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Introduction

This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between April and June 2011. It is the second of the four reports planned for 2011. Since this quarter, the work is being focused on the next major version of FreeBSD, 9.0, which is to be released in September.

Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! This report contains 36 entries and we hope you enjoy reading it.

Please note that the deadline for submissions covering the period between July and September 2011 is October 15th, 2011.

Projects

FreeBSD Team Reports

Network Infrastructure

Kernel

Documentation

Architectures

Ports

Miscellaneous

Google Summer of Code


    Projects


    Clang replacing GCC in the base system

    Links
    URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/BuildingFreeBSDWithClang
    URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/PortsAndClang

    Contact: Dimitry Andric <[email protected]>
    Contact: Roman Divacky <[email protected]>
    Contact: Brooks Davis <[email protected]>
    Contact: Pawel Worach <[email protected]>

    We imported newer snapshot of clang/llvm. This features quite a lot of goodies. Most notably there's a new register allocator that brings much better runtime performance. If you did a performance evaluation of clang/llvm in the past now it's the time to rerun it with the new register allocator!

    There was some progress on Mips and PowerPC in addition to the usual influx of improvements on ARM, i386 and amd64. We've managed to get clang compiled arm kernel booting. ARM world is blocked by FreeBSD using old ARM ABI.

    We got a buildbot that periodically builds clang/llvm on FreeBSD and FreeBSD (amd64 and i386) using clang/llvm, including booting the resulting image.

    We ran a few ports exp runs and got many ports bugs fixed so right now we're able to build more than 15000 ports with clang. We expect this number to grow rapidly as the problems are mostly trivial.

    Open tasks:

    1. Fix your ports.
    2. Performance evaluate the new clang/llvm.
    3. Fix clang warnings in src.
    4. Implement proper support for cross compiling.

    Fix clang warnings

    Contact: Ben Laurie <[email protected]>

    In order to assist with the process of moving away from gcc, while I learn the ropes of being a contributor, I am systematically fixing clang warnings, so we can turn on -Werror again.

    Down from > 42,000 warnings at the end of May to < 9,000 warnings now.

    Open tasks:

    1. Always happy if someone else finds and fixes a warning!

    libarchive, bsdtar, bsdcpio

    Links
    URL: http://code.google.com/p/libarchive

    Contact: Tim Kientzle <[email protected]>
    Contact: Michihiro Nakajima <[email protected]>

    Libarchive, bsdtar and bsdcpio in 9-CURRENT have been updated to version 2.8.4 (thanks to [email protected]) and bsdtar now supports extracting XAR and RPM archive formats.

    There is ongoing development in trunk with many improvements including support for new formats both on the read (e.g. cab, lha, rar) and write parts (e.g. iso9660, xar).

    ZFS pool version 28

    Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <[email protected]>
    Contact: Martin Matuska <[email protected]>

    ZFS pool version 28 has been merged into 8-STABLE as of June 6, 2011. In addition, several bugfixes and improvements from the Illumos project have been imported.

    Open tasks:

    1. Investigation of ZFS problem reports.

    FreeBSD Team Reports


    ArabBSD

    Links
    Official Website URL: https://sites.google.com/site/arabbsd/

    Contact: Mohammed Farrag <[email protected]>

    FreeBSD Awareness, Handbook Translation and FreeBSD Kernel Development Summer Course.

    Open tasks:

    1. FreeBSD Kernel Development Summer Course.

    The FreeBSD Foundation

    Links
    URL: www.FreeBSDFoundation.org

    Contact: Deb Goodkin <[email protected]>

    We were a proud sponsor of BSDCan. We also sponsored 6 developers to attend the conference. And, we brought in over $1,000 in donations! The Foundation was also represented at FlourishConf in Chicago, IL and SouthEast LinuxFest in Spartanburg, SC.

    We acquired a non-exclusive copyright license to the libcxxrt C++ runtime software from PathScale.

    Sponsored a project to create an IPv6-only version of FreeBSD and PC-BSD.

    We're pleased announce the addition of Ed Maste to our Board of Directors. Ed has been involved with FreeBSD since 2003. And, has been a committer since 2005. Ed leads the OS team at Sandvine and is responsible for a number of developers who bring enhancements from FreeBSD into Sandvine's OS and contribute their own changes back to FreeBSD.

    We continued our work on infrastructure projects to beef up hardware for package-building, network-testing, etc. This includes purchasing equipment as well as managing equipment donations. In fact we just placed an order for a 80-core server for SMP performance work.

    Stop by and visit with us at Ohio LinuxFest, Columbus, OH, on September 10.

    The work above, as well as many other tasks we do for the project, couldn't be done without donations. Please help us by making a donation or asking your company to make a donation. We would be happy to send marketing literature to you or your company. Find out how to make a donation at http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/donate/.

    Find out more up-to-date Foundation news by reading our blog and Facebook page.


