FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Third Quarter 2018

From: Edward Tomasz Napierała <trasz_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2018 00:00:01 +0000
FreeBSD Project Quarterly Status Report - 3rd Quarter 2018

   With FreeBSD having gone all the way to 12, it is perhaps useful to
   take a look back at all the things that have been accomplished, in
   terms of many visible changes, as well as all the things that happen
   behind the scenes to ensure that FreeBSD continues to offer an
   alternative in both design, implementation, and execution.

   The things you can look forward to reading about are too numerous to
   summarize, but cover just about everything from finalizing releases,
   administrative work, optimizations and depessimizations, features added
   and fixed, and many areas of improvement that might just surprise you a
   little.

   Please have a cup of coffee, tea, hot cocoa, or other beverage of
   choice, and enjoy this culmulative set of reports covering everything
   that's been done since October, 2017.

   --Daniel Ebdrup
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Team Reports

     * Continuous Integration
     * Core Team
     * Ports Collection
     * Release Engineering Team
     * The FreeBSD Foundation

Projects

     * 32-bit compatibility and other ABI cleanups
     * 4G/4G address space split for i386
     * ACPI NVDIMM driver
     * Boot Loader
     * Building FreeBSD on non-FreeBSD hosts
     * Device Mode USB
     * ENA FreeBSD Driver Update
     * FreeBSD Graphics Team
     * FreeBSD/DTrace
     * ifuncs
     * Intel Work on Core Enabling and Security
     * Large scale package building
     * LLVM 7.0 - Sanitizers support improvements / Static code analysis
     * Performance improvements
     * Save/Restore/Migration support in bhyve
     * SMAP
     * String functions on the amd64 architecture
     * Usermode mapping of PCI BARs

Architectures

     * Allwinner SoC Support
     * Armada 38x FreeBSD support
     * ARMv6 and ARMv7 image now use EFI loader
     * DTS Update
     * FreeBSD on POWER9
     * FreeBSD on PowerNV (ppc64)
     * FreeBSD on RISC-V
     * PINE64-LTS Image
     * PocketBeagle Support
     * RPI Firmware/DTB/U-Boot Update

Ports

     * KDE on FreeBSD
     * Puppet
     * scarab: CLI tool for Bugzilla-related workflows

Documentation

     * Cleaning up the Wiki
     * Quarterly Reports

Third-Party Projects

     * HardenedBSD 2018Q3 Update
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Team Reports

   Entries from the various official and semi-official teams, as found in
   the Administration Page.

Continuous Integration

   Links
   FreeBSD Jenkins Instance
    URL: https://ci.FreeBSD.org
   FreeBSD CI artifact archive
    URL: https://artifact.ci.FreeBSD.org/
   FreeBSD Jenkins wiki
    URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Jenkins
   freebsd-testing Mailing List
    URL: https://lists.FreeBSD.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-testing
   freebsd-ci Repository
    URL: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ci

   Contact: Jenkins Admin <jenkins-admin_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD CI team maintains continuous integration tasks for FreeBSD.
   The CI system regularly checks the changes committed to the project's
   Subversion repository can be successfully built, and performs various
   tests and analysis with the build results. The CI team also maintains
   the archive of the artifact built by the CI system, for the further
   testing and debugging needs.

   Starting from June 2018, the project is sponsored by the FreeBSD
   Foundation in hardware and staff. For more details of the sponsored
   projects, please refer to:

   https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/newsletter/freebsd-fo
   undation-update-september-2018/

   In addition to that, we also helped checking regressions for OpenSSL
   1.1.1 update and test continuously for 12-STABLE branch.

   We had meetings and working groups at two developer summits during
   2018Q3:
     * BSDCam 2018
     * EuroBSDCon 2018

   Work in progress:
     * Fixing the failing test cases and builds
     * DTrace test
     * ZFS test
     * GCC build
     * Adding drm ports building test against -CURRENT
     * Adding tests for selected project branches, e.g.: clang700-import
     * Adding new hardware to the embedded testbed
     * Implementing automatic tests on bare metal hardware
     * Planning running ztest and network stack tests
     __________________________________________________________________

Core Team

   Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <core_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Much of Core's focus for the past months has been on three items:

   1. Coordination between different groups to support the upcoming 12.0
   release. The timing of the OpenSSL 1.1.1 release posed challenges, the
   new OpenSSL version included API changes, many components of the base
   system and ports required changes. Staying with the older OpenSSL in
   12.0 was not a feasible option, because it would have meant backporting
   many changes to a version of OpenSSL that would be unmaintained by the
   upstream source.

   2. Discussions with the release engineering team and Scott Long about
   updating the FreeBSD release process. Topics for exploration include:
     * having more frequent point releases
     * changing the support model
     * revising and improving the tooling used to manage the tree and
       releases
     * additional topics as they are discovered

   3. Gathering information to make decisions more data-driven. For
   example, we are planning developer and user surveys. If there are
   questions that you think should be added to the survey, please discuss
   them on freebsd-arch_at_. We are exploring ways for automated user-driven
   hardware usage data to understand the changing ways our software is
   used and to target better hardware support.

   Here are other noteworthy events (in chronological order) since the
   last quarterly report.

   2017 Q4
     * Sean Eric Fagan's (sef_at_) commit bit was reactivated with a period
       of re-mentoring under Alexander Motin (mav_at_).
     * The MIPS architecture was promoted to tier 2 status.
     * Core approved changes to the Code of Conduct.
     * All fortune data files, except freebsd-tips, were removed in
       r325828.
     * Core approved the adoption of a policy requiring any license
       exceptions to be recorded alongside code.
     * Gordon Tetlow (gordon_at_) became the new security officer.
     * Core approved the use of SPDX tags.

   2018 Q1
     * Jeb Cramer (jeb_at_) was awarded a src commit bit under the mentorship
       of Sean Bruno (sbruno_at_) and Eric Joyner (erj_at_).
     * Members of the CoC Review Team were approved. The membership is to
       be reviewed once per year.
     * A vendor commit bit was awarded to Slava Shwartsman (slavash_at_) of
       Mellanox Technologies under the mentorship of Konstantin Belousov
       (kib_at_) and Hans Petter Selasky (hselasky_at_).
     * Walter Schwarzenfeld was awarded project membership.
     * Brad Davis (brd_at_) was awarded a src commit bit under the mentorship
       of Allan Jude (allanjude_at_) with Baptiste Daroussin (bapt_at_) as
       co-mentor.
     * Vincenzo Maffione (vmaffione_at_) was awarded a src commit bit under
       the mentorship of Hiroki Sato (hrs_at_).
     * Ram Kishore Vegesna (ram_at_) was awarded a src commit bit under the
       mentorship of Kenneth D. Merry (ken_at_) and Alexander Motin (mav_at_).

   2018 Q2
     * Tom Jones (thj_at_) was awarded a src commit bit under the mentorship
       of Jonathan T. Looney (jtl_at_).
     * Matt Macy's (mmacy_at_) commit bit was restored under the mentorship
       of Sean Bruno (sbruno_at_).
     * Breno Leitao (leitao_at_) was awarded a src commit bit under the
       mentorship of Justin Hibbits (jhibbits_at_) with Nathan Whitehorn
       (nwhitehorn_at_) as co-mentor.
     * Leandro Lupori (luporl_at_) was awarded a src commit bit under the
       mentorship of Justin Hibbits (jhibbits_at_) with Nathan Whitehorn
       (nwhitehorn_at_) as co-mentor.
     * The handover from the ninth to the tenth elected Core team took
       place. The tenth Core members are: Allan Jude (allanjude_at_),
       Benedict Reuschling (bcr_at_), Brooks Davis (brooks_at_), Hiroki Sato
       (hrs_at_), Warner Losh (imp_at_), Jeff Roberson (jeff_at_), John Baldwin
       (jhb_at_), Kris Moore (kmoore_at_), and Sean Chittenden (seanc_at_).
     * Joseph Mingrone (jrm_at_) was appointed the Core secretary under
       mentorship of the retiring Core secretary, Matthew Seaman
       (matthew_at_).
     * The new team liaisons were decided. portmgr: Sean, doceng: Hiroki,
       secteam: Brooks, re: John, clusteradm: Allan, CoC: Warner,
       Foundation: Benedict, bugmeister: John, CI: Sean.
     * David Maxwell (dwm_at_) was awarded project membership.
     * Daichi Goto's (daichi_at_) commit bit was reactivated with a period of
       re-mentoring under George Neville-Neil (gnn_at_).
     * A vendor commit bit was awarded to Ben Widawsky (bwidawsk_at_) of
       Intel under the mentorship of Ed Maste (emaste_at_).

   2018 Q3
     * Core decided to begin meeting twice per month in an attempt to
       catch up with many new agenda items.
     * Li-Wen Hsu (lwhsu_at_) was awarded a src commit bit under the
       mentorship of Mark Johnston (markj_at_) with Ed Maste (emaste_at_) as
       co-mentor.
     * Samy al Bahra was awarded project membership.
     * George Neville-Neil (gnn_at_) was approved to begin co-mentoring
       Vincenzo Maffione (vmaffione_at_).
     __________________________________________________________________

Ports Collection

   Links
   About FreeBSD Ports
    URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
   Contributing to ports
    URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing/ports-contributing.html
   FreeBSD ports monitoring
    URL: http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/index.html
   Ports Management Team
    URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/portmgr/index.html
   FreeBSD portmgr (_at_freebsd_portmgr)
    URL: https://twitter.com/freebsd_portmgr/
   FreeBSD Ports Management Team (Facebook)
    URL: https://www.facebook.com/portmgr
   FreeBSD Ports Management Team (Google+)
    URL: https://plus.google.com/communities/108335846196454338383

   Contact: René Ladan <portmgr-secretary_at_FreeBSD.org>

   During the first quarter of 2018, the number of ports grew to almost
   32,000. In 2018Q1, there were 2,100 open PRs with fewer than 600
   unassigned. There were 7,900 commits from 169 committers. Compared to
   last quarter, the number of commits grew by 18% and the number of PRs
   dropped by 25%. Those are some good numbers!

