FreeBSD Foundation

Foundation at FOSDEM

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:51:00 +0000

Erwin Lansing from the Foundation will be at FOSDEM, in Brussels, Belgium (February 4-5). He'll have some cool swag and can accept donations to the Foundation. You can find him hanging out at the FreeBSD booth in the expo area on Saturday and in the BSD Devroom on Sunday.

Interview with Deb Goodkin

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Episode 211 of bsdtalk has an interview with Deb Goodkin, Director of Operations for the FreeBSD Foundation. The interview is available as an mp3 or as an ogg.

Quarterly Status Report

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:28:00 +0000

The FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report is available. The Foundation has the following section in the report:

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 the completed Feed-Forward Clock Synchronization Algorithms Project by the University of Melbourne. We approved two new projects at the beginning of 2012: analyzing the performance of FreeBSD's IPv6 stack by Bjoern Zeeb, and implementing the 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.

FreeBSD 9.0 Press Release

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:31:00 +0000

The Foundation has written a press release for the release of FreeBSD 9.0. From PRWeb:

Release of FreeBSD 9.0 Delivers More Power to Serve

Today, the FreeBSD Foundation announced the recent release of FreeBSD 9.0. FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE raises the bar for open source operating systems in terms of file system reliability, IPv6-readiness, networking capabilities, compiler and toolchain technologies, and security. Many of its new features directly benefit system administrators, application developers, and companies that use or base their products on FreeBSD.

"FreeBSD 9.0 represents the culmination of over two years of ground-breaking work in operating system performance, reliability, and security," said Ken Smith, Release Engineer for the FreeBSD Project. "We are proud to dedicate this release to the memory of Dennis M. Ritchie, one of the founding fathers of the UNIX® operating system, whose vision and work laid the foundations for FreeBSD."

Filesystem changes in this release provide great benefits to both UFS and ZFS users. When installing with UFS, softupdates journaling (UFS+SUJ) is automatically enabled. UFS+SUJ uses an intent log which safely eliminates the need for a long filesystem check and recovery process, even after an unclean shutdown.

ZFS has been updated to version 28 which supports data deduplication, triple parity RAIDZ3, snapshot holds, log device removal, zfs diff, zpool split, zpool import -F, and read-only zpool import.

FreeBSD 9.0 also introduces the Highly Available STorage (HAST) framework which provides transparent storage of the same data across several systems connected by a TCP/IP network. In combination with other high availability features of FreeBSD like the CARP fail-over protocol, HAST makes it possible to build a highly available storage cluster that is resistant to hardware failures.

Continuing its heritage of innovating in the area of security research, FreeBSD 9.0 introduces Capsicum. Capsicum is a lightweight framework which extends a POSIX UNIX kernel to support new security capabilities and adds a userland sandbox API. Originally developed as a collaboration between the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and Google and sponsored by a grant from Google, FreeBSD was the prototype platform and Chromium was the prototype application. FreeBSD 9.0 provides kernel support as an experimental feature for researchers and early adopters. Application support will follow in a later FreeBSD release and there are plans to provide some initial Capsicum-protected applications in FreeBSD 9.1.

"Google is excited to see the award-winning Capsicum work incorporated in FreeBSD 9.0, bringing native capability security to mainstream UNIX for the first time," said Ulfar Erlingsson, Manager, Security Research at Google.

FreeBSD has been been an early adopter and active participant in the IPv6 community since FreeBSD 4.0 was released in 2000 with the KAME reference implementation of IPv4/IPv6 networking support. In addition, the FreeBSD Project has been serving releases from IPv6-enabled servers for more than 8 years and FreeBSD’s website, mailing lists, and developer infrastructure have been IPv6-enabled since 2007. FreeBSD 9.0 introduces IPv6-only snapshots which completely remove IPv4 from the operating system.

2012 has been called the 'year of IPv6' and "the FreeBSD project is well positioned to be one of the leaders in IPv6-Only validation work," stated Bjoern Zeeb, member of the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team and recipient of the 2010 Itojun Service Award for his significant improvements in open source implementations of IPv6. "The growing usage of FreeBSD's IPv6 networking stack by appliance builders, integration of a more flexible interface configuration, and the implementation of new standards such as Secure Neighbor Discovery, DNS Options for Router Advertisements, and CPE Requirements, makes FreeBSD 9.0 the perfect open source operating system to build your IPv6 deployments and products on."

Other new features include:

userland DTrace has been added to supplement kernel-level DTrace
the FreeBSD world and kernel can now be compiled using the BSD-licensed LLVM toolchain
resource limit actions can be applied to processes, users, login classes, and jails
the addition of a pluggable congestion framework and five new TCP congestion control algorithms
HPN-SSH is enabled by default and increases transfer speeds on long, high bandwidth network links
NFSv4 support added
flattened device trees (FDT) allows for hardware resource enumeration and simplifies configuration on embedded platforms

A complete list of the features in this release is available on the web at http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.0R/relnotes.html. FreeBSD 9.0 can be downloaded for free from the FreeBSD website or purchased from FreeBSDMall.com.

About the FreeBSD Foundation

The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD Project and community. The Foundation gratefully accepts donations from individuals and businesses, using them to fund and manage projects, sponsor FreeBSD events, Developer Summits and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers. In addition, the Foundation represents the FreeBSD Project in executing contracts, license agreements, and other legal arrangements that require a recognized legal entity. The FreeBSD Foundation is entirely supported by donations. More information about The FreeBSD Foundation is available on the web.

About The FreeBSD Project

The FreeBSD Project provides an up-to-date and scalable modern operating system that offers high-performance, security, and advanced networking for personal workstations, Internet servers, routers, and firewalls. The FreeBSD packages collection includes popular software like the Apache web server, GNOME, KDE, X.org, Python, Firefox, and over 23,000 software suites. FreeBSD can be found on the Internet.

CAM Target Layer

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:48:00 +0000

Earlier this week, Ken Merry committed CTL to HEAD for testing. From the commit message:

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.

We spoke to Ken about the benefits of CTL and this is what he had to say:

CTL offers a number of benefits, but here are a couple of ways we can use it:

It provides the missing piece needed to turn a FreeBSD box into an external RAID array. All you need is a Fibre Channel card (Qlogic 4Gb and 8Gb cards work now), and some disks, and with ZFS managing the disks and CTL providing the target interface, you've got an external RAID array. End users can do it, or companies can use it as the foundation for a FreeBSD-based storage appliance.

CTL provides a test framework for CAM. When we implement new features and command support in CAM, we can immediately test out the new features in CTL. For instance, when I implemented SCSI descriptor sense support last year, I actually first implemented descriptor sense in CTL. That way, when I implemented it in CAM, I had a way to test everything out. I was able to test, through sense data injection, scenarios that would be impossible to trigger using an ordinary hard disk. You can't make a hard disk return every possible error and combination of errors, but with CTL, you can do that. So I was able to more fully test everything out and gain confidence that the descriptor sense code worked properly.

