Last month's status report was apparently a great success: I received + countless e-mails with comments, questions, and suggestions. I've tried + to incorporate any suggestions and address any problems from these e-mails + in this month's report, which captures a far more extensive snapshot of + FreeBSD activity in the last month. Unlike last month's report, it does a + better job of reflecting non-development activity, such as on-going + conference planning, documentation, and so on. This is a trend I hope to + see improve in future months as well.
+ +On the topic of conferences, in the future I'd like to report more on + publication activities relating to FreeBSD, including online journals with + articles relating to FreeBSD, paper journals, conference papers, and so + on. Likewise, I would be interested in including references to Call for + Papers relating to FreeBSD. I'll take this opportunity to plug both + registration and paper submission for BSDCon Europe in November, which has + status included in this report, and for the general BSD Conference being + hosted by USENIX in February. Your attendance and submissions make these + conferences "happen", and promote FreeBSD as a platform for new research, + feature development, and application products. Work of extremely high + calibre is performed on FreeBSD, and we need to get the word out.
+ +Next month, we're maintaining much the same submission requirements: reports + should be one or two paragraphs long, sent by e-mail, and approximate the + layout of the entries this month (Project, Contact, URL, and text). I'll + send out reminders again over the week before the deadline, with more + specific instructions. An area where I'd like to explore improvement lies + in the coordination of related status reports for larger projects, such as + new architectural work or platform ports. This might even have the effect + of encouraging communication within these projects :-). I'd like to + continue to focus on pulling in a broader range of groups and their + activities, including the Security Officer, Release Engineer, and Core + Team.
+ +-- Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
+ +The following projects submitted summaries for the July 2001 report:
+ +Contact: Mike Smith <msmith@FreeBSD.org>
+ +ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) is an industry + standard which obsoletes APM, Intel MPS, PnPBIOS, and other Intel PC + firmware interface standards. It is also used on the IA64 platform. + More information on ACPI is available at
+ + + http://developer.intel.com/technology/iapc/acpi + +The FreeBSD ACPI subsystem project is based heavily on the Intel + ACPI Component Architecture. This status report outlines the current + state of the project; future updates will focus on changes as they + occur.
+ +The Intel ACPI interpreter is fully integrated, although bugs are still + coming out of the woodwork occasionally.
+ +Work is ongoing in the following areas:
+ +Contact: Stephane E. Potvin <sepotvin@videotron.ca>
+ +The ARM port is currently going pretty well. The kernel is compiling + and is able to boot to the point where it panics trying to initialize + the network subsystem. The current reference platform is the Netwinder + but this may change as many people expressed interest in a more broadly + available platform. Things that need to be done before it can get + further includes adding footbridge, timer and interrupt supports. The + pmap module is not completed yet either.
+ +Contact: Doug Barton <dougb@freebsd.org>, Jeroen Ruigrok <asmodai@freebsd.org>
+ +Now that BIND 8.2.4 is finally imported the time has come to look at + getting BIND 9 imported into CURRENT. The current idea is to have it + imported alongside BIND 8 so that people can play with either one until + all import problems have been taken care of and people have tested it a + bit.
+ +Contact: Eric Melville <eric@FreeBSD.org>
+ +Although gaining a new name, the project has been at a standstill due to + both resource availability during the move between BSDi and Wind River, + and other commitments of the developers. The project should obtain an + official mailing list, as well as return to an active state after the + dust settles.
+ +URL: http://www.bsdconeurope.org
+Contact: Paul Richards <paul@freebsd-services.co.uk>, Josef Karthauser <joe@tao.org.uk>
+ +The conference will take place at the Thistle Hotel, Brighton, UK from + 9-11 November 2001.
+ +The aim of the conference is to provide a focal point for European + users and developers of all the BSD derived operating systems. The + format will be similar to other conferences, with 2 days of technical + sessions over the Saturday and Sunday.
+ +We'll be finalising the schedule towards the end of the month and + anybody who is interested in doing a talk should contact us asap. There + are no restrictions on the use of talks, if it's been done before we + may still be interested in having it presented to an European audience, + and we make no claims to the talks so speakers are free to present the + talks again at other conferences.
+ +We're also still looking for sponsors.
