FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report, July-September 2013
Introduction
This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between July and September
2013. This is the third of four reports planned for 2013.
We have had another very active three months in the FreeBSD world,
including two Developer Summits (BSDCam and EuroBSDcon) that will be
covered in separate status reports. FreeBSD continues to push hard on
security, with improvements to both the performance and reliability of
the random number generation, and more compartmentalisation in programs
in the base system. For developers, there is work on a new modern
debugger. There is also a significant amount of of modernization in the
support for Objective-C and Ada via ports, making FreeBSD a first-rate
platform for developing in either language, in addition to the existing
C++11 and C11 support already present in the base system. Server users
will be pleased to see improvements in the iSCSI stack and scalability
allowing over a million I/O operations per second on commodify
hardware, while desktop users will see improvements in X support for
new GPUs and for possible X replacements.
Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! This report
contains 30 entries and we hope you enjoy reading it.
The deadline for submissions covering between October and December, 2013
is January 14th, 2014.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Team Reports
* FreeBSD Core Team
* FreeBSD Port Management Team
* FreeBSD Postmaster Team
* FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
Projects
* Static Code Analysis
Kernel
* AES-NI Improvements for GELI
* Atomic "close-on-exec"
* Continuation of the Newcons Project
* GEOM Direct Dispatch and Fine-Grained CAM Locking
* Native iSCSI Stack
* Reworking random(4)
* SDIO Driver
* VirtIO Network Multiqueue
* VMware VMXNET3 Driver
Architectures
* FreeBSD on Cubieboard2
* FreeBSD/EC2
* FreeBSD/pseries
* FreeBSD/sparc64
* Superpages for ARMv7
Userland Programs
* Capsicum
* LLDB Debugger Port
Ports
* FreeBSD Ada Ports
* FreeBSD Python Ports
* GNOME/FreeBSD
* GNUstep on FreeBSD
* X.Org on FreeBSD
Documentation
* FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer Edit
* The entities Documentation Branch
Google Summer of Code
* Download Manager Service for the Ports Collection
Miscellaneous
* The FreeBSD Foundation
__________________________________________________________________
AES-NI Improvements for GELI
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/255187
Contact: John-Mark Gurney <jmg at FreeBSD.org>
An enhancement to the AES-NI implementation for OpenCrypto, the
kernel's cryptography framework, has been committed that significantly
improves AES-XTS and AES-CBC decryption performance. This gives geli(8)
around a three times performance boost on gnop(8) using AES-XTS
compared to the old code.
These improvements are available to users of the OpenCrypto framework
and crypto(4).
__________________________________________________________________
Atomic "close-on-exec"
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/AtomicCloseOnExec
Contact: Jilles Tjoelker <jilles at FreeBSD.org>
If threads or signal handlers call fork() and exec(), file descriptors
may be passed undesirably to child processes, which may lead to hangs
(if a pipe is not closed), exceeding the file descriptor limit, and
security problems (if the child process has lower privilege). One
solution is various new APIs that set the "close-on-exec" flag
atomically with allocating a file descriptor. Some existing software
will use the new features if present or will even refuse to compile
without them.
With mkostemp(), dup3(), and a change to modes of fopen() and
freopen(), everything proposed in Austin Group issue #411 has now been
implemented. For all POSIX-specified functions that allocate file
descriptors, it is possible to request that the new descriptor be set
close-on-exec atomically.
Additionally, many file descriptors used internally by libc and libutil
now have the close-on-exec bit set.
__________________________________________________________________
Capsicum
Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at FreeBSD.org>
Capsicum is the FreeBSD sandboxing subsystem, which presents
programmers with a capability module allowing fine-grained delegation
of rights to less-privileged processes. Casper is a friendly daemon
that provides services to sandboxed processes, allowing policy-based
access to privileged services such as DNS resolution.
The work on Capsicum and related projects (such as Casper, libnv, etc.)
is progressing nicely. An overhaul of the cap_rights_t was committed to
FreeBSD head and will be included in 10.0. This allows us to have more
capability rights on file descriptors than the previous limit of 64
rights, which was almost reached. This change is not backward
compatible, so it was very important to get it into 10.0.
libnv, used for communication between Casper services and consumers,
but which will hopefully be used more widely, is finalized and comes
with a nice set of regression tests.
The number of applications sandboxed using the Capsicum framework is
increasing. We have around 10 of them already in base and more that are
not yet committed.
This project is being sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Finish documentation of Casper and its services.
2. Implement regression tests for Casper services.
3. Finish documentation for libnv.
4. Start making libc more sandbox-friendly, that is, modifying
functions such as strerror(3), strsignal(3), localtime(3),
login_get*(), getservent(3), getprotent(3), and getrpcent(3) which
currently open files on first use, which might be too late if we
are already in a capability-mode sandbox.
