FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report, October-December 2013
Introduction
This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between October and
December 2013. This is the last of four reports planned for 2013.
The last quarter of 2013 was very active for the FreeBSD community,
much like the preceding quarters. Many advances were made in getting
FreeBSD to run on ARM-based System-on-Chip boards like Cubieboard,
Rockchip, Snapdragon, S4, Freescale i.MX6 and Vybrid VF6xx. FreeBSD is
also becoming a better platform for Xen and the Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud. There are plans for FreeBSD to become a fully supported compute
host for OpenStack. The I/O stack has again received some performance
boosts on multi-processor systems through work touching the CAM and
GEOM subsystems, and through better adaptation of UMA caches to system
memory constraints for ZFS. The FreeBSD Foundation did an excellent job
in this quarter, and many of their sponsored projects like VT-d and
UEFI support, iSCSI stack, Capsicum, and auditdistd are about to
complete. At the same time, new projects like Automounter and Intel GPU
updates have just been launched. The Newcons project has been merged
into -CURRENT, which will make it possible to finally move to the
latest version of X.Org in the Ports Collection. Efforts are also under
way to improve testing with Jenkins and Kyua. It is an exciting time
for users and developers of FreeBSD!
Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! This report
contains 37 entries and we hope you enjoy reading it.
The deadline for submissions covering between January and March 2014 is
April 7th, 2014.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Team Reports
* FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team
* FreeBSD Core Team
* FreeBSD Port Management Team
* FreeBSD Postmaster Team
* FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
Projects
* CBSD
* Jenkins Continuous Integration for FreeBSD
Kernel
* GEOM Direct Dispatch and Fine-Grained CAM Locking
* Intel 802.11n NIC (iwn(4)) Work
* Intel GPU Driver Update
* Native iSCSI Stack
* New Automounter
* UEFI Boot
* UMA/ZFS and RPC/NFS Performance Improvements
* Updated vt(9) System Console
Architectures
* FreeBSD Host Support for OpenStack and OpenContrail
* FreeBSD on Cubieboard{1,2}
* FreeBSD on Freescale i.MX6 processors
* FreeBSD on Freescale Vybrid VF6xx
* FreeBSD on Newer ARM Boards
* FreeBSD/EC2
* FreeBSD/Xen
* Intel IOMMU (VT-d, DMAR) Support
Userland Programs
* auditdistd(8)
* Base GCC Updates
* BSDInstall ZFSBoot
* Capsicum and Casper
* Centralized Panic Reporting
* FreeBSD Test Suite
* The LLDB Debugger
Ports
* FreeBSD Python Ports
* GNOME/FreeBSD
* KDE/FreeBSD
* Wine/FreeBSD
* X.Org on FreeBSD
* Xfce/FreeBSD
Miscellaneous
* The FreeBSD Foundation
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team
Contact: FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team <admins@>
The FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team consists of the people
responsible for administering the machines that the project relies on
for its distributed work and communications to be synchronised. In the
last quarter of 2013, they continued general maintenance of the FreeBSD
cluster across all sites.
In addition to general upkeep tasks, additional cluster-related items
were addressed. Some of these items include:
* Added several machines for the Kyua testing framework.
* Replaced failed hardware hosting various web services.
* Coordinated with the FreeBSD Security Officer and Ports Management
Teams to implement signed binary packages.
* Added the redports.org machines to the list of machines managed by
the Cluster Administration Team.
* Began discussion with contacts at Yandex regarding the addition of
a mirror site for binary packages and Subversion repositories.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Core Team
Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <core at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Core Team constitutes the project's "Board of
Directors",
responsible for deciding the project's overall goals and direction as
well as managing specific areas of the FreeBSD project landscape.
In the fourth quarter of 2013, the Core Team finally reached its
previous goal of launching the official repositories for pkg(8)-based
binary packages. The Core Team also unified the commit bit expiration
policies for all Project repositories, allowing committers to idle for
18 months before their commit bits are automatically taken into
safekeeping. This was then followed by an extension to suspension of
cluster accounts for the committers who lost all of their commit bits.
This helps to improve the security of the Project server cluster by
temporarily disabling inactive accounts. In addition to the above
efforts, Thomas Abthorpe resurrected the "Grim Reaper" service
which
helps to enforce the aforementioned policy.
With the work of John Baldwin, Hiroki Sato, and others, many licenses
in the base system source code have been revisited and cleaned up.
Furthermore, the Core Team is hoping that the situation can be improved
by introducing periodic automated checks of the license agreements, and
by providing developers guidelines on questions of licensing. John
Baldwin and David Chisnall have been guiding the work of the FreeBSD
Graphics Team on moving to the newer version of X.Org and related
software in the Ports Collection, in coordination with the switch to
Newcons on FreeBSD 10.x.
It was a busy quarter for the src repository as well. The Core Team was
happy to welcome Jordan K. Hubbard (jkh) back who has recently returned
to the FreeBSD business, and joined iXsystems as project manager and
release engineer of FreeNAS. In addition to this, there were 3 commit
bits offered for new developers, 2 committers were upgraded, 1 commit
bit was taken for safekeeping, and 1 src bit was reactivated.
__________________________________________________________________
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://plus.google.com/communities/108335846196454338383
Contact: FreeBSD Port Management Team <portmgr at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Ports collection is a package management system for the
FreeBSD operating system, providing an easy and consistent way of
installing software packages. The FreeBSD Ports Collection now contains
approximately 24,500 ports, while the PR count exceeds 1,900.
The FreeBSD Port Management Team ensures that the FreeBSD ports
developer community provides a Ports Collection that is functional,
stable, up-to-date and full-featured. Its secondary responsibility is
to coordinate among the committers and developers who work on it. As
part of these efforts, we added 3 new committers, took in 3 commit bits
for safe keeping, and reinstated 1 commit bit in the fourth quarter of
2013.
Ongoing effort went into testing larger changes, as many as 8 a week,
including sweeping changes to the tree, moderization of the
infrastructure, and basic quality assurance (QA) runs. Many iterations
of tests against 10.0-RELEASE were run to ensure that the maximum
number of packages would be available for the release.
