FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - First Quarter 2020

From: Lorenzo Salvadore <salvadore_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Sun, 12 Apr 2020 22:05:48 +0000 (UTC)
FreeBSD Project Quarterly Status Report - First Quarter 2020
Introduction

   Welcome, to the quarterly reports, of the future! Well, at least the
   first quarterly report from 2020. The new timeline, mentioned in the
   last few reports, still holds, which brings us to this report, which
   covers the period of January 2020 - March 2020.

   As you will see from this report, we've had quite an active quarter
   with big changes to both kernel, userland, documentation, ports, and
   third-party projects in the form of everything from bug and security
   fixes over new features to speed improvements and optimizations.

   As this report also covers the start of the epidemic, it's also
   interesting to note that a quick glance at the svn logs reveal that
   there has been no overall drop in number of source commits, that docs
   commits have also stayed constant, and that ports have seen an upwards
   trend.

   We hope that all of you are and yours are as safe as can be managed,
   and that we get through this together by working together.

   -- Daniel Ebdrup Jensen, debdrup_at_freebsd.org
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Team Reports

     * FreeBSD Foundation
     * FreeBSD Core Team
     * FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
     * Cluster Administration Team
     * Continuous Integration
     * Ports Collection
     * FreeBSD Graphics Team status report

Projects

     * NFS over TLS implementation
     * Import of the Kyua test framework
     * Linux compatibility layer update
     * syzkaller on FreeBSD

Kernel

     * if_bridge
     * sigfastblock(2)
     * arm64 LSE atomic instructions
     * FreeBSD on Microsoft HyperV and Azure
     * FreeBSD on the ARM Morello platform
     * NXP ARM64 SoC support
     * ENA FreeBSD Driver Update

Architectures

     * FreeBSD/powerpc Project
     * FreeBSD/RISC-V Project

Userland Programs

     * GCC 4.2.1 Retirement
     * elfctl utility
     * ELF Tool Chain

Ports

     * KDE on FreeBSD
     * XFCE
     * Wine on FreeBSD
     * Go on freebsd/arm64
     * sysctlmibinfo2 API

Documentation

     * FreeBSD Translations on Weblate
     * FreeBSD Manpages overhaul

Third-Party Projects

     * pot and the nomad pot driver
     * NomadBSD
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Team Reports

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

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 we did to help FreeBSD last quarter:

General

   We moved! Our new address is: The FreeBSD Foundation 3980 Broadway St.
   STE #103-107 Boulder, CO 80304 USA

   In February, the board of directors had an all-day board meeting in
   Berkely, CA, where FreeBSD began! We put together our strategic plans
   for the next 2 years, which includes software developments projects we
   want to support and some educational initiatives.

   COVID-19 impacts the Foundation. We put policies in place for all of
   our staff members to work from home. We also put a temporary ban on
   travel for staff members. We are continuing our work supporting the
   community and Project, but some of our work and responses are delayed
   because of changes in some of our priorities and the impact of limited
   childcare for a few of our staff members.

Partnerships and Commercial User Support

   We help facilitate collaboration between commercial users and FreeBSD
   developers. We also meet with companies to discuss their needs and
   bring that information back to the Project. In Q1, Deb Goodkin met with
   commercial users at LinuxConfAu in Australia, FOSDEM in Belgium, and
   SCALE18x in the US. These venues provide an excellent opportunity to
   meet with commercial and individual users and contributors to FreeBSD.
   It's not only beneficial for the above, but it also helps us understand
   some of the applications where FreeBSD is used. In addition to meeting
   with commercial users at conferences, we continued discussions over
   email or on calls over the quarter.

Fundraising Efforts

   Last quarter we raised $57,000! Thank you to everyone who came through,
   especially in this economic crisis we have found ourselves in. It
   heartens us deeply that individuals and organizations have supported
   our efforts, when there are so many people, animals, and businesses in
   need right now. We also want to extend a big thank you to Tarsnap,
   VMWare, and Stormshield for leading the way with Silver level
   donations. We hope other organizations will follow their lead and give
   back to help us continue supporting FreeBSD.

   We are 100% funded by donations, and those funds go towards software
   development work to improve FreeBSD, FreeBSD advocacy around the world,
   keeping FreeBSD secure, continuous integration improvements, sponsoring
   BSD-related and computing conferences, legal support for the Project,
   and many other areas.

   Please consider making a donation to help us continue and increase our
   support for FreeBSD: https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/donate/.

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

OS Improvements

   The Foundation supports software development projects to improve the
   FreeBSD operating system through our full time technical staff,
   contractors, and project grant recipients. They maintain and improve
   critical kernel subsystems, add new features and functionality, and fix
   problems.

   Over the last quarter there were 273 commits to the FreeBSD base system
   source repository tagged with FreeBSD Foundation sponsorship, about 12%
   of base system commits over the quarter. Many of these are part of
   sponsored or staff projects that have their own entries in this FreeBSD
   Quarterly Report, but Foundation staff and contractors (Ed Maste,
   Konstantin Belousov, Mark Johnston, Li-Wen Hsu) also support the
   project with an ongoing series of bug fixes, build fixes, and
   miscellaneous improvements that don't warrant a separate entry.

   Ed committed miscellaneous improvements to various parts of FreeBSD's
   build infrastructure, largely prompted by the work to retire the
   obsolete GCC 4.2.1. This included removal of the LLVM_LIBUNWIND option
   (now always set), and the removal of unused gperf, gcov, and the GPL
   devicetree compiler (dtc). Ed committed sendfile support for the
   Linuxulator, submitted by previous intern Bora Özarslan, and tested and
   committed a number of submitted bug fixes for the Microchip
   USB-Ethernet controller if_muge driver. Ed also updated the copy of
   OpenSSH in the base system to 7.9p1, with additional updates in
   progress, and worked on a number of security advisories released during
   the quarter.

   Konstantin Belousov and Mark Johnston both performed a large number of
   code reviews during the quarter under Foundation sponsorship. This work
   helps developers in the FreeBSD community and those working at
   companies using FreeBSD to integrate their work into FreeBSD.

   In addition to work described elsewhere in this report Konstantin also
   continued his usual series of bug fixes and improvements. This quarter
   this included low-level x86 support, fixing sendfile bugs, file system
   and vfs bug fixes, and dozens of other miscellaneous improvements.
   Additional work included a variety of commits to support Hygon x86 CPUs
   and improvements to the runtime linker (rtld)'s direct execution mode.

   Mark Johnston continued his work on the Syzkaller system-call fuzzer,
   and committed fixes for many issues reported by Syzkaller. Mark triaged
   a large number of submitted bug reports and in many cases committed
   attached patches or developed fixes. Mark also addressed dozens of
   Coverity Scan reports.

