FreeBSD Foundation

Quarterly Status Report

2012-01-27T06:28:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-26T05:31:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-16T10:48:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-13T05:52:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-12T18:37:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-12T18:30:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-10T12:26:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-30T21:25:00.000-08:00

Thank you to everyone who has made a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation this year! We have just around 24 hours left to reach our goal of raising $400,000 for 2011. At this time we have raised over $320,000 from 758 donors.

Your donation helps us support FreeBSD by funding/sponsoring development projects, BSD-related conferences, FreeBSD developers to travel to these conferences, and legal support for the Project. We are a non-for-profit organization and we cannot do it without you.

If you have not had the opportunity to donate this year, it's not too late! It only takes a few minutes to make a donation and help make a difference for the FreeBSD Project and community.

Please visit us at http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ to make a donation today! If you send a check, the envelope must be postmarked by December 31, 2011 to count as a 2011 donation.

Thanks for your support!

'Tis the season for giving

2011-12-22T07:06:00.000-08:00

Colin Percival recently wrote this blog post. With his permission, it is republished here as it may be of interest to other Foundation supporters.

Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Pancha Ganapati,Hogmanay, Newtonmas, or simply the end of the Gregorian year, oddsare that you're giving gifts some time around now. We give giftsto family; we give gifts to friends; we donate to charities; andmany people also offer up tithes to religious institutions. Giftsto individuals are a social bonding ritual — the voluntarytransfer of wealth signals a lower bound on the value we place on arelationship, and the giving of non-monetary gifts in particular canbe a way tocommunicateour level of personal understanding — but these do notapply to charitable and religious donations. For those, I think anentirely different explanation is required: We pay voluntary taxesin order to help create the world we want to live in.

This also applies to companies. I run anonline backup service, andfor the past two years I've donated all of the profits made duringthe month of December to theFreeBSD Foundation;I'm going to be doing the same thing this year too. I'm not doingthis just because I'm a FreeBSD developer, because I use FreeBSDpersonally, or because I would never have launched Tarsnap if Ihadn't been able to build on the open source code in FreeBSD: I'mdoing it because I think supporting FreeBSD development will make the world a better place for both Tarsnap and many other startup companies.

I'm not alone in believing in corporate support of open source software,either. NetApp andHudson River Trading,both major FreeBSD users, have each made donations of $50,000 ormore in each of the past 3 years, andmany other companies regularly donate. Some open source softwareorganizations havemuch longer listsof major donors. And last year Gabriel Weinberglauncheda FOSS Tithing movement by pledging thatDuckDuckGo would tithe in supportof open source software every year.

Most internet startup companies today would never exist without opensource software. As Paul Grahamhas noted, opensource software is one of the big reasons why it's now possible to launcha startup with just $20k and a few months of coding; with high quality freeoperating systems, databases and datastores, application frameworks, webservers and caches, it's now easy to build companies which would havebeen nearly impossible a decade ago.It would be easy to say that startup companies should contribute back toopen source projects out of simple gratitude, but I know it can be hardto justify making business decisions on that basis alone. Instead, I'dlike to ask the startup community to look to the future: Think about howmuch open source has helped you, and help to build a better world— one where open source will be able to help you even more.

And remember that we live in a world where most startup founders end uplaunching several companies over their careers: If the past decade ofopen source software development has made your current startup companypossible, just think how much the next decade of open source softwaredevelopment will help your next startup company.

Apache Software Foundation Testimonial

2011-12-14T18:10:00.000-08:00

Did you know that the Foundation that powers half the Internet uses FreeBSD for nearly all of its public facing services? The FreeBSD Foundation recently received this testimonial from the Apache Software Foundation:

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad rangeof open source software projects. The Foundation provides an establishedframework for intellectual property and financial contributions thatsimultaneously limits contributors potential legal exposure.Through a collaborative and meritocratic development process, Apacheprojects deliver enterprise-grade, freely available software productsthat attract large communities of users. The pragmatic Apache Licensemakes it easy for all users, commercial and individual, to deploy Apacheproducts.

The ASF powers half the Internet, petabytes of data, teraflops ofoperations, billions of objects, and enhances the lives of countlessusers and developers. Established in 1999 to shepherd, develop, andincubate Open Source innovations, "The Apache Way," the ASF oversees150+ projects led by a volunteer community of over 350 individualMembers and 3,000 Committers across six continents.

ApacheCon North America 2011 was just recently held in Vancouver,British Columbia, Canada where FreeBSD was a highlight in the DevOpstrack talks. The Apache Software Foundation itself leverages FreeBSDfor nearly all of its public facing servicesincluding one of the largest SVN repositories in the world. Ourrepository is mirrored on several continents and contains over 1.4million revisions stretching for over a decade. We will even be lendinga hand converting the FreeBSD CVS ports tree to SVN.

The Apache Software Foundation makes use of both custom FreeBSDTinderbox and FreeBSD Update servers to rapidly perform application andbase system updates across multiple datacenters in an automated, quick,and efficient fashion. The Apache Infrastructure Team frequently worksdirectly with FreeBSD developers to stress cutting-edge features likeZFS under real-world loads.

Like The FreeBSD Foundation, the ASF is also a 501(c)3 organization. Donating to FreeBSD through The FreeBSD Foundation, makes Apache better too and will help make your's and others' daily lives less stressful.

RideCharge/TaxiMagic Testimonial

2011-12-14T18:02:00.000-08:00

Did you know that Taxi Magic, the first nationwide free online taxi booking service that is directly integrated with taxi dispatch systems, is entirely based on FreeBSD? Philip M. Gollucci, Director of Operations, recently explained why in his testimonial for the Foundation:

RideCharge, Inc. creates innovative technology solutions that improvelocal ground transportation industries. The company's most renownedproduct, Taxi Magic, is an online & mobile software application thatrevolutionizes the taxi industry by aligning riders, drivers and fleetsfor a better overall ride experience. Taxi Magic is the first nationwidefree online taxi booking service that is directly integrated with taxidispatch systems, providing consumers with the tools to:

Book a taxi from a mobile app or the Web with a few quick taps
Track the taxi's arrival
Charge the ride to a credit card through the mobile app
Expense the trip with an e-receipt

From its inception, RideCharge has been entirely based on FreeBSD. Byleveraging FreeBSD Jails for virtualization, we are able to maximizeresources and expand dynamically. ZFS keeps our data safe and ourdeployments magically quick. Userland DTRACE in FreeBSD 9 is now anindispensable tool for troubleshooting issues in real-time. Even ourJuniper firewalls and switches leverage FreeBSD through JUNOS (TM).iXsystems is incredibly helpful in recommending the correct setup andoptimizing our technology resources to fit our needs for FreeBSD.

RideCharge is a long time contributor to the FreeBSD ports collectionand we employ highly active contributors in the ruby, apache, and perlareas. The Taxi Magic team leverages these incredibly tight feedbackloops to quickly and efficiently contribute back to the community.

RideCharge/TaxiMagic has directly sponsored FreeBSD developers toenhance freebsd-update(8). We now use this update to quickly updateevery machine to maintain PCI DSS Level 1 compliance. These greatcapabilities are now available to the entire FreeBSD community.