For people who want to test it, you don't need a Fibre Channel card, you can actually create LUNs and use CTL without any new hardware. With the CTL CAM SIM, the LUNs are visible on the internal 'ctl2cam0' bus. Here's what the output of camcontrol devlist -v looks like:

scbus6 on ctl2cam0 bus 0:
             at scbus6 target 1 lun 0 (pass56,da48)
             at scbus6 target 1 lun 1 (pass57,da49)
             at scbus6 target 1 lun 2 (pass58,da50)
<>                                 at scbus6 target -1 lun -1 ()

The da(4) driver is attached to the CTL LUNs, and you can do normal I/O to them just as you would any other disk.

One thing to watch out for is that if you use a block device (as opposed to a file or a ramdisk) as your backing store for CTL, you will need to disable synchronize cache support with ctladm realsync off. The reason is that g_dev_strategy() does not support the BIO_FLUSH command, and will panic with a KASSERT. That is something that needs to be fixed.

Files and ramdisks work fine without disabling flush support.

There is a brief description of how to create LUNs and enable ports in the CTL README.ctl.txt file in sys/cam/ctl, and the ctladm(8) man page also describes all of the options and provides some examples.

CTL is pretty functional, and should work well in most cases, but I am certainly interested in any feedback on it. The README has a to-do list, and I'm also planning on doing some performance optimizations as well.

One of the next things we need is more hardware support for various boards that support target mode. (e.g. other Fibre Channel, iSCSI and FCoE boards) It would also be nice to get CTL working with the Firewire target driver.

We'll be at SCALE

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:52:00 +0000

The FreeBSD Foundation will be accepting donations at the FreeBSD booth at SCALE, to be held next weekend at the Hilton LAX in Los Angeles, CA. If you're in the area, drop by to check out our cool swag and to chat about the Foundation's projects.

Registration for the expo is $10, or $70 if you would like to also attend the SCALE presentations.

Accepting Travel Grant Applications for AsiaBSDCon 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 02:37:00 +0000

Calling all FreeBSD developers needing assistance with travel expenses to AsiaBSDCon 2012.

The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please fill out and submit the Travel Grant Request Application by February 20, 2012 to apply for this grant.

This program is open to FreeBSD developers of all sorts (kernel hackers, documentation authors, bugbusters, system administrators, etc). In some cases we are also able to fund non-developers, such as active community members and FreeBSD advocates.

Your request should be based on a realistic and economical estimate of travel costs (economy airfare, trainfare, ...), accommodations (conference hotel and sharing a room), and registration or tutorial fees. If there are other sponsors willing to cover costs, such as your employer or the conference, we prefer that you talk to them first, as our budget is limited. We are happy to split costs with you or another sponsor, such as just covering airfare or board.

If you are a speaker at the conference, we expect the conference to cover your travel costs, and will most likely not approve your request.

If your application is approved, we will authorize you to seek reimbursement up to a limit. We consider several factors, including our overall and per-event budgets, and the benefit to the community by funding your travel. We reimburse costs based on receipts, and by check or bank transfer. And, we do not cover your costs if you end up having to cancel your trip. We require you to submit a report on your trip, which we may show to current or potential sponsors, and may include in our semi-annual newsletter or this blog.

There's some flexibility in the mechanism, so talk to us if something about the model doesn't quite work for you or if you have any questions. The travel grant program is one of the most effective ways we can spend money to help support the FreeBSD Project, as it helps developers get together in the same place at the same time, and helps advertise and advocate FreeBSD in the larger community.

New Funded Project: Implementing auditdistd daemon

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 02:30:00 +0000

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Pawel Jakub Dawidek has been awarded a grant to implement the auditdistd daemon.

The FreeBSD audit facility provides fine-grained, configurable logging of security-relevant events. One of the key purposes of logging security events is postmortem analysis in case of system compromise. Currently the kernel can push audit records directly into a file or make them available through the /dev/auditpipe device. Because audit logs are stored locally by the kernel, an attacker has access to them once the system is compromised, which enables him to remove trails of his activity.

The goal of the auditdistd project is to securely and reliably distribute audit records over the TCP/IP network from a local auditdistd daemon to a remote auditdistd daemon. In case of source system compromise, the attacker's activity can be analysed using data collected by the remote system, as only the remote system's audit logs can still be trusted.

The project will conclude in February 2012.

New Funded Project: IPv6 Performance Analysis

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:26:00 +0000

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has awarded Bjoern Zeeb a grant to analyze the performance of FreeBSD's IPv6 stack. This project is jointly sponsored with iXsystems.

Last year, Bjoern improved FreeBSD IPv6 support, allowing the possibility to build a FreeBSD system without IPv4 support. This project will continue on this work and concentrate on the kernel, looking at the performance of FreeBSD's IPv6 stack. Various parties have seen lower performance when comparing IPv4 to IPv6 on FreeBSD. While the numbers seem to differ between releases the causes are mostly unknown.

The project will carry out a detailed performance analysis starting with benchmarking IPv6 to IPv4 to get up-to-date numbers to better understand where we are. It will then continue to identify the origins of differences in performance, and where possible, directly address them or identify areas of future work. Having initial benchmark numbers will allow changes to be evaluated by re-running the measurements and quantifying the improvements.

"As the world starts to roll out IPv6 and traffic patterns shift from IPv4 to IPv6, not only correctness and stability, but also feature parity and performance matter," said developer Bjoern Zeeb. "Getting the performance numbers aligning with IPv4 will ensure that our users will not need more resources when using IPv6."

"ISC uses FreeBSD extensively across our server infrastructure and have provided IPv6 services to the community since 2002," commented Peter Losher, ISC Sr. Operations Engineer. "We are excited to support The FreeBSD Foundation and Bjoern's efforts to improve IPv6 performance in FreeBSD."

Bjoern Zeeb is a consultant based in Germany and has been an active FreeBSD committer since 2004. He is currently also a member of the FreeBSD Security and Release Engineering teams.

noreply@blogger.com (Deb) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 05:25:00 +0000

Thank you to everyone who has made a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation this year! We have just around 24 hours left to reach our goal of raising $400,000 for 2011. At this time we have raised over $320,000 from 758 donors.

Your donation helps us support FreeBSD by funding/sponsoring development projects, BSD-related conferences, FreeBSD developers to travel to these conferences, and legal support for the Project. We are a non-for-profit organization and we cannot do it without you.

If you have not had the opportunity to donate this year, it's not too late! It only takes a few minutes to make a donation and help make a difference for the FreeBSD Project and community.

Please visit us at http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ to make a donation today! If you send a check, the envelope must be postmarked by December 31, 2011 to count as a 2011 donation.

Thanks for your support!

'Tis the season for giving

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:06:00 +0000

Colin Percival recently wrote this blog post. With his permission, it is republished here as it may be of interest to other Foundation supporters.

Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Pancha Ganapati,Hogmanay, Newtonmas, or simply the end of the Gregorian year, oddsare that you're giving gifts some time around now. We give giftsto family; we give gifts to friends; we donate to charities; andmany people also offer up tithes to religious institutions. Giftsto individuals are a social bonding ritual — the voluntarytransfer of wealth signals a lower bound on the value we place on arelationship, and the giving of non-monetary gifts in particular canbe a way tocommunicateour level of personal understanding — but these do notapply to charitable and religious donations. For those, I think anentirely different explanation is required: We pay voluntary taxesin order to help create the world we want to live in.