   Mark's other changes included arm64 Large System Extensions (LSE)
   atomic operations, low-level arm64 and x86 work, virtual memory (VM)
   work, and bug fixes or other improvements to syslog, the lagg(4) link
   aggregation driver, and build reproducibility.

   Li-Wen Hsu committed many changes to tests in the base system, such as
   turning off known failing tests tracked by PRs, test-related pkgbase
   fixes, and other improvements.

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.

   During the first quarter of 2020, Foundation staff continued to improve
   the Project's CI infrastructure, worked with contributors to fix the
   failing build and test cases. The building of a CI staging environment
   is in progress on the new machine purchased by the Foundation. We are
   also working with other teams in the Project for their testing needs.
   For example, we added a new job for running LTP (Linux Testing Project)
   on the Linuxulator, to validate improvements in the Foundation's
   sponsored Linux emulation work. We are also working with many external
   projects and companies to improve their support of FreeBSD.

   See the FreeBSD CI section of this report for completed work items and
   detailed information.

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. We purchased one server for a mirror in
   Malaysia, and signed the MOU for the new NYI colocation facility in
   Illinois. NYI generously provides this as an in-kind donation to the
   Project.

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 presented at the first ever FreeBSD Mini-Conf
       LinuxConfAu 2020, in Gold Coast, Australia in addition to
       sponsoring the conference itself. The recap can be found here.
     * Presented BSD Dev Room at FOSDEM '20, in Brussels, Belgium and
       represented FreeBSD at a stand along with other members of the
       community. Find out more here:
       https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/fosdem-2020-conference-recap/
     * Represented FreeBSD at Apricot 2020 in Melbourne, Australia and
       sponsored the event.
     * Industry Partner Sponsor for USENIX FAST '20 in Santa Clara, CA
     * Sponsored FOSSASIA 2020, in Singapore
     * Committed to hold FreeBSD Day at SCALE 18x, in Pasadena, CA
     * Held a "Getting Started with FreeBSD Workshop" at SCALE 18x in
       addition to giving a talk, representing FreeBSD at the Expo and
       holding a "Why FreeBSD is Me" BoF. Check out the conference recap.

   We continued producing FreeBSD advocacy material to help people promote
   FreeBSD.

   Learn more about our efforts in 2019 to advocate for FreeBSD.

   In addition to the information found in the Development Projects update
   section of this report, take a minute to check out the latest update
   blogs:
     * POWER to the People: Making FreeBSD a First Class Citizen on POWER.
     * Development Project Update: Toolchain Modernization.

   Read more about our conference adventures in the conference recaps and
   trip

   reports in our monthly newsletters.

   We help educate the world about FreeBSD by publishing the
   professionally produced FreeBSD Journal. As we mentioned previously,
   the FreeBSD Journal is now a free publication. Find out more and access
   the latest issues.

   You can find out more about events we attended and upcoming events
   here. As is the case for most of us in this industry, SCALE was the
   last event we will be attending for a few months. However, we're
   already working on how we can make more on-line tutorials and how-to
   guides available to facilitate getting more folks to try out FreeBSD.
   In the meantime, please check out the how-to guides we already have
   available!

   We have continued our work with a new website developer to help us
   improve our website. Work has begun to make it easier for community
   members to find information more easily and to make the site more
   efficient.

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!
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Core Team

   Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <core_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD Core Team is the governing body of FreeBSD.
     * Core approved a source commit bit for Alfredo Dal'Ava Júnior.
       Alfredo has been working on powerpc64 support. Justin Hibbits
       (jhibbits) will mentor Alfredo.
     * Core approved a source commit bit for Ryan Moeller. Ryan has been
       working on porting ZoL to FreeBSD. Alexander Motin (mav) and Matt
       Macy (mmacy) will mentor Ryan.
     * Core approved a source commit bit for Nick O'Brien. Nick has been
       working on RISC-V at Axiado. Kristof Provost (kp) and Philip Paeps
       (philip) will mentor Nick.
     * Core approved a source commit bit for Richard Scheffenegger.
       Richard has been contributing TCP work. Michael Tuexen (tuexen)
       will mentor Richard and Rodney Grimes (rgrimes) will act as
       co-mentor.
     * Core approved a source commit bit for Aleksandr Fedorov. Aleksandr
       has been testing and reviewing bhyve networking code. Vincenzo
       Maffione (vmaffione) will mentor Aleksandr and John Baldwin (jhb)
       will act as co-mentor.
     * Core requested that the freebsd-mobile_at_ list be retired as it was
       almost exclusively receiving spam. postmaster_at_ completed core's
       request.
     * Core approved third party authentication for some project services
       with certain conditions. For example, for authentication with
       Google, users must be using a FreeBSD.org account with two-factor
       authentication enabled. For GitHub, we will enable and force
       multi-factor authentication for our organization.
     * The Core-initiated Git Transition Working Group continued to meet
       over the first quarter of 2020. Their report is still forthcoming.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team

   Links
   FreeBSD 11.4-RELEASE schedule 
    URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.4R/schedule.html
   FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE schedule 
    URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.2R/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 is responsible for setting and
   publishing release schedules for official project releases of FreeBSD,
   announcing code freezes and maintaining the respective branches, among
   other things.

   The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team published the schedules for the
   upcoming 11.4-RELEASE and 12.2-RELEASE cycles.

   Much time was spent by Glen Barber working on updates to the various
   build tools adding support for builds from both Subversion and Git.
   This is very much a work in progress, as there are a number of
   inter-connected moving parts.

   Additionally throughout the quarter, several development snapshots
   builds were released for the head, stable/12, and stable/11 branches.

   Much of this work was sponsored by Rubicon Communications, LLC
   (netgate.com) and the FreeBSD Foundation.
     __________________________________________________________________

Cluster Administration Team

   Links
   Cluster Administration Team members 
    URL: https://www.freebsd.org/administration.html#t-clusteradm

   Contact: Cluster Administration Team <clusteradm_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team consists of the people
   responsible for administering the machines that the Project relies on
   for its distributed work and communications to be synchronised. In this
   quarter, the team has worked on the following:
     * Upgrade all ref- and universe- machines
     * South Africa mirror (JINX) is online
     * Package service of Seattle, USA mirror (TUK) is online
     * Ongoing systems administration work:
          + Creating accounts for new committers.
          + Backups of critical infrastructure.
          + Keeping up with security updates in 3rd party software.