Foundation Newsletter Published

2011-12-14T17:54:00.000-08:00

The Foundation has published its semi-annual newsletter. It contains updates on this year's projects and fundraising campaign, testimonials from TaxiMagic and the Apache Software Foundation, and the Q1-Q3 balance sheet. You can read the newsletter here. It begins with the letter from the President which is as follows:

The Making of The FreeBSD Foundation

My first introduction to FreeBSD came in the form of a tall, wirery,figure, camped out in the Walnut Creek CDROM machine room. RodGrimes cut the figure of a true hacker: skin only touched by therays of a glowing CRT, nicotine stains on his long fingers tonedby hours of vi keywork, and a wardrobe comprised of faded blue jeansand worn out t-shirts. Regardless of what hours I worked duringmy internship that summer of 1993, Rod was always awake, hunchedover his keyboard, putting all of his energy into the first everrelease of FreeBSD.

I was between my second and third years working on an undergraduatedegree at the University of California at Berkeley. Even attendingthe institute of BSD's genesis, I was completely unaware of Berkeley'scontributions to UNIX. So it was really a stroke of luck, a randomchoice to take a job organizing OS/2 software into a CDROM distribution,that led me to Walnut Creek that summer to witness the making ofFreeBSD 1.0. But without Rod's passion and dedication, I doubt I'dhave realized the opportunity before me.

What I quickly learned from watching Rod and then delving intoFreeBSD, was the incompleteness of my education from Berkeley. SureI was technically proficient in computer algorithms and writingcode, but my courses failed to give me a sense of the art of computerengineering: how to be a craftsman practicing my trade, how todesign and build a complex system that is robust and maintainable,and how to collaborate successfully in such a system. The structureand methodology behind FreeBSD made it the perfect vehicle forabsorbing the real world skills of being a successful programmer.

In 1993, the development model used by the BSDs was rarely encounteredin open source projects: revision control, a bug tracking database,a coding style standard, the hardening of software through peerreview and discussion, and a governing body to mediate write accessto the code and to resolve disputes. Many of these pillars ofprofessional and successful engineering are lacking in both corporateand open source environments today. In fact, it took almost adecade for BSD's main competitor Linux to catch up and adopt somethingas fundamental as revision control. In so many ways, FreeBSD'sdevelopment model was superior and ahead of the times.

So I started my second education while completing my first. Duringmy last two years at Berkeley I spent most of my free time, andsome time I should have devoted to the classes for my degree,absorbing the lessons FreeBSD had to teach. The FreeBSD distributionoffered practical examples of how to deal with almost any type ofcomputer science challenge - examples that I found much morecompelling than the contrived exercises in my text books. While Iwas learning I was also able to contribute in small ways. Thereviews of my work were much more useful than for the projectsassociated with my formal studies. The feedback wasn't alwaysdelivered in the most pleasant way, but that in itself providedvaluable experience on how to improve my people skills.

Small contributions lead to larger ones. The apprentice became amentor. Upon receiving my degree, I found myself sitting on FreeBSD'sgoverning body, the FreeBSD Core Team, with a skill set and experiencein high demand and not found in other members of my graduatingclass.

The historical way to contribute back to the FreeBSD project hasalways been to volunteer time to enhance the "product" that isFreeBSD. For seven years this was the primary way I repaid FreeBSDfor the valuable education I received by being part of its community.However, by 2000 I was struggling to find a better way to ensurethe continued success of FreeBSD. FreeBSD's mindshare growth wasslowing. Linux was starting to receive the attention and financialbacking of large corporations. I wanted to create something thatcould promote, protect, and grow the use of FreeBSD even while theduties of my paid day job prevented me from personally achievingthat mission. The natural answer was to form a corporation.

This had been done before. Jordan Hubbard was operating FreeBSDInc., but its charter and activities were never well defined. Iwanted to build an entity that engendered the trust of the FreeBSDcommunity, followed in the Open Source spirit of doing good forgood's sake, yet could perform tasks only possible with a legalcorporate entity. The FreeBSD Foundation, an open-book, 501(c)3U.S. non-profit charity, was born.

Fast forward a little over a decade, and the FreeBSD Foundationstill adheres to the same mission I defined for it in 2000. Everyyear we sponsor BSD conferences and events around the globe, workto protect the intellectual property of the FreeBSD project, visitinstitutions and corporations to promote the use of FreeBSD, andfund research and development projects that enhance the FreeBSD OS.But even with our $400,000 annual budget there are so many thingswe want to do, but can't. Just as was the case for me in 2000, theFreeBSD Foundation is searching today for new ways to help supportthe FreeBSD project.

In the coming months you will see one of the ways the FreeBSDFoundation is changing. Using the feedback we have gleaned fromcountless meetings with FreeBSD consumers both large and small, theFreeBSD Foundation is sponsoring the work to fully specify andestimate the cost of implementing critical enhancements to theFreeBSD platform. Developed in partnership with the FreeBSDcommunity, the goal of this effort is to provide a roadmap forinfrastructure improvements that have long been needed, but havegone unsatisfied due to lack of a coherent direction. This modelwill also give current and potential supporters of the FreeBSDFoundation concrete insight into our future plans.

I can't imagine what my life would be like today without my FreeBSDexperience. Through the FreeBSD Foundation I hope to give back tothe FreeBSD community even more than I have received, and help toensure that the next young engineer has the same opportunities asI did. However the FreeBSD Foundation can't do it alone. If FreeBSDhas impacted your life, please visit our website and help us to continue FreeBSD's legacy.

Justin T. Gibbs
President and Founder
The FreeBSD Foundation

End-of-Year Fundraising Campaign

2011-12-05T17:51:00.001-08:00

The FreeBSD Foundation has been proudly supporting the FreeBSD Project and community for 11 years now. Every year we sponsor BSD conferences and events around the globe, help developers with their travel expenses to attend these conferences, work to protect the intellectual property of the FreeBSD project, visit institutions and corporations to promote the use of FreeBSD, purchase equipment to grow the FreeBSD infrastructure, and fund research and development projects that enhance the FreeBSD OS.

We are deeply grateful for all the support we receive from so many individuals and organizations who value FreeBSD. We currently are at the half way point towards our goal of raising $400,000 this year. We are hoping that you, the FreeBSD community, will help us meet our goal by making a donation this month. By donating to the foundation, you are donating to the FreeBSD Project and community as a whole.

We have had the privilege of meeting many FreeBSD enthusiasts in person, through email, and on the phone. We are always impressed with the passion that these people have for FreeBSD. Most volunteer their precious time after work and some are more fortunate where they actually get paid by their companies to work with FreeBSD. When there is a BSD related conference we usually get quite a few travel grant applications requesting help with developers' travel expenses. Thanks to your support, we have been able to sponsor the travel expenses of developers from Mexico, Lithuania, New Zealand, Germany, Japan, Denmark, and many other countries.

Some of these developers recently wrote personal stories about how receiving help with their travel expenses to attend conferences helped them with their FreeBSD work. These stories will be published in our upcoming newsletter. One developer from Japan, whose attendance we've sponsored more than once, is a technical writer. The Japanese development community is comprised of earnest and skillful people. They are sharp programmers who know many programming languages, but learning and understanding English is difficult for many of them. He attends the conferences so he can keep up with the latest FreeBSD information and provide this information to the Japanese FreeBSD community in their native spoken language.

Another recent travel grant recipient runs a FreeBSD mirror server in Sweden, a country that apparently does not have many BSD users. He had a chance to meet many FreeBSD developers for the first time by attending EuroBSDCon. He has recently started submitting patches to our FreeBSD documentation set, and will hopefully become a committer, literally doubling the number of committers in Sweden!

Lastly, a Canadian developer that we've sponsored told us, "By attending these conferences I have gained valuable experience, connected with fascinating people that use FreeBSD, learned from presenters and most importantly, forged some friendships that will last a lifetime."

