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This report covers &os; related projects between October and
December 2009. Obviously, this is the last report in 2009,
which has shown to be very important for the &os; Project. Besides
other remarkable things, a new major version of &os;, 8.0-RELEASE, has been
released, while the release process for 7.3-RELEASE is soon to begin. Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! We hope you
enjoy reading. Let us also use this opportunity to wish you all a
happy and successful new year for 2010. Please note that the deadline for submissions covering the
period between January and March 2010 is April 15th, 2010. A module for DAHDI support for &os; has been created in the
official Asterisk SVN repository. The following drivers are currently ported: The following HW drivers are currently ported and tested: Existing ata(4) infrastructure, which has been around many years,
has various problems and limitations with respect to modern
controllers/devices support. A CAM subsystem (used for SCSI), which
has been around for almost the same time, implements many of the
algorithms required to solve many problems in a better way. To reduce code
duplication and better support border cases such as ATAPI and SAS,
a new CAM based ATA implementation has been started in order to use
its benefits. As such, CAM infrastructure has been extended to support different
transports. New transport has been implemented to support PATA/SATA
buses. To support ATA disks, a new CAM driver ada has been written. ATAPI
devices are supported by existing SCSI drivers cd, da, sa, etc. To
support SATA port-multipliers a new CAM driver pmp has been written. To
support most featured and widespread SATA controllers, new drivers
ahci(4) and siis(4) have been developed. To support legacy ATA controllers, a kernel option ATA_CAM has been
added. When used, it makes all ata(4) controllers directly
available to CAM, deprecating ata(4) peripheral drivers and external
APIs. To make this possible, ata(4) code has been heavily refactored,
making controller driver API stricter. Command queuing support gives new ATA implementation up to
double performance benefit on some workloads, whereas 20-30% is
quite usual. SATA Port Multiplier support makes it easy to build fast and
cheap storage with huge capacities, by using dozens of SATA drives
in one system or external enclosures, Some of that code has been presented in the recently released &os; 8.0-RELEASE but
8-STABLE now includes a much improved version. Chromium is a Webkit-based web browser that is largely BSD
licensed. We have ported it from Linux to &os; in October and have been
posting patches and test builds periodically since then. Chromium
works well on &os; — it is very fast and stable, but there
are a handful of rough edges that need to be polished up. Two
remaining bugs should probably be fixed before releasing a
chromium-devel port. We are looking for volunteers to test and
maintain this port, to make this BSD browser a viable option on
&os; desktop systems. I have been adding a small intent log to SoftUpdates to
eliminate the requirement for fsck after an unclean shutdown. This
work has been funded by Yahoo!, iXsystems, and Juniper. Kirk
McKusick has been aiding me with design critiques and helping me
better understand SoftUpdates. Extensive testing by myself and Peter Holm has yielded a stable
patch. Current users are encouraged to follow the instructions
posted to the current@FreeBSD.org mailing list to verify stability in your own workloads.
Updates are forthcoming and it is expected to be merged with
current before the end of January. Ports to older versions of &os;
will be available in SVN under alternate branches. Official
backports will be decided by re@ when 9.0-CURRENT is stable. The changes are fully backwards and forwards compatible as there
are very few metadata changes to the filesystem. The journal may be
enabled or disabled on existing FFS filesystems using tunefs(8).
The log consumes 64 MB of space at maximum and fsck time is
bounded by the size of the log rather than the size of the
filesystem. Other details are available in my technical
journal. Most of the recent activity has been dealing with the 8.0-RELEASE
process. As an experiment, we have tried to decouple the ports QA
timeline as much as possible from the src QA timeline. Although
this meant that the impact on people actively maintaining and using
ports has been much less than in previous releases, it still has not
solved the problem of the release going out with a stale set of
packages. We are still trying to come up with a better solution for
the problem. The ports count is over 21,000. The PR count jumped to over
1000, but is now back to around 950. We are currently building packages for amd64-6, amd64-7,
amd64-8, i386-6, i386-7, i386-8, i386-9, ia64-8, sparc64-7, and
sparc64-8. This represents the addition of i386-9 and ia64-8 since
the last report. There has been some discussion of when to drop regular package
builds for 6.X but no decision has been made yet. The cluster and
the port managers are struggling to keep up with so many branches being
active all at the same time. Mark Linimon continues to make progress on the cluster nodes.
