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.

Interview with Deb Goodkin

Episode 211 of bsdtalk has an interview with Deb Goodkin, Director of Operations for the FreeBSD Foundation. The interview is available as an mp3 or as an ogg.

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.

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

A complete list of the features in this release is available on the web at http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.0R/relnotes.html. FreeBSD 9.0 can be downloaded for free from the FreeBSD website or purchased from FreeBSDMall.com.

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.

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 0 (pass56,da48)
             at scbus6 target 1 lun 1 (pass57,da49)
             at scbus6 target 1 lun 2 (pass58,da50)
<>                                 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.

We'll be at SCALE

The FreeBSD Foundation will be accepting donations at the FreeBSD booth at SCALE, to be held next weekend at the Hilton LAX in Los Angeles, CA. If you're in the area, drop by to check out our cool swag and to chat about the Foundation's projects.

Registration for the expo is $10, or $70 if you would like to also attend the SCALE presentations.

Accepting Travel Grant Applications for AsiaBSDCon 2012

Calling all FreeBSD developers needing assistance with travel expenses to AsiaBSDCon 2012.

The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please fill out and submit the Travel Grant Request Application by February 20, 2012 to apply for this grant.

This program is open to FreeBSD developers of all sorts (kernel hackers, documentation authors, bugbusters, system administrators, etc). In some cases we are also able to fund non-developers, such as active community members and FreeBSD advocates.

Your request should be based on a realistic and economical estimate of travel costs (economy airfare, trainfare, ...), accommodations (conference hotel and sharing a room), and registration or tutorial fees. If there are other sponsors willing to cover costs, such as your employer or the conference, we prefer that you talk to them first, as our budget is limited. We are happy to split costs with you or another sponsor, such as just covering airfare or board.

If you are a speaker at the conference, we expect the conference to cover your travel costs, and will most likely not approve your request.

If your application is approved, we will authorize you to seek reimbursement up to a limit. We consider several factors, including our overall and per-event budgets, and the benefit to the community by funding your travel. We reimburse costs based on receipts, and by check or bank transfer. And, we do not cover your costs if you end up having to cancel your trip. We require you to submit a report on your trip, which we may show to current or potential sponsors, and may include in our semi-annual newsletter or this blog.

There's some flexibility in the mechanism, so talk to us if something about the model doesn't quite work for you or if you have any questions. The travel grant program is one of the most effective ways we can spend money to help support the FreeBSD Project, as it helps developers get together in the same place at the same time, and helps advertise and advocate FreeBSD in the larger community.

New Funded Project: Implementing auditdistd daemon

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Pawel Jakub Dawidek has been awarded a grant to implement the auditdistd daemon.

The FreeBSD audit facility provides fine-grained, configurable logging of security-relevant events.  One of the key purposes of logging security events is postmortem analysis in case of system compromise. Currently the kernel can push audit records directly into a file or make them available through the /dev/auditpipe device.  Because audit logs are stored locally by the kernel, an attacker has access to them once the system is compromised, which enables him to remove trails of his activity.

The goal of the auditdistd project is to securely and reliably distribute audit records over the TCP/IP network from a local auditdistd daemon to a remote auditdistd daemon. In case of source system compromise, the attacker's activity can be analysed using data collected by the remote system, as only the remote system's audit logs can still be trusted.

The project will conclude in February 2012.

New Funded Project: IPv6 Performance Analysis

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has awarded Bjoern Zeeb a grant to analyze the performance of FreeBSD's IPv6 stack. This project is jointly sponsored with iXsystems.

Last year, Bjoern improved FreeBSD IPv6 support, allowing the possibility to build a FreeBSD system without IPv4 support. This project will continue on this work and concentrate on the kernel, looking at the performance of FreeBSD's IPv6 stack. Various parties have seen lower performance when comparing IPv4 to IPv6 on FreeBSD. While the numbers seem to differ between releases the causes are mostly unknown.

The project will carry out a detailed performance analysis starting with benchmarking IPv6 to IPv4 to get up-to-date numbers to better understand where we are. It will then continue to identify the origins of differences in performance, and where possible, directly address them or identify areas of future work. Having initial benchmark numbers will allow changes to be evaluated by re-running the measurements and quantifying the improvements.

"As the world starts to roll out IPv6 and traffic patterns shift from IPv4 to IPv6, not only correctness and stability, but also feature parity and performance matter," said developer Bjoern Zeeb. "Getting the performance numbers aligning with IPv4 will ensure that our users will not need more resources when using IPv6."

"ISC uses FreeBSD extensively across our server infrastructure and have provided IPv6 services to the community since 2002," commented Peter Losher, ISC Sr. Operations Engineer. "We are excited to support The FreeBSD Foundation and Bjoern's efforts to improve IPv6 performance in FreeBSD."

Bjoern Zeeb is a consultant based in Germany and has been an active FreeBSD committer since 2004. He is currently also a member of the FreeBSD Security and Release Engineering teams.