Introduction
This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between April and June 2014. This is the second of four reports planned for 2014.
The second quarter of 2014 was a very busy and productive time
for the FreeBSD�Project. A new FreeBSD�Core Team was
elected, the FreeBSD�Ports Management Team branched the second
quarterly stable
branch, the FreeBSD�Release
Engineering Team was in the process of finalizing the
FreeBSD�9.3-RELEASE cycle, and many exciting new features have
been added to FreeBSD.
Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! This report contains 24 entries and we hope you enjoy reading it.
The deadline for submissions covering the period from July to September 2014 is October 7th, 2014.
FreeBSD Team Reports
Projects
- Chelsio iSCSI Offload Support
- CUSE4BSD
- FreeBSD and Summer of Code 2014
- New Automounter
- pkg(8)
- QEMU bsd-user-Enabled Ports Building
- RPC/NFS and CTL/iSCSI Performance Optimizations
- ZFSguru
Kernel
- PostgreSQL Performance Improvements
- Running FreeBSD as an Application on Top of the Fiasco.OC Microkernel
- SDIO Driver
- TMPFS Stability
- UEFI Boot
- Updated vt(4) System Console
Architectures
Ports
Documentation
Miscellaneous
FreeBSD Team Reports
FreeBSD Core Team
Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <[email protected]>
The FreeBSD Core Team constitutes the project's "Board of Directors", responsible for deciding the project's overall goals and direction as well as managing specific areas of the FreeBSD project landscape.
Topics for core this quarter have included some far-reaching policy reviews and some significant changes to the project development methodology.
In May, a new release policy was published and presented at the BSDCan developer conference by John Baldwin. The idea is that each major release branch (for example, 10.X) is guaranteed to be supported for at least five years, but individual point releases on each branch, like 10.0-RELEASE, will be issued at regular intervals and only the latest point release will be supported.
Another significant change did not receive approval. When the change to the Bylaws reforming the core team election process was put to the vote of all FreeBSD developers, it failed to reach a quorum.
June saw the culmination of a long running project to replace the project's bug tracking system. As of June 3, the FreeBSD project has switched to Bugzilla as its bug tracking system. All of the history of GNATS PRs has been preserved, so there is no need to re-open old tickets. Work is still going on to replicate some of the integration tweaks that had been applied to GNATS, but all necessary functionality has been implemented and the project is already seeing the benefits of the new capabilities brought by Bugzilla.
An election to select core members for the next two year term of office took place during this period. We would like to thank retiring members of core for their years of service. The new core team provides continuity with previous core teams: about half are incumbents from the previous team, and several former core team members have returned after a hiatus. Core now includes two members of the FreeBSD Foundation board and one other Foundation staff member, aiding greater coordination at the top level of the project. At the same time the core-secretary role was passed on to a new volunteer.
Other activities included providing consultation on licensing terms for software within the FreeBSD source tree, and oversight of changes to the membership of postmaster and clusteradm.
Three new src commit bits were issued during this quarter, and one was taken into safekeeping.
FreeBSD Port Management Team
Contact:
Frederic
Culot
<[email protected]>
Contact: FreeBSD Port Management Team <[email protected]>
The ports tree slowly approaches the 25,000 ports threshold, while the PR count is slightly below 1800.
In Q2 we added three new committers, took in one commit bit for safekeeping, and reinstated one commit bit.
In May, Thomas Abthorpe was replaced by Frederic Culot as portmgr secretary, and Steve Wills became a member of the portmgr team.
Commencing July 1, the third intake of portmgr-lurkers started active duty on portmgr for a four month duration. The next two candidates are William Grzybowski and Nicola Vitale.
This quarter also saw the release of the second quarterly branch, namely 2014Q2. This branch was not only built for 10 (as 2014Q1) but for 9 as well (both i386 and amd64).
Open tasks:
- As previously noted, many PRs continue to languish, we would like to see committers dedicate themselves to closing as many as possible.
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
| Links | |
| FreeBSD�9.3-RELEASE schedule | URL: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.3R/schedule.html |
| FreeBSD development snapshots | URL: http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/ |
Contact: FreeBSD Release Engineering Team <[email protected]>
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is responsible for setting and publishing release schedules for official project releases of FreeBSD, and announcing code freezes and maintaining the respective branches, among other things.
In early May, the FreeBSD�9.3-RELEASE cycle entered the code slush phase. The FreeBSD�9.3-RELEASE cycle is nearing the final phases, and 9.3-RC3 builds will be starting soon. 9.3-RC3 is planned to be the final release candidate for this release cycle, and at the time of this writing, 9.3-RELEASE should be available on schedule.
