasks:
1. Merge remaining changes into head.
__________________________________________________________________
Xfce/FreeBSD
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Xfce
Contact: FreeBSD Xfce Team <xfce at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Xfce Team has updated its ports to the latest stable
releases, especially:
* Core (mostly bugfixes and translation updates):
* deskutils/xfce4-tumbler (0.1.29)
* x11-wm/xfce4-panel (4.10.1)
* sysutils/xfce4-settings (4.10.1)
* x11-wm/xfce4-session (4.10.1)
* sysutils/garcon (0.2.1)
* x11/libxfce4util (4.10.1)
* x11-wm/xfce4-wm (4.10.1)
Applications:
* multimedia/xfce4-parole (0.5.1)
* www/midori (0.5.2)
* deskutils/xfce4-notifyd (0.2.4)
* misc/xfce4-appfinder (4.10.1)
* x11/xfce4-terminal (0.6.2)
* x11-fm/thunar (1.6.3)
Panel plugins:
* deskutils/xfce4-xkb-plugin (0.5.6)
* textproc/xfce4-dict-plugin (0.7.0)
* x11-clocks/xfce4-timer-plugin (1.5.0)
* x11/xfce4-embed-plugin (new)
Thunar plugins:
* audio/thunar-media-tags-plugin (0.2.1)
* archivers/thunar-archive-plugin (0.3.1)
x11/xfce4-embed-plugin can integrate any application window into the
Xfce panel.
A new plugin is also available which monitors and displays
earthquakes, it is called xfce4-equake-plugin.
Open tasks:
1. Fix CPU issue with textproc/xfce4-dict-plugin (bug #10103).
2. Investigate why midori-gtk3 crashes too often. (The port is
finished, but some libraries are not present by default in ports
tree).
3. Fix x11-themes/gtk-xfce-engine with Gtk+ >=3.6.
__________________________________________________________________
xorg on FreeBSD
URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/Xorg
URL: http://trillian.chruetertee.ch/ports/browser/trunk
Contact: <x11 at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Niclas Zeising <zeising at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Koop Mast <kwm at FreeBSD.org>
During the beginning of this quarter, work focused on making the xorg
update as robust and stable as possible in preparation for the merge to
ports. As a part of this, ports exp-runs were performed to find and
resolve regressions and other issues. Once this was completed, xorg was
updated to version 7.7 on May 25, after more than a year of hard work.
After the update, work immediately shifted to focus on updating and
patching xorg client libraries, since numerous security issues had been
identified in those. Unfortunately, this took a little longer than
anticipated, but all fixes were comitted eventually.
There has also been work on making the new xorg distribution the
default for FreeBSD 9.1 and later. A patch was sent out and tested with
good results, but this is currently postponed because switching virtual
terminals is not working with the KMS driver.
Currently, work is focusing on keeping xorg drivers and libraries up to
date. Instead of making big updates every year or less, minor updates
to some libraries, applications and drivers happen fairly regularly.
Focus is also starting to shift towards newer versions of MESA and
xorg-server, but this is still very experimental.
Open tasks:
1. Continue the porting effort of recent versions of MESA. This is
ongoing work, but integrating this into the development repo is
hard work. Once this is completed, and KMS support for ATI is more
mature, more testing can be done.
2. Port Wayland. The future of graphical environments in open source
operating system seems to be Wayland. This needs to be ported to
FreeBSD so that a wider audience can test it, and so that it
eventually can be integrated into the ports tree, perhaps as a
replacement for the current xorg.
3. Look into replacements for HAL. HAL is used for hot-plugging of
devices, but it has been long abandoned by Linux. A replacement,
perhaps built on top of devd(8), would be nice to have. This work
should be coordinated with the FreeBSD GNOME and KDE teams.
__________________________________________________________________
ZFS TRIM and Enhanced BIO_DELETE Support
Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Steven Hartland <smh at FreeBSD.org>
As of the end of June, FreeBSD's ZFS implementation now includes TRIM
support in head, stable/9, and stable/8 branches. This allows ZFS to
help maintain high performance on flash-based devices such as SSD's
even under high-load conditions.
When creating new pools and adding new devices to existing pools it
first performs a full-device level TRIM to help ensure optimum starting
performance. This behaviour can be overridden by setting the
vfs.zfs.vdev.trim_on_init sysctl variable to 0 if for example the disks
are new or have already been secure erased, which can also now be done
using camcontrol(8) security actions.
In order to support TRIM, the kernel requires the underlying device
driver supports BIO_DELETE. This is currently mapped through to
hardware methods such as ATA TRIM and SCSI UNMAP, which are commonly
supported by SSDs via CAM.
In order to increase the supported hardware base, CAM's SCSI layer was
also enhanced to allow ATA TRIM via SATL ATA Passthrough to be used in
addition to the existing UNMAP and WS methods. This allows SATA disks
attached to SCSI controllers with CAM based drivers such as mps(4) and
mpt(4) to provide delete support.
Stats for ZFS TRIM can be monitored by looking at the sysctl variables
under kstat.zfs.misc.zio_trim in addition to live GEOM delete stats via
the gstat -d command.
This project was sponsored by Multiplay and implemented by Pawel Jakub
Dawidek.
__________________________________________________________________