   During the 2018Q2 and 2018Q3 quarters, the number of ports grew to just
   under 34,000. The number of open PR grew to almost 2,500 with fewer
   than 600 of those unassigned. A total of 175 committers made almost
   14,200 commits. Compared to the first quarter, the number of commits
   dropped by 10% and the number of PRs grew by 19%.

   During the last three quarters, portmgr took twelve commit bits in for
   safekeeping: daichi_at_, deichen_at_, ian_at_, junovitch_at_, kevlo_at_, maho_at_,
   nemysis_at_, pawel_at_, rea_at_, tabthorpe_at_, vg_at_, and wxs_at_.

   Portmgr welcomed thirteen new committers in 2018Q2 and 2018Q3:
     * Devin Teske (dteske_at_)
     * Eric Turgeon (ericbsd_at_)
     * Fernando Apesteguía (fernape_at_)
     * Fukang Chen (loader_at_)
     * Gleb Popov (arrowd_at_)
     * Jesper Schmitz Mouridsen (jsm_at_)
     * John Hixson (jhixson_at_)
     * Kevin Bowling (kbowling_at_)
     * Koichiro IWAO (meta_at_)
     * Mateusz Piotrowski (0mp_at_)
     * Matthias Fechner (mfechner_at_)
     * Sergey Kozlov (skozlov_at_)

   The following committers returned after a hiatus:
     * Ion-Mihai Tetcu (itetcu_at_)
     * Kevin Lo (kevlo_at_)
     * Sean Chittenden (seanc_at_)

   During the last three quarters, Antoine Brodin (antoine_at_) ran no fewer
   than 113 exp-runs against the ports tree. These runs were executed to
   test updates, perform cleanups, and make improvements to the framework
   and the base system. Most of the runs were for port upgrades, but
   others include LLD progress, changes to the default port versions,
   improved support for armv6, armv7, and RISC-V architectures, removed
   old base system functionality, new USES, and better matching pkg-plist
   with Makefile options (DOCS and EXAMPLES).

   Five new USES values were introduced:
     * apache: handle dependencies on the Apache web server and modules
     * eigen: automatically depend on math/eigen2 or math/eigen3
     * emacs: handle dependencies on the Emacs editor and modules.
     * gl replaces the old USE_GL from bsd.port.mk
     * qt-dist, qt:4 and qt:5 replace the old USE_QT from bsd.qt.mk

   The EXTRA_PATCHES functionality has been extended to support
   directories, where it will automatically apply all patch-\* files to
   the port.

   Ports using USES=php:phpize, php:ext, php:zend, and php:pecl have been
   flavored and packages are now automatically built for all versions of
   PHP that are supported (5.6, 7.0, 7.1 or 7.2).

   2018Q3 had updates of major ports: pkg 1.10.5, Chromium 65.0.3325.181,
   Firefox 59.0.2, Firefox-ESR 52.7.3, Ruby 2.3.7/2.5.1 and Qt5 5.9.4. The
   default version of PHP was changed from 5.6 to 7.1. The former version
   of PHP is no longer supported by the developers. The default versions
   of Samba and GCC are now respectively 4.7 and 7. The Xorg ports have
   been reorganized and there have been changes to net/openntpd. Please
   review the UPDATING file for relevant details.

   Open tasks:
     * The number of commits dropped somewhat over the last three
       quarters, leaving more PRs unresolved. If possible, please pick up
       some PRs and improve everyone's experience.
     __________________________________________________________________

Release Engineering Team

   Links
   FreeBSD 10.4-RELEASE announcement
    URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/10.4R/announce.html
   FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE announcement
    URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/11.2R/announce.html
   FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE schedule
    URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/12.0R/schedule.html
   FreeBSD development snapshots
    URL: https://download.FreeBSD.org/ftp/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/

   Contact: FreeBSD Release Engineering Team <re_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team responsibilities include:
     * setting and publishing release schedules for official project
       releases of FreeBSD
     * announcing code slushes, freezes, and thaws
     * maintaining the respective branches for all supported releases

   The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team, led by Marius Strobl, completed
   the 10.4-RELEASE in early October 2017. FreeBSD 10.4-RELEASE was the
   fifth release from the stable/10 branch, which built on the stability
   and reliability of 10.3-RELEASE.

   The FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE cycle started April 20, 2018 with the
   announcement of the code slush. The first stage progress was continued
   throughout the rest of the quarter with the code freeze, followed by
   three BETA builds, three RC builds, and the final release build was
   announced June 27, 2018.

   The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team started the 12.0-RELEASE cycle
   August 10, 2018 with the announcement of the code slush. The code
   freeze followed on August 24, 2018. The tentative date for the
   stable/12 branch was expected to be September 21, 2018.

   Due to unforeseen circumstances with upstream code that was necessary
   to include in 12.0-RELEASE, the tentative release schedule needed to be
   adjusted several times. The API changes in the updated version of the
   upstream code required changes to be made for all base system utilities
   that linked with the upstream code. By the end of the 2018Q3 quarter,
   the stable/12 branch had not been created due to this delay.

   Throughout the remainder of 2018Q3, several development snapshots
   builds were released for the head, stable/11, and stable/10 branches.

   Much of this work was sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Foundation

   Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb_at_FreeBSDFoundation.org>

   The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated
   to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community
   worldwide. Funding comes from individual and corporate donations and is
   used to fund and manage software development projects, conferences and
   developer summits, and provide travel grants to FreeBSD contributors.
   The Foundation purchases and supports hardware to improve and maintain
   FreeBSD infrastructure and provides resources to improve security,
   quality assurance, and release engineering efforts; publishes marketing
   material to promote, educate, and advocate for the FreeBSD Project;
   facilitates collaboration between commercial vendors and FreeBSD
   developers; and finally, represents the FreeBSD Project in executing
   contracts, license agreements, and other legal arrangements that
   require a recognized legal entity.

   Here are some highlights of what the FreeBSD Foundation did to help
   FreeBSD last quarter:

   Partnerships and Commercial User Support

   As a 501(c)(3) non-profit, we don't directly support commercial users,
   but we do work with them to understand their needs and help facilitate
   collaboration with the community. Last quarter we met with a few key
   FreeBSD users and supporters, to discuss pain points, how they can
   contribute back to FreeBSD, and what technologies they would like to
   see supported, to support FreeBSD over more of their technologies and
   products.

   As many of you know, we formed a partnership with Intel around one and
   a half years ago. Since then the people we worked directly with left
   the company, but it moved us into a new relationship with their Open
   Source Technology Center (OTC).

   We are very encouraged that Intel has dedicated additional resources
   from the OTC to work on FreeBSD in addition to existing resources from
   the networking group and other technologies such as QuickAssist. Much
   of the work has been focused on security and OS mitigations but we're
   also focusing on other areas such as power management and persistent
   memory. In May and again in July we traveled to Intel's Hillsboro
   campus to meet with management and engineers from OTC and the
   networking team. We presented an overview of the project and Foundation
   and also discussed key markets and vendors who use FreeBSD in their
   products or services and their future requirements.

   Intel was also interested in learning more about who contributes to
   FreeBSD. Along those lines we've done some work with OTC to create
   scripts and organizational mappings to answer that question. Note that
   we do need developers to help us update and maintain the organizational
   mappings as we understand that developers do tend to move around and
   contractors are often working on behalf of multiple organizations.

   Fundraising Efforts

   Our work is 100% funded by your donations. As of September 30, we
   raised $328,482. Our 2018 fundraising goal is $1,250,00 and we are
   continuing to work hard to meet and exceed this goal! Please consider
   making a donation to help us continue and increase our support for
   FreeBSD: https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/donate/.

   We also have a new Partnership Program, to provide more benefits for
   our larger commercial donors. Find out more information at
   https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/FreeBSD-foundation-partnership-progra
   m/ and share with your companies!

   OS Improvements

   The Foundation improves the FreeBSD operating system by employing
   technical staff to maintain and improve critical kernel subsystems, add
   features and functionality, and fix problems. This also includes
   funding separate project grants like the arm64 port, porting the
   blacklistd access control daemon, and the integration of VIMAGE
   support, to make sure that FreeBSD remains a viable solution for
   research, education, computing, products and more.

   We kicked off or continued the following projects last quarter:
     * OpenZFS RAID-Z Expansion project
     * Headless mode out-of-the-box for embedded ARM boards like the
       Beaglebone Black
     * Performance and scalability improvements

   Having software developers on staff has allowed us to jump in and work
   directly on projects to improve FreeBSD such as:
     * ZFS improvements
     * New Intel server support
     * kqueue(2) updates
     * 64-bit inode support
     * Stack guard
     * Kernel Undefined Behavior Sanitizer
     * Toolchain projects
     * i915 driver investigation
     * NVDIMM support in acpiconf(8)
     * Continuous integration dashboard (web page and physical hardware)
     * FAT filesystem support in makefs(8)

   Continuous Integration and Quality Assurance

   The Foundation provides a full-time staff member who is working on
   improving our automated testing, continuous integration, and overall
   quality assurance efforts.

