[FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD Project Status Report - Fourth Quarter of 2006

From: Brad Davis <brd_at_FreeBSD.org>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 01:05:08 -0600
FreeBSD Status Report

Introduction

   This report covers FreeBSD related projects between June and October
   2006. This includes the conclusion of this year's Google Summer of
   Code with 13 successful students. Some of last year's and the current
   SoC participants have meanwhile joined the committer ranks, kept
   working on their projects, and improving FreeBSD in general.

   This year's EuroBSDCon in Milan, Italy has meanwhile published an
   exciting program. Many developers will be there to discuss these
   current and future projects at the Developer Summit prior the
   conference. Next year's conference calendar has a new entry - in
   addition to the now well established BSDCan in Ottawa - AsiaBSDCon
   will take place in Tokyo at the begining of March.

   As we are closing in on FreeBSD 6.2 release many bugs are being fixed
   and new features have been MFCed. On the other hand a lot of the
   projects below already are focusing on FreeBSD 7.0 and promise a lot
   of exciting news and features to come.

   Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! We hope you enjoy
   reading.
     _________________________________________________________________

Google Summer of Code

     * Analyze and Improve the Interrupt Handling Infrastructure
     * Bundled PXE Installer
     * Gvirstor
     * IPv6 Stack Vulnerabilities
     * Jail Resource Limits
     * Nss-LDAP importing and nsswitch subsystem improvement
     * Porting the seref policy and setools to SEBSD
     * Porting Xen to FreeBSD
     * SNMP monitoring (BSNMP)
     * Summer of Code Summary
     * Update of the Linux compatibility environment in the kernel

Projects

     * CScout on the FreeBSD Source Code Base
     * DTrace
     * Embedded FreeBSD
     * FreeSBIE
     * GJournal
     * iSCSI Initiator
     * Porting ZFS to FreeBSD
     * Summer of FreeBSD security development
     * TrustedBSD Audit
     * USB

FreeBSD Team Reports

     * FreeBSD Security Officer and Security Team
     * Ports Collection
     * Release Engineering
     * The FreeBSD Foundation

Network Infrastructure

     * Bridge Spanning Tree Protocol Improvements
     * FAST_IPSEC Upgrade
     * Highly improved implementations of sendfile(2), sosend_*() and
       soreceive_stream()
     * SCTP Integration
     * TSO - TCP Segmentation Offload committed

Kernel

     * Gvinum improvements
     * MMC/SD Support
     * Sound Subsystem Improvements

Documentation

     * Chinese (Simplified) Project
     * Hungarian translation of the webpages

Userland Programs

     * Libelf
     * OpenBSD dhclient

Architectures

     * CPU Microcode Update Software
     * FreeBSD/arm on Atmel AT91RM9200
     * Sun Niagara port
     * Xen Port

Ports

     * Enlightenment DR17 support in the ports tree
     * FreshPorts
     * Improving FreeBSD Ports Collection Infrastructure
     * OCaml language support in ports

Miscellaneous

     * AsiaBSDCon 2007
     * BSDCan 2007
     * EuroBSDCon 2006
     * FreeBSD Multimedia Resources List
     _________________________________________________________________

Analyze and Improve the Interrupt Handling Infrastructure

   URL: http://wikitest.freebsd.org/Interrupts

   Contact: Paolo Pisati <pisati_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: John Baldwin <jhb_at_FreeBSD.org>

   This project consisted in the improvement of the Interrupt Handling
   System in FreeBSD: while retaining backward compatibility with the
   previous models (FAST and ITHREAD), a new method called 'Interrupt
   filtering' was added. With interrupt filtering, the interrupt handler
   is divided into 2 parts: the filter (that checks if the actual
   interrupt belong to this device) and the ithread (that is scheduled in
   case some blocking work has to be done). The main benefits of
   interrupt filtering are:
     * Feedback from filters (the system finally knows if any handler has
       serviced an interrupt or not, and can react consequently).
     * Lower latency/overhead for shared interrupt line.
     * Previous experiments with interrupt filtering showed an increase
       in performance against the plain ithread model

   Moreover, during the development of interrupt filtering, some MD
   dependent code was converted into MI code, PPC was fixed to support
   multiple FAST handlers per line and an interrupt stray storm detection
   logic was added. While the framework is done, there are still machine
   dependent bits to be written (the support for ppc, sparc64, arm and
   itanium has to be written/reviewed) and a serious analysis of the
   performance of this model against the previous one is a
   work-in-progress
     _________________________________________________________________

AsiaBSDCon 2007

   URL: http://www.asiabsdcon.org/

   Contact: Hiroki Sato <hrs_at_freebsd.org>
   Contact: George Neville-Neil <gnn_at_freebsd.org>
   Contact: <secretary_at_asiabsdcon.org>

   Web site is up and we're soliciting papers and presentations. Some
   tutorials are already scheduled. Email secretary_at_asibsdcon.org if you
   have questions or submissions.

Open tasks:

    1. Send in more papers!
     _________________________________________________________________

Bridge Spanning Tree Protocol Improvements

   Contact: Andrew Thompson <thompsa_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Work is almost finished to implement the Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol
   (RSTP) which supersedes Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). RSTP has a much
   faster link failover time of around one second compared to 30-60
   seconds for STP, this is very important on modern networks. The code
   will be posted shortly for testing and feedback.
     _________________________________________________________________

BSDCan 2007

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

   Contact: Dan Langille <dan_at_langille.org>

   The dates for BSDCan 2007 has been set: 11-12 May 2007. As is usual,
   BSDCan will be held at University of Ottawa, with two days of
   tutorials prior to the conference starting.

   The call for papers will go out in mid December. Start thinking about
   your submissions now!
     _________________________________________________________________

Bundled PXE Installer

   URL: http://wikitest.freebsd.org/MarkusBoelter

   Contact: Markus Boelter <m_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Paul Saab <ps_at_FreeBSD.org>

   For me, the Google Summer of Code was a new and very exciting
   experience. I got actively involved in doing Open Source Software and
   giving something back to the community. Facing some challenges within
   the project forced me to look behind the scenery of FreeBSD. The
   result was a better understanding of the overall project. Working with
   a lot of developers directly also gave a very special spirit to the
   Google Summer of Code.

   I really enjoyed the time and will continue to work on the project
   after the deadline. For me, it was a great chance to get involved in
   active development and not just some scripts and hacks at home.
   Getting paid for the work was just a small part of the overall
   feeling.

