FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report for October - December 2009

From: Daniel Gerzo <danger_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:42:11 +0000
Introduction

   This report covers FreeBSD related projects between October and
   December 2009. This is the last of the four reports covering 2009,
   which has shown to be a very important year for the FreeBSD Project.
   Besides other notable things, a new major version of FreeBSD,
   8.0-RELEASE, has been released, while the release process for
   7.3-RELEASE is soon to begin.

   Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! We hope you enjoy
   reading. Let us also take this opportunity to wish you all a happy and
   successful new year for 2010.

   Please note that the deadline for submissions covering the period
   between January and March 2010 is April 15th, 2010.
     __________________________________________________________________

Google Summer of Code

     * BSD-licensed iconv

Projects

     * 3G USB support
     * Clang replacing GCC in the base system
     * FreeBSD TDM Framework
     * HAST -- Highly Available Storage
     * Intel XScale hwpmc(9) support
     * POSIX utmpx for FreeBSD
     * SUJ -- Journaled SoftUpdates
     * The webcamd deamon

FreeBSD Team Reports

     * FreeBSD Bugbusting Team
     * FreeBSD Release Engineering
     * The FreeBSD Foundation Status Report

Network Infrastructure

     * bwn(4) -- Broadcom Wireless driver
     * IP Payload Compression Protocol support
     * Ralink wireless RT2700U/2800U/3000U run(4) USB driver
     * Syncing pf(4) with OpenBSD 4.5
     * Wireless mesh networking

Kernel

     * CAM-based ATA implementation
     * Group Limit Increase
     * NFSv4 ACL support
     * V4L support in Linux emulator

Documentation

     * The FreeBSD German Documentation Project
     * The FreeBSD Hungarian Documentation Project
     * The FreeBSD Spanish Documentation Project

Architectures

     * Flattened Device Tree for embedded FreeBSD
     * FreeBSD/ia64
     * FreeBSD/mips
     * FreeBSD/sparc64

Ports

     * Chromium web browser
     * Ports Collection
     * VirtualBox on FreeBSD

Vendor / 3rd Party Software

     * DAHDI (Zaptel) support for FreeBSD
     * NVIDIA amd64 driver

Miscellaneous

     * AsiaBSDCon 2010 -- The BSD Conference
     * BSDCan 2010 -- The BSD Conference
     * meetBSD 2010 -- The BSD Conference
     * The FreeBSD Forums

Userland utilities

     * BSD-licensed text processing tools
     __________________________________________________________________

3G USB support

   Contact: Andrew Thompson <thompsa_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Recently, a bunch of new device IDs have been added for the u3g(4)
   cellular wireless driver; the list should be comparable now with other
   operating systems around. A lot of these devices have a feature where
   the unit first attaches as a disk or CD-ROM that contains the Win/Mac
   drivers. This state should be detected by the u3g driver and the usb
   device is sent a command to switch to modem mode. This has been working
   for quite some time but as it is implemented differently for each
   vendor I am looking for feedback on any units where the auto switchover
   is not working (or the init is not recognized at all). Please ensure
   you are running an up to date kernel, like r201681 or later from
   9.0-CURRENT, or 8-STABLE after the future merge of this revision.
     __________________________________________________________________

AsiaBSDCon 2010 -- The BSD Conference

   URL: http://2010.AsiaBSDCon.org/

   Contact: AsiaBSDCon Information <secretary_at_AsiaBSDCon.org>

   AsiaBSDCon is a conference for users and developers on BSD based
   systems. AsiaBSDCon is a technical conference and aims to collect the
   best technical papers and presentations available to ensure that the
   latest developments in our open source community are shared with the
   widest possible audience. The conference is for anyone developing,
   deploying and using systems based on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
   DragonFlyBSD, Darwin and MacOS X.

   The next conference will be held at the Tokyo University of Science,
   Tokyo, Japan, on 11th to 14th March, 2010.

   For more detailed information, please check the conference web site.
     __________________________________________________________________

BSD-licensed iconv

   URL:
   http://p4db.FreeBSD.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/soc2
   009/gabor_iconv

   Contact: Gábor Kövesdán <gabor_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Good compatibility has been ensured and there are only few pending
   items that have to be reviewed/enhanced. Recently, an enhancement has
   been completed, which makes it possible to accomplish better
   transliteration, just like in the GNU version. An initial testing patch
   is expected at the beginning of February.

Open tasks:

    1. Enhance conversion tables to make use of enhanced transliteration.
    2. A performance optimization might be done later.
     __________________________________________________________________

BSD-licensed text processing tools

   URL:
   http://p4db.FreeBSD.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/soc2
   008/gabor_textproc

   Contact: Gábor Kövesdán <gabor_at_FreeBSD.org>

   As 8.0-RELEASE is out, BSD bc/dc can be now committed to 9.0-CURRENT.
   We are only waiting for an experimental package building to make sure
   there are no regressions after this change. BSD grep is complete but it
   cannot be integrated yet because of some regex library issues. We need
   first a fast and modern regex library so that we can change to BSD
   grep. BSD sort has few incomplete features and needs some performance
   review.

Open tasks:

    1. Commit BSD bc/dc.
    2. Implement remaining features for sort and optimize performance.
     __________________________________________________________________

BSDCan 2010 -- The BSD Conference

   URL: http://www.BSDCan.org/2010/

   Contact: BSDCan Information <info_at_BSDCan.org>

   BSDCan, a BSD conference held in Ottawa, Canada, has quickly
   established itself as the technical conference for people working on
   and with 4.4BSD based operating systems and related projects. The
   organizers have found a fantastic formula that appeals to a wide range
   of people from extreme novices to advanced developers.

