This report covers FreeBSD related projects between April and September 2009. During that time a lot of work has been done on wide variety of projects, including the Google Summer of Code projects. The BSDCan and EuroBSDCon conferences were held in Ottawa, CA, and Cambridge, UK which were both very successful. - A new major version of FreeBSD, 8.0, is to be released soon. + A new major version of FreeBSD, 8.0 is to be released soon. If you are wondering what's new in this long awaited release, read - the Ivan Voras' excellent summary.
Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! We hope you enjoy the reading.
Please note that the next deadline for submissions covering reports between October and December 2009 is January 15th, 2011.
pefs is a kernel level filesystem for transparently encrypting - files on top of other filesystem (like zfs or ufs). pefs adds no +
Pefs is a kernel level filesystem for transparently encrypting + files on top of other filesystems (like zfs or ufs). It adds no extra information into files (unlike others), doesn't require cipher block sized io operations, supports per directory/file keys and key chaining, uses unique per file tweak for encryption. - Supported algorithms: AES, Camellia, Salsa20 Code is ready for + Supported algorithms: AES, Camellia, Salsa20. The code is ready for testing.
The BSD# Project is devoted to porting the Mono .NET framework and applications to the FreeBSD operating system.
During the past year, the BSD# Team continued to track the Mono development and the lang/mono port have almost always been up-to-date (we however had to skip mono-2.2 because of some regression issues in this release). Most of our patches have been merged in the mono trunk upstream, and should be included in the upcoming mono-2.6 release.
In the meantime, a few more .NET related ports have been updated or added to the FreeBSD ports tree. These ports include:
The current translations (Handbook and some articles) are kept
up to date with the English versions. Some parts of the website
have been
In May 2009, Benedict Reuschling received its commit bit to the +
In May 2009, Benedict Reuschling received his commit bit to the www/de and doc/de_DE.ISO8859-1 trees under the mentorship of Johann - Kois. Since then, he has worked primarily on the handbook, updating + Kois. Since then, he has been working primarily on the Handbook, updating existing chapters and translating new ones. Most notably, the - filesystems and DTrace chapters were newly translated. Bugs found + filesystems and DTrace chapters have been recently translated. Bugs found in the original documents along the way were reported back so that - the other translation teams could incorporate them as well.
+ the other translation teams could incorporate them, as well.Christoph Sold has put his time in translating the wiki pages of - the BSD Certification Group into the german language. This is a - great help for germans who want to take the exam and like to read + the BSD Certification Group into the German language. This is a + great help for German people, who want to take the exam and like to read the information about it in their native language. Daniel Seuffert has sent valuable corrections and bugfixes. Thanks to both for their time and efforts!
The website is translated and updated constantly. Missing parts will be translated as time permits.
We appreciate any help from volunteers in proofreading documents, translating new ones and keeping them up to date. Even - small small error reports are of great help to us. You can find + small error reports are of great help for us. You can find contact information at the above URL.
Since the spring, the FreeBSD KDE team has been busy upgrading KDE from 4.2.0 up through to 4.3.1. As part of the ongoing maintenance of KDE, the team also updated Qt4 from 4.4.3 through to 4.5.2
We added two new committers/maintainers to the team, Kris Moore (kmoore@) and Dima Panov (fluffy@). We also granted enhanced area51 access to contributors Alberto Villa and Raphael Kubo da Costa. Alberto has been our key contributor updating and testing Qt - 4.6.0-tp1. Raphael is a KDE developer that has become our Gitorious + 4.6.0-tp1. Raphael is a KDE developer, who has become our Gitorious liaison, he has been responsible for getting FreeBSD Qt patches merged in upstream.
-Markus Brüffer (markus@) spent a lot of time patching widgets +
Markus Brüffer (markus@) spent a lot of time patching widgets and system plugins so they would work under FreeBSD. We would like to thank him for all his effort!
EuroBSDcon 2009 happened in Cambridge, with over 160 users, developers, friends and others. Slides, papers and audio are now up - on the website for those who couldn't make it to Cambridge. Next - year's event in 2010 will take place in Karlsruhe from 8 10 October - 2010. If you're interested in what you missed in 2009, or to join - the mailing list so you don't miss out next year, visit + on the website for those who could not make it to Cambridge. Next + year's event in 2010 will take place in Karlsruhe from 8 to 10 October + 2010. If you are interested in what you missed in 2009, or to join + the mailing list so you do not miss out next year, visit - http://2009.eurosbsdcon.org + http://2009.eurosbsdcon.org. - .
+Since their public launch in November 2008, the FreeBSD Forums (the most recent addition to the user community and support channels for the FreeBSD Operating System), have witnessed a healthy and steady growth.
The user population is now at over 8,000 registered users, who have participated in over 6,000 topics, containing over 40,000 posts in total. The sign-up rate hovers between 50-100 each week. - The total number of visitors (including 'guests') is hard to gauge, + The total number of visitors (including 'guests') is hard to gauge but is likely to be a substantial multiple of the registered userbase.
