Skip site navigation (1) Skip section navigation (2)

Introduction

May and June were remarkably busy months for the FreeBSD Project-- FreeBSD developers met in Monterey, CA in June for FreeBSD Developer Summit III to discuss strategy for the FreeBSD 5.0 release later this year, for the USENIX Annual Technical conference and for the FreeBSD BoF. Substantial technical progress was made on FreeBSD 5.0, and FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE was cut on the RELENG_4 branch in June.

The remainder of the summer will continue to be busy. Final components and features for 5.0-RELEASE will go into the tree, and the development direction will change from new features to stability, performance, and production-readiness. With additional 5.0 development previews late in the summer, we hope to broaden the tester base for the -CURRENT branch, and start to get early adopters digging out any potential problems in their test environments. I encourage both FreeBSD Developers and FreeBSD Users to give 5.0-DP2 a spin (on a machine without critical data!) and let us know how it goes. The more testing that happens before the release, the less fixing we have to do afterwards!

Robert Watson

Bluetooth stack for FreeBSD (Netgraph implementation)

Links

Contact: Maksim Yevmenkin <[email protected]>

Not much to report. Another engineering snapshot is available for download at http://www.geocities.com/m_evmenkin/ngbt-fbsd-20020709.tar.gz. If anyone has Bluetooth hardware and spare time please join in and help me with testing.

This snapshot includes basic support for USB devices and manual pages. The HCI layer now has support for multiple control hooks. All HCI transport drivers (H4, BT3C and UBT) has been changed to provide consistent interface to the rest of the world. Some userspace utilities have been changed as well.

Still no support for RFCOMM (Serial port emulation over Bluetooth link) and SDP (Service Discovery Protocol). Several design flaws have been discovered and it might take some time to resolve these issues.

BSDCon 2003

Links
Call for papers URL: http://www.usenix.org/events/bsdcon03/cfp/

Contact: Gregory Shapiro <[email protected]>

The BSDCon 2003 Program Committee invites you to contribute original and innovative papers on topics related to BSD-derived systems and the Open Source world. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Embedded BSD application development and deployment
  • Real world experiences using BSD systems
  • Using BSD in a mixed OS environment
  • Comparison with non-BSD operating systems; technical, practical, licensing (GPL vs. BSD)
  • Tracking open source development on non-BSD systems
  • BSD on the desktop
  • I/O subsystem and device driver development
  • SMP and kernel threads
  • Kernel enhancements
  • Internet and networking services
  • Security
  • Performance analysis and tuning
  • System administration
  • Future of BSD

Submissions in the form of extended abstracts are due by April 1, 2003. Be sure to review the extended abstract expectations before submitting. Selection will be based on the quality of the written submission and whether the work is of interest to the community.

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Fast IPSEC Status

Contact: Sam Leffler <[email protected]>

The main goal of this project is to modify the IPSEC protocols to use the kernel-level crypto subsystem imported from OpenBSD (see elsewhere). A secondary goal is to do general performance tuning of the IPSEC protocols.

Basic functionality is operational for IPv4 protocols. IPv6 support is coded but not yet tested. Hardware assisted cryptographic operations are working with good performance improvements. Operation with software-based cryptographic calculations appears to be at least as good as the existing implementation. Numerous opportunities for performance improvements have been identified.

This work is currently being done in the -stable tree. A port to the -current tree is about to start.

FreeBSD C99 & POSIX Conformance Project

Links
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/c99/

Contact: Mike Barcroft <[email protected]>
Contact: FreeBSD-Standards Mailing List <[email protected]>

Since the last status report, the following utilities have been brought up to conformance (at least to some degree) with POSIX.1-2001, they include: asa(1), cd(1), compress(1), ctags(1), ls(1), newgrp(1), nice(1), od(1), pathchk(1), renice(1), tabs(1), tr(1), uniq(1), wc(1), and who(1). In addition, development is taking place on bringing the BSD SCCS suite up to date with newer standards.

On the API front, printf(9) has been given support for the `j' and 'n' flags, waitpid(2) now supports the WCONTINUED option, and an implementation of fstatvfs() and statvfs() has been committed. An implementation of utmpx is in progress, which has an aim to address some of the major problems with the current utmp. Several headers have been brought up to conformance with POSIX.1-2001, they include: <netinet/in.h>, <pwd.h>, <sys/statvfs.h>, and <sys/wait.h>.