Almost every node that does not have a hard disk failure is now
online. In addition, he continues to make progress debugging
problems that occasionally take nodes offline. The next task is to characterize the overall performance of the
build cluster. The question has been asked of us, "what would it
take to speed up package builds?" There is no one simple answer. It
is not merely a matter of having a larger number of package
building machines -- before asking for funding we first need to
identify the current bottlenecks. While we are starting to
understand the problems on the nodes, the problems on the dispatch
machine itself are much harder. Complicating the matter is that
there are several periodic processes (ZFS backup, ZFS expiration,
and errorlog compression, among others) that can combine to slow
that machine significantly. The simultaneous interaction of all these
is proving difficult to quantify. Between Pav Lucistnik and Martin Wilke, many more experimental ports runs have
been completed and committed. We have added 3 new committers since the last report, and 1
older one has rejoined us. The main thing that has taken place since the last Status Report
is that I have gotten to the bottom of the remaining PCI problems
with Sun Fire V215/V245 and support for these has been completed
and since r202023 now is part of 9.0-CURRENT. With some luck it will also
be part of the upcoming 7.3-RELEASE. In other news: Recently, a bunch of new device IDs have been added for the
u3g(4) cellular wireless driver; the list should be comparable now with
other operating systems around. A lot of these devices have a
feature where the unit first attaches as a disk or CD-ROM that
contains the Win/Mac drivers. This state should be detected by the
u3g driver and the usb device is sent a command to switch to modem
mode. This has been working for quite some time but as it is
implemented differently for each vendor I am looking for feedback
on any units where the auto switchover is not working (or the init
is not recognized at all). Please ensure you are running an up to
date kernel from 9.0-CURRENT r201681 or later, or 8-STABLE if r201681 has
been merged by the time of publication. We are happy to announce that Benedict Reuschling is now free
from mentorship and can commit to the documentation tree on his own. Since the last status report, the German Documentation Team has
chased updates to various sections of the &os; Handbook, FAQ and
the German website. Many handbook pages have been updated to the latest
version, including chapters about configuration, disks, kernel
configuration, printing, multimedia and virtualization. We require help from volunteers that are willing to contribute
bug fixes or translations. The following documents need active
maintainership and are a good training ground for those willing to
join the translation team: There is one article translation pending review. Apart from this,
neither translations nor maintainance work have been done. We need
more volunteers, mostly translators but we are glad to have
more reviewers, as well. One can join by simply subscribing to
the translators' mailing list where all the work is done. In the last months, no new translation has been added.
Lacking human resources, we can only manage to keep the existing
documentation and web page translations up to date. If you are interested
in helping us, please contact us via the the email addresses
noted above. Since the last report we have seen a growth of 2,000 users on our
forums resulting in approximately 10,000 registered users at this time. The
posts count is about to reach 60,000 soon, which are contained in
almost 9,000 threads. The sign-up rate still hovers between 50-100 each week. The
total number of visitors (including 'guests') is currently 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 &os; community. One of the contributing factors to the forums' success is their
'BSD-style' approach when it comes to administration and
moderation. The forums have a strong and unified identity and are
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
&os;. V4L video support in the Linux emulator is now available. This work allows Linux applications using V4L video calls to
work with existing &os; video drivers that provide V4L interfaces.
It is tested and working with the net/skype port and also with
browser-based Flash applications that access webcams. It is tested on
&os;-8.0/amd64 and &os;-7.2/i386. An early version has been
committed to 9.0-CURRENT and work is in progress to commit the latest
version and then MFC. Note: to be clear, this does not add V4L support to all webcams.
