FreeBSD Status Report Fourth Quarter 2005

From: Max Laier <max_at_love2party.net>
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 16:00:41 -0000
October-December 2005 Status Report

Introduction

   This report is about the rather quite last quarter of 2005, with the
   release of FreeBSD 6.0 and the holiday season things evolved in the
   background. Nontheless, most exciting projects hit the tree (or are
   going to very soon).

   Upcoming events, such as the release of FreeBSD 6.1/5.5 and the third
   BSDCan conference with a big developer summit promise to provide a
   busier start in 2006. The foundation for upcoming development,
   however, are the projects that are described herein.

   We hope that you find interesting projects to look at or work on. The
   next status report collection will be April 7 2006. We are looking
   forward to your report then.

   Thanks again to everyone who submitted reports, and thanks to Brad
   Davis who stepped up for an extensive spelling and grammar review.
   Enjoy reading!
     _________________________________________________________________

Projects

     * FreeSBIE
     * jemalloc
     * variant symlinks

Documentation

     * FreeBSD list of projects and ideas for volunteers (TODO list for
       volunteers)
     * Problem Report Database
     * The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project

FreeBSD team reports

     * FreeBSD Security Officer and Security Team
     * Ports Collection
     * Release Engineering Status Report

Kernel

     * Bt878 Audio Driver (aka FusionHDTV 5 Lite)
     * E1000 driver improvements
     * LSI MegaRAID improvements
     * Sound subsystem improvements

Network infrastructure

     * Early Binding Updates and Credit-Based Authorization for the
       Kame-Shisa Mobile IPv6 Software
     * FAST_IPSEC Upgrade
     * KAME Project Status Report
     * New Networking Features in FreeBSD 6.0
     * Optimizing the FreeBSD IP and TCP Stack

Userland programs

     * OpenBSD dhclient

Architectures

     * FreeBSD on Xen 3.0
     * FreeBSD/xbox

Ports

     * FreshPorts

Vendor / 3rd Party Software

     * SysKonnect/Marvell Yukon device driver

Miscellaneous

     * A Comprehensive Delay Analysis for Reactive and Proactive Handoffs
       with Mobile IPv6 Route Optimization
     * BSDCan 2006
     * TCP/IP Optimization Fundraiser Status
     _________________________________________________________________

A Comprehensive Delay Analysis for Reactive and Proactive Handoffs with
Mobile IPv6 Route Optimization

   URL:
   http://doc.tm.uka.de/2006/vogt-2006-delay-analysis-for-reactive-and-pr
   oactive-handoffs.pdf

   Contact: Christian Vogt <chvogt_at_tm.uka.de>

   Optimizations to reduce handoff delays inherent in Mobile IPv6 Route
   Optimization as well as IPv6 router discovery, address configuration,
   and movement detection have so far been mostly considered on an
   individual basis. This document evaluates three integrated solutions
   for improved handoff experience in surroundings with different
   preconditions: reactive handoffs with unmodified routers, reactive
   handoffs with router support, and movement anticipation and proactive
   handoff management.
     _________________________________________________________________

BSDCan 2006

   URL: http://www.bsdcan.org/

   Contact: Dan Langille <dan_at_langille.org>

   We are well into the process of selecting the talks for BSDCan 2006.
   Our new program committee has a hard selection task over the new few
   weeks. The deadline for the Call For Papers has passed, but it's not
   too late to submit a talk. Please see the above URL for details. After
   the success of the Work in Progress last year , we are going to do it
   again this year. If you are working on something you'd like to tell
   the world about, considering giving a 5 minute talk at BSDCan. The
   registration prices for BSDCan 2006 will be the same as they were for
   2005 . We will be again in the SITE building at University of Ottawa
   and you'll have lots of opportunity to meet with people from all over
   the world. Be sure to make your travel plans now and don't miss out on
   the biggest BSD event this year: BSDCan 2006.

