FreeBSD Project Quarterly Status Report - 3rd Quarter 2017
This quarter's FreeBSD developments continue to provide excitement and
promise for further developments. I myself have a soft spot for manual
pages, so it is especially good to see that we have gained some
documentation for writing them (and I hope that this will translate to
more and improved manual pages in the future!). The core@ entry is also
of particular note, with the introduction of the FCP process and the
recognition of the first non-committer FreeBSD Project Member (and
more). Read on to find out more about these, as well as improved
support for the AMD Zen family of processors (e.g., Ryzen), and a whole
lot more!
--Benjamin Kaduk
__________________________________________________________________
The deadline for submissions covering the period from October to
December 2017 is January 14, 2017.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Team Reports
* FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
* Ports Collection
* The FreeBSD Core Team
* The FreeBSD Foundation
Projects
* FreeBSD CI
Kernel
* Intel 10G iflib Driver Update
* Intel iWARP Support
* pNFS Server Plan B
Architectures
* AMD Zen (family 17h) support
Userland Programs
* Updates to GDB
Ports
* FreeBSDDesktop
* OpenJFX 8
* Puppet
Documentation
* Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd Edition
* Manual Pages
Third-Party Projects
* The nosh Project
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Team Reports
Entries from the various official and semi-official teams, as found in
the Administration Page.
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
Links
FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE Announcement
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/11.1R/announce.html
FreeBSD 10.4-RELEASE Schedule
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/10.4R/schedule.html
FreeBSD Development Snapshots
URL: https://download.FreeBSD.org/ftp/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/
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.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team continued finalizing the
11.1-RELEASE cycle, with the final release builds starting on July 21
and the official release announcement email sent on July 26. Thank you
to everyone who helped test 11.1-RELEASE, ensuring its quality and
stability. [1]
FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE is the second release from the stable/11 branch.
Additionally, the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team started the
10.4-RELEASE cycle, with the code slush starting on July 28. With the
final release build expected to start on September 29 and the official
announcement overlapping the end of the quarter, everything is on
schedule as of this writing. [2]
FreeBSD 10.4-RELEASE will be the fifth release from the stable/10
branch, and is planned to be the final release of the 10.x series.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation [1].
This project was sponsored in part by The FreeBSD Foundation [2].
__________________________________________________________________
Ports Collection
Links
About FreeBSD Ports
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
Contributing to Ports
URL:
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing/ports-contributing.html
FreeBSD Ports Monitoring
URL: http://portsmon.freebsd.org/index.html
Ports Management Team Website
URL: https://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/index.html
FreeBSD portmgr on Twitter (@freebsd_portmgr)
URL: https://twitter.com/freebsd_portmgr/
FreeBSD Ports Management Team on Facebook
URL: https://www.facebook.com/portmgr
FreeBSD Ports Management Team on Google+
URL: https://plus.google.com/communities/108335846196454338383
Contact: Ren? Ladan <portmgr-secretary at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: FreeBSD Ports Management Team <portmgr at FreeBSD.org>
The Ports Collection now features over 31,600 ports. There are
currently 2671 problem reports, of which 718 are unassigned. This
quarter saw almost 5,900 commits from 175 committers. The number of
open PRs grew compared to last quarter, and outpaced the number of
changes.
This quarter, we welcomed Zach Leslie (zleslie@), Luca Pizzamiglio
(pizzamig@), Craig Leres (leres@), Adriaan de Groot (adridg@), and Dave
Cottlehuber (dch@) as new committers. The commit bits of the following
committers were taken in for safekeeping: alonso@ after 19 months of
inactivity, rpaulo@ per his request, and ache@ after he passed away.
Despite several tries and changing mentors, kami@ lacked interest in
completing his mentorship, so his commit bit was also taken in for
safekeeping.
On the infrastructure side, two USES values were removed because they
outlived their usefulness:
* execinfo: libexecinfo is now available in the base system of all
supported FreeBSD versions
* twisted: there is only one Twisted port left
The default version of GCC was bumped from 5 to 6. Firefox was updated
to version 56.0 and Chromium to version 61.0.3163.100. The version of
pkg itself was updated to 1.10.1.
During this quarter, antoine@ performed 28 exp-runs to test version
updates of major ports, improving USE_GITHUB and SHEBANG_FILES, and API
changes to the base system. This quarter, the foundation for ports
"flavors" was committed, though more development and testing will
be
performed in the coming quarter before it goes live.