   Foundation employee Li-Wen Hsu set up new CI servers to speed up amd64
   build and test jobs, to reduce the latency between changes being
   committed and results being available. Li-Wen also set up a staging /
   development server in order to test changes to the CI system itself
   without affecting production results. We have also started a small
   hardware test lab, currently connected to the staging server, that
   tests the full boot and test cycle on physical hardware. In the near
   future additional hardware devices will be added, and this will migrate
   to the production CI server.

   Release Engineering

   The Foundation provides a full-time staff member to lead the release
   engineering efforts. This has provided timely and reliable releases
   over the last five years.

   Foundation employee Glen Barber continued leading the efforts on the
   upcoming 12.0-RELEASE. For details surrounding the work involved and
   progress thus far on 12.0-RELEASE, please see the FreeBSD Release
   Engineering Team section of this quarterly status report.

   Supporting FreeBSD Infrastructure

   The Foundation provides hardware and support to improve the FreeBSD
   infrastructure. Last quarter, we continued supporting FreeBSD hardware
   located around the world.

   FreeBSD Advocacy and Education

   A large part of our efforts are dedicated to advocating for the
   Project. This includes promoting work being done by others with
   FreeBSD; producing advocacy literature to teach people about FreeBSD
   and help make the path to starting using FreeBSD or contributing to the
   Project easier; and attending and getting other FreeBSD contributors to
   volunteer to run FreeBSD events, staff FreeBSD tables, and give FreeBSD
   presentations.

   The FreeBSD Foundation sponsors many conferences, events, and summits
   around the globe. These events can be BSD-related, open source, or
   technology events geared towards underrepresented groups. We support
   the FreeBSD-focused events to help provide a venue for sharing
   knowledge, to work together on projects, and to facilitate
   collaboration between developers and commercial users. This all helps
   provide a healthy ecosystem. We support the non-FreeBSD events to
   promote and raise awareness of FreeBSD, to increase the use of FreeBSD
   in different applications, and to recruit more contributors to the
   Project.

   Check out some of the advocacy and education work we did last quarter:
     * Organized and ran the Essen FreeBSD Hackathon in Essen, Germany
     * Participated in the FreeBSD Developer Summit BSDCam, in Cambridge,
       England
     * Represented FreeBSD at the ARM Partner Meeting
     * Presented and taught about FreeBSD at SdNOG 5 in Khartoum, Sudan
     * Exhibited and gave a talk at OSCON 2018 in Portland, OR
     * Exhibited at the 2018 Grace Hopper Celebration and sponsored as a
       Silver Non-Profit Sponsor
     * Exhibited at COCON 2018 in Taipei, Taiwan
     * Sponsored and gave presentations and tutorials at EuroBSDCon in
       Bucharest, Romania
     * Organized and ran the Bucharest FreeBSD Developer Summit
     * Sponsored the 2018 USENIX Security Symposium in Baltimore, MD as an
       Industry Partner
     * Provided FreeBSD advocacy material
     * Sponsored the 2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference in Boston, MA
       as an Industry Partner
     * Sponsored the OpenZFS Developer Summit as a Silver Sponsor
     * Presented and taught about FreeBSD at SANOG32 in Dhaka, Bangladesh
     * Sponsored the SNIA Storage Developer Conference 2018 as an
       Association Partner
     * Provided 11 travel grants to FreeBSD contributors to attend many of
       the above events.

   We continued producing FreeBSD advocacy material to help people promote
   FreeBSD around the world.

   Read more about our conference adventures in the conference recaps and
   trip reports in our monthly newsletters:
   https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/newsletter/

   We help educate the world about FreeBSD by publishing the
   professionally produced FreeBSD Journal. Last quarter we published the
   July/August issue that you can find at
   https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/journal/.

   You can find out more about events we attended and upcoming events at
   https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/news-and-events/.

   Legal/FreeBSD IP

   The Foundation owns the FreeBSD trademarks, and it is our
   responsibility to protect them. We also provide legal support for the
   core team to investigate questions that arise.

   Go to http://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org to find out how we support
   FreeBSD and how we can help you!
     __________________________________________________________________

Projects

   Projects that span multiple categories, from the kernel and userspace
   to the Ports Collection or external projects.

32-bit compatibility and other ABI cleanups

   Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks_at_FreeBSD.org>

   As part of maintaining an external ABI (application binary interface)
   compatibility layer, I've been improving FreeBSD infrastructure,
   primarily the 32-bit compatibility layer. One of FreeBSD's strengths is
   that we can easily support many ABIs. This includes support for a.out
   format executables (vs the standard ELF), support for i386 on amd64,
   the Linux emulation layer, etc.

   This infrastructure has existed for decades and not every design
   decision has stood the test of time. Support has also been incomplete
   in a number of areas (e.g. network management under 32-bit emulation).

   Committed improvements include:
     * Improved ioctl and sysctl support to allow ifconfig and netstat to
       work in 32-bit compat mode.
     * Migration from a model of translating ioctl commands and data
       structures at the kernel boundary to translating where the commands
       are processed. This is a correctness improvement (`ioctl` commands
       do not have meaning outside the specific file descriptor in
       question) and improves code reusability (my out-of-tree work will
       soon include a 64-bit compatibility layer.)
     * Simplifications of the generic ELF process execution path by Ed
       Maste, John Baldwin, and myself. A number of simplifications
       including minor speedups have been committed.

   Portions of this work were developed by SRI International and the
   University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory (Department of Computer
   Science and Technology) under DARPA/AFRL contract FA8750-10-C-0237
   ("CTSRD"), as part of the DARPA CRASH research programme and under
   DARPA contract HR0011-18-C-0016 ("ECATS"), as part of the DARPA SSITH
   research programme.

   Work in progress includes cleanups to the APIs used by the kernel when
   creating processes and continued ioctl improvements. Work is also
   underway to generate the 32-bit system call list from the "default"
   list.

   The remaining ioctl commands handled in
   sys/compat/freebsd32/freebsd32_ioctl.c need to be migrated to the point
   of implementation. Help with the latter would be appreciated.
     __________________________________________________________________

4G/4G address space split for i386

   Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Most 32-bit FreeBSD architectures, including i386, started to suffer
   from the rapid growth of the size of software during the past decade.
   When a 32-bit address space is enough space for a given task, 32-bit
   mode still has an intrinsic advantage over 64-bit mode, due to less
   memory traffic and more economical use of caches. It has grown harder
   to provide the self-hosting i386 system build due to the increase in
   size of the build tools.

   The FreeBSD i386 kernel, prior to the 12.0-RELEASE version, split the
   4GB address space of the platform into 3GB (minus 4MB) accessible to
   userspace accesses and 1GB for kernel accesses. Neither kernel nor
   userspace could access a full 4GB address space. Programs that require
   very large virtual address spaces, such as clang when compiling or lld
   when linking, could run out of address space: 3GB of address space was
   insufficient for their operation. The kernel also had trouble fitting
   into the traditional 1GB limitation of address space with the modern
   sizing for network buffers, ZFS and other KVA-hungry in-kernel
   subsystems.

   In FreeBSD 12, the i386 architecture has been changed to provide
   dedicated separate address spaces for userspace and kernel, giving each
   mode full access to 4GB (minus 8MB) of usable address space. The
   userspace on the i386 architecture now has access to the same amount of
   address space as the compat32 subsystem in the amd64 architecture
   kernel. The increase in kernel address space enables further growth and
   maintainability of the i386 architecture.

   The split 4GB/4GB user/kernel implementation uses two page directory
   entries (PDEs) shared between modes: one for mapping the page table,
   another for the mode switching trampoline and other required system
   tables. The required system tables, which must always be mapped,
   regardless of kernel or user mode, includes such things as the
   GDT/IDT/TSS entries. Significant changes were made to the locore code.
   The page table creation portion of the code was completely rewritten
   from assembly to C, improving readability and maintainability of the
   code.

   Because the user address space is no longer shared with the kernel, the
   copyout(9) functions were rewritten to make a transient mapping of
   userspace pages for the duration of any needed accesses. The initial
   implementation used the vm_fault_quick_hold_pages() framework, but this
   was later optimized by temporarily switching to user mode mappings from
   a trampoline, and then using hand-written assembler routines to perform
   a faster small block copy operation.

   Future plans for the ongoing maintenance of i386 include making the
   i386 pmap capable of runtime selection of the PAE or non-PAE page table
   format and supporting NX (no execute) mappings for regular i386 kernel.

   This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
     __________________________________________________________________

ACPI NVDIMM driver

   Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib_at_FreeBSD.org>

   NVDIMM is a technology which provides non-volatile memory with access
   characteristics similar to regular DRAM, which is the technology that
   implements the normal memory address space of a host. There are ACPI
   and UEFI specifications that define platform independent ways to detect
   and enumerate the presence of NVDIMMs. These specifications allow the
   retrieval of most of the data needed to allow proper application use of
   the NVDIMM storage.

   A new FreeBSD driver parses the ACPI NFIT table which lists NVDIMMs,
   their operational characteristics, and the physical address space where
   the NVDIMM memory is accessible. The driver presents each address
   region as two devices: One device allows userspace to open(2) a devfs
   node, which can be read/written/mapped from the application. This
   mapping is zero-copy. The second device is a geom disk(9), which makes
   it possible to use NVDIMM for the backing storage for a normal FreeBSD
   filesystem, such as UFS, ZFS, or msdosfs. Note that buffer
   cache/mapping of files from a traditional filesystem created over
   NVDIMM causes an unneeded double-buffering.