We now have pkg(8) packages for the releases 8.3, 8.4, 9.1, 9.2, 10.0
and -CURRENT on pkg.FreeBSD.org. During this same time, further
enhancements were put into pkg(8), including secure package signing.
Commencing November 1, the Port Management Team undertook a
"portmgr-lurkers" pilot project in which ports committers could
volunteer to assist the Port Management Team for a four-month duration.
The first two candiates are Mathieu Arnold (mat) and Antoine Brodin
(antoine).
Ongoing maintenance goes into redports.org, including QAT runs, ports
and security updates.
Open tasks:
1. As previously noted, many PRs continue to languish; we would like
to see some committers dedicate themselves to closing as many as
possible!
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Postmaster Team
URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/svn-src-stable-10
URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/ctm-src-10
URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/ctm-src-10-fast
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/committers-guide/pgpkeys.html
Contact: FreeBSD Postmaster Team <postmaster at FreeBSD.org>
In the fourth quarter of 2013, the FreeBSD Postmaster Team has
implemented the following items that may be interest of the general
public:
* Retired the freebsd-aic7xxx mailing list.
* Created a graphics-team alias, requested by Niclas Zeising.
* Worked with the FreeBSD Port Management Team to set up
portmgr-lurkers so port managers can move addresses between those
two aliases at their discretion.
* Created the lists associated with the new stable/10 branch:
svn-src-stable-10, ctm-src-10, and ctm-src-10-fast.
* Redirected the vbox alias to the emulation list, requested by
Bernhard Fr?hlich.
* Continued a discussion on current and possible future mail and spam
filtering.
* Disbanded lua and transferred it to Baptiste Daroussin, requested
by Matthias Andree and Baptiste Daroussin.
* Modified the list moderators/administrators for ports-secteam,
requested by Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav.
* Assisted Warren Block with an update to the "OpenPGP Keys for
FreeBSD" section of the Committer's Guide.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
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 is finishing the 10.0-RELEASE
cycle. The release cycle changed with two last-minute release candidate
builds, each addressing fixes critical to include in the final release.
The FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE cycle is expected to be completed by
mid-January, approximately eight weeks behind the original schedule.
__________________________________________________________________
CBSD
URL: http://www.bsdstore.ru/
URL: https://github.com/olevole/cbsd
Contact: Oleg Ginzburg <olevole at olevole.ru>
CBSD is another FreeBSD jail management solution, aimed at combining
various features, such as racct(8), vnet, zfs(8), carp(4), and
hastd(8), into a single tool. This provides a more comprehensive way to
build application servers using pre-installed jails with a typical set
of software, and requires minimal effort to configure.
Open tasks:
1. Proper English translation of the website and the documentation.
__________________________________________________________________
Jenkins Continuous Integration for FreeBSD
URL:
http://www.ixsystems.com/whats-new/jenkins-bhyve-and-webdriver-continuous-integration-testing-on-freenas/
Contact: Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc at FreeBSD.org>
At the November 2013 FreeBSD Vendor Summit, some of the work was
presented that Craig Rodrigues has been doing with Continuous
Integration and Testing at iXsystems. Craig's presentation described
how iXsystems is using modern best practices for building and testing
the FreeNAS code. Jenkins is a framework for doing continuous builds
and integration that is used by hundreds of companies. BHyve (BSD
Hypvervisor) is the new virtual machine system which will be part of
FreeBSD 10. Webdriver is a Python toolkit for testing web applications.
By combining these technologies, iXsystems is developing a modern and
sophisticated workflow for testing and improving the quality of
FreeNAS.
Ed Maste from The FreeBSD Foundation was interested in this work, and
based on this interest, it is now being ported to FreeBSD. Currently, a
machine in the FreeBSD cluster has been allocated for this purpose,
where a bhyve(4)-based virtual machine was set up and Jenkins was
installed. The remainder is still in progress.
Open tasks:
1. Finish setting up Jenkins.
2. Add more builds to Jenkins.
3. Integrate testing with Jenkins.
__________________________________________________________________
GEOM Direct Dispatch and Fine-Grained CAM Locking
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~mav/disk.pdf
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/260387
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/260385
Contact: Alexander Motin <mav at FreeBSD.org>
The CAM and GEOM multi-processor scalability improvement project has
completed. The corresponding code has been committed to FreeBSD head
and recently merged to the stable/10 branch; it shall appear in
10.1-RELEASE.
As part of this project, cam(4) (the ATA/SCSI subsystem) has received
more fine-grained locking for better utilization of multi-core systems.
In addition, the locking in geom(4) (the block storage subsystem) has
also been polished, and a new direct dispatch functionality was
implemented to spread the load between multiple threads and processors,
and reduce the number of context switches.
Thanks to these cam(4) and geom(4) changes, the peak I/O rate has
doubled on comptemporary hardware, reaching up to 1,000,000 IOPS!
This project is sponsored by iXsystems, Inc.
Open tasks:
1. Some CAM controller drivers (SIMs) could also be optimized to get
more benefits from this project, utilizing the new locking models
and direct command completions from multiple interrupt threads.
__________________________________________________________________
Intel 802.11n NIC (iwn(4)) Work
Contact: Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org>
There has been a large amount of work on iwn(4) over the last six
months:
* New hardware support: 2xxx, 6xxx, 1xx series hardware.
* Many bugs were fixed, including scanning, association, EAPOL
related fixes.
* iwn(4) now natively works with 802.11n rates from the net80211 rate
control code, rather than mapping non-11n rates to 11n rates.
Open tasks:
1. There are still some scan hangs, due to how net80211 scans a single
channel at a time. This needs to be resolved.
2. The transmit, receive, scan and calibration code needs to be
refactored out of if_iwn.c and into separate source files.
3. There still seem to be some issues surrounding 2 GHz versus 5 GHz
association attempts leading to firmware assertions, especially on
the Intel 4965 NIC.