FreeBSD GNOME Project

Links
FreeBSD GNOME Project Homepage. URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome/

Contact: Joe Marcus <[email protected]>
Contact: Maxim Sobolev <[email protected]>

Things are going well with the FreeBSD GNOME Project. We have just finished porting the GNOME 2.0 Final development platform and desktop to FreeBSD! We hope to be able to make GNOME 2.0 the default for 5.0-DP2 and 4.7-RELEASE. In the meantime, we're working to port more GNOME 2.0 applications.

In order to allow GNOME 1.4.1 applications to work with GNOME 2.0, we are revamping the GNOME porting infrastructure. GNOME 1.4.1 based ports are being converted to use the new GNOMENG porting structure. The specifics of this new system will be written up in the GNOME porting guide found on the FreeBSD GNOME project homepage.

FreeBSD Java Project

Links
FreeBSD Java Project URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/java/

Contact: Greg Lewis <[email protected]>

The BSD Java Porting Team has been making slow but steady progress on a number of fronts in the last few months. Unfortunately most of this has occurred behind the scenes, meaning this is a good opportunity to bring the community up to date.

  • Bill Huey has gotten the Java HotSpot Virtual Machine up and running on FreeBSD! While dubbing the code of alpha quality, Bill has been working hard and is able to run major examples such as the Java 2D demo. This code has hit the repository and will soon be available.
  • The port of the 1.4 J2SDK has commenced. The first commits have gone into the tree, although a first patchset is a way off yet.
  • Progress continues with the TCK compliance testing. The current status has the JDK down to 19 compiler failures and 183 runtime failures. As we edge closer to compliance its hoped that example code will be released to allow the community to pull together through the final few bugs.
  • A new patchset for JDK 1.3.1 is imminent. This patchset will include HotSpot for the first time.

FreeBSD Release Engineering

Links
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng

Contact: <[email protected]>

Over the past few months the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team oversaw a release process that culminated in the release of FreeBSD 4.6 for the i386 and Alpha architectures on June 15. The RE team is currently working concurrently on FreeBSD 4.6.1 and 5.0 DP2. 4.6.1 is a minor point release with an updated SSH and BIND, fixes for some of the reported ata(4) problems, and assorted security enhancements that will be detailed in the release notes. The release engineering activities for 4.6.1 are taking place on the RELENG_4_6 branch in CVS, while the work on 5.0 DP2 is taking place in Perforce so as not to disturb ongoing -CURRENT development. We are still committed to FreeBSD 5.0 on or around November 15, 2002. For more information about upcoming release schedules, please see our website above. The RE team would like to thank Sentex Communications for providing the release builders with access to a fast i386 build machine. Compaq also donated a couple of fast Alpha build machines to the project.

FreeBSD Security Officer Team

Links
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/security

Contact: Jacques Vidrine <[email protected]>

After an outstanding job serving the project as Security Officer for over a year, Kris stepped down in January in order to focus more of his time pursuing his PhD. I offered to attempt to fill the vacant role.

This is the first report by the SO Team. Notable events since the beginning of 2002 follow.

28 FreeBSD Security Advisories have been issued, 16 of which were regarding the base system. Of those sixteen, 8 affected only FreeBSD.

FreeBSD Security Notices were introduced, and four have been issued so far. The Security Notices cover issues that are not regarded as critical enough to warrant a Security Advisory. So far only Ports Collection issues (i.e. vulnerabilities in optional 3rd party packages) have been reported in Security Notices. The first four Security Notices covered 53 individual issues.

Issues reported to the SO team are now being tracked using a RequestTracker ticket database.

The SO team has undergone membership changes, as well as some changes in internal organization. The membership and organization has also been made publicly visible on the FreeBSD Security Officer web page.

FreeBSD/ia64

Links
IA64 project updates and information. URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~peter/ia64/

Contact: Peter Wemm <[email protected]>

IA64 has been progressing slowly. We have access to a prototype 4-way Itaninum2 system from Intel and have managed to get it up and running to the point of being able to access disk and network with SMP enabled. We have a big problem with ACPI2.0 and PCI routing table entries behind pci-pci bridges with no short-term solution in sight. Various WIP items have been committed to CVS, namely more complete support for executing 32bit i386 binaries as well as Marcel Moolenaar's prototype EFI GPT tools.