Open tasks:
1. The PR load needs more attention, as the number of open PRs has
started to increase again.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Core Team
Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <core at FreeBSD.org>
The new "FreeBSD Community Process" was drafted during BSDCan
earlier
this year. The first such document, FCP 0, defines how the whole
process works. After some time for discussion and revision, FCP 0 was
voted on and accepted by core, following the procedure laid down within
that document. Currently the use of FCPs is entirely optional; we shall
see how the community begins to adopt their usage and evolve the
process based on experience.
A draft update to the Code of Conduct has been prepared by the advisory
committee. Core is currently reviewing the text, and will soon vote on
accepting it. Core is keen to avoid the trap of "rules lawyering".
At
the moment, the feeling is that we need to add a preamble to the CoC to
articulate the goals of the project and to act as a general guide to
the exercise of the code.
This quarter has been quite a busy one concerning changes to the roster
of committers and project members. We have elected our first new
Project Member: John Hixson, who will be familiar from many conferences
where he has given presentations and ably represented iXsystems. A
second proposed Project Member was not accepted by core, but only
because core felt that Fedor Uporov really deserved a commit bit
instead.
In addition to Fedor Uporov, please also welcome (in no particular
order) Matt Joras, Marcin Wojtas, Chuck Tuffli, Ilya Bakulin and Alex
Richardson as brand-new committers. We have also awarded Steven Hurd
and Eugene Grosbein src commit bits to go with their existing ports
bits. Welcome back Gordon Tetlow as a src committer, essential for his
new role within secteam. Eric Davis and Rui Paulo have both decided to
hang up their commit bits: we wish them well in their future
endeavours. Finally, we must report the sad death of Andrey Chernov,
who will be sorely missed by his colleagues and collaborators.
Andrey's death has highlighted another question which is only going to
become more complex over time. Keeping track of copyrights is already
hard enough within a mature source tree with many contributors, such as
the FreeBSD sources. Now we need to consider trying to keep track of
the heirs and beneficiaries of contributors who have sadly passed away.
Core will consult with the Foundation legal team to discuss possible
approaches to alleviate this.
There have been complaints that the workings of Core are being kept
overly confidential, and that consequently the majority of the project
has too little idea of what is going on. This is certainly not
intentional by Core, and we are keen to open up Core's business to more
general community scrutiny as far as seems reasonable.
Core dealt with a number of licensing questions:
* When upstreaming patches and other original works to VirtualBox or
other Oracle properties, pragmatically it works best to provide
them under the terms of the MIT license (one of two opensource
licenses accepted by Oracle). Of course, this only applies to work
upstreamed by or with the permission of the original author.
* The Viking software license is sufficiently BSD-like that magic
constants from their drivers can be used in FreeBSD code.
* There is no separate register of deviations from the allowed
BSD-like licenses in the source tree: any code in the tree under
other than BSD-like license terms can be assumed to have been
approved by core.
* At the moment the FreeBSD copyright requirement to include the
copyright notice in redistributions in binary form is satisfied by
making the FreeBSD sources, with all of the detailed copyright
information included in the different source code files, available
alongside pre-compiled system images. However, this does not
necessarily meet the needs of downstream projects based on FreeBSD,
and given the new "packaged base", adding per-package licensing
metadata in a way similar to how the Ports Collection works is
under consideration as an alternative mechanism.
Concerns were raised regarding the pending HardenedBSD entry in the
previous quarterly report prior to publication. The FreeBSD project
welcomes reports from separate (but derived) projects in quarterly
reports and has included similar reports in the past from other
projects (such as TrueOS and pfSense). The HardenedBSD report was
edited for length and to concentrate on activities during the quarter
in question.
Amazon is proposing to set up mirrors of the freebsd-update and pkg
servers within AWS in order to provide faster access for EC2 users.
These mirrors will be publicly accessible, but the expectation is that
use will primarily be from within EC2. FreeBSD AMIs will have a preset
configuration that references the Amazon servers.
The old, long-deprecated, and insecure "r-commands" (rsh, rlogin,
rcp)
are being removed from the base system for 12.0-RELEASE. Notice of this
was added to the man pages and release notes in time for 11.1-RELEASE
and 10.4-RELEASE. Anyone requiring these commands for backwards
compatibility can use the new net/bsdrcmds port.