5. Rethink the system.filesystem Casper service to allow for easy
compartmentalization of various command-line tools that operate on
multiple files.
__________________________________________________________________
Continuation of the Newcons Project
URL: http://svn.freebsd.org/base/user/ed/newcons/
Contact: Aleksandr Rybalko <ray at FreeBSD.org>
The Newcons project is aimed to replace the old syscons(4)-based
virtual terminals. The main objectives are: support Unicode characters,
and move away from the dependency on fixed VGA and VESA graphics modes
and built-in BIOS services.
This project was originally started by Ed Schouten, and it already
featured the following features (among many others) in 2013:
* Unicode fonts with Latin, Cyrillic and some more simple character
sets.
* Unicode output support.
* Graphics mode support.
* Text mode support.
* sysmouse(4) support, without copy/paste.
And these have been extended by the following items recently:
* History, that is, the ability to scroll through the terminal
history. The old, separate history buffer has been removed.
* The history is implemented by a circular buffer which has no risk
of overflow, and scrolling appears "unlimited".
* VT_PROCESS mode, a way to hold the terminal and prevent terminal
switching. For example, X.Org uses this feature to prevent the user
from switching to a non-X terminal.
* drm2/fb_helper, the KMS driver. This binds Newcons to framebuffers
created the DRM-enabled video drivers in the kernel (such as
i915kms and radeonkms).
* Dynamic attachment of VT drivers, vt_allocate() to allow attaching
console video drivers at a later point where framebuffer owner can
manage the initialization. This is for KMS and devices without
early graphics support.
Supported startup modes for KMS:
* Start without VT graphics drivers, then load KMS.
* Start with VGA, then load KMS.
* Preload KMS, then the KMS driver will be attached to the output.
* Preload KMS, start with VGA, then KMS driver will replace the VGA
output.
This project is being sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation. Many thanks
to Ed Schouten, who started the Newcons project and did most of the
work.
Open tasks:
1. Implement a Generic Framebuffer interface, a simple interface to
offer direct access to the framebuffer from the userland (via
/dev/fb*) and automatic management of virtual terminals by Newcons.
2. Mouse support, copy/paste using sysmouse(4).
3. Improve locking.
4. Bug fixes.
5. Integrate into FreeBSD head.
6. Integrate into FreeBSD 10.0.
7. Implement mapping non-ASCII characters to Unicode on keyboard
input.
8. Adapt existing screen savers.
9. Last but not least, testing is welcome!
__________________________________________________________________
Download Manager Service for the Ports Collection
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2013/IntellegentDownloadManager
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/IdeasPage/IDMS
Contact: Ambarisha Bhatlapenumarthi <ambarisha at freebsd.org>
Contact: Xin Li <delphij at freebsd.org>
This is a Google Summer of Code 2013 project that aims to replace the
fetch(1)-based method for getting distribution files, such as source
tarballs, for the third-party applications (ports) with an intelligent
Download Manager Service (see links for more information).
All the modules highlighted in the project wiki have been completed
(see links). Specifically:
* A service that receives and serves download requests. It samples
download speeds from different mirrors and uses this information to
pick the best mirror on the next request. It can migrate jobs
between mirrors if it realizes that a complete download from a
different mirror would be faster than proceeding with the mirror it
is currently using.
* A status dump feature has also been added to the client (dmget)
which dumps the information about active downloads, speeds from
mirrors, etc.
Open tasks:
1. The implementation (especially job migration and dumping status)
has not been tested thoroughly. Test the code, write more unit and
regression tests.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Ada Ports
URL: http://www.dragonlace.net
Contact: John Marino <marino at FreeBSD.org>
A few years ago, Ada-based ports almost completely disappeared from the
Ports Collection. This was not surprising, as FSF GNAT, the only
open-source Ada compiler, ceased to build correctly on any BSD flavor.
Previously-built bootstrap compilers would not run on modern FreeBSD,
and certainly not on amd64. The first step, see the link for details,
was to patch GCC in order to fix GNAT not only on FreeBSD, but
DragonFly, NetBSD, and OpenBSD as well. New bootstraps for both i386
and amd64 platforms were produced during this effort. Ada compilers on
FreeBSD now pass 100% of the ACATS and GCC testsuites.
With the introduction of the first new Ada compiler port, the
GCC 4.6-based lang/gnat-aux, the GNAT Programming Studio (a
multilanguage integrated development environment), XML/Ada, and GtkAda
were among the first Ada ports resurrected.
With the latest compiler, lang/gcc-aux based on GCC 4.7, a cohesive Ada
framework was created with the new USES= framework. Currently around 20
ports are part of this framework including Florist, ASIS, GPRbuild,
QtAda, AdaControl, AdaBrowse, PolyOrb, and AWS (Ada Web Server).