   Work in progress:
     * Setup Malaysia (KUL) mirror
     * Setup Brazil (BRA) mirror
     * Setup Amsterdam (PKT) mirror
     * Review the service jails and service administrators operation.
     * Infrastructure of building aarch64 and powerpc64 packages
          + NVME issues on PowerPC64 Power9 blocking dual socket machine
            from being used as pkg builder.
          + Drive upgrade test for pkg builders (SSDs) courtesy of the
            FreeBSD Foundation.
          + Boot issues with Aarch64 reference machines.
     * New NYI.net sponsored colocation space in Chicago-land area.
     * Prepare resource for git working group
     * Searching for more mirror providers
          + https://wiki.freebsd.org/Teams/clusteradm/generic-mirror-layout
          + https://wiki.freebsd.org/Teams/clusteradm/tiny-mirror
     __________________________________________________________________

Continuous Integration

   Links
   FreeBSD Jenkins Instance 
    URL: https://ci.FreeBSD.org
   FreeBSD Hardware Testing Lab 
    URL: https://ci.FreeBSD.org/hwlab
   FreeBSD CI artifact archive 
    URL: https://artifact.ci.FreeBSD.org
   FreeBSD CI weekly report 
    URL: https://hackmd.io/_at_FreeBSD-CI
   FreeBSD Jenkins wiki 
    URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Jenkins
   Hosted CI wiki 
    URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/HostedCI
   3rd Party Software CI 
    URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/3rdPartySoftwareCI
   Tickets related to freebsd-testing_at_ 
    URL: https://preview.tinyurl.com/y9maauwg
   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>

   Contact: freebsd-testing Mailing List Contact: IRC #freebsd-ci channel
   on EFNet

   The FreeBSD CI team maintains the continuous integration system and
   related tasks for the FreeBSD project. The CI system regularly checks
   the committed changes can be successfully built, then performs various
   tests and analysis of the results. The artifacts from the build jobs
   are archived in the artifact server for further testing and debugging
   needs. The CI team members examine the failing builds and unstable
   tests and work with the experts in that area to fix the codes or adjust
   test infrastructure. The details of these efforts are available in the
   weekly CI reports.

   During the first quarter of 2020, we continue working with the
   contributors and developers in the project for their testing needs and
   also keep working with external projects and companies to improve their
   support of FreeBSD.

   Important changes:
     * All the -head jobs are using clang/lld toolchain
     * All the -head test are using kyua in the base
     * RISC-V jobs now generate full disk image and run tests in QEMU with
       OpenSBI
     * freebsd-doc job also checks building of www.freebsd.org

   New jobs added:
     * https://ci.freebsd.org/job/FreeBSD-head-amd64-test_ltp/
     * https://ci.freebsd.org/job/FreeBSD-head-powerpc64-images/
     * https://ci.freebsd.org/job/FreeBSD-head-powerpc64-testvm/

   Work in progress:
     * Collecting and sorting CI tasks and ideas here
     * Setup the CI stage environment and put the experimental jobs on it
     * Implementing automatic tests on bare metal hardware
     * Adding drm ports building test against -CURRENT
     * Testing and merging pull requests in the FreeBSD-ci repo
     * Planning for running ztest and network stack tests
     * Helping more 3rd software get CI on FreeBSD through a hosted CI
       solution
     * Adding non-x86 test jobs.
     * Adding external toolchain related jobs.
     * Adding more hardware to the hardware lab

   Please see freebsd-testing_at_ related tickets for more WIP information,
   and join the efforts

   Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
     __________________________________________________________________

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

   Contact: René Ladan <portmgr-secretary_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: FreeBSD Ports Management Team <portmgr_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The Ports Management Team is responsible for overseeing the overall
   direction of the Ports Tree, building packages, and personnel matters.
   Below is what happened in the last quarter.

   During the last quarter the number of ports settled in at 39,000. There
   are currently just over 2,400 open PRs of which 640 are unassigned. The
   last quarter saw 8146 commits by 173 committers to the HEAD branch and
   357 commits by 52 committers to the 2020Q1 branch. This means the
   number of PRs grew although the committer activity remained more or
   less constant.

   As always, people come and go. This time we welcomed Loïc Bartoletti
   (lbartoletti_at_), Mikael Urankar (mikael_at_), Kyle Evans (kevans_at_, who is
   already a src committer), and Lorenzo Salvadore (salvadore_at_, who we
   already know for compiling these reports you are reading right now). We
   said goodbye to dbn_at_ and theraven_at_, who we hope to see back in the
   future.

   On the infrastructure side, USES=qca was added and USES=zope was
   removed. The latter was also due to it was incompatible with Python 3,
   and portmgr is in the process of removing Python 2.7 from the Ports
   Tree. This means that all ports that currently rely on Python 2.7 need
   to be updated to work with Python 3 or be removed.

   After a long period of work by multiple people, Xorg got updated from
   the 1.18 to the 1.20 release series. Also, the web browsers were
   updated: Firefox to version 75.0, Firefox ESR to 68.7.0, and Chromium
   to 80.0.3987.149. The package manager itself got updated to version
   1.13.2.

   antoine_at_ ran 29 exp-runs during the last quarter for various updates to
   KDE, poppler, pkg and build tools; and test compatibility with src
   changes: removing procfs-based debugging, fixing TLS alignment, and
   only including libssp_nonshared.a in libc for the i386 and Power
   architectures.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Graphics Team status report

   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 maintains 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.

   The biggest highlight by far during the previous quarter was the long
   awaited update of xorg-server to version 1.20. After years of work by
   many people, this update finally landed in the form of xorg-server
   1.20.7. With this update came a couple of new things, most notably,
   FreeBSD 12 and later was switched to use the udev/evdev backend by
   default for handling input devices, such as mice and keyboards.
   Together with this release, the OpenGL library implementation mesa was
   switched to use DRI3 by default, instead of the older DRI2.

   These updates caused some fallout when they first were comitted, most
   notably issues with keyboards. But with help from Michael Gmelin and
   others on the mailing lists, most issues were sorted fast.
   Unfortunately version 304 of the nVidia graphics driver is no longer
   supported as of this release.

   Since this update, xorg-server has also been bumped to 1.20.8, which is
   the latest upstream release.

   Apart from this update, there has also been ongoing work to keep the
   various drm-kmod ports and packages up to date, mostly in response to
   changes in FreeBSD CURRENT and to security issues found in the Intel
   i915 driver.

   We have also done updates as needed to keep the graphics and input
   stack up to date and working, and deprecated and removed several old
   and no longer used drivers, applications and libraries.

   We have also continued our regularly scheduled bi-weekly meetings.

   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
     __________________________________________________________________

Projects

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

NFS over TLS implementation

   Contact: Rick Macklem <rmacklem_at_freebsd.org>

   In an effort to improve NFS security, an internet draft which I expect
   will become and RFC soon specifies the use of TLS 1.3 to encrypt all
   data traffic on a Sun RPC connection used for NFS.

   Although NFS has been able to use sec=krb5p to encrypt data on the
   wire, this requires a Kerberos environment and, as such, has not been
   widely adopted. It also required that encryption/decryption be done in
   software, since only the RPC message NFS arguments are encrypted. Since
   Kernel TLS is capable of using hardware assist to improve performance
   and does not require Kerberos, NFS over TLS may be more widely adopted,
   once implementations are available.

