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FreeBSD Project Quarterly Status Report: July - September 2015
The third quarter of 2015, from July to September, was again a period
of busy activity for FreeBSD: for the second quarter in a row we have
the largest report yet published.
The Foundation continues to play a strong role, bringing both a
developer and evangelist presence to conferences, funding much of the
hardware that the cluster administration team uses to keep things
running, and sponsoring many development projects for FreeBSD. This
quarter we also hear from some of the student projects funded by Google
Summer of Code 2015, ranging a wide gamut from the bootloader to
additional ARM support, but also at a range of completion status. Some
of the GSoC output is in the tree already, but others could benefit
from additional attention to help out our budding new contributors as
their schedules fill with the return to classes.
ZFS and the network stack continue to be strong areas for FreeBSD, with
both receiving active maintenance and feature improvements during this
quarter. Substantial work continues on arm64, potentially putting it on
the path toward a promotion to Tier-1 status, and a new port to the
RISC-V architecture has made great headway in a short period of time.
But it is not just our strengths and exciting new areas that have seen
attention this cycle; there are also some parts of the system that are
frequently perceived as unchanging infrastructure that have received
attention and improvements, with truss and (k)gdb receiving significant
overhauls, new implementations for the man page tools being brought in,
the website receiving a new skin, and a brand new system for
translating documentation that greatly lowers the barrier to entry.
Nonetheless, despite its record length, this report does not and cannot
cover all of the work being done on FreeBSD throughout the reporting
period -- there are many bug fixes too minor to mention here, and
developers too busy working on the next project to write up an entry
for the previous project. It is not just the developers committing to
Subversion that comprise the ongoing activities of FreeBSD, but also
the users testing unreleased code or reporting bugs in released code,
and participants on the mailing lists and forums helping each other
solve their problems. Even the chats on IRC that wander far from the
stated topic of a channel contribute to the community around FreeBSD;
it is that community whose effectiveness and helpfulness is a key
component of the effectiveness and usefulness of FreeBSD itself. Not
just to the developers listed in this report, but to everyone in the
community, thank you for making FreeBSD a great operating system.
--Ben Kaduk
__________________________________________________________________
Please submit status reports for the fourth quarter of 2015 (from
October to December) by January 7, 2016.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Team Reports
* FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team
* FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
* The FreeBSD Core Team
Projects
* automtud: Better Jumbo Frame Support
* bhyve
* Clang, llvm, lldb, compiler-rt and libc++ Updated to 3.7.0
* DTrace and TCP
* FreeBSD on the Acer C720 Chromebook
* High Availability Clustering in CTL
* Multipath TCP for FreeBSD
* Porting bhyve to ARM-based Platforms
* Root Remount
* The Graphics Stack on FreeBSD
* The nosh Project
* UEFI Boot and Framebuffer Support
* ZFS Code Sync with Latest Illumos
* ZFS Support for UEFI Boot/Loader
Kernel
* Adding PCIe Hot-plug Support
* Cavium LiquidIO Smart NIC Driver
* CloudABI: Pure Capabilities Runtime Environment
* FreeBSD Xen
* ioat(4) Driver Import
* IPsec Upgrades
Architectures
* Atomics
* FreeBSD on Cavium ThunderX (arm64)
* FreeBSD on the HiKey ARMv8 Board
* FreeBSD/arm64
* FreeBSD/RISC-V Port
Userland Programs
* mandoc and roff Toolchain
* pkg 1.6
* sesutil(8)
* truss(1)
* Updates to GDB
Ports
* Bringing GitLab into the Ports Collection
* GNOME on FreeBSD
* KDE on FreeBSD
* Node.js Modules
* Ports Collection
* Ports on PowerPC
* Xfce on FreeBSD
Documentation
* PO Translation Project
* Website CSS Update
Google Summer of Code
* Allwinner A10/A20 Support
* mtree Parsing and Manipulation Library
* Multiqueue Testing
* Update Ficl in Bootloader
Miscellaneous
* The FreeBSD Foundation
* ZFSguru
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team
Contact: FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team <clusteradm@>
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.
Our primary cluster has been hosted as a guest in California for many
years. Our ongoing project is relocating the core functionality to a
location in New Jersey with a formal hosting arrangement. This is an
equipment refresh, consolidation for better use of resources, and for
better continuity of service.
There is a significant amount of behind-the-scenes work to make this
happen. The original cluster was implemented with a common, shared,
assumed-to-be secure network with ubiquitous NFS everywhere. This
structure does not lend itself well to being distributed across
geographically diverse locations, particularly when Internet transit is
required. The bulk of the work is rebuilding services to be portable,
stand-alone components that do not depend on shared-network access and
are safe enough to use across the insecure Internet.
Highlights this quarter:
* Many internal distribution systems switched from rsync to a
distribution mesh using "syncthing".
* We have implemented more code/data signing infrastructure with
out-of-band verification.
* New 32-core reference build hosts are online.
* Internal admbugs switched from bugzilla 4.4 to 5.0 and packages
were made available for the bugmeister team.
* Finally switched from varnish3 to varnish4.
* We exorcised hub.FreeBSD.org, the last survivor of the 2012
security incident.
* vuxml and the legacy portaudit build system were converted to
components and integrated.
* https://download.FreeBSD.org/ is nearing completion (please do not
use until officially announced).
* A Taiwan node was brought into service for pkg, ftp, svn, and vuxml
mirroring.
* One of the freebsd-update mirrors was converted from lighttpd to
nginx due to a data corruption bug.
* We completed detachment of the svn repository from the old cluster
and moved it to its new location.
Ongoing:
* The cluster runs a mixture of 11-current and 10-stable as part of
our "eat our own dogfood" project. For this to be useful, we do
monthly cluster refreshes to keep up with current code.
* We build internal base system snapshots every few days and packages
every day.
* We also provide support for non-clusteradm-operated services
including jenkins, reviews, portsnap, freebsd-update, bugzilla,
package builders, git, and mercurial. This varies from as little as
maintaining SSL front-ends through operating servers, distributing
data or building packages/binaries to run.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
Links
FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE announcement
URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.2R/announce.html
FreeBSD development snapshots
URL: http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/
FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE schedule
URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.3R/schedule.html
FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE schedule
URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/schedule.html
Contact: FreeBSD Release Engineering Team <re at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is responsible for setting and
publishing release schedules for official project releases of FreeBSD,
announcing code freezes, and maintaining the respective branches, among
other things.
In mid-August, the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team released
FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE, two weeks earlier than the original schedule
anticipated.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team would like to thank all that have
tested the BETA and RC builds and reported issues during the release
cycle.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team, with approval from the
FreeBSD Core Team, appointed Marius Strobl as the Deputy Lead.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Core Team
Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <core at FreeBSD.org>
The biggest task handled by the Core Team during this quarter was
developing and publishing the new Code of Conduct. The Code of Conduct
describes how people are expected to behave on all FreeBSD official
communication channels, as well as how developers and other people
involved with the project are to behave when representing the project
in public.
The Code of Conduct was generally well received and elicited numerous
comments and suggestions for improvements from the community, many of
which have been integrated.
The next task handled by Core was the restoration of Babak Farrokhi's
ports commit bit. Babak resides in Iran. A few years ago, legal advice
suggested that allowing contributions from Iranian residents might
violate US trade sanctions. After several years, Core was asked to
revisit the issue. On the advice of counsel, Core decided that it could
restore commit privileges to commmitters residing in Iran.
The CTM service came under security review. Given that the lack of use
of routine authenticity checking made the injection of trivial exploit
code relatively easy, the service was held to be too risky to continue
as an official part of the FreeBSD base system. CTM has very few
remaining users but they should be able to install CTM from the Ports
Collection in order to continue doing so.
Core learned that ISC was ceasing its hosting service, which has
entailed a rapid rework of plans on the movement of significant
portions of the FreeBSD cluster to that data center. Cluster
administration has taken ownership of the situation and is making
progress.
Core fielded an enquiry about NextBSD and whether this should be the
future direction for the whole FreeBSD project. Core's position is that
NextBSD is an interesting project, and we regard it, like the other BSD
projects, as a potential source of good ideas. However, we currently
have no plans to adopt NextBSD as the official FreeBSD distribution.
Beyond these issues, Core also spent time in various routine
activities. During this quarter we issued three new src commit bits,
and took none in for safekeeping. Welcome to Allan Jude, Marcelo
Araujo, and Andriy Voskoboinyk.
__________________________________________________________________
automtud: Better Jumbo Frame Support
Links
jmgurney/automtud on github
URL: https://github.com/jmgurney/automtud
Contact: John-Mark Gurney <jmg at FreeBSD.org>
The automtud script will allow a FreeBSD machine to send jumbo frames
to machines that support them, while using normal-sized frames for
other machines.
There are various advantages to using jumbo frames, such as reduced
protocol overhead. It also means that TCP streams will not be segmented
as much, although TSO helps mitigate the disadvantages of such
segmentation. In cases where LRO does not work well, fewer packets will
be received.
The script currently does not restore the system to its original state
when it exits. This means that you must manually change the interface
MTU and delete host routes after stopping the script.
Open tasks:
1. Fix up various Ethernet drivers to better support jumbo frames.
Most Ethernet drivers, though they support scatter/gather, use a
physically contiguous zone to do so, which can cause resource
shortages.
2. More testing is needed to ensure that things behave as expected.
This means that when running the script, communication to all
machines functions normally, without slowdown or connectivity
issues. Check vmstat -z | grep mbuf to ensure that such issues are
not due to running out of jumbo_9k or jumbo_16k buffers due to
Ethernet driver issues.