FreeBSD/KGI Status Report

Links
Project URL URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/~nsouch/ggiport.html

Contact: Nicholas Souchu <[email protected]>

Progression is slow, but the effort is maintained. Most of fb over KGI has been written in parallel with a KGI display driver based on fb. DDC/DDC2 is being discussed for Plug & Play monitor support. KGI aims at providing a generic OS independent interface which would take advantage of FreeBSD I2C (iic(4)) infrastructure.

GEOM - generalized block storage manipulation

Links
Old concept paper here. URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/~phk/Geom/

Contact: Poul-Henning Kamp <[email protected]>

The GEOM code has gotten so far that it beats our current code in some areas while still lacking in others. The goal is for GEOM to be the default in 5.0-RELEASE.

Currently work on a cryptographic module which should be able to protect a diskpartition from practically any sort of attack is progressing.

Hardware Crypto Support Status

Contact: Sam Leffler <[email protected]>

The goal of this project is to import the OpenBSD kernel-level crypto subsystem. This facility provides kernel- and user-level access to hardware crypto devices for the calculation of cryptographic hashes, ciphers, and public key operations. The main clients of this facility are the kernel RNG (/dev/random), network protocols (e.g. IPSEC), and OpenSSL (through the /dev/crypto device).

The software has been available as a patch against the -stable tree for about six months. The core crypto support is tested, including device drivers for the Hifn 7951, and Broadcom 5805, 5820, and 5821 parts. Recent work has concentrated on fixing device driver bugs, fixing support for Hifn 7811 parts, adding support for public key operations, and adding flow-control between the crypto layer and device drivers. Future work includes porting this facility to the -current tree.

Improving FreeBSD Startup Scripts

Links
The Yahoo! group site for discussion of this project URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FreeBSD-rc/links/

Contact: Doug Barton <[email protected]>

Contact: Mike Makonnen <[email protected]>

Contact: Gordon Tetlow <[email protected]>

We are making excellent progress. There is a fully functioning implementation imported to -current now. We need as many people as possible to rc_ng equal to YES in /etc/rc.conf.

The next step is to set the default to YES, which we plan to do before DP 2.

IP Routing Table Replacement

Contact: Andre Oppermann <[email protected]>
Contact: Claudio Jeker <[email protected]>

The current Patricia Trie routing table in BSD UNIX is not very efficient and wastes an enormous amount of space for every node (more than 256 bytes) (A full Internet view of 110k routes takes 33 MByte of KVM). Another problem are pointers from and to everywhere in the routing table. This makes replacing the table very hard and also significantly increases the table maintenance burden (for example for some kinds of updates the entire PCB has to be searched linearly). Also this is a heavy burden for SMP locking. The rewrite focuses on untangling the pointer mess, making the routing table replaceable and providing a more IP optimized table (5 MByte for 110k routes). Other new options include policy routing and some structural alignments in the network stack for clarity, simplicity and flexibility.

The rewritten IP routing table will be ready for committing in October.

ipfw2

Links
URL: http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/

Contact: Luigi Rizzo <[email protected]>

In summer 2002 the native FreeBSD firewall has been completely rewritten in a form that uses BPF-like instructions to perform packet matching in a more effective way. The external user interface is completely backward compatible, though you can make use of some newer match patterns (e.g. to handle sparse sets of IP addresses) which can dramatically simplify the writing of ruleset (and speed up their processing). The new firewall, called ipfw2, is much faster and easier to extend than the old one. It has been already included in FreeBSD-CURRENT, and patches for FreeBSD-STABLE are available from the author.

jp.FreeBSD.org daily SNAPSHOTs project

Links
Project Webpage URL: http://snapshots.jp.FreeBSD.org/
Project Webpage (in Japanese ) URL: http://www.jp.FreeBSD.org/snapshots/
SNAPSHOTs anonftp area on the web URL: http://snapshots.jp.FreeBSD.org:8021
Release branch snapshots for FreeBSD/i386 URL: ftp://daemon.jp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/

Contact: Makoto Matsushita <[email protected]>

I spent busy days in last two months, many new topics are emerged from the project. We now support FreeBSD/alpha 5-current distribution by cross-compiling on the x86 PC. Anonymous ftp area is now exported to the yet another web server. Our release branch snapshots are relocated to daemon.jp.FreeBSD.org because of our CPU/network bandwidth problem.