   Thanks to the people at the FreeBSD Project and Google for the really,
   really great time!
     _________________________________________________________________

Chinese (Simplified) Project

   URL: http://cnsnap.cn.FreeBSD.org/zh_CN/
   URL: http://cnsnap.cn.FreeBSD.org/doc/zh_CN.GB2312/

   Contact: Xin LI <delphij_at_FreeBSD.org>

   In the previous quarter we primarily focused on overall quality of the
   translation rather than just increasing the number of translations,
   and we have strived to make sure that these translated stuff are
   up-to-date with their English revisions. Also, we have merged the
   translated website into the central repository.

   In the next quarter we will focus on developing documentation that
   will help to attract more developers.

Open tasks:

    1. Translate more development related documentation.
    2. Review more of the currently translated documentation.
     _________________________________________________________________

CPU Microcode Update Software

   Contact: Stanislav Sedov <stas_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Last month I was working on a driver/module to update the microcode of
   Intel or AMD CPUs that support having their microcode updated. As you
   might know these processors are microcode-driven and this firmware can
   be updated. Intel(R) often releases microcode updates, and AMD(R)
   updates can be found in BIOS programs. The work is almost finished
   now, I just need to find a bit of time to test it on AMD64 systems and
   perform some code cleanup. The driver also provide a way for userland
   programs to access the Machine Specific Registers (MSR) and CPUID info
   for a certain cpu. This will allow some programs like x86info to
   provide more accurate information about cpus in SMP systems and make
   assumptions based on the contents of the MSR.

   Thanks to John Baldwin, Kostik Belousov, John-Mark Gurney and Divacky
   Roman for helping during development.

Open tasks:

    1. Perform testing on the AMD64-based systems.
    2. Write manpage.
    3. Code cleanup/checks.
     _________________________________________________________________

CScout on the FreeBSD Source Code Base

   URL: http://wikitest.freebsd.org/CScout

   Contact: Diomidis Spinellis <dds_at_FreeBSD.org>

   CScout is a refactoring editor and source code browser for collections
   of C code. The aim of the project is to make it easy for FreeBSD
   developers to use CScout and to improve the FreeBSD source code
   quality through CScout-based queries and refactorings.

   CScout was first applied to the FreeBSD kernel in 2003. Its
   application at that point involved substantial tinkering with the
   build system. The version released in October 2006 makes the running
   of CScout on the three Tier-1 architectures a fairly straightforward
   procedure. The current version can also draw a number of call graphs;
   this might help developers better understand foreign code.

Open tasks:

    1. Use CScout to locate problematic code areas (for example unused or
       too liberaly visible objects).
    2. Use CScout to globaly rename identifiers in a more consistent
       fashion.
    3. Apply CScout to the userland code.
    4. Identify CScout extensions that would help us improve the quality
       of our code.
    5. Arrange for the continous availability of a live CScout kernel
       session on the current version of the source code.
     _________________________________________________________________

DTrace

   Contact: John Birrell <jb_at_freebsd.org>

   Progress this month has been limited due to my sea-change, moving
   house to the country.

   Sun's OpenSolaris developers have followed through and released the
   DTrace test suite as part of the OpenSolaris distribution.

   jkoshy_at_'s work on libbsdelf is nearing feature completion for DTrace
   and will make life easier in FreeBSD for DTrace, given that we have
   more architectures to support than Sun has.

   The FreeBSD project has made available a dual processor AMD64 machine
   for DTrace porting.

   I am currently working through the diffs between the DTrace project in
   P4 and -current, committing files to -current if they are ready,
     _________________________________________________________________

Embedded FreeBSD

   URL: http://www.embeddedfreebsd.org/

   Contact: George Neville-Neil <gnn_at_freebsd.org>

   Moved the HTML pages into the project CVS tree.

Open tasks:

    1. Setup the web site to be served from projects CVS so that it can
       be updated by others.
    2. Complete the ARM port.
    3. Work on the MIPS port.
    4. Update the documentation to include common tasks for embedded
       engineers.
     _________________________________________________________________

Enlightenment DR17 support in the ports tree

   Contact: Stanislav Sedov <stas_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Integration of the new innovative e17 window manager into the ports
   tree is almost completed. A lot of new e17-related applications was
   ported, all old ports were updated to the latest stable cvs snapshot.
   The special framework (bsd.efl.mk) was created to support the whole
   thing and simplify the creation of dependent ports. I'll commit the
   changes in the days before the ports freeze.

   Thanks to Sergey Matveychuk (sem_at_) for providing a machine to place
   CVS snapshots on. Without his help it will be impossible.

Open tasks:

    1. Port Entrance (xdm-like app, but very appealing).
    2. Port Net and Wlan e17 module.
    3. Develop FreeBSD-specific e17 apps/modules to use The Ports
       Collection, system configs, etc.
     _________________________________________________________________

EuroBSDCon 2006

   URL: http://www.eurobsdcon.org/
   URL: http://www.eurobsdcon.org/register/

   Contact: EuroBSDCon Organizing Committee <info_at_eurobsdcon.org>

   EuroBSDCon 2006 is taking place in Milan (Italy), from the 10th to the
   12th of November.

   EuroBSDCon represents the biggest gathering for BSD developers from
   the old continent, as well as users and passionates from around the
   World. It is also a chance to share experiences, know-how, and
   cultures.

   The program is rich in talks about FreeBSD, with topics ranging from
   "How the FreeBSD ports collection works" to "Interrupt Filtering in
   FreeBSD". This means that both the novice and the hacker can enjoy the
   conference.

   Registration is open. The EuroBSDCon Organizing Committee hopes to see
   you in Milan.
     _________________________________________________________________

FAST_IPSEC Upgrade

   URL: www.freebsd.org/~gnn/fast_ipv6.patch

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

   First working version of code. Does not pass all TAHI tests, but does
   pass packets correctly and does not panic.

Open tasks:

    1. More testing of the patch needed.
     _________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Multimedia Resources List

   URL: http://www.mavetju.org/unix/multimedia.php
   URL: http://www.mavetju.org/unix/multimedia-rss.php

   Contact: Edwin Groothuis <edwin_at_FreeBSD.org>

   I have setup the FreeBSD Multimedia Resources List, a one-stop-shop
   for FreeBSD related podcasts, vodcasts and audio/video resources.
   Hopefully this list will make it easier for people to find and keep up
   to date with these recordings. The overview is available as a normal
   HTML page and as an XML/RSS feed.