This also applies to companies. I run anonline backup service, andfor the past two years I've donated all of the profits made duringthe month of December to theFreeBSD Foundation;I'm going to be doing the same thing this year too. I'm not doingthis just because I'm a FreeBSD developer, because I use FreeBSDpersonally, or because I would never have launched Tarsnap if Ihadn't been able to build on the open source code in FreeBSD: I'mdoing it because I think supporting FreeBSD development will make the world a better place for both Tarsnap and many other startup companies.

I'm not alone in believing in corporate support of open source software,either. NetApp andHudson River Trading,both major FreeBSD users, have each made donations of $50,000 ormore in each of the past 3 years, andmany other companies regularly donate. Some open source softwareorganizations havemuch longer listsof major donors. And last year Gabriel Weinberglauncheda FOSS Tithing movement by pledging thatDuckDuckGo would tithe in supportof open source software every year.

Most internet startup companies today would never exist without opensource software. As Paul Grahamhas noted, opensource software is one of the big reasons why it's now possible to launcha startup with just $20k and a few months of coding; with high quality freeoperating systems, databases and datastores, application frameworks, webservers and caches, it's now easy to build companies which would havebeen nearly impossible a decade ago.It would be easy to say that startup companies should contribute back toopen source projects out of simple gratitude, but I know it can be hardto justify making business decisions on that basis alone. Instead, I'dlike to ask the startup community to look to the future: Think about howmuch open source has helped you, and help to build a better world— one where open source will be able to help you even more.

And remember that we live in a world where most startup founders end uplaunching several companies over their careers: If the past decade ofopen source software development has made your current startup companypossible, just think how much the next decade of open source softwaredevelopment will help your next startup company.

Apache Software Foundation Testimonial

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:10:00 +0000

Did you know that the Foundation that powers half the Internet uses FreeBSD for nearly all of its public facing services? The FreeBSD Foundation recently received this testimonial from the Apache Software Foundation:

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad rangeof open source software projects. The Foundation provides an establishedframework for intellectual property and financial contributions thatsimultaneously limits contributors potential legal exposure.Through a collaborative and meritocratic development process, Apacheprojects deliver enterprise-grade, freely available software productsthat attract large communities of users. The pragmatic Apache Licensemakes it easy for all users, commercial and individual, to deploy Apacheproducts.

The ASF powers half the Internet, petabytes of data, teraflops ofoperations, billions of objects, and enhances the lives of countlessusers and developers. Established in 1999 to shepherd, develop, andincubate Open Source innovations, "The Apache Way," the ASF oversees150+ projects led by a volunteer community of over 350 individualMembers and 3,000 Committers across six continents.

ApacheCon North America 2011 was just recently held in Vancouver,British Columbia, Canada where FreeBSD was a highlight in the DevOpstrack talks. The Apache Software Foundation itself leverages FreeBSDfor nearly all of its public facing servicesincluding one of the largest SVN repositories in the world. Ourrepository is mirrored on several continents and contains over 1.4million revisions stretching for over a decade. We will even be lendinga hand converting the FreeBSD CVS ports tree to SVN.

The Apache Software Foundation makes use of both custom FreeBSDTinderbox and FreeBSD Update servers to rapidly perform application andbase system updates across multiple datacenters in an automated, quick,and efficient fashion. The Apache Infrastructure Team frequently worksdirectly with FreeBSD developers to stress cutting-edge features likeZFS under real-world loads.

Like The FreeBSD Foundation, the ASF is also a 501(c)3 organization. Donating to FreeBSD through The FreeBSD Foundation, makes Apache better too and will help make your's and others' daily lives less stressful.

RideCharge/TaxiMagic Testimonial

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:02:00 +0000

Did you know that Taxi Magic, the first nationwide free online taxi booking service that is directly integrated with taxi dispatch systems, is entirely based on FreeBSD? Philip M. Gollucci, Director of Operations, recently explained why in his testimonial for the Foundation:

RideCharge, Inc. creates innovative technology solutions that improvelocal ground transportation industries. The company's most renownedproduct, Taxi Magic, is an online & mobile software application thatrevolutionizes the taxi industry by aligning riders, drivers and fleetsfor a better overall ride experience. Taxi Magic is the first nationwidefree online taxi booking service that is directly integrated with taxidispatch systems, providing consumers with the tools to:

Book a taxi from a mobile app or the Web with a few quick taps
Track the taxi's arrival
Charge the ride to a credit card through the mobile app
Expense the trip with an e-receipt

From its inception, RideCharge has been entirely based on FreeBSD. Byleveraging FreeBSD Jails for virtualization, we are able to maximizeresources and expand dynamically. ZFS keeps our data safe and ourdeployments magically quick. Userland DTRACE in FreeBSD 9 is now anindispensable tool for troubleshooting issues in real-time. Even ourJuniper firewalls and switches leverage FreeBSD through JUNOS (TM).iXsystems is incredibly helpful in recommending the correct setup andoptimizing our technology resources to fit our needs for FreeBSD.

RideCharge is a long time contributor to the FreeBSD ports collectionand we employ highly active contributors in the ruby, apache, and perlareas. The Taxi Magic team leverages these incredibly tight feedbackloops to quickly and efficiently contribute back to the community.

RideCharge/TaxiMagic has directly sponsored FreeBSD developers toenhance freebsd-update(8). We now use this update to quickly updateevery machine to maintain PCI DSS Level 1 compliance. These greatcapabilities are now available to the entire FreeBSD community.

Foundation Newsletter Published

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 01:54:00 +0000

The Foundation has published its semi-annual newsletter. It contains updates on this year's projects and fundraising campaign, testimonials from TaxiMagic and the Apache Software Foundation, and the Q1-Q3 balance sheet. You can read the newsletter here. It begins with the letter from the President which is as follows:

The Making of The FreeBSD Foundation

My first introduction to FreeBSD came in the form of a tall, wirery,figure, camped out in the Walnut Creek CDROM machine room. RodGrimes cut the figure of a true hacker: skin only touched by therays of a glowing CRT, nicotine stains on his long fingers tonedby hours of vi keywork, and a wardrobe comprised of faded blue jeansand worn out t-shirts. Regardless of what hours I worked duringmy internship that summer of 1993, Rod was always awake, hunchedover his keyboard, putting all of his energy into the first everrelease of FreeBSD.

I was between my second and third years working on an undergraduatedegree at the University of California at Berkeley. Even attendingthe institute of BSD's genesis, I was completely unaware of Berkeley'scontributions to UNIX. So it was really a stroke of luck, a randomchoice to take a job organizing OS/2 software into a CDROM distribution,that led me to Walnut Creek that summer to witness the making ofFreeBSD 1.0. But without Rod's passion and dedication, I doubt I'dhave realized the opportunity before me.

What I quickly learned from watching Rod and then delving intoFreeBSD, was the incompleteness of my education from Berkeley. SureI was technically proficient in computer algorithms and writingcode, but my courses failed to give me a sense of the art of computerengineering: how to be a craftsman practicing my trade, how todesign and build a complex system that is robust and maintainable,and how to collaborate successfully in such a system. The structureand methodology behind FreeBSD made it the perfect vehicle forabsorbing the real world skills of being a successful programmer.