   Empirically, on typical modern hardware, NVDIMM regions are located far
   from the regular DRAM backed memory in the address space, and have
   attributes that are not compatible with regular DRAM memory. This makes
   it unfeasible to extend the kernel's direct map to provide the kernel
   mappings for the NVDIMM regions. A new pmap KPI was designed,
   pmap_large_map(9), which allows efficient mapping of very large
   physical regions into the KVA. The new code has some optimizations to
   the cache flushing operations over the mapped regions, which is needed
   to efficiently support bio flushes from a filesystems using the NVDIMM
   storage. The NVDIMM driver is the first user of the new KPI, but the
   new KPI might also be useful for the NTB driver.

   TODO:
     * Intel is currently working on extending the driver to support UEFI
       namespaces.
     * A DAX-capable filesystem is needed, which solves the issue of
       double-buffering. Our tmpfs already provides VM facilities which
       allows it to avoid double-buffering for mmap, which can be reused
       there.

   This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
     __________________________________________________________________

Boot Loader

   Contact: Warner Losh <imp_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Kyle Evans <kevans_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Toomas Soome <tsoome_at_Freebsd.org>

   The FreeBSD boot loader lives in src/stand (prior releases had it in
   sys/boot and lib/libstand). It covers all the code that the project
   provides that interacts with the hardware before the kernel starts.

   The LUA interpreter added earlier in 2018 was made default in 2018Q3.
   Due to undiagnosed booting issues, the LUA interpreter has been
   disabled on sparc64 and all powerpc. The LUA interpreter is scheduled
   to replace the FORTH interpreter entirely in FreeBSD 13, although the
   FORTH interpreter will remain available as a build option in FreeBSD
   12. The plans are not to remove the FORTH loader for about a year after
   12.0 release, or approximately January 2020. Platforms not currently
   working with the LUA interpreter have until that date to resolve the
   issues.

   At this point, the LUA scripts implement everything that the FORTH
   scripts did. Where there was ambiguity in the spec, or where the FORTH
   scripts were more forgiving than was strictly documented, every effort
   has been made to improve the documentation and follow the old FORTH
   behavior, or document the new behavior where the old behavior was
   clearly a bug.

   It's anticipated that no further changes to the FORTH loader or the
   FORTH scripts will happen. They are quite mature and bullet proof at
   this point and it's unlikely that an undiscovered bug will need to be
   fixed before retirement.

   Other work in progress includes Toomas Soome's port to OpenIndiana. In
   addition to porting, he's enhanced the code in a number of ways (both
   in the block layer, and UEFI). Many of his improvements have been
   committed to FreeBSD, though a few remain and hopefully will be
   entering the tree soon after the freeze lifts.

   UEFI booting has been greatly enhanced. There are still some machines
   that have issues with the default BootXXXX variables or something else
   in the environment that are being investigated. We hope to understand
   the problems well enough to provide a fix for FreeBSD 12.0.

   Ian Lepore has reworked the GELI support so that it is architecture
   independent and can be used on any architecture we support.

   There are also efforts underway to support booting signed images,
   improved crypto booting options, and implement Multiboot 2.0 support.
     __________________________________________________________________

Building FreeBSD on non-FreeBSD hosts

   Links
   Wiki          
    URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/BuildingOnNonFreeBSD
   GitHub project
    URL: https://github.com/arichardson/freebsd/tree/crossbuild-aug2018

   Contact: Alex Richardson <arichardson_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Currently FreeBSD can only be built on a FreeBSD host. However, most
   free CI tools only allow building on Linux or macOS and therefore can
   not be used for building the FreeBSD base system. It is sometimes
   useful to cross-build FreeBSD for a remote machine or an emulator even
   if the build machine is not running FreeBSD. The goal of this project
   is to allow building FreeBSD on both Linux and macOS hosts and in the
   future it may be extended to allow compiling on a Windows host. This
   work originates from the CHERI project and was motivated by multiple
   cases of people wanting to try out CheriBSD but not being able to
   compile it since they did not have a FreeBSD system available for
   compiling. Once completed this project will also allow developers to
   contribute to FreeBSD even if they don't have access to a FreeBSD build
   system.

   The current set of patches for this project can be found on GitHub.
   With the current prototype it is possible to compile both world and
   kernel for architectures that use the clang compiler and for MIPS64,
   which uses gcc. However, some options such as LOCALES are not supported
   yet and require further changes before the bootstrap tools can be built
   on Linux/macOS.

   Some changes required for building on non-FreeBSD have already been
   merged to HEAD but there are still a rather large number of changes
   that need review.

   If you are interested in getting this into HEAD and would like to help,
   please try the current prototype and report any issues to
   arichardson_at_FreeBSD.org. If you can help with reviewing the changes
   please contact arichardson_at_FreeBSD.org to be added to any pending
   Phabricator reviews.
     __________________________________________________________________

Device Mode USB

   Links
   Handbook chapter
    URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/usb-device-mode.html

   Contact: Edward Tomasz Napierala <trasz_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Many embedded boards include hardware which supports device side USB -
   the ability for the board to present itself to another system as a USB
   drive, network adapter, or a virtual serial port. The FreeBSD USB stack
   has supported this functionality for quite some time, but it has not
   been used to its fullest extent.

   The goal of this project was to fix that - to document the
   functionality, possibly fix some bugs, and to make it easy to use,
   automating it as much as possible.

   Starting with FreeBSD 12.0, this functionality is enabled out of the
   box. This means you can connect your BeagleBone Black's (using its USB
   client socket) or a Raspberry Pi 0 (using the On-The-Go (OTG) port) to
   your laptop, and you'll get a virtual USB serial port, which serves as
   a system console, with getty(8) waiting for you to log in. This means
   you no longer need to look for a keyboard and a screen, or mess with
   the console cables just to configure your system. You can also switch
   it to provide network interface, or present itself as a USB drive -
   it's all documented in the FreeBSD Handbook.

   This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
     __________________________________________________________________

ENA FreeBSD Driver Update

   Links
   ENA README
    URL: https://github.com/amzn/amzn-drivers/blob/master/kernel/fbsd/ena/README

   Contact: Michal/ Krawczyk <mk_at_semihalf.com>

   ENA (Elastic Network Adapter) is the smart NIC which is used in the
   virtualised environment of Amazon Web Services (AWS). It supports
   multiple queues and can handle up to 25 Gb/s, depending on the instance
   type on which it is used.

   Since last report, ENA versions v0.8.0 and v0.8.1 have been released,
   which introduced many bug fixes, new features, optimization, stability
   and error recovery improvements. The last is especially important on
   the AWS, where the instances have to be reliable as they may be running
   very sensitive functions and the down time of the VM should be reduced
   to minimum.

   The v0.8.0 and v0.8.1 release patches included:
     * Upgrade of the HAL to version v1.1.4.3
     * Improvement to the reset routine - the driver is now triggering
       reset from more fault points and is passing the reset reason to the
       device, which can perform the reset adequately to the encountered
       error.
     * Device statistics (like global Tx and Rx counters) are no longer
       read directly from the device. The only exception is Rx drops,
       which are still read using the AENQ descriptor.
     * The RX Out Of Order completion feature was added, which enabled to
       cleanup the RX descriptors out of order by keeping trace of all
       free descriptors.
     * RX ring is now being monitored, to prevent the ring from stalling.
     * Error handling paths were reworked and fixed.
     * Driver was covered with branch prediction statements, to make the
       most of this CPU feature in the hot paths.
     * Fix handling of the DF flag in the IP packets.
     * Add dynamic logging and reduce number of messages being printed by
       the driver.
     * MTU configuration now is being verified using the device
       capabilities instead of a constant value.
     * Do not pass packet header length hint to the device, because for
       the chained mbufs it may be problematic to determine header length,
       if the header is split into multiple segments.

   This project was sponsored by Amazon.com Inc..
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Graphics Team

   Links
   Project GitHub page
    URL: https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop

   Contact: FreeBSD Graphics Team <x11_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Niclas Zeising <zeising_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD X11/Graphics team is responsible for the lower levels of
   the FreeBSD graphics stack. This includes graphics drivers, graphics
   libraries such as the MESA OpenGL implementation, the X.org xserver
   with related libraries and applications, and Wayland with related
   libraries and applications.

   There have been a lot of changes since the last report. The most
   important one is the change of driver distribution and updates. On
   FreeBSD 11.2 and later modern graphics drivers using the Linux KPI
   subsystem are found in ports. These give much improved support for
   Intel and AMD graphics hardware, however, they are currently only
   available for amd64.

   The legacy drivers available in the FreeBSD base system are also
   available in the ports tree, since they cause issues with the new
   drivers. They will remain in tree for 11.2 and 12, but work is on-going
   to have them removed for 13, except for arm.

   The easiest way to install the new drivers is to install
   graphics/drm-kmod which will install the correct driver depending on
   your architecture and FreeBSD version.

   There have been changes to the ports as well. Most notably is the
   changed handling of OpenGL dependencies, which has moved to USES
   instead of being handled directly in bsd.port.mk. Other big
   infrastructure changes is the move from individual \*proto packages to
   xorgproto, and turning that into a build time dependency. Many thanks
   to portmgr for help with exp-runs for these changes.

   There have been updates to applications and libraries as needed.

   On the project management side, there is ongoing work to set up a more
   efficient way of working, including bi-weekly conference calls to
   discuss the current works in progress. Notes from these conference
   calls will be posted on the mailing list.