Work is ongoing to integrate support for embedded architectures into the release build process. At this time, support exists for a number of ARM kernels, in particular the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, and WandBoard.
Additionally, work is in progress to produce virtual machine images as part of the release cycle, supporting various cloud services such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, and Google Compute Engine.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Projects
Chelsio iSCSI Offload Support
| Links |
Contact: Sreenivasa Honnur <[email protected]>
Building on the new in-kernel iSCSI target and initiator stack released in FreeBSD�10.0, Chelsio Communications has begun developing an offload interface to take advantage of the hardware offload capabilities of Chelsio T4 and T5 10 and 40 gigabit Ethernet adapters.
The code currently implements a working prototype of offload for the initiator side, and target side offload should begin shortly. The code will be released under the BSD license and is expected to be completed later in the year and be committed to FreeBSD-HEAD, and will likely ship in a FreeBSD release in early 2015.
Open tasks:
- Complete testing and debugging of the initiator offload.
- Start development of target offload.
- Create hardware-independent offload APIs, based on experiences with target and initiator proof-of-concept implementations.
CUSE4BSD
| Links | |
| Commit | URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/266581 |
Contact: Hans Petter Selasky <[email protected]>
The so-called CUSE4BSD
has been imported into the base
system of FreeBSD-11. CUSE is short for character device in
userspace
. The CUSE library is a wrapper for the
devfs(8) kernel functionality which is exposed
through /dev/cuse. In order to function, the CUSE kernel code
must either be enabled in the kernel configuration file or
loaded separately as a module. Follow the commit message link
to get more information.
FreeBSD and Summer of Code 2014
| Links | |
| URL: http://gsoc.FreeBSD.org | |
| URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2014 |
Contact:
Gavin
Atkinson
<[email protected]>
Contact:
Glen
Barber
<[email protected]>
Contact:
Wojciech
Koszek
<[email protected]>
FreeBSD received 39 project proposals this year, many of which were of a very high standard. After a difficult selection process narrowing these down into the slots we had been allocated, a total of 16 projects were selected to participate in Google Summer of Code 2014 with FreeBSD.
The projects selected span a wide range of areas within FreeBSD, covering both the base system and ports infrastructure, userland and kernel. We have students working on firewall optimisation, ports packaging tools, embedded systems, debugging infrastructure, improved Unicode support, enhancements to the loader and to the installer, and several other areas of work. We are just over halfway through the allocated time this year, and are very much looking forward to integrating code produced by these projects into FreeBSD.
This is the tenth time FreeBSD has taken part in Google's Summer of Code, and we are grateful to Google to have accepted us as a participating organisation.
New Automounter
| Links |
Contact: Edward Tomasz Napierała <[email protected]>
Deficiencies in the current automounter, amd(8), are a recurring problem reported by many FreeBSD users. A new automounter is being developed to address these concerns.
The automounter is a cleanroom implementation of functionality available in most other Unix systems, using proper kernel support implemented via an autofs filesystem. The automounter supports a standard map format, and will integrate with the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) service.
The project is at the early testing stage. A patch will be released as part of a broader call for testing after additional review on some critical components (in particular, the autofs filesystem). After fixing reported problems, the code will be committed to FreeBSD�11-CURRENT. It is expected to ship in the FreeBSD�10.2 release.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
- Fix bad interaction with fts(3).
- Debug a problem with Kerberos NFS mounts.
pkg(8)
| Links | |
| The main pkg(8) git repository. | URL: https://github.com/freebsd/pkg |
| The preferred place to raise bug reports concerning pkg(8). | URL: https://github.com/freebsd/pkg/issues |
Contact:
Baptiste
Daroussin
<[email protected]>
Contact:
Bryan
Drewery
<[email protected]>
Contact:
Matthew
Seaman
<[email protected]>
Contact:
Vsevolod
Stakhov
<[email protected]>
Contact: The pkg mailing list <[email protected]>
pkg(8) is the new package management tool for FreeBSD. It is now the only supported package management tool for FreeBSD releases from 10.0-RELEASE, including the upcoming 9.3-RELEASE. pkg(8) is available on all currently supported releases. Support for the legacy pkg_tools is due to be discontinued at the beginning of September 2014.
The release of pkg(8) 1.3 is imminent. This includes major improvements in the dependency solver. Now we can:
- Switch versions of, for example, Perl or PHP and resolve all the conflicts with packages that depend on them automatically. No more need to manually switch package origins.
