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Introduction

This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between October and December 2011. It is the last of the four reports planned for 2011. This quarter was mainly devoted to polishing the bits for the next major version of FreeBSD, 9.0, which was already successfully released in the beginning of January 2012.

Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! This report contains 32 entries and we hope you enjoy reading it.

Please note that the deadline for submissions covering the period between January and March 2012 is April 15th, 2012.

Projects

Auditdistd Project

Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <[email protected]>

Current weakness of FreeBSD's Security Event Audit facility is that audit records are stored locally and can be modified or removed by an attacker after a system compromise.

The auditdistd will allow to reliably and securely distribute audit trail files over TCP/IP network to remote system. In case of system compromise it will enable administrators to analyze audit records in trusted environment.

This project is sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation and should be completed by the end of February 2012.

BSD-Licensed C++ Stack

Contact: David Chisnall <[email protected]>

Two new libraries, libc++ (providing a C++11 STL implementation) and libcxxrt (providing an implementation of the C++ ABI specification) have been added. This is enabled by adding WITH_LIBCPLUSPLUS=yes to src.conf. It is not enabled by default because libc++ does not build with the version of gcc in the base system and requires you to build with clang.

Once it is built, you can select between using GNU libstdc++ and libc++ by adding -stdlib=libc++ or -stdlib=libstdc++ to your compile and link flags (when building with clang).

If you are running head (or have a spare [virtual] machine you can try it on) then please try building your C++ code with libc++ and let me know of any failures, ideally with reduced test cases.

Open tasks:

Test ports with libc++. Hopefully most will Just Work., but others may need patches or have a hard dependency on libstdc++.
Make libstdc++ dynamically link to libsupc++. This will allow us to use libmap.conf to switch between libsupc++ and libcxxrt.
Enable building libc++ by default (hopefully in the 9.1 time-frame, when clang becomes the default system compiler) and switch to using libcxxrt instead of libsupc++ by default.
Lots more testing. Followed by even more testing.
Removing libstdc++ from the base system and making it available through ports for backwards compatibility.

pfSense

Links
pfSense homepage	URL: http://www.pfsense.org/

Contact: Scott Ullrich <[email protected]>
Contact: Chris Buechler <[email protected]>
Contact: Ermal Lu�i <[email protected]>

pfSense is a free and open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router.

2.0.1 was just released which corrected a number of issues http://blog.pfsense.org/?p=633.

Open tasks:

6 month release cycle.
Moving builds to FreeBSD 9.
Full IPV6 support.
PBI Package binaries.
Unbound integration.
Multi-instance Captive Portal.
Replacing Prototype with jQuery.

User-land Programs

Replacing the Regular Expression Code

Links
Project repo	URL: http://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/base/user/gabor/tre-integration/
TRE homepage	URL: http://laurikari.net/tre/
A paper on the topic	URL: http://www.tdk.aut.bme.hu/Files/TDK2011/POSIX-regularis-kifejezesek1.pdf

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

The current regular expression code in libc has to be replaced because it is old, unmaintained and does not support wide characters. As it has been elaborated, TRE is the most suitable replacement outside that has an acceptable license. However, the development of BSD grep also brought some relevant observations. In short, there are some possibilities to optimize pattern matching but it is not possible with the POSIX API, because:

It uses NUL-terminated strings that requires processing each character and makes longer jumps impossible.
It matches for one pattern at a time. If more patterns are searched, there are more efficient ways for pattern matching but we have to know all of them and process them together.

This project intends to implement these shortcut and provide efficient pattern matching for all programs that use regex matching. It will also help avoiding the custom tricks that are hardcoded into some programs, like GNU grep, to work around the limiting POSIX API. Besides, GNU grep has some extensions over the POSIX regular expression, which are necessary if we want to get rid of GNU code in the end.

Open tasks:

Implement multi-pattern heuristic regex matching.
Implement GNU-specific regex extensions.
Adapt BSD grep to use the multi-pattern interface.
Test standard-compliance and correct behavior.

System Configuration Utilities

Links
The DruidBSD Project	URL: http://druidbsd.sourceforge.net/

Contact: Devin Teske <[email protected]>

On December 31st, 2011 sysutils/sysrc was added to the ports-tree. On January 6th, 2012 sysutils/host-setup was added to the ports-tree. Still pending is the addition of sysutils/tzdialog.