   BSDCan 2010 will be held on 13-14 May 2010 at the University of Ottawa,
   and will be preceded by two days of Tutorials on 11-12 May 2010.

   There will be related events (of a social nature, for the most part) on
   the day before and after the conference.

   Please check the conference web site for more information.
     __________________________________________________________________

bwn(4) -- Broadcom Wireless driver

   URL:
   http://p4db.FreeBSD.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/user/weongyo/
   wireless/src/sys/dev/bwn&HIDEDEL=NO

   Contact: Weongyo Jeong <weongyo_at_FreeBSD.org>

   bwn(4) is replacing bwi(4) driver for to the following reasons:
     * Uses latest v4 firmware image instead of using the much older v3
       firmware. In this way, we have some great benefits, such as support
       for N-PHYs and the fixes of various earlier firmware bugs.
     * Supports PIO mode. This is important because -- as you might know
       -- the Broadcom Wireless Driver is created by reverse-engineering
       so some pieces of hardware might not work with DMA operations.
     * Supports 64 bit DMA operations.
     * Separates bwi(4) driver into two parts; siba(4) driver and bwn(4)
       driver. Many Broadcom wireless and NIC devices are based on Silicon
       Sonics Backplane, such as bwi(4), which implemented the SIBA
       operations internally. This resulted in code duplication as other
       drivers had to implement their own routines to deal with SIBA. In
       the case of bwn(4), these two parts have been separated and
       implemented in their own kernel modules to avoid this problem and
       help further development by providing a standalone siba(4) driver.

   Currently, it is tested on big/little endian machines and 32/64-bit DMA
   operation with STA mode. A major patch for siba(4) is being reviewed
   before committing into 9.0-CURRENT.

Open tasks:

    1. MESH/IBSS/HOSTAP mode is not supported.
    2. LP/N PHYs are not supported.
     __________________________________________________________________

CAM-based ATA implementation

   Contact: Alexander Motin <mav_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Scott Long <scottl_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Existing ata(4) infrastructure, which has been around many years, has
   various problems and limitations when compared to modern
   controllers/device support. Although the CAM subsystem (used for SCSI)
   is almost as old as ata(4), it is more eligible to solve the current
   problems. To reduce code duplication and better support border cases
   such as ATAPI and SAS, we have started to develop a new CAM based ATA
   implementation.

   As such, CAM infrastructure has been extended to support different
   transports. New transport has been implemented to support PATA/SATA
   buses. To support ATA disks, a new CAM driver (ada) has been written.
   ATAPI devices are supported by existing SCSI drivers cd, da, sa, etc.
   To support SATA port-multipliers another new CAM driver (pmp) has been
   written. To support most featured and widespread SATA controllers, new
   drivers ahci(4) and siis(4) have been developed.

   To support legacy ATA controllers, a kernel option ATA_CAM has been
   added. When used, it makes all ata(4) controllers directly available to
   CAM, deprecating ata(4) peripheral drivers and external APIs. To make
   this possible, ata(4) code has been heavily refactored, making
   controller driver API stricter.

   Command queuing support gives new ATA implementation up to double
   performance benefit on some workloads, with 20-30% improvement quite
   usual.

   SATA Port Multiplier support makes it easy to build fast and cheap
   storage with huge capacities, by using dozens of SATA drives in one
   system or external enclosures,

   Some of that code has been presented in the recently released FreeBSD
   8.0-RELEASE but 8-STABLE now includes a much improved version.

Open tasks:

    1. Improve timeout and transport error recovery.
    2. Improve hot-plug support.
    3. Find and fix any show stoppers for legacy ata(4) deprecation.
    4. Write a new, more featured driver for Marvell SATA controllers
       (specifications desired).
    5. Write SAS-specific transport and drivers for SAS HBAs
       (specifications desired). SAS controllers can support SATA devices
       and multipliers, so it should fit nicely into the new
       infrastructure.
     __________________________________________________________________

Chromium web browser

   URL: http://chromium.jaggeri.com
   URL: http://www.links.org/?p=724

   Contact: Ben Laurie <ben_at_links.org>

   Chromium is a Webkit-based web browser that is largely BSD licensed. It
   has been ported from Linux to FreeBSD in October and we have been
   posting patches and test builds periodically since then. Chromium works
   well on FreeBSD -- it is very fast and stable but there are a handful
   of rough edges that need to be polished up. Two remaining bugs should
   probably be fixed before releasing a chromium-devel port. We are
   looking for volunteers to test and maintain this port to make this BSD
   browser a viable option on FreeBSD desktop systems.

Open tasks:

    1. Fix sporadic rendering freezes.
    2. Fix JavaScript interpreter, v8, on i386 architecture.
     __________________________________________________________________

Clang replacing GCC in the base system

   URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/BuildingFreeBSDWithClang

   Contact: Ed Schouten <ed_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Roman Divacky <rdivacky_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Pawel Worach <pawel.worach_at_gmail.com>

   We are again able to build bootable i386/amd64 kernel. Nathan Whitehorn
   committed a fix to FreeBSD, which enabled LLVM/clang to work mostly
   fine on PowerPC. There is some preliminary testing of LLVM/clang on ARM
   and MIPS being done. We have some ideas about sparc64 support which are
   currently being investigated. You are welcome to contact us if you want
   to help.