+ +We had 80 pre-registrations in the first week so we're expecting a good + turnout.
+ +Contact: <mjacob@freebsd.org>, <gibbs@freebsd.org>, <ken@freebsd.org>
+ +The new CAM transport code is starting to get supported in more HBAs + and to get refined so that it does the intended per-protocol support. + No progress on doing any SMPNG work for CAM has been made yet. This is + a fairly high priority.
+ +URL: http://phk.freebsd.dk/Gnats/
+Contact: <phk@FreeBSD.org>
+ +Thanks to various outstanding individual efforts, we are now + down to just below 2300 open bug-reports. This means that we + have fought our way back to the level we had around march 2000.
+ +URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/docs.html
+URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/docproj/index.html
+Contact: Documentation Project <doc@FreeBSD.org>
+ +Work continues (in large part sponsored by WRS) on updating the + Handbook ready for the second print edition. There has been a flurry + of activity in this area recently, and the ToDo list can be seen at
+ ++ http://www.freebsd.org/docproj/handbook.html
+ +Dima and others are doing a stellar job of keeping up with the steady + flow of incoming PRs relating to the documentation project.
+ +The Developers' Handbook, + +
+ http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/developers-handbook/index.html
+ +is a year old; it contains a wealth of useful content for developers + developing on, or for, FreeBSD. As ever, more contributions are + always required, not only for the developers' handbook, but for all of + the FreeBSD documentation set.
+ +Contact: <mjacob@feral.com>
+ +The basic design hasn't changed and this project mainly is in the + phase of continued hardening and test case development. The next + major feature will be to fully integrate into the new CAM TRAN + code and to fully support on the fly device addition and removal. + The only HBA supported is QLogic at this time. Future support for + the QLogic line is planned to have 2300 (2Gb) and IP support before + October.
+ +Contact: Brian Dean <bsd@FreeBSD.org>
+ +Hardware watchpoints are now available for kernel debugging on the + IA32 (i386) architecture. One can now set hardware watchpoints + using the new ddb command 'hwatch', which is analogous to the + existing 'watch' command. Alternatively, if greater flexibility is + required, direct access to the debug registers is available using + the ddb 'set' command which allows complete control over the + processor hardware debug facilities. Hardware watchpoints are very + useful in tracking down those elusive memory overwrite bugs in the + kernel. Hardware watchpoints can even be used to set a code + breakpoint in ROM, which is commonly found in embedded systems.
+ +Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks@FreeBSD.org>
+ +Support for configuring IEEE 802.11 wireless devices via ifconfig + has been committed to -current and -stable. It contains most of + the functionality needed to configure an wireless device. Some + missing features are being worked on including integrated support + for DHCP so a single entry in /etc/rc.conf can be used to fully + configure a wireless device on a DHCP lan and setting the CTS/RTS + threshold. Currently the an(4) and wi(4) drivers are supported + in -current and -stable with the awi(4) device supported in + -current. Further work is needed to support Frequency Hopping + devices such as ray(4).
+ +Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
+ +jailNG is a from-scratch rewrite of the popular jail(8) service, + focussing on improved management functions, as well as more fine-grained + configurability. An initial prototype has been written, based on + explicitly named and configured jails, and work is proceeding on + userland integration. Currently, it's not clear if the timeline for + this will be 5.0-RELEASE, or 5.1-RELEASE.
+ +URL: http://www.freebsd.org/java/
+Contact: <glewis@eyesbeyond.com>
+ +The main development in the FreeBSD Java Project over the last month was + the release of an initial "Developers Only" patchset for the JDK 1.3.1. + Since that release progress had been made towards a much more useable + alpha quality patchset which is likely to be turned into a port, as per + the current JDK 1.2.2 patchset. This new patchset will feature a number + of bugfixes, which essentially get the JDK to a working state for early + adopters, and an initial implementation of "native threads" based on + FreeBSD's userland pthreads. Unfortunately this implementation isn't + fully functional, but is included in the hope of more getting more + eyesballs on the code (particularly experience pthread programmers). + We'd also like to welcome Fuyuhiko Maruyama-san as a new committer, the + usual punishment for too many good patches.