In 1993, the development model used by the BSDs was rarely encounteredin open source projects: revision control, a bug tracking database,a coding style standard, the hardening of software through peerreview and discussion, and a governing body to mediate write accessto the code and to resolve disputes. Many of these pillars ofprofessional and successful engineering are lacking in both corporateand open source environments today. In fact, it took almost adecade for BSD's main competitor Linux to catch up and adopt somethingas fundamental as revision control. In so many ways, FreeBSD'sdevelopment model was superior and ahead of the times.

So I started my second education while completing my first. Duringmy last two years at Berkeley I spent most of my free time, andsome time I should have devoted to the classes for my degree,absorbing the lessons FreeBSD had to teach. The FreeBSD distributionoffered practical examples of how to deal with almost any type ofcomputer science challenge - examples that I found much morecompelling than the contrived exercises in my text books. While Iwas learning I was also able to contribute in small ways. Thereviews of my work were much more useful than for the projectsassociated with my formal studies. The feedback wasn't alwaysdelivered in the most pleasant way, but that in itself providedvaluable experience on how to improve my people skills.

Small contributions lead to larger ones. The apprentice became amentor. Upon receiving my degree, I found myself sitting on FreeBSD'sgoverning body, the FreeBSD Core Team, with a skill set and experiencein high demand and not found in other members of my graduatingclass.

The historical way to contribute back to the FreeBSD project hasalways been to volunteer time to enhance the "product" that isFreeBSD. For seven years this was the primary way I repaid FreeBSDfor the valuable education I received by being part of its community.However, by 2000 I was struggling to find a better way to ensurethe continued success of FreeBSD. FreeBSD's mindshare growth wasslowing. Linux was starting to receive the attention and financialbacking of large corporations. I wanted to create something thatcould promote, protect, and grow the use of FreeBSD even while theduties of my paid day job prevented me from personally achievingthat mission. The natural answer was to form a corporation.

This had been done before. Jordan Hubbard was operating FreeBSDInc., but its charter and activities were never well defined. Iwanted to build an entity that engendered the trust of the FreeBSDcommunity, followed in the Open Source spirit of doing good forgood's sake, yet could perform tasks only possible with a legalcorporate entity. The FreeBSD Foundation, an open-book, 501(c)3U.S. non-profit charity, was born.

Fast forward a little over a decade, and the FreeBSD Foundationstill adheres to the same mission I defined for it in 2000. Everyyear we sponsor BSD conferences and events around the globe, workto protect the intellectual property of the FreeBSD project, visitinstitutions and corporations to promote the use of FreeBSD, andfund research and development projects that enhance the FreeBSD OS.But even with our $400,000 annual budget there are so many thingswe want to do, but can't. Just as was the case for me in 2000, theFreeBSD Foundation is searching today for new ways to help supportthe FreeBSD project.

In the coming months you will see one of the ways the FreeBSDFoundation is changing. Using the feedback we have gleaned fromcountless meetings with FreeBSD consumers both large and small, theFreeBSD Foundation is sponsoring the work to fully specify andestimate the cost of implementing critical enhancements to theFreeBSD platform. Developed in partnership with the FreeBSDcommunity, the goal of this effort is to provide a roadmap forinfrastructure improvements that have long been needed, but havegone unsatisfied due to lack of a coherent direction. This modelwill also give current and potential supporters of the FreeBSDFoundation concrete insight into our future plans.

I can't imagine what my life would be like today without my FreeBSDexperience. Through the FreeBSD Foundation I hope to give back tothe FreeBSD community even more than I have received, and help toensure that the next young engineer has the same opportunities asI did. However the FreeBSD Foundation can't do it alone. If FreeBSDhas impacted your life, please visit our website and help us to continue FreeBSD's legacy.

Justin T. Gibbs
President and Founder
The FreeBSD Foundation

End-of-Year Fundraising Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:51:00 +0000

The FreeBSD Foundation has been proudly supporting the FreeBSD Project and community for 11 years now. Every year we sponsor BSD conferences and events around the globe, help developers with their travel expenses to attend these conferences, work to protect the intellectual property of the FreeBSD project, visit institutions and corporations to promote the use of FreeBSD, purchase equipment to grow the FreeBSD infrastructure, and fund research and development projects that enhance the FreeBSD OS.

We are deeply grateful for all the support we receive from so many individuals and organizations who value FreeBSD. We currently are at the half way point towards our goal of raising $400,000 this year. We are hoping that you, the FreeBSD community, will help us meet our goal by making a donation this month. By donating to the foundation, you are donating to the FreeBSD Project and community as a whole.

We have had the privilege of meeting many FreeBSD enthusiasts in person, through email, and on the phone. We are always impressed with the passion that these people have for FreeBSD. Most volunteer their precious time after work and some are more fortunate where they actually get paid by their companies to work with FreeBSD. When there is a BSD related conference we usually get quite a few travel grant applications requesting help with developers' travel expenses. Thanks to your support, we have been able to sponsor the travel expenses of developers from Mexico, Lithuania, New Zealand, Germany, Japan, Denmark, and many other countries.

Some of these developers recently wrote personal stories about how receiving help with their travel expenses to attend conferences helped them with their FreeBSD work. These stories will be published in our upcoming newsletter. One developer from Japan, whose attendance we've sponsored more than once, is a technical writer. The Japanese development community is comprised of earnest and skillful people. They are sharp programmers who know many programming languages, but learning and understanding English is difficult for many of them. He attends the conferences so he can keep up with the latest FreeBSD information and provide this information to the Japanese FreeBSD community in their native spoken language.

Another recent travel grant recipient runs a FreeBSD mirror server in Sweden, a country that apparently does not have many BSD users. He had a chance to meet many FreeBSD developers for the first time by attending EuroBSDCon. He has recently started submitting patches to our FreeBSD documentation set, and will hopefully become a committer, literally doubling the number of committers in Sweden!

Lastly, a Canadian developer that we've sponsored told us, "By attending these conferences I have gained valuable experience, connected with fascinating people that use FreeBSD, learned from presenters and most importantly, forged some friendships that will last a lifetime."

These grant recipients have given far more back to the FreeBSD community than what they have received from the foundation. And, this is only one area where your donations provide a significant, tangible, measurable benefit for the entire FreeBSD community.

If you benefit from FreeBSD, please donate. With your donation, we can continue to support FreeBSD activities like:

development projects to support emerging technologies such as IPv6 support in FreeBSD, GEM, KMS, and DRI support for Intel drivers, Five New TCP Congestion Control Algorithms, and much more.
BSD conferences around the globe, including Europe, Japan, Canada, US, and Ukraine.
giving students and contributors the opportunity to attend conferences and developer summits.
maintaining the infrastructure of computers and equipment that support our community.
growing the FreeBSD community through marketing and outreach to users and businesses.
protecting the FreeBSD trademarks and providing the project with access to legal counsel.
helping FreeBSD continue to serve as the foundation for research and enterprise.

Please consider making a donation so we can continue, and increase, our support of the FreeBSD Project and community! Visit The FreeBSD Foundation website to find out how you can make a difference for FreeBSD today.

Thank you for your support!

Foundation at LISA

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:03:00 +0000

There will be a FreeBSD booth during LISA in Boston, next Wednesday and Thursday (December 7–8). We’ll have some cool Foundation swag, Foundation brochures, and will be available to answer FreeBSD questions and to accept donations for the Foundation. Entrance to the exhibition area is free, but you do need to register first. If you’re in Boston, stop by booth #408 and say hi!