These grant recipients have given far more back to the FreeBSD community than what they have received from the foundation. And, this is only one area where your donations provide a significant, tangible, measurable benefit for the entire FreeBSD community.

If you benefit from FreeBSD, please donate. With your donation, we can continue to support FreeBSD activities like:

development projects to support emerging technologies such as IPv6 support in FreeBSD, GEM, KMS, and DRI support for Intel drivers, Five New TCP Congestion Control Algorithms, and much more.
BSD conferences around the globe, including Europe, Japan, Canada, US, and Ukraine.
giving students and contributors the opportunity to attend conferences and developer summits.
maintaining the infrastructure of computers and equipment that support our community.
growing the FreeBSD community through marketing and outreach to users and businesses.
protecting the FreeBSD trademarks and providing the project with access to legal counsel.
helping FreeBSD continue to serve as the foundation for research and enterprise.

Please consider making a donation so we can continue, and increase, our support of the FreeBSD Project and community! Visit The FreeBSD Foundation website to find out how you can make a difference for FreeBSD today.

Thank you for your support!

Foundation at LISA

2011-11-28T10:03:00.001-08:00

There will be a FreeBSD booth during LISA in Boston, next Wednesday and Thursday (December 7–8). We’ll have some cool Foundation swag, Foundation brochures, and will be available to answer FreeBSD questions and to accept donations for the Foundation. Entrance to the exhibition area is free, but you do need to register first. If you’re in Boston, stop by booth #408 and say hi!

SoC Mentor Summit Trip Report

2011-11-25T06:31:00.001-08:00

The Foundation provided a travel grant to Bjoern Zeeb to attend the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit and the FreeBSD Vendor Summit. Bjoern's trip report is as follows:

Thank you for helping with my travel costs to the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit and the FreeBSD Vendor Summit.

Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit

Google's registration requirements and provided wiki space made it possible to coordinate travel with others, which allowed me to make first contact with mentors from other Open Source projects even before I left and obviously I ran into more geeks by the time I got to the airport.

Saturday morning the Google buses picked us up. After an excellent breakfast, there were important rules during the opening session: do not go beyond the areas where we have put up signs. This was obviously the largest mentor summit so far as the classic un-conference approach for finding topics and rooms no longer scaled. Since the schedule changed regularly, it wasn't possible to attend all the sessions I had planned, especially on Sunday. Let me highlight a few:

Umbrella Organizations (Admins and Mentors meeting): while this does not directly apply to FreeBSD, I was curious to see what kinds of problems other organizations were facing and whether they have some interesting ways to solve their issues that could also help FreeBSD. I was overwhelmed by the real problems I heard about and it made me realize how well organized and well run FreeBSD is. On a side note, I learned that KDE had 50 GSoC slots, which I wish FreeBSD could handle as well. One interesting idea that came up was that some organizations are either providing web forms or spreadsheets for mentors and students to more easily keep track not only of progress but also for catching interaction problems. Given FreeBSD has the weekly or bi-weekly mailing list updates, tells students to let admins know in case of problems with their mentor, we are not too far away from that but it could certainly simplify some tracking for admins.
Women in Open Source: there were multiple sessions on this. For me a lot of the discussions did not go too far into the topic of attracting more women to open source development. Only Gnome has hosted women summer outreach programs in the past, which was interesting to hear about. One important item is to provide dedicated mentors upfront that women can talk to one-to-one and that a list of these would be available all year long. Astonishingly the discussions often went along the reasoning of not driving woman away rather than attracting them in first place; there were plenty of suggestions of what not to do, and what to do to help them stay.

Marketing and Open Source: a topic that FreeBSD needs to get further up to speed on. A lot of talk was how to help commercialize an open source project. Social Media, videos, and local communities were also big discussion items. Some ideas were: leveraging users by providing pamphlets and posters that they can distribute, advertise at events, and use references and independent reviewers on the web page. PostgreSQL is doing a good job and we should leverage some of their ideas.

Open Source OS summit: this was one of the most interesting discussion groups during the weekend. It is like an organized hallway track with everyone but Linux in the room. Major topics were: combined arm twisting of vendors to not only help one but many projects, firmware licensing, shared documentation (such as data sheets) repository, and possibly setting up a mailing list to coordinate. It was interesting to learn beyond other informal discussions how many other projects such as RTEMS, Haiku, and Illumos take bits and pieces from FreeBSD and wondering why we don't talk a lot more or invite them to our devsummits. Another thing to consider is how to "sell" the project - which reaches into the marketing but also a funding discussion. Should a project just provide the source and let the ecosystem create distributions? Would commercial support on top be an option?

The hallway track and dinner conversations: in addition to the Open Source OS summit session, this was most helpful for getting in touch with other BSD consumers and projects which we consume. I had extended chats with Illumos people pondering collaboration on some topics, talks with NTP folks, discussions on the network stack with RTMES, and I also got to know MoinMoin folks who are quite local to me and who could immediately help me to solve a problem so that we can easily have links on the wiki to SVN commits. My other hallway track item was to debug why IPv6 on the Google guest network did not work for me. The problem has since been worked around and IPv6 should work flawlessly for everyone there now. The diagnosing on why it only affected certain people or possibly only BSD (derived) operating systems continues.

All in all it was a productive, informative, fun weekend. Now that I am back home, I'll need to follow-up on some of the possible collaboration ideas.

The FreeBSD Vendor Summit

The FreeSBD vendor summit, a couple of days later, continued to provide insights on what people need or want from FreeBSD. It was even more interesting to hear about what was cooking and what people considered to give back. The general trend to push changes not considered to be IP back to FreeBSD continues and makes me believe that in some ways things are going better in our world. The afternoon was almost all about virtualization. We heard about FreeBSD on Microsoft Hyper-V and talked a bit about EC2, Xen, bhyve, as well as tools and frameworks to help to simplify the usage of FreeBSD in or for virtualized environments. At the end of the day I started to look at the virtio drivers for Peter to commit them to HEAD and we got the QLogic 10G driver into the tree as well. In addition to the session, the breaks provided some time to informally chat with the other participants. It would have been great to have some time the following day to continue these informal group discussions but BSDCan is only a couple of months away. Having such an event at least twice a year is extremely helpful and my thanks goes to George for running this!

Trip Report: Andrew Turner

2011-11-02T16:47:00.000-07:00

The next trip report is from Andrew Turner:

On day one of the Developer summit, I attended the bmake/bus_bma and toolchain working groups. I contributed to these by announcing a patch to allow FreeBSD to be compiled from Linux. The patch is available; however, it is against an old copy of HEAD and does not apply correctly. An updated version is expected to be committed to a project branch in subversion in the next few weeks as I have the time to work on it. In the toolchain working group, I discussed the current state of the ARM EABI port. The last remaining part is getting GCC configured correctly. Until now I have been using a minimally configured copy of GCC. Due to the nature of the change, I would like to ensure it is correct as the ABI will need to work with clang in the future.

The second day of the Developer summit had interesting discussions on virtualization. This is an area that will soon pick up in the embedded area when ARM vendors release their System on Chips containing Cortex-A15 cores, as these have hardware supported virtualization.

I gave a talk in the FreeBSD track at the conference on the current state of NAND flash with FreeBSD, what I would like to change, and where NAND flash hardware is heading. The main point is that the the NAND flash framework is mostly done; however, we need a flash filesystem or flash translation layer before we can use it.

