FreeBSD Status Reports Q2/2007

From: Max Laier <max_at_love2party.net>
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2007 12:16:26 +0200
FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report

Introduction

   This report covers FreeBSD related projects between April and June
   2007. Again an exciting quarter for FreeBSD. In May we saw one of the
   biggest developers summits to date at BSDCan , our 25 Google Summer of
   Code students started working on their projects - progress reports are
   available below, and finally the 7.0 release cycle was started three
   weeks ago.

   If your are curious about what's new in FreeBSD 7.0 we suggest reading
   Ivan Voras' excellent summary at:
   http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd7.html and of course these
   reports.

   The next gathering of the BSD community will be at EuroBSDCon in
   Copenhagen , September 14-15. More details about the conference and the
   developer summit are available in the respective reports below.

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

Google summer of code

     * A GUI audit analyzer for FreeBSD
     * Apple's MacBook on FreeBSD
     * BSD Bintools project
     * Distributed Logging Daemon
     * finstall
     * FreeBSD-update front end
     * Gvinum improvements
     * http support for PXE
     * Linuxulator update
     * lockmgr rewriting
     * mtund - Magic Tunnel Daemon
     * Multicast DNS and Service Discovery
     * Porting Linux KVM to FreeBSD
     * Porting OpenBSD's sysctl Hardware Sensors Framework to FreeBSD
     * Ports Collection infrastructure improvements
     * Security Regression Test
     * tarfs: A tar File System

Projects

     * FreeBSD/xen
     * HDTV Drivers (ATSC)
     * Kernel contention reduction using mysql
     * Stack trace capture in PMCTools
     * TrustedBSD Audit
     * TrustedBSD MAC Framework
     * USB
     * USB update

FreeBSD Team Reports

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

Kernel

     * Fine grain thread locking
     * gvirstor
     * SCHED_SMP and SCHED_ULE
     * TrustedBSD priv(9)

Network Infrastructure

     * 10Gigabit Network Support
     * FAST_IPSEC Upgrade
     * FreeBSD and Wake On Lan
     * Multi-link PPP daemon (MPD)
     * Multiprocessor Network Stack
     * Network Stack Virtualization
     * Wireless Networking

Vendor / 3rd Party Software

     * FreeBSD and Coverity Prevent
     * FreeSBIE
     * OpenBSD packet filter - pf
     * PC-BSD

Miscellaneous

     * EuroBSDcon 2007
     * EuroBSDCon 2007 Developer Summit
     * libarchive/bsdtar
     * The Hungarian Documentation Project
     __________________________________________________________________

10Gigabit Network Support

   Contact: Kip Macy <kmacy_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Jack Vogel <jfv_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Support was added for two more 10gigabit network drivers and there were
   major advances on improving system performance over 10g media.

   Kip Macy committed a new driver for the Chelsio adapters. The cxgb
   driver supports all current 10g adapters, as well as the new four-port
   gigabit model. The cxgb driver work was supported by Chelsio.

   Drew Gallatin made significant improvements to the Myricom 10g driver
   mxge. With these updates the driver does line rate transfers with less
   system overhead.

   Neterion contributed the nxge driver to support all their Xframe 10Gbe
   Server/Storage adapters. The initial driver import was done by Sam
   Leffler; a switch over to vendor support will happen soon.

   Jack Vogel is preparing a driver to support the latest Intel 10g
   hardware devices. The new driver - ixgbe - will complement the existing
   ixgb driver that supports older Intel 10g cards.

   Kip and Drew worked with other folks on performance analysis and
   tuning. This work improved cpu affinity and reduced overhead for
   managing network resources. Work is also underway to define a common
   Large Receive Offlaod (LRO) infrastructure. LRO is analogous to TSO on
   the receive side enabling drivers to receive at near line rate with
   normal sized frames. This common code base will help replace
   driver-specific code.
     __________________________________________________________________

A GUI audit analyzer for FreeBSD

   URL:

   Contact: Dongmei Liu <ldm_at_ercist.iscas.ac.cn>

   This project is due to provide a GUI audit log analysis tool for
   FreeBSD. Refer to ethereal/wireshark packet parsing engine and its
   framework to view and parse audit logs.

Open tasks:

    1. Get a GUI framework using GTK2.0 include menu bar, toolbar, list
       view and tree view.
    2. Parse and display audit log in the trailer file in the list view
       and tree view.
    3. Online capture audit log and parse and display them in the list
       view and tree view
    4. Add the filter mechanism
    5. Add the statistic mechanism
    6. Remote audit log analysis mechanism
     __________________________________________________________________

Apple's MacBook on FreeBSD

   URL:
   http://repoman.freebsd.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/s
   oc2007/rpaulo%2dmacbook/
   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleMacbook

   Contact: Rui Paulo <rpaulo_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Apple's MacBook computers are nicely designed and have neat features
   that other laptops don't. While Mac OS X is a nice operating system,
   UNIX folks (like me) would prefer to run other operating systems like
   FreeBSD. This project aims to bring bug fixes and new drivers to
   FreeBSD that would help running this OS on this platform.

Open tasks:

    1. Write drivers or fix issues for/with the touchpad, keyboard, remote
       control IR reciever, Bluetooth.
    2. Fix reboot, halt, suspend/resume issues.
     __________________________________________________________________

BSD Bintools project

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

   Contact: Kai Wang <kaiw27_at_gmail.com>

   A basic implementation of ar(1) (include ranlib) was finished and
   available in the perforce repository. Currently it provides all the
   main functions an ar(1) should have and it is based on the libarchive
   and libelf library thus is expected to have a better and simpler
   structure than the GPL'ed version. The work left in this part of the
   project is to perform a elaborate test and add additional functions.
     __________________________________________________________________

Distributed Logging Daemon

   URL:
   http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=232192+0+/usr/local/www/db
   /text/2007/freebsd-hackers/20070527.freebsd-hackers
   URL:
   http://perforce.freebsd.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/
   soc2007/karma%5faudit/dlog&HIDEDEL=NO

   Contact: Alexey Mikhailov <karma_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Bjoern Zeeb <bz_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The basic idea behind this project is to implement secure and reliable
   log file shipping to remote hosts. While the implementation focuses on
   audit logs, the goal is to build tools that will make it possible to
   perform distributed logging for any application by using a simple API
   and linking with a shared library.

Open tasks:

    1. Network protocol implementation
    2. Spooling
    3. SSL support
     __________________________________________________________________

EuroBSDcon 2007

   URL: http://2007.EuroBSDCon.org/

   Contact: EuroBSDCon 2007 Organizing Committee <info_at_EuroBSDCon.dk>

   The sixth EuroBSDCon will take place at Symbion in Copenhagen, Denmark
   on Friday the 14th and Saturday 15th of September 2007.

   The programme is ready and online at the webpage. Registration is open.
   Details about tutorials and Legoland trip are ready too.
   The keynote will be John Hartman: Real men's pipes

   If you share a room with friends at the hostel, then lodging is really
   inexpensive, and the lounge has high speed Internet access. Staying at
   the hostel is of course optional, and the area has several hotels.

   KD85.com and O'Reilly will each have a booth at the conference.

   We are still looking for more sponsors.