+ +URL: http://www.jp.FreeBSD.org/man-jp/ (in Japanese)
+Contact: <man-jp@jp.FreeBSD.org>
+ +We have been working to provide Japanese version of FreeBSD online + manuals, since 1996. Currently, RELENG_4 manuals are based. + Translated versions are placed on doc/ja_JP.eucJP/man and provided + to users using ports/japanese/man-doc. Also, we discuss about + related commands (e.g. ports/japanese/man and ports/japanese/groff).
+ +URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/summit/usenix01/
+Contact: John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
+ +The first FreeBSD kernel summit meeting was held June 29-30, 2001 in + Boston, MA at the Usenix 2001 Annual Technical Conference. Links + to a variety of files are posted on the web site.
+ +Note: I (jhb) am still working on writing up a general summary of the + meeting. When that is completed it will be posted here and mailed to the + -hackers mailing list.
+ +URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~jasone/kse/
+Contact: <julian@elischer.org>
+ +I'm working on multithreading the kernel. So far I have over 400KB of + diffs relative to todays -current (I'm keeping my tree updated with + changes as they occur rather than get hit with a big updte at the end).
+ +I have split the proc structure and am changing most of the kernel to + pass around a thread identifier instead of a proc structure.
+ +The following interfaces have been changed so far:
+I have still a lot of work to go with a lot of "dumb editing" (s/struct + proc \*p/struct thread \*td/) usually I change a few items and then fix + everything that breaks when I try compile it. I'd like to check it in + on a branch so others can help the editing but haven't worked out the + best way to do it yet.
+ +I have implemented changes to the scheduler so that kse's are scheduled + instead of processes, and threads sleep, letting the kse pick up a new + thread. but it's not anywhere ready yet (heck it doesn't compile yet + :-)
+ +Note that I have not yet updated the document listed above.. everywhere + it mentions "ksec" or "KSE-context", the code uses the word "thread". I + will update it soon as Jason has sent me the source.
+ +URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/news/status/
+Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>, Chris Costello <chris@FreeBSD.org>
+ +The FreeBSD Monthly Development Status Report aims to keep users and + developers up-to-date on the latest goings-on in the FreeBSD project by + providing summaries of each project and its status. At the time of this + writing, the July 2001 status report is being prepared and is very near + release. The FreeBSD Web site now has a Status Reports section, which, + when the July 2001 report is released, will be updated to include a + link to an HTML-ified version.
+ +URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FreeBSD-rc
+Contact: <dougb@FreeBSD.org>, <sheldonh@FreeBSD.org>
+ +The NetBSD rc.d port aims to improve the FreeBSD startup process by + porting Luke Mewburn's rc.d work from NetBSD to FreeBSD. This will + score FreeBSD startup and shutdown dependencies without losing the + traditional and much loved monolothic configuration file system.
+ +Luke Mewburn's USENIX paper and slides on the system as implemented in + NetBSD are available here:
+ ++ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FreeBSD-rc/message/3
+ +Interested parties are urged to study this material before joining the + discussion list.
+ +The intention at this stage is to decide on an approach that will + ensure that the differences between the NetBSD rc.d system and the + system as ported to FreeBSD will be kept to a minimum. This will + probably involve discussions with Luke around those areas of the + system that are identified as areas for potential improvement.
+ +Contact: Hartmut Brandt <brandt@fokus.gmd.de>
+ +The goal of this project is the implementation of ATM signalling and + other ATM protocols by means of the netgraph(4) framework. This should + provide an easily extendable architecture for using ATM on FreeBSD. + Currently the full UNI4.0 stack (except for the LIJ capability) has + been implemented, including ILMI and a first version of the ATM Forum + API for UNI. An implementation of Classical IP over ATM is also + available. Drivers have been implemented for the Fore PCA200E and Fore + HE-155 cards.
+ +Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks@FreeBSD.org>
+ +Network device cloning support has been imported from NetBSD. + This allows virtual devices to be allocated on demand rather then + being staticly allocated at compile time. Our implementation + differs slightly from that of NetBSD's in that we allow both the + creation of specific devices (i.e. gif0) and arbitrary devices + instead of just allowing specific devices. Currently, the only + device in the tree which has been converted is the gif(4) device + which has been converted in both -current and -stable. Work is + ongoing to convert all other virtual network devices with work + in progress on faith, stf, and vlan interfaces. In general this + conversion is accompanied by appropriate modifications to make + these devices fully modular.