__________________________________________________________________
bhyve
Links
bhyve FAQ and talks
URL: http://www.bhyve.org
NE2000 device emulation GSoC project
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2015/NE2000EmulationForBhyve
Porting bhyve to ARM GSoC project
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2015/PortingBhyveToArm
ptnetmap support in bhyve GSoC project
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2015/ptnetmapOnBhyve
Windows support
URL: http://docs.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?561187FB.8040506
Illumos support
URL: http://docs.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?56118B2B.2040101
Contact: Peter Grehan <grehan at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Neel Natu <neel at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Tycho Nightingale <tychon at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Allan Jude <freebsd at allanjude.com>
Contact: Michael Dexter <editor at callfortesting.org>
bhyve is a hypervisor that runs on the FreeBSD/amd64 platform. At
present, it runs FreeBSD (8.x or later), Linux i386/x64, OpenBSD
i386/amd64, NetBSD/amd64, Illumos, and Windows
Vista/7/8/10/2008r2/2012r2/2016 x64 guests. Current development is
focused on enabling additional guest operating systems and implementing
features found in other hypervisors.
A combined bhyve and ZFS BoF was held during vBSDCon 2015, hosted by
Michael Dexter and Allan Jude. Questions asked about bhyve included
live migration and suspend/resume support, and configurations using
ZFS.
Three bhyve-related projects were selected for GSoC 2015: NE2000 device
emulation, porting bhyve to ARM, and ptnetmap support.
The major enhancement for bhyve this quarter was support for external
firmware, along with a port of the Intel edk2 UEFI firmware. This
allows bhyve to run Windows in headless mode, and also Illumos.
Open tasks:
1. Improve the documentation.
2. bhyveucl is a work-in-progress script for starting bhyve instances
based on a libUCL config file. More information at
https://github.com/allanjude/bhyveucl.
3. Add support for virtio-scsi.
4. Flexible networking backends: wanproxy, vhost-net.
5. Support running bhyve as non-root.
6. Add filters for popular VM file formats (VMDK, VHD, QCOW2).
7. Implement an abstraction layer for video (no X11 or SDL in base
system).
8. Suspend/resume support.
9. Live migration.
10. Nested VT-x support (bhyve in bhyve).
11. Support for other architectures (ARM, MIPS, PPC).
__________________________________________________________________
Clang, llvm, lldb, compiler-rt and libc++ Updated to 3.7.0
Links
LLVM 3.7.0 Release Notes
URL: http://llvm.org/releases/3.7.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
Clang 3.7.0 Release Notes
URL: http://llvm.org/releases/3.7.0/tools/clang/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
PR 201377 Ports exp-run
URL: https://bugs.freebsd.org/201377
Contact: Dimitry Andric <dim at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Roman Divacky <rdivacky at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Davide Italiano <davide at FreeBSD.org>
We have updated clang, llvm, lldb, compiler-rt, and libc++ in base to
the 3.7.0 release. These all contain numerous improvements. Please see
the linked release notes for more detailed information. This brings us
completely up-to-date with the latest upstream versions of these
projects. Meanwhile, Ed Maste is working on importing the llvm.org
version of libunwind.
Like the 3.5.x and 3.6.x releases, these components require C++11
support to build. At this point, FreeBSD 10.0 and later provide that
support, at least on x86. Currently, there are no solid plans to MFC
these versions to any stable branches, due to the difficulties this
would introduce for the usual upgrade scenarios.
Thanks to Ed Maste and Andrew Turner for their help with this import,
and thanks to Antoine Brodin for several ports exp-runs.
During the first ports exp-run, some major problems were found, one
introduced by a clang bug which caused pow() to generate floating point
exceptions in some cases. This in turn caused libpng to fail to build,
and one bug in libjpeg-turbo, which was caused by undefined behavior.
These two problems took some time to fix, after which another exp-run
was done, and this resulted in about a dozen newly failed ports. For
almost all of these new failures, fixes were submitted and linked to
the original PR 201377 for the exp-run.
Open tasks:
1. Commit ports fixes for dependencies of PR 201377.
2. Test and report issues with the new tool chain.
__________________________________________________________________
DTrace and TCP
Links
Commit adding trace points replacing TCPDEBUG
URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/287759
Contact: George Neville-Neil <gnn at FreeBSD.org>
With the advent of DTrace we are able to replace many of the internal
kernel debugging options, such as TCPDEBUG, with statically defined
tracepoints (SDTs). Tracepoints have now been added to the system that
replicate the functionality of the TCPDEBUG kernel option. No new
kernel options need to be added -- they are standard with any kernel
that has DTrace, which is included in the default GENERIC kernels in
10.X and HEAD.
This project is sponsored by Limelight Networks.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on the Acer C720 Chromebook
Links
Blog post on how to get things working
URL: http://blog.grem.de/pages/c720.html
Blog post with links to commits in HEAD
URL:
http://blog.grem.de/sysadmin/FreeBSD-On-AcerC720-Merged-2015-07-25-23-30.html
Backported patch for 10.2-RELEASE
URL: http://blog.grem.de/sysadmin/FreeBSD-10.2-On-AcerC720-2015-09-19-17-00.
html
Contact: Michael Gmelin <freebsd at grem.de>
The Acer C720 Chromebook is an affordable (under $200) and powerful
little laptop that provides a battery life of up to six hours running
FreeBSD. It is a great machine for travelling and coding in general.
The machine is fully functional, meaning that all essential devices
work: keyboard, trackpad, light sensor, backlight control, display in
VESA mode (fast), external Display on HDMI (only VESA mirror mode),
sound, USB ports, SD card slot, camera, and Atheros wireless.
This quarter, this project extended previous work on the boot process
and keyboard driver as well as the smbus(4) driver. It added three new
drivers: ig4(4) for the I2C bus, cyapa(4) for the trackpad, and isl(4),
for the ambient light sensor.
Much of the development was originally done in late 2014. Since then,
the patches have been massively improved and merged into HEAD, so that
all relevant devices work without manual patching.
For those who are unable to run HEAD, there is a backported patch to
10.2-RELEASE.
Thanks to everyone who helped in the process. I couldn't have done it
without you (you know who you are).
__________________________________________________________________
High Availability Clustering in CTL
Contact: Alexander Motin <mav at FreeBSD.org>
CAM Target Layer (CTL), when originally developed by Copan/SGI, had
support for High Availability clustering. Unfortunately, significant
portions of the HA code were never published with the main body of the
source code. Now, the missing part has been reimplemented from scratch,
fixed, and improved.
This code supports dual-node HA with Asynchronous LUN Unit Access
(ALUA) in four modes:
* Active/Unavailable without interlink between nodes, where the
secondary node can report nothing except its presence.
* Active/Standby with the secondary node handling only basic LUN
discovery and reservation, synchronizing state and command
execution with the primary node through the interlink.
* Active/Active with both nodes processing commands and accessing the
backing storage, synchronizing state and command execution with the
primary node through the interlink.
* Active/Active with the secondary node having no backing storage
access, but instead working as a proxy, transferring all commands
to the first node for execution through the interlink.
In the case of lost interlink connectivity to primary node, the
secondary node falls into the Transitioning state, which is like
Unavailable and cannot answer most requests, but makes the initiator
wait for recovery or cluster failover.
CTL also got a large number of other improvements, including support
for emulation of CD/DVD drives and removable disks, live LUN
reconfiguration, and so on.
The code is committed to FreeBSD head and was recently merged to the
stable/10 branch.
This project is sponsored by iXsystems, Inc..
__________________________________________________________________
Multipath TCP for FreeBSD
Links
MPTCP for FreeBSD Project Website
URL: http://caia.swin.edu.au/urp/newtcp/mptcp/
MPTCP for FreeBSD Source Repository
URL: https://bitbucket.org/nw-swin/caia-mptcp-freebsd/
Contact: Nigel Williams <njwilliams at swin.edu.au>
Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is an extension to TCP that allows for the use of
multiple network interfaces on a standard TCP session. The addition of
new addresses and scheduling of data across them occurs transparently
from the perspective of the TCP application.
The goal of this project is to deliver an MPTCP kernel patch that
interoperates with the reference MPTCP implementation, along with
additional enhancements to aid network research.
The v0.5 patch was released, which is the first patch of the re-written
implementation. We are in the process of documenting the new design and
addressing some feedback as provided from the community.
Work has commenced on improved input handling, as the current method of
receiving and reassembling segments has been the cause of some
instability and stalls during connection shutdown. This will involve
re-using the subflow receive buffers and an upcall to enqueue a
MP-layer reassembly task without the need to take a lock on the MP
control block. The improvements should also allow bypassing
mptcp_usrreq for standard TCP connections.
The MPTCP commit history was synchronized with hg-beta.FreeBSD.org, and
we have made the repository available on BitBucket (see links). Future
patch releases will be tagged there. The tree is now merged with
FreeBSD head weekly. An updated v0.51 patch is ready for release.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Release the v0.51 patch.
2. Populate documentation and the issue tracker on the BitBucket
repository.
3. Improvements to receive-side code before further testing.
4. Prepare a technical report detailing the design of the current
patch.