Open tasks:

    1. We're looking for volunteers to help out just before and during
       the conference. Contact Dan at the above address.
    2. If you have a talk you'd like to present, contact Dan at the above
       address.
     _________________________________________________________________

Bt878 Audio Driver (aka FusionHDTV 5 Lite)

   URL:
   http://perforce.freebsd.org/fileSearch.cgi?FSPC=%2F%2Fdepot%2Fuser%2Fj
   mg%2Fbktrau%2F...&ignore=GO%21

   Contact: John-Mark Gurney <jmg_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Basic audio capture is working. All of the parameters are set by
   userland, while the RISC program generation is by kernel. No real
   audio has been captured as there are no drivers for the tuner yet.
   Someone with a real Bt878 NTSC card that is supported by bktr(4) could
   use this to capture audio w/o using the sound card.

   The real goal of this driver is to make HD capture possible with the
   DViCO FusionHDTV5 Lite card that I have. I have some of the
   documentation that I need, but I'm still missing two key docs. The
   docs for the LGDT3303 ATSC/8VSB/QAM demodulator chip and a block
   diagram of the board showing which GPIO lines go where and how the
   chips are interconnected. DViCO has been responsive in acknowledging
   my emails, but they have yet to produced any data besides pointing me
   to the Linux driver (which is difficult to figure out stuff by).

Open tasks:

    1. Complete basic capture driver.
    2. Make the bktr(4) drive cleanly attach to the card, and possibly
       add support for analog capture.
     _________________________________________________________________

E1000 driver improvements

   Contact: Scott Long <scottl_at_freebsd.org>
   Contact: Andre Opperman <andre_at_freebsd.org>

   In an effort to solve the 'interrupt aliasing' problem that plagues
   many motherboards under FreeBSD, I modified the Intel e1000 network
   driver (if_em) to use a combination of fast interrupts and taskqueues.
   This technique avoids interrupt threads entirely, which in turn avoids
   triggering the aliasing problem in the Intel APIC. The result is that
   the driver now handles and masks interrupts immediately, and a private
   taskqueue is then scheduled to run to process the link events and
   rx/tx events. A side effect of this asynchronous processing is that it
   acts much as traditional polling does, in that the amount of work done
   in the taskqueue can be controlled, and the taskqueue rescheduled to
   process work at a later time. This leads to the driver having the
   low-latency benefits of interrupts and the workload segmentation of
   polling, all without complicated heuristics. Several users have
   reported that the driver can handle higher loads than traditional
   polling without deadlocks.

   Along with this work, I modified the SMPng locking in the driver so
   that no lock is required for the RX path. Since this path is already
   implicitly serialized by the interrupt and/or taskqueue and/or polling
   handler (all of which are exclusive to each other), there was no need
   for extra synchronization. This has two benefits. The first is
   reduction in processing overhead to unlock and lock the driver for
   every RX packet, and significant reduction in contention of the driver
   lock when transmitting and receiving packets at the same time. I
   believe that it is further possible to run the TX-complete path
   without a lock, further reducing overhead and contention for high
   transmit loads. The reduced contention also greatly benefitted the
   fast-forward bridging code in FreeBSD, with up to 25% performance
   improvement seen, as well as lower CPU utilization.

   The work can be found in FreeBSD 7-CURRENT for now. There are still
   some rough edges relating to falling back to traditional ithread and
   polling behavior, and I do not intend to merge the changes back to
   FreeBSD 6.x until these are resolved. I also hope to extend the
   INTR_FAST+taskqueue model into a general framework for doing Mac OSX
   style filter interrupts. The work in the if_em driver can also be
   extended to other high-performance network drivers such as if_bge and
   if_ti. Any help with investigating these topics is welcomed.
     _________________________________________________________________

Early Binding Updates and Credit-Based Authorization for the Kame-Shisa
Mobile IPv6 Software

   URL: http://www.tm.uka.de/~chvogt/ebucba/
   URL:
   http://doc.tm.uka.de/2005/draft-vogt-mobopts-early-binding-updates-00.
   txt
   URL:
   http://doc.tm.uka.de/2005/draft-vogt-mobopts-credit-based-authorizatio
   n-00.txt

   Contact: Christian Vogt <chvogt_at_tm.uka.de>

   Based on the Kame-Shisa Mobile IPv6 Software for FreeBSD 5.4, we
   implemented the performance optimization "Early Binding Updates" and
   "Credit-Based Authorization". The combined optimizations facilitate
   significant reductions in handoff delay without compromising protocol
   security [1][2].
     _________________________________________________________________

FAST_IPSEC Upgrade

   Contact: George Neville-Neil <gnn_at_freebsd.org>
   Contact: Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz_at_freebsd.org>

   Currently splitting out the rest of the PF_KEY data-structures from
   the key database. This will mean the user level applications and the
   kernel will not share datastructures and that they can, hopefully,
   advance on their own without being in lockstep.