Together or separately, these utilities try to make configuring the system easier and more efficient.

sysrc(8) allows you to safely modify rc.conf(5) without fear or trepidation; making remote-management and scripted changes a simple transaction. Also useful in managing puppet installations.

host-setup(8) allows you to configure your time zone, hostname, network interfaces, default router/gateway, DNS nameservers in resolv.conf(5) all via dialog(1) (or Xdialog(1)) interface. Designed to replace sysinstall(8), host-setup is written entirely in sh(1) and is completely stand-alone.

tzdialog(8) is an ISO-3166 compatible sh(1) rewrite of tzsetup(8). It is designed to be a drop-in replacement for tzsetup. The major difference between the two is tzdialog(8) adds supports for graphical user interface via Xdialog(1) (by passing the `-X' argument), whereas tzsetup(8) only supports console-based interaction.

Open tasks:

Write a man-page for tzdialog(8).
Submit current tzdialog(8) version (1.1) and yet-to-be completed man-page to ports-tree as sysutils/tzdialog.

FreeBSD Team Reports

FreeBSD Ports Management Team Status Report

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

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

The ports tree finally surpassed 23,000 ports. The PR count still remains at about 1100.

In Q4 we added 4 new committers, took in 4 commit bit for safe keeping, and had one committer return to ports work.

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:

KDE4 and cmake updates
Multiple runs to test and fix breakages induced by the bump in digits for FreeBSD 10
Verify the removal of X11BASE from ports
Test ports after import of flex and m4 into src base
Optimizations to bsd.ports.mk
Test xcb update and split into multiple ports
Estimate number of ports utilizing old interface ioctls
Ongoing validation of infrastructure with pkgng
testing ports with clang as default compiler

pkgng now has real safe binary upgrade, as well as real integrity checking, work has been started to have the ports tree be able to bootstrap pkgng. More info on the CFT email..

The pointyhat-west build machine continues toward production use, code updates have made it more versatile such as swapping out information in make.conf for build slaves, assist in testing of pkgng -exp runs and to properly build linux_base ports.

It has been decided that the ports tree will be migrated from CVS to Subversion, beat@ will be in charge of the project. More information on the wiki.

A moderated mailing list has been created for ports related announcements, http://lists.FreeBSD.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports-announce, it is intended, but not limited, to be a means of communicating portmgr@ announcements, Calls for Testing, plus other relevant information to be used by our committers and ports maintainer community.

Open tasks:

Looking for help getting ports to build with clang.
Looking for help fixing ports broken on CURRENT. (List needs updating, too)
Looking for help with Tier-2 architectures.
ports broken by src changes.
ports failing on pointyhat.
ports failing on pointyhat-west.
ports that are marked as BROKEN.
When did that port break.
Most ports PRs are assigned, we now need to focus on testing, committing and closing.

Release Engineering Team Status Report

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

Contact: Release Engineering Team <[email protected]>

The Release Engineering Team was pleased to announce the release of FreeBSD-9.0 on January 12th, 2012. To acknowledge his incredible contributions to the world of computing and in particular the FreeBSD Project's corner of that world FreeBSD-9.0 was dedicated to Dennis Ritchie. May he rest in peace. The Release Engineering Team also wishes to thank the FreeBSD Developers and Community for all the work they put into the release.

With the FreeBSD-9.0 release cycle completed our focus shifts to preparing for the FreeBSD-8.3 release. A schedule has not been set but we expect to be shooting for release some time in March 2012.

The FreeBSD Foundation Status Report

Links
	URL: www.FreeBSDFoundation.org

Contact: Deb Goodkin <[email protected]>

The most exciting news to report is that we raised $426,000 through our fundraising efforts. We were overwhelmed by the generosity of the FreeBSD community. We would like to thank everyone who made a contribution to FreeBSD by either making a financial donation to the foundation or volunteering on the Project.

We published our semi-annual newsletter in December. If you have not already done so, please take a moment to read this publication to find out how we supported the FreeBSD Project and community during the second half of 2011. There are also two great testimonials in the newsletter from TaxiMagic and the Apache Software Foundation.