   A public IRC channel #eurobsdcon on EFnet has been created for
   discussion and questions about the conference.
     __________________________________________________________________

EuroBSDCon 2007 Developer Summit

   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/200709DevSummit

   Contact: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The next developer summit will be different from the previous ones.

   Very different.

   Gone are the auditorium style seating, beamers, endless presentations
   and soggy sandwiches.

   Instead we head out to a an old village school in the beautiful Danish
   countryside, we hang around all over the place, sleep in the old
   science room, cook our own food and hack the living daylights out of
   anything we care for.

   September 17th and 18th, right after EuroBSDcon2007 in Copenhagen.
   (Well, right after the optional trip to legoland...)

   Be there!

   PS: Yes, it's not uncivilized, there is a full speed ADSL and WLAN.
     __________________________________________________________________

FAST_IPSEC Upgrade

   Contact: George Neville-Neil <gnn_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Bjoern Zeeb <bz_at_FreeBSD.org>

   FAST_IPSEC has now replaced Kame IPsec as the IPsec stack in HEAD. This
   will be part of the 7.0 release. The merge happened in early July with
   George handling the kernel bits and Bjoern handling user space.

   The kernel option IPSEC is now the ONLY option for IPsec support in the
   FreeBSD kernel.

Open tasks:

    1. Test test test!!!!
     __________________________________________________________________

Fine grain thread locking

   Contact: Jeff Roberson <jeff_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Attilio Rao <attilio_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Kris Kennaway <kris_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Over the past 6 months several developers undertook an effort to
   replace the global scheduler lock with a finer-grain interface modeled
   on the Solaris container lock approach. This significantly reduces
   contention on higher-end multiprocessor machines.

   This patch went into 7.0-CURRENT and has proven to be very stable. The
   last remaining bugs are in rusage and effect only process time
   accounting statistics.
     __________________________________________________________________

finstall

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

   Contact: Ivan Voras <ivoras_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Project "finstall" aims to create a next-generation FreeBSD installer
   that will make use of the newest features present in the system. The
   project should yield something usable for 7.0-RELEASE, but the
   intention is to keep it as a "second" installer system during 7.x,
   alongside sysinstall. In any case, sysinstall will be kept for
   architectures not supported by finstall (e.g. all except i386 and
   amd64).

Open tasks:

    1. The work is progressing well and on plan. There's a small setback
       currently with X11 applications executing of a read-only file
       system (at least that's the currently recognizable symptom).
    2. Any interested testers are very much welcome!
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD and Coverity Prevent

   Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: David Maxwell <dmaxwell_at_coverity.com>

   FreeBSD's static analysis scans have been updated with a recent version
   of Coverity Prevent. Coverity is providing additional advice on
   configuration of the analysis to maximize the benefit from the tools.

   At BSDCan2007, Coverity provided FreeBSD with a license for an
   additional analysis tool called Extend, which allows writing custom
   FreeBSD specific code checkers. David Maxwell presented training
   material for interested FreeBSD developers. Some applications of custom
   checkers have been considered, and more results will be forthcoming as
   they are implemented and tested.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD and Wake On Lan

   URL: http://stsp.name/wol/
   URL: http://stsp.name/wol/README.txt
   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=83807&cat=kern

   Contact: Stefan Sperling <stsp_at_stsp.name>

   I have been working on making wake on lan (WOL) work with FreeBSD.
   Contrary to popular believe OS support is required for WOL to work
   properly. In particular network card drivers need to configure network
   cards for WOL during system shutdown, else the cards won't wake up. WOL
   is _not_ just a BIOS issue.

   This is work in progress. Currently the following cards/chipsets are
   supported:
     * NatSemi DP83815 (if_sis)
     * Via Rhine (if_vr, only VT6102 and up chips support WOL)
     * Nvidia nForce (if_nve, needs testing )
     * 3Com Etherlink XL and Fast Etherlink XL (if_xl, needs testing ,
       only 3c905B type adapters support WOL)

   I would be glad to get more feedback on my patch. I can add support for
   more chipsets but I need testers for hardware I don't have. I would
   appreciate access to data sheets for any NIC chipsets that are
   supported by FreeBSD and have WOL support.

   I would especially appreciate technical feedback on the patch,
   preferably by a committer who is willing to nitpick the patch to make
   it ready for inclusion in -CURRENT. I currently maintain the patch
   against RELENG_6_2 for my own use but I would port it to -CURRENT for
   inclusion.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD-update front end

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

   Contact: Andrew Turner <andrew_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The project is split up with a front end to interact with the user and
   a back end to interact with freebsd-update. The back and front ends are
   able to communicate with each other using an XML protocol. The GUI is
   almost at the point it can take a command from the user and send it to
   the back end. The back end is able to detect when updates are ready.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD/xen

   Contact: Rink Springer <rink_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Work is well under way to finish Kip Macy's FreeBSD/xen port, and get
   it into a shape which is suitable for inclusion in 7.0.

   Generally, the port is stable and performs quite well. The major
   bottleneck is the inability to work with GCC 4.2, this is the last
   major TODO before the work can be committed.

Open tasks:

    1. Fix the port to correctly work with GCC 4.2.
    2. Port the Xen drivers to newbus.
    3. Test/fix PAE support.
    4. Start on amd64 support.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeSBIE

   URL: http://www.freesbie.org
   URL: http://liste.gufi.org/mailman/listinfo/freesbie

   Contact: Matteo Riondato <matteo_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: FreeSBIE Staff <staff_at_freesbie.org>
   Contact: FreeSBIE ML <freesbie_at_gufi.org>

   After the success of FreeSBIE-2.0.1-RELEASE, development slew down a
   bit, but we have a big task for the summer: enable unionfs again and
   trying the new efficient memory filesystem, tmpfs.

   For all new ISO images we will be following RELENG_7, with the hope to
   release a stable image once 7.0-RELEASE have been released.

Open tasks:

    1. Build and test an ISO image with FreeSBIE+unionfs+tmpfs.
     __________________________________________________________________

Gvinum improvements

   URL: http://folk.ntnu.no/lulf/patches/freebsd/gvinum/soc2007
   URL: http://blogs.freebsdish.org/lulf/
   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/UlfLilleengen/SOC

   Contact: Ulf Lilleengen <lulf_at_FreeBSD.org>

   My previous status reports contained a lot of code that updated gvinum
   with the old vinum features.

   This year gvinum has been significantly rewritten. Lukas Ertl began
   rewriting the way gvinum is organized from using a multi
   consumer/provider model, to use a single consumer and provider, and
   having an event-system that first handles user-requests, and then runs
   normal I/O operations (Much like other GEOM classes). This makes the
   code easier to read, and perhaps there will be less bugs :)
    1. setstate on plexes and volumes.
    2. attach/detach command now works.
    3. concat/stripe/mirror commands. The previous code conflicted more
       than I expected with the new gvinum system, but it should work now.
    4. (Mounted) rebuilds possible.
    5. (Mounted) sync possible.
    6. Some refactoring of old code (Basically updating old code to use
       the new event system, and add some abstractions where possible)

   And of course, some time has gone to work out how things should be
   done, and to fix other bugs. I hope some of you are interested in
   trying this out (all the work has been in perforce so far), a patch can
   be found in the URL section. . This is a bit experimental, and although
   I've done much testing to hunt down bugs, there are most probably bugs
   left.