   The ultimate goal is to have this list to reside under the
   www.FreeBSD.org umbrella.
     _________________________________________________________________

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>

   In the time since the last status report, six security advisories have
   been issued concerning problems in the base system of FreeBSD; of
   these, five problems were in "contributed" code, while one was in code
   maintained within FreeBSD. The Vulnerabilities and Exposures Markup
   Language (VuXML) document has continued to be updated by the Security
   Team and Ports Committers documenting new vulnerabilities in the
   FreeBSD Ports Collection; since the last status report, 57 new entries
   have been added, bringing the total up to 814.

   The following FreeBSD releases are supported by the FreeBSD Security
   Team: FreeBSD 4.11, FreeBSD 5.3, FreeBSD 5.4, FreeBSD 5.5, FreeBSD
   6.0, and FreeBSD 6.1. The respective End of Life dates of supported
   releases are listed on the web site; of particular note, FreeBSD 5.3
   and FreeBSD 5.4 will cease to be supported at the end of October 2006,
   while FreeBSD 6.0 will cease to be supported at the end of November
   2006 (or possibly a short time thereafter in order to allow time for
   upgrades to the upcoming FreeBSD 6.2).
     _________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD/arm on Atmel AT91RM9200

   Contact: Warner Losh <imp_at_freebsd.org>
   Contact: Olivier Houchard <cognet_at_freebsd.org>

   The FreeBSD/arm port has grown support for the Atmel AT91RM9200.
   Boards based on this machine are booting to multiuser off either NFS
   or an SD card. The onboard serial ports, PIO, ethernet and SD/MMC card
   controllers are well supported. Support for the SSC, IIC and SPI flash
   parts in the kernel will be forthcoming shortly.

   In addition to normal kernel support, the port includes a boot loader
   that can initialize memory and boot off IIC eeprom, SPI DataFlash,
   BOOTP/TFTP and SD memory cards.

   The port will be included in forth coming commercial products.

Open tasks:

    1. Add support for other members of the AT91 family of arm9
       processors.
    2. Finish support for AT45D* flash parts.
    3. Finish support for USB ports
    4. Write support for USB Device functionality
     _________________________________________________________________

FreeSBIE

   URL: http://www.FreeSBIE.org
   URL: http://liste.gufi.org/mailman/listinfo/freesbie
   URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~matteo/GMV/GMVAnnounce.txt

   Contact: FreeSBIE Staff <staff_at_FreeSBIE.org>
   Contact: Matteo Riondato <matteo_at_FreeBSD.org>

   FreeSBIE is a FreeBSD based LiveCD.

   On August 19th, Matteo Riondato, a member of the FreeSBIE staff,
   released an unofficial ISO, codename FreeSBIE GMV, based on FreeBSD
   -CURRENT (read the Announcement to download it). This is supposed to
   be the first in a series of four ISOs that will end up with the
   release of FreeSBIE 2.0. Matteo is now working on another ISO,
   codename FreeSBIE LVC, which is scheduled to be released October 12th.

   FreeSBIE 2.0 will be based on FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE and will hopefully
   be released at EuroBSDCon 2006 in Milan. It will be available for the
   i386 and AMD64 platforms.

Open tasks:

    1. Test the released ISO in preparation for the release.
    2. Suggest software to include in the ISO.
    3. Submit a simple and clear but complete fluxbox configuration.
     _________________________________________________________________

FreshPorts

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

   Contact: Dan Langille <dan_at_langille.org>

   The new 2U server mentioned in the last report now has a collection of
   Raptor drives in a RAID-10 configuration. Thanks to very generous
   donations from the community, I purchased eight of these drives at
   very good prices. The server will be deployed in the next few weeks.

   There has been quite a bit of work since the last report in June. Some
   highlights include:
     * New news feed formats, including newsfeeds for your watch list.
     * Better pages caching for faster response.
     * Sanity Test Failures now available online.
     * Ability to search for all commits (ports, doc, src, etc) under a
       given point in the tree.

   For more detail, please review the FreshPorts Blog .
     _________________________________________________________________

GJournal

   URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~pjd/patches/gjournal_20060930.patch
   URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~pjd/patches/gjournal6_20060930.patch

   Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd_at_FreeBSD.org>

   GJournal seems to be finished. I fixed the last serious bug and it is
   now stable and reliable in our tests. I'm planning to commit it really
   soon now.

   The work was sponsored by home.pl
     _________________________________________________________________

Gvinum improvements

   URL:
   http://folk.ntnu.no/lulf/patches/freebsd/gvinum/gvinum_all_current.dif
   f

   Contact: Ulf Lilleengen <lulf_at_pvv.ntnu.no>

   I thought that since I sent a status report the last time, I might as
   well send one now.

   Since the last status report I have done work on several of the
   remaining commands as attach, detach, and finally the concat command
   to be able to create concatenated volumes with one easy command. The
   mirror and stripe commands are the next step after this.

   The most important thing I've been working on is maybe the
   implementation of drivegroups. I have posted a bit information on this
   mailinglists, but basically, it's a way to group drives with the same
   configuration. This way, you can make many commands operate on groups
   instead of drives, and the group-abstraction will handle how the
   underlying subdisks are created on the drives. In the future one will
   be able to move groups to different machines, etc.

   I've created a patch of all my work that is not in HEAD yet here (this
   is a snapshot of my developement branch, so how thing's are done might
   be changed quite fast):
   http://folk.ntnu.no/lulf/patches/freebsd/gvinum/gvinum_all_current.dif
   f

   Be aware that a there will probably be bugs in the code, so don't use
   it in production yet!

   Thanks to Greg Lehey for offering to help me on getting this into CVS,
   and all feedback on this has been good.

Open tasks:

    1. Remaining components, mirror, stripe and some info commands.
     _________________________________________________________________

Gvirstor

   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/gvirstor

   Contact: Ivan Voras <ivoras_at_freebsd.org>

   Gvirstor is a GEOM class providing virtual ("overcommit") storage
   devices larger than physical available storage, with possibility to
   add physical storage on-line when the need arises. Current status is
   that it's done and waiting commit to HEAD, scheduled for some time
   after 6.2 is released.