As a result of my talk, I was asked about devices we support that contain NAND flash. The OpenRD-Ultimate appears to be a device we support that developers are able to buy; however, as I have never used one, I am unable to recommend it. This lead to a discussion on getting one into one of the FreeBSD clusters. Since the conference, Wojciech Koszek has taken the lead in organising embedded devices for the Netperf cluster.

Trip Report: Brooks Davis

2011-11-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

The next EuroBSDCon trip report is from Brooks Davis:

I arrived in Maarssen on the 5th of October and met up with fellow developers for drinks at the hotel and then dinner.

On the 6th, we headed to the conference site and commenced with the developers summit. After an opening session, we broke up into working groups. For the first session, I attended the ports session. I lead a short discussion on the ports impact of our migration to Clang/LLVM as the base tool chain. The general conclusion was that we need to add support for switching the default ports compiler (a project which is well underway), as well as the ability to specify a restricted set of acceptable compilers for a given port. There seemed to be solid support for allowing the default to be clang for FreeBSD 10 builds on architectures where we make it the base compiler.

After lunch, I lead a session on our toolchain work. I outlined our current status to the group. The status report was followed up by a discussion of the remaining requirements to produce a GPL-free base system. Those items include:

an LLDB port
libgcc replacement on some architectures (at least MIPS and sparc64)
libgcc*.so
FDT tools
unwinding library
GDB server
as(1) wrapper (maybe?)
16-bit ASM support (at least on x86)
libdwarf

While not required for a GPL free system, we also identified a desire for a CDDL-free CTF implementation and a libbsdctf or similar.

Of the pieces required for a GPL-free base, the largest component remaining is a linker. Because linkers have quite a bit of scope, we spent most of the remaining time brainstorming requirements for a BSD licensed linker. Those requirements included:

linker scripts (or equivalent)
LTO framework
Link time optimization against IR or machine code
Incremental linking
Support for IR in ELF
GNU ld compatibility
IR processing by plugin
Limited non-ELF support (for boot blocks, etc)
Alternative hash table support
Crunching support
Be fast
Native cross-architecture support
Multipass lookup
Unit tests
Coded to LLVM standards (to allow inclusion in LLVM)
linker is a library
C and C++ support
Architecture support: i386, x86_64, ARM, PPC(64), MIPS(64), PiNaCl
Possible architecture support: sparc64

After the toolchain summit, I attended the capsicum summit where we discussed the status of capsicum and various thing we could protect with capability sandboxes. We produced quite a long list of things that should be sandboxed, though it got a bit silly near the end when we basically started listing all ports. One area I found my self pondering was how to sandbox moderately complex web applications like Trac which can't be fully sandboxed in Apache and must wait until at least application initialization has happened.

Friday the 7th commenced with an opening session followed immediately by working group reports. I reported on the toolchain session and most other session leaders reported on their sessions. That was followed by a discussion of options for using Git to track FreeBSD. At the end we concluded that we definitely need a git.freebsd.org to provide officially "blessed" git trees, but we left some details unresolved such as the exact scope of the git trees. This discussion was followed by a set of presentations by Chris Buechler of pfSense, Jeroen van Nieuwenhuizen of Snow, Robert Watson of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory and Yvan Vanhullebus of NETASQ on their use (or non-use in the case of Snow's clients) of FreeBSD. After these presentations we broke for lunch.

When we reconvened after lunch we started with a discussion of virtualization on FreeBSD. In a number of key ways FreeBSD was late to the virtualization game, but it looks like we're catching up. Between the addition of BHyVe and an upcoming Xen Dom0 implementation, we will soon be well positioned to host guest VMs on FreeBSD and our support for running as a guest seems to be improving steadily. We're still behind in some senses, but given the remarkably poor reality that is accepted as the state of the art, it seems like we have a chance to pull ahead in areas of management if we invest some effort.

The virtualization session was followed by a session for FreeBSD 10.0 brainstorming. As usual for such a session, many ideas were generated. If even half of them are completed, I think we'll have a fantastic 10.0 release.

Following the success of the dev summit track introduced at BSDCan this spring, Saturday contained such a track along side the conference. I attended several of these talks and gave a presentation on our participation in the 2011 edition of the Google Summer of Code. We had 13 successful projects and have already gained two comitters as a result of this year's projects, with a couple more expected in the next few months.

Trip Report: Gleb Kurtsou

2011-10-24T07:10:00.000-07:00

The next trip report is from Gleb Kurtsou:

Thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation, I was able to attend the Developer Summit and EuroBSDcon'2011. It was my first Developer Summit. Two of my main goals were to popularize PEFS and meet in person people I communicate with via email. FreeBSD developers are all great people and nice to talk to. I only wish I could also meetmy past GSoC mentors at the conference; hopefully I'll be more lucky next time.

PEFS is a kernel level stacked cryptographic file system for FreeBSD. It's been around for a while, but still remains unknown to many FreeBSD users. I gave ashort presentation about PEFS at the DevSummit, outlining its design anddifferences compared to other cryptographic stacked file systems. I had a numberof comments, particularly regarding data authentication in PEFS, so I've startedlooking closer at the issue and have already evaluated various designs. Whatsurprised me is that interest in PEFS has increased after adding PEFS to thelist of talks on the wiki page. Perhaps the outcome of giving the talk could beeven larger than I originally expected.

The DevSummit was both very inspirational and technically useful. I took valuableideas and knowledge from every working group session. The toolchain and bmakegroups discussed some of the issues I've faced myself building and maintaininga project partially based on FreeBSD and reusing its build system: portions ofthe code couldn't be compiled with the base system toolchain, managinginterdependencies, and faster builds. It's encouraging to see the FreeBSD projectsolving these problems right way instead of using homegrown hacks. Capsicum andvirtualization are areas of my interest and closely related to projects I work on.An additional file systems working group would have made this event ideal for me.It looks like a sufficient number of VFS gurus couldn't get to this place at thesame time, so I'm looking forward to attending the next Developer Summit.

Thanks again to the Foundation for its support!

Trip Report: Niklas Zeising

2011-10-22T06:04:00.000-07:00

The next trip report is from Niklas Zeising:

This year I had the privilege and pleasure to attend EuroBSDcon 2011 and the preceding Developers Summit. I have had plans to travel to earlier EuroBSDcon conferences, but have never been able to partly because of the cost. What made this year different was the generous sponsorship from the FreeBSD Foundation which finally made it possible for me to attend EuroBSDcon 2011. My primary reason for attending the conference was to meet and talk to some of the people in the FreeBSD community that I have had contact with over IRC and e-mail. I was also hoping to be able to contribute to the discussions during the Developer Summit and to listen to the talks and perhaps learn something new.

My travel started in Sweden from where I traveled via Copenhagen to Amsterdam and then on to the conference city, Maarssen. When I arrived at the hotel, I was just in time to drop my things off in my room and run to the bus to catch up for the Wednesday dinner.

My first day since arriving in Maarssen I attended the FreeBSD Developers Summit, to which I had been invited by Benedict Reuschling. After arriving at the venue and registering for the conference, the first order of business was eating breakfast, which was served at the venue. After breakfast and the Developer Summit opening ceremony, I spent the rest of the morning attending the documentation working group. During this session we had interesting discussions about several topics, including the conversion of the repository to subversion and what was needed to convert the FreeBSD documentation to a more modern markup language. We also discussed how to get more people involved in the documentation effort and how to make use of all the howtos floating around in the FreeBSD forums and the Internet in general. After lunch I continued the day by attending the Toolchain and Capsicum working groups. It was very nice to listen to these great minds discussing various aspects of FreeBSD.