__________________________________________________________________
Intel GPU Driver Update
Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib at FreeBSD.org>
This project will update the Intel graphics chipset driver, i915kms, to
a recent snapshot of the Linux upstream code. The update will provide
at least 1.5 years of bugfixes from the Intel team, and introduce
support for the newest hardware -- in particular Haswell and
ValleyView. The IvyBridge code will also be updated. The addition of
several features, which are required in order to update X.Org and Mesa,
is also planned.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
Native iSCSI Stack
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Native%20iSCSI%20target
Contact: Edward Tomasz Napiera?a <trasz at FreeBSD.org>
iSCSI is a popular block storage protocol. Under this project, a new,
fast, and reliable kernel-based iSCSI initiator (client) and target
(server) have been implemented.
During October to December, the work focused on performance and
scalability. The target and the initiator now spread the load over
multiple kernel threads, and the locking is optimized to reduce
contention. This makes better use of multiple processor cores.
Work to finish iSER support is ongoing. All those optimizations will be
gradually merged to head in February, and are expected to merged back
to stable/10 and finally arrive in 10.1-RELEASE.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
New Automounter
Contact: Edward Tomasz Napiera?a <trasz at FreeBSD.org>
Research and prototyping has begun on a new project to implement
autofs(4) -- an automounter filesystem -- and its userland counterpart,
automountd(8). The idea is to provide a very similar user experience to
the automounters available on Linux, MacOS X, and Solaris, including
using the same map format. The automounter will also integrate with
directory services, such as LDAP.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
UEFI Boot
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/UEFI
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/projects/uefi/
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at FreeBSD.org>
The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) provides boot- and
run-time services for x86 computers, and is a replacement for the
legacy BIOS. This project will adapt the FreeBSD loader and kernel boot
process for compatibility with UEFI firmware, found on contemporary
servers, desktops, and laptops.
In 2013, The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored Benno Rice for a short
project to improve the UEFI bootloader. This resulted in a working
proof-of-concept in the UEFI project branch, but it was not ready to be
merged to FreeBSD head.
Ed Maste has taken that original work and, with review feedback from
Konstantin Belousov, been preparing it for integration into FreeBSD
head. Some changes have been merged to head already. The rest will be
merged as they are refined.
Intel provided a motherboard and CPU for the project, which proved
invaluable for addressing bugs that did not appear while testing with
the QEMU emulator.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Resolve a 32- versus 64-bit libstand(3) build issue.
2. Merge kernel parsing of EFI memory map metadata.
3. Integrate the EFI framebuffer with vt(9) (also known as Newcons).
4. Connect efiloader to the build.
5. Document manual installation for dual-boot configurations.
6. Integrate UEFI configuration with the FreeBSD installer.
7. Support secure boot.
__________________________________________________________________
UMA/ZFS and RPC/NFS Performance Improvements
URL: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?52894C92.60905
Contact: Alexander Motin <mav at FreeBSD.org>
The performance of ZFS and NFS was suboptimal in FreeBSD, so we have
recently investigated some possible improvement paths. The uma(9)
memory allocator caching code was improved to adapt better to system
memory constraints. Combined with other virtual memory subsystem
improvements done in the previous years, it should be safe to actively
use uma(9) caches now. Their use in ZFS for ZIO/ARC may be enabled via
the vfs.zfs.zio.use_uma loader(8) tunable, which is now the default for
amd64, where it is recommended. Use of uma(9) caches for LZ4
compression buffers is unconditionally enabled on all architectures as
it is has no serious drawbacks. On systems with many CPUs, these
changes doubled the performance in the benchmarks.
Several areas of the NFS server stack (RPC, FHA, DRC) got a number of
fixes and performance optimizations that significantly improve
performance and reduce the CPU usage in a number of tests. Together
with the ZFS memory allocator changes mentioned above, it was possible
to reach 200K NFS block read IOPS and 55K SPEC NFS IOPS.
The code was committed to head. The uma(9) ZFS commits have been
already merged to stable/10, and the remainder will be done soon as
well.
This project is sponsored by iXsystems, Inc.
Open tasks:
1. The SPEC NFS test hits lock congestion on several global locks in
the file system layer when a quite intensive READDIRPLUS NFS
request is received. Fixing this problem could improve performance
on large systems even further.
__________________________________________________________________
Updated vt(9) System Console
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Newcons
Contact: Aleksandr Rybalko <ray at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ed Schouten <ed at FreeBSD.org>
Colloquially known as Newcons, vt(9) is a modern replacement for the
existing, quite old, virtual terminal emulator called syscons(4).
Initially motivated by the lack of Unicode support in syscons(4), the
project was later expanded to cover the new requirement to support
Kernel Mode Switching (KMS).
The project is now approaching completion and is ready for wider
testing as the related code was already merged to FreeBSD head. Hence,
vt(9) can be tested easily by replacing the following two lines in the
kernel config file:
device sc
device vga
with the following ones:
device vt
device vt_vga
Major highlights:
* Unicode support.
* Double-width character support for CJK characters.
* xterm(1)-like terminal emulation.
* Support for Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) drivers (i915kms, radeonkms).
* Support for different fonts per terminal window.
* Simplified drivers.
Brief status of supported architectures and hardware:
* amd64 (VGA/i915kms/radeonkms) -- works.
* ARM framebuffer -- works.
* i386 (VGA/i915kms/radeonkms) -- works.
* IA64 -- untested.
* MIPS -- untested.
* PPC and PPC64 -- Works, but without X.Org yet.
* SPARC -- works on certain hardware (e.g., Ultra 5).
* vesa(4) -- in progress.
* i386/amd64 nVidia driver -- need testing.
* Xbox framebuffer driver -- need testing.
Known Issues:
* Switching to vty0 from X.Org on Fatal events will not work.
* Certain hardware (e.g., Lenovo X220) get a black screen when
i915kms is preloaded.
* Scrolling can be slow;
* Screen borders are not cleared when changing fonts.
* vt(9) locks up with the gallant12x22 font in VirtualBox.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Create sub-directories for vt(9) under /usr/share/ to store key
maps and fonts.