I'm seriously considering to solve the lack of CPU and network resources for the project's future evolution. Maybe the bandwidth problem can be resolved (several bandwidth offers have been received!), but there is no answer about CPU problems (I have a plan to upgrade our PCs from P3-500MHz to P4 or better). If you have interested in donating PCs to the project, please email me for more detail.

jpman project

Links
jpman project URL: http://www.jp.FreeBSD.org/man-jp/

Contact: Kazuo Horikawa <[email protected]>

For 4.6-RELEASE, we announced the package ja-man-doc-4.6.tgz which is in sync with 4.6-RELEASE base system manual pages except for perl5 pages (jpman project do not maintain them). Continuing section 3 updating has 88% finished.

KAME Project

Links
KAME Project Web Page URL: http://www.kame.net/
IPv6 Showcase at Network+Interop2002 URL: http://www.interop.jp/eng/exhibition/ipv6_showcase.html
IPv6 Showcase at Network+Interop2002 (detailed, but in Japanase) URL: http://www.interop.jp/jp/exhibition/ipv6_showcase.html
Pictures of IPv6 Showcase URL: http://www.sfc.wide.ad.jp/~say/n+i/

Contact: SUZUKI Shinsuke <[email protected]>

I'm afraid KAME Project does not work actively with regard to FreeBSD in these two month, since we are too busy with the demonstration of our IPv6 implementation at Networld+Interop 2002 Tokyo. (Thanks to a great effort, the demonstration was quite successful)

We are aware of netinet6-related bug reports regarding socket handling, fine-grain locking, ip6fw etc. Regret to say, we could not answer them right now due to the above situation, however we'll discus these issues internally and determine what to do.

KSE (Kernel schedulable Entity) thread support

Links
Some info here. URL: http://www.freebsd.ord/~julian/

Contact: Julian Elischer <[email protected]>
Contact: Dan Eischen <[email protected]>

The project took a major step at the beginning of July when Milestone-III was committed. Milestone-III allows a simple test program (available at /usr/src/tools/KSE/ksetest/) to run multiple threads, using kernel support. It does not yet allow the ability to allow these threads to run on different CPUs simultaneously. Milestone IV will be to allow this, however Milestone-III should allow Dan to start (with any interested parties) to start prototyping the userland part of the system. Milestone-III is only currently usable on x86, and does not include some of the requirements for full thread-control, suspension etc. that will be required later.

Before M-IV is started some small tweaking is likely in the central sources on M-III as we discover issues as we try to get the userland jumpstarted. These will have no effect on non-KSE processes, (i.e. all of them :-) and should not be an issue for other developers.

A tex/fig->html guru is needed to help maintain the KSE web page (not mentioned above as it is broken).

Libh Status Report

Links
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/libh.html
libh new development web page. URL: http://usw4.FreeBSD.org/~libh/
First snapshots of the diskeditor in action URL: http://usw4.FreeBSD.org/~libh/screenshots

Contact: Antoine Beaupre <[email protected]>

Contact: Alexander Langer <[email protected]>

Contact: Nathan Ahlstrom <[email protected]>

Max has been busy cleaning up the user interface dark side, and has come up with a plan to improve the build system (using an automated Makefile dependency generator); the UI design and the TCL glue magic (using Swig). A development page has been created on usw4, publishing a lot of information about the current project status, a Changelog, screenshots, documentation, etc. A new listbox widget has been implemented, making diskeditor look nicer and more usable. The package system backend is being inspected and redesigned to conform to a standard that is itself being re-thought. Indeed, the old sysinstall2.txt text has been SGML-ized and enhanced and now provides a good (although rough) overview of libh package system. This allowed the document to be enhanced with diagrams of how different procedures work. We are therefore getting closer to a real pkgAPI specification document. The package management tools have been slightly enhanced and should be a bit more usable, and we started committing regression test suites in the tree, mostly to test and maintain pkg API conformance.