The GNAT AUX compiler is also still in use to serve as a basis for the
GNATDroid ports which are FreeBSD-to-Android Ada+C cross-compilers.
However, these will soon be integrated into the Ada Framework.
At this point, it looks like FreeBSD (shared with DragonFly via DPorts)
has taken the crown from Debian as the recognized best Ada development
platform. The FreeBSD versions of the software are more recent and the
Ports Collection has ports not available on Debian, such as
LibSparkCrypto, the Matreshka library, and the Ahven unit tester.
Future work potentially includes converting GCC AUX to GCC 4.8 to
acquire better Ada 2012 support, importing Spark 2014 into ports when
it arrives and to continue to add new Ada ports to the framework.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Core Team
Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <core at FreeBSD.org>
In the third quarter of 2013, the Core Team focused on officially
launching pkg.freebsd.org, the Project's official pkg(8) repository, in
cooperation with the Port Management Team, the Security Team, and the
Cluster Administration Team. At the same time, there are plans to
gradually deprecate the use of the old pkg_add(1), allowing pkg(8) to
be the default binary package management solution for FreeBSD, arriving
with 10.0-RELEASE. Thomas Abthorpe has been appointed to the role of
liaison between the Core Team and the Ports Management Team, in order
to make the collaboration more effective.
David Chisnall has joined the group that publishes the Quarterly Status
reports and compiled a special status report on the results of the
BSDCan 2013 Developer Summit. David also took the lead role on the
organization of an off-season developer summit in Cambridge, UK, which
was finally held at the end of August. For the items discussed in
Cambridge, preparation of a detailed report is still in progress.
There were src commit bits issued for 5 new developers and most of the
src commits being idle more than 12 months have been taken into
safekeeping as result of a major cleanup to the repository access file
in July, performed by Gavin Atkinson.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer Edit
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/fdp-primer/book.html
Contact: Warren Block <wblock at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer had not changed at the same
rate as the documents themselves. Some sections were outdated and
others were verbose and confusing, while information on new changes to
the documentation were not described at all. In July, Warren gave the
entire FDP Primer a fairly intense edit for simplicity and clarity.
Chapters and sections were moved into a more logical order, and
information was updated to be a better guide to the current state.
Markup examples were added and revised. Style guidelines were also
extended and updated. The Primer is now far more consistent and usable.
As always, there is still room for improvement, and additions or
corrections are encouraged.
Open tasks:
1. An introductory chapter on writing manual pages with mdoc(7) would
be an excellent addition.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on Cubieboard2
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/254056
Contact: Ganbold Tsagaankhuu <ganbold at FreeBSD.org>
Initial support of Allwinner A20 SoC is committed to head. The A20 SoC
on Cubieboard2 is pin-to-pin compatible with the A10 in Cubieboard1 and
FreeBSD supports the following peripherals:
* USB EHCI
* GPIO
Open tasks:
1. Get the EMAC Ethernet driver working. Need more help from network
driver experts.
2. Add more drivers.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Port Management Team
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/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
URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-pkg-fallout
Contact: FreeBSD Port Management Team <portmgr at FreeBSD.org>
The ports tree contains approximately 24,400 ports, while the PR count
exceeds 1,900. In the third quarter, we added four new committers and
took in six commit bits for safekeeping.
A significant amount of effort has gone into tweaking and manipulating
the infrastructure to modernize and update it, in preperation for
pkg(8) replacing the old pkg_add(1) infrastructure, as well as
preparing for FreeBSD 10.0 with Clang as default compiler, libc++ as
the default C++ standard library, and iconv(1) integrated into libc.
Automated procedures for quality assurance have been implemented,
notably pkg-fallout. All porters are encouraged to subscribe to the
associated mailing list (see links), and do their part to fix ports for
pkg(8) and Clang readiness.
Many iterations of tests were run to ensure that as many packages as
possible would be available for the 9.2 release.
Open tasks:
1. Most ports PRs are assigned, we now need to focus on testing,
committing, and closing.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Postmaster Team
URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-fortran
URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-pkg-fallout
URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-users-jp
Contact: FreeBSD Postmaster Team <postmaster at FreeBSD.org>
In the third quarter of 2013, the FreeBSD Postmaster Team has
implemented the following items that may be interest of the general
public:
* Created the freebsd-fortran list, requested by Anton Shterenlikht.
* Created the freebsd-pkg-fallout list, requested by Baptiste
Daroussin.
* Created the freebsd-users-jp list, requested by Hiroki Sato
* Retired the freebsd-mozilla list, requested by Florian Smeets.