+ +URL: http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/pthreads/
+Contact: <arun@sharmas.dhs.org>
+ +NGPT is an effort led by IBM engineers to implement MxN threads (also + known as many user threads to one kernel thread mapping) on Linux. I + have ported it to FreeBSD to use rfork(2).
+ +The port is right here:
+ ++ http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=29239
+ +URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~imp/oldcard-status.html
+Contact: <imp@village.org>
+Funded by: Monzoon Networking, LLC
+ +This month has been a month of conventration and consolidation. Much of + the changes from current have been migrating into stable. I've improved + power support, suspend/resume interactions, interrupt handling, and + ability to work after windows/NEWCARD has run. Interrupt routing + continues to be a locking issue for a complete MFC. Current patches + are available at the above website. I'm racing to get this done before + 4.4 is released.
+ +URL: http://www.intel.com/research/mrl/orp/
+Contact: <arun@sharmas.dhs.org>, <orp@egroups.com>
+ +Information on Intel ORP - a BSD licensed Java VM is right here:
+ ++ http://www.intel.com/research/mrl/orp/
+ +A FreeBSD patch has been tested to work with NGPT and submitted to + the ORP project. The patch is available here:
+ ++ http://www.sharma-home.net/~adsharma/projects/orp/orp-freebsd-1.0.5.patch.txt.gz
+ +There are some issues to be ironed out to make it work with FreeBSD's + default (user level) pthread implementation.
+ +OpenPackages intends to create a software packaging system that will + allow third-party programs to be installed, without operating system + dependent changes, on as many platforms as are feasible. OpenPackages + was originally based on code from the BSD ports systems, and has been + improved and extended by developers of many heritages.
+ +The OpenPackages Project is pleased to release the Milestone 2 + codebase. This release contains a working package building system and a + single test package. OP currently is known to build on certain + instances of the following operating systems: FreeBSD, HP/UX, IRIX, + Linux (Debian, Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, TurboLinux, Caldera, etc.), + NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris
+ +Contact: Mark R V Murray <mark@grondar.za>
+ +(First report)
+Large cleanup and extension of FreeBSD PAM modules. All modules + are to be documented, consistant in style (style(9) used) and + as complete as possible WRT functionality. Mostly done.
+ +Contact: <benno@FreeBSD.org>
+ +We now have the rudiments of device support. We have a nexus driver for + OpenFirmware machines, along with support for the Apple UniNorth PCI/AGP + host bridge. I'm currently trying to get the USB hardware working so that + I can get closer to having a console driver independant of OpenFirmware, + then I'll be trying to get the system to get to single-user mode using + NFS.
+ +Contact: <brian@freebsd-services.com>
+ +Work has begun, but nothing has yet been committed. The NCP + addresses used by ppp have been abstracted and initial support has + been added to the filter set for ipv6 addresses. NCP negotiation + hasn't yet been started.
+ +Contact: <brian@Awfulhak.org>
+ +Patches have been submitted to get ppp working under HURD, and + mostly under Linux. There are GPL copyright problems that need to + be addressed.
+ +Contact: <brian@freebsd-services.com>
+ +Making pppoed function in a production environment. Most of the + work is complete and committed. Additional work includes adding a + -l option where ``-l label'' is shorthand for ``-e exec ppp -direct + label'' and discovering why rogue child processes are being left + around.
+ +Contact: Evan Sarmiento <ems@open-root.org>
+ +PRFW is a set of hooks which I have integrated into the FreeBSD kernel. + This allows modules to easily intercept system calls with less overhead. + It also supports per-pid restrictions, which means, one process may not + be able to use X function in Y manner, but another process may.
+ +Progress: I was working on this in 4.3-RELEASE, but now I'm merging it + into current. I will be submitting a patch to the mailing lists in about + a week.
+ +Contact: <mjacob@feral.com>
+ +This driver is currently not working well under -current and is + undergoing some work at this time. No major design or feature + changes are planned. There was some notion of adding TapeAlert + support, but HP supports that as a binary product via a user + library and it was felt that it'd be more politically prudent + to leave it alone.