2. Implement remaining features supported by vidcontrol(1).
3. Write the vt(9) manual page.
4. Support keyboard handled directly by device kbd (without
kbdmux(4)).
5. CJK fonts (in progress).
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Host Support for OpenStack and OpenContrail
URL: http://www.openstack.org/
URL: http://www.opencontrail.org/
URL: https://github.com/Semihalf/openstack-devstack
URL: https://github.com/Semihalf/openstack-nova
URL: https://github.com/Semihalf/contrail-vrouter
URL: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/freebsd-compute-node
Contact: Grzegorz Bernacki <gjb at semihalf.com>
Contact: Micha? Dubiel <md at semihalf.com>
Contact: Rafa? Jaworowski <raj at semihalf.com>
OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of
compute, storage, and networking resources in a data center.
OpenContrail is a network virtualization (SDN) solution comprising a
network controller, a virtual router, and an analytics engine, which
can be integrated with cloud orchestration systems like OpenStack or
CloudStack.
The goal of this work is to enable FreeBSD as a fully supported compute
host for OpenStack, using OpenContrail virtualized networking. The main
areas of development are the following:
* OpenStack compute driver (nova-compute) for the FreeBSD bhyve(4)
hypervisor.
* OpenContrail vRouter (forwarding-plane kernel module) port to
FreeBSD.
* Integration and performance optimizations.
The current state of development features a working demo of OpenStack
with compute node components running on a FreeBSD host:
* The native bhyve(4) hypervisor is driven by a nova-compute
component for spawning guest instances and a nova-network component
for providing simple networking between those guests.
* The nova-network approach (based on local host bridging) is
becoming an obsolete technology in OpenStack and was used here only
for demonstration and proof-of-concept purposes, without exploring
all the possible features.
* The main objective is to move to OpenContrail-based networking,
therefore becoming compliant with the modern OpenStack networking
API ("neutron").
This project is sponsored by Juniper Networks, Inc.
Open tasks:
1. Decide how to integrate bhyve(4) with nova-compute, either natively
or via the libvirt management layer.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on Cubieboard{1,2}
URL: https://github.com/tsgan/allwinner_a10/blob/master/if_emac.c
Contact: Ganbold Tsagaankhuu <ganbold at FreeBSD.org>
Cubieboard is a single-board computer based on the AllWinner A10 SoC,
popular on cheap tablets, phones and media PCs. The second version
enhances the board mainly by replacing the AllWinner A10 SoC with an
AllWinner A20 which contains 2 ARM Cortex-A7 MPCore CPUs and 2 Mali-400
GPUs (Mali-400MP2). In the last few months, work has continued on their
FreeBSD port, and some work was done on the EMAC 10/100 Ethernet driver
(see link). The driver is now in a good shape, however the RX side is
very slow and there is need to have an external DMA driver that can be
used in this case.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on Freescale i.MX6 processors
URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arm/2013-November/006877.html
Contact: Ian Lepore <ian at freebsd.org>
The i.MX range is a family of Freescale Semiconductor proprietary
microprocessors for multimedia applications based on the ARM
architecture and focused on low-power consumption. The i.MX6x series is
based on the ARM Cortex A9 solo, dual or quad cores. Initial support
for them has been committed to head, and merged to stable/10. All
members of the i.MX6 family (Solo, Dual, and Quad core) are supported,
but SMP support on the multi-core SoCs has not yet been enabled.
Initial driver support includes:
* USB (EHCI)
* Ethernet (Gigabit)
* SD Card
* UART
The initial hardware bringup was done on Wandboard hardware, see the
announcement on freebsd-arm in the links section for more information.
Open tasks:
1. Write drivers for additional on-chip hardware, including I2C, SPI,
AHCI, audio, and video.
2. Add support to FreeBSD-crochet script to generate Wandboard images
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on Freescale Vybrid VF6xx
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/258057
Contact: Ruslan Bukin <br at freebsd.org>
Basic support for the Freescale Vybrid Family VF6xx heterogeneous ARM
Cortex-A5/M4 System-on-Chip (SoC) was added to FreeBSD head. The Vybrid
VF6xx family is an implementation of the new modern Cortex-A5-based
low-power ARM SoC boards. Vybrid devices are ideal for applications
including simple HMI in appliances and industrial machines, secure
control of infrastructure and manufacturing equipment, energy
conversion applications such as motor drives and power inverters,
ruggedized wired and wireless connectivity, and control of mobile
battery-operated systems such as robots and industrial vehicles.
Supported device drivers:
* NAND Flash Controller (NFC)
* USB Enhanced Host Controller Interface (EHCI)
* General-Purpose Input/Output (GPIO)
* Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART)
Also supported:
* Generic Interrupt Controller (GIC)
* MPCore timer
* ffec Ethernet driver
Open tasks:
1. Add support for a number of different VF5xx- and VF6xx-based
development boards.
2. Expand device driver support, including framebuffer and other
devices.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on Newer ARM Boards
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/Radxa%20Rock
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/256949
URL: https://github.com/tsgan/qualcomm
Contact: Ganbold Tsagaankhuu <ganbold at FreeBSD.org>
Rockchip is a series of SoC (System on Chip) integrated circuits that
are mainly for embedded systems applications in mobile entertainment
devices such as smartphones, tablets, e-books, set-top boxes, media
players, personal video, and MP3 players. Due to their evolution from
the MP3/MP4 player market, most Rockchip ICs feature advanced media
decoding logic but lack integrated cellular radio basebands. Initial
support for the Rockchip RK3188 (Quad core Cortex A9) SoC is committed
to head. Now FreeBSD runs on Radxa Rock and it supports the following
peripherals:
* Existing DWC OTG driver in host mode
* GPIO
Some work was also done on initial support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon
S4 SoC, featuring the Krait CPU, which is considered a "platform"
for
use in smartphones, tablets, and smartbook devices. Krait has many
similarities with the ARM Cortex-A15 CPU and is also based on the ARMv7
instruction set. A minimal console driver was written, and FreeBSD's
early boot messages can be now seen on the serial console. The timer
driver works too, and the boot now stops at the mountroot prompt.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/EC2
URL: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/
URL: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2013-12-09-FreeBSD-EC2-configinit.html
Contact: Colin Percival <cperciva at freebsd.org>
An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a special type of virtual appliance
that is used to create a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic
Compute Cloud ("EC2"). It serves as the basic unit of deployment
for
services delivered using EC2. Such AMIs are available for 8.3-RELEASE
and later FreeBSD releases, and every ALPHA, BETA, and RC of
FreeBSD 10.0. Starting from FreeBSD 10.0-BETA1, FreeBSD/EC2 images are
running "fully supported" FreeBSD binaries, and starting from
FreeBSD 10.0-RC1, FreeBSD/EC2 images include a "configinit" system
for
autoconfiguration using EC2 user-data.