- Deal more gracefully with complex upgrade or install scenarios.
- Sandbox operations dealing with freshly downloaded data until it can be verified as trustworthy by checking the package signature.
- Deal with provides-and-requires style of dependencies, so for example we can say "this package needs to use a web server" and allow that dependency to be fulfilled by apache or nginx or any other alternative that provides web-server functionality.
Beyond the next release, we have work in progress on allowing ranges of versions in dependency rules and handling a selection of "foreign" package repositories, such as CPAN or CTAN or PyPi.
There are plans to use pkg(8) to package up the base system. Along with other benefits, this will allow writing a universal installer: download one installer image and from there install any available version of FreeBSD, including snapshots.
We are also intending to use pkg(8) within the ports tree at package-build time to handle fulfilling build dependencies. This opens the possibility of installing build-dependencies by downloading binary packages, which means you can install a package with customized options with the minimum amount of time spent compiling anything else.
Open tasks:
- We are sorely lacking a comprehensive testing setup. Integrating automated regression testing into the development cycle is becoming an imperative.
- We need testers who can run development versions of pkg in as many distinct types of use-cases as possible, and report feedback from their experiences to the [email protected] mailing list or our issues list on github.
QEMU bsd-user-Enabled Ports Building
Contact:
Stacey
Son
<[email protected]>
Contact:
Juergen
Lock
<[email protected]>
Contact:
Sean
Bruno
<[email protected]>
The ports-mgmt/poudriere-devel port is capable of building ports via an emulator. Configuration of the miscellaneous binary image activator is required prior to a poudriere-devel run.
ARMV6, MIPS32 and MIPS64 packages can be produced via full emulation. There are several packages that block a full run of builds. They can be viewed on the "Status of ports building" link.
To build packages via emulation, on current or latest stable/10:
Clone the github repository, and switch to the bsd-user branch. Then run:
./configure --static \
--target-list="arm-bsd-user i386-bsd-user \
mips-bsd-user mips64-bsd-user mips64el-bsd-user \
mipsel-bsd-user ppc-bsd-user ppc64-bsd-user sparc-bsd-user \
sparc64-bsd-user x86_64-bsd-user"
gmake; gmake install
Then set up the binmiscctl tools to do some evil hackery to redirect execution of armv6 binaries to qemu:
binmiscctl add armv6 --interpreter \
"/usr/local/bin/qemu-arm" --magic \
"\x7f\x45\x4c\x46\x01\x01\x01\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x02 \
\x00\x28\x00" --mask "\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\x00\xff\xff\xff\xff \
\xff\xff\xff\xff\xfe\xff\xff\xff" --size 20 --set-enabled
Install poudriere-devel from ports. It knows how to set up things.
Create a poudriere jail to do all the magic:
poudriere jail -c -j 11armv632 -m svn -a armv6 \
-v head
Now run poudriere against that jail to build all the ports:
poudriere bulk -j 11armv632 -a
Nullfs mount the ports tree into the jail:
mkdir /usr/local/poudriere/jails/11armv632/usr/ports
mount -t nullfs /usr/ports /usr/local/poudriere/jails/11armv632/usr/ports
To chroot into the jail:
mount -t devfs devfs /usr/local/poudriere/jails/11armv632/dev
chroot /usr/local/poudriere/jails/11armv632/
Open tasks:
- PPC on AMD64 emulation. This is a work in progress as there appear to be some serious issues running the bsd-user binary on big-endian hardware. Justin Hibbits is working on this.
- SPARC64 on AMD64 emulation is non-functional and instantly segfaults. We are looking for someone to poke at the bits here.
- External Toolchain, XDEV support. There is partial support for using an AMD64 toolchain that can output binaries for other architecture (e.g., using an AMD64 toolchain to build MIPS64 packages). We are currently tracking a linking issue with ports-mgmt/pkg. Thanks to Warner Losh, Baptiste Daroussin, Dimitry Andric for poking at bits in here to make the XDEV target useful.
- Signal handling. The MIPS/ARMV6 target stills display a failure that manifests itself when building devel/p5-Sys-SigAction.
- Massive documentation update needed. These modifications actually allow chrooting into a MIPS or ARMv6 environment and using native toolchains and libraries to prototype software for a target platform.