   Looking forward, the current major work in progress is to update the
   graphics driver to be on par with Linux 4.17. The code is merged, but
   patching and bug fixing is ongoing.

   There is also work to port the VMware guest graphics driver, vmwgfx, to
   FreeBSD and to the Linux KPI, to get better graphics support in VMware.

   Lastly, on the driver side is to get the new graphics drivers to work
   on i386 as well. Experimental support for this exists in the code
   repository, but is not yet merged to the FreeBSD ports tree.

   In userland, the biggest things happening is the update of the input
   stack, including libinput and supporting libraries.

   Work is also ongoing on updating MESA libraries.

   On the project management side, the most important tasks is to continue
   to work on the team, and how we work internally.

   We are also working on setting up a list of requirements for testing,
   so that we can be reasonably assured that updates won't cause
   regressions.

   People who are interested in helping out can find us on the
   x11_at_FreeBSD.org mailing list, or on our Gitter chat:
   https://gitter.im/FreeBSDDesktop/Lobby. We are also available in
   #freebsd-xorg on EFNet.

   We also have a team area on GitHub where our work repositories can be
   found: https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD/DTrace

   Contact: George Neville-Neil <gnn_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Domagoj Stolfa <domagoj.stolfa_at_cl.cam.ac.uk>

   DTrace is a whole-system debugging tool in FreeBSD and is one of the
   actively supported projects during the past year.

   A research prototype of a distributed version of DTrace and a version
   of DTrace that can trace bhyve virtual machines from the host FreeBSD
   system are currently under development at the University of Cambridge
   as a part of the CADETS project. Recent developments include the
   creation of dlog, an in-kernel DTrace consumer which is able to publish
   to Kafka, and improvements to early boot and shutdown tracing. On the
   virtualisation front, improvements were made in the ability to
   dereference and follow pointers inside guests from the host in the
   probe context by implementing a nested page table walk inside DTrace
   for Intel architectures. The CADETS project has started formalizing
   DTrace in HOL4 which enables automated test generation, high assurance
   of DTrace implementations in terms of adherence to the specification
   and exploration of all allowable behaviors for a given D script.
   Currently, the formal model contains most of DIF instructions and a
   code generator for them, providing the ability to run DIF programs
   specified using the model using FreeBSD's DTrace implementation.

   As a result of all of this, a number of changes were upstreamed to the
   FreeBSD auditing subsystem and new variables such as jid and jailname
   were added to DTrace which can be accessed from D scripts.

   OpenDTrace Specification 1.0 has been published which covers the
   internal workings of DTrace in general, and its adaptation to various
   operating systems in particular. This work was sponsored by AFRL/DARPA
   through the CADETS project.

   Ruslan Bukin (br_at_) has added C-compressed ISA extension support to the
   RISC-V FBT provider as a part of the ECATS project.

   Mark Johnston (markj_at_) has done some work to fix interactions between
   FBT and ifuncs. ifuncs are a toolchain feature which allow programmers
   to select a function's implementation at boot-time, rather than at
   compile-time. For instance, on amd64, memcpy() is an ifunc and may be
   implemented by either memcpy_erms() or memcpy_std(). FBT created probes
   for the implementation functions, but we needed some extra support to
   ensure that fbt::memcpy:entry continues to work as expected. Similar
   work is needed for the PID provider, but is still pending.

   Microsoft showed a working demo of DTrace, which was ported from
   FreeBSD.

   Added to FreeBSD base in 11.2, dwatch is a new DTrace tool, developed
   by Devin Teske (dteske_at_), for automating complex queries for data and
   surgically tapping the kernel. In base there are 85 profiles for
   interpreting domain-specific data with another 17 available from ports
   making a total of over 100 different pipelines from which you can
   extract data in multiple formats. dwatch also simplifies observation of
   over 100,000 probe points available in FreeBSD, making it easy to find
   any process, thread, or jail triggering any probe. On top of all that,
   dwatch profiles can leverage higher-level languages such as python,
   perl, sh, and many more.
     __________________________________________________________________

ifuncs

   Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Ed Maste <emaste_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Mark Johnston <markj_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Mateusz Guzik <mjg_at_FreeBSD.org>

   An ifunc is a special construct in an ELF object, which allows for the
   selection of the implementation for the given symbol at runtime, when
   the ELF module gets the final relocations applied. The selection of
   which code to use is governed by the small piece of user provided code,
   attached to the symbol, the so called resolver function. Ifuncs provide
   a convenient way to select between different machine-specific
   implementations of the parts of the code, without the ugliness and
   unsafety of the alternative approach, which is runtime patching.

   Ifuncs require support both from the static linker ld(1), and from the
   runtime linker for the corresponding execution environment. On FreeBSD,
   with the switch from the ancient GPLv2 licensed BFD-based ld(1) to
   either in-tree LLD or external modern BFD ld, the use of ifuncs become
   possible. Runtime linkers for ifunc support exists for the following
   environments:
     * i386, amd64, and arm64 kernels
     * usermode dynamic linker ld-elf.so.1 on i386 and amd64
     * static binaries startup code for i386 and amd64

   The use of ifuncs were previously applied for optimization of the
   following areas of the amd64 kernel:
     * context switching code, instead of huge number of runtime checks
       (PTI vs non-PTI, PCID or not, is INVPCID instruction supported for
       PCID) now uses set of mode-specific routines, see
       pmap_activate_sw(). Besides removing checks at runtime, it also
       makes the code much more cleanly structured and readable.
     * TLB and cache flush implementation.
     * memcpy/memmove, copyin/copyout variants selection for ERMS and
       SMAP.
     * FPU state save and restore, depending on the support for AVX or
       not, this is also used on i386.

   For amd64 userspace, we currently use ifunc for optimization of the
   architecture dependent TLS base set and get functions.

   This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
     __________________________________________________________________

Intel Work on Core Enabling and Security

   Contact: Ben Widawsky <bwidawsk_at_FreeBSD.org>

   A new team has been formed within Intel to help with side channel
   security mitigations as well as core enabling. They are evaluating work
   from all areas except networking. The team is currently focusing on two
   areas:
    1. Power Management improvements
    2. NVDIMM namespace support

   The ultimate goal of the power management work is to get runtime power
   management to hit "opportunistic idle". What this means is when devices
   are idle, the OS will power them down, and when everything goes idle
   certain SoCs will allow you to hit very low power states across the
   platform. FreeBSD currently doesn't have any notion of runtime power
   management, and many devices don't properly implement suspend and
   resume. In addition, some preliminary work is in process as it was
   thought to help when eventually enabling opportunistic idle. That
   preliminary work has been happening and is now up for review:
     * https://reviews.FreeBSD.org/D17675
     * https://reviews.FreeBSD.org/D17676

   NVDIMM namespace support has also been put up for review. ACPI spec
   defines namespaces as a way of partitioning the device into separate
   labels. The current work will integrate with geom(4). How these are
   used is application dependent. This work is up for review as well:
   https://reviews.FreeBSD.org/D17619

   The team has additionally taken on smaller tasks like porting
   turbostat(8), working on git svn init scripts, some small modifications
   to acpi tooling, and an effort to create a port PMDK.
     __________________________________________________________________

Large scale package building

   Contact: Mateusz Guzik <mjg_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Building packages on a 128-thread machine with poudriere exhibits some
   bottlenecks.

   See the October FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter for a short write-up:
   https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/newsletter/freebsd-fo
   undation-update-october-2018/

   One encountered problem stems from process handling.

   The standard process life cycle on UNIX-like systems looks like this:
     * a process is created with fork(2)
     * it can do regular work or execve(2) a new binary
     * it exits, becoming a zombie
     * the parent collects the exit code and removes the zombie

   There are other variations (e.g. vfork(2) can be used instead of fork).

   When you type 'ls' into your shell, it will typically vfork a new
   process which will then execve /bin/ls.

   All this is guarded with several global kernel locks, but the
   granularity can be significantly improved.

   A different problem stems from pipes.

   Pipes are used all the time, e.g. "du -s | sort -n" creates a pipe
   whose one endpoint is standard output for du and another is standard
   input for sort.

   By default the pipe can hold up to 16KB before it gets filled up.

   The kernel dedicates part of its virtual address space to hold pipe
   buffers and allocates/deallocates physical pages as pipes get
   created/destroyed. This induces TLB invalidation requests to other
   CPUs, which causes an unnecessary slowdown.

   An easy way out is to cache a certain number of buffers.

   This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
     __________________________________________________________________

LLVM 7.0 - Sanitizers support improvements / Static code analysis

   Links
   Release notes
    URL: http://releases.llvm.org/7.0.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

   Contact: David Carlier <devnexen_at_gmail.com>

   In order to increase the FreeBSD tooling to uncover code bugs in the
   userland, further compiler-rt components support and static code
   analysis improvements had been added since the last 6.0 version.

   Starting with the sanitizers, Memory Sanitizer (for amd64) mainly to
   detect unitialized pointers. There is also a simple W^X paging requests
   detection available from most of sanitizers.

   Also libFuzzer support finally had been possible. It allows code to be
   tested with random values from corpus inputs. Mutation and combination
   algorithms of those random inputs can be overwritten. Can also be used
   in addition to ubsan, asan, msan and so on.

   At last, the X-Ray instrumentation feature is also supported. It is
   mainly about performance profiling purposes for a reasonable
   performance runtime cost.

   In the static code analysis department, reliable strlcpy (unfortunately
   strlcat did not get merged in due time for the release) wrong usage
   cases are now covered and W^X code detection tooling had been added.