So work continues on libh. I plan to take a look at the rhtvision port to see if it would be better to use it for the tvision backend. I'll keep on working on the package system to make it really trustworthy, while Max is continuing his great work on the UI subsystem. I hope to make a new libh alpha release soon. Note that from now on, libh progress will be published on the development page.

Lightweight Interrupt Scheduling

Links
The interrupt p4 branch URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~peter/p4db/chb.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/interrupt/sys/...

Contact: Bosko Milekic <[email protected]>

The lightweight interrupt scheduling code makes scheduling an interrupt on i386 without having to grab the sched_lock possible, and also avoids a full-blown context switch.

Currently, the code in the p4 branch works, although needs a little bit of cleanup and, most importantly, requires a merge to post-KSE III. Now that stuff seems to have stabilized a bit, I'm waiting to get a little time (and nerve) to do the merge. Also, looking forward for some KSE interface that will allow for "KSE borrowing," which would make this cleaner with regards to KSE and lightweight interrupts. This is a 5.0 feature.

locking up pcb's in the networking stack

Links

Contact: Jeffrey Hsu <[email protected]>

Jennifer Yang's patch was committed June 10 for the BSD Summit. After a few bugs which were reported initially and fixed that same week, networking in -current has been stable, including the parts that were not locked up, like IPv6. Work is on-going to lock up the rest of the stack.

mb_alloc updates

Links
Some [Old] mb_alloc stuff URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~bmilekic/code/mb_alloc/

Contact: Bosko Milekic <[email protected]>

mb_alloc is getting some updates and a couple of optimizations. A new allocator interface routine should already be committed by the time this report is "published:" m_getcl() allocates an mbuf and a cluster in one shot. This is the result of months (literally) of requests from Alfred and, recently, Luigi - who, coincidentally, is the author of the same [upcoming] routine in -STABLE.

Other than that, mb_alloc is being shown how to perform multi-mbuf or cluster allocations without dropping the cache lock in between (m_getcl() and m_getm() will use this). Finally, work is being done to optimize ext_buf ref. count allocations and to provide support for jumbo (> 9K) clusters.

NATD rewrite

Contact: Claudio Jeker <[email protected]>
Contact: Andre Oppermann <[email protected]>

The current natd is pretty powerful in translating different kinds of traffic but not very powerful in configuration. This project rewrites natd and parts of libalias to give it a configuration set as powerful and expressive as the ones in ipf (ipnat) and pf. In addition it'll use kqueue and will support aliasing to multiple IP addresses.

The rewritten natd will be ready for committing in early September.

NEWCARD

Contact: Warner Losh <[email protected]>

A devd daemon, to replace pccardd and usbd, has been designed. A few minor bugs have been fixed in NEWCARD. NEWCARD is now the default in -current. There is an experimental pci/cardbus bus code merge available as a branch which will be merged into current as soon as it is stable.

Status: The ed driver, for non-ne2000 clones, is broken and won't probe. The ata driver won't attach. The sio driver hangs on the first character. The wi driver is known to work well. Cardbus cards are generally known to work well, except for some de based cards, which unfortunately includes the popular Xircom cards. Many systems fail to work because acpi fails to route interrupts correctly for non-root pci bridges.

OLDCARD

Contact: Warner Losh <[email protected]>

A major power bug was fixed in oldcard. This caused many problems for people using PCI interrupts having their machines hang on boot. This fix has made it into 4.6.1.

Cardbus power is now used on all cardbus bridges that support it. This means that we now support 3.3V cards on all cardbus bridges. Before, we only supported them on some of the bridges because every bridge uses different 3.3V power control when programmed through the ExCA registers. Now that we're going through the CardBus bridge's power control register, 3.3V cards work. In fact, for CardBus bridges, the so called X.XV and Y.YV cards will work in those bridges that support them. However, X.XV and Y.YV haven't been defined yet, and no bridges support them (but the bridge interface define it). Obviously this latter part is untested.

CL-PD6722 support has been augmented slightly. Now it is possible to instruct the driver which type of 3.3V card detection strategy to use. There are three choices: none, do it like the CL-PD6710 does it and do it like the CL-PD6722 does it.

Preliminary support for the CL-PD6729 on a PCI card using PCI interrupts has been committed. However, it fails for at least one of the cards like this the author has.