The &os; camera driver must already offer V4L support itself in
order for a Linux application to be able to use that camera. The
multimedia/pwcbsd port provides the pwc(4) driver that already has
V4L support. If your camera is supported by a different driver, you
will need to enhance that driver to add V4L support. The webcamd daemon enables hundreds of different USB based
webcam devices to be used under the &os;-8/9 operating system. The
webcam daemon is basically an application, which is a port of
Video4Linux USB webcam drivers into userspace on &os;. The daemon
currently depends on libc, pthreads, libusb and the VIDEO4BSD
kernel module. Historically, &os; has limited the number of supplemental
groups per process to 15 (NGROUPS_MAX was incorrectly declared to be
16). In &os; 8.0-RELEASE we raised the limit to 1023, which should be
sufficient for most users and will be acceptably efficient for
incorrectly written applications that statically allocate
NGROUPS_MAX + 1 entries. Because some systems such as Linux 2.6 support a larger
group limit, we have further relaxed this restriction in 9.0-CURRENT and
made kern.ngroups a tunable value, which supports values between 1023
and INT_MAX - 1. We plan to merge this to 8-STABLE before
8.1-RELEASE. This import is based on OpenBSD 4.5 state of pf(4). It includes
many improvements over the code currently present in &os;. The
actual new feature present in pf45 repository is support for
divert(4), which should allow tools like snort_inline to work with
pf(4) too. Currently, the pf(4) import is considered stable with normal
kernel, as well as VIMAGE enabled kernels. Native NFSv4 ACL support in ZFS and UFS has been committed into 9.0-CURRENT. It
is expected to be MFCed in order to make it into &os; 8.1-RELEASE. The run(4) driver brings support for Ralink RT2700U/2800U/3000U
USB wireless devices. For detailed information and list of all the
supported devices, please see the above mentioned URL. The source
code has been imported to the USB P4 repository on January 10, 2010
(172906). The base/projects/mips branch has been merged into 9.0-CURRENT.
The merge is complete and the sanity tests have passed. The code
has booted on both a Ubiquiti RouterStation (big endian) as well as
in gxemul (little endian). The branch lived for one year, minus a day, and accumulated much
work: The development branch had been updated incorrectly several times over the
past year, and the damage was too much to repair. We have retired the
branch and will do further mips development in 9.0-CURRENT for the time
being. If you have a checked out tree, the suggested way to update
the projects/mips tree you have is to do a "svn switch
svn://svn.FreeBSD.org/base/head" in that tree. I would like to thank everybody that has contributed time, code
or hardware to make &os;/mips better. As development proceeds, I will keep posting updates. In
addition, I hope to have some mini "how-to" wiki pages done for
people that want to try it out. The purpose of this project is to provide &os; with support for the
Flattened Device Tree (FDT) technology, the mechanism for describing
computer hardware resources, which cannot be probed or self enumerated, in
a uniform and portable way. The primary consumer of this technology are
embedded &os; platforms (ARM, AVR32, MIPS, PowerPC), where a lot of
designs are based on similar chips but have different assignment of pins,
memory layout, addresses bindings, interrupts routing and other resources. Current state highlights: Work on this project has been sponsored by the &os; Foundation. HAST software will provide synchronous replication of any GEOM
provider (eg. disk, partition, mirror, etc.) or file from one &os;
machine (primary node) to another one (secondary node). Because data is replicated at the block level neither applications, nor
file systems have to be modified to take advantage of this
functionality. The functionality that HAST software will provide is very similar
to the functionality provided by the DRBD project for Linux. The HAST project is sponsored by the &os; Foundation. Work is progressing well; first milestone was reached in December
2009 and the expected project completion date is January 31,
2010. Check out &os; mailing lists for patches to test in February and
wish me good luck! And by the way, do not forget to donate to the &os; Foundation, as your
donations make projects like this possible. Thank you! Development of the &os; 802.11s stack continues. The code in
&os; HEAD has been updated to comply with draft 4.0. Merge to