The Foundation sponsored EuroBSDCon 2011 which was held in The Netherlands, October 6-9. And, we sponsored six developers to attend the conference. We sponsored the Bay Area Vendor Summit in November. We were represented at LISA '11, Dec 7-8 in Boston MA.

We are a proud sponsor of AsiaBSDCon 2012, which will be held in Tokyo, Japan, March 22-25.

The Foundation funded project Feed-Forward Clock Synchronization Algorithms Project by the University of Melbourne completed. We approved two new projects for 2012, they are analyzing the performance of FreeBSD's IPv6 stack by Bjoern Zeeb, and implementing auditdistd daemon by Pawel Jakub Dawidek

We purchased more servers and other hardware for the FreeBSD co-location centers at Sentex, NYI, and ISC.

The work above, as well as many other tasks which we do for the FreeBSD Project, could not 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 our donate page.

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

Kernel

CAM Target Layer (CTL)

Links
	URL: http://lists.FreeBSD.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2012-January/031007.html

Contact: Ken Merry <[email protected]>

The CAM Target Layer (CTL) is now in FreeBSD/head.

CTL is a disk and processor device emulation subsystem originally written for Copan Systems under Linux starting in 2003. It has been shipping in Copan (now SGI) products since 2005.

It was ported to FreeBSD in 2008, and thanks to an agreement between SGI (who acquired Copan's assets in 2010) and Spectra Logic in 2010, CTL is available under a BSD-style license. The intent behind the agreement was that Spectra would work to get CTL into the FreeBSD tree.

It will likely be merged into the stable/9 tree in mid-February.

Some CTL features:

Disk and processor device emulation
Tagged queueing
SCSI task attribute support (ordered, head of queue, simple tags)
SCSI implicit command ordering support. (e.g. if a read follows a mode select, the read will be blocked until the mode select completes.)
Full task management support (abort, LUN reset, target reset, etc.)
Support for multiple ports
Support for multiple simultaneous initiators
Support for multiple simultaneous backing stores
Persistent reservation support
Mode sense/select support
Error injection support
High Availability support (1)
All I/O handled in-kernel, no userland context switch overhead.

(1) HA Support is just an API stub, and needs much more to be fully functional.

For the basics on configuring and running CTL, see src/sys/cam/ctl/README.ctl.txt in the FreeBSD/head source tree.

FreeBSD No-IPv4 ("IPv6-Only") Support

Links
FreeBSD No-IPv4 Support	URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ipv6/ipv6only.html

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

The No-IPv4 (fka. "IPv6-Only") project initially prototyped in p4 and merged into mainstream FreeBSD with support from the FreeBSD Foundation and iXsystems earlier in 2011 for World IPv6 Day continued as a free time project. Thanks to the help of an anonymous source, dedicated i386 and amd64 build machines and a distribution node were setup to allow continuous building of snapshots and we hope to extend the support for the snapshots in the future providing more services.

During the 9.0 release cycle a BETA and an RC snapshot were built and released. FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE will be the first official release supporting a kernel to compile out IPv4 support. We will provide (and given 9.0 is out at time of writing do provide) a no-IPv4 snapshot accompanying the official release and hope for your feedback.

I would like to thank Hiroki Sato/allbsd.org for providing a mirror in Japan for the Asian community in addition to mine in Europe.

Open tasks:

Commit/Submit upstream a few user space fixes.
More user space cleanup and testing.
Get rid of gethostby*() calls.

GEOM MULTIPATH Rewrite

Links
Patch committed into the HEAD.	URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~mav/gmultipath5.patch

Contact: Alexander Motin <[email protected]>

The GEOM MULTIPATH class underwent a major rewrite to fix many problems and improve functionality, including:

Improved locking and destruction process to fix crashes.
"Automatic" configuration method improved to make it safe by reading metadata back from all specified paths after writing to one.
"Manual" configuration method added to work without using on-disk metadata. New "add" and "remove" commands allow to manage paths manually.
Failed paths are no longer dropped from GEOM, but only marked as failed and excluded from I/O operations. Failed paths can be automatically restored when all other paths are lost or marked as failed, for example, because of device-caused (not transport) errors. "Fail" and "restore" commands added to manually control failure status.
Added Active/Active mode support. Unlike the default Active/Passive mode, the load is evenly distributed between all working paths. If supported by the device, it allows to significantly improve performance, utilizing bandwidth of all paths. It is controlled by the -A option during creation.
Provider size check added to reduce chance of conflict with other GEOM classes.
GEOM is now destroyed on last provider disconnection.
`status` and `list` commands output was improved.