RPC/NFS and CTL/iSCSI Performance Optimizations
Contact: Alexander Motin <[email protected]>
The FreeBSD RPC stack, used as a base for its NFS server, received multiple optimizations to improve performance and SMP scalability. Algorithmic optimizations reduced processing overhead, while improved locking allowed it to scale up to at least 40 processor cores without significant lock congestion. Combined with some other kernel optimizations, the peak NFS request rate increased by many times, reaching up to 600K requests per second on modern hardware.
The CAM Target Layer (CTL), used as the base for the new kernel iSCSI server, also received a series of locking optimizations which allowed its peak request rate to increase from ~200K to ~600K IOPS with the potential of reaching a rate of 1M requests per second. That rate is sufficient to completely saturate 2x10Gbit Ethernet links with 4KB requests. For comparison, the port of net/istgt (user-level iSCSI server) on the same hardware with an equivalent configuration showed only 100K IOPS.
There is also ongoing work on improving CTL functionality. It was already made to support three of four VMware VAAI storage acceleration primitives (net/istgt supports 2), while the goal is to reach full VAAI support during next months.
With all these improvements, and earlier improvements in CAM, GEOM, ZFS, and a number of other kernel areas coming soon, FreeBSD�10.1 may become the fastest storage release ever. ;)
These projects are sponsored by iXsystems, Inc.
ZFSguru
| Links | |
| URL: http://zfsguru.com | |
| URL: http://zfsguru.com/news/stateoftheproject/2014 |
Contact: Jason Edwards <[email protected]>
ZFSguru is a multifunctional server appliance with a strong emphasis on storage. ZFSguru began as simple web-interface frontend to ZFS, but has since grown into a FreeBSD derivative with its own infrastructure. The scope of the project has also grown with the inclusion of add-on packages that add functionality beyond the traditional NAS functionality found in similar product like FreeNAS and NAS4Free. ZFSguru aims to be a true multifunctional server appliance that is extremely easy to setup and can unite both novice and more experienced users in a single user interface. The modular nature of the project combats the danger of bloat, whilst still allowing extended functionality to be easily deployed.
Where development in the first quarter of this year brought drag-and-drop permissions for Samba and NFS, development in the second quarter focused on strengthening the infrastructure of the project. A new library and toolkit solution dubbed 'Mesa' is in the works, providing a cleaner foundation to the project. A new master server providing secure remote services is being setup, to be located in a high-speed datacenter. But most importantly, a new system build infrastructure has shown great progress and will soon be able to provide automated system builds to our users. This not only improves the frequency of system releases but also frees much developer time to be spent on different areas of the project.
Furthermore, a new website and forum is being worked on, replacing the old-fashioned website that offers only limited functionality. The new website will be linked to the server database, providing real-time updates about the project.
In addition, a new platform for collaborative development is in the works. A service addon has been created for the GitLab project, which is a drop-in replacement of the popular GitHub website. The choice was made to host our own solution and not rely on GitHub itself. In retrospect this appears to be a good decision. The recent development where GitHub removed projects after DCMA takedowns being sent is incompatible with the philosophy of free-flow-of-information, which the ZFSguru project is a strong proponent of. By hosting our own solution, we have avoided any dependency on third party projects.
It is expected that after the infrastructure of the project has been revamped, work on the web-interface itself can continue. New functionality such as GuruDB and Service Bulletins provide a tighter connection between the server infrastructure and the web-interface. The Migration Manager is one of the last remaining features still missing in the web-interface. This functionality provides an easy way to upgrade the current system by performing a new clean installation, but migrate all relevant configuration to the new installation. It also allows to backup all system configuration in a single file to be stored on a different machine should things go awry.
A longer version of this status report giving a wider
perspective on the project can be found at the
stateoftheproject
link.
Kernel
PostgreSQL Performance Improvements
| Links | |
| URL: https://www.kib.kiev.ua/kib/pgsql_perf_v2.0.pdf |
Contact: Konstantin Belousov <[email protected]>
Analysis of the performance of the latest 9.3 version of PostgreSQL on FreeBSD-CURRENT has been performed. The issues which prevented good scalability on a 40-core machine were determined, and changes prototyped which solve the bottlenecks.
The URL above provides a paper which contains a detailed explanation of the issues and solutions, together with a graph demonstrating the effects on scalability.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Running FreeBSD as an Application on Top of the Fiasco.OC Microkernel
Contact: Ilya Bakulin <[email protected]>
Fiasco.OC belongs to the L4 microkernel family. A microkernel provides a bare minimum of services to the applications running on top of it, unlike traditional kernels that incorporate complex code like IP stacks and device drivers. This allows a dramatic decrease in the amount of code running in the privileged mode of the CPU, achieving higher security while still providing an acceptable level of performance.