Work to replace Heimdal Kerberos in base with the more widely
compatible MIT Kerberos has begun in a new projects/krb5 branch. This
should not fall afoul of any US cryptography export regulations: the
project is required to notify the US government that cryptographic
software can be downloaded from FreeBSD servers, and this already
covers MIT Kerberos, already available within ports.
A number of Bay Area FreeBSD User Group-related domain names are being
given up by their original owner. The current BAFUG organisers have
been made aware.
Core has voted on a change to the Doceng voting rules to provide for a
"did not vote" status during doceng voting similar to how portmgr
and
core voting operates. The current requirement for all five members of
doceng to register a vote on issues was proving to be a significant
bottleneck.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Foundation
Links
FreeBSD Foundation Website
URL: https://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/
FreeBSD Foundation Quarterly Newsletter
URL:
https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/FreeBSD-Foundation-July-August-2017-Update.pdf
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 software development projects, conferences and
developer summits, and provide travel grants to FreeBSD contributors.
The Foundation purchases and supports hardware to improve and maintain
FreeBSD infrastructure and provides full-time Release Engineering
support; publishes marketing material to promote, educate, and advocate
for the FreeBSD Project; facilitates collaboration between commercial
vendors and FreeBSD developers; and finally, 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:
Fundraising Efforts
Our work is 100% funded by your donations. This year we have raised
over $860,000 from over 500 donors. Our 2017 fundraising goal is
$1,250,00 and we are continuing to work hard to meet and exceed this
goal! Please consider making a donation to help us continue and
increase our support for FreeBSD:
https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/donate/.
We also have a new Partnership Program, to provide more benefits for
our larger commercial donors. Find out more information at
https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/FreeBSD-foundation-partnership-program/
and share with your companies!
OS Improvements
The Foundation improves the FreeBSD operating system by employing our
technical staff to maintain and improve critical kernel subsystems, add
features and functionality, and fix problems. This also includes
funding separate project grants like the arm64 port, blacklistd access
control daemon, and the integration of VIMAGE support, to make sure
that FreeBSD remains a viable solution for research, education,
computing, products and more.
We kicked off or continued the following projects last quarter:
* OpenZFS RAID-Z Expansion project
* Broadcom Wi-Fi infrastructural improvements (bhnd(4) driver)
* Headless mode out-of-the-box for the Beaglebone Black
* Extending bhyve/ARMv7 features
* Porting bhyve/ARM to an ARMv8 platform
Having software developers on staff has allowed us to jump in and work
directly on projects to improve FreeBSD like:
* ZFS improvements
* New Intel server support
* kqueue(2) updates
* 64-bit inode support
* Stack guard
* Kernel Undefined Behavior Sanitizer
* Toolchain projects
* i915 driver investigation
* NVDIMM support in acpiconf(8)
* Continuous integration dashboard (web page and physical hardware)
* FAT filesystem support in makefs(8)
Staff and board members continued hosting bi-weekly conference calls to
facilitate efforts for individuals to collaborate on different
technologies.
Release Engineering
The Foundation provides a full-time staff member to lead the release
engineering efforts. This has provided timely and reliable releases
over the last few years.
Last quarter, our full-time staff member worked with the FreeBSD
Release Engineering and Security Teams to finalize 11.1-RELEASE. He
also supported the 10.4 release effort, and has continued producing
10-STABLE, 11-STABLE, and 12-CURRENT development snapshot builds
throughout the quarter. At the vBSDCon Developer Summit, he gave a
presentation on the state of the release engineering team.
You can find out more about the support we provided to the Release
Engineering Team by reading their status update in this report.
Supporting FreeBSD Infrastructure
The Foundation provides hardware and support to improve the FreeBSD
infrastructure. Last quarter, we continued supporting FreeBSD hardware
located around the world.
FreeBSD Advocacy and Education
A large part of our efforts are dedicated to advocating for the
Project. This includes promoting work being done by others with
FreeBSD; producing advocacy literature to teach people about FreeBSD
and help make the path to starting using FreeBSD or contributing to the
Project easier; and attending and getting other FreeBSD contributors to
volunteer to run FreeBSD events, staff FreeBSD tables, and give FreeBSD
presentations.