Open tasks:

    1. Calculate diffs between Kame IPv4 version of IPSec and FAST_IPSEC
       and upgrade FAST to the latest standards.
    2. Add IPv6 support to FAST_IPSEC.
     _________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD list of projects and ideas for volunteers (TODO list for volunteers)

   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/ideas/

   Contact: Joel Dahl <joel_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Alexander Leidinger <netchild_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The "TODO list for volunteers" is now committed as the "FreeBSD list
   of projects and ideas for volunteers". So far the interest in the list
   is high and some volunteers already took the opportunity to start
   tackling some of the entries.

   Unfortunately the FreeBSD project does not have enough human resources
   to provide a technical contact for every entry. Interested volunteers
   should not be afraid to try to come up with a solution for an entry
   without a technical contact. The people on the hackers and current
   mailing list are typically very helpful regarding answering specific
   questions (as long as they know the answer...).

   We are looking forward to hear about new ideas, people willing to be
   technical contacts for generic topics (e.g. USB) or specific entries
   (already existing or newly created), suggestions for existing entries
   or completion reports for (parts of) an entry.

Open tasks:

    1. Add more ideas.
    2. Find more technical contacts.
     _________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD on Xen 3.0

   URL: http://www.fsmware.com/xenofreebsd/7.0/STATUS

   Contact: Kip Macy <kip.macy_at_gmail.com>

   Full domU support in p4 branch of -CURRENT, except suspend / restore.
   Dom0 work is in progress. Scott Long is working on xenbus integration
   with newbus. After newbus integration it will go into CVS. I hope to
   see it MFCed to RELENG_6 so it will be available for 6.1.

Open tasks:

    1. Port the backend drivers from Linux.
    2. Port the domain management tools from Linux.
    3. Add multiboot support to loader(8) to support it booting xen.
    4. SMP, x86_64, and PAE support.
     _________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Security Officer and Security Team

   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/security/
   URL:
   http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/staff
   -listing.html#STAFF-SECTEAM
   URL: http://vuxml.freebsd.org/

   Contact: Security Officer <security-officer_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Security Team <security-team_at_FreeBSD.org>

   This report covers the period July 2005 - January 2006, since the
   FreeBSD Security Team did not submit a status report for July -
   October 2005.

   In August 2005, the long-time Security Officer, Jacques Vidrine,
   stepped down and was replaced by Colin Percival. Jacques remains with
   the team as Security Officer Emeritus, and the team thanks him for all
   his work over the past four years.

   Also in August 2005, Dag-Erling C. Smørgrav was replaced by Simon L.
   Nielsen as Deputy Security Officer. In addition, Tom Rhodes and Guido
   van Rooij retired from the team in September 2005 and January 2006
   respectively in order to devote their time to other parts of the
   FreeBSD project. The current Security Team membership is published on
   the web site.

   In the time since the last status report, ten security advisories have
   been issued (five in 2005, five in 2006) concerning problems in the
   base system of FreeBSD; of these, four problems were in "contributed"
   code, while six were in code maintained within FreeBSD. The
   Vulnerabilities and Exposures Markup Language (VuXML) document has
   continued to be updated by the Security Team and the Ports Committers
   documenting new vulnerabilities in the FreeBSD Ports Collection; since
   the last status report, 117 new entries have been added, bringing the
   total up to 636.