   Since the last report, a lot has happened mostly in the area of C++;
   clang is currently able to build working groff, gperf and devd, i.e.
   all of the C++ apps we have in base. Unfortunately, it still cannot
   build any of the C++ libraries -- two of them are missing builtins and
   libstdc++ is broken for other reasons.

   Not much happened in the clangbsd branch as we cannot upgrade the
   clang/llvm there because we are blocked by a bug that requires using
   newer assembler than we can ship. This might be solved by either fixing
   this (short term) or using llvm-mc instead of GNU as for assembling
   (longer term).

Open tasks:

    1. Help with ARM/MIPS/sparc64.
    2. More testing of clang on 3rd party apps (ports).
    3. Discussion on integrating LLVM/clang into FreeBSD.
     __________________________________________________________________

DAHDI (Zaptel) support for FreeBSD

   URL:
   http://www.mail-archive.com/asterisk-dev_at_lists.digium.com/msg39598.html
   URL: http://svn.digium.com/svn/dahdi/freebsd/trunk/

   Contact: Max Khon <fjoe_at_FreeBSD.org>

   A DAHDI support module for FreeBSD has been created in the official
   Asterisk SVN repository.

   The following drivers are currently ported:
     * main DAHDI driver
     * all software echo cancellation drivers
     * dahdi_dynamic
     * dahdi_dynamic_loc

   The following HW drivers are currently ported and tested:
     * wct4xxp, including HW echo cancellation support (Octasic)
          + Digium TE205P/TE207P/TE210P/TE212P: PCI dual-port T1/E1/J1
          + Digium TE405P/TE407P/TE410P/TE412P: PCI quad-port T1/E1/J1
          + Digium TE220: PCI-Express dual-port T1/E1/J1
          + Digium TE420: PCI-Express quad-port T1/E1/J1
     * wcb4xxp
          + Digium B410: PCI quad-port BRI
          + Junghanns.NET HFC-2S/4S/8S duo/quad/octoBRI
          + OpenVox B200P/B400P/B800P
          + BeroNet BN2S0/BN4S0/BN8S0

Open tasks:

    1. The port for dahdi_dynamic_eth and dahdi_dynamic_ethmf is underway.
    2. More HW drivers need to be ported.
    3. Please let me know if you can provide remote access with serial
       console to any box with ISDN/T1/E1 HW not currently supported by
       DAHDI for FreeBSD but supported by DAHDI for Linux. I am also
       interested in porting drivers for FXO/FXS cards. Please let me know
       if you can provide a remote access or donate a card.
     __________________________________________________________________

Flattened Device Tree for embedded FreeBSD

   URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/FlattenedDeviceTree
   URL:
   http://p4db.FreeBSD.org/changeList.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/fdt/...

   Contact: Rafal Jaworowski <raj_at_semihalf.com>

   The purpose of this project is to provide FreeBSD with support for the
   Flattened Device Tree (FDT) technology, the mechanism for describing
   computer hardware resources, which cannot be probed or self enumerated,
   in a uniform and portable way. The primary consumers of this technology
   are embedded FreeBSD platforms (ARM, AVR32, MIPS, PowerPC), where a lot
   of designs are based on similar chips but have different assignment of
   pins, memory layout, addresses bindings, interrupts routing and other
   resources.

   Current state highlights:
     * Environment, supported tools
          + Integrated device tree compiler (dtc) and libfdt into FreeBSD
            userspace, kernel and loader build
     * loader(8)
          + Full support for device tree blob handling
          + Load, traverse, modify (including add/remove) device tree
            nodes and properties
          + Pass the device tree blob to the kernel
          + Both ARM and PowerPC loader(8) supported
     * Kernel side FDT support (common)
          + Developed OF interface for FDT-backed platforms
          + ofw_bus I/F (and /dev/openfirm) available with FDT
          + Integrated FDT resources representation with newbus (fdtbus
            and simplebus drivers)
     * PowerPC kernel (Freescale MPC85XX SOC)
          + MPC8555CDS and MPC8572DS successfully converted to FDT
            conventions
     * ARM kernel (Marvell Orion, Kirkwood and Discovery SOC)
          + Work in progress on integrating FDT infrastructure with ARM
            platform code

   Work on this project has been sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation.

Open tasks:

    1. Complete missing pieces for PowerPC (PCI bridge driver conversion
       to FDT).
    2. Complete ARM support.
    3. Merge to SVN.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Bugbusting Team

   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/support.html#gnats
   URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/BugBusting
   URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~linimon/studies/prs/
   URL:
   http://people.FreeBSD.org/~linimon/studies/prs/recommended_prs.html
   URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~linimon/recommended_subscribers.txt

   Contact: Gavin Atkinson <gavin_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Mark Linimon <linimon_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Remko Lodder <remko_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Volker Werth <vwe_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Bugmeister Gavin Atkinson has now been granted a src commit bit, and is
   now starting to work through some of our backlog.

   The list of PRs recommended for committer evaluation by the Bugbusting
   Team continues to receive new additions; however, it has not yet
   achieved high visibility. (This list contains PRs, mostly with patches,
   that the Bugbusting Team consider potentially ready to be committed
   as-is, or are probably trivially resolved in the hands of a committer
   with knowledge of the particular subsystem.) One of the suggestions at
   the Cambridge devsummit was to create a way for people to be emailed
   the weekly summary that is posted to freebsd-bugs_at_, and this has now
   been implemented. Please email linimon_at_FreeBSD.org to ask to be added
   to the recommended_subscribers.txt file (see above).