New topics and posts are actively 'pushed out' to search engines. This in turn makes the Forums show up in search results more and more often, making it a valuable and very accessible source of information for the FreeBSD community.
One of the contributing factors to the Forum's success is its 'BSD-style' approach when it comes to administration and moderation. The Forums have a strong and unified identity, they are neatly divided into sub-forums (like 'Networking', 'Installing & Upgrading', etc.), very actively moderated, spam-free, and with a core group of very active and helpful members, dispensing many combined decades' worth of knowledge to starting, intermediate and professional users of FreeBSD.
We expect the Forums te be, and to remain, a central hub in FreeBSD's community and support efforts.
Problem: Over the years the FreeBSD locale database (share/colldef, share/monetdef, share/msgdef, share/numericdef, share/timedef) has accumulated a total of 165 definitions (language - country-code - character-set triplets). The contents of the files is for Western European languages often low-ASCII but for Eastern European and Asian languages partly or fully high-ASCII. Without knowing how to display or interpret the character-sets, it is difficult to make sure by the general audience that the local languages (language - country-code) definitions is displayed properly in various character-sets. Suggested approach: With the combination of the data in the Unicode project (which goal is to define all the possible written characters and symbols on this planet) and the Common Locale Data Repository (which goal is to document all the different data and definitions needed for the locale database), we can easily keep track of the data, without the - need for being able to display the data in the required + need of being able to display the data in the required charactersets or understand them fully when updates are submitted by third parties. Current status: Conversion of share/monetdef, - share/msgdef, share/numericdef, share/timedef to the newdesign is + share/msgdef, share/numericdef, share/timedef to the new design is completed. The Makefile infrastructure is converted. Regression checks are done. Most of the tools are in place, waiting on the import of bsdiconv to the base system.
The code has been extracted from NetBSD and has been transformed
+ into an independent shared library. The basic encodings are
+ well supported. Almost all forward conversions
+ (foo -> UTF-32) are compatible with GNU but the reverse ones
+ are not so accurate because of GNU's advanced transliteration.
+ Some extra encodings have also been added. There are two modules,
+ which segfault, they need some debugging. I can keep working on this
+ project as part of my BSc thesis, so I hope to be able to solve
+ the remaining issues. An improved GNU compatibility is also very
+ desired (extra command line options for iconv(1), iconvctl(),
+ private interfaces, etc.).
+
+
+
FreeBSD's ext2fs had some parts under GPL. The aim of my project was + to rewrite those parts and free ext2fs from GPL. I have been + successful in rewriting the parts and NetBSD's ext2fs was a great + help in this. Certain critical parts under GPL were also removed due + to which the write performance suffered. I also implemented Orlov + Block Allocator for ext2fs. Currently I am planning to make ext2fs + Multiprocessor Safe (MPSAFE). My work resides in truncs_ext2fs + branch of Perforce.
+ + +In the last months, we have not added new translations, although we + have been working on the existing ones to have them updated. We need + more translators and volunteers to keep the amount of the translated + documentation growing, so feel free to contribute, every line of + submission or feedback is appreciated and highly welcome.
+ +If you want to join our work, please read the introduction + to the project as well as the FDP Primer + (both of them are available in Hungarian).
+ + +Recently, we have added one new article translation. The + existing translations have not been updated, though. We need + more human resources to keep up with the work and keep the + translations up-to-date.
+ + + +This project was started as part of Google Summer of Code 2008 but + there is still an ongoing work to complete some missing parts. + The BSD-licensed grep implementation is feature-complete and + has a good level of GNU compatibility. The only concern is the + performance. The GNU variant is much more complex, has about + 8 KSLOC, while BSD grep is tiny, has only 1.5 KSLOC. GNU uses + some shortcuts and optimizations to trick out the regex library, + that is why it is significantly faster. My point of view is that + such optimizations must be implemented in the regex library, + keeping the dependent utilities clean and easy to read. BSD + grep is so tiny that there is hardly any optimization opportunity + by simplifying the code, so the regex library is the next important + TODO. There is another issue with the current regex library. + It does not support some invalid regular expressions, which work + in GNU. We need to maintain compatibility, so we cannot just drop + this feature. Actually, BSD grep is linked to the GNU regex library + to maintain this feature but due to the lack of the mentioned + shortcuts, it is still slower than GNU. Anyway, if we can live + with this little performance hit until we get a modern regex library, + I think grep is ready to enter HEAD. As for the regex library, + NetBSD's result of the last SoC is worth taking a look.
+ +The sort utility has been rewritten from scratch. The existing + BSD-licensed implementation could not deal with wide characters + by design. The new implementation is still lacking some features + but is quite complete. There is a performance issue, though. + Sorting is a typical algorithmic subject but I am not an algorithmic + expert, so my implementation is not completely optimal. Some help + would be welcome with this part.
+ +The bc/dc utilities have been ported from OpenBSD. They pass + OpenBSD's and GNU's regression tests but they arrived too late to + catch 8.X, so they will go to HEAD after the release.
+ + + +