Open tasks:

    1. The project is in need of testing! If you have the equipment and
       time, please give it a try so possible bugs can be fixed before it
       goes into -CURRENT.
     _________________________________________________________________

Highly improved implementations of sendfile(2), sosend_*() and
soreceive_stream()

   URL:
   http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2006-September/0659
   97.html
   URL:
   http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2006-September/0661
   99.html
   URL:
   http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/sendfile+sosend+soreceive-20061006.di
   ff

   Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre_at_freebsd.org>

   The addition of TSO (TCP Segmentation Offload) has highlighted some
   shortcomings in the sendfile(2) and sosend_*() kernel implementations.

   The current sendfile(2) code simply loops over the file, turns each 4K
   page into an mbuf and sends it off. This has the effect that TSO can
   only generate 2 packets per send instead of up to 44 at its maximum of
   64K. kern_sendfile() has been rewritten to work in two loops, the
   inner which turns as many pages into mbufs as it can -- up to the free
   send socket buffer space. The outer loop then drops the whole mbuf
   chain into the send socket buffer, calls tcp_output() on it and then
   waits until 50% of the socket buffer are free again to repeat the
   cycle. This way tcp_output() gets the full amount of data to work with
   and can issue up to 64K sends for TSO to chop up in the network
   adapter without using any CPU cycles. Thus it gets very efficient
   especially with the readahead the VM and I/O system do.

   Looking at the benchmarks we see some very nice improvements: 181%
   faster with new sendfile vs. old sendfile (non-TSO), 570% faster with
   new sendfile vs. old sendfile (TSO).

   The current sosend_*() code uses a sosend_copyin() function that loops
   over the supplied struct uio and does interleaved mbuf allocations and
   uiomove() calls. m_getm() has been rewritten to be simpler and to
   allocate PAGE_SIZE sized jumbo mbuf clusters (4k on most
   architectures). m_uiotombuf() has been rewritten to use the new
   m_getm() to obtain all mbuf space in one go. It then loops over it and
   copies the data into the mbufs by using uiomove(). sosend_dgram() and
   sosend_generic() have been changed to use m_uiotombuf() instead of
   sosend_copyin().

   Looking at the benchmarks we see some very nice improvements: 290%
   faster with new sosend vs. old sosend (non-TSO), 280% faster with new
   sosend vs. old sosend (TSO).

   Newly written is a specific soreceive_stream() function for stream
   protocols (primarily TCP) that does only one socket buffer lock per
   socket read instead of one per data mbuf copied to userland. When
   doing netperf tests with WITNESS (full lock tracking and validation
   enabled) the receive performance increases from ~360Mbit/s to
   ~520Mbit/s. Without WITNESS I could not measure any statistically
   significant improvement on a otherwise unloaded machine. The reason is
   two-fold: 1) per packet we do a wakeup and readv() is pretty much as
   many times as packets come it, thus the general overhead dominates; 2)
   the packet input path has a pretty high overhead too. On heavily
   loaded machines which do a lot of high speed receives a performance
   increase should be measureable.

   The patches are scheduled to be committed to FreeBSD-current at end of
   October or early November 2006.

   This work was sponsored by the TCP/IP Optimization Fundraiser 2005.
     _________________________________________________________________

Hungarian translation of the webpages

   URL: http://gabor.t-hosting.hu/data/hu/

   Contact: Gábor Kövesdán <gabor_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Since the last status report, there has been a lot of progress. I
   investigated a lot of charset issues and found out that HTML tidy
   breaks some entities when using iso-8859-2, so HTML tidy had to be
   disabled for Hungarian pages.

Open tasks:

    1. Translate 4 pages.
    2. Review, fix typos and improve the wording where necessary.
     _________________________________________________________________

Improving FreeBSD Ports Collection Infrastructure

   URL: http://wikitest.freebsd.org/G%C3%A1borK%C3%B6vesd%C3%A1n

   Contact: Gábor Kövesdán <gabor_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Contact: Erwin Lansing <erwin_at_FreeBSD.org>

   During the Google Summer of Code 2006, Gábor worked on several ideas
   to improve the ports infrastructure:
    1. New handling for i386 binary ports.
    2. Cleanup: use ECHO_CMD and ECHO_MSG in bsd.port.mk properly.
    3. Add a basic infrastructure support for debugging.
    4. Installing ports with different destination (DESTDIR macro).
    5. Cleanup: Move fetch shell scripts out of bsd.port.mk.
    6. Make ports respect CC and CFLAGS.
    7. Cross-compiling Ports.
    8. Plist generator tool.

   The first three items have been completed and the next two items are
   being worked on. The DESTDIR support was more complicated than
   presumed and took more time than expected to complete. Gábor will
   continue working to finish these tasks and other ports related tasks.
   FreeBSD is happy to have interested him to keep working on ports and
   ports infrastructure.
     _________________________________________________________________

IPv6 Stack Vulnerabilities

   URL: http://wikitest.freebsd.org/ClementLecigne
   URL: http://pcs.sf.net

   Contact: George Neville-Neil <gnn_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Clement Lecigne <clem1_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The focus of this project was to review past vulnerabilities, create
   vulnerability testing tools and to discover new vulnerabilities in the
   FreeBSD IPv6 stack which is derived from the KAME project code. During
   the summer Clement took two libraries, the popular libnet, and his
   mentor's Packet Construction Set (PCS) and created tools to find
   security problems in the IPv6 code. Several issues were found, bugs
   filed, and patches created. At the moment Clement and George are
   editing a 50 page paper that describes the project which will be
   submitted for conference publication.

   All of the code from the project, including the tools, is on line and
   is described in the paper.

   By all measures, this was a successful project. Both student and
   mentor gained valuable insight into a previously externally maintained
   set of code. In addition to the new tools development in this effort,
   the FreeBSD Project has gained a new developer to help work on the
   code.
     _________________________________________________________________

iSCSI Initiator

   URL: ftp://ftp.cs.huji.ac.il/users/danny/freebsd/iscsi-17.5.tar.bz2 

   Contact: Damiel Braniss <danny_at_cs.huji.ac.il>

   This iSCSI initiator kernel module and its companion control program
   are still under development, but the main parts are working.