* Worked with the FreeBSD Cluster Administrators to enable TLS
support on incoming and outgoing mail servers.
* Started discussions and exploration of current and possible future
mail and spam filtering.
* Started the process for retiring the aic7xxx mailing list.
Completion of this is scheduled for 12 October 2013.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Python Ports
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Python
URL: irc://freebsd-python at irc.freenode.net
Contact: FreeBSD Python Team <python at FreeBSD.org>
We are currently working on cleaning up the lang/python* ports to
improve their compatibility with the original upstream build behaviour
and to reduce the need for FreeBSD-specific build patches. A first step
was made in September by reducing the flags injected into the different
Python interpreter versions.
The first tasks have been completed to support the installation of
packages for different Python ports. A new metaport structure has
replaced the original Python port behaviour, and will be enhanced over
the next months to enable improved installation support of packages for
different Python versions at the same time.
The Python ports framework was enhanced with automated packaging list
creation and replacement macros, which improve the compatibility with
multiple Python versions and reduce the packaging list sizes.
PyPy was heavily enhanced over the last couple of months. Major updates
to the port solved integration issues and a new pypy-devel port for
snapshots and previews was added. Since the PyPy 3 release, there is a
new pypy3-devel port available to provide not only compatibility for
Python 2.x specific scripts, but also for those using the 3.x language
specification.
IronPython found its way into the FreeBSD ports tree, providing an
implementation of the Python language based on .NET and Mono.
Open tasks:
1. Develop a high-level and lightweight Python Ports Policy.
2. Chase the unification of Distribute (devel/py-distribute) and
Setuptools (devel/py-setuptools*).
3. Add support for granular dependencies (for example >=1.0 or < 2.0).
4. Look at what adding pip (Python Package Index) support looks like.
5. More tasks can be found on the Team's wiki page (see links).
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/9.2R/schedule.html
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/10.0R/schedule.html
URL: http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/VM-IMAGES/
URL: http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/
Contact: FreeBSD Release Engineering Team <re at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has completed the 9.2-RELEASE
process. The release cycle changed with a last-minute addition of
9.2-RC4. The 9.2-RELEASE was announced September 30, four weeks behind
the original schedule.
The FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE cycle has started, and testing is strongly
encouraged. For testing purposes, both installation images and virtual
machine images exist on the FreeBSD Project FTP servers.
Open tasks:
1. Test 10.0-CURRENT and report problems.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/EC2
URL: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/
URL: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00AA25MLK/
Contact: Colin Percival <cperciva at freebsd.org>
FreeBSD images are available for use in EC2 for 8.3-RELEASE,
8.4-RELEASE, 9.0-RELEASE, 9.1-RELEASE, and 9.2-RELEASE. In 9.2-RELEASE,
FreeBSD runs in EC2 using an unpatched source tree, but it needs the
XENHVM kernel configuration.
Starting from FreeBSD 10.0-ALPHA3, the GENERIC kernel configuration now
contains all the XENHVM bits needed to allow FreeBSD to run in EC2
natively. Consequently, FreeBSD 10.0 will be the first release for
which FreeBSD/EC2 is purely "bits off the ISO". This also means
that
starting with 10.0 it will be possible to use freebsd-update(8) for all
base system updates -- in earlier releases it was necessary to
recompile the XENHVM kernel manually.
Due to FreeBSD's use of HVM virtualization, running on "old"
EC2
instance types (m1, m2, c1, t1) requires that FreeBSD pretends to be
Windows, which unfortunately results in paying the higher "windows"
EC2
instance prices. On "new" EC2 instances (cc1, cc2, cg1, cr1, hi1,
hs1,
and m3) FreeBSD can run as a "unix" image at the lower rate.
Open tasks:
1. Test FreeBSD 10.0-ALPHAs/BETAs/RCs as they become available. Plenty
of new Xen code has been committed recently and there are probably
bugs to find before the release.
2. Keep nagging Amazon to provide more instance types which FreeBSD
can run on without paying a "Windows tax".
3. Provide some mechanism for instance configuration via EC2
user-data. This might involve using cloud-init, or it might be a
new system.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/pseries
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/255643
Contact: Andreas Tobler <andreast at freebsd.org>
Contact: Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org>
Starting with FreeBSD 10.0-ALPHA4, the projects/pseries branch has been
merged into FreeBSD head. This allows FreeBSD/powerpc64 to run in an
IBM POWER logical partition and on certain classes of older IBM-type
PowerPC hardware.
Open tasks:
1. Test, possibly on real hardware. Most testing and development was
conducted with the emulated LPAR target in QEMU. Please send any
testing reports to the freebsd-ppc mailing list.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/sparc64
Contact: Marius Strobl <marius at FreeBSD.org>
There are several things going on with the FreeBSD/sparc64 port.