&os; 8-STABLE will be done soon. The developer is looking for funding to be able to implement mesh
link security algorithms and/or coordinated channel access
(performance improvement). Important changes regarding &os; TDM Framework since last Status
Report: On January 13, I removed the utmp user accounting database and
replaced it with POSIX utmpx. Unfortunately, the upgrade path is a bit
bumpy, because the utmp interface provided almost no library
interface to interact with the database files. This change may have caused some regressions. Some ports may fail
to build, while there could also be bugs in the library
functions. Good compatibility has been ensured and there are only few pending
items which have to be reviewed/enhanced. Recently, an enhancement
has been completed which makes it possible to accomplish better
transliteration, just like in the GNU version. An initial testing
patch is expected at the beginning of February. As 8.0-RELEASE is out, BSD bc/dc can be now committed to 9.0-CURRENT. We are
only waiting for an experimental package building to make sure there are no
regressions after this change. BSD grep is complete but it cannot be integrated yet because of
some regex library issues. We need first a fast and modern regex
library so that we can change to BSD grep. BSD sort has few
incomplete features and needs some performance review. NVIDIA has released the first BETA version of its graphics
drivers for &os;/amd64. Note that this driver will work on &os;
versions 7.3 or 8.0 and later. It also works on very recent
versions of 7.2-STABLE. More details are provided in the
official release announcement. Bugmeister Gavin Atkinson has now been granted a src commit
bit, and is now starting to work through some of our
backlog. The list of PRs recommended for committer evaluation by the
Bugbusting Team continues to receive new additions; however, it
has not yet achieved high visibility. (This list contains PRs,
mostly with patches, that the Bugbusting Team feel are probably
ready to be committed as-is, or are probably trivially resolved
in the hands of a committer with knowledge of the particular
subsystem.) One of the suggestions at the Cambridge devsummit
was to create a way for people to be emailed the weekly summary
- that is posted to freebsd-bugs, and this has now been implemented.
+ that is posted to freebsd-bugs@, and this has now been implemented.
Please email linimon@FreeBSD.org to ask to be added to the
recommended_subscribers.txt file (see above). We continue to classify PRs as they arrive, adding 'tags' to the
subject lines corresponding to the kernel subsystem involved, or
man page references for userland PRs. These tags, in turn, produce
lists of PRs sorted both by tag and by manpage. At this point
most of the PRs that refer to supported versions of &os; have
been converted, and we are keeping up as new ones come in. We
hope that this is making it easier to browse the PR database. The overall PR count jumped to over 6200 during the 8.0 release
cycle, but seems to have stabilized at around 6100. As in the
past, we have a fairly good clearance rate for ports PRs, but
much less so for other PRs. (Partly this is due to the concept
of individual ports having 'maintainers'.) Work continues on our ia64 port. Many recent commits to
help improve stability have been made to -CURRENT and MFCed
to 8-STABLE. Due to interest from one very motivated user, package builds
have been restarted for ia64-8. This is primarily intended as
a QA step to discover and fix bugs on ia64, rather than to
create packages for upload. Based on the above, Mark Linimon documented how to add more
architectures to the package cluster scheduler. (This work will
also be of use in an upcoming effort to start powerpc package
builds.) There are currently 3 ia64 machines online and building
packages. The machines seem stable as long as multiple
simultaneous package builds are not attempted, in which case
they get machine checks. This is puzzling, since other heavy
workloads seem stable on the same machines. bwn(4) is replacing bwi(4) driver for to the following
reasons: Currently it is tested on big/little endian machines and 32/64
bits DMA operation with STA mode. A major patch for siba(4)
is being reviewed before committing into HEAD. The Release Engineering Team announced &os; 8.0-RELEASE on
November 26th, 2009. With 8.0-RELEASE completed planning has
begun for 7.3-RELEASE. The schedule has been set with the
release date planned for early March 2010. The Release Engineering Team would like to thank George