__________________________________________________________________
Porting bhyve to ARM-based Platforms
Links
Project Wiki page
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2015/PortingBhyveToArm
Contact: Mihai Carabas <mihai at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Peter Grehan <grehan at FreeBSD.org>
This summer we have started porting bhyve onto ARMv7 platforms. The
low-level routines for ARM processors were rewritten while trying to
preserve the hypervisor API originally created for the x86
architectures. We managed to bring up a FreeBSD guest up to the point
of initializing interrupts. There is still work to be done in order to
virtualize the interrupts and the timer. Our short-term plan after
finishing the interrupts and the timer is porting to a real hardware
platform (Cubie2).
Open tasks:
1. Virtualize interrupts and timer.
2. Port to a real hardware platform.
3. Create SMP support for bhyve-on-arm.
4. Port to ARMv8.
__________________________________________________________________
Root Remount
Links
Userland code review
URL: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D3693
Contact: Edward Tomasz Napierala <trasz at FreeBSD.org>
A feature long missing from FreeBSD was the ability to boot up with a
temporary rootfs, configure the kernel to be able to access the real
rootfs, and then replace the temporary root with the real one. In
Linux, this functionality is known as pivot_root. The reroot project
aims to provide similar functionality in a different, slightly more
user-friendly, way. Simply put, from the user's point of view it is as
simple as running reboot -r. The system performs a partial shutdown,
killing all processes and unmounting the rootfs, and then partial
bringup, mounting the new rootfs, running init, and running the startup
scripts as usual.
The kernel part of the project has been committed to 11-CURRENT. The
userland part is at the "finishing touches" stage, and is expected
to
be committed soon. A merge to stable/10 is planned and reroot support
is planned be included in FreeBSD 10.3.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
The Graphics Stack on FreeBSD
Links
Graphics stack roadmap and supported hardware matrix
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Graphics
Graphics stack team blog
URL: http://blogs.freebsdish.org/graphics/
Ports development tree on GitHub
URL: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports-graphics
Contact: FreeBSD Graphics team <freebsd-x11 at FreeBSD.org>
The Mesa ports were updated to 10.6.8. At the same time, the ports
received a major overhaul to make sure all ports are correctly
configured. Dual version support was removed. There is only one Mesa
version for all supported FreeBSD versions. The libosmesa port, which
provided the off-screen version of Mesa, was merged into the Mesa
framework.
Another big item that was included in the Mesa port is OpenCL. There
are two GPU-based OpenCL implementations: lang/clover for supported
Radeon cards, and lang/beignet for supported Intel cards (currently
only Ivybridge). Thanks go to Johannes Dieterich, O. Hartmann, and Koop
Mast for making this happen.
Now that Mesa is up-to-date, we can apply the same update procedure to
the X.Org server. It is currently at 1.14, and an update to 1.17 is
ready. It will be committed shortly.
On the kernel side, progress has been made with the i915 update. The
driver is able to attach. There are some reports that the X.Org server
starts but Mesa is unhappy, so acceleration does not work yet. If you
want to test, instructions will be posted on the wiki in the i915
update article (see links). At this stage, we can only accept patches,
though -- we will not be able to provide support.
We attended two conferences: XDC 2015 in Toronto and EuroBSDcon 2015 in
Stockholm. Reports will be posted on the blog.
Open tasks:
1. See the Graphics wiki page for up-to-date information.
__________________________________________________________________
The nosh Project
Links
Introduction and blurb
URL:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh.html
FreeBSD binary packages
URL:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh/freebsd-binary-packages.html
Installation How-To
URL:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh/timorous-admin-installation-how-to.html
Roadmap
URL:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh/roadmap.html
Commands
URL:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh/commands.html
A slightly outdated nosh Guide
URL:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh/guide/index.html
Contact: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard
<J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups at NTLWorld.COM>
The nosh project is a suite of system-level utilities for initializing,
running, and shutting down BSD systems, and for managing daemons,
terminals, and logging. It supersedes BSD init and the NetBSD rc.d
system, drawing inspiration from Solaris SMF for named milestones,
daemontools-encore for service control/status mechanisms, UCSPI, and
IBM AIX for separated service and system management. It comprises a
range of compatibility mechanisms, including shims for familiar
commands from other systems, and an automatic import mechanism that
takes existing configuration data from /etc/fstab,
/etc/rc.conf{,.local}, /etc/ttys, and elsewhere, applying them to its
native service definitions and creating additional native services. It
is portable (including to Linux) and composable, it provides a
migration path from the world of systemd Linux, and it does not require
new kernel APIs. It provides clean service environments, orderings and
dependencies between services, parallelized startup and shutdown
(including fsck), strictly size-capped and autorotated logging, the
service manager as a "subreaper", and uses kevent(2) for
event-driven
parallelism.
The past few months have seen a growth in the import mechanism, with
full import of /etc/fstab and /etc/ttys available in version 1.18 in
July, and importing PC-BSD Warden and FreeBSD 9 jails, and full import
of gbde and geli mount/unmount mechanisms in version 1.21 in October.
It has also gained the ability to automatically re-generate host.conf
and sysctl.conf whenever their source files change.
Other developments in the past few months include fully independent
shutdown support, no longer relying upon an externally provided
shutdown command from another toolset, and a full suite of binary
packages. As of version 1.20, it became possible to have a
fully-nosh-managed system, on both FreeBSD and Linux, using just
precompiled binary packages.
The biggest task remaining is one that was set a while ago: the
creation of enough native service bundles and ancillary utilities to
entirely supplant the rc.d system. A lot of this has been achieved,
with the original target list of 157 items now down to just 39
remaining. These are the tricky ones, of course, where help is most
needed.
Open tasks:
1. There are still a few rc scripts left that should be easy to
convert, such as /etc/rc.d/gptboot and /etc/rc.d/growfs as oneshot
services, /etc/rc.d/routing, and /etc/rc.d/kldxref.
2. FreeBSD's /etc/rc.d/bluetooth is over 360 lines long. In 2011, Iain
Hibbert wrote a "simpler" bluetooth for NetBSD. This can
perhaps be
used as a simpler basis for a nosh translation.
3. Add kernel support for passing a -b option to pid 1, and support
for a boot_bare variable in the loader, to allow "emergency"
(where
even no shell dotfiles are loaded) and "rescue" mode
bootstraps,
akin to Linux. (History: The -b mechanism and idea date back to
version 2.57d of Miquel van Smoorenburg's System 5 init clone,
dated 1995-12-03, and was already known as "emergency boot" by
1997.)
4. Add support to FreeBSD's fsck(8) for outputting machine-readable
progress reports to a designated file descriptor, so that nosh can
provide progress bars for multiple fscks running in parallel. nosh
already provides this functionality on Linux, where fsck(8) does
provide machine-readable output.
5. Identify when the configuration import system needs to be
triggered, such as when bsdconfig alters configuration files, and
create the necessary hooks to import external configuration changes
into nosh.
6. Investigate how FreeBSD/PC-BSD could be improved by taking
advantage of some available nosh package mechanisms.
__________________________________________________________________
UEFI Boot and Framebuffer Support
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at freebsd.org>
Contact: Marcel Moolenaar <marcel at freebsd.org>
A number of UEFI bug fixes were committed over the last quarter,
improving compatibility with different UEFI implementations. This
includes improvements to EFI's vt(4) framebuffer driver, efifb, to
handle systems with high resolution displays and unusual framebuffer
stride values. In particular, this improves compatibility with a large
number of recent Apple MacBook Pros and other Macs.
Open tasks:
1. Test FreeBSD head and FreeBSD-STABLE snapshots on a variety of UEFI
implementations.
__________________________________________________________________
ZFS Code Sync with Latest Illumos
Contact: Alexander Motin <mav at FreeBSD.org>
The ZFS codebase received a significant batch of merges, and is now in
sync with the latest Illumos. Among other things, this update includes:
* LZ4 is now the default compression algorithm.
* Improved prefetch for faster send/receive.
* Reduced RAM usage by almost 50% for L2ARC.
* Improved I/O aggregation.
* Fine-grained checksumming in send/receive stream.
* Reduced import time for pools with many datasets.
* Reworked and simplified predictive prefetcher.
The code is committed to FreeBSD head and was recently merged to the
stable/10 branch.
__________________________________________________________________
ZFS Support for UEFI Boot/Loader
Contact: Eric McCorkle <eric at metricspace.net>
UEFI-enabled boot1.efi and loader.efi have been modified to support
loading and booting from a ZFS filesystem, as described in the previous
report. The ZFS-enabled loader.efi can be treated as a chainloader when
using ZFS-enabled GRUB.
During this quarter, several successful tests have been reported on
simple ZFS setups, using both boot1.efi with loader.efi as well as GRUB
and loader.efi.
Successful tests have been reported for UFS with the patched boot1.efi
and loader.efi as well.
Open tasks:
1. Test reports are needed for more complex ZFS setups, such as with
log/l2arc vdevs, mirroring, striping, and raidz.
2. Pending successful reports, the patch needs to be reviewed and
committed.
__________________________________________________________________
Adding PCIe Hot-plug Support
Links
PCIe Hot-plug Perforce Branch
URL:
http://p4db.FreeBSD.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/pciehotplug
Commit adding bridge save/restore
URL: https://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/changeset/base/r281874
Github branch with patches
URL: https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/freebsd/tree/pciehp
Contact: John-Mark Gurney <jmg at FreeBSD.org>
PCI Express (PCIe) hot-plug is used on both laptops and servers to
allow peripheral devices to be added or removed while the system is
running. Laptops commonly include hot-pluggable PCIe as either an
ExpressCard slot or a Thunderbolt interface. ExpressCard has built-in
USB support that is already supported by FreeBSD, but ExpressCard PCIe
devices like Gigabit Ethernet adapters and eSATA cards are only
supported when they are present at boot, and their removal may cause
FreeBSD to crash.