    Network Infrastructure


    DIstributed Firewall and Flow-shaper Using Statistical Evidence (DIFFUSE)

    Links
    URL: http://caia.swin.edu.au/urp/diffuse/
    URL: http://caia.swin.edu.au/urp/diffuse/downloads.html

    Contact: Sebastian Zander <[email protected]>
    Contact: Grenville Armitage <[email protected]>

    DIFFUSE is a system enabling FreeBSD's IPFW firewall subsystem to classify IP traffic based on statistical traffic properties.

    With DIFFUSE, IPFW computes statistics (such as packet lengths or inter-packet time intervals) for observed flows, and uses ML (machine learning) to classify flows into classes. In addition to traditional packet inspection rules, IPFW rules may now also be expressed in terms of traffic statistics or classes identified by ML classification. This can be helpful when direct packet inspection is problematic (perhaps for administrative reasons, or because port numbers do not reliably identify applications).

    DIFFUSE also enables one instance of IPFW to send flow information and classes to other IPFW instances, which then can act on such traffic (e.g. prioritise, accept, deny, etc.) according to its class. This allows for distributed architectures, where classification at one location in your network is used to control fire-walling or rate-shaping actions at other locations.

    The DIFFUSE prototype is a set of patches for FreeBSD-CURRENT that can be downloaded from the project's web site. The web site also contains a more comprehensive introduction, as well as links to related work and documentation.

    In July 2011, we released DIFFUSE v0.4. This release contains a number of bug fixes and new features. Most notably we improved the functionality of the tools used for training classification models, and performing offline analysis.

    DIFFUSE v0.4 is the last release, as the DIFFUSE project has concluded. However, we may release bug fixes in the future if necessary.

    FreeBSD IPv6-only Support

    Links
    FreeBSD Foundation project announcement URL: http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/project%20announcements.shtml#Bjoern
    FreeBSD Foundation and iXsystems press release URL: http://www.ixsystems.com/ix/media/freebsd-foundation-and-ixsystems-announce-ipv6-only-testing-versions-of-freebsd-and-pc-bsd
    FreeBSD IPv6-only Support URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ipv6/ipv6only.html
    PC-BSD IPv6 URL: http://www.pcbsd.org/IPv6

    Contact: Bjoern A. Zeeb <[email protected]>

    As a follow-up work to the no-IP kernel, a FreeBSD IPv6-only prototype kernel was build beginning of 2010. This work was now carried on and merged to mainstream FreeBSD and will be part of the upcoming 9.0-RELEASE allowing for custom no-IPv4 kernels to be built. In addition IPv6 installation and configuration support for FreeBSD and PC-BSD were improved.

    An IPv6-only kernel and continued efforts to build world without IPv4, like FreeBSD had supported compiling out IPv6 for a long time, will allow easier IPv6 validation work to happen. This will not only help FreeBSD or FreeBSD-derived commercial product builders but we are also hoping to motivate other Open Source projects to test their software for IPv6-readiness on FreeBSD or PC-BSD.

    We have provided and will continue to provide IPv6-only snapshots for FreeBSD. In IPv6-only PC-BSD snapshots have been released to provide a great Open Source desktop environment to test GUI applications for IPv6-readiness as well.

    I would like to thank the FreeBSD Foundation and iXsystems for their support of the project, as well as George Neville-Neil for providing review and Kris Moore for helping on the PC-BSD integration and building and providing the PC-BSD snapshots.

    IPv6 RA Handling Improvements

    Contact: Hiroki Sato <[email protected]>

    ICMPv6 Router Advertisement (RA) message is a part of IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Protocol in RFC 4861 and takes an important role in IPv6 basic functionality. FreeBSD supports it in the kernel, and the rtadvd(8) and rtsold(8) programs derived from KAME project handle it in userland.

    This small project aims to improve the current RA handling by removing limitations and adding new functionality found in the latest RFCs. Changes committed are as follows:

    • FreeBSD now supports RA receiving even if net.inet6.ip6.forwarding=1 and enabling/disabling the receiving in a per-interface basis. The traditional "host" and "router" node model in IPv6 RFCs is translated into a concept of "RA-receiving interfaces" and "RA-sending interfaces" in FreeBSD�9.0 or later, not depending only on system-wide IP forwarding capability. This is useful for a system with multiple IPv6-capable interfaces (such as a customer-edge router) which require SLAAC (Stateless Address Autoconfiguration) feature described in RFC 4862.
    • The rtadvd(8) and rtsold(8) programs now support IPv6 Router Advertisement Options for DNS Configuration in RFC 6106. This enables updating /etc/resolv.conf by using RAs.
    • The rtadvd(8) daemon now supports dynamically-added/removed interfaces. Although it was needed that all of RA-sending interfaces exist before the daemon was invoked, the new version no longer requires it. When a new interface arrived, it will be configured on the fly.
    • The rtadvctl(8) utility has been added. This displays RA-sending status on each interface and provides a way to control the daemon. This utility makes system administration much easier.