Due to limitations of old (m1, m2, c1, t1) instance types,
"Windows"-labelled images are required for those instance types;
however all of the recent instances types -- m3 (general purpose), c3
(high-CPU), and i2 (high-I/O) -- support FreeBSD at the "unix"
pricing
rates.
The maintainer of this platform considers it to be ready for production
use.
Open tasks:
1. Hand over the task of building FreeBSD AMIs to the Release
Engineering Team.
2. Get Amazon to add "FreeBSD" to the list of platforms supported
by
EC2, so that it can stop showing up as "Other Linux".
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/Xen
URL: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/FreeBSD_PVH
Contact: Roger Pau Monn? <royger at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Justin T. Gibbs <gibbs at FreeBSD.org>
Xen is a native (bare-metal) hypervisor providing services that allow
multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer
hardware concurrently. Xen 4.4 will bring a virtualization mode called
PVH -- PV (paravirtualization) in an HVM (fully-virtual) container.
This is essentially a paravirtualized guest using paravirtualized
drivers for boot and I/O. Otherwise it uses hardware virtualization
extensions, without the need for emulation.
After merging the changes in order to improve Xen PVHVM support, work
has shifted on getting PVH DomU support on FreeBSD. Patches have been
posted, and after a couple of rounds of review the series looks almost
ready for merging into head. Also, very initial patches for FreeBSD PVH
Dom0 support has been posted. So far the posted series only focuses on
getting FreeBSD booting as a Dom0 and being able to interact with the
hardware.
This project is sponsored by Citrix Systems R&D, and Spectra Logic
Corporation.
Open tasks:
1. Finish reviewing and commit the PVH DomU support.
2. Work on PVH Dom0 support.
__________________________________________________________________
Intel IOMMU (VT-d, DMAR) Support
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/257251
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/259512
Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib at FreeBSD.org>
An Input/Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU) is a Memory Management
Unit (MMU) that connects a Direct Memory Access-capable (DMA-capable)
I/O bus to main memory; therefore, I/O virtualization is performed by
the chipset. An example IOMMU is the graphics address remapping table
(GART) used by AGP and PCI Express graphics cards. Intel has published
a specification for IOMMU technology as Virtualization Technology for
Directed I/O, abbreviated VT-d.
A VT-d driver was committed to head and stable/10, so busdma(9) is now
able to utilize VT-d. The feature is disabled by default, but it may be
enabled via the hw.dmar.enable loader(8) tunable -- see the links for
more information. The immediate plans include increasing the support
for this kind of hardware by testing and providing workarounds for
specific issues, and by adding features of the next generation of Intel
IOMMU. Hopefully, the existing and new consumers of VT-d will start to
use the driver soon.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
auditdistd(8)
Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at FreeBSD.org>
The auditdistd(8) daemon is responsible for distributing audit trail
files over TCP/IP network securely and reliably. Currently, the daemon
uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) for communication, but only
server-side certificates are verified, based on the certificate's
fingerprint. The ongoing work will make it possible to use client-side
certificates and will support more complete public-key infastructure,
which includes validation of the entire certificate chain, including
revocation checking against Certification Revocation Lists at every
level. From now on, auditdistd(8) will support TLSv1.2 and PFS modes
only. In addition, it will be possible to send audit trail files to
multiple receivers.
The work will be completed at the beginning of February 2014.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
Base GCC Updates
Contact: Pedro Giffuni <pfg at FreeBSD.org>
The GCC compiler in the FreeBSD base system is on its way to
deprecation and is only used by some Tier-2 platforms at this time.
While Clang is much better in many aspects, we still cannot use in the
base system all the new features that it brings until we can drop GCC
completely. As a stop-gap solution, several bug fixes and features from
Apple GCC and other sources have been ported to our version of
GCC 4.2.1 to make it more compatible with Clang. FreeBSD's GCC has
added more warnings and some enhancements like -Wmost and
-Wnewline-eof. An implementation for Apple's blocks extension is now
available, too, and it will be very useful to enhance FreeBSD's support
for Apple's Grand Central Dispatch (GCD).
Open tasks:
1. A merge from head to stable/9 is being considered but it disables
nested functions by default, so the impact on the Ports Collection
needs to be evaluated.
2. No further development of GCC 4.2 in the base system is planned.
__________________________________________________________________
BSDInstall ZFSBoot
URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-sysinstall
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot/9.0-RELEASE
Contact: Allan Jude <freebsd at allanjude.com>
Contact: Devin Teske <dteske at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Warren Block <wblock at FreeBSD.org>
BSDInstall has been the default installation program since
FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE. However, it could not utilize one of the best
features of FreeBSD, ZFS.
The ZFSBoot project started at EuroBSDCon 2013 and reached stable
status in December, just in time for FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE. Currently,
ZFSBoot implements root-on-ZFS with 4k partition alignment, optional
forced 4k sectors, optional geli(8) full disk encryption, and support
for boot environments.
As part of ZFSBoot, BSDInstall itself also received a number of
updates, including enhanced debugging, more scriptability, a new keymap
selection menu, and a number of other small changes to streamline the
installation process. The new keymap menu allows the user to test the
selected keymap before continuing, to ensure it is the desired keymap.
Minor changes were made to the network configuration dialogues to make
the identification of wireless interfaces easier.
