This year's Open Source Days will take place at Copenhagen Business School (in Denmark) on March 10 and 11. Sven Esbjerg will be bringing a supply of Foundation flyers to give away--you can find him at the BSD booth in the "hallway track". Erwin Lansing from the Foundation will also be available to answer questions regarding funded projects and the Foundation's work.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Thursday, February 16, 2012
FreeBSD Foundation one of 12 Initial Affiliates for OSI
Earlier this year, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) switched from a Board-only organization
focused largely on licensing to a member-led organization of affiliates. The OSI Board
invited the FreeBSD Foundation to its initial set of Affiliates and Justin Gibbs and Dru Lavigne from the FreeBSD Foundation have agreed to act as delegates.
Simon Phipps from the OSI announced the 12 initial affiliates at FOSDEM. In addition to the FreeBSD Foundation, the initial affiliates include: KDE, the Apache Software Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, the Plone Foundation, Creative Commons, the Linux Foundation, Joomla, the Sahana Software Foundation, Drupal, the Eclipse Foundation, and the Wikiotics Foundation.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Foundation at FOSDEM
Erwin Lansing from the Foundation will be at FOSDEM, in Brussels, Belgium (February 4-5). He'll have some cool swag and can accept donations to the Foundation. You can find him hanging out at the FreeBSD booth in the expo area on Saturday and in the BSD Devroom on Sunday.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Interview with Deb Goodkin
Friday, January 27, 2012
Quarterly Status Report
The FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report is available. The Foundation has the following section in the report:
The most exciting news to report is that we raised $426,000 through our fundraising efforts. We were overwhelmed by the generosity of the FreeBSD community. We would like to thank everyone who made a contribution to FreeBSD by either making a financial donation to the foundation or volunteering on the Project.
We published our semi-annual newsletter in December. If you have not already done so, please take a moment to read this publication to find out how we supported the FreeBSD Project and community during the second half of 2011. There are also two great testimonials in the newsletter from TaxiMagic and the Apache Software Foundation.
The Foundation sponsored EuroBSDCon 2011 which was held in The Netherlands, October 6-9. And, we sponsored six developers to attend the conference. We sponsored the Bay Area Vendor Summit in November. We were represented at LISA '11, Dec 7-8 in Boston MA.
We are a proud sponsor of AsiaBSDCon 2012, which will be held in Tokyo, Japan, March 22-25.
The Foundation funded the completed Feed-Forward Clock Synchronization Algorithms Project by the University of Melbourne. We approved two new projects at the beginning of 2012: analyzing the performance of FreeBSD's IPv6 stack by Bjoern Zeeb, and implementing the auditdistd daemon by Pawel Jakub Dawidek
We purchased more servers and other hardware for the FreeBSD co-location centers at Sentex, NYI, and ISC.
The work above, as well as many other tasks which we do for the FreeBSD Project, could not be done without donations. Please help us by making a donation or asking your company to make a donation. We would be happy to send marketing literature to you or your company. Find out how to make a donation at our donate page.
Find out more up-to-date Foundation news by reading our blog and Facebook page.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
FreeBSD 9.0 Press Release
The Foundation has written a press release for the release of FreeBSD 9.0. From PRWeb:
Release of FreeBSD 9.0 Delivers More Power to Serve
Today, the FreeBSD Foundation announced the recent release of FreeBSD 9.0. FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE raises the bar for open source operating systems in terms of file system reliability, IPv6-readiness, networking capabilities, compiler and toolchain technologies, and security. Many of its new features directly benefit system administrators, application developers, and companies that use or base their products on FreeBSD.
"FreeBSD 9.0 represents the culmination of over two years of ground-breaking work in operating system performance, reliability, and security," said Ken Smith, Release Engineer for the FreeBSD Project. "We are proud to dedicate this release to the memory of Dennis M. Ritchie, one of the founding fathers of the UNIX® operating system, whose vision and work laid the foundations for FreeBSD."
Filesystem changes in this release provide great benefits to both UFS and ZFS users. When installing with UFS, softupdates journaling (UFS+SUJ) is automatically enabled. UFS+SUJ uses an intent log which safely eliminates the need for a long filesystem check and recovery process, even after an unclean shutdown.
ZFS has been updated to version 28 which supports data deduplication, triple parity RAIDZ3, snapshot holds, log device removal, zfs diff, zpool split, zpool import -F, and read-only zpool import.
FreeBSD 9.0 also introduces the Highly Available STorage (HAST) framework which provides transparent storage of the same data across several systems connected by a TCP/IP network. In combination with other high availability features of FreeBSD like the CARP fail-over protocol, HAST makes it possible to build a highly available storage cluster that is resistant to hardware failures.
Continuing its heritage of innovating in the area of security research, FreeBSD 9.0 introduces Capsicum. Capsicum is a lightweight framework which extends a POSIX UNIX kernel to support new security capabilities and adds a userland sandbox API. Originally developed as a collaboration between the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and Google and sponsored by a grant from Google, FreeBSD was the prototype platform and Chromium was the prototype application. FreeBSD 9.0 provides kernel support as an experimental feature for researchers and early adopters. Application support will follow in a later FreeBSD release and there are plans to provide some initial Capsicum-protected applications in FreeBSD 9.1.
"Google is excited to see the award-winning Capsicum work incorporated in FreeBSD 9.0, bringing native capability security to mainstream UNIX for the first time," said Ulfar Erlingsson, Manager, Security Research at Google.