The FreeBSD Foundation sponsors many conferences, events, and summits
around the globe. These events can be BSD-related, open source, or
technology events geared towards underrepresented groups. We support
the FreeBSD-focused events to help provide a venue for sharing
knowledge, to work together on projects, and to facilitate
collaboration between developers and commercial users. This all helps
provide a healthy ecosystem. We support the non-FreeBSD events to
promote and raise awareness of FreeBSD, to increase the use of FreeBSD
in different applications, and to recruit more contributors to the
Project.
Here is a list highlighting some of the advocacy and education work we
did last quarter:
* Organized and ran the Essen FreeBSD Hackathon in Essen Germany
* Sponsored and participated in the FreeBSD Developer Summit BSDCam,
in Cambridge, England
* Represented FreeBSD at the ARM Partner Meeting
* Presented and taught about FreeBSD at SdNOG 4 in Khartoum, Sudan
* Sponsored and gave presentations and tutorials at EuroBSDCon in
Paris, France
* Organized and ran the Paris FreeBSD Developer Summit
* Organized and ran the FreeBSD Developer Summit at vBSDCon
* Sponsored and attended vBSDCon
* Proved travel grants to FreeBSD contributors to attend the above
events.
* Sponsored the 2017 USENIX Security Symposium in Vancouver BC as an
Industry Partner
* Provided FreeBSD advocacy material
* Sponsored the 2017 USENIX Annual Technical Conference in Santa
Clara, CA as an Industry Partner
We continued producing FreeBSD advocacy material to help people promote
FreeBSD around the world.
We help educate the world about FreeBSD by publishing the
professionally produced FreeBSD Journal. Last quarter we published the
July/August issue that you can find at
https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/journal/.
You can find out more about events we attended and upcoming events at
https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/news-and-events/.
Legal/FreeBSD IP
The Foundation owns the FreeBSD trademarks, and it is our
responsibility to protect them. We also provide legal support for the
core team to investigate questions that arise.
Go to http://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org to find out how we support
FreeBSD and how we can help you!
__________________________________________________________________
Projects
Projects that span multiple categories, from the kernel and userspace
to the Ports Collection or external projects.
FreeBSD CI
Links
freebsd-ci Repository
URL: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ci
freebsd-testing Mailing List
URL: https://lists.FreeBSD.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-testing
FreeBSD Jenkins Instance
URL: http://ci.FreeBSD.org
Contact: Jenkins Admins <jenkins-admin at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD CI team runs various continuous integration solutions for
FreeBSD, regularly checking that the current state of the Subversion
repository can successfully build, and performing various tests and
analysis upon the build results.
We have introduced a DTrace test pipeline, with the results and
artifacts available at:
* https://ci.FreeBSD.org/job/FreeBSD-head-amd64-dtrace_test/
* https://artifact.ci.FreeBSD.org/dtrace-test/
We had team meetings at two developer summits during Q3:
* BSDcam
* EuroBSDCon
Open tasks:
1. Fix the failing test cases and builds.
2. Create builds for additional architectures.
3. Add more tests.
4. The additional TODO items listed at
https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Jenkins/TODO .
__________________________________________________________________
Kernel
Updates to kernel subsystems/features, driver support, filesystems, and
more.
Intel 10G iflib Driver Update
Links
ixgbe iflib Conversion
URL: https://reviews.FreeBSD.org/D11727
Contact: Chris Galazka <krzysztof.galazka at intel.com>
Contact: Piotr Pietruszewski <piotr.pietruszewski at intel.com>
The ix and ixv network interface drivers support a variety of Intel
network interfaces, with line speeds at 10 Gbit/second.
This quarter, with the help of Matt Macy and Sean Bruno (among others),
we have submitted a review in Phabricator for the conversion of the
ixgbe driver to use the new (and evolving) iflib framework.
Stay tuned for the conversion of the 40G driver (ixl), as it is
currently being ported to use iflib.
Open tasks:
1. Additional testing.
__________________________________________________________________
Intel iWARP Support
Links
iWARP for ixl
URL: https://reviews.FreeBSD.org/D11378
Contact: Bartosz Sobczak <bartosz.sobczak at intel.com>
iWARP is a protocol suite that enables efficient movement of data
across the network, building on Remote Direct Memory Access, Direct
Data Placement, and Marker PDU Aligned Framing. It endeavors to avoid
unnecessary (local) data copies and to offload work from the main CPU
to dedicated hardware.
