Monday, December 30, 2013

Last Day to Make 2013 Donation to The FreeBSD Foundation

It's hard to believe that 2014 is just around the corner! We've raised around $660,000 so far as of 7PM Colorado Time December 30. We also have $75,000 in pledges that we should be receiving soon! We only have around 24 hours left to reach our goal of raising $1,000,000. Here is my plea to ask for your help. Please consider making a donation. It is so easy to do. Just click here to make a donation online or to find out where to mail a check. If you file US taxes, most likely your donation will be tax-deductible. If you send a check, please mail it tomorrow (December 31). For the donation to count towards 2013, the envelope has to be postmarked by December 31. Writing 2013 donation on your check doesn't work for our accounting.

This year has been amazing. Because of our successful fundraising campaign last year, we were able to support the FreeBSD Project and community in so many ways. You can read my appeal here to see where we spent the money this year.

There are three areas where we've grown the most. One is our FreeBSD development work. We now have two staff members working on FreeBSD projects, a full-time employee working on FreeBSD System Administration and Release Engineering work, and we have a Project Manager who is not only overseeing all of our funded projects, but also working on project roadmaps and helping facilitating collaboration between our corporate users and FreeBSD developers. This is helping to bring in more corporate sponsors too.

We've also increased our FreeBSD advocacy by producing professional FreeBSD marketing brochures, white papers, literature, and our new FreeBSD Journal that will be debuting in a few weeks!

Lastly, we've spent over $100,000 on hardware to improve the FreeBSD infrastructure. This equipment resides in our four co-location facilities at NYI, Sentex, Yahoo!, and ISC.

Our End-of-Year newsletter highlights everything we supported this last year. Take a few minutes to read up on why we need your donations and how we spend the money.

Thank you for your support!

Deb Goodkin
Secretary/Treasurer
The FreeBSD Foundation

P.S. Making a donation is quick and easy! Click here to make a donation now.

Faces of FreeBSD - Isabell Long

FACES OF FREEBSD

Each week we are sharing a story from someone involved in FreeBSD. This is our Faces of FreeBSD series. It may be a story from someone who’s received funding from us to work on development projects, run conferences, travel to conferences, or advocate for FreeBSD. Or, it may be from someone who gives back to FreeBSD financially or in another way. But, it is always from someone who is making a positive difference in the FreeBSD world.

Here’s a chance to get to know your fellow FreeBSD enthusiast. Sit back and enjoy another 2013 Faces of FreeBSD story.

Isabell's Story

My name is Isabell Long, and I am a 19-year-old living in the south of England. I'm a Ruby on Rails web developer at a social media startup named Gerraroom and a volunteer staff member of the freenode IRC network. I love open data and—on the non-tech side—good food, music (both playing and listening) and learning. Before FreeBSD, I contributed documentation and support for Ubuntu, which was a good introduction into the world of open source.

Friends hinted that I should try FreeBSD by posting me burned CDs of releases. Then in 2011, I decided to participate in the Google Code-In contest, completing documentation-related tasks and becoming heavily involved in the documentation project afterwards. I became a documentation committer in April 2012. The new committer mentoring process proved very useful and that, plus the accepting community of FreeBSD, are reasons why I stay involved.

Thanks to FreeBSD Foundation funding, I was able to attend my first overseas conference at EuroBSDcon 2013 in Malta. Apart from the experience of going to a country I’d never visited before, meeting people who I only knew on IRC and seeing some people I met at the DevSummits in Cambridge was one of the best bits. The documentation sessions were very useful and I completed a few tasks on the website and Handbook during my time there and afterwards. I'm looking forward to having a few similarly productive days in Bulgaria next year.

As a thank you for providing resources to keep FreeBSD going and enabling committers like me to travel to conferences, I donated a small amount in Malta to the FreeBSD Foundation as I strongly believe that giving where possible keeps positivity going and one day, that repays.

Isabell Long

Donate today to help us continue and increase our support of the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide! Making a donation is quick and easy. To make a donation go to: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/

Thursday, December 26, 2013

FreeBSD 10.0-RC3 Now Available

The third RC build of the 10.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.

The image checksums follow at the end of this email.

ISO images and, for architectures that support it, the memory stick images are available here.

Important note to freebsd-update(8) users: Please be sure to follow the instructions in the following FreeBSD Errata Notices before upgrading the system to 10.0-RC3:

Pre-installed virtual machine images for 10.0-RC3 are also available for amd64 and i386 architectures.