Running an operating system kernel on top of the microkernel allows leveraging any software that was developed for that operating system. The OS kernel runs in user-mode side-by-side with other microkernel applications such as real-time components. Multiple OSes, each with their userland applications, can even be run in parallel, thus allowing construction of products where processing of corporate data is strictly separated from the processing of private data.
The project aims to create a port of FreeBSD to the Fiasco.OC microkernel, a high performance L4 microkernel developed by TU Dresden. Existing ports of OpenBSD and Linux are used as a reference. This will allow the use of unique FreeBSD features like ZFS in L4-based projects.
Open tasks:
- Finish opensourcing the port of L4OpenBSD/amd64 made by genua mbh. This is a work in progress.
- Publish the sources of the L4FreeBSD port that is largely based on the L4OpenBSD code.
- Improve the port, the first task being adopting the pmap(9) module to work with L4 microkernel memory allocation services.
SDIO Driver
| Links | |
| SDIO project page on FreeBSD�Wiki | URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/SDIO |
| Source code | URL: https://github.com/kibab/freebsd/tree/mmccam |
Contact: Ilya Bakulin <[email protected]>
SDIO is an interface designed as an extension of the existing SD card standard, which allows the connecting of different peripherals to a host with a standard SD controller. Peripherals currently sold on the general market include WLAN/BT modules, cameras, fingerprint readers, and barcode scanners. Additionally, SDIO is used to connect some peripherals in products like Chromebooks and Wandboards. A prototype of the driver for the Marvell SDIO WLAN/BT (Avastar 88W8787) module is also being developed, using the existing Linux driver as the reference.
SDIO card detection and initialization already work. Most necessary bus methods are implemented and tested.
The WiFi driver is able to load firmware onto the card and initialize it. A rewrite of the MMC stack as a transport layer for the CAM framework is in progress. This will allow utilization of the well-tested CAM locking model and debug features.
Open tasks:
- SDIO stack: finish CAM migration. The initialization of the MMC/SD card is implemented in the XPT layer, but cannot be tested with real hardware because of the lack of any device drivers that implement peripheral drivers and SIMs for CAM MMC. The plan is to use a modified version of the BeagleBone Black SDHCI controller driver for the SIM and a modified version of mmcsd(4) as a peripheral driver.
- Marvell SDIO WiFi: connect to the FreeBSD network stack, write the code to implement required functions (such as sending/receiving data, network scanning and so on).
TMPFS Stability
Contact:
Konstantin
Belousov
<[email protected]>
Contact:
Peter
Holm
<[email protected]>
Extensive testing of tmpfs(5) using the stress2 kernel test suite was done. The issues found were debugged and fixed.
Most of the problems are related to bugs in the interaction of the vnode and node lifetime, culminating in e.g., unmount races and dotdot lookup bugs.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
UEFI Boot
| Links | |
| FreeBSD UEFI wiki page | URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/UEFI |
| FreeBSD�snapshots | URL: http://www.freebsd.org/snapshots/ |
Contact:
Ed
Maste
<[email protected]>
Contact:
Nathan
Whitehorn
<[email protected]>
The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) provides boot- and run-time services for x86 and other computers. For the x86 architecture it replaces the legacy BIOS. This project will adapt the FreeBSD loader and kernel boot process for compatibility with UEFI firmware, found on contemporary servers, desktops, and laptops.
Ed and Nathan completed a number of integration tasks over the past three months. Nathan added a first-stage loader, boot1.efi, to support chain-loading the rest of the system from a UFS filesystem. This allows the UEFI boot process to proceed in a similar fashion as with BIOS boot. Nathan also added UEFI support to the FreeBSD installer and release image creation script.
The EFI framebuffer requires the vt(4) system console — a framebuffer driver is not implemented for the legacy syscons(4) console. Ed added automatic vt(4) selection to the UEFI boot path.
Snapshots are now built as dual-mode images, and should boot via both BIOS and UEFI. Our plan is to merge the UEFI and vt(4) work to stable/10 to appear in FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
- Document manual installation, including dual-boot configurations.
- Implement boot1.efi for ZFS file systems.
- Add support for UEFI variables stored in non-volatile memory (NVRAM).
- Debug boot failures with certain UEFI firmware implementations.
- Support secure boot.