   We continue to classify PRs as they arrive, adding 'tags' to the
   subject lines corresponding to the kernel subsystem involved, or man
   page references for userland PRs. These tags, in turn, produce lists of
   PRs sorted both by tag and by manpage. At this point most of the PRs
   that refer to supported versions of FreeBSD have been converted, and we
   are keeping up as new ones come in. We hope that this is making it
   easier to browse the PR database.

   The overall PR count jumped to over 6,200 during the 8.0-RELEASE
   release cycle but seems to have stabilized at around 6,100. As in the
   past, we have a fairly good clearance rate for ports PRs but much less
   so for other PRs. (Partly this is due to the concept of individual
   ports having 'maintainers'.)

Open tasks:

    1. Try to find ways to get more committers helping us with closing PRs
       that the team has already analyzed.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Release Engineering

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

   Contact: Release Engineering Team <re_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The Release Engineering Team announced FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE on November
   26th, 2009. With 8.0-RELEASE completed planning has begun for
   7.3-RELEASE. The schedule has been set with the release date planned
   for early March 2010.

   The Release Engineering Team would like to thank George Neville-Neil
   (gnn_at_) for his service on the team. George continues to work with the
   FreeBSD Project but has stepped down from the Release Engineering Team
   to focus on other activities.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD TDM Framework

   Contact: Rafal Czubak <rcz_at_semihalf.com>
   Contact: Michal Hajduk <mih_at_semihalf.com>

   Important changes regarding FreeBSD TDM Framework since the last status
   report:
     * Fully functional TDM controller driver for Marvell Kirkwood and
       Discovery SoCs.
     * Working voiceband channel character device driver.
     * Working Si3215, Si3050 codec drivers on corresponding FXS, FXO
       ports.
     * Demo application, which is capable of manipulating voiceband
       channel and codec state, starting/stopping channel transfers and
       echoing on single channel.
     * Preliminary version of driver bridging the voiceband infrastructure
       with Zaptel/DAHDI.

Open tasks:

    1. Improve various issues regarding working drivers and demo
       application.
    2. Test Si3050 codec driver operation with PSTN.
    3. Fully integrate voiceband infrastructure with Zaptel/DAHDI
       telephony hardware drivers.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD/ia64

   Contact: Marcel Moolenaar <marcel_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Work continues on our ia64 port. Many recent commits to help improve
   stability have been made to 9.0-CURRENT and MFCed to 8-STABLE.

   Due to interest from a very motivated user, package builds have been
   restarted for ia64-8. This is primarily intended as a QA step to
   discover and fix bugs on ia64, rather than to create packages for
   upload.

   Based on the above, Mark Linimon documented how to add more
   architectures to the package cluster scheduler. (This work will also be
   of use in an upcoming effort to start powerpc package builds.)

   There are currently 3 ia64 machines online and building packages. The
   machines seem stable as long as multiple simultaneous package builds
   are not attempted, in which case they get machine checks. This is
   puzzling, since other heavy workloads seem stable on the same machines.

Open tasks:

    1. Continue to try to understand why multiple simultaneous package
       builds bring the machines down.
    2. Upgrade the firmware on the two machines at Yahoo! to see if that
       helps the problem.
    3. Configure a fourth machine that has been made available to us.
    4. Figure out the problems with the latest GCC port on ia64.
    5. We can use some help with reviewing the ia64 platform pages and
       bringing them up-to-date.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD/mips

   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/mips/index.html
   URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD/mips

   Contact: The FreeBSD/mips mailing list <mips_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Warner Losh <imp_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The base/projects/mips branch has been merged into 9.0-CURRENT. The
   merge is complete and the sanity tests have passed. The code has booted
   on both a Ubiquiti RouterStation (big endian) as well as in gxemul
   (little endian).

   The branch lived for one year, minus a day, and accumulated much work:
     * A new port to the Atheros AR71xx series of processors. This port
       supports the RouterStation and RouterStation PRO boards from
       Ubiquiti. Other boards should work with minimal tweaking. This port
       should be considered as nearing production quality, and has been
       used extensively by the developers. The primary author of this port
       is Oleksandr Tymoshenko (gonzo_at_FreeBSD.org).
     * A new port to the SiByte BCM1250 SoC on the BCM91250 evaluation
       board (aka SWARM). This port is reported to be stable, but this
       hardware is a little old and not widely available. The primary
       author of this port is Neel Natu (neel_at_FreeBSD.org). Only one core
       is presently supported.
     * A port, donated by Cavium, to their Octeon and Octeon plus series
       of SoC (CN3xxx and CN5xxx). This code is preliminary, supporting
       only a single core right now. It has been lightly tested on the
       CN3860 evaluation board only in 32-bit mode. Warner Losh
       (imp_at_FreeBSD.org) has been driving the efforts to get this code
       into the tree.
     * A port, donated by RMI, to their XLR series of SoCs. This port is
       single core only, as well. The code reaches multi-user but should
       be considered beta quality for the moment. Randal Stewart
       (rrs_at_FreeBSD.org) has been driving the efforts to integrate this
       into the tree.
     * Preliminary support for building a mips64 kernel from this source
       base. More work is needed here, but at least two kernels
       successfully build in 64-bit mode (OCTEON1 and MALTA64).
     * Very early support for N32 and N64 ABIs
     * Support for booting compressed kernels has been added (gonzo_at_).
     * Improved support for debugging
     * Improved busdma and bus_space support
     * Many bug fixes
     * More types of MIPS cores are recognized
     * Expanded cache handling for newer processors
     * Beginning of a port to the alchemy au1XXX cpus is present, but
       experimental.
     * Work on SMP is underway to support multicore processors like the
       SiByte, Octeon and XLR processors.