An initial commit adding iWARP support for the Intel X722 family of
network adapters is under review. This is an important step towards
introducing full iWARP support on systems equipped with Intel C620
Series Chipsets. Currently, with the iw_ixl driver, only the kVerbs API
is supported.
Open tasks:
1. Additional testing.
__________________________________________________________________
pNFS Server Plan B
Links
Instructions for Testing
URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~rmacklem/pnfs-planb-setup.txt
Contact: Rick Macklem <rmacklem at FreeBSD.org>
A pNFS server allows an NFS service to be spread over multiple servers,
separating the MetaData operations from the Data operations (Read and
Write). This project will add the ability to use FreeBSD systems to
create a pNFS service consisting of a single MetaData Server plus a set
of Data Servers. The Data Servers can be mirrored, so that redundant
copies of the file data are maintained.
The support for non-mirrored Data Servers is now believed to be
complete. Support for mirrored Data Servers using the Flexible File
Layout, which will soon be published as an RFC, is implemented.
However, there is still significant work to be done, since the current
implementation of mirrored Data Servers does not handle failed Data
Servers or their resilvering/recovery. It is hoped that support for
failure/recovery of Data Servers will be implemented in the next six
months.
The patched FreeBSD sources may now be accessed for testing via either
Subversion or downloading a gzipped tarball. They consist of a patched
kernel and nfsd and can be used on any FreeBSD 11 or later system. The
installation procedure is covered in the linked document.
Open tasks:
1. Testing by others will be needed, now that the implementation is
available.
2. Implementation and testing of mirror failure/recovery.
__________________________________________________________________
Architectures
Updating platform-specific features and bringing in support for new
hardware platforms.
AMD Zen (family 17h) support
Contact: Conrad Meyer cem at FreeBSD.org <>
This quarter, a bit of work was done to enhance platform support for
AMD Zen (Ryzen, Threadripper, Epyc) processors:
* The CPU topology detection code was enhanced to properly detect Zen
dies and CPU Complexes. This gives the scheduler more locality
information to use when making scheduling decisions.
* The x86 topology analysis was enhanced to report dies and CPU
Complexes, in addition to the existing reporting on packages,
cores, and threads. An example of the new output is FreeBSD/SMP: 1
package(s) x 2 groups x 2 cache groups x 4 core(s) x 2 hardware
threads.
* The amdsmn(4) driver for accessing SMN (System Management Network)
registers was added.
* CPU temperature monitoring support for Zen was added to amdtemp(4).
* In cpufreq(4):
+ Added support for decoding Zen P-state information from
Machine State Registers (which is usually not necessary, since
it is largely redundant with ACPI P-state information, but is
potentially useful)
+ Work around the apparent Ryzen inability to achieve the P1
state by not busying cores waiting to transition to it
* The intpm(4) smbus driver was fixed to attach to the AMD FCH
(Fusion Controller Hub).
* All MCA banks are now enabled and monitored on Zen CPUs.
* Feature-bit decoding was added for: CLZERO, SVM features, and RAS
capabilities.
* SHA intrinsic support was added to the aesni(4) driver. Ryzen is
currently the only desktop processor to feature these intrinsics.
Support for these intrinsics is also present in Intel's Goldmont
line of low-end SoCs.
Overall, Zen is now a very usable platform for x86 workstations and
servers.
This project was sponsored by Dell EMC Isilon.
Open tasks:
1. Add HWPMC support for the new performance counters avilable on the
Zen architecture.
2. Add support for the CCP (Crypto Co-Processor).
__________________________________________________________________
Userland Programs
Changes affecting the base system and programs in it.
Updates to GDB
Contact: John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Luca Pizzamiglio <pizzamig at FreeBSD.org>
The devel/gdb port has been updated to GDB 8.0.1.
Support for FreeBSD/aarch64 userland binaries has been committed
upstream. These patches, along with support for debugging
FreeBSD/aarch64 kernels, have been committed to the port.
Upstream patches adding improved support for FreeBSD/arm userland
binaries are currently in review. FreeBSD 12 has recently grown support
for debugging VFP registers via ptrace() and core dumps as part of this
work. Support for FreeBSD/arm kernels will be added to the port after
the upstream patches are added to the port.