+ +Contact: Peter Wemm <peter@FreeBSD.org>, John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
+ +In the 'smpng' p4 branch there is code to make the ast() function loop to + close the race when an AST is triggered while we are handling previously + triggered AST's.
+In the 'jhb_preemption' p4 branch work is being done to make the kernel + fully preemptive. It is reportedly stable on UP x86, but SMP x86 locks up, + UP alpha has problems during shutdown and can recurse indefinitely until it + exhausts its stack.
+ +We are using a perforce repository for live development work, which + can track multiple seperate long-lived works-in-progress and collaborate + between multiple developers at the same time on the same change set.
+ +FreeBSD-current is being imported into p4 hourly, for easy tracking + of the moving -current tree.
+ +I haven't written up a good primer yet, but we're able to open this + up to the general developer community. NEWCARD work looks like it will + be done here too. Perforce is ideal for tracking this sort of long-lived + project without having to resort to passing patches around.
+ +KSE work is now being checked into a kse p4 branch - thanks Julian!
+ +KSE work is focusing on getting the main API changes into the base + tree well before 5.0.
+ +URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~bmilekic/code/mb_slab/
+Contact: Bosko Milekic <bmilekic@FreeBSD.org>
+ +mb_alloc is a specialized allocator for mbufs and mbuf clusters. It + offers various important advantages over the old mbuf allocator, + particularily for MP machines. Additionally, it is designed with the + possibility of important future enchancements in mind.
+ +The mb_alloc code has been committed to -CURRENT a month ago and + appears to be holding up well. Prior to committing it, preliminary + performance measurements were done merely to ensure that it is not + significantly worse than the old allocator, even with Giant still in + place. Results were promising + + [http://people.freebsd.org/~bmilekic/code/mb_alloc/results.html] - also + see jlemon's results (link at the bottom of accompanying text). Since + the commit, Matt Jacob has provided useful feedback and bugfixes. Work + is now being done to re-enable mbtypes statistics and make appropriate + changes to netstat(1) and systat(1).
+ +Contact: Jake Burkholder <jake@freebsd.org>
+ +The sparc64 port has been committed to the FreeBSD repository. As such + further development will occur in cvs, rather than as a separately + maintained patch set. Significant progress has been made since the + last status report, including; support for kernel debugging with ddb, + much more complete pmap support, support for context switching and + process creation, and filling out of important machine dependent data + structures. Thomas Moestl has shown a strong interest in working on + the port and is in the process of implementing support for saving and + restoring a process's floating point context. I look forward to + working with him and any other developers that happen to fall out of + the wood works.
+ +Contact: Robert Drehmel <robert@ferrari.de>
+ +The sparc64 loader is functional enough to boot an ELF binary from an + UFS filesystem using the existent openfirmware library, which has been + revised to work flawlessly on 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. Support + for netbooting and modules will be implemented next, followed by a + better openfirmware mapping strategy.
+ + +Contact: Jonathan Lemon <jlemon@freebsd.org>
+ +This project brings a SYN cache implementation to FreeBSD, in + order to make it more robust to DoS attacks. A SYN cookie approach + was considered, but ultimately rejected becuase it does not conform + to the TCP protocol. The SYN cache will work with T/TCP, IPV6 and + IPSEC, and the size of each cache element is currently is less than + 1/5th the size of a normal TCP control block.
+ +URL: http://www.TrustedBSD.org/
+Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
+ +It's been a busy month, with a number of relevant news items. Not + least important is that NAI Labs was awarded a $1.2M contract from + the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to work + on a variety of components relevant to the TrustedBSD Project, + including support for pluggable security models, and supporting + features such as improving the extended attributes implementation, + simple crypto support for swap and file systems, documentation, and + much more.
+ +On the features side, progress continues on Mandatory Access Control, + object labeling, and improving the consistency of kernel access + control mechanisms--in particular, with regard to inter-process + authorization and credential management. Work has begun on porting + LOMAC, NAI Labs' Low-Watermark Mandatory Access Control scheme, from + Linux to FreeBSD, and it has been re-licensed under a BSD license. + We hope to have an initial port complete in time for 5.0-RELEASE + later this year.
+ + &footer; + +