   I have other goals this summer as well. However, since some parts of
   gvinum was rewritten, I might not be able to do all of these, but
   growing is already working for the concatenated volumes (and also
   mirrored). I'd also like to implement growing for Raid5 arrays as well.
   Logging plexes would also be cool to have, but this is not really
   needed, since we have g_journal. Both these features will be addressed
   after I've made sure gvinum does all old vinum does, and also perhaps
   better. As I might have some extra time on my hands this summer, so I
   gladly accept suggestions on what else I might fix or implement "while
   I'm at it".

Open tasks:

    1. Stability, stability, stability. I want gvinum to work really well.
       To accomplish that I have several test-machines I'm going to do
       different tests on. I sort of have a little test-plan in the
       working that I'll be using.
    2. A gvinumadmin tool that would make gvinum easier to use for
       unexperienced users. Perhaps integrate this into the installer.
       This is now probably something I'll do at the end, when hopefully
       everything works :) I might poke Ivan Voras a bit on this.
    3. Documenting gvinum and it's differences to vinum better. I take
       notes on where I need to document, so this is in progress.
    4. Implementing growing and shrinking of volumes.
    5. Implement logging plexes. Log all parity data being written.
     __________________________________________________________________

gvirstor

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

   Contact: Ivan Voras <ivoras_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Gvirstor is a GEOM class which provides virtual storage capacity
   (something like virtual memory for storage devices). It's ready to be
   committed to HEAD (the plan is for it to get into 7.0-RELEASE).

Open tasks:

    1. Any interested testers are welcome!
     __________________________________________________________________

HDTV Drivers (ATSC)

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

   Contact: John-Mark Gurney <jmg_at_FreeBSD.org>

   This entry was previously the Bt878 Audio Driver (aka FusionHDTV 5 Lite
   driver) announcement, but as work expanded slightly, it's a bit more
   generic now.

   A few bugs in bktrau has been fixed since January. If you have been
   running an earlier version, it is recommended to upgrade as the driver
   could panic. The driver works with multiple cards in the same machine
   (tested with two).

   FusionHDTV 5 Lite -- Due to lack of documentation from DViCO and LG, I
   have copied magic values from the Linux driver to get ATSC capturing
   working.

   ATI HDTV Wonder -- After years of trying to get into the ATI developer
   program, they have finally suspended it, so no support from ATI. I have
   started work on a driver, cxd, for the Conexant CX2388x based cards.
   The ATI HDTV Wonder uses ATI's own demodulator, and I was able to get
   it to tune, after cribbing from the Linux driver. When capturning, I
   get some valid data, but not all the data. Due to lack of support from
   ATI and linux-dvb the project has been put on indefinate hold.

   If someone has another CX2388x based card, it shouldn't be too hard to
   take the driver and get it working with a different tuner.

   A Python module is available for both drivers/cards, along w/ a sample
   capture application using it. The module is now known to work well with
   threads so that tuning (expensive due to i2c ioctl's) can happen in
   another thread without causing program slow down. The module is working
   well with a custom PVR backend.

Open tasks:

    1. Provide support for NTSC and FM tuning.
    2. Add support for other cards and tuners that use the Bt878 chip.
    3. Add support for other cards and tuners that use the CX2388x chip.
     __________________________________________________________________

http support for PXE

   URL:
   http://perforce.freebsd.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/
   soc2007/taleks-pxe_http
   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/http_support_for_PXE

   Contact: Alexey Tarasov <taleks_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Main goal of project is to introduce code working in PXE preboot
   environment, able to download from web server via direct connection or
   http proxy and prepare booting of FreeBSD kernel.

   Already implemented, but haven't thoroughly tested: PXE wrappers core
   code, ARP, ICMP echo request/reply, sockets code similar to common
   sockets (UDP and TCP modules). On base of sockets: simple DHCP client,
   DNS client.

   Currently working on http client, TCP testing, kernel booting and
   documenting main concepts of project modules.

Open tasks:

    1. Testing PXE API related code in different PXE implementations.
    2. Testing of implemented protocols.
     __________________________________________________________________

Kernel contention reduction using mysql

   URL: http://jeffr-tech.livejournal.com/

   Contact: Jeff Roberson <jeff_at_FreeBSD.org>

   FreeBSD developers have been using mysql as a testbed to find kernel
   contention hotspots in the kernel. As a result of this we have seen a
   5x performance improvement over 6.0 on 8way machines. Recent changes
   include finer locking in fcntl(), removing Giant from flock and fcntl
   F_SETLK. These changes will be available in 7.0 and primarily improve
   write performance. Experimental changes to select() have also been
   discussed on arch_at_ that solve contention issues there however these
   will not be ready in the 7.0 timeframe.
     __________________________________________________________________

libarchive/bsdtar

   URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~kientzle/libarchive/

   Contact: Tim Kientzle <kientzle_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Colin Percival <cperciva_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Both libarchive 2 and bsdtar 2 are now in -CURRENT and will be in 7.0.
   Libarchive 1.9 and bsdtar 1.9 should be in 6-STABLE in time for 6.3.

   libarchive 2 is much faster writing to disk than libarchive 1. It also
   supports new formats, has several minor API/ABI corrections, is more
   portable, and has many fewer bugs. Of special note is
   "libarchive_test", a new program that exercises much of the libarchive
   functionality; anyone interested in working on libarchive should become
   familiar with this test suite. bsdtar 2 is less ambitious, but does
   have a number of bug fixes and takes advantage of several new features
   in libarchive 2.

   libarchive 1.9 is identical to libarchive 2 except it maintains the old
   API/ABI. Similarly, bsdtar 1.9 is nearly identical to bsdtar 2, lacking
   only a few features that would prevent it from being used with existing
   libarchive 1 libraries.

Open tasks:

    1. Tim Kientzle has started work on a libarchive-based cpio
       implementation that should be ready for inclusion with FreeBSD 8.
    2. Volunteer needed: We want a libarchive-based pax to replace our
       out-of-date pax implementation.
    3. Volunteer needed: pkg_add should use libarchive instead of forking
       an external tar; this could eventually make it much faster.
    4. Volunteer(s) needed: libarchive should write more cpio variants
       (easy); libarchive should read and write mtree format (not
       difficult); libarchive should write GNUtar 1.0 format sparse tar
       entries (tricky); bsdtar should support --metadata=<archive> to
       read names and properties from one archive, with data from disk, to
       create a new archive (mtree support in libarchive would make this
       very useful); bsdtar should preserve sparseness when creating
       archives.
     __________________________________________________________________

Linuxulator update

   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/linux-soc2007

   Contact: Roman Divacky <rdivacky_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Just like last year I got the opportunity to work on updating the
   Linuxulator to Linux version 2.6. This year I work on finishing
   futexes, *at syscalls and epoll/inotify.

   I, cooperating with Konstantin Belousov, have managed to fix futexes to
   the state of passing the official futex testing program. The fix was
   committed and 7.0R will ship with correct futex implementation. Work is
   planned on removing Giant locking from futexes. This only needs some
   carefull review and testing.

   These days I mostly focus on *at syscalls, the patch is almost finished
   for commiting and I hope that it will make it into 7.0R. As a part of
   this work I implemented native FreeBSD syscalls as well. Watch arch
   mailing list as I post the patch there.

   I also finished writing my master thesis describing how the Linuxulator
   works and Gabor Kovesdan is working on integrating it into official
   FreeBSD articles.

   No work has happened in the epoll/inotify area but I hope to work on it
   right after I finish the *at syscalls.h

Open tasks:

    1. Finishing *at syscalls.
    2. Start the epoll/inotify work.
    3. Finish removal of Giant from futexes.
     __________________________________________________________________

lockmgr rewriting

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

   Contact: Attilio Rao <attilio_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Jeff Roberson <jeff_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The project consists in a rewriting of the lockmgr(9) interface on a
   lighter basis, using atomic instructions and direct usage of the
   sleepqueue interface. This should lead to a faster primitive, a saner
   interface and an higher maintainability of the code.

   So far, 3 newly files called kern/kern_lockng.c, sys/_lockmgrng.h and
   sys/lockmgrng.h have been created for the new primitive and an initial
   implementation has been committed into the perforce branch:
   //depot/user/attilio/attilio_lockmgr/...

   The implementation contains a good set of code intended to replace old
   lockmgr. Actually it only misses the support for lock draining that
   will be committed after an initial phase of testing and the inclusion
   of a better wake-up algorithm (which will simplify draining a lot and
   will improve performance on wakeup).

Open tasks:

    1. Need some testing
     __________________________________________________________________

mtund - Magic Tunnel Daemon

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

   Contact: Matus Harvan <mharvan_at_FreeBSD.org>

   IP can easily be tunneled over a plethora of network protocols at
   various layers, such as IP, ICMP, UDP, TCP, DNS, HTTP, SSH. While a
   direct connection may not always be possible due to a firewall, the IP
   packets could be encapsulated as payload in other protocols, which
   would get through. However, each such encapsulation requires the setup
   of a different program and the user has to manually probe different
   encapsulations to find out which of them works in a given environment.

   mtund is a tunneling daemon using run-time loadable plugins for the
   different encapsulations. It automagically selects the best
   encapsulation in each environment and fails over to another
   encapsulation in case the environment changes. There already is running
   code available, capable of tunneling via TCP and UDP with a working
   failover mechanism. As this is a Summer of Code project, rapid changes
   and addition of new features can be expected during the summer. Please
   see the wiki page for more details and up-to-date information.

   Note that the project originally started under the name of Super Tunnel
   Daemon, but was later renamed to mtund for Magic Tunnel Daemon.

Open tasks:

    1. I am always happy to hear from others trying out the code and
       providing feedback, both positive and negative.
     __________________________________________________________________

Multi-link PPP daemon (MPD)

   URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpd/
   URL: http://mpd.sourceforge.net/doc/mpd5.html

   Contact: Alexander Motin <mav_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Mpd-4.2 has been released. It includes many new features, performance
   improvements and fixes.

   The most significant and unique new feature is a link repeater
   functionality. It allows mpd to accept incoming connection of any
   supported type and forward it out as same or different type outgoing
   connection. As example, this functionality allows mpd to implement real
   LAC with accepting incoming PPPoE connection from client and forwarding
   it using L2TP tunnel to LNS. All other software L2TP implementations I
   know is only a LAC emulators without real incoming calls forwarding
   abilities.

   Also mpd-4.2 presents:
     * PPTP listening on multiple different IPs,
     * L2TP tunnel authentication with shared secret,
     * fast traffic filtering, shaping and rate-limiting using ng_bpf and
       ng_car,
     * new 'ext-auth' auth backend as full-featured local alternative to
       'radius-auth',
     * NetFlow generation for both incoming and outgoing packets same
       time.

   Replacing external ifconfig and route calls with their internal
   implementations and other optimizations in 4.2 gave significant
   performance boost in session management. Newly implemented overload
   protection mechanism partially drops incoming connection requests for
   periods of critical load by monitoring daemon's internal message queue.
   As result, simple 2GHz P4 system is now able to accept, authenticate
   and completely process spike of 1000 concurrent PPPoE connections in
   just a 30 seconds.

Open tasks:

    1. Implement dynamic link/bundle creation.
    2. Auth proxying support in repeater mode. It is required for some
       LAC/PAC and Tunnel Switching Aggregator (TSA) setups.
    3. Remove static phys - link - bundle and phys - repeater relations.
       Implement ability to differentiate incoming connections processing
       depending on user login, domain and/or other parameters.
     __________________________________________________________________

Multicast DNS and Service Discovery

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

   Contact: Fredrik Lindberg <fli_at_FreeBSD.org>

   This project aims to create a multicast DNS daemon and service
   discovery utilities suitable for the base system. Multicast DNS is a
   part of Zero Configuration Networking (Zeroconf) and provides the
   ability to address hosts using DNS-like names without the need of an
   existing (unicast), managed DNS server. Work on the responder daemon is
   well underway and the only large missing piece of the puzzle is a way
   for local clients to do queries. The code can be found in the p4 branch
   projects/soc2007/fli-mdns_sd if anyone would like to give it a spin,
   even though it's incomplete. The project plan can be found on the wiki.
     __________________________________________________________________

Multiprocessor Network Stack

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

   Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: <net_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The custom file descriptor array lock has been replaced with an
   optimized sx lock, resulting in 2x-4x improvement in MySQL transaction
   rates on 8-core MySQL benchmarks. This improvement is due to moving to
   shared locking for frequent fd lookup operations, as well as
   significant optimization of the case where the filedesc lock is highly
   contended (as occurs in the threaded MySQL server performing constant
   socket I/O).

   The custom socket buffer I/O serialization lock (sblock), previously
   created by interlocking SB_WANT and SB_LOCK flags with the socket
   buffer mutex, has been replaced with an optimized sx lock, leading to a
   10% performance improvement in MySQL and PostgreSQL benchmarks on
   8-core systems. As part of this change, sx locks now have interruptible
   sleep primitives to allow the SB_NOINTR flag to work properly.

   These changes also correct a long-standing bug in socket buffer lock
   contention and SB_NOWAIT reported by Isilon; a simpler patch has been
   merged to 6.x to fix this bug without merging loocking changes.

   TCP debugging is now properly synchronized using a new tcp_debug_mtx.

   UMA allocation counters are now used for pipes rather than custom
   atomic counters, resulting in lowered overhead for pipe allocation and
   free.

   Significant code cleanup, commenting, and in some cases MFC'ing, has
   taken place with respect to the network stack and synchronization.
   Additional DDB debugging commands for sockets of various sorts have
   been added, allowing listing of socket state from DDB without the use
   of GDB.

   Certain non-MPSAFE subsystems have been removed or will be removed from
   FreeBSD 7.0, including IPX over IP tunneling (not general IPX/SPX
   support, just the tunneling over IP), KAME IPSEC (FAST_IPSEC is MPSAFE
   and now now supports IPv6), i4b, netatm (two other ATM stacks are still
   present), and ng_h4. Some of these features will be reintroduced in
   FreeBSD 7.1, but by removing them now, we are able to remove the
   NET_NEEDS_GIANT compatibility infrastructure that significant
   complicates and obfuscates the socket and network stack code.

   Other measurement and optimization projects continue; however, the 7.0
   locking/synchronization work for the network stack is essentially
   complete.

Open tasks:

    1. New work to parallelize the netisr thread (netisr2) as well as
       distribute UDP and TCP processing over multiple CPUs by connection,
       rather than just by input source as in 7.0, was presented at
       BSDCan. This work will be targeted at the 8-CURRENT branch.
    2. Complete netatm and NET_NEEDS_GIANT removal for 7.0.
    3. Complete MPSAFE locking of mld6 and nd6 IPv6 subsystems, which
       currently run under a global lock.
     __________________________________________________________________

Network Stack Virtualization

   URL: http://imunes.tel.fer.hr/virtnet/

   Contact: Marko Zec <zec_at_fer.hr>

   The network stack virtualization project aims at extending the FreeBSD
   kernel to maintain multiple independent instances of networking state.
   This will allow for complete networking independence between jails on a
   system, including giving each jail its own firewall, virtual network
   interfaces, rate limiting, routing tables, and IPSEC configuration.

   I believe that the prototype, which is kept in sync with FreeBSD
   -CURRENT, is now sufficiently stable for testing. It virtualizes the
   basic INET and INET6 kernel structures and subsystems, including IPFW
   and PF firewalls, and more. In the next month I plan to have the IPSEC
   code fully virtualized, and refine and document the management APIs.
   The short-term goal is to deliver production-grade kernel support for
   virtualized networking for FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE (as a snap-in kernel
   replacement), while continuing to keep the code in sync with -CURRENT
   for possible merging at a later date.
     __________________________________________________________________

OpenBSD packet filter - pf

   Contact: Max Laier <mlaier_at_FreeBSD.org>

   pf in HEAD (soon to be FreeBSD 7.0) has been updated to OpenBSD 4.1
   bringing in a couple of new features:
     * ftp-proxy has been rewritten, and a tftp version, tftp-proxy, has
       been added
     * pf(4) now supports Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF) checks
       for simplified ingress filtering
     * The pflog(4) interface is now clonable. pf(4) can log to multiple
       pflog interfaces now, each rule can specify which pflog interface
       to log to
     * pflogd(8) can now be told which pflog interface to work with
     * pfctl(8) can now expire table entries
     * keep state is now the default for pf.conf(5) rules, as is the flags
       S/SA option on TCP connections. no state and flags any can be used
       to disable stateful filtering or TCP flags checking
     * The pfctl(8) ruleset optimiser can be enabled in pf.conf(5)
     * pf(4) anchors can now be loaded inline in the main pf.conf(5) and
       can be printed recursively
     * Allow pf(4) rules inside anchors to have their counters reset, and
       make counter read & reset an atomic operation

   Some patches that went into OpenBSD after 4.1 and improve performance
   significantly will be merged later.

   Work to support pf and netgraph interaction is underway and will be
   imported after 7.0. As all required ABI changes have been made during
   the update, we will be able to MFC this work for 7.1 later on.
     __________________________________________________________________

PC-BSD

   URL: http://www.pcbsd.org/

   Contact: Kris Moore <kris_at_pcbsd.com>

   The last major updates are currently being made to PC-BSD 1.4, which
   will include KDE 3.5.7, Beryl, Flash, Intel Wireless, Nvidia Drivers
   and more! This release will also include new utilities to make running
   PC-BSD on the desktop easier than ever, including:
     * Network Manager with WIFI Support
     * Add / Remove Components
     * Firewall Manager for PF
     * Xorg Display setup wizard

   Once any final major issues are resolved, we will be issuing a public
   beta of PC-BSD 1.4 to ensure compatibility across a variety of
   platforms.
     __________________________________________________________________

Porting Linux KVM to FreeBSD

   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/FabioChecconi/PortingLinuxKVMToFreeBSD

   Contact: Fabio Checconi <fabio_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Luigi Rizzo <luigi_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The Linux kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a mechanism to exploit
   the virtualization extensions present in some modern CPUs (e.g., Intel
   VT and AMD-V). Virtualization extensions let ordinary processes execute
   a subset of privileged instructions in a controlled way at near-native
   speed. This in turn may improve the performance of system emulators
   such as qemu, xen, vmware, vkernel, User Mode Linux (UML), etc.

   This project consists in porting to FreeBSD the Linux KVM, implemented
   as a loadable module, lkvm.ko. We use the approach in
   ports/devel/linux-kmod-compat to reuse the original Linux source code
   almost unmodified. We will also port a modified version of qemu which
   exploits the facilities made available by the Linux KVM to speed up
   emulation.

   The URL above links to progress report detailing the exact project
   goals, milestones reached, and commit log details.

   As of end of June 2007, we have mainly extended linux-kmod-compat to
   support the kernel API used by the Linux KVM code. The required
   functions have been implemented at various degrees, from simple stubs
   to fully functional ones. We have also imported the modified qemu and
   the libraries that are used to build the Linux KVM userspace client. In
   the second half of the SoC work we plan to complete the implementation
   of the kernel API and have a fully functional Linux KVM module,
   together with its client (qemu).
     __________________________________________________________________

Porting OpenBSD's sysctl Hardware Sensors Framework to FreeBSD

   URL: http://mojo.ru/us/GSoC2007.FreeBSD.cnst-sensors.proposal.html
   URL: http://cnst.livejournal.com/tag/GSoC2007
   URL: http://cnst.livejournal.com/data/atom?tag=GSoC2007
   URL:
   http://perforce.freebsd.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/
   soc2007/cnst-sensors/

   Contact: Constantine A. Murenin <cnst_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Shteryana Shopova <syrinx_at_FreeBSD.org>

   OpenBSD includes sysctl hw.sensors framework since 2003; since 2005 the
   frameworks supports raid drives and most known i2c sensors; since 2006
   the framework is redesigned with a sensor device concept in mind to
   accommodate continued growth. Consists of kernel api,
   sysctl(3)/sysctl(8), sensorsd(8), ntpd(8), systat(1),
   ports/sysutils/symon and 51 drivers as of 2007-07-07.

   This GSoC2007 project is to port the underpinnings of this unified
   hardware monitoring interface to FreeBSD. Whilst it won't be possible
   to port all of the drivers due to architecture differences, we aim at
   porting all other parts of the framework and accompanying userland
   utilities.

   At this time, lm(4) at isa and some kernel api have already been
   ported. The next big step is to complete sysctl(3) glue code so that
   further work on porting userland utilities could be accomplished.
   Details about sysctl are being discussed on arch_at_.

Open tasks:

    1. sysctl(3) glue code
     __________________________________________________________________

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 count is over 17,300. The PR count has been stable at around
   800; we have not quite cleared up the backlog that showed up during the
   freeze to import xorg7.2.

   There have been 4 experimental runs on the build cluster, most notably
   resulting in some speedups for package registration. A further
   experimental run to genericize autotools handling is in progress.

   One of the most sweeping ports commits to happen in years was the
   upgrade of xorg from 6.9 to 7.2. This involved a complete rework of the
   internals of the port, as X.org itself has effectively pushed the
   responsibility for packaging to the OSes that incorporate it. The idea
   was to be able for them to update individual code (such as video
   drivers) without having to reroll the entire distribution. This commit
   caused us to have the longest period of preparation work, and actual
   tree lockdown, that I am aware of. The commit continues to be
   controversial, partly due to the fact that none of our port upgrade
   tools was up to the task of doing the upgrade without manual
   intervention.

   At the same time that xorg was upgraded, we moved the installation
   directory from the obsolete /usr/X11R6 to our default /usr/local. This
   further complicated the upgrade.

   There have been new releases of the ports tinderbox code, the
   portmaster update utility, and portupgrade.

   GNOME was updated to 2.18.2.

   We have added 7 new committers since the last report. We appreciate all
   the new help. However, a few committers have turned in their commit
   bits for safekeeping, due to lack of time.

   Unfortunately, Clement Laforet has also had to step down from portmgr
   due to lack of time. We thank him for his help so far.

   Erwin, Kris and Mark met up at BSDCan and reviewed all the
   portmgr-owned PRs. A large number were closed, or suspended pending
   more work from the submitter. After closing the PRs that were committed
   after the -exp builds, the number of portmgr owned PRs came down to an
   all time low of 48 from around 70. We hope to make further progress
   during the rest of the year.

Open tasks:

    1. gcc4.2 has been imported to the base for 7.0. Unfortunately, this
       breaks a large number of ports. We need committer and maintainer
       help to get these in good shape for the release.
    2. Most of the remaining ports PRs are "existing port/PR assigned to
       committer". Although the maintainer-timeout policy is helping to
       keep the backlog down, we are going to need to do more to get the
       ports in the shape they really need to be in.
    3. Although we have added many maintainers, we still have many
       unmaintained ports. The packages on amd64 are lagging behind a bit;
       those on sparc64 require even more work.
     __________________________________________________________________

Ports Collection infrastructure improvements

   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/G%C3%A1borSoC2007

   Contact: Gábor Kövesdán <gabor_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Andrew Pantyukhin <sat_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Gábor Kövesdán is working on some improvements for the Ports Collection
   infrastructure. This year, he aimed to work on long-standing issues,
   which are tracked in GNATS, but we have not had a volunteer for
   recently. With the mentorship of Andrew Pantyukhin, he is also
   reimplementing the DESTDIR support for Ports Collection in a more
   practical way. The complete description and status of this project is
   available on Gábor's SoC 2007 Wiki page.

Open tasks:

    1. Please see the Wiki page for the current status.
     __________________________________________________________________

Problem Report Database

   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/support.html#gnats
   URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~bsd/prstats/

   Contact: Mark Linimon <bugmeister_at_FreeBSD_dot_org>

   Gavin Atkinson has joined the bugbuster team via getting a GNATS
   account on the FreeBSD cluster. He is following in the footsteps of
   Matteo Riondato, who later graduated to a full src commit bit. So far,
   he has helped close nearly 150 PRs, including many that had become
   stale. Welcome!

   Our short-term goal is to try to identify bugs that we might be easily
   able to fix before the 6.3/7.0 simultaneous release. So far, great
   progress has been made on ata- and usb-related PRs.

   The goal for the rest of this year is to generate more developer
   interest in fixing bugs. To do this, we are, first, trying to do more
   work on triaging PRs as they come in, to help flag ones that seem to be
   valid problems (especially if they include patches.) Secondly, we have
   started a new weekly periodic posting to the
   freebsd-bugbusters_at_FreeBSD.org mailing list, which is a short list of
   PRs that we feel are ready for committer action. This posting is
   automatically generated from a text-file list that we maintain.

   We are continuing to try to manage our community's expectations of what
   we can do with the incoming PRs. In particular, we are trying to
   discourage submissions of the form "I cannot get the XYZ function to
   work". In practice, these PRs are not worked on. Instead, we are now
   encouraging these postings to go to one of the mailing lists such as
   freebsd-questions_at_, freebsd-x11_at_, and so forth. The idea is to
   emphasize GNATS as a "Problem Report" method, rather than a "general
   FreeBSD support" method. I feel that, otherwise, we were creating a
   false expectation.

   The overall PR count has dropped to below 5000, despite the extra PRs
   still not cleared up from the ports freeze for the xorg7.2 import.
   Significant progress has been made on the i386, kern, and bin PRs, as
   well as PRs in the 'feedback' state. In addition, Warner Losh has made
   progress on closing many of the usb PRs.

Open tasks:

    1. Please join us on the freebsd-bugbusters_at_ mailing list, or on
       #freebsd-bugbusters on EFNet, to help us triage PRs as they come in
       and also help us to work through the backlog, and help us to try to
       create a bugbusting "community".
     __________________________________________________________________

Release Engineering

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

   Contact: Release Engineering Team <re_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Code freeze in preparation for FreeBSD 7.0 began on June 18th. There
   are several large projects still being finished up as well as some
   issues that resulted as "fallout" from the work done just before the
   code freeze started (e.g. things resulting from the GCC 4.2 import). A
   schedule for the 7.0 release has not been set yet but the hope is that
   the first BETA build will be done near the end of July with a "fairly
   normal" release cycle (a few BETA builds followed by two or three RCs,
   each separated by around two weeks).

   We are planning to release FreeBSD 6.3 around the same time as FreeBSD
   7.0 is released so the release schedule for that will be set at the
   same point we set the release cycle for 7.0, hopefully late in July.
     __________________________________________________________________

SCHED_SMP and SCHED_ULE

   URL: http://jeffr-tech.livejournal.com/

   Contact: Jeff Roberson <jeff_at_FreeBSD.org>

   SCHED_SMP is a fork of the ULE scheduler which makes use of the new
   fine grain scheduler locking in 7.0-CURRENT to significantly improve
   SMP performance on some workloads. It has improved and stronger
   affinity, smarter CPU load balancing, structural improvements and many
   sysctl tunables. This can be considered ULE 3.0. Discussions are
   ongoing as to whether this will go into 7.0 as SCHED_SMP or as
   SCHED_ULE in 7.0 or 7.1.

   SCHED_ULE has had many bugfixes and performance improvements over the
   7.0 development cycle and should no longer be considered unstable or
   experimental. On most workloads it significantly outperforms SCHED_4BSD
   on SMP and even slightly outperforms it on UP. There are some
   pathlogical workloads which exhibit as much as a 5% performance
   penalty. Many thanks to Kris Kennaway and current users for bug reports
   and performance testing.
     __________________________________________________________________

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, two security advisories have
   been issued concerning problems in the base system of FreeBSD; both of
   these problems were in "contributed" code maintained outside of
   FreeBSD. The FreeBSD Vulnerabilities and Exposures Markup Language
   (VuXML) document has continued to be updated; since the last status
   report, 35 new entries have been added, bringing the total up to 925.

   In order to improve handling of security issues in the FreeBSD Ports
   Collection a new "ports-security" team has been created to include
   ports committers who periodically help with fixing ports security
   issues and documenting them in the FreeBSD VuXML document. Committers
   who wish to help with this effort can contact simon_at_ for details.