Open tasks:

    1. Network Disconnect Recovery.
    2. Sysctl Interface and Instrumentation.
    3. Rewrite the userland side of iscontrol.
     _________________________________________________________________

Jail Resource Limits

   URL: http://wikitest.freebsd.org/JailResourceLimits

   Contact: Chris Jones <cdjones_at_freebsd.org>
   Contact: Kip Macy <kmacy_at_freebsd.org>

   We now have support for limiting CPU and memory use in jails. This
   allows fairer sharing of a systems' resources between divergent uses
   by preventing one jail from monopolizing the available memory and CPU
   time, if other users and jails have processes to run.

   The code is currently available as patches against RELENG_6, and Chris
   is in the process of applying it to -CURRENT. More details can be
   found at JailResourceLimits on the wiki.

Open tasks:

    1. Port patches against -CURRENT.
     _________________________________________________________________

Libelf

   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/LibElf
   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/PmcTools
   URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~jkoshy/projects/perf-measurement/

   Contact: Joseph Koshy <jkoshy_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Libelf is a BSD-licensed library for ELF parsing & manipulation
   implementing the SysV/SVR4 (g)ELF[3] API.

   Current status: Implementation of the library is nearly complete. A
   TET-based test suite for the API is being worked on.

Open tasks:

    1. Reviewers are needed for the code and the test suite. If you have
       extensions to the stock SysV/SVR4 ELF(3) API that you would like
       to see in -lelf, please send Joseph an email.
     _________________________________________________________________

MMC/SD Support

   Contact: Warner Losh <imp_at_freebsd.org>
   Contact: Bernd Walter <tisco_at_freebsd.org>

   The MMC/SD stack got a significant boost this quarter. Warner Losh and
   Bernd Walter have written a generic MMC/SD flash card stack for
   FreeBSD, and have implemented a host controller for the AT91RM9200
   embedded ARM controller they are each using in separate projects.

   The stack is presently experimental in quality. It is being used as
   the root file system for these embedded projects. There's been no work
   done to support hot insertion and removal of cards (neither board
   wires up the pins necessary, and besides, / disappearing is very bad).
   There are still many rough edges.

   This is a freshly written stack. It has been written using the SD 1.0
   (and recently 2.0) simplified specification, with the SanDisk MMC
   application notes supplementing. The Linux stack looks good, although
   not entirely standards conforming (there's work in progress that I've
   not seen that is supposed to fix this) and it is contaminated with the
   GPL. The OpenBSD stack also looks interesting, but Warner's experience
   porting NEWCARD over from NetBSD suggested that a fresh rewrite may be
   faster, at least for the bus and driver level. Since MMC is fairly
   simple, a port of the sdhci driver might be possible.

   Please see the open tasks list.

Open tasks:

    1. Write sdhci driver, and integrate it into the current stack.
    2. Add support for hot plugging of cards.
    3. Add support for MMC cards (SD cards were the first target).
    4. Expand SD support to include SDIO cards as well as the new SDHC
       standard cards.
    5. Export stats via sysctl for each of the cards that are found as a
       debugging and usage monitoring aid.
    6. Add support for reading/writing multiple blocks at a time to
       improve performance.
    7. Implement any other host controller.
    8. Add proper support for timeouts.
     _________________________________________________________________

Nss-LDAP importing and nsswitch subsystem improvement

   URL: http://wikitest.freebsd.org/MichaelBushkov
   URL: http://wikitest.freebsd.org/LdapCachedOriginalProposal
   URL: http://wikitest.freebsd.org/LdapCachedDetailedDescription

   Contact: Michael Bushkov <bushman_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Hajimu UMEMOTO <ume_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The Project consisted of five parts:
    1. Nsswitch modules and libc separation. The idea was to move the
       source code for different nsswitch sources (such as "files",
       "dns", "nis") out of the libc into the separate shared libraries.
       This task was successfully finished and the patch is available.
    2. Regression tests for nsswitch. A set of regression tests to test
       the correctness of all nsswitch-related functions and the
       invariance of their behavior between system upgrades. The task can
       be considered successfully completed, the patch is available.
    3. Rewriting nss_ldap. Though, this task was not clearly mentioned in
       the original proposal, during the SoC we found it would be easier,
       not to simply import PADL's nss_ldap, but to rewrite it from
       scratch (licensing issues were among the basic reasons for this).
       The resulting module behaves similarly to PADL's module, but has a
       different architecture that is more flexiable. Though it's
       basically finished, several useful features from the PADL's
       nss_ldap still need to be implemented. Despite the lack of some
       features, this task can be considered successfully completed.
       Missing features will be implemented as soon as possible,
       hopefully during September.
    4. Importing nss_ldap into the Base System. The task was to prepare a
       patch, that will allow users to use nss_ldap from the base system.
       The task was successfully completed (the patch is available), but
       required importing OpenLDAP into the base in order for nss_ldap to
       work properly, and it had led to a long discussion in the mailing
       list. This discussion, however, have concluded with mostly
       positive opinions about nss_ldap and OpenLDAP importing.
    5. Cached performance optimization. The caching daemon performance
       needs to be as high as possible in order for cached to be as close
       (in terms of speed) to "files" nsswitch source as possible.
       Cached's performance analysis was made and nsswitch database
       pre-caching was introduced as the optimization. This task was
       completed (the patch is available). However there is room for
       improvement. More precise and extensive performance analysis
       should be made and more optimizations need to be introduces. This
       will be done in the near future.

   Though none of the code was committed yet into the official FreeBSD
   tree, my experience from the previous year makes me think that this
   situation is normal. I hope, that the code will be reviewed and
   committed in the coming months.
     _________________________________________________________________

OCaml language support in ports

   URL:
   http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/ports/lang/ocaml/bsd.
   ocaml.mk?rev=1.3&content-type=text/plain

   Contact: Stanislav Sedov <stas_at_FreeBSD.org>

   There were a number of OCaml ports in our tree, and each of them was
   doing the same work by maintaining OCaml ld.conf in the correct state,
   installing/removing their files/entries etc. To simplify the task of
   OCaml-language ports creationm the special framework (bsd.ocamk.mk)
   was developed and most of the ports was converted to use this
   framework. This allowed a lot of duplicate code to be removed. This
   new framework handles all the things required to install an
   OCaml-language library and properly register it. bsd.ocaml.mk also
   contains knobs to deal with findlib-powered libraries, modify ld.conf
   in the proper way, etc. Also, a lot of new Ocaml-related ports were
   added.
     _________________________________________________________________