The goal of this project is to allow these devices to be inserted and
removed while FreeBSD is running. This work will provide the basic
infrastructure to support adding and removing devices, though it is
expected that additional work will be needed to update individual
drivers to support hot-plug.
Current testing is focused on getting a simple UART device functional.
Basic hot swap is currently functional.
A set of the patches for the work done in this project is now available
on github.com.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Get suspend/resume functional by saving and restoring the necessary
registers. This should be addressed by r281874.
2. Make sure that upon suspend, devices are removed so that we are not
fooled if they are replaced with different devices while the
machine is suspended.
3. Improve how state transitions are handled, possibly by using a
proper state machine.
__________________________________________________________________
Cavium LiquidIO Smart NIC Driver
Links
LiquidIO product page
URL: http://www.cavium.com/LiquidIO_Application_Acceleration_Adapters.html
Contact: Stanislaw Kardach <kda at semihalf.com>
Contact: Zyta Racia <zr at semihalf.com>
This project aims to add support for the LiquidIO family of
high-performance programmable accelerator 10/40-gigabit Ethernet
network adapters. The currently developed kernel driver supports
CN6640- and CN6880-based PCIe cards, enabling these features:
* A CNNIC API for controlling/interacting with the smart NIC from
user and kernel space including:
+ Handling multiple concurrent applications running on the same
device
+ A request/reply mechanism for (a)synchronous ordered/unordered
communication
+ Remote memory operations
+ Device shutdown/reset
* A basic NIC module utilizing the CNNIC API and a Cavium-provided
NIC firmware. This module provides:
+ Single/multi-queue TX
+ Hardware TCP/UDP checksum offloading
+ Large Receive Offload
+ Promiscous mode
* Sysctl-based device statistics and configuration view
* Custom firmware loading via user-built modules and FreeBSD's
firmware(9) mechanism.
The project is currently being developed in house and is being prepared
for upstream. We plan on making it available in FreeBSD 11.
This project is sponsored by Cavium, and Semihalf.
Open tasks:
1. Upstream the code to FreeBSD head.
__________________________________________________________________
CloudABI: Pure Capabilities Runtime Environment
Links
CloudABI project page
URL: https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudlibc
CloudABI Ports Collection
URL: https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudabi-ports
CloudABI presentation at FrOSCon
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTHSZGVvLw4
Contact: Ed Schouten <ed at FreeBSD.org>
CloudABI is a POSIX-like runtime environment that uses Capsicum as its
sole access control mechanism. CloudABI allows you to develop software
that is better hardened against security vulnerabilities, is easier to
test, and is easier to migrate across systems.
As of August, all of the kernel modifications that are needed to run
CloudABI programs have been integrated into FreeBSD head. After loading
the cloudabi64 kernel module, you can either run CloudABI programs
directly from the shell or by using the cloudabi-run tool
(sysutils/cloudabi-utils). cloudabi-run allows you to inject sockets,
files, and directories into the launched program in a more structured
way.
In the meantime, work has started on developing a Ports Collection that
contains cross-compiled utilities and libraries for CloudABI. The
intent is that this framework generates native packages for a number of
operating systems, making it possible to develop CloudABI applications
on any operating system, regardless of whether that operating system
actually supports CloudABI.
If you are interested in CloudABI, be sure to go to the project page on
GitHub, watch recordings of talks at conferences, or wait for the
upcoming edition of the FreeBSD Journal, which will feature an article
on CloudABI.
This project is sponsored by Nuxi, the Netherlands.
Open tasks:
1. CloudABI is currently only available for amd64. It would make sense
to port CloudABI to additional architectures like aarch64.
2. Support for CloudABI has only been integrated into FreeBSD. If we
manage to upstream support for CloudABI into other operating
systems, it should be possible to run the same binary on multiple
operating systems without recompilation.
3. The CloudABI Ports Collection currently has only 60 packages.
Although these packages already the building blocks of some
interesting software, we are always interested in expanding.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Xen
Links
FreeBSD PVH DomU wiki page
URL: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/FreeBSD_PVH
FreeBSD PVH Dom0 wiki page
URL: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/FreeBSD_Dom0
Porting FreeBSD as a Xen ARM guest
URL:
http://www.xenproject.org/component/allvideoshare/video/latest/bsdcan-2015-how-to-port-bsd-as-a-xen-on-arm-guest.html
Contact: Roger Pau Monn?<royger at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Julien Grall <julien.grall at citrix.com>
Xen is a hypervisor using a microkernel design, providing services that
allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same
computer hardware concurrently. Xen support for FreeBSD on x86 as a
guest was introduced in version 8 and ARM support is currently being
worked on. Support for running FreeBSD as an amd64 Xen host (Dom0) is
available in HEAD.
On the x86 front, most of the work during this quarter focused on the
implementation of PVH inside Xen. Consequently, most of the activity
happened inside of the hypervisor. Patches for a clean PVH
implementation have been posted, with the aim of having them merged in
the next Xen release (4.7). Once that is done, work will continue
adding new features to both FreeBSD and Xen to have feature parity with
traditional PV guests/hosts.
Apart from this, work is ongoing to import a new netfront from Linux in
order to support new features, like split event channel and multiple
queue support.
On the ARM front, this quarter's work focused on getting FreeBSD/arm64
booting as a Xen guest. The current activity is to upstream patches
preparing Xen drivers to support arm64. This includes a rework of the
console driver.
This project is sponsored by Citrix Systems R&D.
Open tasks:
1. Generalize the event channel code so it can be used on ARM.
2. Improve backend (netback, blkback) performance.
3. Work with upstream Xen to improve PVH and make it stable.
4. Improve the generic bounce buffer code for unmapped bios in order
to support the alignment requirements of the blkfront driver.
__________________________________________________________________
ioat(4) Driver Import
Links
Wikipedia article on IOAT
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O_Acceleration_Technology
Commit importing ioat(4)
URL: https://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/base?view=revision&revision=r287117
Contact: Jim Harris <jimharris at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Conrad Meyer <cem at FreeBSD.org>
A new driver, ioat(4), was added to the tree. ioat(4) supports Intel's
I/O Acceleration Technology devices which are found on some Intel
server systems.
These devices are DMA offload engines, which can accelerate some
I/O-heavy applications by offloading memory copies from the main CPU to
the I/OAT unit. This acceleration is not transparent; applications must
be adapted to take advantage of the hardware.
Some I/OAT models support more advanced copying modes, such as XOR;
these modes are not yet supported in the ioat(4) driver.
This project is sponsored by Intel Corporation, and EMC / Isilon
Storage Division.
Open tasks:
1. Further testing, especially on a range of device models other than
BDXDE (looking for volunteers here).
2. Support for the more advanced copy modes.
__________________________________________________________________
IPsec Upgrades
Contact: George Neville-Neil <gnn at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: John-Mark Gurney <jmg at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ermal Lu? <eri at FreeBSD.org>
IPsec is now enabled by default in the GENERIC kernel configuration,
and work is proceeding to speed things up in various ways. The latest
changes are the addition, by John-Mark Gurney, Ermal Lu?, and George
V. Neville-Neil, of AES modes both in hardware and in software. Part of
this work also includes more benchmarks undertaken using Conductor in
the netperf project. Results have been reported at BSDCan and vBSDcon
with more to come at EuroBSDcon and BSDCon Brasil.
This project is sponsored by Netgate, and The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Performance improvements and other tweaks are ongoing.
__________________________________________________________________
Atomics
Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Alan Cox <alc at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Bruce Evans <bde at FreeBSD.org>
Atomic operations serve two fundamental purposes. First, they are the
building blocks for expressing synchronization algorithms in a single,
machine-independent way using high-level languages. In essense, atomics
abstract the different building blocks supported by the various
architectures on which FreeBSD runs, making it easier to develop and
reason about lock-less code by hiding hardware-level details.
Atomics also provide the barrier operations that allow software to
control the effects on memory of out-of-order and speculative execution
in modern processors as well as optimizations by compilers. This
capability is especially important to multithreaded software, such as
the FreeBSD kernel, when running on systems where multiple processors
communicate through a shared main memory.
Each machine architecture defines a memory model, which specifies the
possible effects on memory of out-of-order and speculative execution.
More precisely, it specifies the extent to which the machine may
visibly reorder memory accesses to optimize performance. Unfortunately,
there are almost as many models as architectures. Some architectures,
for example IA32 or Sparcv9 TSO, are relatively strongly ordered. In
contrast, others, like PowerPC or ARM, are very relaxed. In effect,
atomics define a very relaxed abstract memory model for FreeBSD's
machine-independent code that can be efficiently realized on any of
these architectures.
Most FreeBSD development and testing still happens on x86 machines,
which, when combined with x86's strongly ordered memory model, leads to
errors in the use of atomics, specifically, barriers. In other words,
the code is not properly written to FreeBSD's abstract memory model,
but the strong ordering of the x86 architecture hides this fact. The
architectures impacted by the code that incorrectly uses atomics are
less popular or have limited availability, and the resulting bugs from
the misuse of atomics are hard to diagnose.
The goal of this project is to audit and upgrade the usage of lockless
facilities, hopefully fixing bugs before they are observed in the wild.
FreeBSD defines its own set of atomics operations, like many other
operating systems. But unlike other operating systems, FreeBSD models
its atomics and barriers on the release consistency model, which is
also known as acquire/release model. This is the same model which is
used by the C11 and C++11 language standards as well as the new 64-bit
ARM architecture. Despite having syntactical differences, C11 and
FreeBSD atomics share essentially the same semantics. Consequently,
ample tutorials about the C11 memory model and algorithms expressed
with C11 atomics can be trivially reused under FreeBSD.