   At the moment, this 7.0 version is imported by Dimitry Andric, within
   its own git branch available only for FreeBSD after 12 releases.
     __________________________________________________________________

Performance improvements

   Contact: Matthew Macy <mmacy_at_FreeBSD.org>

   FreeBSD 12 saw the introduction of a number of performance
   improvements:
     * The introduction of the new synchronization primitive epoch(9) to
       replace the use of reader locks for providing existence guarantees
       for data structures.
     * epoch(9) was used to provide an 85+% reduction in the overhead of
       pcb lookup in high core count systems.
     * epoch(9) was used to provide an 85+% reduction in UDP send overhead
       on high core count systems. See the link for a bit more detail:
       http://scalebsd.org/blog/2018/06/16/UDP-and-epoch-for-liveness-guar
       antees
     * System call overhead is now half that of FreeBSD 11.
     * UNIX sockets now scale near linearly (previously maxed out at 3-4
       threads).
     * The NUMA work has lead to a 20x-80x improvement in the scalability
       of page fault handling.
     __________________________________________________________________

Save/Restore/Migration support in bhyve

   Links
   Github repository for the save/restore and migration features
    URL: https://github.com/FreeBSD-UPB/freebsd/tree/projects/bhyve_migration
   Github wiki - How to Save and Restore a bhyve guest
    URL: https://github.com/FreeBSD-UPB/freebsd/wiki/Save-and-Restore-a-virtual-machine-using-bhyve
   Github wiki - How to Migrate a bhyve guest
    URL: https://github.com/FreeBSD-UPB/freebsd/wiki/Virtual-Machine-Migration-using-bhyve
   Github wiki - Suspend/resume test matrix
    URL: https://github.com/FreeBSD-UPB/freebsd/wiki/Suspend-Resume-test-matrix

   Contact: Elena Mihailescu <elenamihailescu22_at_gmail.com>
   Contact: Darius Mihai <dariusmihaim_at_gmail.com>
   Contact: Sergiu Weisz <sergiu121_at_gmail.com>
   Contact: Mihai Carabas <mihai_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The Save/Restore feature is a facility to suspend and resume guest
   virtual images that has been added to the FreeBSD/amd64's hypervisor,
   bhyve. The bhyvectl tool is used to save the guest virtual machine into
   three files:
     * a file for the guest memory
     * a file for state of each device / CPU state
     * a file that has metadata that is used in the restore process

   To suspend a bhyve guest, the bhyvectl tool must be run with the
   --suspend <state_file_name> option followed by the guest name.

   To restore a bhyve guest from a checkpoint, one simply has to add the
   -r option followed by the main state file (the same file that was given
   to the --suspend option for bhyvectl) when starting the VM.

   The Migration feature uses the Save/Restore implementation to migrate a
   bhyve guest from one FreeBSD host to another FreeBSD host. To migrate a
   bhyve guest, one needs to start an empty guest on the destination host
   from a shared guest image using the bhyve tool with the -R option
   followed by the source host IP and the port to listen to migration
   request. On the source host, the migration is started by executing the
   bhyvectl command with the --migrate option, followed by the destination
   host IP and the port to send to the messages.

   New features added:
     * Create the socket connection between source and destination hosts
     * Migrate the guest state via sockets
     * Separate the suspend/resume/migration code from the bhyverun.c and
       bhyvectl.c and added two new files for them: migration.c and
       migration.h
     * Added save/restore state for xhci
     * Added save/restore state for fbuf
     * Fix vhpet restore state issues (timers related)
     * Add partially support for suspending and resuming a Linux guest

   Future tasks:
     * Check if live migration can be implemented using the FreeBSD's
       Copy-on-Write mechanism
     * Add live migration support by using EPT (Intel)
     * Add live migration support by using NPT (AMD)
     * Add suspend/resume support for nvme
     * Add suspend/resume support for virtio-console
     * Add suspend/resume support for virtio-scsi
     * Fix restore timers issues
     * Fix suspending bhyve - threads issues
     * Fix suspending bhyve - mutexes issues
     * Add suspend/resume support for Windows guests

   This project was sponsored by Matthew Grooms, and iXsystems.
     __________________________________________________________________

SMAP

   Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Support for SMAP (Supervisor-Mode Access Prevention), has been added to
   the amd64 kernel. The SMAP feature makes any access from the supervisor
   mode to the pages accessible to user mode cause a fault, unless the
   %eflags.AC bit is set at the time of the access.

   The SMAP implementation uses the ifunc framework to avoid checking for
   the SMAP capability of hardware on each call to copyout(9) and other
   functions.

   In the amd64 architecture, FreeBSD has a common address space between
   the kernel space and user space. Enabling SMAP virtually splits the
   shared address space into two disjoint address spaces, which have
   different access criteria. This splitting of the address space provides
   a relatively low-overhead way of catching direct accesses from kernel
   to usermode, when not using the copyout(9) family of functions. The
   copyout(9) family of functions are permitted direct access to user
   space. Any direct access from kernel mode to user address space that
   isn't performed through the copyout(9) family of functions indicates a
   potential programming error.

   It is interesting that very few bugs were found in the FreeBSD kernel
   after the SMAP feature was enabled. One issue that was identified
   existed in the pci(9) user driver. Enabling the SMAP feature identified
   at least two ports, VBox and acpi_call, which appeared to access
   userspace in an unsafe manner.

   This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
     __________________________________________________________________

String functions on the amd64 architecture

   Contact: Mateusz Guzik <mjg_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Functions like memset, memmove and memcpy are very frequently used by
   virtually all programs. They can be optimized in various ways, but
   FreeBSD uses very rudimentary implementations using rep movsq/stosq.
   rep prefix has high startup latency which is overly expensive when
   dealing with small sizes.

   Short term goal of this project is to implement faster variants for the
   kernel and import them into libc. The main speed up comes from not
   using rep for small sizes (< 256) and from aligning target buffers to
   16 bytes when rep is used. On top of that runtime detection of the
   Enhanced REP MOVSB/STOSB extention can be used to only use rep
   movsb/stosb.

   Mid term goal extends userspace. SIMD extensions can be used to make
   these functions faster. They can't easily be used in the kernel: SIMD
   registers are not saved on transitions user<->kernel for performance
   reasons. Thus any use would have to take care of saving these
   registers, which can consume any advantage from using them in the first
   place. This is not a concern for userspace code.

   There is a BSD-licensed implementation in bionic:
   https://android.googlesource.com/platform/bionic/+/master/libc/arch-x86
   _64/string/

   which with some modifications can be used in libc later on.

   See the Intel Optimization Manual for reference:
   https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/manuals/64
   -ia-32-architectures-optimization-manual.pdf

   This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
     __________________________________________________________________

Usermode mapping of PCI BARs

   Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Modern PCI(e) devices typically define memory-mapped BARs (Base Address
   Registers) to make a memory region available to the device. Each BAR
   has a separate page-aligned boundary and memory region associated with
   it. This is enforced by the need of hypervisors to provide the
   pass-through using VT-d, which operates with memory and has the
   granularity of one page for access control. As is, it also means that
   the BARs have a suitable configuration for providing access to
   usermode, controlling access by the normal page tables.

   Linux already gives a way for userspace mapping of BARs using sysfs.

   Of course, if a userspace program has enough privileges, it can read a
   BAR, determine the physical address of the mapping as seen by CPU, and
   use mem(4) (aka /dev/mem) to mmap() that region of memory. This is very
   cumbersome, and leaves many unresolved issues. For example, a BAR might
   be not activated, which would require involvement of the IOMMU on some
   architectures. Also this rude approach makes it very hard to create
   mappings with the correct caching attributes.

   The FreeBSD pci(4) driver was enhanced to support such mappings, and
   pciconf(8) utility was extended to use the new support. See pci(4) for
   PCIOCBARMMAP ioctl(2) request description for details, and pciconf(8)
   for the -D switch.

   TODO: automatically activate the BAR on mapping, this is not done yet.
   There is a problem with avoiding the resource conflicts on possible
   future attachmens of the kernel driver.

   This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation, and Mellanox
   Technologies.
     __________________________________________________________________

Architectures

   Updating platform-specific features and bringing in support for new
   hardware platforms.

Allwinner SoC Support

   Contact: Emmanuel Vadot <manu_at_FreeBSD.org>
     * SPI driver added for A64 SoC
     * Thermal driver added/fixed for A64/H3/H5 SoCs
     * Lot of bugs where fixed in the mmc driver, stability should be
       better
     * New driver for AXXP803 which is the power chip companion of the A64
       SoC
     * Add overlays to use another timer controller as the default one in
       A64 if faulty These overlay is enabled in the PINE64/LTS images by
       default
     __________________________________________________________________

Armada 38x FreeBSD support

   Links
   PRODUCT BRIEF
    URL: https://www.marvell.com/documents/egrkpyqzpoebxblyeept/

   Contact: Marcin Wojtas <mw_at_semihalf.com>
   Contact: Patryk Duda <pdk_at_semihalf.com>
   Contact: Rafal/ Kozik <rk_at_semihalf.com>

   The Marvell Armada 38x is a very poplular ARMv7-based dual core SoC.
   Thanks to the multiple low and high speed interfaces the platform is
   used in a wide range of products, such as Network-Attached Storage
   (NAS), Wi-Fi Access Point (WAP) and others.