Changes between -RC2 and -RC3 include:

Several minor bugfixes and functionality enhancements to bhyve.
Add new sysctl, kern.supported_archs, containing the list of FreeBSD MACHINE_ARCH values whose binaries this kernel can run.
Add a pkg(8) repository configuration file for cdrom-based package installation.
Implement a fix to allow bsdconfig(8) to be able to install packages included on the DVD.
Fix pkg(8) multi-repository support by properly respecting 'enabled' flag.
Fix Xen build without INET.
Several bugfixes to bsdinstall(8).
Fix a ZFS-related panic triggered by an incorrect assertion.
Fix mountroot> prompt eating most of the characters by not enabling RXRDY interrupts in the attach routine.
Fix a regression in ng_ksocket(4).
Apply patch from upstream Heimdal for encoding fix.

Love FreeBSD? Support this and future releases with a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation!

Monday, December 23, 2013

Faces of FreeBSD - Kevin Martin

FACES OF FREEBSD

Here’s a chance to get to know your fellow FreeBSD enthusiast. Sit back and enjoy another 2013 Faces of FreeBSD story.

Kevin's Story

My name is Kevin Martin, and I am the CEO and Founder of pair Networks, Inc. I've been a computer person since I was very young. My father made a wise investment in the very first Model 5150 of the IBM PC. He brought home the 64KB model with two floppy disk drives in October 1981, and I immediately moved up from writing games on the HP-41C, and in BASIC on notebook paper.

In junior high and high school, I was "that kid" who helped fix computers, whether in the school's library or main office. When I attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (for Computer Science, naturally), there were SunOS 4.1 workstations available to students, and I jumped into BSD-flavored UNIX with both feet. Soon I was an assistant at the Image Processing Lab, which had the latest and greatest equipment on campus.

My other passion is pinball. As a pre-teen I hung out in the arcade when my mother went to her bowling league. In college I discovered pinball tournaments, and started attending. Eventually I took over the Professional & Amateur Pinball Association and started running the world's largest pinball tournaments, twice yearly, just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. More recently, I founded Replay Foundation, a non-profit that promotes the preservation, restoration, and enjoyment of pinball, with an emphasis on the player experience.

In the summer of 1995, I founded pair Networks, with an eye towards simple Web design projects. I’d been running an FTP/Web site called "The Pinball Archive" since early 1993, and was paying a series of obscure ISPs to host it. While working on ideas for pair, I noticed that the latest ISP I was using, Best Internet Communications, was migrating their servers from BSDI to FreeBSD.

Curious, I borrowed a server from my uncle and installed FreeBSD 2.0.5. I was impressed and immediately hooked. My experience with SunOS, combined with the power of FreeBSD, made it possible to launch my own hosting company—which is what pair Networks became. In January 1996, our T-1 to Digital Express came online, and pair was launched with just a couple of Pentium servers, all running FreeBSD 2.1. The Pinball Archive had found its permanent home.

Over the past 18 years, FreeBSD has been an asset to our operations, and while we have branched out a bit, we still primarily use FreeBSD and promote it whenever possible. FreeBSD is a terrific technology with a terrific community.

Kevin Martin

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

FreeBSD Foundation Announces Capsicum Integration Project Completion

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce the successful completion of work on the improvement and integration of the Capsicum framework and the Casper services daemon. The Google Open Source Programs Office and the FreeBSD Foundation jointly sponsored Paweł Jakub Dawidek for this project.

Capsicum is a lightweight OS capability and sandbox framework developed at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. Capsicum extends the POSIX API, providing several new OS primitives to support object-capability security on UNIX-like operating systems. Capsicum is now a standard part of FreeBSD, and ports to other operating systems are in progress.

The Casper daemon provides an easy to use programming interface for services which are otherwise difficult or impossible to access in a capability sandbox, including DNS resolution, access to the password and system groups database, entropy, and sysctl system configuration nodes.

"Libcapsicum and the Casper daemon make it easier for application developers to take advantage of capability sandboxing -- a critical step in allowing not just web browsers, but also security-ciritical desktop applications such as mail readers and office suites, to mitigate security vulnerabilities," said Robert N. M. Watson, the FreeBSD Foundation board member and University of Cambridge lecturer who led the Google-funded Capsicum research project.

The new libnv library developed as part of this project simplifies inter-process communication, a critical aspect of the Capsicum sandboxing model. Redesigned capability rights allow for finer-grained control of individual capabilities by eliminating the previous limit on the number of different kinds of file-descriptor operations controlled by capabilities.