SoC Mentor Summit Trip Report

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 14:31:00 +0000

The Foundation provided a travel grant to Bjoern Zeeb to attend the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit and the FreeBSD Vendor Summit. Bjoern's trip report is as follows:

Thank you for helping with my travel costs to the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit and the FreeBSD Vendor Summit.

Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit

Google's registration requirements and provided wiki space made it possible to coordinate travel with others, which allowed me to make first contact with mentors from other Open Source projects even before I left and obviously I ran into more geeks by the time I got to the airport.

Saturday morning the Google buses picked us up. After an excellent breakfast, there were important rules during the opening session: do not go beyond the areas where we have put up signs. This was obviously the largest mentor summit so far as the classic un-conference approach for finding topics and rooms no longer scaled. Since the schedule changed regularly, it wasn't possible to attend all the sessions I had planned, especially on Sunday. Let me highlight a few:

Umbrella Organizations (Admins and Mentors meeting): while this does not directly apply to FreeBSD, I was curious to see what kinds of problems other organizations were facing and whether they have some interesting ways to solve their issues that could also help FreeBSD. I was overwhelmed by the real problems I heard about and it made me realize how well organized and well run FreeBSD is. On a side note, I learned that KDE had 50 GSoC slots, which I wish FreeBSD could handle as well. One interesting idea that came up was that some organizations are either providing web forms or spreadsheets for mentors and students to more easily keep track not only of progress but also for catching interaction problems. Given FreeBSD has the weekly or bi-weekly mailing list updates, tells students to let admins know in case of problems with their mentor, we are not too far away from that but it could certainly simplify some tracking for admins.
Women in Open Source: there were multiple sessions on this. For me a lot of the discussions did not go too far into the topic of attracting more women to open source development. Only Gnome has hosted women summer outreach programs in the past, which was interesting to hear about. One important item is to provide dedicated mentors upfront that women can talk to one-to-one and that a list of these would be available all year long. Astonishingly the discussions often went along the reasoning of not driving woman away rather than attracting them in first place; there were plenty of suggestions of what not to do, and what to do to help them stay.

Marketing and Open Source: a topic that FreeBSD needs to get further up to speed on. A lot of talk was how to help commercialize an open source project. Social Media, videos, and local communities were also big discussion items. Some ideas were: leveraging users by providing pamphlets and posters that they can distribute, advertise at events, and use references and independent reviewers on the web page. PostgreSQL is doing a good job and we should leverage some of their ideas.

Open Source OS summit: this was one of the most interesting discussion groups during the weekend. It is like an organized hallway track with everyone but Linux in the room. Major topics were: combined arm twisting of vendors to not only help one but many projects, firmware licensing, shared documentation (such as data sheets) repository, and possibly setting up a mailing list to coordinate. It was interesting to learn beyond other informal discussions how many other projects such as RTEMS, Haiku, and Illumos take bits and pieces from FreeBSD and wondering why we don't talk a lot more or invite them to our devsummits. Another thing to consider is how to "sell" the project - which reaches into the marketing but also a funding discussion. Should a project just provide the source and let the ecosystem create distributions? Would commercial support on top be an option?

The hallway track and dinner conversations: in addition to the Open Source OS summit session, this was most helpful for getting in touch with other BSD consumers and projects which we consume. I had extended chats with Illumos people pondering collaboration on some topics, talks with NTP folks, discussions on the network stack with RTMES, and I also got to know MoinMoin folks who are quite local to me and who could immediately help me to solve a problem so that we can easily have links on the wiki to SVN commits. My other hallway track item was to debug why IPv6 on the Google guest network did not work for me. The problem has since been worked around and IPv6 should work flawlessly for everyone there now. The diagnosing on why it only affected certain people or possibly only BSD (derived) operating systems continues.

All in all it was a productive, informative, fun weekend. Now that I am back home, I'll need to follow-up on some of the possible collaboration ideas.

The FreeBSD Vendor Summit

The FreeSBD vendor summit, a couple of days later, continued to provide insights on what people need or want from FreeBSD. It was even more interesting to hear about what was cooking and what people considered to give back. The general trend to push changes not considered to be IP back to FreeBSD continues and makes me believe that in some ways things are going better in our world. The afternoon was almost all about virtualization. We heard about FreeBSD on Microsoft Hyper-V and talked a bit about EC2, Xen, bhyve, as well as tools and frameworks to help to simplify the usage of FreeBSD in or for virtualized environments. At the end of the day I started to look at the virtio drivers for Peter to commit them to HEAD and we got the QLogic 10G driver into the tree as well. In addition to the session, the breaks provided some time to informally chat with the other participants. It would have been great to have some time the following day to continue these informal group discussions but BSDCan is only a couple of months away. Having such an event at least twice a year is extremely helpful and my thanks goes to George for running this!

Trip Report: Andrew Turner

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 23:47:00 +0000

The next trip report is from Andrew Turner:

On day one of the Developer summit, I attended the bmake/bus_bma and toolchain working groups. I contributed to these by announcing a patch to allow FreeBSD to be compiled from Linux. The patch is available; however, it is against an old copy of HEAD and does not apply correctly. An updated version is expected to be committed to a project branch in subversion in the next few weeks as I have the time to work on it. In the toolchain working group, I discussed the current state of the ARM EABI port. The last remaining part is getting GCC configured correctly. Until now I have been using a minimally configured copy of GCC. Due to the nature of the change, I would like to ensure it is correct as the ABI will need to work with clang in the future.

The second day of the Developer summit had interesting discussions on virtualization. This is an area that will soon pick up in the embedded area when ARM vendors release their System on Chips containing Cortex-A15 cores, as these have hardware supported virtualization.

I gave a talk in the FreeBSD track at the conference on the current state of NAND flash with FreeBSD, what I would like to change, and where NAND flash hardware is heading. The main point is that the the NAND flash framework is mostly done; however, we need a flash filesystem or flash translation layer before we can use it.

As a result of my talk, I was asked about devices we support that contain NAND flash. The OpenRD-Ultimate appears to be a device we support that developers are able to buy; however, as I have never used one, I am unable to recommend it. This lead to a discussion on getting one into one of the FreeBSD clusters. Since the conference, Wojciech Koszek has taken the lead in organising embedded devices for the Netperf cluster.

Trip Report: Brooks Davis

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:48:00 +0000

The next EuroBSDCon trip report is from Brooks Davis:

I arrived in Maarssen on the 5th of October and met up with fellow developers for drinks at the hotel and then dinner.

On the 6th, we headed to the conference site and commenced with the developers summit. After an opening session, we broke up into working groups. For the first session, I attended the ports session. I lead a short discussion on the ports impact of our migration to Clang/LLVM as the base tool chain. The general conclusion was that we need to add support for switching the default ports compiler (a project which is well underway), as well as the ability to specify a restricted set of acceptable compilers for a given port. There seemed to be solid support for allowing the default to be clang for FreeBSD 10 builds on architectures where we make it the base compiler.

After lunch, I lead a session on our toolchain work. I outlined our current status to the group. The status report was followed up by a discussion of the remaining requirements to produce a GPL-free base system. Those items include:

an LLDB port
libgcc replacement on some architectures (at least MIPS and sparc64)
libgcc*.so
FDT tools
unwinding library
GDB server
as(1) wrapper (maybe?)
16-bit ASM support (at least on x86)
libdwarf

While not required for a GPL free system, we also identified a desire for a CDDL-free CTF implementation and a libbsdctf or similar.