The second day started with reports from the different working groups, after which Ulrich Spoerlein led a discussion about using git. The next topic on the agenda was the vendor discussion. It was very insightful and interesting to hear from some of the people that use FreeBSD in their commercial and research applications. I also found it interesting to hear why some companies choose not to use FreeBSD in their IT infrastructure. After lunch, the Developer Summit continued with a discussion on Virtualization. For me it was very interesting to hear about BHyVe, since I was not aware that this project existed. It is also clear that there still are tasks to work on to make FreeBSD an even more competitive platform in the virtualization market. The developer summit then ended with a brainstorming session on the FreeBSD 10.0 release.

Saturday meant that it was time for the conference proper. After a very interesting keynote given by Hans van de Looy on the topic of the recent data breach at Diginotar, and other issues regarding IT security, such as trust, I started the day in the hacking lounge where I began working on some of the ideas and suggestions talked about during the documentation working group. The first talk I attended was about OpenBSD's packet filter, PF, and its history. After lunch I spent the afternoon listening on the devsummit track. The last talk of the day was by Marshall Kirk McKusick on the topic of BSD history. I found this talk very funny and it was interesting to hear more about the history of BSD.

The EuroBSDcon social event took place Saturday evening at the railway museum in Utrecht. I found the museum entertaining and we got a very nice guided tour through the museum. After the tour, dinner was served in the museum.

Sunday began with a second keynote, this time the topic was reliable systems, which was given by Herbert Bos. I continued the morning listening to the talk on Capsicum by Robert Watson and BSD Multiplicity by Michael Dexter. After lunch the Sendmail talk by Eric Allman was on the agenda, which I followed up with the talk on OpenSSH by Damien Miller and ZFS by Brooks Davis. The day ended with a work in progress session and the closing ceremony. It was actually a little saddening that the conference was over since I had a very good time.

I am very glad that I went to EuroBSDcon 2011 and really hope that I will be able to go again in the future. It was very nice to finally be able to meet some of the great persons behind e-mail addresses, commit messages and IRC nicknames and talk to them in person. I want to thank Benedict Reuschling for talking me into finally going and to the FreeBSD Foundation for giving me the opportunity to attend. I also want to thank all the other people I met and talked to during the conference and who made me feel right at home. Last but not least, I want to thank the organizers who made the conference a reality. Hopefully we will see each other next year!

Trip Report: Daichi Goto

2011-10-21T06:06:00.000-07:00

The next EuroBSDCon trip report is from Daichi Goto:

Thank you for the great support of my journey to EuroBSDCon 2011 and the FreeBSD DevSummit 2011. It was a great experience. Thank you again.

On the first day of the DevSummit, I attended the Ports, Toolchain, and Capsicum working groups. These days, GPL-free toolchains are becoming a big concern between *BSD folks and users not only for business reasons but because they are technically interesting. Many developers and users require GPL-free toolchains and FreeBSD 10 represents a big milestone for that. The working group discussions were very exciting and had a forward-looking attitude.

The new idea "Package Set" and the weekly package set release are important for most common FreeBSD users. Come to think of it, developers and advanced users prefer to use the Ports Collection as their package management system, but it's hard for most novice users, lightweight users and enterprise-class managers who just want to run a stable system for their jobs. FreeBSD's current binary package management system is not good for updating as it can result in package update failures. The Package Set and the weekly update mechanism have an advanced potential to solve this issue and provide a more comfortable and easy to use packages update experience.

The new security feature "Capsicum" is valuable for all *nix. The working group discussions about Capsicum and FreeBSD have given developers a chance to discuss which libraries, commands and 3rd party applications would benefit from Capsicum. Capsicum will be a default feature from FreeBSD 9.1 and FreeBSD 10 will be the new land of Capsicum security.

On the 2nd day, the last session "FreeBSD 10 Thinking" provided me a chance to re-think the design and the implementation of our unionfs. FreeBSD's unionfs was reimplemented to solve some lock issues some years ago and it works very well in most situations. But in some situations, the current unionfs implementation causes a kernel panic because of kernel memory exhaustion. Also, our VFS based multi stackable unionfs implementation has some issues that are very difﬁcult to solve. Based on the advice from hrs, we (I and ozawa-san) are re-thinking the design and implementation to improve robustness and reliability, as well as to include some new features such as the dynamic mount layer moves-up or moves-down and non-top layer umount. We are going to brush up our design ideas and try to do experimental developments for FreeBSD 10. I'm pleased to get a good chance at this.

The EuroBSDCon 2011 keynotes and sessions have also given me some great inspirations. My thanks goes to the EuroBSDCon 2011 committee members and sponsors. I'm looking forward to seeing all you at the next EuroBSDCon, and of course, if it is possible, I'm looking forward to seeing you at Spring, AsiaBSDCon 2012 in Tokyo. That's during cherry blossom's beautiful season.

When I get back to Japan, I am going to write some news and articles about FreeBSD and the conference for some Japanese IT media, including Gihyo.jp FreeBSD Daily Topics, MYCOM Journal, and @IT.. For most common Japanese developers and users, English news sources are hard to understand. My Japanese articles around FreeBSD are very valuable for Japanese users of FreeBSD. Thank you again for the FreeBSD Foundation's travel support.

Trip Report: Marius Strobl

2011-10-20T08:17:00.000-07:00

The EuroBSDCon trip reports are starting to arrive and will be posted here. The first report is from Marius Strobl:

The generous sponsorship of the FreeBSD Foundation for the first time allowed me to attend EuroBSDCon'11 as well as the associated Developer Summit in its entirety (so far I could only attend one day of last year's EuroBSDCon Developer Summit). Having the chance to take part in the busdma(9), for which Marcel Moolenaar and myself had a preparatory email conversation, and the bmake working groups on the first day was really helpful. Having done work for the sparc64 port and machine independent network and storage controller drivers, I came across several limitations in the current implementation of busdma(9). Other architectures will benefit from the proposed busdma(9) overhaul. Switching to a bmake based build infrastructure will provide better and optimized cross-compilation of FreeBSD on other operating systems. While this isn't something that I have a direct need for, it will come in handy should the rest of the FreeBSD developers decide to remove the GPL'ed toolchain in the base for all platforms in favor of LLVM/clang, which so far doesn't support 64-bit SPARC v9. The bmake based build infrastructure will provide a backup plan by allowing the use of an external GCC and binutils via its external toolchain support. Surprisingly, there was next to no opposition to the plans of these two working groups. Collaboration on the bmake build infrastructure and busdma(9) overhaul working groups will take place via the FreeBSD Wiki.

The working group presentations and the brainstorming sessions on the second day of the Developer Summit provided a good overview of what's going on and is planned in the FreeBSD project beyond the src base, including the infrastructure and the ports collection. Both the first and the second day of the Developer Summit as well as "day zero" were concluded by nice dinners which allowed one to make contacts with fellow FreeBSD developers, especially doc and ports committers, which I as a src committer otherwise don't have that much contact with, even online.

On the third day of the Developer Summit, which also was the first official day of EuroBSDCon'11, I gave a short talk about the status of the FreeBSD/sparc64 port. Based on the feedback that I received, the presentation was well received. The rest of that conference day I spent mainly attending the rest of the Developer Summit track, which was an official part of EuroBSDCon'11 and also attracted some non-FreeBSD committers. This again provided me with a good overview of what else is going in FreeBSD. The pkgng project seems like an especially worthy addition. Slides of the talks given in that track are available here. That day was closed by a nice social event at the Utrecht Railway Museum, again giving good opportunities to make contacts with fellow developers.