OpenBSD dhclient

   Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Most dhclient changes in HEAD have been merged to 6-STABLE for
   6.2-RELEASE. The highlight of these changes is a fix for runaway
   dhclient processes when packets are not 4 byte aligned. Further
   changes including always sending client identifiers are scheduled for
   merge before the release. Work is ongoing to improve dhclient's
   interaction with alternate methods of setting interface addresses.
     _________________________________________________________________

Porting the seref policy and setools to SEBSD

   URL: http://wikitest.freebsd.org/DongmeiLiu

   Contact: Dongmei Liu <dongmei_at_freebsd.org>
   Contact: Christian Peron <csjp_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Dongmei Liu spent the summer working on the basic footwork required to
   port the SEREF policy to SEBSD. This work has been submitted and can
   be viewed in the soc2006/dongmei_sebsd Perforce branch. This work was
   originated from the SEBSD branch: //depot/projects/trustedbsd/sebsd.
   Additionally setools-2.3 was ported from Linux and can be found in
   contrib/sebsd/setools directory. It is hoped that this work will be
   merged into the main SEBSD development branch.
     _________________________________________________________________

Porting Xen to FreeBSD

   URL: http://www.yuanjue.net/xen/howto.html
   URL: http://wikitest.freebsd.org/YuanJue

   Contact: Jue Yuan <yuanjue_at_FreeBSD.org>

   As a participant of Google's Summer of Code 2006, I am focusing on
   porting Xen to FreeBSD these months. The result of this summer's work
   include a domU kernel that could be used for installation, a guide for
   getting started with FreeBSD on Xen, and some other trivial
   improvements. But there are still a lot of work needing to be done in
   this area, e.g, the long-expeted dom0 support. So I will continue my
   work here and try to keep up with the update of Xen itself.

Open tasks:

    1. dom0 support is the most urgent
     _________________________________________________________________

Porting ZFS to FreeBSD

   URL:
   http://perforce.freebsd.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/user/pjd
   /zfs
   URL: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/porting/
   URL: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20060822104516.GB16033

   Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd_at_FreeBSD.org>

   My work is moving slowly forward. ZVOL is, I believe, fully functional
   (I recently fixed snapshots and clones on zvols), which means you can
   put UFS on top of RAID-Z volume, take a snapshot of the volume, clone
   it if needed, etc. Very cool. The hardest part is the ZPL layer, I'm
   still working on it. Most file system methods work, but probably need
   detailed review and many fixes. Most of the time these days I'm
   spending on implementing mmap(2) correctly. It works more or less in
   simple tests but fails under fsx program. On the other hand, 'fsx -RW'
   works very stable and reliable. Other test programs (those that don't
   use mmap(2)) also work quite well. There is still a lot of work to do,
   mostly in ZPL area, many clean-ups, etc. Some functionality (like
   ACLs) I haven't even tried to touch yet.
     _________________________________________________________________

Ports Collection

   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/ports/
   URL:
   http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing-ports
   /
   URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~fenner/portsurvey/
   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>

   The ports PRs surged (especially due to a large number of new port
   submissions), but with some hard work we have been able to get back
   down to around 900. We are rapidly approaching 16,000 ports.

   Due to this acceleration in adding new ports, portmgr is now very
   concerned that we are outstripping the capacity of both the build
   infrastructure and our volunteers to keep up with build errors and
   port updates. Accordingly, we've added a guideline (not a rule) that
   ports should be of more than just theoretical use to be added to the
   Ports Collection (e.g. we can't support all of CPAN + all of
   Sourceforge + everything else). Basically, use common sense as a
   guideline; certainly no one wants to see any kind of "gateway"
   procedure to get incoming ports approved.

   Seven sets of changes have been added to the infrastructure, mostly
   refactoring and bugfixing.

   As part of a Summer of Code project, we have also incorporated some of
   gabor_at_'s changes to incorporate better DESTDIR support. However, due
   to some unanticipated side-effects, more work is going to be needed in
   this area. gabor_at_ is continuing to work on the changes.

   netchild_at_ and bsam_at_ have been doing a great deal of work to bring the
   linux emulator ports closer to sanity, including bringing up a
   regression-test suite.

   The long-anticipated import of X.Org 7 has stalled due to developer
   time, mostly to deal with documentation and upgrade instructions.
   Hopefully this can get done in the early 6.3 development cycle. See
   the wiki for more information.

   As a part of that work, the decision has been made to move away from
   using X11BASE and just put everything into LOCALBASE; /usr/X11R6 is
   simply an artifact at this point. A plan for a transition process is
   underway; a great deal of testing will need to be done, but in the end
   the ports tree will be much cleaner. The GNOME team has already done
   the work to move all of their ports over, and it will be incorporated
   after the 6.2 release is shipped.

   tmclaugh_at_ is looking for someone to take over the C# ports. He has
   maintained them for over a year and wants more time to be able to work
   on other projects.

   Some work has been done to get rid of FreeBSD 2.X cruft in ports.
   Further work is needed to get the 3.X cruft removed.

   linimon_at_ did another pass through resetting inactive maintainers.
   Another list is waiting in the wings.

   linimon_at_ is also working on adding the ability for portsmon to analyze
   successful packages (not just failed ones), so that queries such as
   "show me packages that build on i386 but not amd64" and "show me why
   dependent package foo was not built on bar". This is currently in
   alpha testing.

   We have added 4 new committers since the last report.

Open tasks:

    1. We still need help getting back to our modern low of 500 PRs.
    2. We have nearly 4400 unmaintained ports (see, for instance, the
       list on portsmon ). Although there has been a welcome upsurge in
       new maintainers recently which has dropped the percentage down
       below 28%, we still need much more help.
    3. A test run of gcc4.1 on the ports tree showed around 1000 new
       build errors. Kris_at_ has posted some results so that people can
       start working on the problems now. In particular, it seems that
       certain older versions of GCC cannot be built with GCC 4.1, so
       ports that depend on those older versions are going to have to be
       fixed as well. Although the import of GCC 4.1 to -CURRENT is not
       imminent, the time to start planning is now.
    4. The state of the packages on AMD64 and sparc64 significantly lags
       that of i386. In many of these cases, packages are not attempted
       because NOT_FOR_ARCH is used instead of more accurately only
       setting BROKEN based on ARCH. (pointyhat can be forced to build
       packages that are marked BROKEN, but not NOT_FOR_ARCH).
       NOT_FOR_ARCH is supposed to denote only "will never work on this
       ARCH". Although we have volunteers who have expressed interest in
       sparc64 (and ia64), we need more people who are running amd64
       (especially as a desktop) to help us get more packages working.
     _________________________________________________________________