These changes are now committed into the FreeBSD HEAD branch. Merge to 9-STABLE and 8-STABLE is planned after 9.0 release.

Project sponsored by iXsystems, Inc.

Open tasks:

Implement some additional request ordering mechanism for the Active/Active mode. Some consumers in theory may not wait for previous requests completion before submitting new overlapping or dependent requests. Those requests may be reordered on device if run via different paths simultaneously.

HDA Sound Driver (snd_hda) Improvements

Links
Latest patch	URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~mav/hda.rewrite2.patch

Contact: Alexander Motin <[email protected]>

snd_hda(4) driver took major rewrite:

Big old hdac driver was split into three independent pieces: HDA controller driver (hdac), HDA CODEC driver (hdacc) and HDA audio function driver (hdaa). All drivers are completely independent and talk to each other only via NewBus interfaces. Using more NewBus bells and whistles allows to properly see HDA structure with standard system instruments, such as `devinfo -v`. Biggest driver file size now is 150K, instead of 240K before, and the code is much cleaner.
Support for multichannel recording was added. While I have never seen it configured by default, UAA specification tells that it is possible. Now, as specification defines, driver checks input associations for pins with sequence numbers 14 and 15, and if found (usually) — works as before, mixing signals together. If it does not, it configures input association as multichannel. I have found some CODECs doing strange things when configured for multichannel recording, but I have also found successfully working examples.
Signal tracer was improved to look for cases where several DACs/ADCs in CODEC can work with the same audio signal. If such a case is found, the driver registers additional playback/record stream (channel) for the pcm device. Having more than one stream allows to avoid vchans use and so avoid extra conversion to vchan's pre-configured sample rate and format. Not many CODECs allow this, especially on playback, but some do.
New controller streams reservation mechanism was implemented. That allows to have more pcm devices than streams supported by the controller (usually 4 in each direction). Now it limits only number of simultaneously transferred audio streams, that is rarely reachable and properly reported if happens.
Codec pins and GPIO signals configuration was exported via set of writable sysctls. Another sysctl dev.hdaa.X.reconfig allows to trigger driver reconfiguration in run-time. The only requirement is that all pcm devices should be closed at the moment, as they will be destroyed and recreated. This should significantly simplify process of fixing CODEC configuration. It should be possible now even to write GUI to do it with few mouse clicks.
Driver now decodes pins location and connector type names. In some cases it gives a hint to the user where the connectors of the pcm device are located on the system case. The number of channels supported by pcm device, reported now (if it is not 2), should also make finding them easier.

The code is in testing now and should be soon committed to the HEAD branch.

Project sponsored by iXsystems, Inc.

Open tasks:

Closer inspection of HDMI/DisplayPort audio is planned.
A number of hardware, mostly laptops, need workarounds to work properly. Some statistics should be collected to implement some of them avoiding excessive code bloat.

LSI Supported mps(4) SAS driver

Links
	URL: http://lists.FreeBSD.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2012-January/031358.html

Contact: Ken Merry <[email protected]>
Contact: Kashyap Desai <[email protected]>

The LSI-supported version of the mps(4) driver, that supports their 6Gb SAS controllers and WarpDrive solid state drives, is available in FreeBSD/head.

In addition to WarpDrive support, the driver also has several other new features:

Integrated RAID (IR) support
Improved error recovery code
Support for SCSI protection information (EEDP)
Support for TLR (Transport Level Retries), needed for tape drives
ioctl interface compatible with LSI utilities

Thanks to LSI for doing the work on this driver, and the testing.

I plan to merge it into stable/9 and stable/8 in early February.