The second day of EuroBSDCon'11, which no longer hosted Developer Summit events,had some interesting talks, of which the "OpenBSD/sun4v: Porting OpenBSD to Sun's UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors" by Mark Kettenis turned out to be especially useful as it gave me 2-3 new ideas about how to address integration of sun4v support into FreeBSD/sparc64. A short chat with Mark afterwards yielded helpful advice for adding support for the line of Fujitsu/Oracle Mx000 Enterprise servers to FreeBSD/sparc64.

I'm especially thankful that the Developer Summit and EuroBSDCon'11 for the first time allowed me to meet my former mentor Marcel Moolenaar in person. Other interesting contacts I've made and topics relevant to the FreeBSD project I've talked about with them were:

Jonathan Anderson
Gavin Atkinson (Solaris binary-compatibility for FreeBSD/sparc64)
Baptiste Daroussin (pkgng)
Pawel Dawidek (ZFS)
Wilko Bulte (donate a dual Sun SCSI-HBA and will try to get me disks for a machine used for package building and for my development machine)
Beat Gaetzi (will try to get me UltraSPARC T1/T2 hardware)
Justin Gibbs (fixing issues revealed by a recent commit of Kenneth Merry regarding sense residual handling in Justin's ahc(4) and ahd(4) drivers)
Alexander Motin (NCQ timeouts with ahci(4))
Gabor Pali (seems like I've even managed to catch his cold ...)
Daniel Seuffert (will try to get me UltraSPARC T1/T2 and SPARC64 VI/VII hardware)
Ed Shouten (thankfully agreed to adapt/fix rp(4) to his TTY-rework if I send him the respective card)
Shteryana Shopova
Florian Smeets
Bjoern Zeeb

While at the conference and during the trips to and from Maarssen I managed to finally commit support for SCHED_ULE to sparc64 and vice versa, which should also provide a tiny performance improvement on other architectures, commit fixes for two PRs, clean up some PHY device driver stuff Warner Losh left behind, fix fallout like the ahc(4)/ahd(4) issue mentioned above in other HBA drivers, port the NetBSD MII bitbang'ing code and convert most of the network device drivers that can take advantage of it to use it, and fix a real bug that is present in 153 device drivers.

All in all, I think it was fruitful for me to attend EuroBSDCon'11 and the associated Developer Summit as a member of the FreeBSD project and community.

Implementing xlocale APIs Project Update

2011-09-26T09:38:00.000-07:00

The following project update was written by David Chisnall who received a grant from us to implement xlocale APIs to enable porting libc++. We're pleased that the project is almost completed!It's traditional to start this sort of thing by telling you who I am. I started using FreeBSD around 2001. At the time, I'd used Linux but switched to FreeBSD because it sounded like it worked correctly - I could have xmms playing music, my IM and email clients notifying me of new messages, and BZFLag making gunshot noises all at the same time. Apparently, ten years later, this still doesn't work reliably on Linux...
I got involved with clang via a somewhat indirect route. I'm a member of the core team of the Étoilé project, which aims to build a (BSD licensed) desktop environment on top of GNUstep. I grew increasingly frustrated with the level of Objective-C support in GCC, which included shipping one release with Objective-C completely broken and displaying no progress towards supporting the Objective-C 2 extensions that were about 5 years old at the time. I looked at the code, but it was an incomprehensible mess of spaghetti.

Apple had just released a new compiler front end (clang) that had Objective-C parsing mostly finished, but code generation missing. I started poking the clang code to try to support the GCC Objective-C runtime, and a few weeks later had a working Objective-C 2 compiler. I then grew frustrated with the limitations (including the license) of the GCC Objective-C runtime and wrote a more modern (MIT licensed) replacement. Clang now supports both and with the new runtime is at feature parity with Apple's implementation of the language.

While hacking on clang - which I do on FreeBSD - I fixed various FreeBSD-related bugs. This put me in contact with Roman Divacky, who had been working on importing clang into the base system. This is an important task, because FreeBSD currently uses the last GPLv2 version of GCC as the system compiler. Although this release seems less buggy than subsequent ones, it is now over 4 years old and is no longer supported upstream. It won't, for example, get any of the features of C1x or C++11.

The compiler is only half of the problem. The other half is the standard library. For C, this isn't an issue: FreeBSD has had its own C standard library implementation since before it was FreeBSD. For C++, it's a bigger problem. FreeBSD currently ships with GNU libstdc++, which has undergone the same sort of license change as GCC, leaving FreeBSD stuck with an old version.

A good candidate for replacement is libc++, developed as part of the LLVM project and available under UIUC and MIT licenses. This has a few dependencies. One is a low-level C++ ABI library, which implements the dynamic parts of C++ such as exception handling and run-time type information. I'd written an implementation of this for PathScale, and the FreeBSD and NetBSD Foundations jointly paid for it to be open sourced. I've since extended it with some additional features required to support C++11, which includes an std::exception_ptr object that allows exceptions to be passed between threads.

The other dependency is the C standard library. Libc++ was written by Apple developers (Apple is in the same situation as FreeBSD with regards to the GPLv3) and so uses some features of Darwin libc that are not portable. Specifically, Darwin libc has a convenient set of extensions to localisation: xlocale. This extends the POSIX 2008 per-thread locale APIs (missing in FreeBSD) to provide a set of _l variants of locale-aware libc functions that use a specific locale, rather than the global one.

My recent work, sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation, has been to implement the missing xlocale APIs. This is now mostly done and pending code review. With this and the new tweaks to libcxxrt, it's now possible to build libc++ on FreeBSD and most of the tests pass.

Most of the remaining test failures are in the header. This defines a lot of complex atomic operations and requires a lot of compiler support. Eli Friedman has been working on adding this support in clang, and with his latest patch applied 25 of the 52 atomic tests pass. There are still a few remaining failures:

- 27 caused by clang not fully supporting the atomic operations yet
- 3 caused by clang not fully supporting the C++11 type-trait intrinsics
- 20 that I don't think are real failures - they're caused by the VM where I'm running the tests not having sufficiently fine-grained time reporting for the thread operation timeout tests to work properly
- 1 is caused by FreeBSD lacking the C1x quick_exit() APIs.
- 2 caused by FreeBSD lacking the uchar.h header

For comparison, Howard Hinnant, the libc++ lead developer, just sent me a list of the failures on OS X. On FreeBSD, 4271 tests pass, 53 fail. On OS X 4253 pass, 71 fail. This is looking very promising for an entirely GNU-free C++ stack.

DIFFUSE for FreeBSD

2011-09-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Swinburne Universityof Technology's Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures hasbeen awarded a grant to implement DIFFUSE for FreeBSD.

DIFFUSE (Distributed Firewall and Flow-shaper Using StatisticalEvidence) is an extension to the FreeBSD IPFW firewall subsystemdeveloped by CAIA. It allowsIPFW to classify traffic based on statistical properties of flows beingobserved in realtime, and instantiate network actions across adistributed set of "action nodes" for particular flows if required.

This project will tidy up and integrate theexisting DIFFUSEprototype into FreeBSD, and incorporate a number of important newfeatures. Integration of DIFFUSE into FreeBSD will increase FreeBSD'sutility to designers and implementers of FreeBSD-based networkinginfrastructure.

Network architects frequently require the ability to classify differenttraffic types flowing across a network, typically using packetinspection capabilities of base system tools such as ipfw and pf.Traffic classification then enables the provision of customized servicelevels to different traffic types (such as priority packet queuing andforwarding, or allocation of specific bandwidth guarantees).