Release Engineering

   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/
   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/
   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/snapshots/

   Contact: Release Engineering Team <re_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD Release Engineering team is currently working on FreeBSD
   6.2-RELEASE, which is scheduled for release in early November 2006.
   Some notable features of this release include the debut of security
   event auditing as an experimental feature, Xbox support, the FreeBSD
   Update binary updating utility, and of course many fixes and updates
   for existing programs. Pre-release images for all Tier-1 architectures
   are available for testing now; feedback on these builds is greatly
   appreciated. More information about release engineering activities can
   be found at the links above.
     _________________________________________________________________

SCTP Integration

   URL: http://www.sctp.org/

   Contact: Randall Stewart <randall_at_freebsd.org>
   Contact: George Neville-Neil <gnn_at_freebsd.org>

   There are currently patches available for testing. A planned
   integration to HEAD is set to happen in October.

Open tasks:

    1. The code still needs plenty of testing. See patches on sctp.org
       and in -CURRENT soon.
     _________________________________________________________________

SNMP monitoring (BSNMP)

   URL:
   http://perforce.freebsd.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/user/soc
   %2dshteryana/bsnmp&HIDEDEL=NOe
   URL: http://wikitest.freebsd.org/CategorySNMP
   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/SnmpBridgeModule
   URL: http://www.freshports.org/net-mgmt/bsnmptools/

   Contact: Shteryana Shopova <shteryana_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Contact: Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz_at_FreeBSD.org>

   A BRIDGE monitoring module for FreeBSD's BSNMP daemon has been
   implemented. In addition to RFC 4188 single bridge support and
   extending the kernel to get access to all the information, a private
   MIB was designed in order to be able to monitor multiple bridges
   supported by FreeBSD. The kernel part has already been committed to
   -CURRENT (thanks to thompsa_at_), for -STABLE a patch is available (see
   the wiki), code has already been reviewed.

   SoC 2005 work on SNMP client tools is now available too via port
   (net-mgmt/bsnmptools), thanks to Andrew Pantyukhin for the port.

Open tasks:

    1. More testing is very welcome.
    2. if_vlan(4) monitoring module.
    3. jail(8) monitoring module.
     _________________________________________________________________

Sound Subsystem Improvements

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

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

   Since the last status report we added basic support for envy24ht
   chips, imported the emu10kx driver into the base system and added
   support for High Definition Audio (HDA) compatible chips.

   Additionally the work of Ryan Beasley as part of his Google Summer of
   Code 2006 participation is committed. It adds compatibility to the
   Open Sound System (OSS) v4 API as far as this was possible. This
   allows for more sophisticated programs to be written. For example it
   is now possible to synchronize the start of multiple sound channels.
   It is also possible for a driver to support more than the AC97 mixer
   devices, but so far no driver has been extended to support this yet.
   More about it can be found in the wiki and in the official OSS
   documentation.

   The wiki page about the sound system was started to describe the
   current status of the sound system and to provide some information
   about where we are heading. But more work needs to be done to reach
   this goal. So far we collected some information about the status of
   the most recent work in the soundsystem. So if you have a look at it
   and you think that something important is missing, just tell us about
   it. While fully prepared content is very welcome, we are even happy
   about some ideas what we should list on the wiki page.

Open tasks:

    1. Have a look at the sound related entries on the ideas list.
    2. 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).
    3. Plugable FEEDER infrastructure. For ease of debugging various
       feeder stuff and/or as userland library and test suite.
    4. Extend the wiki page.
     _________________________________________________________________

Summer of Code Summary

   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/summerofcode-2006.html
   URL: http://wikitest.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2006
   URL:
   http://perforce.freebsd.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects
   /soc2006/

   Contact: Murray Stokely <murray_at_FreeBSD.org>

   We had another successful summer taking part in the Google Summer of
   Code. By all accounts, the FreeBSD participation in this program was
   an unqualified success. We received over 150 applications for student
   projects, amongst which 13 were selected for funding. All successful
   students received the full $4,500.

   These student projects included security research, improved
   installation tools, new utilities, and more. Many of the students have
   continued working on their FreeBSD projects even after the official
   close of the program. At least 2 of our FreeBSD mentors will be
   meeting with Google organizers in Mountain View this month to discuss
   the program at the Mentor Summit.
     _________________________________________________________________

Summer of FreeBSD security development

   URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~cperciva/funding.html
   URL: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-upgrade-6.0-to-6.1/

   Contact: Colin Percival <cperciva_at_FreeBSD.org>

   I spent the months of May through August working on improving
   Portsnap, FreeBSD Update, and devoting more time to my (continuing)
   role as Security Officer. FreeBSD Update is now part of the FreeBSD
   base system and is fully supported by the FreeBSD Security Team;
   updates are currently only being built for the i386 architecture, but
   AMD64 updates will become available soon.

   In an attempt to reduce the number of people running out of date (and
   unsupported) FreeBSD releases, I wrote an automatic binary upgrade
   script for upgrading systems from FreeBSD 6.0 to FreeBSD 6.1; I will
   be releasing a new script for upgrading to FreeBSD 6.2-(RC*|RELEASE)
   soon (possibly before this status report is published).

   Further improvements to Portsnap are still ongoing.
     _________________________________________________________________

Sun Niagara port

   Contact: Kip Macy <kmacy_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Support for the UltraSparc T1 (Niagara) continues to improve. The code
   has recently been checked into public CVS under sys/sun4v.

   It isn't clear whether or not I will have time to implement full
   logical domaining support before the APIs become publicly available.
   Testing indicates that substantial work will be needed before FreeBSD
   can take full advantage of all 32 threads.