   The following FreeBSD releases are supported by the FreeBSD Security
   Team: FreeBSD 4.10, FreeBSD 4.11, FreeBSD 5.3, FreeBSD 5.4, and
   FreeBSD 6.0. Their respective End of Life dates are listed on the web
   site.
     _________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD/xbox

   URL: http://xbox-bsd.nl

   Contact: Rink Springer <rink_at_FreeBSD.org>

   FreeBSD/xbox support is nearing completion. Patches are available for
   nve(4) ethernet support, as well as a syscons(4)-capable console. I am
   working to integrate these in CURRENT, a backport to 6.x is planned
   too.

   Work is under way to support X.Org as well; people with more detailed
   knowledge of X.Org are welcome to assist.

Open tasks:

    1. Enable framebuffer support in X.Org
    2. Figure out a way to use mfsroots without using loader(8)
     _________________________________________________________________

FreeSBIE

   URL: http://www.freesbie.org
   URL: http://torrent.freesbie.org
   URL: freesbie_at_gufi.org

   Contact: FreeSBIE staff <staff_at_freesbie.org>

   Development is going on after the complete rewrite of the toolkit.
   There are many plugins available and we're testing a new
   implementation of unionfs for 6.x. Since it's a bit unstable, it won't
   be included in the release anyway. Developers hope to enter the BETA
   state on February 1st, to release an -RC image around February 15th
   and the RELEASE around March 1st. We need more people to test the
   images we provide. Torrents for them are available at
   torrent.freesbie.org .

Open tasks:

    1. A new BETA Release, based on 6-STABLE, is available for testing.
     _________________________________________________________________

FreshPorts

   URL: http://www.freshports.org/

   Contact: Dan Langille <dan_at_langille.org>

   FreshPorts recently moved to a new webserver. This should speed things
   up considerably.

   You can read all about the new hardware on the recently introduced
   FreshPorts Blog . This blog will include technical discussions about
   ports and the problems they present with respect to FreshPorts. Site
   announcements will be posted there. As bugs are found, they will be
   listed, as well as their fixes.

   Supporting multiple platforms and architectures is still in the
   development stage. Lack of time is affecting progress.

   A fix for virtual ports is in the works. I'm also going to implement
   more caching to speed things up. If interested in discussing the
   options there, please get involved in the blog.
     _________________________________________________________________

jemalloc

   Contact: Jason Evans <jasone_at_FreeBSD.org>

   libc's malloc implementation has been replaced with an implementation
   that is designed to scale well for multi-threaded applications running
   on multi-processor systems. This is accomplished by creating multiple
   allocation arenas that are independent of each other, and permanently
   assigning threads to these arenas. In the common case, threads do not
   access the same allocator arena at the same time, which reduces
   contention and cache sloshing.

   Single-threaded application performance is approximately equivalent to
   what it was with phkmalloc, but for multi-threaded applications that
   make heavy use of malloc, the performance difference can be huge
   (orders of magnitude).

   As with phkmalloc, the new malloc implementation supports runtime
   configuration via the MALLOC_OPTIONS environment variable. See the
   malloc(3) manpage for details on supported options, as well as more
   information about the allocator's architecture.
     _________________________________________________________________

KAME Project Status Report

   URL: http://www.kame.net/
   URL: http://www.kame.net/newsletter/20051107/
   URL: http://www.wide.ad.jp/news/press/20051107-KAME-e.html
   URL: http://ipv6style.jp/en/special/kame/20051205/index.shtml

   Contact: SUZUKI Shinsuke <suz_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Most of the latest KAME code has been merged to 7-current and
   6-stable, to prepare for the project conclusion in March 2006. For the
   same reason, we moved some ports applications (security/racoon,
   net/pim6sd, net/pim6dd, net/dhcp6) from KAME to sourceforge.net.

   Some of the items (e.g. IGMPv3/MLDv2, Mobile-IPv6/NEMO, SCTP, DCCP,
   ISATAP) are not merged yet from the latest KAME code for several
   reasons. Other projects will continue to merge their work.