One facility of C11 that was missing from FreeBSD atomics was fences.
Fences are bidirectional barrier operations which could not be
expressed by the existing atomic+barrier accesses. They were added in
r285283.
Due to the strong memory model implemented by x86 processors,
atomic_load_acq() and atomic_store_rel() can be implemented by plain
load and store instructions with only a compiler barrier. No additional
ordering constraints are required. This simplification of
atomic_store_rel() was done some time ago in r236456. The
atomic_load_acq() change was done in r285934, after careful review of
all its uses in the kernel and user-space to ensure that no hidden
dependency on a stronger implementation was left.
The only reordering in memory accesses which is allowed on x86 is that
loads may be reordered with older stores to different locations. This
results from the use of store buffers at the micro-architecural level.
So, to ensure sequentially consistent behavior on x86, a store/load
barrier needs to be issued, which can be done with an MFENCE
instruction or by any locked read-modify-write operation. The latter
approach is recommended by the optimization guides from Intel and AMD.
It was noted that careful selection of the scratch memory location,
which is modified by the locked RMW operation, can reduce the cost of
the barrier by avoiding false data dependencies. The corresponding
optimization was committed in r284901.
The atomic(9) man page was often a cause of confusion due to both
erroneous and ambiguous statements. The most significant of these
issues were addressed in changes r286513 and r286784.
Some examples of our preemptive fixes to the misuse of atomics that
would only become evident on weakly ordered machines are:
* A very important lockless algorithm, used in both the kernel and
libc, is the timekeeping functionality implemented in
kern/kern_tc.c and the userspace __vdso_gettimeofday. This
algorithm relied on x86 total store order (TSO) behavior. It was
fixed in r284178 and r285286.
* The kern/kern_intr.c lockless updates to the it_need indicator were
corrected in r285607.
* An issue with kern/subr_smp.c:smp_rendezvous_cpus() not
guaranteeing the visibility of updates done on other CPUs to the
caller was fixed in r285771.
* The pthread_once() implementation was fixed to include missed
barriers in r287556.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation (Konstantin
Belousov's work).
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on Cavium ThunderX (arm64)
Contact: Dominik Ermel <der at semihalf.com>
Contact: Wojciech Macek <wma at semihalf.com>
Contact: Zbigniew Bodek <zbb at semihalf.com>
Cavium's ThunderX is a high-performance 64-bit ARMv8 CPU, available in
configurations with up to 48 cores per package. ThunderX is the initial
reference platform for the FreeBSD/arm64 porting effort.
Additional Semihalf-sponsored work on ThunderX support brought brand
new features such as:
* Multi-socket operation: FreeBSD now runs on a two-node ThunderX
server board with a total of 96 CPU cores!
* Virtual Networking Interface Card driver: The VNIC driver consists
of 4 elements (BGX, MDIO, and Physical and Virtual Functions) and
is the second driver in FreeBSD to utilize SR-IOV capabilities.
ThunderX is now able to use built-in networking interfaces at 1-40
Gbps.
Moreover, previously introduced functionalities have been improved and
committed to HEAD. This includes:
* PCIe drivers for both internal and external controllers
* ITS (Interrupt Translation Services) fixes
* Platform-specific changes for ThunderX
* Various other fixes to the kernel (PCI, UMA, etc.)
The remaining features are being reviewed and will be integrated into
HEAD soon. However, the GENERIC kernel already supports and runs on
ThunderX.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation, ARM Ltd., Cavium,
and Semihalf.
Open tasks:
1. Upstream the remaining features: 2-socket support, VNIC driver, and
PCIe fixes
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on the HiKey ARMv8 Board
Links
HiKey wiki entry
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/arm64/HiKey
Hardware description
URL: https://www.96boards.org/products/ce/hikey/
Contact: Andrew Turner <andrew at FreeBSD.org>
The HiKey is a low-cost ARMv8 development board from the Linaro
96boards initiative. It contains a HiSilicon Kirin 6220 with eight
ARMv8 cores and 1GB of ram.
FreeBSD has been ported to run on the HiKey with a minimal set of
drivers. As of this report, FreeBSD supports the micro-SD slot and USB
host, and will boot off the SD card to multi-user mode using a recent
arm64 snapshot.
The kernel is missing a number of device drivers. However, it is at a
usable state for people interested in testing FreeBSD on ARMv8
hardware.
This project is sponsored by ABT Systems Ltd, and ARM Ltd.
Open tasks:
1. A driver for SDIO and the onboard WiFi.
2. Fix the MMC driver to access the eMMC.
3. Support the USB in OTG mode.
4. Support a display via HDMI.
5. Add thermal management.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/arm64
Links
FreeBSD arm64 wiki page
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/arm64
Contact: Andrew Turner <andrew at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at FreeBSD.org>
Numerous cleanups and fixes have been applied to the arm64 kernel. This
includes fixes to exception handling, asynchronous signals, ddb, and
pmap. ddb has been updated to better handle accessing memory that may
be unmapped. The pmap code was made more complete by implementing more
functions as needed.
Further work on SMP means that FreeBSD now boots on all 48 cores on the
Cavium ThunderX platform. This includes adding support for the ARM
GICv3 interrupt controllers and fixing the memory mapping to be
shareable between CPUs.
The test suite has been run on both qemu and hardware. Most of the test
cases are passing, with around 30 tests either broken or failing. Work
on diagnosing the issues with the remaining test cases is ongoing.
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation, and ABT Systems
Ltd.
Open tasks:
1. Port to more SoCs.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/RISC-V Port
Links
FreeBSD wiki RISC-V
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/riscv
Single user boot log
URL: https://people.freebsd.org/~br/riscv-singleuser.txt
Contact: Ruslan Bukin <br at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Arun Thomas <arun.thomas at baesystems.com>
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at FreeBSD.org>
RISC-V is an open source Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) designed at
UC Berkeley. It is freely available for all uses without requiring fees
or license agreements. The RISC-V team intends to provide freely
available BSD licensed CPU designs.
Ruslan Bukin (University of Cambridge) now has FreeBSD booting to a
single user shell on a RISC-V simulator. The porting effort started
only two months ago and is very much a work in progress, requiring
significant refactoring and clean up before it reaches a committable
state. Nonetheless, this is exceptional progress in a short time. The
porting effort also identified a number of proposed ISA improvements.
The port currently uses the GNU tool chain (GCC and binutils), and runs
on the Spike simulator. Improved RISC-V support in Clang/LLVM and
related tools is highly desired.
This project is sponsored by DARPA, AFRL.
__________________________________________________________________
mandoc and roff Toolchain
Links
Heirloom doctools
URL: https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-doctools
mandoc
URL: http://mdocml.bsd.lv/
Contact: Baptiste Daroussin <bapt at FreeBSD.org>
mandoc is a suite of tools for compiling mdoc, the roff macro language
of choice for BSD manual pages.
mandoc is the default renderer for manpages on FreeBSD head. This
quarter, the apropos(1) utility was switched to use mandoc's version,
which offers a new database format (in SQLite) bringing more powerful,
fine-grained ways to search man pages.
While mandoc is very good for man pages, we also provide lots of other
documentation in plain roff format. The Heirloom toolchain is being
studied to replace groff in base. The Heirloom nroff toolchain has
multiple benefits: it has very good unicode support and very good
compatibility with groff.
A great deal of work as been done testing the Heirloom nroff toolchain
with all the roff documents in the base system (including man pages),
and upstream has been very proactive in fixing reported bugs.
The soelim(1) utility has been replaced with a BSD-licensed version
which is good enough to work with all available roff toolchains to ease
the transition. This version of the soelim(1) utility, originally
written solely for FreeBSD, is now part of the mandoc tool suite.
In coordination with Ingo Schwarze from OpenBSD, the col(1) utility has
been cleaned up and updated to recognize both SUSv2-style escape-digit
and BSD-style escape-control-char sequences in the input stream.
The checknr(1) utility has been cleaned up and extended to support
modern roff(7) macros, including synchronizing code from NetBSD and the
Heirloom doctools version.
Many roff fixes were made to documentation and man pages, having been
discovered while testing the new toolchain.
__________________________________________________________________
pkg 1.6
Contact: FreeBSD pkg Team <pkg at FreeBSD.org>
pkg 1.6.0 has been released. Many changes have been made since pkg 1.5:
* The dependency solver is greatly improved
* Lots of fixes in the three-way merge code
* pkg add can now work without a version specified in the dependency
line
* pkg check -d now also checks the required libraries
* Improved support for partial upgrades
* Improved zsh completion support
* Improved Linux support: all regression tests now pass on Linux
* Messages can now be context-aware, showing a given message always,
or only during installation, upgrade (conditional on the previous
version), or removal
* @keywords now accept new entries to add context-aware messages
* Added the ability to generate graphiz's dot format representation
of the solver's problem
* pkg search now defaults to showing the pkg-comments of the matched
packages
* Lots of bug fixes and code cleanup
* Improvements in cross-installation support
Open tasks:
1. Add a notion of priority to the list of files to ensure that
certain files are the first to be replaced. This was a blocker for
packaging base.
2. Investigate replacing openssl by mbedtls.
__________________________________________________________________
sesutil(8)
Links
Wikipedia: SCSI Enclosure Services (SES)
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_Enclosure_Services
Contact: Baptiste Daroussin <bapt at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Allan Jude <allanjude at FreeBSD.org>
sesutil(8) was originally created as a more universal way to blink the
"locate" LEDs on most hot-swappable drive enclosures.