After having fixed all remaining problems and starting with
9.2-RELEASE, releases for this architecture are cross-built on the
FreeBSD Project cluster. As one might already have noticed, this means
that from now on, sparc64 install sets and images including those for
ALPHA, BETA, and RC builds, are available alongside those for the other
platforms supported by FreeBSD. Since August 2013, automatically
cross-built monthly FreeBSD/sparc64 snapshots are distributed via the
official project mirrors. Hopefully, this can soon be extended further
with freebsd-update(8) support for sparc64.
The X.Org ports have been fixed to work on sparc64 when built with the
WITH_NEW_XORG knob. However, it still needs to be evaluated whether the
recently committed update to Mesa 9.1.6 has introduced any breakage.
__________________________________________________________________
GEOM Direct Dispatch and Fine-Grained CAM Locking
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/projects/camlock/
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~mav/camlock_patches/
Contact: Alexander Motin <mav at FreeBSD.org>
Last year's high-performance storage vendor summit reported a
performance bottleneck in the FreeBSD block storage subsystem, limiting
peak performance to around 300-500K IOPS. While that is still more than
enough for average systems, detailed investigation has shown a number
of places that require radical improvement. The unmapped I/O support
implemented early this year has already improved I/O performance by
about 30% and moved more focus toward GEOM and CAM subsystems
scalability. Fixing these issues was the goal of this project.
The existing GEOM design assumed most I/O handling was to be done by
only two kernel threads (g_up() and g_down()). That simplified locking
in some cases, but limited potential SMP scalability and created
additional scheduler overhead. This project introduces the concept of
direct I/O dispatch into GEOM for cases where it is known to be safe
and efficient. That implies marking some GEOM consumers and providers
with one or two new flags, declaring situations when a direct function
call can be used instead of normal request queuing. That permits
avoiding any context switches inside GEOM for the most widely used
topologies, simultaneously processing multiple I/Os from multiple
calling threads.
Having GEOM pass through multiple concurrent calls down to the
underlying layers exposed major lock congestion in CAM. In the existing
CAM design, all devices connected to the same ATA/SCSI controller share
a single lock, which can be quite busy due to multiple controller
hardware accesses and/or code logic. Experiments have shown that
applying only the above GEOM direct dispatch changes burns up to 60% of
system CPU time or even more in attempts to obtain these locks by
multiple callers, killing any benefits of GEOM direct dispatch.
To overcome this scaling limitation, a new fine-grained CAM locking
design was implemented. It implies splitting the big per-SIM locks into
several smaller ones: per-LUN locks, per-bus locks, queue locks, etc.
After these changes, the remaining per-SIM lock protects only the
controller driver internals, reducing lock congestion down to an
acceptable level and keeping compatibility with existing drivers.
Together, the GEOM and CAM changes double the peak I/O rate, reaching
up to 1,000,000 IOPS on contemporary hardware.
The changes were tested by a number of people and will be committed
into FreeBSD head and merged to stable/10 after the end of the FreeBSD
10.0 release cycle.
The project is sponsored by iXsystems, Inc.
Open tasks:
1. More reviews, more stability and performance tests.
__________________________________________________________________
GNOME/FreeBSD
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome/
Contact: FreeBSD GNOME Team <gnome at FreeBSD.org>
Glib 2.36 and Gtk 3.8 were imported into the ports tree. The GNOME Team
is currently working on improving the quality of GNOME 3.6. The version
of multimedia/cheese shipped with GNOME 3 is now able to use devd(8) to
find the camera through multimedia/webcamd. Several build improvements
have been made to the www/webkit-gtk3 port, however it still is rather
fragile.
MATE, a desktop environment forked from the now-unmaintained codebase
of GNOME 2, is about ready to go in.
GNOME 2 will be removed at some point in the near future. How or when
this will happen is not yet clear.
Open tasks:
1. Test the update. Contact the maintainers if it is suspected that a
port does not work with the newer version of devel/glib20.
2. Update the FreeBSD GNOME website with recent changes in the ports
tree, add new items in preparation for GNOME 3 and Mate, etc.
3. Continue working on GNOME 3.6, stability and missing features.
4. Import MATE into the ports tree.
__________________________________________________________________
GNUstep on FreeBSD
Contact: David Chisnall <theraven at FreeBSD.org>
GNUstep is the open source implementation of the Objective-C APIs based
on the OpenStep specification that Apple brands as Cocoa. The
similarities between the FreeBSD and OS X libc make FreeBSD an
attractive target platform for porting OS X applications, with the
addition of GNUstep.