A number of additional features are also planned. The user should be
able to create additional datasets and adjust the properties on all
datasets in an interactive menu. There should also be integration with
BSDConfig to allow users to install packages and the various other
functionality that was previously provided by sysinstall.
Open tasks:
1. Interactive dataset editor.
2. Dataset property editor.
3. Consider using shell geom(4) parser.
4. BSDConfig integration.
5. UFS as a file system option, to allow users to create encrypted UFS
installs.
6. Optionally make the boot pool UFS or reside on USB device(s).
7. Further streamline the installation process.
__________________________________________________________________
Capsicum and Casper
URL:
http://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2013/12/freebsd-foundation-announces-capsicum.html
Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at FreeBSD.org>
Capsicum is a lightweight OS capability and sandbox framework
implementing a hybrid capability system model. The Casper daemon
enables sandboxed application to use functionality normally unavailable
in capability-mode sandboxes.
The Casper daemon, libcasper, libcapsicum(3), libnv(3) and Casper
services (system.dns, system.grp, system.pwd, system.random and
system.sysctl) have been committed to FreeBSD head. The tcpdump(8)
utility in head now uses the system.dns service to do DNS lookups. The
kdump(1) utility in head now uses the system.pwd and system.grp
services to convert user and group identifiers to user and group names.
There is ongoing work to sandbox more applications. If you are
interested in helping to make FreeBSD more secure and would like to
learn about Capsicum and Casper, do not hesitate to contact Pawel -- he
can provide candidate programs that could use sandboxing.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
Centralized Panic Reporting
URL:
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2013-11-06-automated-freebsd-panic-reporting.html
Contact: Colin Percival <cperciva at freebsd.org>
With the sysutils/panicmail port, a mechanism is now in place for
automated submission of kernel panic reports to a central location. It
is hoped that this will prove useful, as similar systems have for other
operating systems, in identifying common panics so that developers can
be alerted and they can be fixed faster.
In the first two months that this mechanism has been in place, 28
kernel panics have been reported. This is nowhere near enough to be
useful, so readers are strongly encouraged to install the
sysutils/panicmail port and follow the instructions to enable it.
Open tasks:
1. Get more systems set up to automatically submit panic reports!
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Test Suite
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/TestSuite
URL: http://kyua1.nyi.FreeBSD.org/
URL:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-testing/2013-December/000109.html
URL: http://julipedia.meroh.net/2013/12/introducing-freebsd-test-suite.html
Contact: Julio Merino <jmmv at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Test Suite project aims to equip FreeBSD with a
comprehensive test suite that is easy to run out of the box and during
the development of the system. The test suite is installed into
/usr/tests/ and the kyua(1) command-line tool (devel/kyua in the Ports
Collection) is used to run them.
The benefits of having a test suite that is easy to use and
continuously run are obvious: regressions can be caught sooner rather
than later and the Release Engineering Team can better assess the
quality of the tree before deciding to cut a release. Additionally,
because we choose to install the tests, we allow any end user to
perform sanity checks on new installations of the system on their
particular hardware configuration -- a very attractive thing to do when
deploying production servers.
During the last few months, we have added the necessary pieces to the
build system to support building and installing test programs of
various kinds. To demonstrate the functionality of these, some test
programs were added and others were migrated from the old testing tree
in tools/regression/ to the new layout for tests.
The current test suite should be seen as a proof of concept at this
point: it is only composed of a small set of test programs and the goal
is to get the infrastructure in place before mass-migrating existing
test code and/or importing external tests.
As part of this work, two new releases of Kyua were published. Of
special interest is the addition of a TAP-compliant backend so that
existing tests from tools/regression/ can be plugged into the test
suite with minimum effort.
As of December 31st, the basic continuous testing infrastructure is up
and running, see the links section for the home page. For further
information, please see the related announcement and blog post on the
subject (also in the links section).
Open tasks:
1. We have three machines for the test cluster. At the moment, only
one of them is in use to continuously test amd64 on both head and
stable/10. We need to figure out the right level of parallelization
to put other machines to use -- but a first easy cut may be to just
test different architectures (with the help of QEMU).
2. Related to the above, the Kyua reporting engine needs significant
tuning to make the reports nice and clean. Ideally, Kyua should be
able to coalesce results from different runs into a single location
and generate cohesive reports out of them. Fixing this is a high
priority.
3. A tutorial on writing tests for FreeBSD has been proposed for
AsiaBSDCon 2014. The outcome of the proposal is still unknown, but
stay tuned!
4. Port, port, and port more tests to the new test suite. A test suite
is worthless if it does not validate stuff. Stay tuned for a
request for help once we have put all basic pieces in place and
have streamlined the migration process.
__________________________________________________________________
The LLDB Debugger
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/lldb
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at FreeBSD.org>
LLDB is the debugger in the LLVM family of projects. It supports Mac OS
X, Linux, and FreeBSD, with ongoing work to support Windows.
In the last quarter of 2013, LLDB gained support for live
(ptrace(2)-based) debugging of multithreaded processes on FreeBSD.
Initial FreeBSD MIPS target support has also been committed, along with
a number of endianness fixes in the general LLDB infrastructure.
The LLDB snapshot in the FreeBSD tree was updated to r196322. Currently
disabled by default, it will be enabled for amd64 after the import of
Clang 3.4. In the interim, it may be enabled by adding WITH_LLDB= to
src.conf(5).
This project is sponsored by DARPA/AFRL, SRI International, and
University of Cambridge.
Open tasks:
1. Update the in-tree snapshot to build after the Clang 3.4 import.
2. Fix amd64 watchpoints.
3. Test and fix the i386 port.
4. Implement FreeBSD ARM support.
5. Add support for kernel debugging (live local and remote debugging,
and core files).
6. Fix the remaining test suite failures.
7. Enable by default on the amd64 architecture.
__________________________________________________________________
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>
Python is a widely used general-purpose, high-level programming
language. For many operating systems, Python is a standard component;
it ships with FreeBSD as well. A lot of progress has been made around
the FreeBSD Python ports in the last quarter.