This work is based on the original SES tools created by Matthew Jacob
in 2000, which have been available in the share/examples section of the
source tree, but were not built by default.
The new utility extends the original code with a number of very useful
features:
* Print a map of all objects connected to the SES controller
* Map device names (/dev/da5) to SES slot number
* Blink the Locate and/or Fault LED of a drive by its SES slot number
or device name
* Check the status of the entire SES controller
This project is sponsored by Gandi, and ScaleEngine Inc..
Open tasks:
1. Test sesutil(8) against more hardware.
2. Diagnose an issue where the locate command sometimes needs to be
sent twice to activate the LED.
3. Add support for libxo output types.
__________________________________________________________________
truss(1)
Contact: John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Bryan Drewery <bdrewery at FreeBSD.org>
The interface between the ABI-specific backends and the truss core was
refactored, reducing duplicated code. This prompted additional
follow-on work to add support for more ABIs, including aarch64 and
CloudABI.
ptrace(2) was extended to return more information about the currently
executing system call. This restored behavior that had been present in
a previous version of truss: knowing the correct number of arguments
for all system calls.
The fork-following support in truss was reworked to use native fork
following in ptrace(2) rather than forking a new truss process for each
child of a traced process.
Support for decoding more arguments has been added in the last quarter
as well.
Open tasks:
1. Create a new libsysdecode library to hold shared code between
truss(1) and kdump(1).
2. Decode more system call arguments.
3. Add appropriate system call decoding specifications for freebsd32
system calls.
4. Implement an ABI for 64-bit Linux binaries under FreeBSD/amd64.
__________________________________________________________________
Updates to GDB
Links
Extend libkvm to support cross-debugging of vmcores
URL: https://reviews.FreeBSD.org/D3341
Contact: John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>
Support for following children after forks for FreeBSD was implemented
and merged upstream to GDB's master branch, and was included in GDB
7.10.
Work has continued on porting kgdb to newer gdb. The amd64, i386,
powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 backends have all been ported and are
now available via a new KGDB option in the devel/gdb port.
The MD backends for libkvm have been rewritten to support
cross-debugging crashdumps, and the kgdb targets for amd64 and i386
have been reworked to support cross-debugging. Both i386 and amd64 kgdb
binaries have been able to cross-debug the other architecture's vmcores
with these changes. This changeset for libkvm is not yet in the tree,
but is awaiting more testing.
Open tasks:
1. Test the libkvm changes on platforms other than amd64, i386, and
powerpc64.
2. Figure out why the powerpc kgdb targets are not able to unwind the
stack past the initial frame.
3. Add support for more platforms (arm, mips, aarch64) to upstream gdb
for both userland and kgdb.
4. Write a new 1:1-only thread target for FreeBSD that can be sent
upstream.
5. Add support for debugging powerpc vector registers.
__________________________________________________________________
Bringing GitLab into the Ports Collection
Links
PR for the new port
URL: https://bugs.FreeBSD.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=202468
Installation guide
URL:
https://github.com/t-zuehlsdorff/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/install/installation-freebsd.md
GitLab Source Tree
URL: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/
Contact: Torsten Z?lsdorff <ports at toco-domains.de>
Contact: Michael Fausten <ports at michael-fausten.de>
GitLab is a web-based Git repository manager with many features, used
by more than 100.000 organizations, including NASA and Alibaba. It also
is a very long-standing entry on the "Wanted Ports" list on the
FreeBSD
Wiki.
In the last month there was steady progress, finally resulting in the
PR for adding the new port. In addition to the many dependencies Philip
M. Gollucci is working on, there was already a large amount of work
done. Along with many new or updated rubygems, Rails 4.1 was
resurrected. A large group of committers were involved in the process
and guided us through the various problems and pitfalls.
Because of the number of dependencies -- we nearly hit 100 -- making
progress takes some time. In the meantime, a new major version of
GitLab has already been released, requiring even more dependencies and
updates. Work on this version is in progress, but the first goal is to
get the latest stable version from the 7.14 branch into the ports tree.
This project is sponsored by anyMOTION GRAPHICS GmbH, D?seldorf,
Germany.
Open tasks:
1. Closing all the PRs of the dependencies
2. Committing the GitLab port itself
3. Updating the port to the latest version of the 8.x branch
__________________________________________________________________
GNOME on FreeBSD
Links
FreeBSD Gnome website
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome
Devel repository
URL: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports-gnome
Upstream build bot
URL: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Jhbuild/FreeBSD
USE_GNOME Porter's Handbook chapter
URL:
https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/using-gnome.html
Contact: FreeBSD GNOME Team <freebsd-gnome at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD GNOME Team maintains the GNOME, MATE, and CINNAMON desktop
environments and graphical user interfaces for FreeBSD. GNOME 3 is part
of the GNU Project. MATE is a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop. CINNAMON is
a desktop environment using GNOME 3 technologies but with a GNOME 2
look and feel.
This quarter, GNOME 3.16 and MATE 1.10 were committed to the ports
tree, followed up by some incremental improvements. A chapter covering
the use of USE_GNOME within individual ports' Makefiles was written and
committed to the Porter's Handbook.
GNOME 3.18 has been ported. There are, however, some issues that need
to be resolved before it can be committed to the ports tree.
Open tasks:
1. The FreeBSD GNOME website is stale. Work is under way to improve
it.
2. Please give feedback on and suggest improvements to the chapter in
the Porter's Handbook on the USE_GNOME functionality.
3. Continue working on investigating the issues blocking GNOME 3.18.
__________________________________________________________________
KDE on FreeBSD
Links
KDE on FreeBSD website
URL: https://freebsd.kde.org/
KDE ports staging area
URL: https://freebsd.kde.org/area51.php
KDE on FreeBSD wiki
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/KDE
KDE/FreeBSD mailing list
URL: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-freebsd
Development repository for integrating KDE 5
URL: http://src.mouf.net/area51/log/branches/plasma5
Contact: KDE on FreeBSD team <kde at FreeBSD.org>
Overall, we have updated the following ports this quarter:
* CMake 3.3.1 (r396266)
* Qt 4.8.7 (r397043)
* QtCreator 3.5.0 (r395935)
* Fixed some dependencies, typos and plists in Qt5-ports
(r396044-r396047), spotted by Ralf Nolden
In our development repository, we have done the following work:
* Updated PyQt-bindings for qt4 to 4.11.4 and added qt5 bindings 5.5,
contributed by Guido Falsi, and modified by Tobias Berner (area51)
* Updated qt5 to 5.5.0. Ralf Nolden has contributed a handful of
useful new ports, for example lang/qt5-l10n (area51/qt-5.5)
* The plasma5 branch has been kept up to date with KDE's upstream and
contains ports for Frameworks 5.14.0, Plasma Desktop 5.4.2 and
Applications 15.08.1 (area51/plasma5)
Open tasks:
1. Work on getting the stuff from plasma5 branch into ports. (This is
a major update to nearly all KDE applications, so testers are very
welcome.)
2. Finalize the work on PyQt5.
3. Port qt5-webengine. Qt-5.5 will probably be the last release
shipping a www/webkit-qt5 port.
__________________________________________________________________
Node.js Modules
Links
Node.js modules
URL: https://www.assembla.com/spaces/cozycloud/subversion/source
Pre-draft documentation
URL: https://people.FreeBSD.org/~olivierd/porters-handbook/using-nodejs.html
Contact: Olivier Duchateau <olivierd at FreeBSD.org>
Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily
building fast, scalable network applications. It uses an event-driven,
non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect
for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed
devices.
The goal of this project is to make it easy to install the modules
available in the npm package registry.
Currently, the repository contains more than 100 new ports, in
particular:
* CoffeeScript (a programming language that transcompiles to
JavaScript)
* node-gyp (allows building Node.js addons, often written in C or
C++)
* Request (a simplified HTTP client)
We have also written several helpers for the porting, available in our
experimental repository.
Open tasks:
1. Bring in grunt.js (and modules), the JavaScript task runner.
2. Put more effort into support for node-gyp in the USES framework
__________________________________________________________________
Ports Collection
Links
Ports Collection website
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
Contributing to the Ports Collection
URL:
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/contributing/ports-contributing.html
Port Monitoring service
URL: http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/index.html
Team Website
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/portmgr/index.html
Blog
URL: http://blogs.freebsdish.org/portmgr/
Twitter feed
URL: http://www.twitter.com/freebsd_portmgr/
Facebook page
URL: http://www.facebook.com/portmgr
Google+ page
URL: http://plus.google.com/communities/108335846196454338383
Contact: Frederic Culot <portmgr-secretary at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: FreeBSD Ports Management Team <portmgr at FreeBSD.org>
As of the end of Q3 the ports tree holds just over 25,000 ports, and
the PR count is above 2,000. The summer period saw less activity on the
ports tree than during the previous quarter, with fewer than 7,000
commits performed by 120 active committers. Unfortunately, the number
of problem reports closed also decreased significantly, with fewer than
1,500 problem reports fixed during Q3.
In Q3 several commit bits were taken in for safekeeping, following an
inactivity period of more than 18 months (fluffy), or on committer's
request (xmj, stefan, brix). One new developer was granted a ports
commit bit (Jason Unovitch junovitch at FreeBSD.org), and one returning
committer (Babak Farrokhi) had his commit bit reinstated.
On the management side, no changes were made to the portmgr team during
Q3.