The GNUstep ports in FreeBSD have now been updated to the latest
releases and now build with the GNUstep Objective-C runtime and Clang
3.3, with the non-fragile ABI by default. This means that all of the
modern features of Objective-C are supported, including Automatic
Reference Counting (ARC) and recent syntax improvements.
The devel/gnustep meta-port will install all of the core GNUstep
libraries, ready for development. The x11/gnustep-app meta-port will
install all of the GNUstep-based applications and libraries currently
in the ports tree. Many of these are old and not well-tested with later
GNUstep release, so consider them experimental at present. We are
currently working on updating them, including moving from some
abandoned upstream locations to the GNUstep Applications Project (GAP),
which has taken over maintenance of a number of older GNUstep programs.
__________________________________________________________________
LLDB Debugger Port
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/lldb
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at freebsd.org>
LLDB is the debugger project in the LLVM family. It supports the Mac OS
X, Linux, and FreeBSD platforms.
A number of improvements have been made to the port since the previous
status update. Unit test failures have been triaged and have defects
entered in LLDB's bug tracker. In combination with the lldb buildbot
this allows for the quick identification of new failures introduced by
other ongoing development. Core file support has also been added.
An LLDB snapshot has been imported into the FreeBSD base system and is
available as of SVN revision 255722. It is not yet built by default but
may be enabled by adding WITH_LLDB= to src.conf(5).
This project is sponsored by DARPA/AFRL in collaboration with SRI
International and the University of Cambridge.
Open tasks:
1. Support live debugging of multithreaded processes.
2. Fix amd64 watchpoints.
3. Add support for remote debugging (gdbserver, debugserver).
4. Add support for kernel debugging.
5. Verify i386 and arm architectures.
6. Implement MIPS target support.
7. Verify cross-debugging.
8. Investigate and fix test suite failures.
__________________________________________________________________
Native iSCSI Stack
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Native%20iSCSI%20target
Contact: Edward Tomasz Napiera?a <trasz at FreeBSD.org>
Due to the quickly approaching time of 10.0-RELEASE, the priorities for
the native iSCSI stack shifted somewhat, from performance optimizations
to making sure the new stack is reliable, feature-complete, and is able
to interoperate correctly with various implementations. Plenty of time
was invested into testing and debugging, mostly on the initiator side,
to make sure it works correctly with other targets, such as Solaris
COMSTAR, and behaves properly in edge conditions like connection
problems. Nevertheless, some fundamental optimizations, such as
Immediate Data support, were implemented. The documentation has
improved, and there will be a new section added to the FreeBSD Handbook
describing the use of the new stack.
The new stack was committed to head and will ship as part of
10.0-RELEASE. There is ongoing work on fixing issues reported by early
adopters.
This project is being sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Fix newly reported issues.
2. Improve performance.
__________________________________________________________________
Reworking random(4)
Contact: Mark Murray <markm at freebsd.org>
Contact: Arthur Mesh <arthurmesh at gmail.com>
Contact: Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav <des at freebsd.org>
Random numbers require a lot more thought and preparation than would
naively appear to be the case. For simulations, number sequences that
are repeatable but sufficiently disordered are often needed to achieve
required experimental duplication ability, and many programmers are
familiar with these. For cryptography, it is essential that an attacker
not be able to predict or guess the output sequence, thus giving a
source of security-critical secret material for uses such as passwords
or "key material".
FreeBSD's random number generator, available as the pseudo-file
/dev/random produces unpredictable numbers intended for cryptographic
use, and is thus a Cryptograpically-Secured Pseudo-Random Number
Generator, or CSPRNG. The security is given by careful design of the
output generator (based on a block cipher) and input entropy
accumulation queues. The latter uses hashes to accumulate stochastic
information harvested from various places in the kernel to provide
highly unpredictable input to the generator. The algorithm for doing
this, Yarrow, by Schneier et al, may be found by web search.
FreeBSD's CSPRNG also allowed for certain stochastic sources, deemed to
be "high-quality", to directly supply the random(4) device without
going through Yarrow. With recent revelations over possible government
surveillance and involvement in the selection of these
"high-quality"
sources, it is felt that they can no longer be trusted, and must
therefore also be processed though Yarrow.
The matter was discussed at various levels of formality at the
Cambridge Developer Summit in August, and at EuroBSDcon 2013 in
September.
This work is now done, and the random(4) CSPRNG is now brought to a
more paranoid, modern standard of distrust with regard to its entropy
sources. Infrastructure work was also done to facilitate certain
entropy-source choices for the convenience of the system
administrators.
Future work is now going ahead with the implementation of the Fortuna
algorithm by Ferguson and Schneier as an upgrade or alternative to
Yarrow. Initially a choice will be presented, and decisions on the
future of the CSPRNG processing algorithms in use will be made in the
future as needs arise.