   The following FreeBSD releases are supported by the FreeBSD Security
   Team: FreeBSD 5.5, FreeBSD 6.1, and FreeBSD 6.2. The respective End of
   Life dates of supported releases are listed on the web site; it is
   expected that of the upcoming releases, FreeBSD 6.3 will be supported
   for two years after release, while FreeBSD 7.0 will be supported for
   one year after release.
     __________________________________________________________________

Security Regression Test

   URL:
   http://perforce.freebsd.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/
   soc2007/zhouzhouyi%5fmactest%5fsoc

   Contact: Zhouyi Zhou <zhouzhouyi_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Security Regression Test is supported by the project of Google summer
   code 2007. The main objective of this stage is to test the correctness
   of FreeBSD Mandatory Access Control Framework including correctly
   passing the security label from userland to kernel and
   non-bypassibility of Mandatory Access Control Hooks.

   Work performed in the last month:
    1. Constructed a pair of pseudo ethernet drivers used for testing
       network related hooks. To avoid the packet go through the lo
       interface, the IP address in the packet is twisted in the driver.
    2. Constructed a framework for logging Mandatory Access Control hooks
       which is got called during a period of time.
          + In kernel, every non-null label is got externalized into human
            readable string and recorded in a tail queue together with the
            name of hook that got called and possible flags or modes (etc.
            VREAD/VWRITE for mac_check_vnode_open hook). There is a thread
            much like audit subsystem's audit_worker logging the queue
            into a userspace file. The userland program use open, ioctl
            and close the /dev/mactest node to trigger and stop the
            logging. The logging file is truncated to zero every time the
            logging mechanism is triggered.
          + In userland, a bison based parsing tool is used to parse the
            logged file and reconstruct the record chain which will be
            compared with testsuite supplied configuration file to examine
            if expected hooks is got called and the label/flags/modes are
            correct. c) The testsuite mainly follows
            src/tools/regression/fstest, modified to adapt to test
            Mandatory Access Control Framework and include tests for
            signals

Open tasks:

    1. The code is quick and dirty. For example, a call to vn_open without
       checking its return value which is not fault tolerance. The coding
       style also needs modifications.
    2. Although a test framework is completely constructed, the detailed
       test cases still need to be written, the test cases beside fstest
       and signal need to be add.
    3. Testing of audit subsystem has not begin.
    4. Other parts of Security Subsystem in FreeBSD also need concern.
     __________________________________________________________________

Stack trace capture in PMCTools

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

   Contact: Joseph Koshy <jkoshy_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The kernel/hwpmc(4) bits of stack trace capture have been implemented
   and are available in Perforce under path
   '//depot/user/jkoshy/projects/pmc/...'. I'm currently enhancing
   pmcstat(8) to extract and summarize this information. Support by Google
   Inc. for this project is thankfully acknowledged.
     __________________________________________________________________

tarfs: A tar File System

   URL: http://www.googlebit.com/doku.php?id=tarfs

   Contact: Eric Anderson <anderson_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Tarfs is a simple tar file system implementation for FreeBSD.

   The current goals are:
     * Support all standard read-only operations
     * Support large tar files (several gb's)
     * Use minimal memory
     * Allow using tar file as a root file system
     * Fast enough to actually use

   Here's the current state of things:
     * Can mount most tar files
     * Can do most operations (open,lookup,stat,readdir,etc)
     * Supports large tar files (tested up to 2GB)
     * Uses a relatively small amount of memory - proportional to number
       of files/dirs

Open tasks:

    1. No `..' directory in root of mounted tar file system
    2. Locking issues regarding `..' in subdirs off root of fs
    3. No block/char special device support. Needed?
    4. Needs a directory hashing method
    5. More testing needed.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Foundation

   URL: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org

   Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD Foundation ended Q2 raising over $116,000. We're almost
   half way to our goal of raising $250,000 this year! We continued our
   mission of supporting developer communication by helping FreeBSD
   developers attend BSDCan. We were also a sponsor of BSDCan and the
   developer summit. We are a sponsor of EuroBSDCon 2007 and are now
   accepting travel grant applications for this conference. Foundation
   board members met with representatives of companies that use or are
   thinking of using FreeBSD both in the bay area and Ottawa.

   The Foundation has negotiated a joint development agreement with
   Google, Inc. to sponsor FreeBSD developer Joseph Koshy to improve
   FreeBSD's HWPMC implementation, including adding stacktrace support,
   and a donation of SMP hardware for future SMP scalability work. We
   greatly appreciate Google's support for this project, which will
   facilitate performance measurement and optimization of both the FreeBSD
   operating system and applications running on it.

   To learn more about what we're doing, go to our website at
   http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/ . Our July newsletter will be
   published soon to update you on how we've been supporting the project
   and community worldwide.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Hungarian Documentation Project

   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/hu/docproj/hungarian.html
   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/hu/
   URL:
   http://www.freebsd.org/doc/hu_HU.ISO8859-2/articles/linux-comparison/

   Contact: Gábor Kövesdán <gabor_at_FreeBSD.org>

   We have added one translated article since the last status report about
   this project. The infrastructure is ready to support localized articles
   and books as well, we just lack of human resource. New volunteers are
   highly welcome! Please see the link below and contact Gábor if you are
   interested.

Open tasks:

    1. Translate more articles and books.
     __________________________________________________________________

TrustedBSD Audit

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

   Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Christian Peron <csjp_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: <trustedbsd-audit_at_TrustedBSD.org>

   General cleanups in preparation for 7.0.

   Process audit state moved to the credential to allow it to be accessed
   lock-free in most cases, as well as allowing it to be used in
   asynchronous contexts.

   OpenBSM 1.0a14 has been imported, which: fixes IPv6 endian issues,
   makes OpenBSM gcc41 warnings clean, teaches audit_submit(3) about
   getaudit_addr(), adds zonename tokens; other changes since the existing
   CVS 1.0a12 release previously imported include man page improvements,
   XML printing support, better audit.log.5 documentation, additional
   64-bit token types, and new audit event identifiers.

   MAC checks have been added so that MAC policies can control use of
   audit system calls.

   Additional system call arguments are now audited.

   Audit now provides a security.audit sysctl node in order to determine
   if audit support is compiled in; boot-time console printfs have been
   removed.

   "options AUDIT" is now in the 7-CURRENT GENERIC kernel, so AUDIT
   support will be available out of the box in 7.0 without a kernel
   recompile. Manually enabling audit support in rc.conf will still be
   required. With FreeBSD 7.0, AUDIT will be a fully supported, rather
   than experimental, feature.
     __________________________________________________________________

TrustedBSD MAC Framework

   URL: http://www.TrustedBSD.org/mac.html

   Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: <trustedbsd-discuss_at_TrustedBSD.org>

   Cleanup of MAC Framework API/KPI layers: mac.h is now just the user and
   user<->kernel API; mac_framework.h is the kernel<->MAC Framework KPI,
   and mac_policy.h is the MAC Framework<->MAC policy module KPI. Along
   similar lines, mac_label_get() and mac_label_set() accessor functions
   now allow policies to access label data without encoding struct label
   binary layout into policy modules, opening the door to more efficient
   layouts. struct label is now in mac_internal.h and used only inside the
   MAC Framework.