Neville-Neil (gnn@) for his service on the team. George
continues to work with the &os; Project but has stepped down
from the Release Engineering Team to focus on those other
activities. One of the longer outstanding feature problems with the &os;
IP security stack, broken IP Payload Compression Protocol
(IPcomp) support, has been fixed. While working on the fix, various problems had been
identified: Patches for all but the zlib support have been committed to
HEAD and merged to all supported stable branches including
RELENG_6. Special thanks to Eugene Grosbein for helping with
testing. Despite a difficult economy, we more than doubled our number
of donors, we raised $269k towards our goal of $300k, and with
an improved economy hope to surpass that this year. We funded two new projects. One is the Flattened Device Tree by
Rafal Jaworowski. And, the second one is Highly Available Storage
by Pawel Jakub Dawidek. We continued supporting the New Console
Driver by Ed Schouten and Improvements to the &os; TCP Stack by
Lawrence Stewart. We also purchased equipment for several
projects. We have big plans for the new year! We are going to significantly
increase our project development and equipment spending. Stay
tuned for a project proposal submission announcement soon. We
just announced that we are accepting travel grant applications
for AsiaBSDCon and will be accepting them soon for BSDCan. And,
we are working on infrastructure projects to beef up hardware
for package-building, network-testing, etc. Read more about how we supported the project and community by
reading our end-of-year newsletter available at http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2009Dec-newsletter.shtml. Follow us on https://twitter.com/freebsdfndationTwitter now!
We are fund-raising for 2010 now! Find out more at http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/.
+ href="http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/donate/">http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/donate/. + + + +VirtualBox 3.1.2 has been committed to the Ports tree.
+ +Several changes to the port have been performed with this + update which include:
+ +BSDCan, a BSD conference held in Ottawa, Canada, has quickly + established itself as the technical conference for people + working on and with 4.4BSD based operating systems and related + projects. The organizers have found a fantastic formula that + appeals to a wide range of people from extreme novices to + advanced developers.
+ +BSDCan 2010 will be held on 13-14 May 2010 at University of + Ottawa, and will be preceded by two days of Tutorials on 11-12 + May 2010.
+ +There will be related events (of a social nature, for the most + part) on the day before and after the conference.
+ +Please check the conference web site for more information.
+ +AsiaBSDCon is a conference for users and developers on BSD + based systems. AsiaBSDCon is a technical conference and aims + to collect the best technical papers and presentations + available to ensure that the latest developments in our open + source community are shared with the widest possible audience. + The conference is for anyone developing, deploying and using + systems based on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, Darwin + and MacOS X.
+ +The next conference will be held at Tokyo University of + Science, Tokyo, Japan, on 11th to 14th March, 2010.
+ +For more detailed information, please check the conference + web site.
+ +We are again able to build bootable i386/amd64 kernel. Nathan + Whitehorn commited a fix to &os; which enabled LLVM/clang to + work mostly fine on PowerPC. There is some preliminary testing + of LLVM/clang on ARM and MIPS being done. We have some ideas + about sparc64 support which are currently being investigated. + You are welcome to contact us if you want to help.
+ +Since the last report a lot has happened mostly in the area of + C++, clang is currently able to build working groff, gperf and + devd, ie. all of the C++ apps we have in base. Unfortunatelly, + it still cannot build any of the C++ libraries — two of + them are missing builtins and libstdc++ is broken for other + reasons.
+ +Not much happened in the clangbsd branch as we cannot upgrade + upgrade the clang/llvm there because we are blocked by a bug + that requires using newer assembler than we can ship. This + might be solved by either fixing this (short term) or using + llvm-mc instead of gnu as for assembling (longer term).
+ +