    All of the changes described above have already been committed to 9-CURRENT and a part of them will be merged to 8-STABLE.

    netmap

    Links
    URL: http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/

    Contact: Luigi Rizzo <[email protected]>

    netmap is a novel framework to achieve wire-speed packet processing in FreeBSD, while retaining the safety and richness of features provided by the user space environment, and using only standard system calls. With netmap, it takes as little as 70 clock cycles to move one packet between the user program and the wire. As an example, a single core running at 900MHz can generate the 14.8Mpps that saturate a 10GigE interface. This is a 5-10x improvement over the use of a standard device driver. netmap is implemented with a relatively small kernel device driver (less than 2000 lines of code), plus individual network card patches (300-500 lines each; currently supported are Intel 1 and 10 Gbit cards, and RealTek 1 Gbit cards). No special user libraries are needed, although we have a small libpcap-over-netmap which enables the use of existing applications on top of the new API with no source or binary modifications. The netmap home page contains a more detailed description of the project, source code, papers and slides.

    New ipfw features

    Links
    URL: http://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/base?view=revision&revision=223666

    Contact: Vadim Goncharov <[email protected]>

    The ipfw(4) packet filter now supports call and return rule actions. When a packet matches a rule with the call action, the rule number is saved in the internal stack and rules processing continues from the first rule with specified number (similar to skipto action, but backward jumps are allowed). If later a rule with return action is encountered, the processing returns to the first rule with number greater than the number saved in the internal stack. This makes it possible to organize "subroutines" with rules, e.g. to call one subroutine several times from different places in the ruleset. For more details, see ipfw(8).

    TCP User Timeout Option (UTO)

    Links
    Project Wiki URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/CatalinNicutar/TCPUTO
    Repository URL: http://p4web.FreeBSD.org/@md=d&cd=//depot/projects/soc2011/&dw=u&c=kml@//depot/projects/soc2011/cnicutar_tcputo_8/?ac=83

    Contact: Catalin Nicutar <[email protected]>
    Contact: Bjoern Zeeb <[email protected]>

    The goal of the User Timeout option is to allow an application to tweak the time TCP waits for acknowledgements. Using UTO, an application can choose the exact time it is willing to wait for data to be acknowledged. Also, an application can suggest to its peer the time it should wait before dropping the connection (the peer may or may not allow this).

    As an example, a SSH client can request a large timeout (4 hours) for a connection. After some time the client is disconnected, reconnecting 2 hours later (with the same IP). Due to UTO, the connection should still be alive and any lost data should be retransmitted.

    Current testing is done on TCP over IPv4. Timeouts can be limited by global sysctls and an application can choose how to send or accept timeout values via socket options. In addition to regression tests, support has been added to telnet, ssh and netcat.

    Open tasks:

    1. Regression tests for TCP over IPv6.
    2. Add support to more userland applications.
    3. Implement strategies and regression tests to handle and simulate DoS scenarios.

    Kernel


    Intel GPU Driver

    Links
    URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Intel_GPU

    Contact: Konstantin Belousov <[email protected]>

    The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored project to port the Linux kernel-mode driver for Intel GPU progressed to the point where some machines can use Xorg with ddx driver from the git head and latest Mesa. On my test machine I was able to run uhexen2 and ioquake3.

    Nonetheless, the driver is still in the early stages of debugging. Read the wiki page for more details, guidelines on installation and initial bug analysis.

    Main efforts right now are directed on getting the required VM changes into the base system, ideally before 9.0 is released.

    OpenAFS port

    Links
    OpenAFS home page URL: http://openafs.org
    FreeBSD Wiki on AFS URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/afs

    Contact: Benjamin Kaduk <[email protected]>
    Contact: Derrick Brashear <[email protected]>

    AFS is a distributed network filesystem that originated from the Andrew Project at Carnegie-Mellon University. Since our last report, upstream OpenAFS has updated to a 1.6.0pre6 release candidate, which is available in the FreeBSD Ports Collection. We still expect the upcoming 1.6.0 release to be usable for regular client workloads (though not heavy load). We have also made progress on integration with the bsd.kmod.mk kernel-module-building infrastructure, with a working prototype implementation. Further cleanup and testing is needed before it is ready to be committed.

    There are several known outstanding issues that are being worked on, but detailed bug reports are welcome at [email protected].

    Open tasks:

    1. Update VFS locking to allow the use of disk-based client caches as well as memory-based caches.
    2. Track down races and deadlocks that may appear under load.
    3. Integrate with the bsd.kmod.mk kernel-module build infrastructure.
    4. Eliminate a moderate memory leak from the kernel module.
    5. PAG (Process Authentication Group) support is not functional.

    Overhaul of the mii(4)-subsystem

    Links

    Contact: Marius Strobl <[email protected]>

    The mii(4)-subsystem has been overhauled and fixes and enhancements from NetBSD/OpenBSD since mii(4) originally has been ported over have been merged. As a result a lot of code duplication and hacks have been removed from the PHY drivers and we are now able again to share the miidevs file with NetBSD. Due to KPI breakages the majority of this work will not be merged back into 8-STABLE and earlier.