Open tasks:

    1. Random testing and bug fixes.
    2. Import and extend improved mutex profiling support.
    3. Virtual network and virtual disk device drivers for logical
       domains.
     _________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Foundation

   URL: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org

   Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD Foundation continued to support the FreeBSD project and
   community through various activities. These activities include
   creating strategies for fund development and actively seeking funding
   for the FreeBSD community, coordinating a new IBM Bladeserver project,
   and protecting the image and integrity of FreeBSD by governing the use
   of the trademarks. We are pleased to be a sponsor of EuroBSDCon and
   will be sponsoring a few developers to attend the conference through
   our travel grant program. And finally, we have secured funds for a
   major project that will be announced later this month.
     _________________________________________________________________

TrustedBSD Audit

   URL: http://www.TrustedBSD.org/audit.html
   URL: http://www.OpenBSM.org/

   Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Christian Peron <csjp_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Wayne Salamon <wsalamon_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The TrustedBSD audit implementation provides fine-grained security
   event logging throughout the FreeBSD operating system. The big news
   for the last quarter is that the TrustedBSD audit implementation has
   been merged into RELENG_6 branch, and appeared in 6.2-BETA2. Over the
   past few months, work has also occurred in the following areas:
     * OpenBSM 1.0 alpha 8 through alpha 12 have been released and merged
       into FreeBSD CVS. Changes include significant numbers of bug
       fixes, documentation improvements, and feature enhancements. These
       include regular expression based matching for auditreduce, auditd
       management of kernel audit policy (such as maximum trail file
       size), improvements in printing support for a variety of tokens
       including execve argument support.
     * Significant enhancements to the FreeBSD Handbook chapter on Audit.
     * Full audit support for execve events, including optional auditing
       of command line arguments and environmental variables, as well as
       audit support for a broad range of other additional kernel events.
     * Kqueue support for audit pipes.
     * Robustness improvements in the presence of low disk space
       conditions.
     * Support for system call capture on additional platforms, such as
       ppc and ia64.
     * Improved support for very large audit record sizes (as required
       for extensive execve support).
     * id(1) now supports a -A argument to query audit state for the
       process.
     * An audit_warn(5) event for trail rotation, which can be used for
       archiving, reduction, and other administrative activities.

   Lots of testing as part of the 6.2-BETA cycle would be much
   appreciated. Audit support will be considered an experimental feature
   in FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE, but we hope that it will be a production
   feature in 6.3-RELEASE.

Open tasks:

    1. Continue expanding auditing of syscall arguments.
    2. Continue expanding auditing of administrative tools.
    3. More testing!
    4. Continue to explore improvements of the administrative model for
       audit trails, etc.
     _________________________________________________________________

TSO - TCP Segmentation Offload committed

   URL:
   http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-src/2006-September/068524.html
   URL:
   http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-src/2006-September/068610.html
   URL:
   http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-src/2006-September/069493.html

   Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre_at_freebsd.org>

   TSO - TCP Segmentation Offload support has been committed to the
   network stack of FreeBSD-current in September 2006. With TSO, TCP can
   send data in the send socket buffer in bulk down to the network card
   which then does the splitting into MTU sized packets. On bulk high
   speed sending the performance is increased by 25% (normal writes) to
   108% (sendfile). Jack Vogel and Prafulla Deuskar of Intel committed
   the driver changes for TSO hardware support of em(4) based network
   cards.

   These changes are scheduled to be backported to FreeBSD 6-STABLE
   shortly after FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE is published to appear in upcoming
   FreeBSD 6.3 early next year.

   This work was sponsored by the TCP/IP Optimization Fundraiser 2005.

Open tasks:
     _________________________________________________________________

Update of the Linux compatibility environment in the kernel

   URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/linux-kernel

   Contact: Alexander Leidinger <netchild_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Roman Divacky <rdivacky_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Emulation Mailinglist <emulation_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Roman Divacky participated in the Google Summer of Code 2006 and
   implemented a major part of the syscall compatibility to the 2.6.16
   Linux kernel. The work has been committed to -CURRENT (the default
   compatibility still being a 2.4.2 Linux kernel) and we are working on
   fixing the remaining bugs as time permits.

   "Intron" submitted an implementation for the linux aio syscalls. His
   work has been committed to the Perforce repository.

   We also started to consolidate a list of known bugs, open issues and
   helpful stuff (e.g. regression tests and their status) in -CURRENT on
   a page in the FreeBSD wiki (see the links-section). It also contains a
   link to a more or less up-to-date patch with stuff we have in the
   Perforce repository so that interested people can help with testing.
   Thanks to the help of Marcin Cieslak we already fixed some bugs (some
   of the fixes are already MFCed to -STABLE).

   Thanks to the nice regression tests of the Linux Test Project (LTP) we
   have a list of small (and not so small) things which need to be looked
   at. This list makes up for a quick start into kernel hacking. So if
   you have a little bit of knowledge about C programming, and if you
   want to help us a little bit in improving FreeBSD, feel free to have a
   look at the list and to try to fix a problem or two. Sometimes it is
   as easy as "if (error condition) return Esomething;" (but you should
   coordinate with the emulation mailinglist, so that nobody does some
   work someone else just did too). Even if you do not know how to
   program, you can help. Have a look at the wiki page and tell us about
   things which should get mentioned there too. Or download the patch and
   test it.
     _________________________________________________________________

USB

   URL:
   http://perforce.freebsd.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects
   /usb/src/sys/dev/usb&HIDEDEL=NO
   URL: http://www.turbocat.net/~hselasky/usb4bsd

   Contact: Hans Petter Sirevaag Selasky <hselasky_at_freebsd.org>

   During the last three months I have finished reworking nearly all USB
   device drivers found in FreeBSD-7-CURRENT. Only two USB drivers are
   left and that is ubser(4) and slhci. Some still use Giant, but most
   have been brought out of Giant. At the moment I am looking for testers
   that can test the various USB device drivers. Some have already been
   tested, and confirmed to work, while others have problems which need
   to be fixed. If you want to test, checkout the USB perforce tree or
   download the SVN version of the USB driver that is available on my
   homepage. At the moment the tarballs are a little out of date.

   Ideas and comments with regard to the new USB API are welcome at:
   freebsd-usb_at_freebsd.org.
     _________________________________________________________________

Xen Port

   Contact: Kip Macy <kmacy_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Work on Xen support has slowly been continuing in perforce. The SOC
   student fixed several bugs and is continuing to work on it. Someone is
   needed who has the time to complete dom0 support and shepherd it
   production level stability.

   Sufficient interest has been expressed in it that it probably makes
   sense to check it in to public CVS so that more people can try it out.
   Time permitting, I will bring it up to date and check it in the next
   month.

Open tasks:

    1. dom0 support.
    2. General testing and bug fixing.
     _________________________________________________________________

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Received on Thu Oct 19 2006 - 11:57:29 UTC

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