SCSI Direct Access Driver (da) Improvements

Contact: Alexander Motin <[email protected]>

BIO_DELETE support (aka TRIM) was added to the CAM SCSI Direct Access device driver (da).

Depending on device capabilities different methods are used to implement it. Currently used method can be read/set via kern.cam.da.X.delete_method sysctls. Possible values are:

NONE - no provisioning support reported by the device;
DISABLE - provisioning support was disabled because of errors;
ZERO - use WRITE SAME (10) command to write zeroes;
WS10 - use WRITE SAME (10) command with UNMAP bit set;
WS16 - use WRITE SAME (16) command with UNMAP bit set;
UNMAP - use UNMAP command (equivalent of the ATA DSM TRIM command).

The last two methods (UNMAP and WS16) are defined by SBC specification and the UNMAP method is the most advanced one. The rest of the methods I have found supported in Linux, and as they were trivial to implement, then why not? I hope they will be useful in some cases.

As side product of fetching logical block provisioning support flag, da driver also got support for reporting device physical sector size (aka Advanced Format) via stripesize/stripeoffset GEOM fields. Some quirks were added for known 4K sector disks not reporting it properly.

The code was committed to the HEAD branch and is going to be merged to 8/9-STABLE after some time.

Project sponsored by iXsystems, Inc.

Open tasks:

To implement more effective selection of the best delete method some more parameters need to be obtained from the device. Unluckily none of devices I have report them.

Status Report for NFS

Contact: Rick Macklem <[email protected]>

The new NFS client and server are no longer considered experimental and are the default for FreeBSD 9.0. Included is fairly complete support for NFSv4.0, as well as NFSv3 and NFSv2. NFSv4.0 delegations are not enabled by default for the server, since there is no handling of them for local system calls done on the server, as yet. So far, the transition seems to have gone alright, with only a couple of obscure issues identified that did not get fixed for FreeBSD 9.0. Patches for these can be found at http://people.FreeBSD.org/~rmacklem

Work is ongoing with respect to NFSv4.1 client support. The current code includes functioning support for the required components, in particular, sessions for both fore and back channels. Development for the big optional component pNFS is in progress and will hopefully be functional for the Files layout in a few months. The modified sources can be found at http://svn.FreeBSD.org/viewvc/base/projects/nfsv4.1-client.

There is also a patch for what I call packrats, where threads perform aggressive on-disk caching of delegated file in the NFSv4.0 client. It currently seems to function OK, but does not yet have client reboot recovery implemented, so it can only be used experimentally at this time. This patch can be found at http://people.FreeBSD.org/~rmacklem/packrat-patches.

The New CARP

Links
The main commit	URL: http://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/base?view=revision&revision=228571

Contact: Gleb Smirnoff <[email protected]>
Contact: Bjoern Zeeb <[email protected]>
Contact: George Neville-Neil <[email protected]>

Significantly updated CARP protocol has been committed to head/. I expect the new code to be easier to maintain and less buggy, since it uses less hacks in the networking stack.

The new CARP does not bring a lot of new features, however here is a couple:

One can put a single redundant address on an interface.
Master/backup state can be switched via ifconfig.
Feature that demotes carp(4) during pfsync(4) update has been restored (it was lost in 7.0).
The overall ifconfig(8) output is now more readable, since addresses are exactly on the interfaces they are running. Yes, this is feature, too :)

The code has been developed by glebius@ with lots of help from bz@.

Open tasks:

Work on arpbalance/ipbalance features. Since I do not utilize them at all, first I need to find somebody eager to see these features and willing to test patches. Sponsoring work is also appreciated. glebius@ to handle.
Estimate whether we need to catch up with OpenBSD on putting demotion counter into datagrams. glebius@ to handle.
Update tcpdump(8) to enable nice printing of CARP packets. gnn@ to handle.
Work with IANA to get an official protocol number. gnn@ to handle.

Documentation

A Tool to Check for Mistakes in Documentation — igor

Links
	URL: http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/igor/

Contact: Warren Block <[email protected]>

igor is a program that proofreads man pages, DocBook SGML source, and other text files for many common mistakes.

Files are tested for spelling mistakes, repeated words, and white-space problems. Man pages are also checked for minimal structure, and DocBook SGML source files are checked for formatting and tag problems.