Support for $_siginfo has been committed upstream. This uses the
recently added NT_LWPINFO note to extract signal information from
process cores.
Hangs that occured when GDB's kill command was used were fixed in
FreeBSD in r313992.
Open tasks:
1. Figure out why the powerpc kgdb targets are not able to unwind the
stack past the initial frame.
2. Test support for sparc64 binaries and kernels.
3. Add support for debugging powerpc vector registers.
4. Implement info proc commands.
5. Implement info os commands.
__________________________________________________________________
Ports
Changes affecting the Ports Collection, whether sweeping changes that
touch most of the tree, or individual ports themselves.
FreeBSDDesktop
Links
FreeBSDDesktop on GitHub
URL: https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/
Contact: Johannes Dieterich <jmd at freebsd.org>
Contact: Mark Johnston <markj at freebsd.org>
Contact: Hans Petter Selasky <hselasky at freebsd.org>
Contact: Matthew Macy <mmacy at nextbsd.org>
The FreeBSDDesktop team is happy to announce the availability of
graphics/drm-next-kmod. This port for FreeBSD-CURRENT (amd64) provides
support for the amdgpu, i915, and radeon DRM modules using the linuxkpi
compatibility framework. The port currently corresponds to the DRM from
Linux 4.9 and is in an experimental state. It works reliably for many
testers with modern GPU hardware (AMD HD7000 series/Tahiti to Polaris
and Intel HD3000/Sandy Bridge to Skylake). Broader testing and
reporting/fixing of bugs is appreciated.
Open tasks:
1. Resolve issues that cause radeonkms and amdgpu to fail with EFI
boot (though there is a workaround available).
2. Upgrade to Linux 4.10 and higher DRM versions.
3. Get feedback from broader testing.
__________________________________________________________________
OpenJFX 8
Links
OpenJFX Wiki
URL: https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/OpenJFX/Main
java/openjfx8-devel
URL: https://www.freshports.org/java/openjfx8-devel
java/openjfx8-scenebuilder
URL: https://www.freshports.org/java/openjfx8-scenebuilder
AsciidocFX
URL: https://github.com/asciidocfx/AsciidocFX
Contact: Tobias Kortkamp <tobik at FreeBSD.org>
OpenJFX is an open source, next generation, client application platform
for desktop and embedded systems, based on JavaSE. This quarter, the
OpenJFX port was reworked and has received some significant
improvements.
More modules are being built. With the new web module we gain support
for applications that have their own builtin web browser such as
AsciidocFX. The new media module allows JavaFX applications to play
audio and video files.
A port of the JavaFX scenebuilder, a RAD tool for building JavaFX
scenes, was added to the ports tree.
The OpenGL Prism backend for GPU acceleration was enabled by default.
From a mainainer's and contributor's perspective, the port was
simplified by moving all FreeBSD-local patches to the ports tree and
fetching the upstream sources directly, instead of using a separate
repository for them.
Open tasks:
1. Upstream some of the patches in the Ports Collection.
__________________________________________________________________
Puppet
Links
Puppetlab's FreeBSD Slack Channel
URL: https://puppetcommunity.slack.com/messages/C6CK0UGB1/
Contact: Puppet Team <puppet at FreeBSD.org>
This summer has seen the creation of a puppet@ team to help maintain
the approximately 30 Puppet-related ports in the FreeBSD Ports
Collection. These ports were previously maintained by various
committers, and from time to time the distributed maintainership
introduced some delays when updating a port, due to the need to wait
for a maintainer's approval for a related change to a different port.
Puppet 5 is now in the ports tree (as sysutils/puppet5). The C++
version of Facter (sysutils/facter) got a lot of attention and is now a
drop-in replacement for the previous Ruby version
(sysutils/rubygem-facter); it is the default facts source for the
Puppet 5 port.
Work continues on bringing in Puppetserver 5 to the ports tree, and on
keeping all the ports up-to-date.
Open tasks:
1. The pkg package provider has some minor issues (it breaks things
when no repos are configured, and is not working properly from the
context of the MCollective package agent).
2. The databases/puppetdb[345] and sysutils/puppetserver[45] ports
rely on Clojure and Java, and download compiled jar files instead
of building them from source.