   Since last report, remaining Armada 38x support was integrated to HEAD,
   which can now compile with the armv7 GENERIC config and use unmodified
   sys/gnu/dts device trees. The details are as follows:
     * GENERIC config
     * Introduce a vast rework of the sys/arm/mv directory for arm and
       armv7 platforms.
     * Enable PLATFORM support for Marvell ARMv7 SoCs, which can now can
       boot with GENERIC kernel.
     * Base on dynamic detection of SoC type and device tree instead of
       using ifdefs and enable more flexible environment for maintaining
       Marvell platforms.
     * sys/gnu/dts device trees
     * Improve platform code and the drivers (e.g. CESA, PCIE, GPIO) to
       properly work with original Linux device trees.
     * GPIO
     * Add multiple fixes and improvements to the sys/arm/mv/gpio.c
     * Rework driver to properly integrate with HEAD GPIO frameworks (main
       and gpioled)
     * Enable support for both old and Linux GPIO device tree bindings, so
       that multiple controllers can be used.

   This project was sponsored by Stormshield, and Semihalf.
     __________________________________________________________________

ARMv6 and ARMv7 image now use EFI loader

   Contact: Emmanuel Vadot <manu_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Instead of using the ubldr version of the loader which uses the U-Boot
   API, all images now use loader.efi as their primary FreeBSD loader.
   This allow us to have a common boot path for all arm and arm64 images.
     __________________________________________________________________

DTS Update

   Contact: Emmanuel Vadot <manu_at_FreeBSD.org>

   DTS files (Device Tree Sources) were updated to be on par with Linux
   4.18 for the 12.0 release.

   The DTS are now compiled for some arm64 boards as the one present in
   U-Boot are now always up-to-date.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD on POWER9

   Contact: Matthew Macy <mmacy_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Once Justin Hibbits largely stabilized the powerpc64 port on the POWER9
   based Talos II I decided to procure one. I've been slowly working
   towards taking powerpc64 to parity with amd64. I've been working in an
   out of tree GitHub project - in part to eliminate the need to continue
   to support the 11 year old in tree gcc4.

   Progress so far:
     * Adapted lock_delay to use POWER's SMT scheduling hints rather than
       using the yield hint from an older ISA
     * Added ifunc support
     * Ported the amd64 pmap so FreeBSD can use POWER9's new radix tree
       page tables. This will give us superpages mostly for free.
     * Reduced the overhead of copyinout primitives for radix.
     * Converted the copyinout primitives to ifuncs to switch between the
       old and the new at initialization time.
     * Converted pmap to use ifuncs to eliminate the overhead of kobj
       dispatch.
     * Hot patch out trap handling paths only needed by the older hashed
       page table support.

   Work in Progress:
     * NMI semantics: NMIs need to be emulated by only soft disabling
       interrupts, disabling interrupts blocks all interrupts except
       machine check exceptions and system resets.
     * Superpage support: Superpages work in the functional simulator
       running SMT4 but currently crash on real hardware due to incomplete
       page walk cache / TLB invalidation.
     * Kernel minidump - with radix MMU enabled minidump support was a
       fairly straightforward port but time needs to be spent on test /
       debug.
     * EARLY_AP_STARTUP - preliminary patches exist, but this is more work
       on !x86 architectures due to IPI setup not being tied to the CPU
       code.

   A list of the other items needed to achieve kernel feature parity with
   a (wishful) list of milestones can be found at:
   https://github.com/POWER9BSD/freebsd/projects/1
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD on PowerNV (ppc64)

   Contact: Patryk Duda <pdk_at_semihalf.com>
   Contact: Wojciech Macek <wma_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Michal Stanek <mst_at_semihalf.com>
   Contact: Nathan Whitehorn <nw_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Semihalf is happy to announce that FreeBSD is now running on IBM
   POWER8. This project is a continuation of work done by Nathan Whitehorn
   who provided basic support for a PowerNV emulator.

   The IBM POWER8 family of CPUs offers superior performance compared to
   previous Power series. It provides complete NUMA support with up to 192
   cores in a two socket system (up to 8 threads per core). All IO
   communication is handled by integrated PCIe interface equipped with
   multiple IOMMU engines.

   The support for POWER8 system running FreeBSD in Non-Virtualized
   environment contains:
     * Generic driver for OPAL hypervisor
     * kboot loader modifications to allow Little-Endian loader to load a
       Big-Endian kernel ELF
     * skiboot update for ELF-parser allowing it to understand FreeBSD
       kernel file format
     * Basic support for PowerNV architecture, including modes of
       operation, MMU, interrupt controller
     * SMP operation (tested with 128 CPU configuration)
     * PHB subsystem driver, including IOMMU mapping for external buses
     * PCIe host controller driver
     * USB-3.0 XHCI driver
     * Reworked drivers to be Big-Endian compatible:
     * Chelsio cxgbe(4) 10/25G network adapter
     * NVMe SSD drive

   All work has been merged into HEAD and will be included in FreeBSD
   12.0-RELEASE.

   Sponsors: IBM, FreeBSD Foundation, QCM Technologies, Semihalf,
   Limelight Networks.

   The project is kindly initiated and supported by Limelight Networks
   (Kevin Bowling).
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD on RISC-V

   Contact: Ruslan Bukin <br_at_FreeBSD.org>

   FreeBSD/RISC-V has been one of the actively supported projects during
   the past year.

   On a compiler front we have upstreamed FreeBSD OS-dependent bits for
   GNU toolchain. It was updated to GCC 8.1 and Binutils 2.30. FreeBSD
   packages are available.

   FreeBSD Testsuite and required dependencies were successfully built for
   RISC-V and we did a test run: 152 tests failed out of 5186, which
   demonstrates a very good result for initial run and reveals areas to
   work on.

   We have added support for compressed ISA extension to KDB debugger and
   DTrace FBT provider enabling C-compressed kernel and userland by
   default. The output of disassembling instructions in KDB is looking
   similar to objdump.

   QEMU has updated to latest privilege spec allowing us to bring up
   FreeBSD on it. The emulation is quite fast: it takes one second only to
   boot FreeBSD to single-user mode in QEMU:
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnWpRBaWF18

   Platform-Level Interrupt Controller (PLIC) driver was added. Interrupt
   support was converted to INTRNG. PLIC is used in QEMU for virtio
   network and block devices. With these changes, a full FreeBSD
   distribution can now be booted in QEMU.

   Network virtualization support (VIMAGE) was fixed and enabled by
   default now.

   In order to support RocketChip and derivatives we had to work on
   A(accessed), D(dirty) PTE (page table entry) bits management. We have
   successfully tested this on a lowRISC board and it is booting to
   multiuser just fine. lowRISC UART driver was added.

   Superuser-User-Modify (SUM) bit in status register is now used: kernel
   can access userspace only within certain functions that explicitly
   handle crossing user/kernel boundary.
     __________________________________________________________________

PINE64-LTS Image

   Contact: Emmanuel Vadot <manu_at_FreeBSD.org>

   We now produce an image for the PINE64-LTS. This image works on the
   PINE64-LTS and the Sopine with Baseboard.
     __________________________________________________________________

PocketBeagle Support

   Links
   Pocket Beagle
    URL: https://www.beagleboard.org/pocket

   Contact: Emmanuel Vadot <manu_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Tom Jones <thj_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The Pocket Beagle is the latest member of the BeagleBoard family.
   Support for it was added and the Beaglebone image can be used on it
   directly.
     __________________________________________________________________

RPI Firmware/DTB/U-Boot Update

   Contact: Emmanuel Vadot <manu_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: U-Boot mailing list <uboot_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The RaspberryPi firmware loads the DTB from the FAT partition based on
   the model. U-Boot now uses this DTB and passes it to the FreeBSD
   loader/kernel instead of using the DTS embedded in U-Boot. This allow
   the FreeBSD Kernel to use the RaspberryPi Foundation provided DTB
   overlays to enable HATs. The overlays can be obtained by installing the
   rpi-firmware package.

   A new U-Boot port for the W variant of the RPI0 was committed as
   u-boot-rpi-0-w. Some experiments started by Edward Tomasz Napierala
   (trasz_at_) have shown that we could possibly produce a generic image for
   all armv6 RPI (RPI-B, RPI0 and RPI0W).
     __________________________________________________________________

Ports

   Changes affecting the Ports Collection, whether sweeping changes that
   touch most of the tree, or individual ports themselves.

KDE on FreeBSD

   Links
   KDE FreeBSD
    URL: https://FreeBSD.kde.org/

   Contact: Adriaan de Groot <adridg_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Tobias C. Berner <tcberner_at_FreeBSD.org>

   KDE FreeBSD is responsible for the ports of the Plasma5 and KDE4
   desktops, and all associated applications. Further we also manage the
   Qt4 and Qt5 ports, as well as CMake.

   We also care for the FreeBSD builders for KDE's upstream CI on
   build.kde.org.

   Since the last status report a lot of things have changed. First and
   foremost, the Plasma5 Desktop and the Qt5 based KDE Applications have
   finally made their way into the official ports tree after lingering for
   multiple years in our development repository.

   Secondly KDE4 has been marked deprecated and will be removed at the end
   of the year. With Qt4 following no later than the next year (due to the
   exponentially increasing burden of maintenance).

   On a more technical side, bsd.qt.mk has been replaced by qt.mk and
   qt-dist.mk. The porter's handbook is being updated (with thanks to
   Tobias Kortkamp).

   Further we have been keeping CMake and Qt5 and almost every other port
   under our control up to date. SDDM has been updated to the
   next-to-latest release with backported security fixes.