Open tasks:
1. Implement FIPS 800-90b support.
2. A full, in-depth review of entropy.
__________________________________________________________________
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 of 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, and
barcode scanners. The driver is implemented as an extension to the
existing MMC bus, adding a lot of new SDIO-specific bus methods. A
prototype of the driver for the Marvell SDIO WLAN/BT (Avastar 88W8787)
module is also being developed, using the existing Linux driver as the
reference.
SDIO card detection and initialization already work, most needed bus
methods are implemented and tested. There is an ongoing work to design
a good locking model for the stack. The WiFi driver is able to load
firmware onto the card and initialize it.
Open tasks:
1. SDIO stack: Design a locking model, define how the interrupts
should be processed (on SDIO controller level, MMC stack level and
by child drivers).
2. Marvell SDIO WiFi: connect to the FreeBSD network stack, write the
code to implement required functions (such as sending and receiving
data, network scanning, and so on).
3. Implement detach path. It cannot be tested on the DreamPlug used
for development, because the DreamPlug does not have an external
SDIO-capable slot.
__________________________________________________________________
Static Code Analysis
URL: http://scan.coverity.com/
URL: http://scan.freebsd.your.org/
URL: http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/
Contact: Ulrich Spoerlein <uqs at FreeBSD.org>
With our own (old and unstable) instance of Coverity Prevent gone, we
have now fully transitioned to the Scan project run by Coverity (see
links), which Open Source projects can use to learn about possible
defects in their source code.
We also continue to run our code base through the Static Analyzer that
is shipped with Clang/LLVM. It cannot track the state of the code over
time, but has the benefit that everyone can use it without any special
setup. See the home page at the links section for more information on
the Clang Static Analyzer project in general, and head over to the
FreeBSD Clang Static Analyzer Scan page (see links) to see those
possible defects (no signup required).
We are looking for a co-admin for both of these projects to increase
the bus-factor and the chance of survival for these services. Fame and
fortune await!
Open tasks:
1. Maybe turn on email reports for new defects to the internal list of
FreeBSD developers.
2. Find co-admin.
3. Fix the defects reported by Coverity and Clang.
__________________________________________________________________
Superpages for ARMv7
URL:
http://static.usenix.org/events/osdi02/tech/full_papers/navarro/navarro.pdf
URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/ARMSuperpages
URL:
http://blogs.arm.com/software-enablement/1079-transparent-superpages-for-freebsd-on-arm
URL:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/201309DevSummit?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=semihalf-superpages_armv7.pdf
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/254918
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". Top-tier companies like Dell and
HP
have already started to develop such systems.
Key to the 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, allowing 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:
* The pmap(9) module has been adjusted to fully utilize superpages.
* Found and fixed minor bugs in superpage management.
* Implemented the pmap_advise() routine.
* Performed extensive testing and benchmarking:
+ Giga Updates Per Second (GUPS) benchmark: 34% lower memory
access latency and 34% higher updates ratio.
+ LMbench: 38% lower memory latency.
+ Self-hosted buildworld: 20% shorter, using GCC.
* Final integration into FreeBSD head.
This project is jointly sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation and
Semihalf.
Open tasks:
1. Adjust pmap to resolve the demotion issue caused by the continuous
active queue scanning in VM.
2. Support for 64KB page size.
3. Move pv_flags to page table entry descriptors.
__________________________________________________________________
The entities Documentation Branch
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/doc/42226
Contact: Ren? Ladan <rene at FreeBSD.org>
The entities project branch has been successfully merged into the main
documentation branch per revision 42226 of the doc repository (see
link). The purpose of this branch was to remove the duplicated
definitions of authors in both authors.ent and developers.ent. The
latter file has been removed after migrating its contents to the former
file. While most changes are not visible to end users, the Committer's
Guide was changed to accomodate for changes related to adding a new
committer. Translators were also informed of the update. The largest
hurdle mentioned in the last report, processing the <email> element,
was solved with the help of G?bor K?vesd?n.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Foundation
URL: http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/
Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb at FreeBSDFoundation.org>
The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated
to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community
worldwide. Most of our funding is used to support FreeBSD development
projects, conferences and developer summits, purchase equipment to grow
and improve the FreeBSD infrastructure, and provide legal support for
the Project.
We listened to our donors who asked us to have more fundraising efforts
throughout the year. This quarter we had the second of three
fundraising campaigns planned for 2013. We started the quarter having
raised $365,291. By the end of the quarter, we raised $410,000 for the
year. These early donations have made a significant impact on our
fundraising efforts this year.