Updated vt(4) System Console
| Links | |
| Project wiki page | URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Newcons |
Contact:
Aleksandr
Rybalko
<[email protected]>
Contact:
Ed
Maste
<[email protected]>
Contact:
Ed
Schouten
<[email protected]>
Contact:
Warren
Block
<[email protected]>
The vt(4) (aka Newcons) project provides a replacement for the legacy syscons system console. It brings a number of improvements, including better integration with graphics modes and broader character set support.
Since the last report, vt(4) gained the ability to make early driver selection. vt(4) selects the best successfully-probed driver before most other kernel subsystems are initialized. Also, to facilitate migration from syscons(4) to vt(4), multiple virtual terminal subsystems in the kernel are now supported. It is controlled by a small module with just one kernel environment variable. Users can select the virtual terminal system to use by setting kern.vty=sc or kern.vty=vt.
The GENERIC kernel configuration for the amd64 and i386 platforms now includes both syscons(4) and vt(4) by default. This configuration is also planned to be in FreeBSD�10.1-RELEASE.
The project finally received a man page, so now vt(4) is not only the project name, but also a link to its documentation. Great thanks to Warren Block for that.
Major highlights:
- Unicode support.
- Double-width character support for CJK characters.
- xterm(1)-like terminal emulation.
- Support for Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) drivers (i915kms, radeonkms).
- Support for different fonts per terminal window.
- Simplified drivers.
Brief status of supported architectures and hardware:
- amd64 (VGA/i915kms/radeonkms) — works.
- ARM framebuffer — works.
- i386 (VGA/i915kms/radeonkms) — works.
- IA64 — untested.
- MIPS — untested.
- PPC and PPC64 — work, but without X.Org yet.
- SPARC — works on certain hardware (e.g., Ultra 5).
- vesa(4) — in progress.
- i386/amd64 nVidia driver — not supported. VGA should be used (VESA planned).
- Xbox framebuffer driver — will be deleted as unused.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
- Implement the remaining features supported by vidcontrol(1).
- Write manual pages for vt(4) drivers and kernel interfaces.
- Support direct handling of keyboard by the kbd device (without kbdmux(4)).
- CJK fonts. (This is in progress).
- Address performance issues on some architectures.
- Switch to vt(4) by default.
- Convert keyboard maps for use with vt(4).
- Implement compatibility mode to be able to use single-byte charsets/key-codes in vt(4).
Architectures
FreeBSD/arm64
| Links | |
| URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/projects/arm64/ |
Contact: Andrew Turner <[email protected]>
Arm64 is the name of the in-progress port of FreeBSD to the ARMv8 CPU when it is in AArch64 mode. Until recently, all ARM CPU designs were 32-bit only. With the introduction of the ARMv8 architecture, ARM has added a new 64-bit mode. This new mode has been named AArch64.
Booting FreeBSD on the ARM Foundation Model has made a lot of progress since the last status report. An initial pmap implementation has been written. With this, FreeBSD is able to enter the Machine Independent boot code. The required autoconf functions have been added allowing FreeBSD to start scheduling tasks. Finally the cpu_switch and copystr functions were added. With these two, FreeBSD will boot to the mountroot prompt.
Work has started on supporting exceptions, including interrupts. This will allow more developers to start working on device drivers.
Open tasks:
- Finish exception and interrupt handling
- Read the Device Tree or ACPI tables from UEFI
- Test on real hardware
Ports
FreeBSD Python Ports
| Links | |
| The FreeBSD Python Team Page | URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Python |
| IRC channel | URL: irc://[email protected] |
Contact: FreeBSD Python Team <[email protected]>
We are pleased to announce the availability of conflict-free Python package support across different Python versions based on the USES=uniquefiles feature recently introduced to the Ports framework. A Python package can be marked as buildable and installable in parallel for different Python versions at the same time on the same host. The package building tools, however, do not support this feature yet and the Python team will work closely with portmgr and the pkg developers to enable support on a global ports and packages scale.
In May and June a huge clean-up operation took place to remove the last bits and pieces targeting easy_install. In the beginning of July we committed the final changes to remove easy_install support completely from the ports framework. This greatly simplifies the infrastructure and allows us to modernize and maintain it with less effort.
We added Python 3.4, removed Python 3.1 after its end of life, updated the setuptools ports to version 5.1 and PyPy's development version to 2.3.1. The latest Python 2.7.8 and an updated setuptools will hit the tree shortly.
Our upstreaming effort continues to produce good outcomes for simplifying maintenance and reducing complexity.
Looking forward, one of the top priorities is to comply with the USES framework in the foreseeable future and to roll out a consistent maintainer policy for integrating new Python-related ports into the tree.