   One big issue we have is www/qt5-webengine, which requires too much
   time to keep up to date, as the underlying chromium is in need of many
   patches, which change with every release. Another upcoming issue is the
   way in which FreeBSD's libinput lags behind. This blocks future updates
   to KDE Plasma as well as Wayland improvements. Thankfully x11_at_ is
   looking at this issue already, so it should be fixed soon -- for the
   meantime people who want to give the latest KDE Plasma Desktop a try
   can use the appropriate branch from our GitHub.

   People who are willing to contribute can find us on #kde-freebsd on
   freenode, the kde_at_FreeBSD.org mailing list. Further, we accept
   pull-requests and contributions on
   github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports-kde.
     __________________________________________________________________

Puppet

   Links
   PuppetLab's FreeBSD slack channel
    URL: https://puppetcommunity.slack.com/messages/C6CK0UGB1/
   BSDCan 2018: IT automation with Puppet
    URL: https://www.bsdcan.org/2018/schedule/events/930.en.html

   Contact: Puppet Team <puppet_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Since our last status report last year, the puppet_at_ team regularly
   updated the Puppet ports to catch on upstream releases. We have also
   held a Puppet talk at BSDCan.

   More recently, Puppet 6 was released, and a bunch of new ports appeared
   in the FreeBSD ports tree: sysutils/puppet6, sysutils/puppetserver6,
   databases/puppetdb6 being (obviously) the main ones. In this update,
   the Puppet language has not been heavily modified. As a consequence,
   upgrading from Puppet 5 to Puppet 6 is an easy task compared to the
   experience you may have encountered from previous major version bumps.
   If you are still using Puppet 4, we recommend to schedule an upgrade
   soon: Puppet 4 is expected to be EOL by the end of 2018.

   Because distributing Marionette Collective modules via Puppet is more
   efficient than using packages, the
   sysutils/mcollective-\*-{agent,client} ports have been deprecated.
   Marionette Collective itself being phased out by PuppetLabs, the
   sysutils/mcollective port is expected to be deprecated at some point in
   the future, but we plan to keep it until an alternative is available.
   This alternative, called Choria, is in active development by
   R.I.Pienaar the original author of Marionette Collective. We are
   actively working with him to support FreeBSD out of the box, and will
   commit sysutils/choria to the tree as soon as it is considered a
   drop-in replacement for Marionette Collective.
     __________________________________________________________________

scarab: CLI tool for Bugzilla-related workflows

   Links
   GitHub repo
    URL: https://github.com/gonzoua/scarab

   Contact: Oleksandr Tymoshenko <gonzo_at_FreeBSD.org>

   scarab is a CLI tool that makes some of Bugzilla functionality
   available from the command line. Normally users interact with the
   bugtracker using a web browser but for certain workflows, Web UI may be
   more of an obstacle than help requiring to perform more steps compared
   to CLI tool.

   Bugzilla provides XML-RPC interfaces that can be used for
   automation/integration and there are several CLI tools like pybugz that
   can be used with bugs.FreeBSD.org as-is. They are generic
   one-size-fits-all tools which mean they can do a lot of thing at the
   cost of more complex CLI.

   scarab was created to be more specialized and less complex with
   following principles in mind:
     * Be an auxiliary tool, not a replacement for the web UI
     * Move complexity to a configuration file, keep arguments as simple
       as possible
     * Optimize for most common/tedious tasks

   Based on my experience with Bugzilla following tasks were identified as
   candidates for inclusion in the first release of the tool:
     * Downloading attachment on host machine and copying it to devbox
     * Creating a file on the devbox and copying it to a host machine to
       be attached through Web UI
     * Creating PRs with common fields' values

   First two operations were implemented as files, fetch, fetchall, attach
   commands of the tool.

   The third operation was implemented by introducing PR templates, set of
   predefined field/value pairs, that can be combined run-time to provide
   higher flexibility. More information and usage examples can be found in
   the config file example
     __________________________________________________________________

Documentation

   Noteworthy changes in the documentation tree or new external
   books/documents.

Cleaning up the Wiki

   Links
   Wiki Fixit Group Website
    URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/WikiFixitGroup/
   IRC channel             
    URL: irc://freebsd-wiki_at_irc.freenode.net

   Contact: <wiki-admin_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD Wiki used to be a scratch pad for the FreeBSD developers to
   organize projects, store notes and publish articles that were about to
   be added to the handbook. Recently, however, the FreeBSD wiki started
   to attract more and more people from the wider FreeBSD community, which
   resulted in a change of the character of the wiki.

   As a result we decided to discuss the future of the tools we want to
   use for documentation in FreeBSD (one of such discussions was held
   during BSDCam 2018, you may see some notes here). The general
   conclusion is that wiki is a great tool for what it was meant for:
   organizing projects and notes in the community of developers. We should
   not move all our documentation (especially handbooks) to Wiki as the
   quality and maintainability would suffer. On the other hand, the
   current workflow of submitting documentation patches, which involves
   checking out the doc tree and patching XML files is not ideal for many
   end users. This is why we are trying to approach the problem from
   various directions:
    1. The wiki is being cleaned up of old content. We are trying to
       define a clear hierarchy of subpages and categories to make
       navigating the wiki easier.
    2. Some articles from the wiki are going to be migrated to either the
       doc tree or manual pages.
     __________________________________________________________________

Quarterly Reports

   Contact: Edward Tomasz Napierała <trasz_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Mateusz Piotrowski <0mp_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The Quarterly Reports have been resurrected after almost a year long
   hiatus. The old workflow, which consisted of users submitting
   XML-formatted entries, which would then get hand-assembled into
   DocBook, was replaced with a new one, using Markdown instead. The XML
   submission form was replaced with GitHub Pull Requests. This should
   make submissions and editing much easier and user-friendly.
     __________________________________________________________________

Third-Party Projects

   Many projects build upon FreeBSD or incorporate components of FreeBSD
   into their project. As these projects may be of interest to the broader
   FreeBSD community, we sometimes include brief updates submitted by
   these projects in our quarterly report. The FreeBSD project makes no
   representation as to the accuracy or veracity of any claims in these
   submissions.

HardenedBSD 2018Q3 Update

   Contact: Shawn Webb <shawn.webb_at_hardenedbsd.org>

   Our last report was June 2017. A lot has transpired since then. In this
   status report, we will attempt to briefly cover all the progress we've
   made, including the few commits that made it upstream to FreeBSD.

   On 01 Jul 2018, we switched back to OpenSSL as the crypto library
   provider in base. We did this because we lack the resources and the
   documentation for properly supporting LibreSSL in base. We still
   maintain LibreSSL in base; however, OpenSSL is simply the default
   crypto library (aka, WITHOUT_LIBRESSL is the default). We look forward
   to building a development community around LibreSSL in HardenedBSD such
   that we can re-enable LibreSSL by default, providing enhanced security
   for our users through the rejection of software monocultures.

   Cross-DSO Control Flow Integrity (Cross-DSO CFI) is an exploit
   mitigation from llvm that provides forward-edge protections across
   shared library and application boundaries. With HardenedBSD 12-STABLE,
   we launched non-Cross-DSO CFI support in base. Meaning, CFI is only
   applied to applications and not shared libraries. Along with SafeStack,
   which provides backward-edge protections, Cross-DSO CFI requires both
   ASLR and W^X for effectiveness as they store crucial metadata needing
   protection. HardenedBSD expertly, efficiently, and robustly fulfill
   those requirements through its PaX ASLR and PaX NOEXEC implementations.

   Over the past two years, we have slowly worked on Cross-DSO CFI support
   in HardenedBSD. In mid-2018, we made enough progress that we could
   publish an alpha Call-For-Testing (CFT). We need to integrate the
   Cross-DSO CFI support with the RTLD such that function pointers
   resolved through dlopen(3)/`dlsym(3)` work properly with the cfi-icall
   scheme. We also need to perform experimental package builds, find
   breakages, and fix those breakages. We hope to officially debut
   Cross-DSO CFI in the latter half of 2019 with the possibility of
   pushing back to 2020. HardenedBSD remains the first and only enterprise
   operating system to use CFI across the base set of applications.

   On 20 Aug 2018, we launched a new tool called hbsdcontrol(8) to toggle
   exploit mitigations on a per-application basis. hbsdcontrol(8) uses
   filesystem extended attributes and is the preferred method for exploit
   mitigation toggling for those filesystem that support extended
   attributes (UFS, ZFS). Our original utility, secadm, should be used
   with filesystems that do not support extended attributes (NFS).

   In September 2018, the HardenedBSD Foundation Corp became a 501(c)(3)
   tax-exempt, not-for-profit organization in the USA. This means that
   donations by US persons are eligible for tax deductions. The creation
   of the HardenedBSD Foundation will ensure that HardenedBSD remains
   successful long-term. We look forward to working with the BSD community
   to provide an open source, clean-room reimplementation of the
   grsecurity patchset based on publicly-available documentation.

   We assisted Kyle Evans with the new bectl(8) utility, primarily
   enhancing jail support and fixing regressions. We are grateful for Kyle
   Evans' assistance in landing the enhancements upstream in FreeBSD and
   his overall responsiveness and helpfulness.

   Relevant commits for the bectl(8) are:
     * r339047
     * r338221
     * r337993
     * r337947

   We taught bhyve(8) how to live in a jailed environment, allowing users
   to jail the hypervisor. We hardened the virtual address space of
   bhyve(8) by using guard pages. This work made it upstream to FreeBSD.
   We are grateful to those in FreeBSD who provided insight to increase
   the quality and efficiency of our patches.
     __________________________________________________________________


Received on Tue Dec 25 2018 - 19:39:18 UTC

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Wed May 19 2021 - 11:41:19 UTC