   Since FreeBSD's kernel TLS requires that data be in ext_pgs mbufs for
   transmission, most of the work so far has been modifying the NFS code
   that builds the protocol arguments to optionally use ext_pgs mbufs.
   Coding changes to handle received ext_pgs mbufs has also been done,
   although this may not be required by the receive kernel TLS.

   The kernel RPC has also been modified to do the STARTTLS Null RPC and
   to do upcalls to userland daemons that perform the
   SSL_connect()/SSL_accept(), since the kernel TLS does not do this
   initial handshake. So far only a self signed certificate on the server,
   with no requirement for the client to have a certificate has been
   implemented.

   Work is still needed to be done for the case where the NFS client is
   expected to have a signed certificate. In particular, it is not obvious
   to me what the correct solution is for clients that do not have a fixed
   IP address/DNS name. The code now is about ready for testing, but
   requires that the kernel TLS be able to support receive as well as
   transmit. Patches to the kernel TLS for receive are being worked on by
   jhb_at_freebsd.org.

   Once receive side kernel TLS becomes available, the code in subversion
   under base/projects/nfs-over-tls will need third party testing and a
   security evaluation by someone familiar with TLS.
     __________________________________________________________________

Import of the Kyua test framework

   Links
   The FreeBSD Test Suite 
    URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/TestSuite

   Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD test suite uses the Kyua test framework to run tests.

   Historically Kyua has been installed from the ports collection
   (devel/kyua). While this is fine for mainstream architectures, it can
   pose bootstrapping issues on new architectures and package installation
   is quite slow under emulation or on FPGA based systems. By including it
   in the FreeBSD base system we can avoid these issues.

   We hope that this inclusion will spur testing of embedded platforms and
   simplify the process of testing within continuous integration systems.

   We currently plan to retain the devel/kyua port to serve FreeBSD
   versions without and to serve as a development version.

   Sponsor: DARPA
     __________________________________________________________________

Linux compatibility layer update

   Contact: Edward Tomasz Napierala <trasz_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Work during this quarter focused on source code cleanup and making it
   easier to debug missing functionality. There were, however, some
   user-visible changes: added support for TCP_CORK as required by Nginx,
   added support MAP_32BIT flag, which fixes Mono binaries from Ubuntu
   Bionic, and a fix for DNS resolution with glibc newer than 2.30, which
   affected CentOS 8.

   The Linux Test Project tests that are being run as part of the the
   FreeBSD Continuous Integration infrastructure now include the Open
   POSIX test suite.

   There's still a lot to do:
     * There are pending reviews for patches that add extended attributes
       support, and fexecve(2) syscall, and they require wrapping up and
       committing
     * There are over 400 failing LTP tests. Some of them are false
       positives, some are easy to fix bugs, and some require adding new
       system calls. Any help is welcome.

   Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
     __________________________________________________________________

syzkaller on FreeBSD

   Contact: Mark Johnston <markj_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Michael Tuexen <tuexen_at_FreeBSD.org>

   See the syzkaller entry in the 2019q1 quarterly report for an
   introduction to syzkaller.

   A number of kernel bugs have been found by syzkaller and fixed this
   quarter, mostly in the network stack and file descriptor table code.
   Bug investigations have led to improvements in debugging facilities and
   assertions, for example in the SCTP stack. Syzkaller reproducers have
   been added to Peter Holm's stress2 suite, helping ensure that
   regressions are found quickly.

   The syzkaller instance hosted by backtrace.io (see the 2019q3 report)
   has been very useful in testing syzkaller improvements and finding
   bugs. Though Google runs a dedicated syzkaller instance targeting
   FreeBSD, it has proved fruitful to run multiple instances since they
   end up building different corpuses and thus discover different, though
   overlapping, sets of bugs.

   Support for fuzzing a number of new system calls has been added,
   including the new copy_file_range() and __realpathat() system calls,
   and the Capsicum system calls. Some work was also done to audit
   existing system call definitions to ensure that FreeBSD-specific
   extensions of POSIX system calls are covered. Work is ongoing to target
   the Linux emulation layer, and to collect kernel dumps so that one-off
   crashes with no reproducer have a chance at being diagnosed and fixed.

   Sponsor: backtrace.io Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
     __________________________________________________________________

Kernel

   Updates to kernel subsystems/features, driver support, filesystems, and
   more.

if_bridge

   Contact: Kristof Provost <kp_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The current implementation of if_bridge uses a single mutex to protect
   its internal data structures. As a result it's nowhere near as fast as
   it could be. This is relevant for users who want to run many vnet jails
   or virtual machines bridged together, for example.

   As part of this project several new tests have already been added for
   if_bridge. These are generally very useful for validating any locking
   changes, and will also help to prevent regressions for other future
   changes. These tests live in /usr/tests/sys/net/if_bridge_test.

   The current work is concentrating on investigating if it's possible to
   leverage the ConcurrencyKit epoch code for the datapath (i.e.
   bridge_input(), bridge_output(), bridge_forward(), ...).

   Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
     __________________________________________________________________

sigfastblock(2)

   Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Rtld services need to be async signal safe. This is needed, for
   instance, to provide working symbol bindings in signal handlers.

   For threaded processes, libthr interposes all user-installed signal
   handlers and saves the signals and related context if signal is
   delivered while rtld or libthr are in protected section of code.

   In non-threaded processes, the async safety is provided by changing
   signal mask for the thread. It is actually better than the interposing
   done by libthr, since signals are delivered in the right context,
   instead of libthr attempt of recreate it later. But the unfortunate
   side-effect is that each rtld entry requires two syscalls, one to set
   mask, and one to restore it. Typically this adds around 40 or more
   syscalls on each process startup. Worse, rtld services used by typical
   language runtime exception handling systems also have the cost of
   signal mask manipulation.

   The new sigfastblock(2) syscall was added that allows thread to
   designate a memory location as fast signal block. If this word contains
   non-zero value, kernel interprets the thread state same as if all
   blockable signals are blocked. The facility drastically improves
   exception handling speed on FreeBSD.

   Since signals might abort interruptible sleeps, initial implementation
   read the blocking word on each syscall entry. This is needed to ensure
   that userspace does not see spurious EINTR/ERESTART if the signals are
   blocked by the word. Since if kernel cached outdated value for the
   block word, it would abort sleep, but then ast sees the correct mask
   and does not deliver the pending signal.

   There were concerns that this read of the word causes slowdown in
   syscalls microbenchmarks, esp. on machines with SMAP. The reason is
   that SMAP requires all userspace access bracketed by STAC/CLAC pair of
   instructions, which are de-facto serializing (this is not
   architectural, but all current microarchitectures do it). The decision
   was made to eliminate the word read, at the cost of possibly returning
   spurious EINTR. The impact should be minimal, since sigfastblock(2) is
   not supposed to be the service available to users, it is only assumed
   for rtld and libthr implementations.

   Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
     __________________________________________________________________

arm64 LSE atomic instructions

   Contact: Mark Johnston <markj_at_FreeBSD.org>

   An investigation of some performance oddities on EC2 Graviton 2
   instances resulted in support for the use of Large System Extension
   (LSE) atomic instructions in the FreeBSD kernel.

   LSE is an mandatory ISA extension specified in ARMv8.1. It consists of
   a number of new atomic instructions, superseding the
   Load-Linked/Store-Conditional (LL/SC) instruction pairs use when LSE is
   not implemented. The extension is present in a number of ARMv8 server
   platforms, including the Cavium ThunderX2 and AWS Graviton 2. The new
   instructions provide significantly better scalability.

   A recent set of patches modified the FreeBSD kernel to detect support
   for LSE and dynamically select an atomic(9) implementation based on the
   new instructions when all CPUs implement the extension. The initial
   atomic(9) implementations were provided by Ali Saidi. Some benchmarking
   on a 64-vCPU Graviton 2 instance shows a ~4% reduction in wall clock
   time for a kernel build, and a ~15% reduction in system CPU time.

   Some ARMv8 multi-processor systems implement a heterogenous CPU
   architecture, referred to as big.LITTLE, in which multiple processor
   types are used. Surprisingly, such systems may implement the LSE on
   only a subset of its CPUs, in which case LSE instructions cannot be
   used by the kernel. As a result, FreeBSD currently waits until all
   processors are online before selecting the atomic(9) implementation,
   which precludes the use of ifuncs to provide dynamic selection.

   Currently atomic(9)'s use of LSE is limited to the kernel. A future
   project would extend this to userspace, so that FreeBSD system
   libraries can leverage the LSE instructions when they are available.

   Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation Sponsor: Amazon
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD on Microsoft HyperV and Azure

   Links
   FreeBSD on MicrosoftAzure wiki 
    URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/MicrosoftAzure
   FreeBSD on Microsoft HyperV    
    URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/HyperV

   Contact: FreeBSD Integration Services Team <bsdic_at_microsoft.com>
   Contact: Wei Hu <whu_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Wei is working on HyperV Socket support for FreeBSD. HyperV Socket
   provides a way for the HyperV host and guest to communicate using a
   common socket interface without networking required. Some features in
   Azure require HyperV Socket support in the guest.

   Details of HyperV Socket is available here.

   The work-in-progress is available here

   This project is sponsored by Microsoft.

   Li-Wen is working on the FreeBSD release code related to Azure for the
   -CURRENT and 12-STABLE branches. The release of 12.1-RELEASE on Azure
   is also in progress.

   The work-in-progress is available here

   This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD on the ARM Morello platform

   Links
   The Arm Morello Board 
    URL: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/cheri-morello.html
   The CHERI Project 
    URL: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/

   Contact: Andrew Turner <andrew_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Ruslan Bukin <br_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: John Baldwin <jhb_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson_at_FreeBSD.org>

   CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions) extends
   conventional hardware Instruction-Set Architectures (ISAs) with new
   architectural features to enable fine-grained memory protection and
   highly scalable software compartmentalization. The CHERI
   memory-protection features allow historically memory-unsafe programming
   languages such as C and C++ to be adapted to provide strong,
   compatible, and efficient protection against many currently widely
   exploited vulnerabilities. The CHERI scalable compartmentalization
   features enable the fine-grained decomposition of operating-system (OS)
   and application code, to limit the effects of security vulnerabilities
   in ways that are not supported by current architectures. CHERI is a
   hybrid capability architecture in that it is able to blend
   architectural capabilities with conventional MMU-based architectures
   and microarchitectures, and with conventional software stacks based on
   virtual memory and C/C++. This approach allows incremental deployment
   within existing ecosystems, which we have demonstrated through hardware
   and software prototyping.

   On 18 October 2019, Arm announced Morello, an experimental
   CHERI-extended, multicore, superscalar ARMv8-A processor,
   System-on-Chip (SoC), and prototype board to be available from late
   2021. Morello is a part of the UKRI £187M Digital Security by Design
   Challenge (DSbD) supported by the UK Industrial Strategy Challenge
   Fund, including a commitment of over £50M commitment by Arm. The aim is
   to test and validate CHERI extensions to the Arm ISA at scale with the
   idea that "successful concepts are expected to be carried forward into
   the architecture." The Morello board is scheduled to ship in the third
   quarter of 2021.

   Over the past decade we have developed CheriBSD, a version of FreeBSD
   supporting CHERI. Our public facing work has been performed on MIPS64
   and more recently on RISC-V. Andrew has also developed a port to an
   earlier version of the Morello ISA which we will be merging into our
   public repository as simulators and compilers become available.

   The Morello board is based on the Arm Neoverse N1 platform and derived
   from the N1SDP development platform. (The AWS Graviton2 systems are
   also based on the N1 core.) Ruslan and Andrew are currently working to
   enable all relevant features of the N1 and the N1SDP to give us a solid
   baseline for work on Morello. These features include the PCI root
   complex, system memory management unit (SMMU), and CoreSight. To the
   extent practical we are upstreaming these features to FreeBSD.

   Sponsor: DARPA, UKRI
     __________________________________________________________________

NXP ARM64 SoC support

   Contact: Marcin Wojtas <mw_at_semihalf.com>
   Contact: Artur Rojek <ar_at_semihalf.com>
   Contact: Dawid Gorecki <dgr_at_semihalf.com>

   The Semihalf team initiated working on FreeBSD support for the NXP
   LS1046A SoC

   LS1046A are quad-core 64-bit ARMv8 Cortex-A72 processors with
   integrated packet processing acceleration and high speed peripherals
   including 10 Gb Ethernet, PCIe 3.0, SATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 for a wide
   range of networking, storage, security and industrial applications.

   Completed since the last update:
     * Clean-up and rebase support on top of FreeBSD-HEAD. Prepare
       features for the upstream submission:
          + QorIQ platform clockgen driver
          + LS1046A clockgen driver
          + GPIO support for QorIQ boards
          + QorIQ LS10xx AHCI driver
          + VF610 I2C controller support
          + TCA6416 GPIO expander
          + Epson RX-8803 RTC
          + QorIQ LS10xx SDHCI driver

   Todo:
     * Upstreaming of developed features. This work is expected to be
       submitted/merged to HEAD in the Q2 of 2020.

   Sponsor: Alstom Group
     __________________________________________________________________

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>
   Contact: Maciej Bielski <mba_at_semihalf.com>
   Contact: Marcin Wojtas <mw_at_semihalf.com>

   ENA (Elastic Network Adapter) is the smart NIC available in the
   virtualized environment of Amazon Web Services (AWS). The ENA driver
   supports multiple transmit and receive queues and can handle up to 100
   Gb/s of network traffic, depending on the instance type on which it is
   used.