Of the pieces required for a GPL-free base, the largest component remaining is a linker. Because linkers have quite a bit of scope, we spent most of the remaining time brainstorming requirements for a BSD licensed linker. Those requirements included:

linker scripts (or equivalent)
LTO framework
Link time optimization against IR or machine code
Incremental linking
Support for IR in ELF
GNU ld compatibility
IR processing by plugin
Limited non-ELF support (for boot blocks, etc)
Alternative hash table support
Crunching support
Be fast
Native cross-architecture support
Multipass lookup
Unit tests
Coded to LLVM standards (to allow inclusion in LLVM)
linker is a library
C and C++ support
Architecture support: i386, x86_64, ARM, PPC(64), MIPS(64), PiNaCl
Possible architecture support: sparc64

After the toolchain summit, I attended the capsicum summit where we discussed the status of capsicum and various thing we could protect with capability sandboxes. We produced quite a long list of things that should be sandboxed, though it got a bit silly near the end when we basically started listing all ports. One area I found my self pondering was how to sandbox moderately complex web applications like Trac which can't be fully sandboxed in Apache and must wait until at least application initialization has happened.

Friday the 7th commenced with an opening session followed immediately by working group reports. I reported on the toolchain session and most other session leaders reported on their sessions. That was followed by a discussion of options for using Git to track FreeBSD. At the end we concluded that we definitely need a git.freebsd.org to provide officially "blessed" git trees, but we left some details unresolved such as the exact scope of the git trees. This discussion was followed by a set of presentations by Chris Buechler of pfSense, Jeroen van Nieuwenhuizen of Snow, Robert Watson of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory and Yvan Vanhullebus of NETASQ on their use (or non-use in the case of Snow's clients) of FreeBSD. After these presentations we broke for lunch.

When we reconvened after lunch we started with a discussion of virtualization on FreeBSD. In a number of key ways FreeBSD was late to the virtualization game, but it looks like we're catching up. Between the addition of BHyVe and an upcoming Xen Dom0 implementation, we will soon be well positioned to host guest VMs on FreeBSD and our support for running as a guest seems to be improving steadily. We're still behind in some senses, but given the remarkably poor reality that is accepted as the state of the art, it seems like we have a chance to pull ahead in areas of management if we invest some effort.

The virtualization session was followed by a session for FreeBSD 10.0 brainstorming. As usual for such a session, many ideas were generated. If even half of them are completed, I think we'll have a fantastic 10.0 release.

Following the success of the dev summit track introduced at BSDCan this spring, Saturday contained such a track along side the conference. I attended several of these talks and gave a presentation on our participation in the 2011 edition of the Google Summer of Code. We had 13 successful projects and have already gained two comitters as a result of this year's projects, with a couple more expected in the next few months.

Trip Report: Gleb Kurtsou

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:10:00 +0000

The next trip report is from Gleb Kurtsou:

Thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation, I was able to attend the Developer Summit and EuroBSDcon'2011. It was my first Developer Summit. Two of my main goals were to popularize PEFS and meet in person people I communicate with via email. FreeBSD developers are all great people and nice to talk to. I only wish I could also meetmy past GSoC mentors at the conference; hopefully I'll be more lucky next time.

PEFS is a kernel level stacked cryptographic file system for FreeBSD. It's been around for a while, but still remains unknown to many FreeBSD users. I gave ashort presentation about PEFS at the DevSummit, outlining its design anddifferences compared to other cryptographic stacked file systems. I had a numberof comments, particularly regarding data authentication in PEFS, so I've startedlooking closer at the issue and have already evaluated various designs. Whatsurprised me is that interest in PEFS has increased after adding PEFS to thelist of talks on the wiki page. Perhaps the outcome of giving the talk could beeven larger than I originally expected.

The DevSummit was both very inspirational and technically useful. I took valuableideas and knowledge from every working group session. The toolchain and bmakegroups discussed some of the issues I've faced myself building and maintaininga project partially based on FreeBSD and reusing its build system: portions ofthe code couldn't be compiled with the base system toolchain, managinginterdependencies, and faster builds. It's encouraging to see the FreeBSD projectsolving these problems right way instead of using homegrown hacks. Capsicum andvirtualization are areas of my interest and closely related to projects I work on.An additional file systems working group would have made this event ideal for me.It looks like a sufficient number of VFS gurus couldn't get to this place at thesame time, so I'm looking forward to attending the next Developer Summit.

Thanks again to the Foundation for its support!

Trip Report: Niklas Zeising

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 13:04:00 +0000

The next trip report is from Niklas Zeising:

This year I had the privilege and pleasure to attend EuroBSDcon 2011 and the preceding Developers Summit. I have had plans to travel to earlier EuroBSDcon conferences, but have never been able to partly because of the cost. What made this year different was the generous sponsorship from the FreeBSD Foundation which finally made it possible for me to attend EuroBSDcon 2011. My primary reason for attending the conference was to meet and talk to some of the people in the FreeBSD community that I have had contact with over IRC and e-mail. I was also hoping to be able to contribute to the discussions during the Developer Summit and to listen to the talks and perhaps learn something new.

My travel started in Sweden from where I traveled via Copenhagen to Amsterdam and then on to the conference city, Maarssen. When I arrived at the hotel, I was just in time to drop my things off in my room and run to the bus to catch up for the Wednesday dinner.

My first day since arriving in Maarssen I attended the FreeBSD Developers Summit, to which I had been invited by Benedict Reuschling. After arriving at the venue and registering for the conference, the first order of business was eating breakfast, which was served at the venue. After breakfast and the Developer Summit opening ceremony, I spent the rest of the morning attending the documentation working group. During this session we had interesting discussions about several topics, including the conversion of the repository to subversion and what was needed to convert the FreeBSD documentation to a more modern markup language. We also discussed how to get more people involved in the documentation effort and how to make use of all the howtos floating around in the FreeBSD forums and the Internet in general. After lunch I continued the day by attending the Toolchain and Capsicum working groups. It was very nice to listen to these great minds discussing various aspects of FreeBSD.

The second day started with reports from the different working groups, after which Ulrich Spoerlein led a discussion about using git. The next topic on the agenda was the vendor discussion. It was very insightful and interesting to hear from some of the people that use FreeBSD in their commercial and research applications. I also found it interesting to hear why some companies choose not to use FreeBSD in their IT infrastructure. After lunch, the Developer Summit continued with a discussion on Virtualization. For me it was very interesting to hear about BHyVe, since I was not aware that this project existed. It is also clear that there still are tasks to work on to make FreeBSD an even more competitive platform in the virtualization market. The developer summit then ended with a brainstorming session on the FreeBSD 10.0 release.

Saturday meant that it was time for the conference proper. After a very interesting keynote given by Hans van de Looy on the topic of the recent data breach at Diginotar, and other issues regarding IT security, such as trust, I started the day in the hacking lounge where I began working on some of the ideas and suggestions talked about during the documentation working group. The first talk I attended was about OpenBSD's packet filter, PF, and its history. After lunch I spent the afternoon listening on the devsummit track. The last talk of the day was by Marshall Kirk McKusick on the topic of BSD history. I found this talk very funny and it was interesting to hear more about the history of BSD.