Some of the highlights from this past quarter include:
* Projects completed last quarter:
+ ARM Superpages
+ Documentation project infrastructure enhancements
* Projects in progress:
+ Native iSCSI kernel stack
+ Newcons console driver
* Projects that started last quarter:
+ Capsicum Integration
+ Network Stack Layer 2 Modernization
* Platinum Sponsor for EuroBSDcon, had six Foundation representatives
attend the conference and the Developer Summit, sponsored 7
developers to attend the conference, and sponsored the Developer
Summit.
* Sponsored the Cambridge Developer Summit, and sponsored 2
developers to attend this event.
* Attended Indianapolis LinuxFest July 27, FOSSCON in Philadelphia
August 10, Ohio LinuxFest in Columbus September 14, and LinuxCon in
New Orleans September 16-17, to promote FreeBSD.
* Met with the FreeBSD Core Team to discuss their goals and to
discuss areas that we can help.
* Met with the Documentation Team to talk about helping them update
their website as well as what other areas we can help them with.
* Recognized Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav at EuroBSDcon for his contributions
to FreeBSD.
* Became a sponsor of vBSDCon, a new conference in Washington, DC.
* Hired Glen Barber as a full-time employee to do system
administration work and to help with release engineering.
* Hired Cinthy Tanko as a part-time administrative assistant to help
with day-to-day Foundation activities.
* Purchased hardware to be placed in our NYI colo to support the
building and distribution of new style packages in advance of
FreeBSD 10.
* Provided teleconferencing services to the Core Team to support
their monthly conferences.
__________________________________________________________________
VirtIO Network Multiqueue
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/255112
Contact: Bryan Venteicher <bryanv at freebsd.org>
The VirtIO network driver, vtnet(4), is used by FreeBSD systems running
on hypervisors including bhyve(4) and Linux's KVM. It recently gained
support for multiple queues, along with a significant cleanup and
support for a few additional features.
__________________________________________________________________
VMware VMXNET3 Driver
URL:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2013-August/043494.html
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/dev/vmware/vmxnet3/
Contact: Bryan Venteicher <bryanv at freebsd.org>
A port of the OpenBSD vmx(4) ethernet driver for VMware virtual
machines has been committed. The driver can be used in place of the
VMware Tools vmxnet3 driver, which currently does not support
10.0-RELEASE (or anything past 9.0-RELEASE).
Open tasks:
1. Performance improvements, multiqueue support.
2. Merge to stable/9.
__________________________________________________________________
X.Org on FreeBSD
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Xorg
URL: http://trillian.chruetertee.ch/ports/browser/trunk
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/AMD_GPU
URL: https://github.com/dumbbell/freebsd/tree/kms-drm-update-38
Contact: FreeBSDX11 Team <x11 at FreeBSD.org>
Mesa 9.1 (libGL and dri) was updated in ports. This includes
experimental ports for libEGL and libgles2: they are dependencies of
the experimental ports for Wayland and Weston.
The radeonkms driver was committed to FreeBSD head in the end of August
and will be part of 10.0-RELEASE. It received several fixes since the
initial commit and now seems quite stable. However, one missing major
feature is support for suspend/resume: the GPU almost always locks up
during resume on the test computer.
Thanks to the update of Mesa and the update of
x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati to 7.2.0 in the ports tree, every pieces are
in place to allow users to use recent AMD video cards (up to HD7000,
maybe some HD8000).
The driver will now only receive bug fixes and focus will move on the
update of the DRM generic code and the i915 driver.
The generic DRM code, shared by the i915kms and radeonkms video drivers
is quite old now. Work has started to update and sync it with that of
Linux 3.8. This code is available on GitHub.
The expected benefits are:
* Fixes in the framebuffer code, which would help the future
deployment of Newcons.
* Preliminary support for minor devices (that is, control versus
render nodes).
* Support for setmaster and dropmaster, which allows to run multiple
X sessions.
Fran?ois Tigeot from DragonFly is also working on updates to their DRM
code, and the X11 team is planning to share the effort.
An experimental devd(8) backend was added to the
x11-servers/xorg-server port. This allows X.Org to use devd(8) to
detect and configure input devices (for example, keyboards and mices)
dynamically.
Our current wiki articles are used to describe projects and report
status. However, they lack some consistency and links between them. We
started to think about reorganizing them to:
* Improve the coordination between the ports and the kernel efforts.
* Make the information more accessible.
Nothing is visible yet on the wiki.
Open tasks:
1. Keep tracking Mesa 9.2 or later and xorg-server 1.14. Both are
currently blocked, but it is good to keep track of what upstream is
doing.
2. Test and report successes and failures for AMD GPUs.
3. Wayland builds now. Work is being done on Weston to see if there
are any run-time issues. Weston is the reference compositor for
Wayland.
4. Improve the devd(8) backend for x11-servers/xorg-server, so the HAL
option can be removed completely.
__________________________________________________________________