   Completed since the last update:
     * Upstream of the driver to v2.1.1, introducing:
          + Bug fix for LLQ mode which was causing race when multiple IO
            queues were used

   Work in progress:
     * Last touches for ENA v2.2.0 release, introducing:
          + Add driver support for the upcoming HW features (like Rx
            offsets, reporting Tx drops)
          + Add sysctl tuneables for IO queue number
          + Create IO queues with optional size backoff
          + Rework the way of configration of drbr and Rx ring size to be
            more robust and stable
          + New HAL version
          + Other minor fixes and improvements

   Sponsor: Amazon.com Inc
     __________________________________________________________________

Architectures

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

FreeBSD/powerpc Project

   Contact: Mark Linimon <linimon_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Justin Hibbits <jhibbits_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Piotr Kubaj <pkubaj_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD/powerpc project continues to mature.

   In addition to the above listed people, we want to acknowledge
   contributions from adalava, bdragon, luporl, and mikael, among others.

   Key points:
     * On -CURRENT, all platforms have been switched to the LLVM 10.0
       compiler and lld10. Thus, ld.bfd has been removed from base.
     * On powerpc64, -CURRENT has been switched to the ELFv2 ABI. Older
       versions of -CURRENT that either used GCC, or LLVM with the ELFv1
       ABI, are no longer supported.
     * On powerpc64 FreeBSD-STABLE (11 and 12), the platforms still remain
       on the antique gcc4.2.1 in base. Note: that version of GCC has been
       removed from the -CURRENT src tree. Support for this configuration
       is now a "best-effort" status.
     * On powerpc (32-bit), the ABI did not change as with powerpc64, so
       upgrading should be easier than with powerpc64.

   Hardware status:
     * The aacraid(4) driver has been been fixed for big-endian, thanks to
       luporl. This means that Talos customers who got the SAS option can
       now use the onboard SAS.
     * The ixl(4) driver has also been fixed for big-endian, also thanks
       to luporl.

   Software status:
     * As a result of -CURRENT switching to LLVM/ELFv2, ifuncs became
       available, meaning that we now have optimized memcpy/bcopy and
       strncpy functions when running on processors that supports VSX
       instructions.
     * powerpc64 is now able to run on QEMU without the need of Huge Pages
       support.
     * The virtio drivers have been fixed.
     * kernel minidump has been fixed.

   Package status:
     * A FreeBSD.org package set is available for powerpc64/12
       (quarterly). The -quarterly build has just been rebased from 12.0
       to 12.1, per the desupport of the older 12.0. The first rebased
       build has been completed, with 29776 packages being available.
     * We are currently working on the upgrade of the package builder to a
       recent -CURRENT. Therefore, the available packages for -CURRENT are
       still ELFv1, which are not useful. Please contact Mark Linimon for
       more information.
     * mesa has been switched to llvm90, which fixes certain problems.
     * Work continues on firefox and related ports.
     * More ports fixes are being committed every day.

   The team would like to thank IBM for the loan of two POWER8 and one

   POWER9 machines, and Oregon State University (OSU) for providing the
   hosting. As well, we would like to thank the clusteradm team for
   keeping the Tyan POWER8 machines online that are hosted at NYI.

   Also, Piotr would like to thank the FreeBSD Foundation for funding his
   personal Talos, and Raptor (via its IntegriCloud subsidiary) for
   loaning a server on which talos.anongoth.pl runs.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD/RISC-V Project

   Links
   Wiki 
    URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/riscv

   Contact: Ruslan Bukin <br_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Mitchell Horne <mhorne_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: John Baldwin <jhb_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Kristof Provost <kp_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Philip Paeps <philip_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Contact: freebsd-riscv Mailing List Contact: IRC #freebsd-riscv channel
   on freenode

   It has been a year since the RISC-V project's last status report. In
   that time, the RISC-V port has benefited from increased attention, and
   received improvements of all kinds.

   The RISC-V project has brought in two new src committers. We'd like to
   welcome Jessica Clarke (jrtc27_at_), who is a member of CheriBSD, and Nick
   O'Brien (nick_at_) of Axiado to the team.

   Some highlights from last year:
     * Bring-up on SiFive's Hifive Unleashed board
     * Support for the OpenSBI firmware and version 0.2 of the SBI
       specification
     * Addition of the UART, SPI, and PRCI device drivers for the HiFive
       Unleashed

   Last quarter, the default compiler and linker was switched to
   clang/lld. This

   required a small number of integration changes on our side, but was
   mainly enabled by the upstream improvements to the RISC-V LLVM
   back-end. LLVM's RISC-V support became "official" with LLVM 9, and LLVM
   10 has brought further improvements. The LLVM back-end is expected to
   continue to mature, as there are now many parties actively involved in
   its development. GCC remains supported as an external toolchain for
   RISC-V.

   The CI job for HEAD has been updated to use the clang/lld toolchain,
   and a GCC job will be added in the future. The RISC-V disk image built
   in the CI system now contains the full base system and is available on
   the CI artifact server for further testing. The CI test job was updated
   to use OpenSBI in qemu. Work on running the FreeBSD test suite for
   RISC-V in the CI system is in progress.

   Some progress has been made on supporting the ports framework on
   RISC-V, which was mostly untested until recently. First,
   emulators/qemu-user-static-devel received an update adding support for
   the RISC-V 64-bit ABI, allowing ports to be cross-compiled via
   poudiere(8). Second, improvements were made to the detection of the
   soft-float ABI, riscv64sf. Systems running either of the hard-float or
   soft-float ABIs can now compile and run ports natively. At the moment a
   small subset of ports can be built successfully, and in the coming
   months we will look to improve that to include a base set of crucial
   ports (e.g. python or perl).

   The CheriBSD project saw an initial port to RISC-V this quarter.
   Preliminary support for the CHERI ISA has been added to the Spike and
   QEMU emulators, as well as the necessary changes on the CheriBSD side.
   Currently, the CheriBSD RISC-V kernel boots, and most statically
   compiled CHERI binaries run without issue.

   Although real RISC-V hardware is still scarce, any users with an
   interest trying out or contributing to the RISC-V port are encouraged
   to do so. Please visit the recently updated wiki page for information
   on getting set up, or check out "Getting Started with FreeBSD/RISC-V"
   in the January/February edition of The FreeBSD Journal.

   Sponsor: DARPA, AFRL, Axiado, the FreeBSD Foundation
     __________________________________________________________________

Userland Programs

   Changes affecting the base system and programs in it.

GCC 4.2.1 Retirement

   Contact: Ed Maste <emaste_at_freebsd.org>
   Contact: Warner Losh <imp_at_freebsd.org>

   In 2007 the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) migrated to GPLv3, which
   prompted discussions about the future of the FreeBSD tool chain. We
   held a Tool Chain Summit at BSDCan 2010. Roman Divacky gave an update
   on the ClangBSD project, building FreeBSD using the new and rapidly
   improving Clang compiler.