Client drivers can now ask for the manufacturer and model number of the card without parsing the CIS directly.

Except for fixing bugs and updating pccard.conf entries, no additional work is planned on the OLDCARD system.

OpenOffice.org for FreeBSD

Links
OpenOffice.org FreeBSD port Homepage URL: http://projects.imp.ch/openoffice

Contact: Martin Blapp <[email protected]>

The port of openoffice 1.0 has been finished. Most showstopper issues with rtld, libc and our toolchain have been fixed. There is one remaining deadlock in the web-browser code of OO.org. If anybody like to help us with fixing this bug (may be another libc_r bug as it looks like) just mail me! Unfortunately gcc2 support got broken again with the import of gcc2.95.4 in STABLE. Exceptions support seems to be broken again; we get internal compiler errors with c++ exceptions code. You'll have to use gcc31 again.

Since our package cluster is outdated and can not build OO.org packages anytime soon, I did my own little package cluster and can now offer packages for 4.6R for 16 different languages. They can be found on the project homepage.

Porting of OpenOffice1.0.1 is on it's way. A beta port and a package have been made available on the project homepage.

Single UNIX Specification conformant SCCS suite

Contact: Juli Mallett <[email protected]>

The final version of SCCS distributed by CSRG has been integrated into the projects CVS repository, and worked on extensively to the point where essential functionality works on FreeBSD (and other operating systems). Some standards-related functionality has been implemented

SMPng Status Report

Links

Contact: John Baldwin <[email protected]>
Contact: <[email protected]>

The SMPng project has continued to make steady progress in the past two months. Jeff Roberson completed the switch over to UMA for the general kernel malloc() and free() pushing down Giant appropriately so that callers of malloc() and free() are no longer required to hold Giant. Alan Cox continues to clean up the locking in the VM system pushing down Giant in several of the VM related system calls. Jeffrey Hsu committed locking for TCP/IP protocol control blocks in the network stack. John Baldwin committed the changes to the p_canfoo() API to use thread credentials for subject threads and added appropriate locking for the targer process credentials. Support for adaptive mutexes on SMP systems as well as the new IA32 PAUSE instruction were also committed in May. The kernel tracing facility KTRACE also received an overhaul such that the majority of its work was pushed out into a worker thread allowing trace points to no longer require Giant. Andrew Reiter has also been pushing down Giant in several system calls.

Bosko continues to work on light-weight interrupt threads for i386. Most of the bugs in the turnstile code have been found and fixed; however, the turnstile and preemption patches have temporarily been put on hold so that more emphasis can be placed on fixing bugs and making -current more stable in preparation for 5.0 release in November. Alan Cox and Andrew Reiter are continuing the work mentioned above. Jeff Roberson is also working on fixing the current vnode locking in VFS. Peter Wemm has also started to tackle TLB issues on SMP in the i386 pmap again as well.

TCP Hostcache

Contact: Andre Oppermann <[email protected]>

The current cache for the TCP metrics is embedded directly into the routing table route objects. This is highly inefficient as every route has an empty 56 Byte large metrics structure in it. TCP is the only consumer (except the MTU and Expiry field) of the structure. A full view of the Internet routes (110k routes) has more than 6 Mbyte of unused overhead due to it. The hit rate today is at only approx. 10% in webserver applications. The TCP hostcache will move this entire metrics structure from the routing table to the TCP stack. Every entry is a host entry so a simple hash table is sufficient to keep the entries. Its implementation is much like the TCP Syncache.

The hostcache is going through testing on our servers and will be ready for committing in September. The results of the TCP metrics measurement will be used to tune the cache.

TCP Metrics Measurement

Links
Diploma Thesis of ZHWIN students, look for Olivier Mueller and Daniel Graf URL: http://www-t.zhwin.ch/pa02_2/diplomarbeiten2002.pdf

Contact: Andre Oppermann <[email protected]>
Contact: Olivier Mueller <[email protected]>

These students will analyse the tcpdumps of five major Swiss newspaper websites which give a representative overview of the user structure in Switzerland. The nice thing about Switzerland is that is has a very good mix of Modem/ISDN, leased line, Cable, ADSL and 3G/GSM/GPRS users. Every Internet access technology is represented. The goal is to analyze the behavior of all TCP sessions to the monitored sites. Parameters to be analyzed include TCP session RTT, RTT variance, in/outbound BDP, MSS changes, flow control behavior, packet loss, packet retransmit and timing of HTTP traffic to find optimal TCP parameter caching method.