Capsicum API enhancements appear in FreeBSD 10.0 along with sandboxing of a number of base-system components; Casper will be available from FreeBSD 10.1 on, and will be used by a number of base system components including tcpdump and kdump.

Monday, December 16, 2013

FreeBSD 10.0-RC2 Now Available

The second RC build of the 10.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.

See the release announcement email for image checksums.

Pre-installed virtual machine images for 10.0-RC2 are also available for amd64 and i386 architectures.

Changes between -RC1 and -RC2 include:

Fix a crash when attempting to use a non-disk device as an iSCSI LUN.
Fix handling of empty iSCSI authentication groups.
Fix a regression in bsdinstall(8) that prevented the system from decrypting GELI providers when installing ZFS on GELI.
Several Radeon KMS bug fixes.
Several wireless bug fixes.
Several clang bug fixes.

The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of amd64 and i386 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running earlier FreeBSD releases can upgrade as follows:

# freebsd-update upgrade -r 10.0-RC2

During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.

# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install

It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example, FreeBSD 9.x. Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat9x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted into the new userland:

# shutdown -r now

Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:

# freebsd-update install

Love FreeBSD? Support this and future releases with a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation!

Faces of FreeBSD - Shteryana Shopova

FACES OF FREEBSD

Here’s a chance to get to know your fellow FreeBSD enthusiast. Sit back and enjoy another 2013 Faces of FreeBSD story.

Shteryana's Story

My name is Shteryana Shopova. I am 31 years old and live in Sofia, the capital of a small East European country called Bulgaria. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Sofia and am finishing a Master’s degree in Computer and Network Security there. I was a guest lecturer at the Network Security course at my Alma Mater this semester, which, along with organizing EuroBSDCon 2014, is one of the biggest challenges I am facing in the next several months.

Away from computers, I enjoy the company of my family and friends, a glass of good wine, and outdoor sports. I was on my school's female basketball team for a few years, and I still enjoy playing the game (I’m good at it). I learned to ski as a kid and I’m happy to be back on the ski slopes in Europe after suffering a serious ankle injury a couple of years ago. I am praying for lots of snow this winter.

My first exposure to FreeBSD was in 2004 when I was working for a company producing network devices. The OS that we developed and ran on the devices was based on WindRiver's vxWorks, with a TCP/IP stack derived from the very early ones from FreeBSD/NetBSD. I often found myself looking at the projects' CVS repositories for solutions of problems that I encountered at work. In 2005, I did the Google Summer of Code program for FreeBSD, coding the client side of the SNMP protocol. Since all FreeBSD development has to happen on FreeBSD-current, I installed FreeBSD on my laptop—alongside the Windows and Slackware Linux I was running on it at the time. Several months later I realized that apart from FreeBSD, I hadn't booted the other two operating systems in months. So I wiped them out.

I try to help the FreeBSD Project any way I can. I am maintaining the native SNMP daemon and client code, doing bugfixes in networking related parts, testing the OS a lot by following the HEAD (a.k.a FreeBSD-CURRENT), and trying out new stuff that gets added there. The last couple of years I had to put off most of the technical work I do for FreeBSD in favor of finishing my formal education. Nevertheless, I continue to help by advocating for FreeBSD. I've given

FreeBSD-related talks on several occasions, organized a BSD-dedicated track at OpenFest (the largest local OpenSource conference), and proctored BSDCG certification exams (the equivalent of LPIs for BSD system administrators). I am also on the board of the EuroBSDCon Foundation in the role of the EuroBSDCon 2014 Organizing Committee Chair.

Why FreeBSD? I think it’s the only OS that so nicely fits all my needs. I appreciate the modern and easy-to-administer filesystem—ZFS, plenty of virtualization options including bhyve, the fast and modern networking stack, plenty of third party software via the ports and packages, and more. I value the extensive and good documentation, and the high quality and liberally licensed source code (so I can experiment, make modifications, or fix problems myself without having to wait for upstream patches, or even sell it without any legal concerns). Finally, by interacting with the FreeBSD community and developers—the entire BSD community in fact—I've learned so much and continue to learn. I think it has shaped me as the professional I am today, and I am very thankful for that.

I think the FreeBSD Foundation is doing a great job of supporting the project. As a developer, the most important activities of the Foundation are funding developers to work on various projects, sponsoring FreeBSD-related technical events, and giving travel grants to developers so that we have a chance to meet physically and discuss ideas, projects, and problems. A couple of years ago I added SNMPv3 authentication, encryption, and access control to bsnmpd(1), along with a module for monitoring wireless interfaces. People had asked for those additions for some time; I doubt I would have had the time and resources to implement them if the Foundation hadn't sponsored me.