Open tasks:

    1. remove __P() macros
    2. set net.inet6.ip6.kame_version to a more appropriate date :-)
    3. update src/sys/netinet6/README
     _________________________________________________________________

LSI MegaRAID improvements

   Contact: Scott Long <scottl_at_freebsd.org>
   Contact: Doug Ambrisko <douga_at_freebsd.org>

   Major work has gone into improving both the performance of the LSI
   MegaRAID (amr) driver, and in adding Linux compatiblity support. SMGng
   locking was added in Oct 2005 as well as a number of performance
   improvements. The result is 138% performance improvement in some local
   transaction tests.

   Throughout 2005 a lot of work has gone into adding Linux compatibility
   to the driver. It is now possible to run many of the LSI-provided
   management apps for Linux under FreeBSD. Both this feature and the
   performance improvements are in the 7-CURRENT development branch of
   FreeBSD and are scheduled to be backported in time for the FreeBSD 6.1
   release.
     _________________________________________________________________

New Networking Features in FreeBSD 6.0

   URL:
   http://people.freebsd.org/New%20Networking%20Features%20in%20FreeBSD%2
   06%20-%20Presentation.pdf
   URL:
   http://people.freebsd.org/New%20Networking%20Features%20in%20FreeBSD%2
   06%20-%20Paper.pdf
   URL: http://www.eurobsdcon.org

   Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre_at_freebsd.org>

   FreeBSD 6 has evolved drastically in the development branch since
   FreeBSD 5.3 and especially so in the network area. The presentation
   and paper give an in-depth overview of all network stack related
   enhancements, changes and new code with a narrative on their
   rationale.
     _________________________________________________________________

OpenBSD dhclient

   Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Sam Leffler <sam_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The OpenBSD rewrite of dhclient has been imported, replacing the ISC
   dhclient. The OpenBSD client provides better support for roaming on
   wireless networks and a simpler model of operation. Instead of a
   single dhclient process per system, there is one per network
   interface. This instance automatically goes away in the even of link
   loss and is restarted via devd when link is reacquired. To support
   this change, many aspects of the network interface configuration
   process were overhauled.

   Support for adding aliases to DHCP configured interfaces has been
   committed to CURRENT and will be merged before 6.1-RELEASE. Soon work
   will begin to merge changes from OpenBSD that have taken place since
   the initial import.

   Work on further interface configuration enhancements is underway for
   FreeBSD 7.0.
     _________________________________________________________________

Optimizing the FreeBSD IP and TCP Stack

   URL:
   http://people.freebsd.org/Optimizing%20the%20FreeBSD%20IP%20and%20TCP%
   20Stack%20-%20Presentation.pdf
   URL:
   http://people.freebsd.org/Optimizing%20the%20FreeBSD%20IP%20and%20TCP%
   20Stack%20-%20Paper.pdf
   URL: http://www.eurobsdcon.org
   URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/tcpoptimization.html

   Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre_at_freebsd.org>

   FreeBSD has gained fine grained locking in the network stack
   throughout the 5.x-RELEASE series cumulating in 6.0-RELEASE. Hardware
   architecture and performance characteristics have evolved
   significantly since various BSD networking subsystems have been
   designed and implemented. This paper gives a detailed look into the
   implementation and design changes in FreeBSD 7-CURRENT to extract the
   maximum network performance from the underlying hardware.

   Sponsored by: TCP/IP Optimization Fundraiser 2005
     _________________________________________________________________

Ports Collection

   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/ports/
   URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~fenner/portsurvey/
   URL: http://edwin.adsl.barnet.com.au/~edwin/ports/
   URL: http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/index.html
   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/index.html
   URL: http://tinderbox.marcuscom.com

   Contact: Mark Linimon <linimon_at_FreeBSD.org>

   During this time, the number of ports PRs briefly dipped below 500 --
   a number not seen since late 2000, when there were 4000 ports instead
   of our new total of over 14,000 ports. This is due to the hard work of
   a large number of individuals, including pav, edwin, mnag, garga, and
   many others. Congratulations folks! Some of this was due to more
   aggressively committing PRs where the maintainer had not responded
   within the timeout period. Although controversial, this new policy
   seems to be succeeding in its goal of improving the Ports Collection.