FreeBSD has been been an early adopter and active participant in the IPv6 community since FreeBSD 4.0 was released in 2000 with the KAME reference implementation of IPv4/IPv6 networking support. In addition, the FreeBSD Project has been serving releases from IPv6-enabled servers for more than 8 years and FreeBSD’s website, mailing lists, and developer infrastructure have been IPv6-enabled since 2007. FreeBSD 9.0 introduces IPv6-only snapshots which completely remove IPv4 from the operating system.
2012 has been called the 'year of IPv6' and "the FreeBSD project is well positioned to be one of the leaders in IPv6-Only validation work," stated Bjoern Zeeb, member of the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team and recipient of the 2010 Itojun Service Award for his significant improvements in open source implementations of IPv6. "The growing usage of FreeBSD's IPv6 networking stack by appliance builders, integration of a more flexible interface configuration, and the implementation of new standards such as Secure Neighbor Discovery, DNS Options for Router Advertisements, and CPE Requirements, makes FreeBSD 9.0 the perfect open source operating system to build your IPv6 deployments and products on."
Other new features include:
- userland DTrace has been added to supplement kernel-level DTrace
- the FreeBSD world and kernel can now be compiled using the BSD-licensed LLVM toolchain
- resource limit actions can be applied to processes, users, login classes, and jails
- the addition of a pluggable congestion framework and five new TCP congestion control algorithms
- HPN-SSH is enabled by default and increases transfer speeds on long, high bandwidth network links
- NFSv4 support added
- flattened device trees (FDT) allows for hardware resource enumeration and simplifies configuration on embedded platforms
About the FreeBSD Foundation
The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD Project and community. The Foundation gratefully accepts donations from individuals and businesses, using them to fund and manage projects, sponsor FreeBSD events, Developer Summits and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers. In addition, the Foundation represents the FreeBSD Project in executing contracts, license agreements, and other legal arrangements that require a recognized legal entity. The FreeBSD Foundation is entirely supported by donations. More information about The FreeBSD Foundation is available on the web.
About The FreeBSD Project
The FreeBSD Project provides an up-to-date and scalable modern operating system that offers high-performance, security, and advanced networking for personal workstations, Internet servers, routers, and firewalls. The FreeBSD packages collection includes popular software like the Apache web server, GNOME, KDE, X.org, Python, Firefox, and over 23,000 software suites. FreeBSD can be found on the Internet.
Monday, January 16, 2012
CAM Target Layer
Earlier this week, Ken Merry committed CTL to HEAD for testing. From the commit message:
CTL is a disk and processor device emulation subsystem originally written for Copan Systems under Linux starting in 2003. It has been shipping in Copan (now SGI) products since 2005. It was ported to FreeBSD in 2008, and thanks to an agreement between SGI (who acquired Copan's assets in 2010) and Spectra Logic in 2010, CTL is available under a BSD-style license. The intent behind the agreement was that Spectra would work to get CTL into the FreeBSD tree.
We spoke to Ken about the benefits of CTL and this is what he had to say:
CTL offers a number of benefits, but here are a couple of ways we can use it:
- It provides the missing piece needed to turn a FreeBSD box into an external RAID array. All you need is a Fibre Channel card (Qlogic 4Gb and 8Gb cards work now), and some disks, and with ZFS managing the disks and CTL providing the target interface, you've got an external RAID array. End users can do it, or companies can use it as the foundation for a FreeBSD-based storage appliance.
- CTL provides a test framework for CAM. When we implement new features and command support in CAM, we can immediately test out the new features in CTL. For instance, when I implemented SCSI descriptor sense support last year, I actually first implemented descriptor sense in CTL. That way, when I implemented it in CAM, I had a way to test everything out. I was able to test, through sense data injection, scenarios that would be impossible to trigger using an ordinary hard disk. You can't make a hard disk return every possible error and combination of errors, but with CTL, you can do that. So I was able to more fully test everything out and gain confidence that the descriptor sense code worked properly.
For people who want to test it, you don't need a Fibre Channel card, you can actually create LUNs and use CTL without any new hardware. With the CTL CAM SIM, the LUNs are visible on the internal 'ctl2cam0' bus. Here's what the output of camcontrol devlist -v looks like:
scbus6 on ctl2cam0 bus 0:
<> at scbus6 target -1 lun -1 ()
The da(4) driver is attached to the CTL LUNs, and you can do normal I/O to them just as you would any other disk.
One thing to watch out for is that if you use a block device (as opposed to a file or a ramdisk) as your backing store for CTL, you will need to disable synchronize cache support with ctladm realsync off. The reason is that g_dev_strategy() does not support the BIO_FLUSH command, and will panic with a KASSERT. That is something that needs to be fixed.
Files and ramdisks work fine without disabling flush support.
There is a brief description of how to create LUNs and enable ports in the CTL README.ctl.txt file in sys/cam/ctl, and the ctladm(8) man page also describes all of the options and provides some examples.
CTL is pretty functional, and should work well in most cases, but I am certainly interested in any feedback on it. The README has a to-do list, and I'm also planning on doing some performance optimizations as well.
One of the next things we need is more hardware support for various boards that support target mode. (e.g. other Fibre Channel, iSCSI and FCoE boards) It would also be nice to get CTL working with the Firewire target driver.
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