DIFFUSE uses machine learning techniques to enable robust and efficientclassification of IP traffic flows based on their unique statisticalproperties in addition to traditional inspection of packet header orpayload contents. DIFFUSE also allows traffic classification to occur inone place (e.g. in the core of a network) and trigger traffic shapingand differentiation elsewhere (e.g. at the edges of a network). DIFFUSEhas applications in ISP, residential broadband and large corporatenetwork scenarios to name a few.

The project will conclude the end of October 2011.

Implementing xlocale APIs

2011-09-25T07:07:00.001-07:00

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that David Chisnall has been awarded a grant to implement xlocale APIs to enable porting libc++.

The C standard library (libc) is one of the most important parts of a UNIX system as most programs interact with the kernel through interfaces written in C. Porting code between platforms with similar libc implementations is trivial and if something is supported by libc, higher-level languages can use it without being reimplemented.

Over time, the C language has slowly evolved to modern multicore systems, but there are still some places that are problematic. One of these is localization as C began originally had no localization support. FreeBSD libc and Darwin libc (used by Mac OS X) are similar, making it much easier to port code from OS X to FreeBSD than from OS X to Linux. The libc used by OS X supports a set of extended locale functions (xlocale) that allow locale to be set on a per-thread basis.

Additionally, libc++, from the LLVM project, was originally developed on Darwin, so it uses xlocale for most of the C++ locale support. The lack of this support is the primary obstacle to porting it to FreeBSD.

Once xlocale is supported in FreeBSD libc, we can port libc++ to FreeBSD, giving us an MIT-licensed C++11 standard library implementation. This, in conjunction with Clang and libcxxrt, means that the entire C++ stack in FreeBSD will be free of any GNU code. This leaves the linker as the only significant obstacle to a GPL-free FreeBSD 10.

The project will conclude the end of September 2011.

Participate in Software Freedom Day

2011-09-13T06:15:00.000-07:00

This Saturday, September 17, is Software Freedom Day (SFD). SFD is an annual global event that encourages open source software users to reach out to their local community to educate others about the benefits of using open source.

Frederic Muller, President of SFI, the non-profit organization behind Software Freedom Day, has been very helpful in encouraging FreeBSD users to participate in SFD. FreeBSD is listed as a partner on the SFD website. In addition, the FreeBSD logo is included on the cover letter and a copy of PC-BSD was included with the 210 packages that were shipped to the pre-registered teams. He also added the FreeBSD news RSS feed to planet SFD so that other SFD participants will get FreeBSD updates.

Julian H. Stacey has also been helpful in spreading the word and will be participating with the Munich team.

BSD user groups are encouraged to put together a team and to register it on the SFD wiki. If you have not participated in SFD before, take a moment to read through the Start Guide for instructions on how to promote your team. If you do register a team, leave a comment so that we can mention it on the @bsdevents twitter feed.

Accepting Travel Grant Applications for EuroBSDCon 2011

2011-08-12T13:46:00.000-07:00

Calling all FreeBSD developers needing assistance with travel expensesto EuroBSDCon 2011.

The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travelgrants to individuals requesting assistance. Please fill out and submitthe Travel Grant Request Application bySeptember 5, 2011 to apply for this grant.

How it works:

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

(1) You request funding based on a realistic and economical estimate oftravel costs (economy airfare, trainfare, ...), accommodations(conference hotel and sharing a room), and registration or tutorialfees. If there are other sponsors willing to cover costs, such as youremployer or the conference, we prefer you talk to them first, as ourbudget is limited. We are happy to split costs with you or anothersponsor, such as just covering airfare or board.

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

(2) We review your application and if approved, authorize you to seekreimbursement up to a limit. We consider several factors, including ouroverall and per-event budgets, and (quite importantly) the benefit tothe community by funding your travel.
Most rejected applications are rejected because of an over-all limit ontravel budget for the event or year, due to unrealistic or uneconomicalcosting, or because there is an unclear or unconvincing argument thatfunding the applicant will directly benefit the FreeBSD Project.Please take these points into consideration when writing your application.

(3) We reimburse costs based on actuals (receipts), and by check or banktransfer. 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 mayshow to current or potential sponsors, and may include in our semi-annual newsletter.

There's some flexibility in the mechanism, so talk to us if somethingabout 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 canspend money to help support the FreeBSD Project, as it helps developersget together in the same place at the same time, and helps advertise andadvocate FreeBSD in the larger community.

Semi-Annual Newsletter Available

2011-08-10T05:07:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce the publication of The FreeBSD Foundation's 2011 Semi-Annual Newsletter. In this edition:

Letter From the President
Fundraising Update
Development Project Updates
IPv6 support in FreeBSD and PC-BSD
Implementing support of GEM, KMS, and DRI for Intel Drivers
Resource Containers Project
Feed-Forward Clock Synchronization Algorithms Project
Five New TCP Project
libcxxrt C++ Runtime Available Under BSD License
Conference Updates
AsiaBSDCon 2011
BSDCan 2011
2011 Grant and Travel Grant Recipients
NYI Testimonial
Foundation Update
Financials

You can help to support the FreeBSD Project by making a donation to the Foundation.

BSDCan Trip Report: Baptiste Daroussin

2011-06-16T04:57:00.000-07:00

The Foundation recently sponsored Baptiste Daroussin to attend BSDCan 2011. Here is his trip report:

This year I had the privilege to attend BSDCan 2011 thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Foundation. I was invited by Erwin Lansing to participate in the Ports Workgroup by presenting the project I am working on with Julien Laffaye: pkgng. That was really important to me because I was able to meet Julien face to face and have a real discussion with him about the future of pkgng. I delivered two presentations for pkgng, one during the Developer Summit (for the Ports Workgroup) and one during the BSDCan short talk. I have to confess that I wasn't really confident about the presentations as it was the first time I had to make a technical presentation in English (I now dread to watch the videos if any) and also the first time we publicly discussed pkgng.

The Ports Workgroup was really interesting and pkgng couldn't have beeen made public at a better time. It fits exactly the need for a better way to distribute packages and perform binary upgrades in the future. We received really good feedback from people concerning pkgng and the project gained a new member, Will Andrews, which brings in new views to further pkgng development. During BSDCan and since then Will has contributed a lot of good code to the project and it was a great pleasure to meet him.

BSDCan is not only technical but also human. I was privileged to meet and discuss with many people and put a face on login names. I was able to meet in person my mentor, Thomas Abthorpe, as well as Rene Ladan who had been my vacation mentor and with whom I have often worked. I have been able to discover the best place in Ottawa to get good Scottish whisky :).

BSDCan was not only about the good points as I was there to present a project that I was expecting to be quite controversial. But it was greatly accepted, and we now have a lot of work to finish it! But it seems that was not enough for some people as I was personally punished during BSDCan when the portmgrs forced me to become one of them! It's unfair :)

BSDCan Trip Report: Julien Laffaye

2011-06-13T17:24:00.000-07:00

The Foundation recently sponsored Julien Laffaye to attend BSDCan 2011. Here is his trip report:

During my trip in Ottawa, I met Baptiste Daroussin, with whom I developed the pkg_install replacement pkgng. It was nice to meet face-to-face and to discuss the future goals of pkgng development. I also met Will Andrews (who was interested by our project and has since joined our effort), Thomas Abthorpe and Rene Ladan. I was also able to put a face to many FreeBSD logins for the first time.