If you write or edit FreeBSD documentation, let igor help you check it for correctness.

Open tasks:

Find a testing or parsing framework that can do a faster or better job, or that can understand the state of DocBook tags.
Add more tests.
Improve speed.

The FreeBSD German Documentation Project

Links
Homepage of the FreeBSD German Documentation Project	URL: https://doc.bsdgroup.de/
The German translation of the bsdinstall handbook chapter	URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/de_DE.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/bsdinstall.html

Contact: Benedict Reuschling <[email protected]>
Contact: Johann Kois <[email protected]>

The German Documentation Project is happy to report that two big chapters have been translated in the past quarter. The first update is in the firewall chapter and covering the complete IPFW section. It was contributed by Christopher J. Ruwe. There were style and language fixes to be done, but the biggest amount of work, the actual translation, was done by him. We thank Christopher very much.

The other chapter that was translated is the new bsdinstall chapter. Benedict Reuschling did the work on this chapter. He tried to keep the same titles for sections that are mostly describing the same things as in the sysinstall chapter (at least where this was possible).

German speaking users are encouraged to read both chapters and report typos or grammar errors back to us so we can fix them.

The German website is being updated on a regular basis.

Open tasks:

Catch up with the latest changes made to the documentation.
Translate more www pages into German.
Find bugs in the German documentation and fix them.

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]>

During this period, many part of the outdated contents in the www/ja subtree were updated to the latest versions in the English counterpart. The "bsdinstall" section in Handbook was newly translated and the "cutting-edge" section is now work-in-progress.

Open tasks:

Further translation work for outdated documents in both doc/ja_JP.eucJP and www/ja.

Architectures

FreeBSD/390

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

I wandered in and started working on FreeBSD/390 about 1 month ago based on source Bjoern provided. My short term goals are to sync it with the current HEAD and write a minimal IPLabel loader, so we do not have to depend on Hercules-only commands to test the kernel boot process.

Then it will be time to make the crossbuild work again and get the kernel booting.

FreeBSD/arm on Marvell Armada XP

Links
ARMv6 branch	URL: http://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/base/projects/armv6/

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 the FreeBSD/arm infrastructure towards support for recent ARM architecture variations along with a basic set of device drivers for integrated peripherals.

The following code has been implemented since the last status report:

SMP support

Implemented TLB broadcast and RFO
Tested 2 and 4 cores setup in WT cache mode

SATA driver integrated and tested
CESA driver integrated and tested

Next steps:

L2 cache support
Full support for WB/WBA cache

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 peripherals.

The following drivers have been created since the last report:

Ethernet controller driver
Classifier driver
Finished Queue Manager/Traffic Manager
Improved performance and stability

Next steps:

L2 cache support
Merge APM86290 support to -CURRENT

FreeBSD/powerpc on Freescale QorIQ DPAA

Links
P2041 product page	URL: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=P2040
P3041 product page	URL: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=P3041
P5020 product page	URL: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=P5020

Contact: Michal Dubiel <[email protected]>
Contact: Rafal Jaworowski <[email protected]>
Contact: Piotr Ziecik <[email protected]>

The QorIQ Data Path Acceleration Architecture (DPAA) from Freescale is a comprehensive architecture, which integrates all aspects of packet processing in the SoC, addressing issues and requirements resulting from the nature of QorIQ multicore SoCs. It includes:

Cores
Network and packet I/O
Hardware offload accelerators
The infrastructure required to facilitate the flow of packets between the above

The DPAA also addresses various performance related requirements, especially those created by the high speed network I/O found on multicore SoCs such as P2041, P3041, P5020, etc. This work is bringing up FreeBSD on these system-on-chip devices along with device drivers for integrated peripherals.

Current FreeBSD QorIQ DPAA support includes:

QorIQ P2041 and P3041 devices
E500mc core complex
Adaptation of toolchain for the new core
Booting via U-Boot bootloader
CoreNet interconnect fabric
L1, L2, L3 cache
Serial console (UART)
Interrupt controller
DPAA infrastructure (BMAN, FMAN, QMAN)
Ethernet (basic network functionality using Independent Mode of DPAA infrastructure)
EHCI controller
PCI Express controller (host mode)
SMP support (up to quad-core)
I2C

Next steps:

QorIQ P5020 (32-bit mode) support
Ethernet (full network functionality using Regular Mode of DPAA infrastructure)
Enhanced SDHC

Improving Support for New Features in the Intel SandyBridge CPUs

Contact: Konstantin Belousov <[email protected]>

Support for new features in the Intel SandyBridge CPUs is progressing.

The patch to query and allow extended FPU states was committed, which enabled the YMM registers and AVX instruction set on the capable processors. Todo items include get wider testing of the change before planned merge to stable/9 in a month, and start using XSAVEOPT instruction to optimize context switch times.

Patch to enable and use per-process TLB was developed. Latest version is available at http://people.freebsd.org/~kib/misc/pcid.2.patch. The facility, referred in the documentation as PCID, allows to avoid TLB flush on context switches by applying PID tag to each non-global TLB entry. On SandyBridge, measurements did not prove any difference between context switch latencies on patched and stock kernels.

Forthcoming IvyBridge CPUs promised to provide optimizations in the form of INVPCID instructions that allow to optimize TLB shootdown handlers. The patch above uses the instruction on the capable CPU. Todo items are to get access to IvyBridge and do the benchmarks.

Future work might provide SEP support, use hardware random generator from IvyBridge for random(4), considering using faster instructions to access %fs and %gs bases, and use improved AES-NI instruction set for aesni(4).

Ports

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]>

We are proud to announce that the FreeBSD Haskell Team has updated the Haskell Platform to 2011.4.0.0, as well as updated GHC to 7.0.4 in FreeBSD Haskell ports repository. We also added a number of new Haskell ports, and their count is now more than 300. Some of the new ports include Yesod, Happstack (popular web development frameworks in Haskell), ThreadScope (a graphical profiler tool for parallel Haskell programs).

Due to ports repository freeze for 9.0-RELEASE, these updates are not in official ports tree yet. They will be committed to the ports repository after it is unfrozen again, in the meantime they can be accessed through FreeBSD Haskell ports repository.

Open tasks:

Commit pending Haskell ports to FreeBSD ports repository.
Test GHC to work with clang/LLVM.
Add an option to the lang/ghc port to be able to build it with already installed GHC instead of requiring a separate GHC bootstrap tarball.

FreeBSD Ruby Ports

Links
Wiki	URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Ruby
PRs	URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~pgollucci/FreeBSD/prs/prefixes.html#ruby-
PRs	URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~pgollucci/FreeBSD/prs/prefixes.html#rubygem-

Contact: Philip Gollucci <[email protected]>
Contact: Steve Wills <[email protected]>

Work is underway to convert the remaining ruby- ports to rubygem-* ports in order to keep up with the gem community.

A second attempt will be made to change the default ruby from 1.8 to 1.9. There will be some unavoidable casualties of this transition. The sysutils/rubygem-chef-server port was contributed by RideCharge Inc / Taxi Magic who is now using it exclusively.

Open tasks:

Need some fresh -exp runs to check the new status especially with ruby 1.9.3-p0.

FreeBSD/GNOME

Links
	URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome
	URL: http://www.marcuscom.com:8080/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/

Contact: GNOME FreeBSD mailing list <[email protected]>

It has been a while since we did a status report.

This year we started work on GNOME 3.0. Due to time constrains and lack of man power, this version did not make it into the ports. Currently we have 3.2 in our development repo. See the development FAQ on our website for details. The MC-UPDATING file contains upgrade instructions.

Currently the GNOME team is understaffed, help is welcome!

Open tasks:

Update the FreeBSD gnome website with GNOME 3.x information, and still supply the 2.32.x info.

FreeBSD/KDE

Links
FreeBSD/KDE home page	URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org
area51	URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org/area51.php

Contact: FreeBSD KDE <[email protected]>

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

Many fixes upstream to make KDE and Qt build with Clang
Making automoc not freeze with parallel builds

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

KDE SC: 4.7.3, 4.7.4 (in the area51 experimental repository)
Qt: 4.8.0 (in the area51 experimental repository)
CMake: 2.8.6, 2.8.7

The team is always looking for more testers and porters so please contact us at [email protected] and visit our home page at http://FreeBSD.kde.org.

Open tasks:

Testing KDE SC 4.8.0.
Testing KDE PIM 4.7.4.
Testing phonon-gstreamer and phonon-vlc as the phonon-xine backend was deprecated (but will remain in the ports for now).
Testing the Calligra beta releases (in the area51 repository).

Multimedia — Watching/Recording Digital TV

Links
Tested DVB and other hardware	URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/WebcamCompat
	URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/HTPC
	URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/VDR

Contact: Hans Petter Selasky <[email protected]>
Contact: Jason Harmening <[email protected]>
Contact: Juergen Lock <[email protected]>

Progress has been made when watching/recording live digital TV using FreeBSD:

multimedia/webcamd is continuously adding support for more and more USB tuners using the Linux V4L/DVB drivers (also including remotes via webcamd and comms/lirc.)
multimedia/cx88 recently added Linux DVB API support for CX88-based PCI(-e) DVB-T tuners so "common" apps can now also be used with that hardware.
multimedia/xbmc-pvr was committed recently and the multimedia/vdr ports are working too for watching/recording live digital TV, and also other apps like kaffeine, or mplayer, or vlc.

Open tasks:

Continue updating the VDR ports to the latest versions and fix remaining bugs.
Update multimedia/libxine to 1.2.0 that recently was released (which VDR uses.)
Test more hardware?

Perl Ports Testing

Contact: Steve Wills <[email protected]>
Contact: Sunpoet Po-Chuan Hsieh <[email protected]>

Many Perl modules in ports come with test cases included with their source. This project's goal is to ensure that all these tests pass. Patches have been added to the ports tinderbox to allow test related dependencies to be installed and many ports have TEST_DEPENDS now. A patch is available to enable testing for those who wish to help out. All p5- ports have been built and tests attempted. Approximately 61% of the Perl ports pass currently. Many ports have been updated to include missing dependencies or make other changes which allow tests to pass. Long term goals include a more generic framework for testing ports and automated tests executed when ports are updated.

Open tasks:

Many Perl ports which do not pass tests remain.
Need to figure out how to move testing out of tinderbox.
A patch to build Perl with -pthread (but not enable useithreads in Perl) is pending. It will fix many currently broken tests

Public FreeBSD Ports Development Infrastructure — redports.org

Links
	URL: http://redports.org/
IRC: #redports on Freenode	URL: irc://irc.freenode.net#redports
redports mailing list	URL: https://groups.google.com/group/redports
Userguide (with Screenshots)	URL: http://redports.org/wiki/UserGuide

Contact: Bernhard Froehlich <[email protected]>

Redports is a free service for FreeBSD port maintainers and port committers to automatically buildtest ports on various FreeBSD versions and architectures. The motivation to do that was because there are many people that do not have access to Ports Tinderboxes and the existing Tinderboxes are usually dedicated to a single team.

The platform was designed with scalability in mind but building capacity is currently very limited until more hardware is available. I am already in contact with the usual suspects to improve that.

Open tasks:

Get more Hardware for building.
Port options support.
ports-mgmt/portlint support.

Up to Date X.Org Server

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

Contact: X11 FreeBSD mailing list <[email protected]>

The X11 team has started work on the next major update for the X.Org ports. You might have noticed libraries and proto ports being updated that belong to the X.Org stack. Currently in our development repository we have the latest versions of many ports including mesa and xf86-video-intel.

We support versions 1.7.7 and 1.10.4 of the X.Org tree for users with the appropriate hardware and patches.

We need more testers for both the standard version from xorg-devel and the WITH_NEW_XORG version. We also need testers for updated input/video drivers, especially for the less mainstream ones.

In order to test check out our svn repository from http://trillian.chruetertee.ch/ports/browser/branches/xorg-dev and the merge script from http://people.FreeBSD.org/~miwi/xorg/xorgmerge. See the wiki for more details.

Open tasks:

Investigate xorg-server 1.12 which brings xinput 2.2.
Merge development repository into the main repository, after more testing.

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