   The development branch had been updated incorrectly several times over
   the past year, and the damage was too much to repair. We have retired
   the branch and will do further mips development in 9.0-CURRENT for the
   time being. If you have a checked out tree, the suggested way to update
   the projects/mips tree you have is to do a "svn switch
   svn://svn.FreeBSD.org/base/head" in that tree.

   I would like to thank everybody that has contributed time, code or
   hardware to make FreeBSD/mips better.

   As development proceeds, I will keep posting updates. In addition, I
   hope to have some mini "how-to" wiki pages done for people that want to
   try it out.

Open tasks:

    1. We are still investigating how feasible merging all this work into
       8-STABLE will be, as it represents a huge leap forward in code
       stability and quality.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD/sparc64

   Contact: Marius Strobl <marius_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The main thing that has taken place since the last Status Report is
   that I have gotten to the bottom of the remaining PCI problems with Sun
   Fire V215/V245 and support for these has been completed and since
   r202023 now is part of 9.0-CURRENT. With some luck it will also be part
   of the upcoming 7.3-RELEASE.

   Some other news:
     * Two bugs in the NFS server causing unaligned access and thus panics
       on sparc64 and all other architectures with strict alignment
       requirements (basically all Tier-2 ones) have been fixed. There
       likely will be a 8.0-RELEASE Erratum Notice released for these.
     * FreeBSD has been adopted to the changed firmware of newer Sun Fire
       V480 (those equipped with version 7 Schizo bridges) and has been
       reported to now run fine on these. The necessary change will be
       part of 7.3-RELEASE. Unfortunately, using the on-board NICs in
       older models of Sun Fire V480 (at least those equipped with version
       4 Schizo bridges) under FreeBSD still leads to the firmware issuing
       a FATAL RESET due to what appears to be a CPU bug, which needs to
       be worked around.
     * Work on supporting Sun Fire V1280 has been started but still is in
       very early stages. Unfortunately, these are rather quirky machines.
       After solving two firmware specialties the loader now is able to
       boot the kernel but the latter currently still fails in early
       cycles as trying to take the trap table over from the firmware
       results in a solid hang.
     __________________________________________________________________

Group Limit Increase

   Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Historically, FreeBSD has limited the number of supplemental groups per
   process to 15 (NGROUPS_MAX was incorrectly declared to be 16). In
   FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE we raised the limit to 1023, which should be
   sufficient for most users and will be acceptably efficient for
   incorrectly written applications that statically allocate NGROUPS_MAX +
   1 entries.

   Because some systems such as Linux 2.6 support a larger group limit, we
   have further relaxed this restriction in 9.0-CURRENT and made
   kern.ngroups a tunable value, which supports values between 1023 and
   INT_MAX - 1. We plan to merge this to 8-STABLE before 8.1-RELEASE.
     __________________________________________________________________

HAST -- Highly Available Storage

   URL:
   http://lists.FreeBSD.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2009-October/001279
   .html

   Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd_at_FreeBSD.org>

   HAST software will provide synchronous replication of any GEOM provider
   (eg. disk, partition, mirror, etc.) or file from one FreeBSD machine
   (primary node) to another one (secondary node).

   Because data is replicated at the block level neither applications, nor
   file systems have to be modified to take advantage of this
   functionality.

   The functionality that HAST software will provide is very similar to
   the functionality provided by the DRBD project for Linux.

   The HAST project is sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation.

   Work is progressing well; first milestone was reached in December 2009
   and the expected project completion date is January 31, 2010.

   Check out FreeBSD mailing lists for patches to test in February and
   wish me good luck!

   And by the way, do not forget to donate to the FreeBSD Foundation, as
   your donations make projects like this possible.

   Thank you!
     __________________________________________________________________

Intel XScale hwpmc(9) support

   Contact: Rui Paulo <rpaulo_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Preliminary Hardware Performance Counter support for Intel XScale ARM
   processors was committed to FreeBSD 9.0-CURRENT in December. This adds
   another supported architecture to hwpmc(9). The system works for basic
   performance counter usage but more advanced usage scenarios, namely
   callchain support, are not yet implemented.
     __________________________________________________________________

IP Payload Compression Protocol support

   Contact: Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz_at_FreeBSD.org>

   One of the longer outstanding feature problems with the FreeBSD IP
   security stack, broken IP Payload Compression Protocol (IPcomp)
   support, has been fixed.

   While working on the fix, various problems had been identified:
     * Problems with the IPcomp packet handling in IPsec.
     * opencrypto compression handling and deflate implementation
       limitations. These were debugged using DTrace SDT probes.
     * Problems due to an outdated version of zlib used in some parts of
       the network stack and by the opencrypto framework.

   Patches for all but the zlib support have been committed to 9.0-RELEASE
   and merged to all supported stable branches including 6-STABLE. Special
   thanks to Eugene Grosbein for helping with testing.