Open tasks:
- Migrate bsd.python.mk to the Uses framework.
- Develop a high-level and lightweight Python Ports Policy.
- Add support for granular dependencies (for example >=1.0,<2.0).
- See what adding pip (Python Package Index) support will require.
- Add default QA targets and functions for Python ports (TEST_DEPENDS, regression-test, etc.)
- More tasks can be found on the team's wiki page (see links).
- To get involved, come and say "hi" on IRC and let us know what you are interested in!
KDE/FreeBSD
| Links | |
| KDE/FreeBSD home page | URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org |
| area51 | URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org/area51.php |
Contact: KDE/FreeBSD Team <[email protected]>
The KDE/FreeBSD team has continued to improve the experience of KDE software and Qt under FreeBSD.
During this quarter, the team has kept most of the KDE and Qt ports up-to-date, working on the following releases:
- KDE SC: 4.12.5; Workspace: 4.11.9
As a result — according to PortScout — kde@ has 526 ports (up from 526), of which 84.63% are up-to-date (down from 98.86%). iXsystems Inc. continues to provide a machine for the team to build packages and to test updates. iXsystems Inc. has been providing the KDE/FreeBSD team with support for quite a long time and we are very grateful for that.
As usual, 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. It would be especially useful to have more helping hands on tasks such as getting rid of the dependency on the defunct HAL project and providing integration with KDE's Bluedevil Bluetooth interface.
Open tasks:
- Updating out-of-date ports, see PortScout for a list
- Removing the dependency on HAL
The Graphics Stack on FreeBSD
Contact: FreeBSD Graphics team <[email protected]>
We were generally short on time this quarter. We made less progress than expected on all fronts.
The alternate pkg(8) repository, built with WITH_NEW_XORG, is now available. This alleviates the need for users to rebuild their ports with WITH_NEW_XORG. See the announcement, linked above for further information.
Thanks to a contribution from Jan Kokem�ller, Radeon 32bit ioctls are now working on 64bit hosts. This was tested successfully with Wine and StarCraft II on FreeBSD 9.x and 11. This required modifications to emulators/i386-wine-devel so that it works with WITH_NEW_XORG, and the creation of a new port, libtxc_dxtn, to support the texture compression used by StarCraft II. We have not yet had the time to polish everything, so this still requires manual steps.
The DRM generic code update is ready, but it breaks the current i915 driver. Therefore, the i915 driver must be updated before anything is committed.
Compared to the previous status report, OpenCL test programs are running fine now, thanks to upgrades and fixes to libc++ and Clang. The relevant ports are still not ready to hit the ports tree, unfortunately.
Open tasks:
- See the "Graphics" wiki page for up-to-date information.
Documentation
Quarterly Status Reports
Contact: Quarterly Status Report Team <[email protected]>
These quarterly status reports help the FreeBSD community stay up-to-date with the happenings in and around the project. Updates from FreeBSD teams, new features being developed in- or out-of-tree, products derived from FreeBSD, and FreeBSD events are all welcome additions to the status reports.
The Monthly team has been busy since the last report, with longtime organizer G�bor P�li having stepped down from the team — thank you G�bor for all your hard work! This has left something of a void in the preparation of this report, for which the call for items was issued quite late. To help fill the void, Warren Block and Benjamin Kaduk have been added to the monthly@ team, joining Glen Barber, Gavin Atkinson, Ed Maste, and the rest of the team in preparing this report. Special thanks to Glen for doing most of the work while simultaneously getting 9.3-RELEASE out the door!
The next cycle is sooner than you think! The deadline for submitting entries for the Q3 report is October 7th, 2014.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
- Submit reports for Q42014 to [email protected]!
Miscellaneous
FreeBSD Host Support for OpenStack and OpenContrail
Contact:
Grzegorz
Bernacki
<[email protected]>
Contact:
Michal
Dubiel
<[email protected]>
Contact:
Dominik
Ermel
<[email protected]>
Contact:
Rafal
Jaworowski
<[email protected]>
OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources in a datacenter.
OpenContrail is a network virtualization (SDN) solution comprising network controller, virtual router, and analytics engine, which can be integrated with cloud orchestration systems like OpenStack or CloudStack.
The goal of this work is to enable FreeBSD as a fully supported compute host for OpenStack using OpenContrail virtualized networking. The main areas of development are:
- Libvirt hypervisor driver for bhyve.
- Support for bhyve (via libvirt compute driver) and the overall FreeBSD platform in nova-compute.