Indeed, the main purpose of my trip to Ottawa was to present pkgng in the Ports and Binary Package workgroup at the FreeBSD DevSummit. In the working group, we discussed issues such as the state of packages building. The agreement was that the project should build packages sets weekly, and monthly sets with an extended support. This approach raised some concerns for the disk space required by the mirrors, and we had a very interesting discussion about the current infrastructure of the project. Here, the agreement was to setup a kind of Content Distribution Network. The main idea behind this new policy of package building is to facilitate the installation and upgrade process of binary packages.

I was very pleased that our effort has been well received. We had a discussion about the state of pkgng, and if it should be commited into HEAD for the 9 release. We thought that pkgng will be ready around the date targeted by the 9 release, but we preferred to have more time to test it. So the agreement was to ship it in 10, and maybe in 9.1 but not as the default package manager.

Then we talked about the migration process and defined the tasks that must be done to make it happen. At the end of the workgroup, we had a very clear list of tasks, and each team (the Ports managers, the cluster administrators and pkgng developers)
knew their part in the process.

BSDCan Trip Report: Simon Nielsen

2011-06-12T08:48:00.000-07:00

The Foundation recently sponsored Simon Nielsen to attend BSDCan 2011. Here is his trip report:

My main goal of attending BSDCan 2011 and the preceding Developers Summit was "networking", talking in person to many of the people I normally only interact with via email or IRC. Both to discuss some of the many smaller and larger outstanding issues but also just to generally meet people and talk to them in person which always help working together in the future. This certainly happened both during the "work day" time at the DevSummit and conference, but also at other times like during breakfast, lunch, and dinner which was almost always done with other FreeBSD'ers.

With my "FreeBSD.org admins hat" I spent some time talking to Brad Davis and Peter Losher about ways to improve administration of FreeBSD.org systems in the future. Among the discussed topics were ISC's use of Kerberos which might be useful at FreeBSD.org and the Puppet system for system administration. Some time was spent talking with Mark Linimon and Brad Davis about future plans for the nyi.FreeBSD.org site. I also attended Mark's talk about lessons learned from the nyi.FreeBSD.org rollout to date.

The FreeBSD Security Team held an informal meeting during the conference where we discussed how to try and improve the workings of the Security Team which will hopefully stir things up a bit.

One evening we had a DNSSEC dinner where it was discussed how to integrate support for DNSSEC into the FreeBSD base system. The main goal was to be able to support DNSSEC verification in normal applications. It was discussed both at the API level (e.g. should applications be able to know about DNSSEC verification failures) and the system level on how to actually implement this in FreeBSD. The primary conclusion was that this needed to be built into the NSS system, and likely integrated with nscd somehow.

I briefly talked to Hiroki Sato about the possibility for setting up an IPv6 tunnel broker for FreeBSD developers as some can't easily get local IPv6 connectivity.

The ports developers have been talking about changing the version control system for the Ports Collection from CVS to Subversion. I had a few discussions in this regard about how to practically do this, including repository layout and a time limited svn2cvs.

During the DevSummit I attended the Ports Working Group where the future of the FreeBSD package system, including distribution, was discussed. I attended the working group both with my hat of FreeBSD.org admin and Security Team member. The discussions were very useful and a rough consensus was agreed upon both for the future of packages, where they can hopefully be a lot more useful, and for how to handle distribution. From the security perspective the proposed system will allow us to build security into the system in the future. The new package system, coupled with the proposed "package set" concept, will require a radically different way of distributing packages. We discussed a workable model where we move to a more centralized system with fewer but better nodes for distribution. This will also allow us to better utilize our current sites and possibly add other sites in the future.

For the main conference, the "BHyVe a Native BSD Hypervisor" presentation was very interesting both from a general technical perspective and because it might allow the FreeBSD.org admins team to run some virtualization of servers without having to run other operating systems as is required today. George Neville-Neil's "Synchronizing Systems on a LAN: An Introduction to PTPd" presentation was very interesting from the technical perspective in hearing about all the challenges of very accurate timekeeping. The talk also had a lot of audience participation from people who knew a lot about the topic which made it even more interesting.

My Photo Album from the trip is available here.

BSDCan Trip Report: Thomas Abthorpe

2011-06-10T12:38:00.000-07:00

The Foundation recently sponsored Thomas Abthorpe to attend BSDCan 2011. Here is his trip report:

The first time I was privileged to attend BSDCan was in 2009, a generous sponsorship from the FreeBSD Foundation enabled me to attend. Of the many topics I could have reported on, I chose to identify the human aspect of FreeBSD, the people that make it happen, and why the Foundation sends developers to conferences.

To me, people are still the most valuable resource in the project. I have mentored in many committers to the ports tree, and at BSDCan 2011, I was pleased to learn that two of my mentees would be attending. Rene Ladan (rene@) and Baptiste Daroussin (bapt@) would be in Ottawa, and for the first time ever, I would meet my proteges face to face. Julien Laffaye had been collaborating with Bapt, and was here for the presentations. Our sense of camaraderie in IRC made the initial meeting feel like a well established friendship. Our travels around Ottawa became a standing joke, “A Canadian, Dutchman and a pair of Frenchmen walk into a ...”, from this you can make your own joke.

This year at BSDCan, the DevSummit was organised a little different than usuall It was done with break out groups forming into working groups and bringing together like minded people to get together and share ideas. As a porter, and member of portmgr@, my working group was the ports infrastructure. Erwin Lansing (erwin@), took the lead in organising this particular session, uniting porters and other interested parties. He asked me to deliver 15 minutes on the Licensing Infrastructure in the Ports tree.

Other speakers throughout the morning included Ben Haduk, presenting Athena Packing, Peter Losher from ISC with his wishlist for ports, and Will Andrew (will@) sharing his vision for ports. A brainstorming period was hosted by Erwin to illicit feedback from the crowd.

The particular, show stopping presentation of the day belonged to Baptiste Daroussin. Bapt, along with former GSoC student Julien Laffaye, offered to revolutionise the packaging infrastructure with libpkgng. Their reports will follow, I do not want to steal their thunder.

Suffice to say the morning session time that was allocated was not enough time considering the buzz and excitement around libpkng; an afternoon session was added to get all topic material included. More detailed plans were discussed on what would be needed to integrated libpkgng into the src base, along with feature requests and other tidbits of administrivia.

One thing that typifies our Information Age is electronic chatter. The hot topic of conversation during coffee and lunch was libpkgng; this was discussed face to face, in groups, and throughout IRC. There were even emails being circulated, particularly through the portmgr mailbox. A private conversation between Mark Linimon (linimon@) and Erwin declared that Bapt may be a valuable member on the
Ports Management Team, not just for his efforts on libpkgng, but for other ideas he has, including a new means of grouping OPTIONS in a port Makefile. The usual vote was held, and unlike the usual week to take care of business, within 24 hours the tally was in favour of adding a new member to portmgr.

Now that the vote was cast, all that remained was to ask Bapt if he was interested. For geographical reasons, this is normally done via IRC, but we had 3 port managers in Ottawa and this one could be done by an old fashioned press gang. It was agreed during the lunch break the three of us would sequester Bapt, and have the chat. Being the jokester that I am, I thought it would be amusing to instill Bapt with a sense of angst. In IRC, I told him privately that the two of us needed to have a “Man-toMan” chat at lunch. Grudgingly, he accepted. We met him in the hall, and we laid it on the line. Bapt graciously accepted and you can see it as YouTube's least viral video.

From this we had what I am told was a new record, 4 portmgr at one event. