FreeBSD Foundation

BSDCan Trip Report: Eitan Adler

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:43:00 +0000

The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored 7 attendees of BSDCan 2013. The first trip report is from Eitan Adler, a doc committer, who attended the BSDCan Developers Summit. Eitan writes:

I arrived Tuesday night and met Colin Percival at the airport. After dropping off luggage at the university, I met up with some of the other developers.

The first day, I attended the "Netflix and FreeBSD" session run by Scott Long. It was interesting to see what kind of problems users of FreeBSD ran into when running at scale.

For the afternoon working group, I chose to attend the "ports and packages" session. A variety of topics were discussed but the most discussed topic was cross-building ports across both versions and architectures. This is a topic that came up repeatedly in prior
discussion and that would come up again in other working groups, so it was good to know about the latest work in this area.

The vendor summit came next. In the past, the vendor summit focused on kernel work but this one revolved around the user land. This is particularly important to me as I run FreeBSD on my laptop as my primary development machine.

At night I spent some time in the hacking lounge or other shared areas meeting people. It was very nice to be able to meet the people I've been talking to for the past three years.

On Thursday I spent my morning in the "Desktop" session. Getting FreeBSD running well on desktops is critical in attracting new developers in the future. Kris Moore, from PCBSD, spoke a lot about the customizations that they made. I pressed to share the improvements
that could be committed upstream. Other issues discussed were packaging for the desktop and a graphical boot loader for FreeBSD/PC-BSD.

The afternoon session for me was "Documentation": a significant portion of the discussion was about the future print edition of the book and what sections need to be updated and improved. In particular, how we could get more source committers involved in writing documentation. We also discussed how to work going forward with other teams that need access to the documentation (e.g., portmgr and postmaster). We also touched on the FAQ, translations, and the new toolchain. The final topic we discussed was the automated QA and statistics tools we have (and don't have) and how we could improve in that area.

After dinner I did some work at the documentation hackathon. I spent the remainder of the night at the hacker lounge discussing kernel internals with Peter Wemm, Sean Bruno, and others.

Unfortunately, I had to leave prior to the conference itself, but I felt that meeting people at the developer summit was well worth the time spent.

FreeBSD Foundation Announces Ed Maste is New Director of Project Development

noreply@blogger.com (Deb) — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:15:00 +0000

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce Ed Maste's new role as the Foundation's part-time Director of Project Development. Ed has served on the Foundation's board for two years, and has stepped down in order to accept this new position.

In this position, Ed will manage the Foundation's sponsored work, including projects funded under specific grants, operational support and project development undertaken by the Foundation's permanent technical staff. Working with the Foundation's Board of Directors, Ed will identify and document specific areas of future project work interest. This roadmap planning will include coordination with FreeBSD consumers and the FreeBSD community.

"2012 represented an inflection point in the Foundation's history,'' said Justin T. Gibbs, President of the FreeBSD Foundation. "The Foundation has a stated goal of investing in permanent staff through 2013. With Ed taking on this new position I'm excited by the Foundation's increased capacity to manage our project development and operational support.''

Ed has over ten years of experience in companies building products on FreeBSD, in both technical and managerial roles. He resides in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.

FreeBSD Foundation announces second technical staff member and iSCSI project

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Maste) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:18:00 +0000

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Edward Tomasz Napierała has joined as its second member of technical staff. This is a continuation of the Foundation's plan to invest in staff in 2013.

A FreeBSD committer since 2007, Edward previously completed a number of projects under Foundation grants, including safe device removal with mounted filesystems, growing mounted filesystems, and resource containers.

Edward is currently implementing a native in-kernel iSCSI stack (both target and initiator) for this increasingly popular block storage protocol. "Although there are a number of iSCSI target implementations that support FreeBSD, the project lacks a high performance and reliable in-kernel target. As iSCSI gains favor, this stack will be a key element in maintaining FreeBSD's competitive position in enterprise and open-source deployments" said Justin T. Gibbs, president of the FreeBSD Foundation. The project is expected to be completed in October 2013.

Another part of Edward's responsibilities will be assisting the FreeBSD Security Team in preparing security advisories and patches.

Edward lives in Warsaw, Poland.

Raise a Million - Spend a Million!

noreply@blogger.com (Deb) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:16:00 +0000

FreeBSD is internationally recognized as an innovative leader in providing a high-performance, secure, and stable operating system. Our mission is to continue and increase our support and funding to keep FreeBSD at the forefront of operating system technology. But, we can’t do this without your help!

Last year with your generosity, we raised over $770,000. This allowed us to not only achieve our goal, but to exceed it by over $250,000.

This year, with your help, we will do more.

This year we will double the amount we spend.

This year we will invest $1,000,000 to support and promote FreeBSD.

What will the Foundation accomplish with your donation in 2013?
• Spend almost $600,000 on software development projects for FreeBSD.
• Support the Release Engineering and Security teams with paid staff time.
• Grow to five technical staff members by year-end.
• Support BSD conferences around the globe, in Europe, Japan, Canada, and the USA.
• Spend over $130,000 on hardware to maintain and improve FreeBSD project infrastructure.
• Grow the FreeBSD community through marketing and outreach to users and businesses.
• Protect the FreeBSD trademarks and provide the project with access to legal counsel.

We have kicked off the new year with 3 newly funded projects, and are actively soliciting additional project proposals now. We've added one new technical staff member and are in the process of adding more.

Please support the Foundation during our Spring Fundraising Drive, and help us raise $100,000 from 1000 donors between April 16th and May 30th.

We can’t do this without you! Just go to http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate to make your donation. Then talk to your employer to either match your gift or to make their own donation.

Thank you for your support!

The FreeBSD Foundation

New Funded Project: Capsicum Framework

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 16:30:00 +0000

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Pawel Jakub Dawidek has been awarded a development grant to further improve the Capsicum framework. The grant is jointly funded by Google's Open Source Programs Office.

The project includes the integration of previous work, implementation of new programmer-friendly capability system calls, improvements to the Casper Capsicum service daemon, and sandboxing various security-sensitive applications.

"My previous Capsicum work focused on improving the framework itself to make it a better fit for real world applications. This new project will make use of the improved Capsicum to secure sensitive programs and libraries found in FreeBSD. The project will also produce many examples for others to follow, allowing them to take advantage of Capsicum to improve the security of their programs," said Pawel.

Ben Laurie, of Google's security team, added that "traditional operating system security is based on Access Control Lists (ACLs). Decades of experience has made it quite clear this is the wrong model - but how can we move to a better way without having to rebuild everything? Capsicum shows that it is possible to migrate gradually from the broken ACL world to a more robust capability based world. We are pleased to be involved in the next step of its evolution."

The project is expected to be completed by June 2013.

Foundation Interview on BSDTalk

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:33:00 +0000

FreeBSD Foundation Directors Marshall Kirk McKusick and George Neville-Neil were recently interviewed by BSDTalk. This 34 minute podcast discusses the work of the FreeBSD Foundation. It is available in mp3 and ogg formats.

FreeBSD Foundation is Soliciting the Submission of Project Proposals

noreply@blogger.com (Deb) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 15:09:00 +0000

The FreeBSD Foundation is soliciting the submission of project
proposals for funded development grants.  Proposals may be related to
any of the major subsystems or infrastructure within the FreeBSD
operating system, and will be evaluated based on desirability,
technical merit, and cost-effectiveness.

Key dates for this proposal solicitation:

Call for proposals:                  27th March 2013
Deadline for submissions:            26th April 2013
Notifcation of accepted proposals:   17th May 2013

Proposals must include the following:

* A detailed description of what is being proposed, how it will
  benefit the FreeBSD Project, and why the work is needed.
* A timeline and costing for the project.
* One or more people that will act as technical reviewers for the work.

Proposals are open to all developers, including non-FreeBSD
committers, but developers without access to commit to the source tree
must provide details about how the completion guidelines will be
achieved.

For details on the proposal submission process see
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/documents/Project%20Proposal%20Procedures%202013.shtml

FreeBSD and Xorg on ARM

noreply@blogger.com (Deb) — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:08:00 +0000

As part of the port of FreeBSD to the Efika Platform Project Xorg is now running on FreeBSD on ARM. Here's an update from the developer, Aleksandr Rybalko:

You've already seen or at least heard about ARM systems running FreeBSD. In most cases its routers, firewalls, network storage, etc. Why doesn't anyone use FreeBSD on an ARM based desktop or laptop It is because no one had implemented Xorg support for boards supported by FreeBSD. Now you have away to do just that!

I'm glad to introduce an Xorg driver for ARM, and not only ARM but for syscons framebuffer devices.It's called xf86-video-scfb.  The driver is very simple, and has been tested and works on the Efika MX and Raspberry Pi devices.  I hope it will work with other devices, including those not based on ARM.

Here are the instructions so you can get this running on your own system:  Building Xorg for FreeBSD ARM.

Porting FreeBSD to Efika Platforms Project Completed

noreply@blogger.com (Deb) — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:32:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce the Porting FreeBSD to the Genesi Efika MX SmartBook laptop and SmartTop nettop devices projects has completed! While many FreeBSD developers are working on ARM on embedded systems we feel it's important to show FreeBSD running on ARM devices that people can easily touch and interact with. The port of FreeBSD to the Genesi Efika platforms makes that possible. It has also made possible Xorg running on many other ARM devices, including the Raspberry Pi.


Here is a set of directions for getting FreeBSD running on one of these incredibly inexpensive, and light weight, laptops for yourself: http://raybsd.blogspot.com/2013/02/easy-way-to-do-it-try-freebsd-on-efika.html

Accepting Travel Grant Applications for BSDCan 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 01:06:00 +0000

Calling all FreeBSD developers needing assistance with travel expenses to BSDCan 2013.

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 April 17, 2013 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.

You request funding 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 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 direct request to us.
We review your application and if approved, authorize you to seek reimbursement up to a limit. We consider several factors, including our overall and per-event budgets, and (quite importantly) the benefit to the community by funding your travel. Most rejected applications are rejected because of an over-all limit on travel budget for the event or year, due to unrealistic or uneconomical costing, or because there is an unclear or unconvincing argument that funding the applicant will directly benefit the FreeBSD Project. Please take these points into consideration when writing your application.
We reimburse costs based on actuals (receipts), and by check or bank transfer. And, we do not cover your costs if you end up having to cancel your trip. We also do not cover meal/food/alcohol expenses. 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 and our 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.

Foundation Announces New Technical Staff Member

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 15:32:00 +0000

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Konstantin Belousov has been hired as its first full-time member of technical staff, a key milestone of the Foundation's investment in staff for 2013.

Konstantin has been a FreeBSD committer since 2006, and he recently implemented support for current-generation Intel graphics controllers under contract to the FreeBSD Foundation. This new position will allow him to spend his full working time on supporting and improving FreeBSD.

Konstantin's first project brings support for unmapped I/O to FreeBSD. The unmapped I/O project improves performance by avoiding mapping buffers in the buffer cache, significantly reducing overhead on multi-processor systems. The project builds on foundational work to unify machine-dependent parts of the busdma interface, recently contributed by Jeff Robertson at EMC's Isilon Storage Division. EMC became a FreeBSD foundation donor in 2012.

Netflix, another new Foundation donor for 2012, is already making use of this project. "Netflix partnered closely with Konstantin to provide design input and testing resources for the unmapped I/O project. The work helped us realize an immediate 25% increase in system performance on production workloads. It underscores the immense value of collaborating and investing in the open source community and FreeBSD in particular," said Scott Long, Senior Software Engineer at Netflix.

Konstantin has also been working with the release engineering team since 2008 and his new role with the Foundation will allow him to focus more time on the tools and process used to make FreeBSD releases.

Konstantin lives in Kiev, Ukraine.

Foundation at AsiaBSDCon and NorthEast LinuxFest

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:03:00 +0000

Foundation representatives will be at two events this weekend (March 16-17). Drop by and say hi if you're near either event. Donations to the Foundation can be made at either event.

AsiaBSDCon is being held at the Tokyo University of Science in Japan.

NorthEast LinuxFest is being held at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

New Funded Project: UEFI Support

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:38:00 +0000

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Benno Rice has been awarded a grant to implement the ability to boot FreeBSD in the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot environment.

The work to be done includes a new version of the loader, kernel modifications to support starting from a UEFI environment and the ability to create install media for pure UEFI systems.

"UEFI support is critical for FreeBSD's future on the amd64 platform and I'm really pleased to be able to ensure that FreeBSD gains support for it," said Benno.

This project is expected to be completed in March 2013.

New Funded Project: FreeBSD/ARM Architecture Superpages Support

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 19:03:00 +0000

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Semihalf, an embedded solutions company, has been awarded a grant to develop transparent superpages support for the FreeBSD/ARM architecture. Semihalf is co-sponsoring the project with the Foundation.

The ARM architecture is already common in the mobile and embedded markets, and is becoming more prevalent in the server market. Among the more interesting industry trends emerging recently is the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture, which is an "ARM server" concept. Many top tier companies have started developing systems or are announcing products with this architecture.

One of the features needed for FreeBSD to be successful in this area is transparent super pages. This provides improved performance and scalability by allowing TLB translations to dynamically cover large physical memory regions.

The project is expected to complete in mid July 2013.

Foundation at SCALE

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 15:24:00 +0000

There will be a FreeBSD booth in the exhibition area of SCALE, to be held at the Hilton LAX in Los Angeles, CA. Exhibition hours are Saturday, February 23 from 10:00–17:30 p.m and Sunday, February 24 from 10:00–16:00. Registration is required for this event, with a nominal fee for the expo area and a slightly higher fee for the entire conference.

We'll be giving out copies of PC-BSD and FreeNAS as well as some cool swag at the FreeBSD booth. We can also accept donations for the FreeBSD Foundation. If you are in the Los Angeles area, drop by and say hi!

Foundation at Ottawa User Group Connect

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:06:00 +0000

User Group Connect is a relaxed one day unconference for meeting and interacting with the many technical User Groups in Ottawa. The event runs on Saturday, February 9 from 10:00-17:00 at Shopify in the Byward Market.

The Foundation will be represented at a FreeBSD booth and will be accepting donations. If you're in the Ottawa area, drop by and visit at this free event.

Faces of FreeBSD - Thomas Abthorpe

noreply@blogger.com (Deb) — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 15:16:00 +0000

Faces of FreeBSD

Are you aware of the tangible benefits derived from our support of the FreeBSD community? In conjunction with our fundraising efforts, we are spotlighting different people on our website and Facebook page who have received funding to work on development projects, run conferences, travel to conferences, and advocate for FreeBSD.

Please enjoy our third installment of our Faces of FreeBSD series!

Let us introduce you to Thomas Abthorpe. We helped him attend BSDCan 2009, 2011, and 2012 by helping with his travel expenses. Here’s his story.

Thomas' Story

My name is Thomas Abthorpe, and I am a Server Administrator working for the Canadian Government during the day. In my spare time I volunteer with a grassroots movement called Bicycles for Humanity and doing various odd jobs within the FreeBSD Project. I became a Ports committer in August 2007, doing my own thing for a while, mostly keeping to myself, until I joined the Donations Team.

The Donations Team was my first real non-ports function within the FreeBSD Project. From there my functions evolved. I was invited to take over as portmgr-secretary@ in March of 2010. One year later my membership was upgraded to full voting member on portmgr@. I was voted by my peers within the FreeBSD Project to join core@this past July.

In my five active years within FreeBSD, I was fortunate enough to be sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation to attend BSDCan 2009, 2011, and 2012. At these conferences I met developers from around the world, attended DevSummits and advanced my knowledge of FreeBSD in general by attending the talks.

The conference format lends itself well to learning, socializing and camaraderie. I attended my first conference just to learn the process and take in the experience. At the next two conferences, I was not only there as a participant, but also to also represent portmgr@.

I have said time and time again that I am purely a hobbyist in FreeBSD. Because of the generosity of The FreeBSD Foundation, I have been able to meet with other like-minded people and do my part to share my knowledge and friendship.

Thomas Abthorpe

Donate today to help us continue and increase our support of the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide! Making a donation is quick and easy. To make a donation go to: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/

Thank You for Helping Us Exceed Our Fundraising Goal!

noreply@blogger.com (Deb) — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 16:41:00 +0000

We want to thank everyone for helping us exceed our fundraising goal for 2012. We are thrilled to report we raised $753,378. And, checks are still coming in! We should have final numbers by mid-January. Donation receipts will be emailed and mailed out by the end of January. If you made a donation and you can't find your name on our donor list, please let us know. We received so many donations in December, that we missed adding some names.

We can't thank you enough for your overwhelming support of the FreeBSD Foundation and Project. As we prepare our 2013 budget, we are very excited to be putting more funding in the Project Development area. In fact, we are always interested in hearing your project proposals. Do you have an idea of something you'd like to work on and need funding to help you accomplish it? Click here to find out about our project proposal process.

We also plan to help more developers attend BSD-based conferences. You can find out how to apply for a travel grant here:

http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/documents/TravelRequestForm.pdf

As the new year starts, we are grateful for the working with such passionate people who give their free time to the FreeBSD Project. The commitment that you all share in making FreeBSD the best OS out there inspires and drives us!

Consider making a donation for 2013! Click here to make a donation.

FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 14:09:00 +0000

The December issue of the FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter has been published:

FreeBSD has a flourishing community. Innovative technology is packed into every release. Thousands of products and services the world relies upon are built on FreeBSD, and the adoption rate of FreeBSD accelerates year after year. By all of these measures, FreeBSD is an amazingly successful open source project. But at the FreeBSD Foundation, we know today's success is just a step on a long path. We constantly ask, "How can we make FreeBSD even better?" "How can we take FreeBSD up that 'extra notch'?" Or as Nigel from 'This is Spinal Tap' would put it, "If we're playing maxed out at ten, how do we take it to eleven?"

Our answer for the 2013 year is to redefine the way the FreeBSD Foundation supports FreeBSD. Every year since I started the FreeBSD Foundation, we have grown our budget and activities by 10 to 25%, all managed by a single part-time employee. This next year we are investing in staff. Staff to bolster FreeBSD's amazing community of volunteers. Staff to scale the FreeBSD Foundation's funded development initiatives. Staff to double our capabilities in a single year.