   Since that time Clang was imported into the FreeBSD base system and was
   used more and more widely - first being installed but not the default
   cc, then used by default on i386 and amd64, and later used on more and
   more targets. In the years since Dimitry Andric has been keeping our
   copy of Clang up-to-date.

   GCC 4.2.1 was kept in the tree for a few FreeBSD targets that hadn't
   migrated to Clang, such as MIPS and Sparc64. By early this year all
   remaning targets had migrated to external toolchain (contemporary GCC
   from ports or packages), or had been deprecated.

   With no in-tree consumers remaining, GCC 4.2.1 was removed from FreeBSD
   in r358454 on February 29, 2020.

   Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
     __________________________________________________________________

elfctl utility

   Contact: Ed Maste <emaste_at_freebsd.org>

   In r340076 Ed added the NT_FREEBSD_FEATURE_CTL ELF note, used to allow
   binaries to opt out of, or in to, vulnerability mitigation and other
   features. FreeBSD Foundation intern Bora Özarslan later added a tool to
   decode and modify the ELF note, but it had yet to be installed by
   default.

   In the previous quarter Ed renamed the tool to elfctl, and installed it
   in /usr/bin. Ed also committed a number of minor bug fixes, code style
   improvements, etc.

   Usage examples - list known feature flags:
$ elfctl -l
Known features are:
aslr            Disable ASLR
protmax         Disable implicit PROT_MAX
stackgap        Disable stack gap
wxneeded        Requires W+X mappings

   List feature tags set on a binary:
$ elfctl /bin/ls
File '/bin/ls' features:
aslr            'Disable ASLR' is unset.
protmax         'Disable implicit PROT_MAX' is unset.
stackgap        'Disable stack gap' is unset.
wxneeded        'Requires W+X mappings' is unset.

   Indicate that a binary requests to opt-out of address randomization:
$ elfctl -e +aslr binary

   Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
     __________________________________________________________________

ELF Tool Chain

   Contact: Ed Maste <emaste_at_freebsd.org>

   A number of performance and functional improvements were committed to
   ELF Tool Chain tools over the last quarter.

   FreeBSD Foundation intern Tiger Gao added DWARF Debug Information Entry
   (DIE) caching to addr2line which provided a substantial improvement
   when translating many entries (even surpassing GNU addr2line with a
   large list).

   Tiger also rebased and updated an upstream ELF Tool Chain submission to
   handle DW_AT_ranges and addressed two elfcopy/objcopy bugs: setting the
   OS/ABI field correctly when converting a binary file to ELF, and
   correctly adding new sections when there is no .shstrtab section.

   Ed committed several readelf improvements, including decoding the
   PROTMAX_DISABLE, STKGAP_DISABLE, and WXNEEDED ELF feature control
   flags, decoding Xen and GNU Build-ID ELF notes, and improved input
   validation.

   Mark Johnston addressed many memory and file descriptor leaks and
   similar issues reported by Coverity Scan.

   Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
     __________________________________________________________________

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/
   KDE Community FreeBSD 
    URL: https://community.kde.org/FreeBSD

   Contact: Adriaan de Groot <kde_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The KDE on FreeBSD project packages the software produced by the KDE
   Community for FreeBSD. The software includes a full desktop environment
   KDE Plasma, the art application Krita, video editor Kdenlive and
   hundreds of other applications that can be used on any FreeBSD desktop
   machine.

   The quarter opened with a new kstars (amateur astronomy application)
   release landing in ports, and then had the usual regular updates:
     * three KDE Frameworks releases (on a monthly schedule),
     * three bugfix releases to the collection of KDE software from the
       KDE release service (formerly KDE Applications, but it was always
       more that only-applications),
     * three bugfix releases to the KDE Plasma desktop.

   There were no substantial Qt updates but four bugfix releases for

   devel/cmake, and regular work all over the ports tree.

   The SDDM login manager was updated to a much newer -- by over a year --
   release and patched to support more FreeBSD features.

   One update to devel/qca dropped compatibility with FreeBSD 11 because
   upstream no longer supports older OpenSSL versions. There is
   infrastructure in the ports tree now that adds a USES=qca for Qt
   applications needing crypto support.

   The open bugs list remains stable around 28 open issues, with some
   interesting xkb issues as a highlight. We welcome detailed bug reports
   and patches. KDE packaging updates are prepared in a copy of the ports
   repository on GitHub and then merged in SVN. We welcome pull requests
   there as well.
     __________________________________________________________________

XFCE

   Contact: Guido Falsi <xfce_at_FreeBSD.org>

   After the XFCE update to 4.14 a regression was observed in the XFCE
   window manager xfwm4. It caused window decorations to be drawn wrong or
   missing with certain graphic hardware setups. It has been reported that
   the recent update to Xorg server in the ports tree fixes this issue.
   The updated Xorg server will be available in the next qurterly branch.
     __________________________________________________________________

Wine on FreeBSD

   Links
   Wine homepage 
    URL: https://www.winehq.org

   Contact: Gerald Pfeifer <gerald_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Lorenzo Salvadore <salvadore_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The standard Wine port has moved from Wine 4.0.3 to Wine 5.0 which
   represents over 7,400 individual changes including built-in modules in
   PE format, multi-monitor support, Vulkan 1.1 support, and an XAudio2
   re-implementation.

   After our request for help in the last quarterly report the i386 wine
   ports have been adopted by salvadore who immediately started resolving
   existing bugs and improving the ports. Most of this work is ready and
   we began committing first pieces in March. Since it takes more time
   than initially expected, we will also update the i386-wine-devel port
   during this process so that users needing a more recent version can
   easily get it from the ports tree (or binary packages). On the other
   hand, we plan on backporting these improvements to i386-wine after
   i386-wine-devel is done and only then update that port, so that we
   always guarantee a stable version of i386-wine.
     __________________________________________________________________

Go on freebsd/arm64

   Links
   Go 1.14 Release Notes 
    URL: https://golang.org/doc/go1.14#freebsd

   Contact: Mikaël Urankar <mikael_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Dmitri Goutnik <dmgk_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Starting from the recently released version 1.14, Go now officially
   supports 64-bit ARM architecture on FreeBSD 12.0 or later. This porting
   effort was initially started by Greg V (aka myfreeweb) and resumed by
   Shigeru Yamamoto, Dmitri Goutnik and Mikaël Urankar. Dmitry has set up
   a CI builder to catch regression on FreeBSD aarch64 (it's required by
   the golang policy for adding a new port to the main Go repository)

   Work in progress:
     * a lot of ports use an old version of golang.org/x/sys or
       golang.org/x/net (to name a few) that doesn't contain the FreeBSD
       aarch64 bits, work is being done to fix these ports (details are in
       the bug tracker entry
     __________________________________________________________________

sysctlmibinfo2 API

   Links
   sysctlmibinfo2 
    URL: https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctlmibinfo2

   Contact: Alfonso Sabato Siciliano <alfonso.siciliano_at_email.com>

   In the previous third and fouth quarterly status reports 2019, the
   sysctlinfo interface and an extension to improve the sysctlbyname()
   syscall were described, they can access to the sysctl MIB and pass the
   properties of an object to the userland, but both are quite low level
   and kernel related.