The EuroBSDcon social event took place Saturday evening at the railway museum in Utrecht. I found the museum entertaining and we got a very nice guided tour through the museum. After the tour, dinner was served in the museum.

Sunday began with a second keynote, this time the topic was reliable systems, which was given by Herbert Bos. I continued the morning listening to the talk on Capsicum by Robert Watson and BSD Multiplicity by Michael Dexter. After lunch the Sendmail talk by Eric Allman was on the agenda, which I followed up with the talk on OpenSSH by Damien Miller and ZFS by Brooks Davis. The day ended with a work in progress session and the closing ceremony. It was actually a little saddening that the conference was over since I had a very good time.

I am very glad that I went to EuroBSDcon 2011 and really hope that I will be able to go again in the future. It was very nice to finally be able to meet some of the great persons behind e-mail addresses, commit messages and IRC nicknames and talk to them in person. I want to thank Benedict Reuschling for talking me into finally going and to the FreeBSD Foundation for giving me the opportunity to attend. I also want to thank all the other people I met and talked to during the conference and who made me feel right at home. Last but not least, I want to thank the organizers who made the conference a reality. Hopefully we will see each other next year!

Trip Report: Daichi Goto

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:06:00 +0000

The next EuroBSDCon trip report is from Daichi Goto:

Thank you for the great support of my journey to EuroBSDCon 2011 and the FreeBSD DevSummit 2011. It was a great experience. Thank you again.

On the first day of the DevSummit, I attended the Ports, Toolchain, and Capsicum working groups. These days, GPL-free toolchains are becoming a big concern between *BSD folks and users not only for business reasons but because they are technically interesting. Many developers and users require GPL-free toolchains and FreeBSD 10 represents a big milestone for that. The working group discussions were very exciting and had a forward-looking attitude.

The new idea "Package Set" and the weekly package set release are important for most common FreeBSD users. Come to think of it, developers and advanced users prefer to use the Ports Collection as their package management system, but it's hard for most novice users, lightweight users and enterprise-class managers who just want to run a stable system for their jobs. FreeBSD's current binary package management system is not good for updating as it can result in package update failures. The Package Set and the weekly update mechanism have an advanced potential to solve this issue and provide a more comfortable and easy to use packages update experience.

The new security feature "Capsicum" is valuable for all *nix. The working group discussions about Capsicum and FreeBSD have given developers a chance to discuss which libraries, commands and 3rd party applications would benefit from Capsicum. Capsicum will be a default feature from FreeBSD 9.1 and FreeBSD 10 will be the new land of Capsicum security.

On the 2nd day, the last session "FreeBSD 10 Thinking" provided me a chance to re-think the design and the implementation of our unionfs. FreeBSD's unionfs was reimplemented to solve some lock issues some years ago and it works very well in most situations. But in some situations, the current unionfs implementation causes a kernel panic because of kernel memory exhaustion. Also, our VFS based multi stackable unionfs implementation has some issues that are very difﬁcult to solve. Based on the advice from hrs, we (I and ozawa-san) are re-thinking the design and implementation to improve robustness and reliability, as well as to include some new features such as the dynamic mount layer moves-up or moves-down and non-top layer umount. We are going to brush up our design ideas and try to do experimental developments for FreeBSD 10. I'm pleased to get a good chance at this.

The EuroBSDCon 2011 keynotes and sessions have also given me some great inspirations. My thanks goes to the EuroBSDCon 2011 committee members and sponsors. I'm looking forward to seeing all you at the next EuroBSDCon, and of course, if it is possible, I'm looking forward to seeing you at Spring, AsiaBSDCon 2012 in Tokyo. That's during cherry blossom's beautiful season.

When I get back to Japan, I am going to write some news and articles about FreeBSD and the conference for some Japanese IT media, including Gihyo.jp FreeBSD Daily Topics, MYCOM Journal, and @IT.. For most common Japanese developers and users, English news sources are hard to understand. My Japanese articles around FreeBSD are very valuable for Japanese users of FreeBSD. Thank you again for the FreeBSD Foundation's travel support.

Trip Report: Marius Strobl

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:17:00 +0000

The EuroBSDCon trip reports are starting to arrive and will be posted here. The first report is from Marius Strobl:

The generous sponsorship of the FreeBSD Foundation for the first time allowed me to attend EuroBSDCon'11 as well as the associated Developer Summit in its entirety (so far I could only attend one day of last year's EuroBSDCon Developer Summit). Having the chance to take part in the busdma(9), for which Marcel Moolenaar and myself had a preparatory email conversation, and the bmake working groups on the first day was really helpful. Having done work for the sparc64 port and machine independent network and storage controller drivers, I came across several limitations in the current implementation of busdma(9). Other architectures will benefit from the proposed busdma(9) overhaul. Switching to a bmake based build infrastructure will provide better and optimized cross-compilation of FreeBSD on other operating systems. While this isn't something that I have a direct need for, it will come in handy should the rest of the FreeBSD developers decide to remove the GPL'ed toolchain in the base for all platforms in favor of LLVM/clang, which so far doesn't support 64-bit SPARC v9. The bmake based build infrastructure will provide a backup plan by allowing the use of an external GCC and binutils via its external toolchain support. Surprisingly, there was next to no opposition to the plans of these two working groups. Collaboration on the bmake build infrastructure and busdma(9) overhaul working groups will take place via the FreeBSD Wiki.

The working group presentations and the brainstorming sessions on the second day of the Developer Summit provided a good overview of what's going on and is planned in the FreeBSD project beyond the src base, including the infrastructure and the ports collection. Both the first and the second day of the Developer Summit as well as "day zero" were concluded by nice dinners which allowed one to make contacts with fellow FreeBSD developers, especially doc and ports committers, which I as a src committer otherwise don't have that much contact with, even online.

On the third day of the Developer Summit, which also was the first official day of EuroBSDCon'11, I gave a short talk about the status of the FreeBSD/sparc64 port. Based on the feedback that I received, the presentation was well received. The rest of that conference day I spent mainly attending the rest of the Developer Summit track, which was an official part of EuroBSDCon'11 and also attracted some non-FreeBSD committers. This again provided me with a good overview of what else is going in FreeBSD. The pkgng project seems like an especially worthy addition. Slides of the talks given in that track are available here. That day was closed by a nice social event at the Utrecht Railway Museum, again giving good opportunities to make contacts with fellow developers.

The second day of EuroBSDCon'11, which no longer hosted Developer Summit events,had some interesting talks, of which the "OpenBSD/sun4v: Porting OpenBSD to Sun's UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors" by Mark Kettenis turned out to be especially useful as it gave me 2-3 new ideas about how to address integration of sun4v support into FreeBSD/sparc64. A short chat with Mark afterwards yielded helpful advice for adding support for the line of Fujitsu/Oracle Mx000 Enterprise servers to FreeBSD/sparc64.