   General MAC policy cleanup, including removing no-op entry points and
   sysctls for some sample policies. mac_test(4) has been cleaned up
   significantly, and counters for all entry points added.

   A MAC check for UNIX domain socket connect has been added.

   MAC checks have been added so that MAC policies can control use of
   audit system calls.

   MAC checks that duplicate existing privileges but add no additional
   context have been removed (such as sysarch_ioperm, kld_unload, settime,
   and system_nfsd) -- checks aligned with privileges but that do provide
   additional context, such as additional arguments, have been kept.

   The Biba and LOMAC policies now implement priv(9) checks,
   differentiating between privileges that may compromise system integrity
   models, and those that don't.

   The essentially unused mnt_fslabel / mnt_label distinction has been
   eliminated by moving to a single mnt_label. No functional change to any
   policy.

   Several MAC-related interfaces have been modified to synchronize with
   the naming conventions present in the version of the MAC Framework
   adopted in Mac OS X Leopard; significant further changes are in the
   pipeline to complete this synchronization. While it will not be
   possible to reuse a policy between the two platforms without careful
   thinking and modification, this makes porting much easier.
     __________________________________________________________________

TrustedBSD priv(9)

   URL: http://www.TrustedBSD.org/

   Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: <trustedbsd-discuss_at_TrustedBSD.org>

   Further reduction of suser(9) consumers in order to attempt to remove
   the suser(9) KPI for 7.0. This includes resource limits, System V IPC,
   PPP, netinet port reuse, the NFS server, and netatalk. Remove
   unnecessary or redundant privilege checks were possible. UFS-privileges
   that apply to other file systems have been renamed to VFS privileges.

   All suser_cred() flags and priv_check_cred() flags are no longer
   required, as SUSER_ALLOWJAIL and SUSER_RUID use are determined entirely
   inside kern_jail.c and kern_priv.c and selected based on the privilege
   number, not a calling context flag. All privileges are now consistently
   allowed or not allowed in jail, and consistently use the ruid or euid.
   We will leave the flags field there as it will likely be used for other
   things in the future.

   Documentation in suser(9) and priv(9) has been updated.
     __________________________________________________________________

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
   URL: http://www.turbocat.net/~hselasky/usb4bsd/dev_new_usb.pdf

   Contact: Hans Petter Sirevaag Selasky <hselasky_at_FreeBSD.org>

   During the last three months there has been several changes to the USB
   stack. Here is a quick list of the most important changes:
    1. FULL speed isochronous devices over HIGH speed USB Hubs are now
       fully supported. Due to various reasons the maximum isochronous
       bandwidth has been limited to 6MBit/s. This limit is tunable.
    2. There is now full support for Linux USB device drivers through a
       Linux USB API emulation layer.
    3. Various cleanups and fixes.

   Markus Brueffer is still working on the USB HID parser and support.
   Nothing has been committed yet.

   If you want to test the new USB stack, checkout the USB perforce tree
   or download the SVN version of the USB driver from my USB 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 .
     __________________________________________________________________

USB update

   Contact: Warner Losh <imp_at_FreeBSD.org>

   About 18 months ago, I started to remove the compatibility macros that
   we had in the USB stack. These macros made it very hard to read the
   code and to diagnose problems. They represented a barrier to entry for
   people reading and understanding the stack. In addition, many of them
   effectively hid bugs from all but the most intensive investigations of
   the code.

   I've removed almost all of the macros in the client drivers, and all
   instances of the macros in the core FreeBSD USB stack. This makes the
   drivers more readable, and a little more robust. During this process, I
   fixed a lot of little bugs that people had been tripping over, and some
   that people hadn't reported. I've added a boatload of new vendor and
   product ids to the drivers from user PRs as well as from OpenBSD/NetBSD
   drivers.

   I finished up this work so that the FreeBSD USB stack would be more
   maintainable during the RELENG_7 period of time. I plan on MFCing most
   of the changes I've made into RELENG_6 after they have been shaken out
   in current. There was only one API changes in this work, so this is
   doable, and makes sharing drivers between 6.x and 7.x much easier. At
   this stage, it is unclear how long RELENG_6 will be around, so I'm
   hoping this will make USB much better in 6.3 if that's the release
   people choose to run.

   I've shied away from many of the more complicated changes to the stack.
   There's work being done outside of the tree by Hans Petter Selasky
   (hps) to make these sorts of changes. There is much in his stack that's
   ready to be merged, and I hope to integrate from that work useful bits
   that can be merged without disruption to improve the FreeBSD USB stack.

   I'm also looking for other FreeBSD developers that can jump in and
   help. Nearly all of the improvements I've done by spending a few hours
   a week sorting through the PRs for extremely low hanging fruit. There's
   plenty of room for others to be involved as well in improving FreeBSD's
   USB stack, as well as chances for us to import the now-useful bits from
   the evolving hps USB stack, hopefully reducing the diffs between it and
   the present FreeBSD USB stack. In addition, I'm looking for someone to
   do similar device ID merges from DragonFlyBSD.

   Finally, I've embarked on a mission to try to merge all the BSD's
   usbdevs files. There's no reason to have separate ones. I've started to
   modify usbdevs(1) to read the src/sys/dev/usb/usbdevs file and report
   more verbose information that way. A merged usbdevs would be larger,
   and take up more memory in a USBVERBOSE kernel, so to mitigate that
   effect, I'm making changes to usbdevs(1).

Open tasks:

    1. The biggest area of concern before the 7.0 release is to get the
       updated device lists into the manual pages. This task is too big
       for me to take on in addition to the work I'm doing in cleaning up.
    2. We need more people that are willing to help out on the 'trivial'
       PRs that add IDs to the driver. In addition, we need people to
       periodically sync our driver lists with DragonFlyBSD, NetBSD, and
       OpenBSD drivers.
    3. Merging the other BSD's usbdevs tables would be very helpful.
    4. Writing a usbdevs parser for usbdevs(1) to use.
     __________________________________________________________________

Wireless Networking

   Contact: Sam Leffler <sam_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Andrew Thompson <thompsa_at_FreeBSD.org>

   A major update of the 802.11 wireless support was committed. Changes
   include advanced station mode facilities such as background scanning
   and roaming, and support for 802.11n devices. In addition parts of the
   Atheros' SuperG protocol extensions were added so that wireless clients
   that communicate with Atheros-based access points can operate more
   effectively. The changes to the infrastructure are also important
   because they simplify future distribution of Virtual AP (VAP) support.

   This work represents the effort of many people including Kip Macy,
   Andrew Thompson, Sepherosa Ziehau, Max Laier, and Kevin Lo. Getting
   these changes into the tree now ensures they will be present for the
   lifetime of the 7.x branch.

   The scanning and SuperG work were supported by Atheros. The
   802.11n-related work was supported by Marvell.

Open tasks:

    1. Please test your wireless networking, especially during the 7.0
       BETA and RC period.
     __________________________________________________________________

   © 1995-2007 The FreeBSD Project. All rights reserved.
Received on Tue Jul 10 2007 - 08:14:08 UTC

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