I want to appeal to everyone: if you like FreeBSD, please consider a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation, so we can make FreeBSD even better. And I hope to see you at EuroBSDCon next year in Sofia!

Shteryana Shopova

Monday, December 9, 2013

FreeBSD 10.0-RC1 Now Available

The first RC build of the FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE cycle is now available.

Please refer to the announcement email for the image checksums.

Please see the change list for an important note regarding the bsdinstall(8) ZFS on GELI option.

ISO images and, for architectures that support it, the memory stick images are available here.

If you notice problems you can report them through the normal GNATS PR system or here on the -current or -stable mailing lists.

Important note to freebsd-update(8) users: Please be sure to follow the instructions in the following FreeBSD Errata Notices before upgrading the system to 10.0-RC1:

Changes between -BETA4 and -RC1 include:

Fix to a regression in bsdinstall(8) that prevents ZFS on GELI installation from working correctly.

Please note: a last-minute problem was found in 10.0-RC1 testing with this installation option that is still being investigated. Please do not select the GELI encryption option from the installer. Although the installation successfully completes, the GELI passphrase will not decrypt the GELI provider.

Build Hyper-V kernel modules by default for i386.
Update oce(4) driver to support 40Gbps devices.
Improve robustness of the Xen balloon driver.
Fix accounting for hw.realmem on the i386 and amd64 platforms.
Fix poweroff(8) on XenServer.
Fix powerd/states on AMD cpus.
Add support for BCM57764, BCM57767, BCM57782, BCM57786 and BCM57787.
Fix PKG_ABI detection in bsdconfig(8) after pkg-1.2.
Fix emulated jail_v0 byte order.
Fix hang on reboot with active iSCSI connections.
Fix a potential system crash if a jail(8) is created and destroyed on systems with VIMAGE.

Faces of FreeBSD - Brooks Davis

FACES OF FREEBSD

Here’s a chance to get to know your fellow FreeBSD enthusiast. Sit back and enjoy another 2013 Faces of FreeBSD story.

Brooks' Story

I’m a Senior Software Engineer for SRI International, working on multiple clean slate research projects using FreeBSD as the operating system for research on the hardware-software interface. A FreeBSD committer since 2001 and core team member from 2006 through 2012, I've built an HPC cluster based on FreeBSD, implemented an internal source code sharing system with FreeBSD and Trac, and most recently helped port FreeBSD to an open source CPU to enable architecture, systems, and security research. I've also helped drive our transition from a GNU toolchain to a more modern LLVM based toolchain.

Outside the world of computing I’m a foodie, gardener, home brewer of beer, mead and cider, woodworker, and blacksmith.

My first exposure to FreeBSD was a floppy disk-based SLIP router installed in my high school in 1993/4 by a local FreeBSD-based ISP. Distracted as a Solaris admin during college, I returned to FreeBSD almost immediately after graduation when FreeBSD made it trivial to set up a PPP router at home. The Aerospace Corporation, my first post-college job, involved working with FreeBSD due to our extensive use of dummynet in our research labs. Over the next decade-plus I spread FreeBSD from the lab to the largest computing cluster at the company and to an internal sourceforge.net-like system hosting over 350 projects.

Now I work to make FreeBSD better, such as working on toolchain and build system issues with a focus on medium to large embedded systems. Our research group developed an open source CPU based on the 64-bit MIPS ISA that we use to explore the hardware-software interface. I maintained Clang and LLVM ports, enhanced the FreeBSD build and release system to work without root permissions, and wrote and modified device drivers for our platform. I also maintained a number of high performance computing related ports including Sun Grid Engine and Ganglia as well as a number of Trac modules.

One of the reasons I like FreeBSD is the community involved in the process of building a principled, technically-advanced operating system platform. Not only do we produce a great product, but we have fun doing it.

I appreciate how the FreeBSD Foundation has helped me both directly and indirectly to attend conferences, developer’s meetings, vendor summits, and events like Google Summer of Code mentors summits. I’ve received travel grants for a number of these events and the FreeBSD Foundation sponsors many BSD conferences where I have presented, including AsiaBSDCon, BSDCan, EuroBSDCon, and BSDDay Argentina.

Donating to the FreeBSD Foundation is an easy way to support FreeBSD. Even the smallest donation helps as your mere presence as a donator demonstrates community support. I'm excited by the early results of the FreeBSD Foundation’s recent expansion of staff and look forward to continued growth. I donate every year.

Brooks Davis