    Additionally shorthand aliases for common media+option combinations as announced by mii(4) have been added to the ifmedia code so that now one can actually supply the media strings found in the dmesg output to ifconfig(8). Support for this will be merged back to 8-STABLE prior to 8.3-RELEASE.

    Status Report for NFS

    Contact: Rick Macklem <[email protected]>

    The new NFS client and server are no longer considered experimental and will most likely be the default for FreeBSD�9.0. Included is support for NFSv4.0 as well as NFSv3 and NFSv2. The NFSv4.0 support was tested at a recent NFSv4 Interoperability Bakeathon held at CITI of the University of Michigan. Also tested at the Bakeathon was a basic client implementation of NFSv4.1 which will soon be available as a test patch against the FreeBSD�9.0 kernel sources. If you are interested in testing NFSv4.1, stay tuned to the [email protected] mailing list. [email protected] and friends will be taking on a majority of the NFSv4 server work while I concentrate on the client, with hopes that the NFSv4.1 support will mature over the next year or so.

    I will also be making a patch for an experimental aggressive client side on-disk caching mechanism for NFSv4 I call Packrats available. An announcement about this will be made on [email protected] as well.


    Documentation


    FreeBSD June 6th, 2011 Doc Sprint

    Links
    The DocSprints page in the FreeBSD wiki URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/DocSprints
    Results of the June 6 Doc Sprint URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~bcr/doc/sprints/20110606-final.html
    Closed PRs during the doc sprint URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~linimon/annotated_prs.docsprint.html
    Website of the Open Help conference URL: http://openhelpconference.com/

    Contact: Benedict Reuschling <[email protected]>
    Contact: Dru Lavigne <[email protected]>

    On June 6, the FreeBSD documentation project held a doc sprint where a number of documentation issues were discussed. The sprint took place primarily in IRC channel #bsddocs on EFNet. Notes were taken in an Etherpad document where all participants could concurrently edit them in an easy to use interface. Parallel to the discussion, a number of doc problem reports have been closed. There are still some doc PRs that have been identified that could also be closed, because their original issue was already committed but the PR is still open. This needs to be investigated on a case by case basis.

    Dru Lavigne brought in her experiences from the Open Help conference that she was attending during the sprint. It would be good to have some FreeBSD documentation people at a future Open Help conference to exchange ideas with other open source documentation projects and how they go about doing their work.

    The primary discussion focused on the issues that have been talked about at the documentation working group at BSDCan's DevSummit in May. Subjects like converting the documentation repository from CVS to SVN, the move from DocBook SGML to XML-based documentation as well as other formats like RST (re-restructured text), and publication efforts of the handbook in electronic and dead-tree form were thoroughly debated.

    Overall participation was good, but we would like to have more documentation folks to participate in future sprints. The next sprint is planned before EuroBSDCon 2011 and will be announced in time so that interested people can set aside some time for it. We also plan to include different time zones so that we can have more input from various areas. We hope to establish these kind of sprints on a regular basis to deal with documentation issues that affect the whole community.

    Thanks to everyone who participated and helped bring some of the issues we talked about forward.

    Open tasks:

    1. Schedule the next documentation sprint before the next EuroBSDCon and include different timezones.
    2. Work on the todo items identified during the sprint.
    3. Resolve open documentation problem reports identified to be fixed, but still open for some reason.

    The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project

    Links
    Wiki Page URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/DutchDocumentationProject
    Perforce repository URL: http://p4web.freebsd.org/@md=d&cd=//depot/projects/&c=Hid@//depot/projects/docproj_nl/?ac=83

    Contact: Remko Lodder <[email protected]>
    Contact: Ren� Ladan <[email protected]>

    During the last period most work went into keeping the Handbook up to date; it is currently up-to-date except for a section on network servers. Other areas being worked on are the FAQ and the web site. The latter two are still a work-in-progress.

    Open tasks:

    1. Volunteers! The best part is that you do not need to be an expert on FreeBSD nor the Dutch language to join, just some enthusiasm and spare time.

    The FreeBSD Japanese Documentation Project

    Links
    Japanese FreeBSD Web Pages URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ja/
    The FreeBSD Japanese Documentation Project Web Page URL: http://www.jp.FreeBSD.org/doc-jp/

    Contact: Hiroki Sato <[email protected]>
    Contact: Ryusuke Suzuki <[email protected]>

    The www/ja and doc/ja_JP.eucJP/books/handbook subtrees have constantly been updated. During this period, many part of out-dated contents in the www/ja subtree were updated to the latest versions in the English counterpart. Thus most of the files in the subtree are already synchronized with www/en at this moment, and this updating work will be finished within this year.

    For FreeBSD Handbook, translation work for the kernelconfig section was just started. In addition, we are planning to translate the upcoming release announcement because it is also important for Japanese people.

    Open tasks:

    1. Further translation work for outdated and/or non-translated documents in both doc/ja_JP.eucJP and www/ja.

    Architectures


    FreeBSD on the Sony Playstation 3

    Links
    URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/ps3/

    Contact: Nathan Whitehorn <[email protected]>

    The FreeBSD Playstation 3 port is now fairly mature and will be included in the 9.0 release, starting with BETA2. Most internal devices, including the USB ports, bluetooth, ethernet, and SATA devices are now supported, and the operating system can be installed to and boot from the internal hard disk.

    There are several remaining pieces to the port (Wireless, Sound, X11, and the SPUs), which may be interesting projects for those interested in non-PC architectures.

    Open tasks:

    1. Built-in wireless. The 802.11 wireless interface on the Playstation 3 is multiplexed through the wired ethernet MAC and is currently unsupported.
    2. The sound hardware is not currently supported.
    3. The framebuffer driver does not currently support X11. This would involve writing a simple X11 framebuffer driver to connect to syscons.
    4. The synergistic processing units (SPUs) on the Cell processor are not supported yet. They present an interesting model of heterogeneous computing, more suited for full treatment by a UNIX-type kernel than GPGPU computing: each SPU has a concept of user and supervisor mode, as well as interrupts, and can share MMU context with the main CPU cores. As such, they in principle can support a full UNIX process model.

    FreeBSD/arm on Marvell Armada XP

    Contact: Grzegorz Bernacki <[email protected]>
    Contact: Rafal Jaworowski <[email protected]>

    Marvell Armada XP is a complete system-on-chip solution based on Sheeva embedded CPU. These devices integrate up to four ARMv6/v7 compliant Sheeva CPU cores with shared L2 cache. This work is extending FreeBSD/arm infrastructure towards support for recent ARM architecture variations along with a basic set of device drivers for integrated peripherials. Current FreeBSD suppport for Armada XP includes:

    • Booting via U-Boot bootloader
    • ARMv6/v7 support
      • Reworked CPU indentification scheme
      • New cache identification scheme
      • Support for PIPT caches
      • Reworked PMAP for ARMv6/v7 features
    • Serial console support (UART)
    • Interrupt controller
    • Integrated timers
    • USB driver attachment
    • Ethernet controller driver

    Next steps:

    • L2 cache support
    • SMP support
    • PCI-Express and SATA drivers

    FreeBSD/powerpc on AppliedMicro APM86290

    Contact: Grzegorz Bernacki <[email protected]>
    Contact: Rafal Jaworowski <[email protected]>

    The APM86290 system-on-chip device is a member of AppliedMicro's PACKETpro family of embedded processors. The chip includes two Power Architecture PPC465 processor cores, which are compliant with Book-E specification of the architecture, and a number of integrated peripherals. This work is extending current Book-E support in FreeBSD towards PPC4xx processors variation along with device drivers for integrated peripherials. Current FreeBSD APM86290 support includes:

    • Booting via U-Boot bootloader
    • Support for PPC465 core
    • L1 cache
    • Serial console (UART)

    Next steps:

    • Interrupt controller
    • EHCI USB driver attachment
    • Ethernet controller
    • Queue Manager/Traffic Manager
    • L2 cache support

    FreeBSD/powerpc64 on IBM pSeries machines

    Links
    Development Branch URL: svn://svn.FreeBSD.org/base/projects/pseries/

    Contact: Nathan Whitehorn <[email protected]>
    Contact: Andreas Tobler <[email protected]>

    The goal of this project is to make FreeBSD running on PAPR compliant machines like the IBM pSeries family.

    Currently we can boot a POWER7 emulation under a recent qemu snapshot.

    The boot process stops when trying to find a PIC.

    The same applies for an IntelliStation-285. (POWER5+).

    Open tasks:

    1. Implement interrupt controller.
    2. PCI bus scanning.
    3. Drivers, drivers, drivers.
    4. Improve memory management.

    FreeBSD/sparc64

    Contact: Marius Strobl <[email protected]>

    • The iommu(4) driver has been changed to take advantage of the streaming buffers of the host-PCI and host-SBus bridges if present, which in at least some configurations results in a modest performance improvement due to the caching of DMA transactions. As a prerequisite, the bus_dma(9) usage of all drivers compiled as part of the sparc64 GENERIC kernel has been reviewed and fixed and in case of sound(4) and sym(4) at least worked around as necessary in order to be able to use the streaming buffers.
      Support for this will be merged back to 8-STABLE prior to 8.3-RELEASE.
    • Following the update of the in-tree binutils to 2.17.50, which now for the first time include support for GNUTLS on sparc64 in the base, support for TLS relocations on sparc64 was added to rtld(1) and enabled in the base GCC and malloc(3).
    • Support and a workaround necessary for Sun Fire V890 equipped with UltraSPARC-IV was added.
      Support for these will be merged back to 8-STABLE prior to 8.3-RELEASE.
    • The schizo(4) driver has been updated to also support the XMITS Fireplane/Safari to PCI-X bridges and a workaround for Casinni/Skyhawk combinations has been added. Chances are that the latter solves the crashes seen when using the on-board Casinni NICs of Sun Fire V480 equipped with centerplanes other than 501-6780 or 501-6790.
      These changes have been merged back to 8-STABLE and will be part of 8.3-RELEASE.
    • As part of the largeSMP project which had the goal of supporting more than 32 CPU cores in FreeBSD several parts of the sparc64 specific code had to be adapted mainly in the assembler bits but as a result now also supports more than 32 CPU cores.
    • On machines where we do not need to lock the kernel TSB into the dTLB and thus may basically use the entire 64-bit kernel address space, i.e. on machines equipped with UltraSPARC-III+ and greater CPUs, the kernel virtual memory was increased to not be limited by VM_KMEM_SIZE_MAX and VM_KMEM_SIZE_SCALE decreased to 1 allowing kernel to use more memory as for example useful for ZFS.
      These changes will be merged back to 8-STABLE prior to 8.3-RELEASE.
    • The shortcut taken in the code responsible for flushing user mappings from the TLBs of UltraSPARC-III and greater CPUs turned out to not scale well on MP-systems with more than 8 CPU cores and thus was re-written. As a result it now scales up to at least 16-way machines.
      These changes will be merged back to 8-STABLE prior to 8.3-RELEASE.