Open tasks:

    1. Fix ng_deflate so that we can make use of Kip Macy's work on an
       up-to-date unified zlib version in the kernel, which would also fix
       the last occasional IPcomp hiccups.
     __________________________________________________________________

meetBSD 2010 -- The BSD Conference

   URL: http://www.meetBSD.org

   Contact: meetBSD Information <info_at_meetBSD.org>

   The meetBSD conference is an annual event gathering users and
   developers of the BSD operating system family, mostly FreeBSD, NetBSD
   and OpenBSD. Afer the special California edition, meetBSD Wintercamp in
   Livigno, this year we are back to Krakow, Poland.

   In 2010, meetBSD will be held on 2-3 July at the Jagiellonian
   University.

   See the conference main web site for more details.
     __________________________________________________________________

NFSv4 ACL support

   URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/NFSv4_ACLs

   Contact: Edward Tomasz Napierala <trasz_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Native NFSv4 ACL support in ZFS and UFS has been committed into
   9.0-CURRENT. It is expected to be MFCed in order to make it into
   FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE.

Open tasks:

    1. Support for NFSv4 ACLs in tar(1).
    2. MFC.
     __________________________________________________________________

NVIDIA amd64 driver

   URL: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=142120

   Contact: John Baldwin <jhb_at_FreeBSD.org>

   NVIDIA has released the first BETA version of its graphics drivers for
   FreeBSD/amd64. Note that this driver will work on FreeBSD versions
   7.3-RELEASE or 8.0-RELEASE and later. It also works on very recent
   versions of 7.2-STABLE. More details are provided in the official
   release announcement.
     __________________________________________________________________

Ports Collection

   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
   URL:
   http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing-ports/
   URL: http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/index.html
   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/portmgr/index.html
   URL: http://tinderbox.marcuscom.com

   Contact: Mark Linimon <linimon_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Most of the recent activity has been dealing with the 8.0-RELEASE
   process. As an experiment, we have tried to decouple the ports QA
   timeline as much as possible from the src QA timeline. Although this
   meant that the impact on people actively maintaining and using ports
   has been much less than in previous releases, it still has not solved
   the problem of the release going out with a stale set of packages. We
   are still trying to come up with a better solution for the problem.

   The ports count is over 21,000. The PR count jumped to over 1,000 but
   is now back to around 950.

   We are currently building packages for amd64-6, amd64-7, amd64-8,
   i386-6, i386-7, i386-8, i386-9, ia64-8, sparc64-7, and sparc64-8. This
   represents the addition of i386-9 and ia64-8 since the last report.

   There has been some discussion of when to drop regular package builds
   for 6.X but no decision has been made yet. The cluster and the port
   managers are struggling to keep up with so many branches being active
   all at the same time.

   Mark Linimon continues to make progress on the cluster nodes. Almost
   every node that does not have a hard disk failure is now online. In
   addition, he continues to make progress debugging problems that
   occasionally take nodes offline.

   The next task is to characterize the overall performance of the build
   cluster. The question has been asked of us, "what would it take to
   speed up package builds?" There is no one simple answer. It is not
   merely a matter of having a larger number of package building machines,
   so before asking for funding we first need to identify the current
   bottlenecks. While we are starting to understand the problems on the
   nodes, the problems on the dispatch machine itself are much harder.
   Complicating the matter is that there are several periodic processes
   (ZFS backup, ZFS expiration, and errorlog compression, among others)
   that can combine to slow that machine significantly. The simultaneous
   interaction of all these is proving difficult to quantify.

   Between Pav Lucistnik and Martin Wilke, many more experimental ports
   runs have been completed and committed.

   We have added 3 new committers since the last report, and 1 older one
   has rejoined us.

Open tasks:

    1. We are still trying to set up ports tinderboxes that can be made
       available to committers for pre-testing.
    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 more than
       4,700 unmaintained ports. (See, for instance, the list on portsmon.
       The percentage remains steady at just over 22%.) We are always
       looking for dedicated volunteers to adopt at least a few
       unmaintained ports. As well, the packages on amd64 and especially
       sparc64 lag behind i386, and we need more testers for those.
     __________________________________________________________________

POSIX utmpx for FreeBSD

   URL:
   http://lists.FreeBSD.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-January/014893.
   html
   URL:
   http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/endutxent.html
   URL:
   http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/lib/libc/gen/utmpx.c
   URL:
   http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/lib/libc/
   port/gen/getutx.c

   Contact: Ed Schouten <ed_at_FreeBSD.org>

   On January 13, I removed the utmp user accounting database and replaced
   it with a new POSIX utmpx implementation. Unfortunately, the upgrade
   path is a bit complex, because the utmp interface provided almost no
   library interface to interact with the database files.

   This change may have caused some regressions. Some ports may fail to
   build, while there could also be bugs in the library functions.

Open tasks:

    1. Get a list of broken ports.
    2. Fix them to comply to standards.
    3. Send patches upstream.
     __________________________________________________________________

Ralink wireless RT2700U/2800U/3000U run(4) USB driver

   URL: http://forums.FreeBSD.org/showthread.php?t=7562

   Contact: Akinori Furukoshi <moonlightakkiy_at_yahoo.ca>

   The run(4) driver brings support for Ralink RT2700U/2800U/3000U USB
   wireless devices. For detailed information and list of all the
   supported devices, please see the above mentioned URL. The source code
   has been imported to the USB P4 repository on January 10, 2010
   (172906).