The devel/py-distribute port has been replaced by the refreshed
devel/py-setuptools port, which comes with a lot of features that
simplify the ways of installing Python packages. The change also led us
to install everything through Setuptools now, which resembles a PyIP a
bit and allows us to perform some major cleanup on the distutils
installation behaviour.
The implicit lang/python build and run-time dependency was removed from
the ports infrastructure. Every port now depends on a specific Python
version or on the lang/python metaport. This prevents compatibility
issues for ports that depend on Python 2.x OR Python 3.x exclusively,
but use the python command, which might point to a version of
incompatible user choice.
The lang/python27 port was updated to version 2.7.6, and the
lang/python33 port was updated to version 3.3.3, and the lang/pypy port
was updated to version 2.2.1.
We are currently working on the necessary infrastructure quirks to
support different Python versions for the same port. Most of the work
has been done and needs to be tested before it can be integrated.
Open tasks:
1. Develop a high-level and lightweight Python Ports Policy.
2. Add support for granular dependencies (for example >=1.0 or <2.0).
3. Look at what adding pip support looks like.
4. Convert all USE_PYDISTUTILS=easy_install entries to yes and remove
the use of easy_install from the ports infrastructure.
5. More tasks can be found on the team's wiki page (see links).
__________________________________________________________________
GNOME/FreeBSD
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome/
URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/ports/334661
Contact: FreeBSD GNOME Team <gnome at FreeBSD.org>
GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs
on top of a computer operating system. GNOME is part of the GNU Project
and can be used with various Unix-like operating systems, including
FreeBSD.
In this quarter, MATE 1.6 was finally imported into the Ports
Collection, thanks to the efforts of Jeremy Messenger. MATE is a
desktop environment forked from the now-unmaintained code base of
GNOME 2, therefore it is basically a replacement for GNOME 2. It
recommended for users wanting to keep GNOME 2 as their desktop to
switch since GNOME 2 will be replaced by GNOME 3 in the near future.
This switch will be announced in advance, so people will have time to
move to MATE if they have not already. The complete MATE-based desktop
environment can be installed via the x11/mate port, or, for a minimal
install, x11/mate-base.
Our home page is quite out of date. An update for it for GNOME 3.6 is
underway. Part of this update is rewriting and updating the old GNOME
porting guide as a chapter of the Porter's Handbook.
Another major task required for getting a bleeding-edge GNOME to build
on FreeBSD mostly out-of-the box is moving to JHbuild with some custom
rules. This is done to find and fix compile issues on other BSDs more
quickly.
Open tasks:
1. GNOME 2 ports still need to be sorted out to evaluate which GNOME 2
components will be gone or be replaced with their newer GNOME 3
versions. This task is current halted until we can get the
documentation into a shape good enough to gather the issues and
document the migration, including how to avoid the migration if the
upgrade is not preferred. (This does not mean we do not want to
know about issues with upgrading, though).
2. Help the X11 Team with Cairo 1.12, since the next version of
GNOME 3 (3.12) will need an up-to-date version of Pango and GTK 3.
__________________________________________________________________
KDE/FreeBSD
URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org
URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org/area51.php
URL: http://portscout.freebsd.org/kde at freebsd.org.html
Contact: KDE FreeBSD Team <kde at FreeBSD.org>
KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated
set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD,
Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and OS X systems. The KDE/FreeBSD Team have
continued to improve the experience of KDE software and Qt under
FreeBSD.
During last quarter, the team has kept most of the KDE and Qt ports
up-to-date, working on the following releases:
* KDE SC (area51): 4.11.2, 4.11.3, 4.11.4
* Qt: 4.8.5 and 5.2 (area51)
* PyQt: 4.10.3; SIP: 4.15.2; QScintilla2: 2.8
* Qt Creator 2.8.0
* KDevelop: 4.5.2
* Calligra: 2.7.5
* CMake: 2.8.12, 2.8.12.1
As a result, according to PortScout, our team has 464 ports (down from
473), of which 88.15% are up-to-date (down from 98.73%). iXsystems Inc.
continues to provide 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.
As usual, the team is always looking for more testers and porters so
please contact us or visit our home page (see links). 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 links for a list.
2. Worke on KDE 4.12 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.
__________________________________________________________________
Wine/FreeBSD
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Wine
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/i386-Wine
URL: http://www.winehq.org/
Contact: Gerald Pfeiffer <gerald at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: David Naylor <dbn at FreeBSD.org>
Wine is a free and open source software application that aims to allow
applications designed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like
operating systems, such as FreeBSD. The Wine/FreeBSD Team have
continued to improve the experience of Wine under FreeBSD.
During the fourth quarter of 2013, the team has kept Wine updated by
porting:
* Stable releases: 1.6 and 1.6.1
* Development releases: 1.7.4 through 1.7.8
The ports have included packages built for amd64 (available through the
Ports Collection).
The Wine ports have been kept up-to-date with the changes in the Ports
Collection, including some improvements:
* Building with Clang by default (via USES=compiler:c11).
* Conditional X11 support (on by default; allowing for headless
instances of Wine).
* Staging support and other ports best practices.
Support in improving the experience of Wine on FreeBSD is needed. Key
areas including fixing regressions, adding copy protection scheme
support and fixing regressions when using Wine under FreeBSD/amd64.
Open tasks:
1. Open Tasks and Known Problems (see links for the wiki page).
2. FreeBSD/amd64 integration (see links for the i386-Wine wiki page).
3. Porting WoW64 and Wine64.
__________________________________________________________________
X.Org on FreeBSD
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics
URL: http://trillian.chruetertee.ch/ports/browser/trunk
URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-x11/2014-January/014003.html
Contact: FreeBSD X11 Team <x11 at FreeBSD.org>
The newer graphics stack (WITH_NEW_XORG) is now built by default on
head and is provided as binary packages from the official FreeBSD
pkg(8) repository for 11-CURRENT. The major updates are:
* X.Org server 1.12.
* Mesa 9.1.
* Recent Intel and Radeon X.Org drivers, using exclusively the KMS
kernel drivers available in FreeBSD 9.x (Intel) and FreeBSD 10.x
(Radeon).