This plan will increase the number and size of the development projects we fund. However, it is the FreeBSD Foundation's investment in "human infrastructure" that I believe will yield the largest dividends. As a volunteer myself, I know that no matter how deep my love for FreeBSD is, family and my "day job" must come first. Even with these other priorities, the volunteers that maintain the project's computer clusters, handle security incidents, tend our revision control and bug tracking systems, and generate our releases, show amazing skill and awe inspiring dedication. But our pool of volunteers for these areas hasn't grown as quickly as the rest of the project. By adding paid staff to support these roles, we will help reduce burn-out, provide continuity, and increase the effectiveness of FreeBSD's volunteers.

If things go as expected, by the end of 2013, the FreeBSD Foundation will have five employees, and an annual budget approaching $750,000. It will be a challenging transition, but a necessary step on the path of FreeBSD's continued success. Please consider giving us your support while we work to take FreeBSD all the way to eleven!

Justin T. Gibbs
President and Founder
The FreeBSD Foundation

Fundraising Update

Wow. I’ve been thoroughly overwhelmed by the outpouring of donations over the last few weeks! As of this publication we have raised $460,000 towards our goal of $500,000.

I want to thank you for everything you do to make this the best operating system around. There wouldn’t be a FreeBSD if we didn’t have you writing code, writing documentation, working on ports and releases, and educating current and future FreeBSD users.

We haven’t met our target yet, but we are getting close. Historically, each year, we have been half way to our fundraising goal at the start of December. Going forward, this is something that we plan on changing.

We unintentionally received some interesting press that disturbed a lot of FreeBSD users. This encouraged over 950 donations to come in, this past week. All I can say, is that it was incredible to see this support. One donor commented, “I don't use FreeBSD yet, but I've heard good things about the project, so that's why I wanted to support you.” How cool is that?

Your donations help us fund projects to improve FreeBSD, sponsor conferences and summits, purchase equipment to build infrastructure, promote FreeBSD, and provide legal counsel for the Project. In short, it helps us to provide the funding to make this the best OS available.

We’ve received some great lessons during this campaign. One thing we learned is that we need to advertise our fundraising needs outside of our FaceBook page, blog, and the FreeBSD Announce mailing list.

I hope that as you read through some of our accomplishments this year, you will consider making a donation to the Foundation. We can’t do it without you!

Efika SmartBook/SmartTop FreeBSD ARM Port

Tired of burning yourself with your laptop? If so, maybe it’s time for a change, such as switching to a platform that doesn’t require a large heat sink or loud cooling fans.

It is now possible to run FreeBSD on a low power, ARM-based, laptop: the Genesi Efika MX Smartbook. It has an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU inside, and, just like a cell phone, is energy efficient, consumes minimal power and uses passive cooling.

Our main project goal is to implement the missing pieces for the Freescale ARM SoC, including graphics, and to provide a great example of FreeBSD running on a low power device that developers can both use, and show off.

With the Efika MX code in the tree, we will have support for ARM-based laptops and even nettops (such as the Efika MX Smartop model) and we can continue pushing FreeBSD into ARM tablets and other ARM-based devices.

Capsicum Component Framework

Capsicum is a novel hybrid capability model that first appeared in FreeBSD 9.0, targeted at application compartmentalization: the mitigation of security vulnerabilities through decomposition of complex and risky applications into isolated components.

In the big picture, Capsicum provides a tight sandboxing mechanism where access to all global name spaces is restricted, and also allows actions that can be performed on file descriptors to be limited (file descriptors represent capabilities).

The purpose of my project was to make Capsicum more mature as well as easier to use by application developers.

The main part of the project was to create the Casper daemon, which is used by sandboxed processes to gain access to functionality that is not directly permitted within a sandbox. As an example, Casper provides a DNS service which can be use by sandboxed processes for host name resolution without the need to read /etc/resolv.conf or send any network packets to DNS servers.

Another part of the project was to remove capability wrapping descriptors - a special kind of file descriptors with a limited set of rights (e.g. a file descriptor which can be used only for reading, but not writing, fchmod, etc.). The capability wrapping descriptors were replaced with the ability to limit rights on any regular descriptor. This simplifies much of Capsicum's kernel support code and makes sandboxing more robust.

Initially the ioctl(2) system call was denied in capability mode (i.e. for sandboxed processes), because of its huge scope. Now, it is possible to limit the ioctl commands that can be performed within a sandbox, on a given descriptor. I also added the ability to control fcntl operations in a similar fashion.

Many bugs were fixed, many smaller improvements were made, and a lot of new regression tests were created along the way.

Capsicum is still on-going work, but thanks to funding from the FreeBSD Foundation and Google, it is maturing quickly and is starting to be used in real world applications (I personally use it in my other, FreeBSD Foundation sponsored, projects: HAST and auditdistd).

iSCSI Target

The goal of this project is to create a native, high performance, iSCSI target facility for FreeBSD. While configuration and connection setup and teardown are handled by a userland daemon, unlike previous target frameworks, all data-movement is performed in the kernel. The iSCSI target is fully integrated with the CAM Target Layer meaning that volumes can be backed by files or any block device. The hardware offload capabilities of modern network adapters will also be supported.

Much of the protocol and data movement logic can be shared between iSCSI target and initiator implementations. Once target support is robust, FreeBSD's existing iSCSI initiator will be updated to use many of the components developed for the target. This will improve initiator performance and add modern features such as InitialR2T.

The project is quickly progressing from a working prototype to a fully functional state; testing phase is expected to start in early January. After that the development will focus on implementing the hardware offload and performance tuning.

EuroBSDCon 2012

In October 2012, the 11th EuroBSDcon was held in the beautiful city of Warsaw in Poland. Four days of talking, learning about BSD, and of course exploring Polish culture (don't forget the Polish Hussars). The conference featured 2 tutorial days followed by two conference days on Saturday and Sunday. The conference consisted of a 2 track program, paralleled by a devsummit track on Saturday.

Traditionally, EuroBSDcon has a strong FreeBSD presence, but there is also enough room for the other BSD's. One of the reasons for the strong FreeBSD presence is the FreeBSD devsummit, which is held concurrently with the EuroBSDcon tutorial days.

The FreeBSD Foundation has been one of the regular sponsors over the years. This support plays an important role in making this an outstanding conference.

Besides sponsoring the conference, The FreeBSD Foundation also provides travel grants for visitors and developers who can not afford to go the conference on their own. This gives them the opportunity to visit the conference and exchange knowledge and ideas with other conference attendees, which greatly improves the value of having such conferences.

We are excited to announce that EuroBSDcon 2013 will be held September 28th-29th, 2013 (tutorials will be September 26th-27th) on Malta (St. Julian's area).

Cambridge Developer Summit 2012

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of co-organizing the Cambridge DevSummit. Robert Watson, in contrast, had most of the stress, and others had the fun of running around and actually doing the work. This was a three-day event, with a documentation summit scheduled for the day before, organized primarily by Gavin Atkinson and Isabell Long.

This was the second such event hosted in Cambridge; the first in which no one fell in the river—possibly because the weather wasn't quite nice enough to encourage punting that week.

The three days of the main event were split into three sessions, with two tracks in each. I invited some visitors from ARM (who, conveniently, are just down the road) to attend one afternoon session. This was productive, and led to further engagement between the FreeBSD community and ARM. ARM is a customer-focused company, and those who may be interested in FreeBSD/ARM are potential customers of ARM's customers.

We finalized the schedule on the first day, filling an entire whiteboard with items that two or more people wanted to discuss and then splitting into groups. While a bit more advanced planning may have been helpful, our strategy worked relatively well this year. A short summary from each of the groups was presented in the final session and then published on the FreeBSD wiki.

The toolchain session, a big session, was of particular interest to me. We arrived at a tentative plan for throwing the switch to make clang the default compiler on FreeBSD-CURRENT. This was further discussed on the mailing list, and has now happened, bringing us one big step closer to a GPL-free FreeBSD 10.

An afternoon of short talks from researchers in the Cambridge Computer Lab involved either operating systems work in general or FreeBSD in particular. Robert Watson showed off a tablet running FreeBSD on a MIPS-compatible soft-core processor running on an Altera FPGA.

Cambridge, an old university town, predates the invention of hills and so is very amenable to cycling. We hired bikes for all non-local developers so they could get around easily.

The DevSummit dinner was hosted by St. John's College and cosponsored by Google and the FreeBSD Foundation. This enjoyable event, in the historic surroundings of a 500-year old college, provided a unique (and possibly never-to-be-repeated) opportunity of seeing a group of FreeBSD developers smartly dressed.

The day after the conference, Ollivier Robert organized a trip to Bletchley Park, which this year was celebrating Turing's centenary. Although it was an informative outing, I don't believe that it resulted in any concrete plans for a FreeBSD/Collossus port.

Bay Area Vendor Summit 2012

On November 8th The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored the FreeBSD Silicon Valley Vendor Summit. The summit was hosted by Yahoo at their Sunnyvale campus. We had over 50 participants from more than 20 different companies participate in the summit, which is a great turnout.

After a round of introductions we discussed the work that had been completed since the last summit, in May of 2012, including:

    Altera IP core drivers
    Amazon EC2 work
    Comprehensive test framework (ATF)
    DTrace on non-x86 (MIPS)
    Intel graphics
    Ivy Bridge hwpmc
    clang/llvm MIPS
    ZFS improvements
    growfs on live fs

After going over the completed and still to be done items, we had a brief set of comments from Tom Hanrahan of Microsoft on HyperV support for FreeBSD. Microsoft's intention is to have full hypervisor support for FreeBSD and they are actively engaging with the community to get the proper drivers in the right places in our tree so that FreeBSD is a first class citizen in their system.

The first major presentation of the day was Jim Harris talking about VTune. VTune is a system to help developers understand the performance of their code. A small number of us have been working with Intel to get this software available on FreeBSD, as, at the moment, it is only available on Windows and Linux.

VTune includes two major components, a data collector and a visualization program. The collector has been ported to FreeBSD and is available as a pre-beta to interested developers. The visualization program continues to only be available on Windows and Linux, but since the collector and the visualizer are separate it is easy to collect information about programs, including the kernel, running on a FreeBSD host and display the results on another system. One feature that VTune continues to lack, but which Intel is working on, is support for call graphs. Right now the system can show you which line of code is causing a performance problem, which is quite useful, but it does not show the call graph, basically how your program happened to get to that point. This is a feature that Intel knows it needs on FreeBSD for the system to be completely accepted by vendors and other folks building high performance systems with FreeBSD. That being said, it's still an impressive piece of software and will definitely help people who care about performance tuning.

Jim says that those who are interested in using VTune in its current form should contact him directly to get ahold of the beta driver: Jim Harris . I've put up a "VTune How To" page on our Wiki and will be populating it over the next week.

After the morning break Adrian Chadd brought people up to date on what's going on with embedded systems and FreeBSD. There has been a good deal of progress here, in particular the work done recently on ARM processor support, with FreeBSD now running on several systems, including the BeagelBone, ShivaPlug, and the now ubiquitous Raspberry Pi. MIPS support continues to improve, with a significant chunk of work coming from the folks in Cambridge, as well as companies that are integrating FreeBSD on MIPS into their products. PowerPC is also moving along, although there remains a dearth of hardware on which to work. A good deal of discussion accompanied this section, in particular about what we need to do to get the rest of the system, i.e. ports and packages, up on these architectures. Here the story is also improving with a set of packages existing for ARM processors as well. People interested in this area should check out recent mail threads on arm@ and embedded@ as well as others.

After talking about embedded systems, Daichi Goto updated us on efforts with vendors in Japan. He and Hiroki Sato have been busy working with companies in Japan and have set up a BSD Consulting company which is working with large Japanese companies to build business services on top of FreeBSD, with a great deal of success. Other work they're doing includes getting a good deal of FreeBSD documentation and information translated into Japanese, so that it is more easily accessible to developers in Japan.

After a lunch break a new, at least to me, FreeBSD Vendor, CacheIQ gave a presentation about their product and their use of FreeBSD. CacheIQ builds an SSD based NFS caching system on top of FreeBSD and are interested in following the project's development tree more closely. What followed was a discussion of the project's release policies and best practices relating to developing a product with FreeBSD.

From CacheIQ we moved on to testing and ATF. Garrett Cooper presented the work he's been doing, in collaboration with Simon Gerraty and Marcel Moolenaar, to get ATF integrated into FreeBSD. ATF was originally written for NetBSD and has been in use there for a couple of years now. The goal is to have a good framework for automated testing in FreeBSD and to improve the quality of our testing. As anyone who has worked with test frameworks knows, there are many bike sheds to be avoided here, and Garrett, Simon and Marcel have worked quite hard to keep away from picking colors, and have instead gotten the system into shape and working on FreeBSD. [As of the writing of this newsletter ATF is now in HEAD under contrib/atf.]

Our last session of the day was creating a new have/need list for vendors with the twist this time that we added a "co sponsor" list. The FreeBSD Foundation is going to put up funds to co-sponsor development projects with companies working on FreeBSD. This has already been successfully done in the past with projects such as the NAND Flash project (co-sponsored with Juniper Networks) and others. The Foundation can't sponsor all these projects, but where there is an ability to get cooperation on funding the development it makes sense to get a few interested parties together to get the work done. The list of possible co-development projects includes:

    NetConf Agent
    EFI Boot on amd64
    NDMP
    MIPS Super Pages
    SID Base Credentials and ACLs
    Xen Dom 0

Upcoming summits are in March at AsiaBSDCon and May at BSDCan. Mark your calendars.

2012 Grant and Travel Grant Recipients

Every year we sponsor FreeBSD related conferences and travel to these events for FreeBSD contributors. We believe that BSD-centered and FreeBSD-specific conferences play the dual roles of expanding the FreeBSD user community and supporting collaborative development. The FreeBSD Foundation's travel grant program helps to reduce financial roadblocks to participation in these events.

Our grant recipients often send us amazing tales of their experiences, proving the value of this program to the FreeBSD community. You can find these stories and trip reports on our blog.

Here is a list of projects, developers, and conferences we have sponsored for 2012.

2012 Conference Grant Recipients:

    AsiaBSDCon 2012 Conference
    BSDCan 2012 Conference
    Ottawa 2012 Developer Summit
    Ottawa 2012 Vendor Summit
    BSDDay 2012
    EuroBSDCon 2012 Conference
    Cambridge 2012 Developer Summit
    Bay Area 2012 Vendor Summit

2012 Project Grant Recipients:

    Edward Napierala - iSCSI Target project
    Pawel Jakub Dawidek - Capsicum Component Framework
    Edward Napierala - Growing Filesystmes Online
    Björn Zeeb - IPv6 Performance Analysis
    Pawel Jakub Dawidek - Implementing auditdistd
    Semihalf - NAND Flash Support
    Aleksandr Rybalko - Porting FreeBSD to Efika ARM platform

2012 Travel Grant Recipients:

    BSDCan - Hiren Panchasara, Adrian Chadd, Florian Smeets, Ben Haga, Marius Strobl, Brooks Davis, Julien Laffaye, Warren Block, Daichi Goto, Giovanni Trematerra, Davide Italiano, Thomas Abthorpe
    EuroBSDCon - Gabor Pali, Alberto Mijares, Gabor Kovesdan, Alexander Pronin
    Open Help - Warren Block
    MeetBSD - Mark Linimon

Faces of FreeBSD Series

Who are these people that receive money from the Foundation? How are your donations making a difference in the FreeBSD community? We've asked our grant recipients to share their stories with you in what we call the "Faces of FreeBSD" campaign. Tune in weekly to the FreeBSD Foundations's blog to hear how Foundation funding is used to run conferences, work on development projects, help with travel expenses to conferences, and to advocate for FreeBSD.

Looking for a recap of past stories? Here are our first two "Faces of FreeBSD":

Faces of FreeBSD - Dan Langille

Faces of FreeBSD - Alberto Mijares

Netflix

More than 30 million Netflix streaming members around the globe watch more than a billion hours of movies and TV shows each month. In the US, Netflix video streaming accounts for a third of peak downstream Internet traffic. Netflix created Open Connect, a single-purpose content delivery network, to help deliver these petabytes of data.

The main component of Open Connect is the Open Connect Appliance, a small-footprint network streaming device. The Open Connect Appliance is a 4U Intel-based server that is designed to economically maximize storage density in a space and power footprint that is ideal for both ISP data centers and metro-area network interchanges.

The Open Connect Appliance runs on FreeBSD 9. Netflix picked FreeBSD 9 because it is a high performing, low-maintenance and reliable operating system that is supported by major hardware vendors. FreeBSD 9 provides a foundation of reliability, performance, and hands-free manageability. Combined with NGINX, a light-weight and high performance Web server, FreeBSD 9 provides a simple but powerful solution that is capable of serving tens of thousands of simultaneous video streams across multiple 10Gbit fiber optic links.

Beyond its technical strengths, FreeBSD comes with an outstanding ecosystem of developers, vendors, and users who openly share expertise, talent, and technical improvements. Netflix has embraced this community and is committed to giving back its bug fixes and enhancements, thus completing the circle of community collaboration.

- David Fullagar, Director of Content Delivery Architecture, Netflix

Faces of FreeBSD - Dan Langille

noreply@blogger.com (Deb) — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 14:31:00 +0000

Faces of FreeBSD

Are you aware of the tangible benefits derived from our support of the FreeBSD community? In conjunction with our year-end fundraising drive we are spotlighting different people on our website and Facebook page who have received funding to work on development projects, run conferences, travel to conferences, and advocate for FreeBSD.

Please enjoy our next installment of our Faces of FreeBSD series!

Here is Dan Langille’s story. We helped him by sponsoring BSDCan since 2006.

Dan's Story

I am a software developer currently residing in Philadelphia, PA with a focus in sysadmin and database areas. I have been working in the computer industry for over 30 years. There have been many changes in that time and I have always enjoyed the challenges the work has brought me—from working with 4K of RAM to systems with 11TB in a tower case.

I found open source in 1998 when I was given some FreeBSD CDs. From there, I started The FreeBSD Diary, created FreshPorts, founded the BSDCan and PGCon conferences, and worked on several other projects. The communities that develop around software projects are fantastic and supportive.

The FreeBSD Foundation has helped me grow BSDCan over the years to where it is today. We started small and grew quickly, thanks to word-of-mouth and publicity from followers. We are about to celebrate our 10th year and could not have done it without the help of our sponsors like The FreeBSD Foundation. Their continued support has allowed us to bring in speakers who could not otherwise appear at our conferences. The ability to bring people together to collaborate in person and build working relationships is both rewarding and fun.

Dan Langille

MeetBSD Trip Report: Mark Linimon

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 16:13:00 +0000

The Foundation sponsored Mark Linimon's travel to California from October 28th to November 9th, 2012, to attend MeetBSD, the preceding Developer's Summit, the postceding Vendor Summit, and to perform work on the FreeBSD systems at ISC. Here is his trip report:

Developer Summit:

I gave a brief overview of the state of the Ports Collection, and invited those interested in more details to attend my talk at MeetBSD proper.

In addition, I answered a number of question in informal sessions from various developers and contributors, some of whom I had met before, and some whom I had not.

Among the issues brought up were ports on various architectures, cross-building ports or perhaps building ports under emulation, and plans for Content Distribution Networks.

Of particular note, I was able to interact in person with the Yahoo team (Peter Wemm, Sean Bruno, and Ben Haga) to talk about issues affecting our machines in the cluster.

MeetBSD:

I presented a session about the state of the Ports Collection on FreeBSD, and future directions. You may view my slides online.

In particular, I focused on the progress in our new packaging system pkgng; our reworked options system optionsng; the state of ports vs. clang; and the Redports distributed build testing system. It should be noted that hardware for both production package building and also Redports was purchased via Foundation funds.

I also attended other sessions that I found useful, especially Sean Bruno's explanation of qemu. I hope that we will be able to use this for cross-building ports in the future.

Vendor Summit:

At the Vendor Summit mostly I was an observer. However, I did present a brief explanation of the status of the ports tree, and how that might affect the vendors. As well, I chatted informally with Tom Hanrahan of Microsoft's Hyper-V effort about how best to interact with the FreeBSD community. In addition, I was able to interact with a number of other representatives from vendors who had questions about the Ports Collection, particularly about building for non-x86 architectures.

ISC:

The ISC systems needed some major work.

For one day overlapping my trip, Simon Nielsen was also on-site and did the preliminary install of 7 new Atom servers. These were purchased by the Foundation to be administration servers for a future fallover facility for the main Yahoo systems. I continued this work and did other work as follows:

I moved most of the Ethernet cables from the old, unmanaged, switches to the Juniper EX3300 managed switch that Simon had also installed.
I wired serial cables to the new Atom servers and verified that they worked properly.
I returned one of the Atom servers to iXsystems for an RMA. It turned out that the CPU had suffered early failure. I reinstalled the system once they were finished.
We still had several systems in rack B2, which ISC wishes us to vacate. Since the portmgr-owened systems there were offline due to other reasons, I relocated them. Two systems still remain.
I deinstalled a power controller that had failed.
The cable situation had become sub-optimal. In many cases, the only cables that had been on hand were 25' or more. It was barely possible to get to the back of the systems, and airflow was a problem. I installed various shorter lengths of cable, and correctly color-coded them while doing so.
I verified all the connections to the console server and the PDUs.
I attempted to install a new hard drive on our PowerPC server there. However, without a CDROM drive, that system is hard to work with. Instead, I carried the hard drive back to Austin, where I will format it up on my similar system here and send it back to ISC.
I purchased a second power supply for the Coverity machine.
I removed rack slides from the systems on which those slides do not fit into the shallow racks there.
I purchased some rack shelves that will stand in for these slides to help us manage our physical space. They still need to be installed.
I physically labeled all the systems.
I annotated all the above in our administration database.

Stunning News Website Fundraising Contribution: Over 650 new donations raise $43,200 in three days!

noreply@blogger.com (Deb) — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 19:43:00 +0000

Astute readers of our blog know that The FreeBSD Foundation's annual year-end fundraising drive began last week. Every year over 50% of our donations arrive during this campaign. We were thus surprised by coverage on Slashdot and Hacker News suggesting that we were behind in our fundraising goal. We’d never turn down additional news coverage of our work raising funds in support of the FreeBSD project, of course, but remain confident in our fundraising target.

The response to those articles was a remarkable outpouring of support — we have had over 650 new donations in the last three days alone, raising $43,196. Individual donations are absolutely critical to the business of The Foundation. Not only do they contribute significantly to our ability to financially support the FreeBSD project, but they also help us demonstrate broad public support in order to maintain our public non-profit status.

This massive increase in small donations will set a new record for individual donors in a single year. The readership of these sites has been instrumental to this success. You'll also be glad to know that the news article triggered a number of further corporate contributions from FreeBSD consumers. Our hard work is not done, however. We still have $195,000 left to go to meet our target this year–or exceed it!

Look forward to more news soon. . .

Faces of FreeBSD - Alberto Mijares

noreply@blogger.com (Deb) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 09:00:00 +0000

Faces of FreeBSD

Are you aware of the tangible benefits derived from our support of the FreeBSD community? In conjunction with our year-end fundraising drive we are going to be spotlighting different people on our website, blog, and Facebook page who have received funding to work on development projects, run conferences, travel to conferences, and advocate for FreeBSD.

Please enjoy our first installment of our Faces of FreeBSD series!

Let us introduce you to Alberto Mijares. We helped him attend EuroBSDCon 2012 by assisting him with his travel expenses. Here’s his story.

Alberto’s Story

Kirk McKusick with Alberto Mijares

My name is Alberto Mijares, I am 33 years old, and was born in Caracas, Venezuela. I started learning about computers in a special program starting in fourth grade on 486 PC’s. By the time I got my bachelor’s degree I had learned programming languages, spreadsheets, word processors, and educational programs (LOGO, dBase, GWBasic, Pascal, and Turbo Pascal) on “cutting edge” Pentium MMX’s.

In the late nineties I studied petroleum engineering at Universidad Central de Venezuela. Later I began work at a telecom company, was introduced to UNIX, and ended up on the technology support team, responsible for monitoring the company’s IT infrastructure, composed of three IBM RS-6000 servers with AIX for the core business, a couple of NT and W2K servers for domain controlled and call center software, and ten servers with FreeBSD for web, mail, dns, proxy, dhcp, database, sms gateway, ivr, monitoring, file sharing, and other services.

Once I learned about FreeBSDI quickly became a fan of UNIX and wanted to know more. I took Linux-based courses and could compare Linux and FreeBSD. I transferred all my new knowledge to a FreeBSDenvironment and learned about both operating systems inspired by the same philosophy, in parallel.

In my country, public administration promoted the use of free software, which influenced the growth of development companies, training institutes, nonprofit user groups, and a philosophical-activist movement. But Linux was also mainstream because of its popularity.

I continued to work with Linux but technical issues and disappointment led me to ask my superiors to migrate the platform to a more robust operating system—FreeBSD. They still thank me for it. I’ve been an advocate to use, promote, learn more, and improve FreeBSD. I work to consolidate a group of users, support the use of FreeBSDin infrastructure projects and encourage public and private companies to help fund The FreeBSD Project.

Three years ago I was able to collaborate with Hans Peter Selasky to support a new device in the u3g driver. This year, thanks to a travel grant from The FreeBSD Foundation, I was able to meet Hans at EuroBSDcon 2012 in Warsaw and talk with him on many topics. I also was able to meet Paul Schenkeveld, Kirk McKusick, Eric Allman, Peter Hansteen, Chris Buechler, Chris Moore, and many other personalities in the BSD world. The FreeBSD Foundation paid for my accommodations and conference fees, and I’m very grateful for that subsidy.

The conference motivated me so much that I organized a meeting with my peers to share the experiences. In November I gave a talk about IPv6 and FreeBSD to local university students. I plan to attend BSDCan next year, take the BSD certification exam, and organize a big BSD event in my country for late 2013 or early 2014. I would like to be a facilitator of the BSD Certification exam in my country. I just submitted a PR with a new port for the FreeBSD Ports Collection. Soon I will be helping to translate the updated handbook to Spanish.

FreeBSD has become a lifestyle for me. I want to be more involved with the project as time passes.

Alberto Mijares

Donate today to help us continue and increase our support of the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide! Making a donation is quick and easy. To make a donation go to: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/

Foundation at LISA

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:34:00 +0000

There will be a FreeBSD booth in the exhibition area of LISA, to be held at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina in San Diego, CA. Exhibition hours are Wednesday, December 12 from 12:00–19:00 p.m and Thursday, December 13 from 9:30–14:00. Registration is required for this event, but is free for the exhibition area.

In addition to accepting donations for the Foundation, we'll be giving out copies of PC-BSD and FreeNAS as well as some cool swag. If you are in the San Diego area, drop by and say hi!

Year-End Fundraising Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (Dru Lavigne) — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 14:05:00 +0000

Dear FreeBSD Community,

Your donations have helped make FreeBSD the best OS available! By investing in The FreeBSD Foundation you have helped us keep FreeBSD a high-performance, secure, and stable operating system.

Thanks to people like you, the FreeBSD Foundation has been proudly supporting the FreeBSD Project and community for 12 years now. We are incredibly grateful for all the support we receive from you and so many individuals and organizations that value FreeBSD. As of this writing we have raised $250,000 towards our goal of raising $500,000. Would you consider making a gift to support our work in 2013?

Donations can easily be made here.

This year your donations helped FreeBSD by:

Funding development projects to improve FreeBSD, including: Capsicum Application Sandboxing, Growing UFS Filesystems Online, the NAND Flash File System, IPv6 Performance Analysis and Improvements, Distributed Security Audit Logging, and porting FreeBSD to the Efika ARM platform.
Educating the public and promoting FreeBSD. We produced a high-quality FreeBSD 9 brochure and visited companies to help facilitate collaboration efforts with the Project.
Sponsoring BSD conferences and summits in Europe, Japan, Canada, and the US.
Protecting FreeBSD IP and providing legal support to the Project.
Purchasing hardware to build and improve FreeBSD project infrastructure.

The FreeBSD Foundation is well known for its successful development projects. Our 2013 plans are even more ambitious and we have recently hired two full-time technical staff members to help achieve these goals.

But are you aware of the tangible benefits derived from our support of the FreeBSD community? The words from one of our travel grant recipients, Alberto Mijares, help tell that story:

“Attending EuroBSDCon motivated me so much that I organized a meeting with my peers just to share my experiences. I gave a talk about IPv6 and FreeBSD at a local student event. I also want to take the BSD certification exam at BSDCan and I’m planning a big BSD event in my country in 2013 or early 2014.”

Alberto also recently submitted a PR with a new port for the Ports Collection and he’s joining the effort to translate the updated FreeBSD handbook into Spanish. He also wants to become a BSD Certification exam facilitator.

And there are so many others we support who are a part of the FreeBSD movement! Stay tuned as we begin our Faces of FreeBSD Campaign. Starting this month we will be spotlighting different people on our website and FaceBook page who have received funding to work on development projects, run conferences, travel to conferences, and advocate for FreeBSD. The numbers are growing thanks to your support!

Donate today to help us continue and increase our support of the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide! Making a donation is quick and easy.

FreeBSD Foundation

BSDCan Trip Report: Eitan Adler

FreeBSD Foundation Announces Ed Maste is New Director of Project Development

FreeBSD Foundation announces second technical staff member and iSCSI project

Raise a Million - Spend a Million!

New Funded Project: Capsicum Framework

Foundation Interview on BSDTalk

FreeBSD Foundation is Soliciting the Submission of Project Proposals

FreeBSD and Xorg on ARM

Porting FreeBSD to Efika Platforms Project Completed

Accepting Travel Grant Applications for BSDCan 2013

Foundation Announces New Technical Staff Member

Foundation at AsiaBSDCon and NorthEast LinuxFest

New Funded Project: UEFI Support

New Funded Project: FreeBSD/ARM Architecture Superpages Support

Foundation at SCALE

Foundation at Ottawa User Group Connect

Faces of FreeBSD - Thomas Abthorpe

Thank You for Helping Us Exceed Our Fundraising Goal!

FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter

Faces of FreeBSD - Dan Langille

MeetBSD Trip Report: Mark Linimon

*Stunning News Website Fundraising Contribution:* Over 650 new donations raise $43,200 in three days!

Faces of FreeBSD - Alberto Mijares

Faces of FreeBSD

Alberto’s Story

Foundation at LISA

Year-End Fundraising Campaign

Stunning News Website Fundraising Contribution: Over 650 new donations raise $43,200 in three days!