On the QA side, 25 exp-runs were performed to validate sensitive
updates or cleanups. Amongst those, the noticeable changes are the
update to pkg 1.6, the automake14 removal, and several important port
updates such as doxygen to 1.8.10, gnome3 to 3.16, cmake to 3.3.1, and
the Qt4 ports to 4.8.7. The default jdk was also set to openjdk8. Some
infrastructure changes included the addition of new options helpers:
opt_VARS, opt_VARS_OFF, opt_IMPLIES, and opt_PREVENTS. Some macros were
also removed, such as UNIQUENAME and LATEST_LINK.
Open tasks:
1. We would like to remind everyone that the ports tree is built and
run by volunteers, and any help is greatly appreciated. This is
more important than ever, since the number of problem reports
cannot seem to stop increasing. So if you use ports or packages,
please consider jumping in and helping! This is also true for
existing porters: it would be great if you would consider the next
step, which is to share your knowledge and mentor someone more
junior with the ports tree internals. And if you already do these
tasks, many thanks to you!
__________________________________________________________________
Ports on PowerPC
Contact: Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe at FreeBSD.org>
The Ports Collection typically receives less attention on Tier-2
architectures than on Tier-1 architectures, although several build-runs
were performed at various points in the past, and broken ports were
marked as such at those times.
Some of the Tier-2 platforms, such as PowerPC and ARM, have improved
considerably recently, both on FreeBSD's and the compilers' sides,
but
as the tree is not rebuilt on the cluster very often, it was suspected
that many ports are marked BROKEN while they in fact now build and run
correctly.
Over the past several weeks, 26 ports that were indeed broken on at
least PowerPC had been fixed, 58 ports that were incorrectly marked as
broken (leftovers from the old times) were marked as working, and fewer
than 40 ports still have issues requiring further work.
Open tasks:
1. The Ports Collection could benefit a lot from more frequent sweeps
targeting Tier-2 systems.
2. Recent work on QEMU-backed emulators and the much-anticipated
cross-building of ports are essential pieces to bring FreeBSD
packages on par with the base system's support, architecture-wise.
__________________________________________________________________
Xfce on FreeBSD
Links
FreeBSD Xfce Project
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Xfce
FreeBSD Xfce Repository
URL: https://www.assembla.com/spaces/xfce4/subversion/source
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.
During this quarter, the team has kept these applications up-to-date:
* science/xfce4-equake-plugin 1.3.8
* sysutils/xfce4-power-manager 1.5.2
* x11/libexo 0.10.7
* x11/xfce4-embed-plugin 1.6.0
* x11/xfce4-verve-plugin 1.1.0
* x11/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin 1.5.1
* x11-wm/xfce4-desktop 4.12.3
* www/midori 0.5.11
We also follow the unstable releases (available in our experimental
repository) of:
* sysutils/xfce4-panel-switch 1.0.2 (utility to backup panel layouts)
* x11/xfce4-dashboard 0.5.1
In the trunk branch, x11-wm/xfce4-panel contains a patch to support
sysutils/xfce4-panel-switch (available through the panel preferences).
Open tasks:
1. Test the new stable release of GLib 2.46.x with the kqueue/kevent
backend enabled (it was disabled with revision r393663). Currently
several features are broken, especially in Thunar, xfce4-panel, and
Xfdashboard.
__________________________________________________________________
PO Translation Project
Links
PO Translations
URL:
https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/po-translations.html
German translation of the Leap Seconds article
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/de_DE.ISO8859-1/articles/leap-seconds/
Dutch translation of the Explaining BSD article
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/nl_NL.ISO8859-1/articles/explaining-bsd/
FreeBSD Translators mailing list
URL: https://lists.FreeBSD.org/pipermail/freebsd-translators/
Contact: FreeBSD Documentation Team <freebsd-doc at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: FreeBSD Translators <freebsd-translators at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Warren Block <wblock at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD documentation translation process has been in need of
modernization for quite some time. The existing process was just too
difficult for translators to keep translations up to date.
With help from Benedict Reuschling, Shaun McCance, Ryan Lortie, Hiroki
Sato, and many others, the availability of a new PO translation system
was announced in August.
PO translations handle most of the overhead of the translation process.
Translators do not have to keep track of commits to the upstream
English version. The actual work of translating is quicker and easier.
PO editors show how much of the document has been translated. If a
translation is already available for a given string, it can be easily
reused.
Early testing has been very successful. Most issues involve discovering
and documenting the new processes rather than fixing bugs. New
translations of English documents have already been committed.
There will certainly be additional changes and improvements, but the
system works. We will continue to discover how to share work between
translation teams and the project as a whole. This work will be much
easier now that the initial hurdle of being able to use PO software has
been passed.
Open tasks:
1. Continue testing. The system is new to us and there are bound to be
bugs and situations with unexpected results.
2. Improve documentation on using the new PO translations. Much of
this involves things that rarely happened with the old system, like
adding a completely new language directory.
3. Add new translations for existing documents. There is much less
work to create and update a translated document now. Existing and
new translators are working on adding and updating translations of
the English documentation.
4. Figure out how to generate and share translation memory with other
members of a language team or translators outside the team.
5. Test new PO editors like Pootle and Virtaal.
6. Determine a method to allow translators commit access for
translations.
7. Develop and test code to translate manual pages.
__________________________________________________________________
Website CSS Update
Links
FreeBSD Main Site
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/
Contact: Warren Block <wblock at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD website has remained essentially unchanged in appearance
for many years. Like other legacy systems, it is difficult to change.
It is heavily used and therefore subject to non-trivial bikeshedding.
The CSS shrunk the reader's font from the size they had requested. It
specified hardcoded font and object sizes in pixels. On wide monitors,
only the middle third of the screen was used. Hardware has changed from
what existed when this version of the site was created. Screens have
become larger and wider, and increased in resolution at the same time.
It was time for a change. Font sizes were set to percentages, with none
smaller than 100%. The width of the main box was changed to 90%. Other
small adjustments were added. These limited changes produced a rendered
site that better respects the reader's settings, is much easier to
read, and shows more information.
Although no content changed, the appearance was so different that some
viewers thought we had redesigned the site. It is gratifying to know
that so many people are using it. We would also like to thank people
for the response, which was overwhelmingly positive and hardly
bikesheddy at all.
Open tasks:
1. Fix other outdated assumptions in the CSS. Alternately, rework the
entire site. However, that is a much more complex and ambitious
project than it might seem.
__________________________________________________________________
Allwinner A10/A20 Support
Links
Wiki page
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD/arm/Allwinner
Contact: Luiz Otavio O Souza <loos at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Pratik Singhal <ps06756 at gmail.com>
The Allwinner A10 and A20 chips are ARM CPUs found in increasingly
common development boards and other devices, such as the
Cubieboard/Cubieboard 2 and the Banana Pi.
With the end of a GSoC project by Pratik Singhal, our A10 and A20
support has improved. Pratik helped with the implementation and testing
of the SD card and SATA support for the Allwinner chips.
Luiz Otavio O Souza added support for the dwc network interface on the
A20, which is capable of gigabit speeds.
Glen Barber kindly added support for official FreeBSD images for
Cubieboard 2 and the Banana Pi.
This project is sponsored by Google Summer of Code 2015 (partly).
Open tasks:
1. Some drivers are still missing: audio, video/HDMI/framebuffer, IR,
I2C, SPI, PWM.
2. Fix if_dwc for better performance.
__________________________________________________________________
mtree Parsing and Manipulation Library
Links
Wiki page
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2015/mtreeParsingLibrary
Contact: Michal Ratajsky <michal at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks at FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD includes several programs that work with file system hierarchy
descriptions in the mtree(5) format. These descriptions, also called
specifications, have a broad range of uses, from automatically creating
directory structures to security auditing.
Each of the programs, namely mtree, bsdtar, install, and makefs, has
its own implementation of the mtree format. This not only adds
maintenance overhead, but also makes interoperability difficult, as
each of the implementations only supports a limited subset of the
format.
The goal of this project was to create a new libmtree library,
implementing everything the mtree format has to offer, and wrapping it
with an expressive API which all the listed programs can use. We also
wanted libmtree to be portable, as one of the major users of the mtree
format is libarchive, the library implementing most of bsdtar.
Currently, the library is functionally complete, ready to be downloaded
and receive everyone's attention. We have also decided to bundle the
mtree program along with it. The bundled mtree has also been modified
for better portability.
The project included modifying libarchive, install and makefs to use
libmtree. These modified versions are also available.
Please see the Wiki page for more information, download locations, and
an example of using the libmtree API.
This project is sponsored by Google Summer of Code 2015.
Open tasks:
1. Test and review the library code and API, and the modifications
made to the programs.
2. Fix the known problems that are mentioned on the Wiki page.
__________________________________________________________________
Multiqueue Testing
Links
Project Wiki Page
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2015/MultiqueueTestingProject
Contact: Tiwei Bie <btw at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Hiren Panchasara <hiren at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: George Neville-Neil <gnn at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson at FreeBSD.org>
The aim of this project is to design and implement infrastructure to
validate that a number of the network stack's multiqueue behaviours are
functioning as expected.
At present, most of this project has been implemented. It mainly
consists of two parts:
1. A general mechanism to collect the per-ring per-cpu statistics that
can be used by all NIC drivers, and extensions to netstat(1) to
report these statistics.