    Ports


    Chromium

    Links
    Main project site URL: http://www.chromium.org/Home
    FreeBSD porting site URL: http://trillian.chruetertee.ch/chromium

    Contact: Chromium on FreeBSD Team <[email protected]>

    During the last quarter we have been keeping the Chromium browser up to date, with new major releases being imported into the Ports Collection the same day as the upstream release. As time passes by, more patches are incorporated or otherwise became obsolete by virtue of upstream code cleanups. Version 13 is already available from the Chruetertee repository, with 70 patches less than version 12.

    FreeBSD Haskell Ports

    Links
    FreeBSD Haskell wiki page URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Haskell
    FreeBSD Haskell ports repository URL: https://github.com/freebsd-haskell/freebsd-haskell/
    FreeBSD Haskell mailing list URL: http://haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-haskell/

    Contact: G�bor J�nos P�LI <[email protected]>
    Contact: Ashish SHUKLA <[email protected]>
    Contact: Giuseppe Pilichi <[email protected]>

    We are proud to announce that the FreeBSD Haskell Team has committed Haskell Platform 2011.2.0.1 to the FreeBSD Ports Collection, as well as updated existing ports to their latest stable versions. Apart from the ports officially available there, many ports (Snap web framework, Leksah, and their dependencies) are still waiting to be added. Any users who like to get early access to them, please refer to the instructions at our development repository.

    Open tasks:

    1. Update Haskell Platform (along with GHC) to 2011.4.0.0 as soon as it gets out.
    2. Add more ports to the Ports Collection.
    3. Create a port for Happstack.
    4. Create a port for gitit.

    KDE-FreeBSD

    Links
    KDE-FreeBSD home page URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org
    Dot article on the KDE sprints in Switzerland URL: http://dot.kde.org/2011/06/29/platform-frameworks-kde-hackers-meet-switzerland
    Call for test of KDE PIM 4.6.0 URL: http://blogs.FreeBSDish.org/avilla/2011/06/14/call-for-tests-kde-pim-4-6-0
    area51 Switzerland URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org/area51.php

    Contact: KDE FreeBSD <[email protected]>

    Alberto Villa and Raphael Kubo da Costa went to Randa, Switzerland, to attend, respectively, the KDE Multimedia/Kdenlive sprint and the Platform 11 sprint. The sprints afforded them the opportunity to form closer bonds with the upstream KDE community, to learn about the future of Qt and KDE and make sure FreeBSD's needs are taken into account. For more information see the article "From Platform to Frameworks -- KDE hackers meet in Switzerland" at dot.kde.org.

    The KDE on FreeBSD team have continued to improve the experience of KDE and Qt under FreeBSD. The latest round of improvements include:

    • Qt supports Clang as a compiler

    The team has also made many releases and upstreamed many fixes and patches. The latest round of releases include:

    • Qt: 4.7.3
    • KDE: 4.6.3; 4.6.4; 4.6.5
    • Amarok: 2.4.1
    • Digikam (and KIPI-plugins): 1.9.0

    Further testing is requested for KDE PIM 4.6.0 and Calligra 2.3.72 before the ports are committed. To test the ports please visit Alberto Villa's call for test and area51.

    The team is always looking for more testers and porters so please visit us at [email protected] and our homepage.

    Open tasks:

    1. Testing KDE PIM 4.6.0.

    libvirt networking port

    Links
    URL: http://www.libvirt.org/

    Contact: Jason Helfman <[email protected]>
    Contact: Daniel P. Berrange <[email protected]>

    Libvirt, a Toolkit to interact with virtualization capabilities, has been ported to FreeBSD, however the networking capabilities have been disabled as they are incompatible with FreeBSD. Libvirt currently supports connecting to many types of hypervisors, however it can be a far more useful tool if the networking capabilities were ported to FreeBSD.