- OpenContrail vRouter (forwarding plane kernel module) port to FreeBSD.
- OpenContrail Agent (network controller node) port to FreeBSD.
- Integration and performance optimizations.
Since the last report the following items have been completed, which allow for a working demo of an OpenStack compute node on a FreeBSD host using OpenContrail for network virtualization:
- Port of the OpenContrail vRouter kernel module for FreeBSD (MPLS over GRE mode only)
- Port of the OpenContrail Agent for FreeBSD
- FreeBSD version of a Devstack installation/configuration script with support for the OpenContrail solution (Compute node components only)
A demo was presented at the DevSummit during BSDCan2014 in Ottawa. Also, a meetup regarding the subject was organized in Krakow, Poland.
Work on this project is sponsored by Juniper Networks.
The FreeBSD Foundation
| Links | |
| URL: http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/ | |
| FreeBSD Journal | URL: http://freebsdjournal.com/ |
Contact: Deb Goodkin <[email protected]>
The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD�Project and community worldwide. Most of the funding is used to support FreeBSD development projects, conferences and developer summits, purchase equipment to grow and improve the FreeBSD infrastructure, and provide legal support for the Project.
We published our third issue of the FreeBSD Journal. We have over 2700 subscriptions so far. We continued working on the digital edition, which will allow subscribers to read the magazine in different web browsers, including those than run on FreeBSD. This will be available for the July/August issue of the Journal.
We hired Anne Dickison, on a freelance basis, as our new marketing director, to help us promote the Foundation and Project.
The annual board meeting was held in Ottawa, Canada, in May. Directors and officers were elected, and we did some long-term planning. We worked on our vision, core values, project road mapping, and our near-term goals. We also met with the core team to discuss roles and responsibilities, project roadmapping, and what we can do to help the Project more.
We were a Gold+ sponsor for BSDCan, May 16-17 and provided 7 travel grants for developers to attend the conference. We also were the sponsor for both the developer and vendor summits.
Justin Gibbs gave a FreeBSD presentation at a FreeBSD user's internal technology summit. Company visits like this help users understand the Project structure better and gives us a chance to communicate what FreeBSD people are working on as well as learn what different companies are doing with FreeBSD, as well as what they'd like to see supported. We can then help facilitate collaboration between the companies and FreeBSD developers.
We were represented at Great Wide Open, April 2-3 (greatwideopen.org), Texas LinuxFest, June 13-14 (texaslinuxfest.org), and SouthEast LinuxFest, June 20-22 (southeastlinuxfest.org).
Hardware was purchased to support an upgrade at Sentex. A new high-capacity 1Gbps switch was deployed to allow for more systems to be added to the test lab. The main file server and development box was upgraded to allow more users in the lab simultaneously.
We purchased hardware, including package builders, and a larger server to allow NYI to be a full replica of all Project systems, comparable to what is in place at Yahoo Inc. and ISC.
We worked with our lawyer to create an NDA between the Foundation and individuals for third party NDAs. This allows developers who need access to proprietary documents, to go through the Foundation, via an NDA for access.
FreeBSD Foundation Systems Administrator and Release Engineer, Glen Barber, continued work on producing regularly-updated FreeBSD/arm snapshots for embedded devices, such as the Raspberry Pi, ZedBoard, and BeagleBone.
In addition to producing weekly development snapshots from the head/ and stable/ branches, with feedback and help from Ed Maste, Glen finished work to produce release images that will, by default, provide debugging files for userland and kernel available on the FreeBSD�Project FTP mirrors. Note that the debugging files will not be included on the bootonly.iso, disc1.iso, or dvd1.iso images due to the size of the resulting images.
Foundation staff member Konstantin Belousov completed an investigation into poor performance of PostgreSQL on FreeBSD. This uncovered scalability problems in the FreeBSD kernel, and changes to address these issues are in progress.
Some previously completed Foundation-sponsored projects received enhancements or additional work. The ARM superpages project was completed last year, but is now enabled by default in FreeBSD-CURRENT. Many stability fixes and enhancements have been committed to the in-kernel iSCSI stack. The iSCSI project was released in FreeBSD�10.0. Many stability fixes and enhancements have been committed and will be included in FreeBSD�10.1.
Work continues on the Foundation-sponsored autofs automount daemon, UEFI boot support, the updated vt(4) system video console, virtual machine images, and the Intel graphics driver update. Foundation-sponsored work resulted in 226 commits to FreeBSD over the April to June period.
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