Open tasks:

    1. Solve USB_TIMEOUT problem when sending beacons, and/or confirm
       which chipsets supports AP mode if all of them do not support it.
    2. Read TX stats for AMRR on AP mode, and/or confirm which chipsets
       supports AP mode if all of them do not support it.
    3. Maintain the code.
     __________________________________________________________________

SUJ -- Journaled SoftUpdates

   URL: http://jeffr_tech.livejournal.com/

   Contact: Jeff Roberson <jeff_at_FreeBSD.org>

   I have been adding a small intent log to SoftUpdates to eliminate the
   requirement for fsck after an unclean shutdown. This work has been
   funded by Yahoo!, iXsystems, and Juniper. Kirk McKusick has been aiding
   me with design critiques and helping me better understand SoftUpdates.

   Extensive testing by myself and Peter Holm has yielded a stable patch.
   Current users are encouraged to follow the instructions posted to the
   current_at_FreeBSD.org mailing list to verify stability in your own
   workloads. Updates are forthcoming and it is expected to be merged to
   9.0-CURRENT before the end of January. Ports to older versions of
   FreeBSD will be available in SVN under alternate branches. Official
   backports will be decided by re_at_ when 9.0-CURRENT is stable.

   The changes are fully backwards and forwards compatible as there are
   very few metadata changes to the filesystem. The journal may be enabled
   or disabled on existing FFS filesystems using tunefs(8). The log
   consumes 64 MB of space at maximum and fsck time is bounded by the size
   of the log rather than the size of the filesystem. Other details are
   available in my technical journal.
     __________________________________________________________________

Syncing pf(4) with OpenBSD 4.5

   URL: http://svn.FreeBSD.org/viewvc/base/user/eri/pf45/
   URL: http://svn.FreeBSD.org/base/user/eri/pf45/head/

   Contact: Ermal Luçi <eri_at_FreeBSD.org>

   This import is based on OpenBSD 4.5 state of pf(4). It includes many
   improvements over the code currently present in FreeBSD. The actual new
   feature present in pf45 repository is support for divert(4), which
   should allow tools like snort_inline to work with pf(4) too.

   Currently, the pf(4) import is considered stable with normal kernel, as
   well as VIMAGE enabled kernels.

Open tasks:

    1. pflow(4)/pflog(4)/pfsync(4) need to be made VIMAGE aware.
    2. More regression testing is needed.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Forums

   URL: http://forums.FreeBSD.org/

   Contact: FreeBSD Forums Admins <forum-admins_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: FreeBSD Forums Moderators <forum-moderators_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Since the last report we have seen a growth of 2,000 users on our
   forums resulting in approximately 10,000 registered users at this time.
   The posts count is about to reach 60,000 soon, which are contained in
   almost 9,000 threads.

   The sign-up rate still hovers between 50-100 each week. The total
   number of visitors (including 'guests') is currently hard to gauge, but
   is likely to be a substantial multiple of the registered userbase.

   New topics and posts are actively 'pushed out' to search engines. This
   in turn makes the forums show up in search results more and more often,
   making it a valuable and very accessible source of information for the
   FreeBSD community.

   One of the contributing factors to the forums' success is their
   'BSD-style' approach when it comes to administration and moderation.
   The forums have a strong and unified identity and are very actively
   moderated, spam-free, and with a core group of very active and helpful
   members, dispensing many combined decades' worth of knowledge to
   starting, intermediate and professional users of FreeBSD.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Foundation Status Report

   URL: http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/
   URL: https://twitter.com/freebsdfndation

   Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb_at_FreeBSDFoundation.org>

   Despite a difficult economy, we more than doubled our number of donors,
   we raised $269K towards our goal of $300K, and with an improved economy
   hope to surpass that this year.

   We have funded two new projects. One is the Flattened Device Tree by
   Rafal Jaworowski. And, the second one is Highly Available Storage by
   Pawel Jakub Dawidek. We continued supporting the New Console Driver by
   Ed Schouten and Improvements to the FreeBSD TCP Stack by Lawrence
   Stewart. We also purchased equipment for several projects.

   We have big plans for the new year! We are going to significantly
   increase our project development and equipment spending. Stay tuned for
   a project proposal submission announcement soon. We just announced that
   we are accepting travel grant applications for AsiaBSDCon and will be
   accepting them soon for BSDCan. And, we are working on infrastructure
   projects to beef up hardware for package-building, network-testing,
   etc.

   Read more about how we supported the project and community by reading
   our end-of-year newsletter available at
   http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/press/2009Dec-newsletter.shtml.

   We are fund-raising for 2010 now! Find out more at
   http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/donate/.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD German Documentation Project

   URL: http://doc.bsdgroup.de

   Contact: Johann Kois <jkois_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Benedict Reuschling <bcr_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Martin Wilke <miwi_at_FreeBSD.org>

   We are happy to announce that Benedict Reuschling is now free from
   mentorship and can commit to the documentation tree on his own.

   Since the last status report, the German Documentation Team has chased
   updates to various sections of the FreeBSD Handbook, FAQ and the German
   website. Many handbook pages have been updated to the latest version,
   including chapters about configuration, disks, kernel configuration,
   printing, multimedia and virtualization.