    In contacting Daniel P. Berrange, he was kind enough to advise on what is required to port networking of libvirt to FreeBSD. His response is paraphrased below:

    There are two aspects to networking in libvirt:

    • The virtual network driver (in src/network/bridge_driver.c) uses the Linux kernel's native 'bridge' functionality to provide an isolated, or routed, or NATed network connection to guests. There is a bridge device on the host created, and guest TAP devices are added to it. There is no physical ethernet device added to the bridge, and iptables is used to control whether the host OS routes traffic to/from the bridge & physical LAN.
      Porting bridge and bridge control functionality to FreeBSD would need to be done, and how to nat/routed/isolated guest configs and write a compatible version of bridge_driver.c for FreeBSD.
    • The host interface driver (in src/inteface/netcf_driver.c) uses the netcf library to manage configuration of host network interfaces to do things like bonding, vlans, bridging and controlling the interfaces availability. The core job is to port netcf to work with FreeBSD. A netcf backend that understands FreeBSD's networking configuration files and calls appropriate tools to bring interfaces online/offline would need to be created.

    Both these jobs are pretty much independent, so can easily be done in parallel.

    Open tasks:

    1. Port bridge network driver for libvirt.
    2. Port netcf driver for libvirt.

    Portbuilder

    Links
    GIT Repository URL: https://github.com/DragonSA/portbuilder
    README URL: https://github.com/DragonSA/portbuilder/blob/0.1.3/README
    TODO URL: https://github.com/DragonSA/portbuilder/blob/0.1.3/TODO

    Contact: David Naylor <[email protected]>

    I would like to introduce a project that has been in the works for the last 3 years. From the projects README:

    A concurrent ports building tool. Although FreeBSD ports supports building a single port using multiple jobs (via MAKE_JOBS), it cannot build multiple ports concurrently. This tool accomplishes just that.

    Some of its key features:

    • Concurrent port building
    • Load control
    • Top like UI
    • Persistent builds (by default)

    Portbuilder originally used threads to control each port at each stage of the build however the required locks resulting in deadlocks, and some ports would not build correctly. To resolve those issues a rewrite was done to use only a single thread, making all locking code redundant. Thanks to the use of kqueue(2) the overhead of managing concurrent port builds is minimal. Further work to reduce that overhead is underway.

    Portbuilder is installable from ports under ports-mgmt/portbuilder, see the README for usage details. Please note that this is considered BETA quality, that the feature set and API are expected to change, and that portbuilder may crash or fail to behave properly.

    Open tasks:

    1. Wiki page.
    2. Testing.
    3. See TODO.

    Ports Collection

    Links
    URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
    URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing-ports/
    URL: http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/index.html
    URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/portmgr/index.html
    URL: http://blogs.FreeBSDish.org/portmgr/
    URL: http://www.twitter.com/freebsd_portmgr/
    URL: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=135441496471197
    URL: http://FreeBSDFoundation.blogspot.com/2011/06/bsdcan-trip-report-baptiste-daroussin.html
    URL: http://FreeBSDFoundation.blogspot.com/2011/06/bsdcan-trip-report-julien-laffaye.html
    URL: http://FreeBSDFoundation.blogspot.com/2011/06/bsdcan-trip-report-thomas-abthorpe.html
    URL: http://blogs.FreeBSDish.org/portmgr/2011/05/26/thankyoufoundation/

    Contact: Thomas Abthorpe <[email protected]>
    Contact: Port Management Team <[email protected]>

    The ports tree slowly moves up closer to 23,000. The PR count still remains at about 1100.

    In Q2 we added 3 new committers, took in 2 commit bits for safe keeping, and added a new member to portmgr.

    The Ports Management team have been running -exp runs on an ongoing basis, verifying how base system updates may affect the ports tree, as well as providing QA runs for major ports updates. Of note, -exp runs were done for:

    • ports/154044, -exp run to update x11-toolkits/open-motif
    • ports/155269, -exp run to fix problem with base/ports ncurses
    • ports/155215, -exp run to update gmake, completed by linimon
    • ports/156575, -exp run to generate a subset of ports in INDEX
    • ports/155983, -exp run to reroot md5 in /sbin
    • ports/139116, -exp run to call target "install-rc-script" before "post-install"
    • ports/155510, -exp run to remove support for pre 7.X
    • ports/156533, -exp run to patch bsd.apache.mk
    • ports/152498, -exp run to improve USERS/GROUPS handling
    • flz has been performing clang -exp runs
    • erwin performed -exp run for perl 5.12.4 update
    • pav performed multiple -exp runs for gtk3

    Open tasks:

    1. Looking for help getting ports to build with clang.
    2. Looking for help fixing ports broken on CURRENT. (List needs updating, too)
    3. Looking for help with Tier-2 architectures. (List needs updating, too)
    4. Most ports PRs are assigned, we now need to focus on testing, committing, and closing.