This change makes X.Org on FreeBSD head work out-of-the-box on
workstations and laptops based on recent Intel and Radeon GPUs.
FreeBSD 10.x will follow in a few weeks or months.
Some software has started to require Cairo 1.12, for example GTK+ 3.10
and Pango. Unfortunately, this version of Cairo triggers a bug in the
old Intel driver (2.7.1, installed when WITH_NEW_XORG is not set),
which causes display artifacts. A "Call For Testers" mail was
posted on
the freebsd-x11 mailing-list (see the links above) to gather
information about the behavior on other configurations (new Intel
driver and non-Intel drivers). As of this writing, the reports received
talk about improvements or, at least, no change noticed.
To better manage changes such as the WITH_NEW_XORG and Cairo 1.12
changes mentioned above, we asked on the freebsd-x11 mailing-list if
people are using FreeBSD 8.x on their desktop computers and why they do
not upgrade to FreeBSD 9.x or 10.x. So far, we received very few
answers to this.
The Radeon KMS driver in FreeBSD 10.x is now considered stable,
especially that integrated GPUs are now properly initialized. One of
the next steps will be to merge this to stable/9.
A "Graphics" wiki article (see links) was created to centralize and
coordinate the work being done on both the ports and the kernel. It
contains the following important information:
* A roadmap of the team.
* A matrix of supported hardware.
* Instructions on upgrading to KMS.
* Project status and results.
This starting page then points to project- and topic-specific articles
where more detailed information is available.
Open tasks:
1. Report why FreeBSD 8.x is still used on your desktop and why moving
to FreeBSD 9.x or 10.x is not an option.
2. Report about the Cairo 1.12 update on your system.
3. See the "Graphics" wiki page for up-to-date information.
__________________________________________________________________
Xfce/FreeBSD
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Xfce
URL: https://people.freebsd.org/~olivierd/xfce-core-unstable.html
URL: https://people.freebsd.org/~olivierd/parole-unstable.html
Contact: FreeBSD Xfce Team <xfce at FreeBSD.org>
Xfce is a free software desktop environment for Unix and Unix-like
platforms, such as FreeBSD. It aims to be fast and lightweight, while
still being visually appealing and easy to use. The FreeBSD Xfce Team
has kept most of the Xfce ports up-to-date, while fixing many issues
along the way in this quarter.
Currently, the following components with the following versions are
available:
Applications:
* Orage (4.10.0)
* Midori (0.5.6)
* xfce4-terminal (0.6.3)
* xfce4-parole (0.5.3, 0.5.4)
Panel plugins:
* xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin (1.2.0, 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.3.0)
* xfce4-mailwatch-plugin (1.2.0)
* xfce4-wmdock-plugin (0.6.0)
We helped Midori's upstream switch from Waf (Python script) to CMake.
Xfce now also supports Gtk2, Gtk3, and the new WebKitGtk API, available
from the 2.x branch, not present in our ports tree at the moment,
though. Most of the ports now use stage directories, with only some
plugins left to convert.
We also removed obsolete ports:
* x11-themes/lila-xfwm4 (Xfwm4 theme)
* multimedia/xfce4-media (multimedia player)
* net-im/xfce4-messenger-plugin
Besides, we followed the development of the Xfce core components and
Parole closely. See the links for documentation on how to upgrade those
libraries.
Open tasks:
1. Fix Midori's build on DragonFly, through DPorts.
2. Fix build of the Granite framework (it is an extension to Gtk and
Midori uses it) on FreeBSD 10 and head. Those are mostly LLVM
failures.
3. Add support for Berkeley DB 5 and higher to Orage.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Foundation
URL: http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/
URL: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2013Dec-newsletter
URL: http://freebsdjournal.com/
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 the 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 held our year-end fundraising campaign. We are still processing
donations and will post the final numbers by mid-January. We are
extremely grateful to all the individuals and organizations that
supported us and the Project by making a donation in 2013. We have
already started our fundraising efforts for 2014.
Some of the highlights from this past quarter include:
* We sponsored or are sponsoring the following projects:
+ Projects completed last quarter: Capsicum, Casper daemon, and
Intel I/O Memory Management Unit driver.
+ Projects in progress: Native in-kernel iSCSI stack, network
stack layer 2 modernization, UEFI boot, updated vt(9) system
console.
+ Projects started last quarter: Automounter, Intel graphics
driver update.
* Continued work on the FreeBSD Journal, our new online FreeBSD
magazine, which debuts on January 27th (see links).
* Sponsored, organized, and ran the Bay Area Developer Summit.
* Sponsored and attended the first ever vBSDCon, which had an
impressive attendance.
* Sponsored and attended the OpenZFS developer summit.
* Represented the foundation at the following conferences: All Things
Open in Raleigh, NC and LISA in Washington, DC.
* Sponsored the FreeBSD 20th Birthday Party, held in San Francisco.
* Attended the ICANN meeting in Buenos Aires in November and gave a
short presentation on the change from BIND to unbound in
FreeBSD 10.0 during the ccNSO Tech Day.
* Met with a few companies to discuss their FreeBSD use, what they
would like to see supported in FreeBSD, and assist with
collaboration between them and the Project.
* Purchased an 80-core server to reside at Sentex for the Project to
use for stability, scalability, and performance improvements. It is
a big step forwards for the Foundation in providing this kind of
hardware to the Project's developers. It will let us test our
scaling to 80 simultaneous cores and 1 TB of RAM. It will also be
used to do performance analysis on large workloads, such as large
databases etc.
* Acquired a second rack to use at Sentex.
* We received a commitment from VMware, Inc. for BSD-licensed
drivers. They also committed to a yearly silver level donation.
* Signed up as a Google Compute trusted tester for the Project.
* Funded a project to produce a white paper titled "Managed Services
Using FreeBSD at NYI".
* Finally, we published our semi-annual newsletter (see links)
highlighting what we did to support the FreeBSD Project and
Community in 2013.
__________________________________________________________________
Love FreeBSD? Support the development with a donation to the FreeBSD
Foundation! https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/