If you have any other metrics you think is useful please contact me so I can put that into the job description for the Students. The study will be made in September and October.

TIRPC port for BSD sockets

Links
TIRPC for FreeBSD Homepage URL: http://www.attic.ch/tirpc
URL: http://www.attic.ch/tirpc

Contact: Martin Blapp <[email protected]>

A lot of remaining PR's and Bugs have been closed. All relevant rpc concerning patches have been committed. Thanks go to Alfred and Ian Dowese.

Jean-Luc Richier <[email protected]> has made a patch available which adds IPv6 support to all remaining rpc servers. See ftp://ftp.imag.fr/pub/ipv6/NFS/NFS_IPV6_FreeBSD5.0.gz and ftp://ftp.imag.fr/pub/ipv6/NFS/0README_NFS_IPV6_FreeBSD5.0 We will check his code and add it to CURRENT ASAP.

A first commit part from TIRPC99 has been done. I'm working now on porting the remaining parts so when FreeBSD 5.0 gets released, it will be TIRPC99 based. This will happen together with the NetBSD project, as they use the same codebase as we do.

TrustedBSD MAC

Links
TrustedBSD main web page URL: http://www.TrustedBSD.org/

Contact: Robert Watson <[email protected]>
Contact: TrustedBSD Discussion Mailing List <[email protected]>

The TrustedBSD Project has been busy in May and June, developing new features, presenting on the technology at the FreeBSD Developer Summit, and improving the readiness of the MAC branch for integration into the main FreeBSD tree. The migration to dynamic labeling in the TrustedBSD MAC framework is complete, with all policies now making use of dynamic labels in the kernel. This permits policies to associate arbitrary additional security data with a variety of kernel objects at run-time. Implement mac_test, a sanity checking module. Pass labels as well as objects to each policy entry point to reduce knowledge of label storage in the policies. Implement mac_partition, a simple jail-like policy. Adapt the MAC framework for process locking.

Improve support for sockets: provide a peerlabel maintained for stream sockets (unix domain, tcp), entry points for accept, bind, connect, listen. Improve support for IPv4 and IPv6 by labeling IP fragment reassembly queues, and providing entry points to instrument fragment matching, update, reassembly, etc. Locally disable KAME if_loop mbuf contiguity hack because it drops labels on mbufs: we need to make sure the label is propagated. Label pipes and provide access control for them. Improve vnode labeling: now handle labeling for devfs, pseudofs, procfs. Fix interactions between MAC and ACLs relating to the new VAPPEND flag.

SELinux policy tools now ported to SEBSD. SEBSD now labels subjects and file system objects. Provide ugidfw, a tool for managing rules for the mac_bsdextended policy.

Massive diff reduction. KSEIII merged. Main tree integration will begin shortly.

Updated prototype code may be retrieved from the TrustedBSD CVS trees on cvsup10.FreeBSD.org.

UFS2 - Extended attribute and large size support for UFS

Contact: Poul-Henning Kamp <[email protected]>
Contact: Kirk Mckusick <[email protected]>

UFS2 is an extension to the well-known UFS filesystem which using a new inode format adds support for "64bit everywhere" and later for extended attribute support, in addition to the current UFS features: soft-updates and snapshots.

The basic UFS2 code has been committed and work on the extended attribute interface and vnode operations will continue.

Userland Regression Tests

Contact: Juli Mallett <[email protected]>

Regression tests for many bugs fixed in text manipulation utilities have been added, as well as tests for various non-standard versions of functionality that FreeBSD users should expect. A library of m4 macros for creating the tests themselves has been added.

Zero Copy Sockets status report

Links
Zero copy patches and information. URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~ken/zero_copy/

Contact: Ken Merry <[email protected]>

The zero copy sockets code was committed to FreeBSD-current on June 25th, 2002. I'm not planning on doing any more patches, although I will leave the web page up as it contains useful information.

Many thanks to the folks who have tested and reviewed the code over the years.

News Home | Status Home