   The sysctlmibinfo2 library provides an API to explore the sysctl MIB,
   to convert an object name in its corresponding Object Identifier and to
   find an object to get its properties, therefore it is useful to handle
   an object correctly and to build a sysctl-like utility.

   Primarily sysctlmibinfo2 wraps the low level interface to provide an
   easy API, some example: sysctlmif_desc() retrieves the description of
   an object, sysctlmif_kind() gets the type (string, integer, etc) and
   sysctlmif_fmt() specifies the format (an integer could represent a
   deciKelvin, milliKelvin, etc), then it is possible to print properly an
   object value.

   Moreover sysctlmibinfo2 provides a high level API: a struct
   sysctlmif_object definition and functions to build data structures of
   objects. Example, let's say we want to manage the sound system,
   sysctlmif_grouplistbyname("hw.snd") returns the list of the Sound
   Driver objects and sysctlmif_treebyname("dev.pcm") returns a tree where
   "dev.pcm" is the root node and each subtree represents an audio device.

   Obviously sysctlmibinfo2 benefits of the features of sysctlinfo:
   handles OIDs up to CTL_MAXNAME levels, supports capability mode, can
   seek an object by its name (avoiding to explore the MIB just to find
   the corresponding OID), gets all info about an object in a time,
   manages a name with a NULL level or expanded with an input for the
   sysctl handler.

   The library can be installed via the devel/libsysctlmibinfo2 port, a
   manual page and examples in the Public Domain are available for getting
   started your projects.
     __________________________________________________________________

Documentation

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

FreeBSD Translations on Weblate

   Links
   Translate FreeBSD on Weblate wiki 
    URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/DocTranslationOnWeblate
   FreeBSD Weblate Instance 
    URL: https://translate-dev.freebsd.org/

   Contact: Danilo G. Baio <dbaio_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Edson Brandi <ebrandi_at_FreeBSD.org>

   As announced on January, The FreeBSD Project is adopting Weblate as its
   web-based continuous localization platform.

   We are getting new volunteers to the effort and so far these are the
   numbers:

Q1 2020 Status

     * 10 languages
     * 47 registered users

Languages

     * Chinese (Simplified) (zh_CN)
     * Chinese (Traditional) (zh_TW) - Added
     * French (fr_FR) - Added
     * German (de_DE) - Added
     * Italian (it_IT) - Added
     * Norwegian Bokmål - Added - New language on FreeBSD
     * Persian (fa_IR) - Added - New language on FreeBSD
     * Portuguese (Brazil)
     * Spanish
     * Turkish (tr-TR) [1] - Added - New language on FreeBSD

   1 - Already had an effort in the past.

   We want to thank everyone that contributed, translating or reviewing
   documents.

   And please, help promote this effort on your local user group, we
   always need more volunteers.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Manpages overhaul

   Contact: Gordon Bergling <gbergling_at_gmail.com>

   I am currently working on an overhaul for the FreeBSD manpages by
   updating the HISTORY and STANDARDS sections and while here creating new
   manpages for parts of the system that missing documentation. FreeBSD
   has already one of the best documentation available for an UNIX-like
   operation system, but there are parts that could be improved.

   For the parts that have been already improved you can have a look at my
   Phabricator account.

   If you would like to help on improving the documentation effort, please
   contact Benedict Reuschling bcr_at_freebsd.org or me at
   gbergling_at_gmail.com.
     __________________________________________________________________

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.

pot and the nomad pot driver

   Links
   pot project      
    URL: https://pot.pizzamig.dev
   pot on github    
    URL: https://github.com/pizzamig/pot
   Nomad pot driver 
    URL: https://github.com/trivago/nomad-pot-driver
   minipot          
    URL: https://github.com/pizzamig/minipot

   Contact: Luca Pizzamiglio <pizzamig_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Esteban Barrios <esteban.barrios_at_trivago.com>

   An initial effort to write proper documentation and guides for the pot
   project has started. The documentation, even if incomplete, is
   available at here. A F.A.Q. page is available and waiting for users to
   submit their questions.

   During the last quarter, some bugs were reported on pot and on the
   nomad-pot-driver. Both projects released a new bug fix version. Many
   thanks to 'grembo' and 'Crest' that reported issues, tested and tried
   our solutions. Thanks also to Mateusz (0mp) for his Pull Requests!

   pot will have a new release soon (0.11.0), focused on network:
     * network stack support: ipv4 only, ipv6 only, dual stack.
     * flexible network setup for alias: adding the ability to use an
       arbitrary network setup for alias network type

   Contributions are welcome! Label "good first issue" has been added to
   issues to invite newcomers to contribute to the project!
     __________________________________________________________________

NomadBSD

   Links
   NomadBSD Website 
    URL: https://www.nomadbsd.org/
   NomadBSD Github  
    URL: https://www.github.com/NomadBSD/NomadBSD
   NomadBSD Forum   
    URL: https://forum.NomadBSD.org/

   Contact: NomadBSD Team <info_at_NomadBSD.org>

   NomadBSD is a persistent live system for USB flash drives, based on
   FreeBSD. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup, it is
   configured to be used as a desktop system that works out of the box,
   but can also be used for data recovery, for educational purposes, or
   testing FreeBSD's hardware compatibility.

   In March we released a new minor version 1.3.1 which improves the
   configuration of the network interfaces, fixed some bugs and added
   nomadbsd-chusr and nomadbsd-sysinfo. Further some new features found
   their way into the release.

   Some days later the channel explainingcomputers on YouTube released a
   review video of NomadBSD. The explainingcomputers has almost 600,000
   followers and the review was positive so we saw the highest peak in
   downloads ever! Along with it came a lot of people looking for help on
   our mailing list and on Twitter so we decided to set up a new support
   forum.

   We are looking for people to help the project. Help is much appreciated
   in all areas:
     * Translation of program interfaces
     * Design artwork
     * Programming new tools, extend existing ones
     * Tests and Bug reports / UX and feature suggestions
     * Mirrors outside of Europe

   Open tasks:
     * Support installation on disk partitions and add a partition editor
       GUI.
     * Complete disk encryption
     * Add a user-friendly network manager
Received on Sun Apr 12 2020 - 20:05:48 UTC

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Wed May 19 2021 - 11:41:23 UTC