__________________________________________________________________
Documentation
Noteworthy changes in the documentation tree or new external
books/documents.
Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd Edition
Links
Official Announcement
URL: https://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/3020
Contact: Michael Lucas <mwlucas at michaelwlucas.com>
The first draft of the third edition of Absolute FreeBSD is finished.
It is 220,200 words, or roughly enough to stun a medium-sized ox. It's
on target to be in print before BSDCan 2018.
Open tasks:
1. Stare at the wall blankly for a few days.
2. Fix all the problems pointed out by dozens of community reviewers.
3. Fix all the problems pointed out by John Baldwin, tech reviewer
extraordinaire.
4. Editing. Copyediting. Page layout. Page editing. Re-editing.
Indexing. Edits discovered by indexer.
5. Pre-orders should open some time next year.
6. Restrain myself from strangling people who ask when the fourth
edition is coming.
__________________________________________________________________
Manual Pages
Links
FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer
URL: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/
Contact: Warren Block <wblock at FreeBSD.org>
Over the last year, interest has increased in manual pages, in large
part due to excellent infrastructure work by Baptiste Daroussin and
others, and promotion by George Neville-Neil and others. This increased
interest has been both gratifying and problematic. Our man pages are
underappreciated gems, but we have sadly lacked any substantial
documentation on how to write new ones.
In September, I added a new chapter to the FreeBSD Documentation
Project Primer describing the basics of creating a man page. It
includes descriptions of the markup, section structure, recommended
optional material such as examples, and sample templates for the most
common types of man pages. The Resources section includes links to
several external resources, including the excellent Practical UNIX
Manuals: mdoc.
While this chapter is not a full tutorial, it does begin to fill in a
large gap in our documentation resources and provide a starting point
from which to grow.
Open tasks:
1. Add more explanation and examples of markup usage.
2. Expand the sample templates with additional desired standard
features, like an EXAMPLES section.
3. Add more sample templates.
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Third-Party Projects
Many projects build upon FreeBSD or incorporate components of FreeBSD
into their project. As these projects may be of interest to the broader
FreeBSD community, we sometimes include brief updates submitted by
these projects in our quarterly report. The FreeBSD project makes no
representation as to the accuracy or veracity of any claims in these
submissions.
The nosh Project
Links
Introduction
URL: http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/
FreeBSD Binary Packages
URL: http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/freebsd-binary-packages.html
Installation How-To
URL: http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/timorous-admin-installation-how-to.html
Roadmap
URL: http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/roadmap.html
A Slightly Outdated User Guide
URL: http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/index.html
Archnosh
URL: http://framagit.org/taca/archnosh
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 attempts to supersede BSD init, the Mewburn
rc.d system, and OpenRC as used on FreeBSD and TrueOS, 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 includes 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.
Since the last status report, in December 2015, the project has seen:
restructured and finer-grained packaging that has fewer conflicts with
other toolsets; the addition of zsh completion files; improvements to
the virtual terminal subsystem, keyboard map, mouse support, and ugen
and DECSCUSR support; RFC 5424/5426 remote logging support; replacement
of libkqueue and the C library's environment handling functions;
several new helper commands; support for Java VM autolocation; improved
socket-passing code; an extended status API and "one-shot" service
support; additional pre-supplied service bundles; support for service
aliases; improved handling of per-user D-Bus services; improved
importing of MySQL, MariaDB, Percona, and OpenVPN services; improved
configuration import support; and extensive additions to the nosh
Guide.
On the recently updated roadmap you can see plans for even more
documentation, continuing the work to extend the capabilities of the
networking subsystem, and the scant handful of rc.d-related items
remaining. There are also some ideas still in the speculative or
planning phases, including work that may depend on incorporating nosh
support into other software.
Open tasks:
1. Improve Ansible and SaltStack integration (the maintainer of the
Arch Linux nosh integration has some ideas).
2. Command-line completions are still needed for bash, csh, and fish.
3. Document convert-systemd-units for use by port maintainers in
making packaged service bundles from systemd unit files.
4. nosh could take advantage of several proposed features for the base
system:
+ the boot loader signaling "emergency" and
"rescue" modes of
operation
+ adding machine-readable status output to fsck
+ adding runtime support for more clang-compilable languages in
the early bootstrap stage
+ adding hooks for invoking external configuration import
mechanisms
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