    Miscellaneous


    bsd_day(2011)

    Links
    URL: http://bsdday.eu/2011

    Contact: Martin Matuska <[email protected]>
    Contact: G�bor P�li <[email protected]>

    The purpose of this one-day event is to gather Central European developers of today's open-source BSD systems to popularize their work and their organizations, and to meet each other in the real life. We would also like to motivate potential future developers and users, especially undergraduate university students to work with BSD systems.

    This year's BSD-Day will be held in Bratislava, Slovakia at Slovak University of Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology on November 5, 2011.

    Everybody is welcome!

    Open tasks:

    1. Apply. We are looking for you!

    Google Summer of Code


    Capsicum adaptation and core libraries

    Links
    URL: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum
    URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SOC2011IlyaBakulin

    Contact: Ilya Bakulin <[email protected]>

    Some applications from the base system received sandboxing support, current task is to adapt lightweight resolver daemon for using it in sandboxes — this fixes problems with applications that need to convert IP addresses into domain names while in sandbox.

    Open tasks:

    1. Add sandboxing to even more applications in the base system.
    2. Help Jonathan Anderson and Robert Watson to merge FreeBSD-Capsicum into FreeBSD-HEAD.

    Disk device error counters

    Links
    Wiki page URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Disk%20device%20error%20counters

    Contact: Oleksandr Dudinskyi <[email protected]>

    Currently, I work on schedule, I printed the information of disk error in utility iostat option -E. While only displays five types of errors. Further analysis will give me the opportunity to identify other types of disk errors.

    Open tasks:

    1. Search other type of error and the place of their registration.
    2. Maybe find a better place registration of errors than xpt_done().

    Google Summer of Code

    Links
    Summer of Code 2011 Project Wiki Pages URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2011

    Contact: Brooks Davis <[email protected]>
    Contact: Robert Watson <[email protected]>

    We are happy to be participating in our 7th Google Summer of Code. After the mid-term evaluation we have 15 projects working towards the final evaluation. You can see the latest status on student's individual wiki pages or by subscribing to the soc-status mailing list.

    nvi-iconv

    Links
    Project proposal URL: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/zy/1
    GitHub page URL: https://github.com/lichray/nvi2

    Contact: Zhihao Yuan <[email protected]>

    This project creates a multibyte aware nvi fork. While most of the userland tools in the FreeBSD base system support multibyte encodings, there is no pure-licensed nvi fork comes with sufficient multibyte encoding (both Unicode and non-Unicode) support prior to this.

    Currently, functionally, the new nvi is ready for testing. The description is at https://github.com/lichray/nvi2/wiki (the patch is deprecated). I will commit a new one latter.

    The features dropped from nvi-1.79 are:

    • Perl and Tcl interpreter supports;
    • The whole Perl/Tcl/Tk scripting framework;
    • A third-party gtags support.

    and the features adopted from nvi-1.81.6 includes:

    • Multibyte encoding supports (wchar_t + libiconv + libncursesw);
    • fileencoding and inputencoding options;
    • Undocumented :vsplit command, which vertically splits the screen.

    Many known bugs, incomplete code from nvi-devel are fixed. However, I find a serious memory leaking (via valgrind) in the nvi-devel iconv framework. This requires a careful review.

    Open tasks:

    1. Reviews the iconv part and fixes the memory leak.
    2. Ex scripts for testing. But it seems that I have no experience on that...
    3. File encoding detection. My plan it to detect UTF-16 BOM first, then UTF-8. If all fails, uses locale. UTF-8 BOM is not supported by iconv, and we need to discuss whether we should support it in the editor.

    Replacing the Regular Expression Code

    Links
    Wiki page URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/G%C3%A1borSoC2011

    Contact: G�bor K�vesd�n <[email protected]>

    The current regular expression code in libc is quite outdated and does not support wide characters. There are various open source regular expression libraries but replacing the code is not a simple task because there are quite many considerations and requirements. The best candidate is TRE, which is a BSD-licensed, supports wide and multibyte characters, conforms to POSIX and it performs well compared to another available alternatives, so the work has been started with TRE. Apart from the replacement, the plan is to implement heuristical matching, which will speed up the pattern matching significantly. Besides, grep and diff in the base system have been using the GNU regex code, which has a more permissive syntax. It is desired to have a single regex engine in the base system, so the GNU syntax has to be implemented (as an optional feature), as well.

    So far, a fast string matching algorithm has been added, which is a variant of the Turbo Boyer-Moore algorithm. It has been slightly tuned to support not only literal patterns but patterns containing $^. symbols. This algorithm is used automatically when the pattern makes it possible.

    Besides, heuristic matching has also been implemented. If the fast matcher cannot be applied directly, it parses the pattern and separates the fixed-length prefix and suffix of the pattern. Then it can be used to locate the possibly matching regions of the text, using a more efficient algorithm than the full regex NFA and the latter only has to be applied to the narrow context that has been located.

    Open tasks:

    1. Implement GNU regex syntax.
    2. Add test suite GNU-specific behavior and also add some tests for locale-specific behavior.
    3. Test and review the code. Contact the author and check if these improvements can be added to the upstream code so that more people can benefit from this.
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