   A new file, ports/KNOBS, was added by ahze to help bring some order in
   the chaos that had been the OPTIONS namespace.

   dougb has changed the way that rc.d works in -HEAD to work more like
   the base rc.d scripts. We are hoping that this change will make ports
   maintenance easier in the future. However, in the meantime a few bugs
   have been introduced (which we intend to have fixed by the time 6.1 is
   released). While this regression is unfortunate, it was decided that
   now was the best time to try to make this change rather than waiting
   for 7.0. We hope our users can be patient with us in the interim.

   Work continues to improve the marcuscom ports tinderbox, with new
   features added by marcus, aDe, and edwin in particular. Several ports
   committers are now running their own copies to test ports changes.

   The www.FreeBSD.org/ports page, and the portmgr web pages, were
   reworked as well.

   We have added 4 new committers since the last report.

Open tasks:

    1. Progress has been made in cracking down on ports that do not
       correctly install when LOCALBASE is not /usr/local, but some ports
       remain.
    2. portmgr would like to remind committers that PRs for their ports
       should be handled (either committed or marked 'suspended' or
       'analyzed') within the two week timeout period. In this way other
       committers do not have to invoke the maintainer timeout and things
       will work more smoothly.
     _________________________________________________________________

Problem Report Database

   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/support.html#gnats

   Contact: Mark Linimon <bugmeister_at_freebsd_dot_org>

   The experiment to add 'tags' to many of the kern and related PRs,
   including such things as '[nfs]', '[fxp]', and so forth, continues. In
   addition, PRs with patches have been more consistently tagged with
   '[patch]'. Two new periodic reports based on both functional tags and
   PRs with patches have been added, with the goal of making these PRs
   more visible.
     _________________________________________________________________

Release Engineering Status Report

   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/releng
   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/releases

   Contact: RE Team <re_at_freebsd.org>

   Another very busy year for the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team.
   Recognizing the problems, both technical and emotional, surrounding
   the FreeBSD 5.x releases, our primary focus was in getting the bugs
   out of FreeBSD 6.0 and getting it released. We succeeded at that quite
   well, and the 6.0 release on Nov 18 was a huge success for the
   project. Many thanks to all of the developers who put in countless
   hours fixing bugs and improving performance, and to the users who
   helped find, fix, and verify bugs.

   Moving forward to 2006, we plan on doing a joint release of FreeBSD
   5.5 and 6.1 in late March. The 5.5 release will mark the end of active
   FreeBSD 5.x development and releases, and is intended to help users
   who have not yet switched to FreeBSD 6. It consists primarily of bug
   fixes and minor improvements. FreeBSD 6.1 will be an upgrade to 6.0
   and will include new drivers, better performance in certain areas, as
   well as bug fixes. We expect to release FreeBSD 6.2 and 6.3 later in
   2006.
     _________________________________________________________________

Sound subsystem improvements

   URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~ariff/
   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/ideas/

   Contact: Ariff Abdullah <ariff_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Alexander Leidinger <netchild_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Multimedia Mailinglist <multimedia_at_FreeBSD.org>

   A lot of changes have taken place in the sound system since the last
   status report. They range from less hickups and distortion by disk
   accesses and/or driver bugs to new and improved features (software
   volume control implemented for soundcards which do not have hardware
   volume control). Additionally a new driver (snd_atiixp) has seen the
   light and a lot of problem reports where fixed.

   Most of those changes and the changes mentioned in the previous status
   report are already merged to RELENG_6 and will be part of 6.1-RELEASE.

Open tasks:

    1. Have a look at the sound related entries on the ideas list.
    2. Rewrite some parts (e.g. a new mixer subsystem with OSS
       compatibility).
    3. sndctl(1): tool to control non-mixer parts of the sound system
       (e.g. spdif switching, virtual-3D effects) by an user (instead of
       the sysctl approach in -current); pcmplay(1), pcmrec(1),
       pcmutil(1).
    4. Plugable FEEDER infrastructure. For ease of debugging various
       feeder stuff and/or as userland library and test suite.
    5. Support for new hardware (envy24, Intel HDA).
    6. Performance enhancement (via 'slave'-channels).
    7. Closer compatibility with OSS, especially for the upcoming OSS v4.
     _________________________________________________________________

SysKonnect/Marvell Yukon device driver

   URL: http://www.marvell.com
   URL: http://www.syskonnect.de

   Contact: Karim Jamal <support_at_syskonnect.de>

   This project provides support for SysKonnect's SK-98xx,
   SK-95xx,SK-9Exx and SK-9Sxx PCI/PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet adapters
   via the yk(4) driver, as well as Marvell's Yukon LOM Gigabit Ethernet
   controllers via the myk(4) driver. Driver source has been made
   available to selected members of the FreeBSD project.
     _________________________________________________________________

TCP/IP Optimization Fundraiser Status

   URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/tcpoptimization.html
   URL:
   http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/em/if_em.c?rev=1.98&
   content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup
   URL:
   http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-july-2005-oct-2005.html#TCP-
   &-IP-Routing-Optimization-Fundraise

   Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre_at_freebsd.org>

   The fundraise has been very successful and I want to thank everyone
   who has pledged their support and tipped the jar. The full amount plus
   a little bit more has been raised in a very short timeframe. More
   information on the exact amounts and their sponsors can be found at
   the first link.

   After the delays on this project caused by the FreeBSD 6.0 Release
   cycle code freeze work has picked up and a paper was written and a
   presentation held on "Optimizing the FreeBSD IP and TCP Stack" for
   EuroBSDCon 05 on November 27th. See related status report under that
   title.

   From December 21st to January 11th I received access to a calibrated
   Agilent N2X gigabit tester and traffic generator. Stock FreeBSD
   7-current was tested and profiled extensively in this timeframe. A
   first proof of concept optimization was developed in cooperation with
   Scott Long. It involved converting the Intel Gigabit ethernet em(4)
   driver to make use of fast interrupt handlers, taskqueues and lockless
   RX ring handling. This improved the performance from 570kpps to
   750kpps, a 25% improvement, with IP fastforwarding enabled.

Open tasks:

    1. A large number of profiles and measurements was taken and a
       detailed report on the performance characteristics and remaining
       bottlenecks is under preparation.
    2. Further optimizations and new features described on the
       Optimization Fundraiser page.
     _________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project

   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/nl/books/handbook
   URL: http://www.freebsd-nl.org/doc/nl
   URL: http://www.freebsd-nl.org/www/nl/

   Contact: Remko Lodder <remko_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Siebrand Mazeland <s.mazeland_at_xs4all.nl>

   The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project is an ongoing project,
   focussed on translating the English documentation and website to the
   Dutch language. Currently we are almost done with the FreeBSD Handbook
   and started the initial translation of the FreeBSD Website. We are
   always looking for people to help out, if you can help, please contact
   Siebrand or me so that we can divide the work amongst us.

   Recent publications:
   Recently the Printing and the Serial Communications chapters were
   added to the FreeBSD Dutch Handbook.

   Recently started items:
   We started with the translation of the PPP and SLIP chapter and the
   translation of the website.

Open tasks:

    1. Translate the final parts of the FreeBSD handbook.
    2. Translate the FreeBSD Website
     _________________________________________________________________

variant symlinks

   URL: http://butcher.heavennet.ru/patches/kernel/varsym/

   Contact: Andrey Elsukov <bu7cher_at_yandex.ru>

   The port of DragonFly's variant symlinks ( project ideas ) to FreeBSD.
   Variant symlinks is a dynamic symbolic link implementation. Source
   file of a variant symlink may contain one or more variable names. Each
   of these variable names is enclosed in braces and preceded by a dollar
   sign in the style of variable references in sh(1). Whenever a variant
   symlink is followed, each variable found in source file is replaced by
   its associated value. In this manner, a variant symlink may resolve to
   different paths based on context.

Open tasks:

    1. Document a new system calls.
    2. More testing.
    3. Write the rc.d script for the variant symlinks initialization.
     _________________________________________________________________

   Legal Notices | © 1995-2005 The FreeBSD Project. All rights reserved.

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Received on Thu Jan 26 2006 - 15:00:45 UTC

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