   We require help from volunteers that are willing to contribute bug
   fixes or translations. The following documents need active
   maintainership and are a good training ground for those willing to join
   the translation team:
     * arch-handbook/jail/
     * developers-handbook/I10n/
     * developers-handbook/policies/
     * developers-handbook/sockets/ (translation from scratch)
     * handbook/firewalls/ (translation from scratch)
     * handbook/security/
     * porters-handbook/

Open tasks:

    1. Read the translations and report bugs to
       de-bsd-translators_at_de.FreeBSD.org.
    2. Translate articles or missing sections listed above.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Hungarian Documentation Project

   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/hu/
   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/hu/
   URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/HungarianDocumentationProject
   URL:
   http://p4web.FreeBSD.org/_at_md=d&cd=//depot/projects/docproj_hu/&c=aXw_at_//
   depot/projects/docproj_hu/?ac=83

   Contact: Gábor Kövesdán <gabor_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Gábor Páli <pgj_at_FreeBSD.org>

   In the last months, no new translation has been added. Lacking human
   resources, we can only manage to keep the existing documentation and
   web page translations up to date. If you are interested in helping us,
   please contact us via the the email addresses noted above.

Open tasks:

    1. Translate release notes.
    2. Add more article translations.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Spanish Documentation Project

   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/es/articles/fdp-es/
   URL: https://listas.es.FreeBSD.org/mailman/listinfo/doc

   Contact: Gábor Kövesdán <gabor_at_FreeBSD.org>

   There is one article translation pending review. Apart from this,
   neither translations nor maintainance work have been done. We need more
   volunteers, mostly translators but we are glad to have more reviewers,
   as well. One can join by simply subscribing to the translators' mailing
   list where all the work is done.

Open tasks:

    1. Update Handbook translation.
    2. Update webpage translation.
    3. Add more article translations.
     __________________________________________________________________

The webcamd deamon

   URL: http://www.selasky.org/hans_petter/video4bsd/

   Contact: Hans Petter Selasky <hselasky_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The webcamd daemon enables hundreds of different USB based webcam
   devices to be used under the FreeBSD-8/9 operating system. The webcam
   daemon is basically an application, which is a port of Video4Linux USB
   webcam drivers into userspace on FreeBSD. The daemon currently depends
   on libc, pthreads, libusb and the VIDEO4BSD kernel module.

Open tasks:

    1. Add support for the remaining Video4Linux USB devices.
    2. Make patches for increased buffer sizes, due to higher latency in
       userspace. Especially for High Speed USB.
     __________________________________________________________________

V4L support in Linux emulator

   URL: http://opal.com/freebsd/sys/compat/linux/

   Contact: J.R. Oldroyd <fbsd_at_opal.com>

   V4L video support in the Linux emulator is now available.

   This work allows Linux applications using V4L video calls to work with
   existing FreeBSD video drivers that provide V4L interfaces. It is
   tested and working with the net/skype port and also with browser-based
   Flash applications that access webcams. An early version has been
   committed to 9.0-CURRENT and work is in progress to commit the latest
   version and then MFC. It is also tested on FreeBSD-8.0/amd64 and
   FreeBSD-7.2/i386.

   Note: to be clear, this does not add V4L support to all webcams. The
   FreeBSD camera driver must already offer V4L support itself in order
   for a Linux application to be able to use that camera. The
   multimedia/pwcbsd port provides the pwc(4) driver that already has V4L
   support. If your camera is supported by a different driver, you will
   need to enhance that driver to add V4L support.
     __________________________________________________________________

VirtualBox on FreeBSD

   URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/VirtualBox

   Contact: Beat Gaetzi <beat_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Bernhard Froehlich <decke_at_bluelife.at>
   Contact: Juergen Lock <nox_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Martin Wilke <miwi_at_FreeBSD.org>

   VirtualBox 3.1.2 has been committed to the ports tree.

   Several changes to the port have been performed with this update
   including:
     * Port has been renamed to virtualbox-ose to reflect that we are now
       using the OSE version.
     * A seperate port for the kernel modules has been created --
       virtualbox-ose-kmod.
     * A seperate port for guest additions for FreeBSD guests has been
       created -- virtualbox-ose-additions.
     * Proper FreeBSD support for PulseAudio has been added.
     * Procfs is not required anymore because vbox uses sysctl(3) now.
     * Juergen Lock's FreeBSD host networking patches have been added.
       They are now also in the upstream vbox SVN (modulo vbox variable
       naming style adjustments).
     * Allow direct tap networking again (for users that need the best
       network performance and/or need more complex network setups, like
       when they want to use routing instead of bridging to e.g. protect
       guests from messing with the lan's ARP tables; a tap + routing +
       proxy arp example is in the above freebsd-emulation_at_ posting.)
     * Enable vbox's shared MAC feature when using bridged mode on a Wifi
       interface, together with the virtualbox-ose-kmod change this should
       fix bridged mode for Wifi users.
     * We would like to say thanks to all the people that helped us by
       reporting bugs and submitting fixes. We also thank the VirtualBox
       developers for their help with the ongoing effort to port
       VirtualBox to FreeBSD
     __________________________________________________________________

Wireless mesh networking

   URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/WifiMesh

   Contact: Rui Paulo <rpaulo_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Development of the FreeBSD 802.11s stack continues. The code in FreeBSD
   HEAD has been updated to comply with draft 4.0. Merge to FreeBSD
   8-STABLE will be done soon.

   The developer is looking for funding to be able to implement mesh link
   security algorithms and/or coordinated channel access (performance
   improvement).
Received on Sun Jan 17 2010 - 16:42:11 UTC

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