2. A suite of network stack behavior testing programs that consists
of:
+ a virtual multiqueue ethernet interface (vme)
+ a UDP packet generator based on vme
+ a UDP server based on socket(2)
+ a TCP client based on lwip and vme
+ a TCP server based on socket(2)
However, it still needs further refinements to make it suitable for
committing to FreeBSD head.
This project is sponsored by Google Summer of Code 2015.
__________________________________________________________________
Update Ficl in Bootloader
Links
Wiki Page
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2015/UpdateFiclInBootloader
Contact: Colin Lord <clord at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD bootloader has used Ficl 3 for quite some time. This
project was intended to update the version of Ficl in use to Ficl 4.
Ficl 4 is not only faster but also has a smaller memory footprint, both
being important advantages for a bootloader.
As part of the Google Summer of Code program, I worked on importing the
Ficl 4 sources to get a bootloader running Ficl 4. The first half of
the summer consisted of setting up my test environment, as well as
arranging the sources in the tree properly and modifying the build
files to point to the new locations. Once that was complete, the
sources had to be modified to build correctly and to add back in some
of the FreeBSD-specific parts from Ficl 3. Unfortunately, after all
those tasks were completed, a few bugs in the Ficl project were
discovered that delayed the bootloader update, so it is not finished.
The Illumos project has faced similar issues with Ficl 4 so I received
some good tips from them, but since school has started back up I have
not been able to put much work into fixing the bugs.
This project is sponsored by Google Summer of Code 2015.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Foundation
Links
Foundation website
URL: http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/
FreeBSD Journal
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. Funding comes from individual and corporate donations and is
used to fund and manage development projects, conferences and developer
summits, and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers. The
Foundation purchases hardware to improve and maintain FreeBSD
infrastructure and publishes FreeBSD white papers and marketing
material to promote, educate, and advocate for the FreeBSD Project. The
Foundation also represents the FreeBSD Project in executing contracts,
license agreements, and other legal arrangements that require a
recognized legal entity.
Here are some highlights of what we did to help FreeBSD last quarter:
Anne Dickison and Deb Goodkin attended OSCON to promote FreeBSD.
Robert Watson organized and ran the Cambridge FreeBSD Developer Summit
2015 ("BSDCam"). We provided travel grants to two FreeBSD
developers to
attend the summit. Three Foundation board/staff members attended too.
George V. Neville-Neil attended the ARM Partner Meeting where he met
with 15 silicon and systems vendors to present the unique traits and
qualities of FreeBSD and work on setting up partnerships with the
companies building and deploying ARM hardware.
George and Robert Watson collaborated in Cambridge on developing
further FreeBSD-based teaching material at undergraduate and masters
levels. Part of this project was funded by the Foundation.
George planned and ran the DevSummit at vBSDCon 2015.
We were proud to be a sponsor of vBSDCon 2015, Sept 11-13 in Washington
DC. George V. Neville-Neil and Ed Maste presented "Supporting a BSD
Project" at the conference. Dru Lavigne, Glen Barber, George V.
Neville-Neil, and Ed Maste attended and represented the Foundation at
both vBSDCon and the FreeBSD Developer Summit that preceded it. We had
many people stop by our table to make a donation, and it was another
great opportunity to talk and work with people face-to-face.
Cheryl Blain and John Baldwin promoted the Foundation and FreeBSD at
the SNIA 2015 Storage Developer Conference, in Santa Clara, California,
Sept 21-24. The Foundation was also a sponsor.
We sponsored Andy Turner to attend Linaro Connect in San Francisco,
Sept 21-25.
Ed Maste, our project development director, attended the X.Org
Developer's Conference (XDC) in Toronto, Ontario.
We sponsored the 2015 nginx Conference and sent FreeBSD community
member John Baldwin.
George Neville-Neil continued planning the 2015 Silicon Valley Vendor
Summit, including securing the venue.
Benedict Reuschling and Erwin Lansing helped plan and organize the
EuroBSDCon FreeBSD Developer Summit. This included setting up the
working groups, securing the venue, and getting the T-shirts made.
Benedict helped organize, and he and Dru Lavigne participated in the
FreeBSD Hackathon in the Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany. It was a
successful weekend of fixing bugs and collaborating with others.
Dru Lavigne taught a FreeBSD class in Berlin, Germany July 29-31.
We were a sponsor of womENcourage 2015, in Uppsala Sweden, Sept 24-26.
Dru was the moderator for a panel on Open Source as a Career Path. All
the panelists were FreeBSD contributors including Dan Langille, Allan
Jude, Benedict Reuschling, and Deb Goodkin. We also had a table at the
job fair and talked to a lot of students and professors about the
benefits of working on FreeBSD as an alternative to an internship,
teaching about FreeBSD in university classes, and hosting FreeBSD
events at their schools. Dan taught a workshop on How to Contribute to
an Open Source project. Deb participated in this workshop and started a
discussion on offering a similar workshop at BSD and non-BSD
conferences. The workshop would be titled "How to Contribute to
FreeBSD", and participants would learn how to contribute documentation
to the Project.
We continued to publish our monthly newsletters, keeping the community
informed on what we are doing, including event recaps, testimonials,
project updates, and upcoming events. We received testimonials from
Microsoft, NYCBus, and ScaleEngine. We also continued to approach
companies to provide us with testimonials to help promote their use of
FreeBSD.
Anne Dickison rebooted the Faces of FreeBSD series and is working with
FreeBSD contributors on writing their stories. She continued to produce
more FreeBSD Swag and literature to promote FreeBSD, as well as
advocating for FreeBSD over our social channels and with new
partnerships.
We reached our 2015 goal of 10,000 FreeBSD Journal subscribers, and we
published a new Open Journal article on our website, to help promote
the Journal. We also started offering a new subscription bundle, where
you can buy all the 2014 issues. The July/August issue was published.
Justin T. Gibbs began teaching a semester-long FreeBSD class at a
middle school in Boulder, Colorado. We are using the BeagleBone Black
(BBB) to run FreeBSD connected to Macs and PCs. We have received a lot
of support, both internally, and from the Project, to get the FreeBSD
images to work on the BBB with the Macs and PCs. It has been a great
collaborative effort with community members, and this will help future
classes in being able to support inexpensive platforms for teaching
FreeBSD.
Work continued on creating a FreeBSD curriculum for a half day
workshop. Hopefully this will be available in late Spring.
We provided legal support for the Project including granting trademark
permission for some users and companies who requested permission to put
the FreeBSD logo on their websites and marketing literature.
We met with commercial users to get their input on what they would like
to see supported in FreeBSD. We also do this to help connect FreeBSD
developers with commercial users to help facilitate collaboration.
FreeBSD Foundation employee and Release Engineer Glen Barber was
extremely busy during this quarter, working on a number of exciting
areas of the FreeBSD Project. Some of the highlights include:
* Code cleanup and bug fixes to several parts of the release build
code, and finishing adding support for automatically uploading
cloud provider images, which was merged to the stable/10 branch
before the code freeze. The 10.2-RELEASE cycle spanned a 9-week
timeframe overall, starting from the code slush.
* With the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team, released two BETA builds
and three RC builds for the 10.2-RELEASE cycle, with the final
release announced mid-August, two weeks ahead of the original
schedule.
* With the FreeBSD Cluster Administrators Team, assisted with a
number of general updates and enhancements to the FreeBSD
infrastructure.
__________________________________________________________________
ZFSguru
Links
Home page
URL: http://zfsguru.com
Forum post on Gnome 3 debugging
URL: http://zfsguru.com/forum/zfsgurudevelopment/1038
Contact: Jason Edwards <jason at zfsguru.com>
ZFSguru started as a front-end to ZFS but has since grown into a
multifunctional server appliance with its own unique features. While
the project is still in early development, it already offers multiple
unique features not found in other projects. Unlike similar projects,
nothing is stripped away from the base operating system, meaning
ZFSguru behaves as a normal FreeBSD installation and thus is very
versatile. The web-interface is designed to unite both novice and
advanced users, providing both very easy to use basic functionality as
well as features to be appreciated by more experienced users. The
modular nature of the project combats the danger of bloat, whilst still
allowing extended functionality to be easily deployed.
On the 15th of August, version 0.3 of ZFSguru was released. Some
highlights of the new version:
* New build infrastructure allows for frequent releases of system
images and services in a semi-automated way.
* A new GuruDB database allows for a growing number of system images
and servers, and provides good caching to accelerate pages.
* The installation procedure was given a major overhaul.
* In addition to the LiveCD, USB images are now available. The USB
image supports both legacy MBR bootcode and UEFI boot.
* Many libraries in the web-interface have been overhauled, in
addition to many other additions to the web interface.
* Many improvements were made to optional add-on services, such as
the new Gnome 3 graphical environment.
Other progress made in the months July, August, and September:
* System image builds 001, 002, 003, and 004 have been released for
all supported branches: 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 (-STABLE), and 11.0
(-CURRENT).
* Work on the 0.4 web-interface has started, which focuses on
improving network support in the web-interface.
* Work on a new visual theme for the web-interface has started. The
new interface is likely to be included in the upcoming 0.4 release.
* A new master server is being prepared, which is likely to be
operational in December.
* A new website is being worked on, to be launched the first of
January, 2016.
Open tasks:
1. The new Gnome 3 desktop does not work for everyone and still has
issues. Anyone capable of diagnosing these issues can give the
Gnome 3 LiveCD a try. Please see the linked forum thread for more
information.
2. Several ports fail to compile with our own build infrastructure,
and require bug reports in order to get them fixed upstream.
3. A 'State of the Project 2015' is due in Q4, providing an overview
for future development of the project.
__________________________________________________________________
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