I'm especially thankful that the Developer Summit and EuroBSDCon'11 for the first time allowed me to meet my former mentor Marcel Moolenaar in person. Other interesting contacts I've made and topics relevant to the FreeBSD project I've talked about with them were:

Jonathan Anderson
Gavin Atkinson (Solaris binary-compatibility for FreeBSD/sparc64)
Baptiste Daroussin (pkgng)
Pawel Dawidek (ZFS)
Wilko Bulte (donate a dual Sun SCSI-HBA and will try to get me disks for a machine used for package building and for my development machine)
Beat Gaetzi (will try to get me UltraSPARC T1/T2 hardware)
Justin Gibbs (fixing issues revealed by a recent commit of Kenneth Merry regarding sense residual handling in Justin's ahc(4) and ahd(4) drivers)
Alexander Motin (NCQ timeouts with ahci(4))
Gabor Pali (seems like I've even managed to catch his cold ...)
Daniel Seuffert (will try to get me UltraSPARC T1/T2 and SPARC64 VI/VII hardware)
Ed Shouten (thankfully agreed to adapt/fix rp(4) to his TTY-rework if I send him the respective card)
Shteryana Shopova
Florian Smeets
Bjoern Zeeb

While at the conference and during the trips to and from Maarssen I managed to finally commit support for SCHED_ULE to sparc64 and vice versa, which should also provide a tiny performance improvement on other architectures, commit fixes for two PRs, clean up some PHY device driver stuff Warner Losh left behind, fix fallout like the ahc(4)/ahd(4) issue mentioned above in other HBA drivers, port the NetBSD MII bitbang'ing code and convert most of the network device drivers that can take advantage of it to use it, and fix a real bug that is present in 153 device drivers.

All in all, I think it was fruitful for me to attend EuroBSDCon'11 and the associated Developer Summit as a member of the FreeBSD project and community.

Implementing xlocale APIs Project Update

noreply@blogger.com (Deb) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:38:00 +0000

The following project update was written by David Chisnall who received a grant from us to implement xlocale APIs to enable porting libc++. We're pleased that the project is almost completed!It's traditional to start this sort of thing by telling you who I am. I started using FreeBSD around 2001. At the time, I'd used Linux but switched to FreeBSD because it sounded like it worked correctly - I could have xmms playing music, my IM and email clients notifying me of new messages, and BZFLag making gunshot noises all at the same time. Apparently, ten years later, this still doesn't work reliably on Linux...
I got involved with clang via a somewhat indirect route. I'm a member of the core team of the Étoilé project, which aims to build a (BSD licensed) desktop environment on top of GNUstep. I grew increasingly frustrated with the level of Objective-C support in GCC, which included shipping one release with Objective-C completely broken and displaying no progress towards supporting the Objective-C 2 extensions that were about 5 years old at the time. I looked at the code, but it was an incomprehensible mess of spaghetti.

Apple had just released a new compiler front end (clang) that had Objective-C parsing mostly finished, but code generation missing. I started poking the clang code to try to support the GCC Objective-C runtime, and a few weeks later had a working Objective-C 2 compiler. I then grew frustrated with the limitations (including the license) of the GCC Objective-C runtime and wrote a more modern (MIT licensed) replacement. Clang now supports both and with the new runtime is at feature parity with Apple's implementation of the language.

While hacking on clang - which I do on FreeBSD - I fixed various FreeBSD-related bugs. This put me in contact with Roman Divacky, who had been working on importing clang into the base system. This is an important task, because FreeBSD currently uses the last GPLv2 version of GCC as the system compiler. Although this release seems less buggy than subsequent ones, it is now over 4 years old and is no longer supported upstream. It won't, for example, get any of the features of C1x or C++11.

The compiler is only half of the problem. The other half is the standard library. For C, this isn't an issue: FreeBSD has had its own C standard library implementation since before it was FreeBSD. For C++, it's a bigger problem. FreeBSD currently ships with GNU libstdc++, which has undergone the same sort of license change as GCC, leaving FreeBSD stuck with an old version.

A good candidate for replacement is libc++, developed as part of the LLVM project and available under UIUC and MIT licenses. This has a few dependencies. One is a low-level C++ ABI library, which implements the dynamic parts of C++ such as exception handling and run-time type information. I'd written an implementation of this for PathScale, and the FreeBSD and NetBSD Foundations jointly paid for it to be open sourced. I've since extended it with some additional features required to support C++11, which includes an std::exception_ptr object that allows exceptions to be passed between threads.

The other dependency is the C standard library. Libc++ was written by Apple developers (Apple is in the same situation as FreeBSD with regards to the GPLv3) and so uses some features of Darwin libc that are not portable. Specifically, Darwin libc has a convenient set of extensions to localisation: xlocale. This extends the POSIX 2008 per-thread locale APIs (missing in FreeBSD) to provide a set of _l variants of locale-aware libc functions that use a specific locale, rather than the global one.

My recent work, sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation, has been to implement the missing xlocale APIs. This is now mostly done and pending code review. With this and the new tweaks to libcxxrt, it's now possible to build libc++ on FreeBSD and most of the tests pass.

Most of the remaining test failures are in the header. This defines a lot of complex atomic operations and requires a lot of compiler support. Eli Friedman has been working on adding this support in clang, and with his latest patch applied 25 of the 52 atomic tests pass. There are still a few remaining failures:

- 27 caused by clang not fully supporting the atomic operations yet
- 3 caused by clang not fully supporting the C++11 type-trait intrinsics
- 20 that I don't think are real failures - they're caused by the VM where I'm running the tests not having sufficiently fine-grained time reporting for the thread operation timeout tests to work properly
- 1 is caused by FreeBSD lacking the C1x quick_exit() APIs.
- 2 caused by FreeBSD lacking the uchar.h header

For comparison, Howard Hinnant, the libc++ lead developer, just sent me a list of the failures on OS X. On FreeBSD, 4271 tests pass, 53 fail. On OS X 4253 pass, 71 fail. This is looking very promising for an entirely GNU-free C++ stack.

DIFFUSE for FreeBSD

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 14:09:00 +0000

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Swinburne Universityof Technology's Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures hasbeen awarded a grant to implement DIFFUSE for FreeBSD.

DIFFUSE (Distributed Firewall and Flow-shaper Using StatisticalEvidence) is an extension to the FreeBSD IPFW firewall subsystemdeveloped by CAIA. It allowsIPFW to classify traffic based on statistical properties of flows beingobserved in realtime, and instantiate network actions across adistributed set of "action nodes" for particular flows if required.

This project will tidy up and integrate theexisting DIFFUSEprototype into FreeBSD, and incorporate a number of important newfeatures. Integration of DIFFUSE into FreeBSD will increase FreeBSD'sutility to designers and implementers of FreeBSD-based networkinginfrastructure.

Network architects frequently require the ability to classify differenttraffic types flowing across a network, typically using packetinspection capabilities of base system tools such as ipfw and pf.Traffic classification then enables the provision of customized servicelevels to different traffic types (such as priority packet queuing andforwarding, or allocation of specific bandwidth guarantees).

DIFFUSE uses machine learning techniques to enable robust and efficientclassification of IP traffic flows based on their unique statisticalproperties in addition to traditional inspection of packet header orpayload contents. DIFFUSE also allows traffic classification to occur inone place (e.g. in the core of a network) and trigger traffic shapingand differentiation elsewhere (e.g. at the edges of a network). DIFFUSEhas applications in ISP, residential broadband and large corporatenetwork scenarios to name a few.

The project will conclude the end of October 2011.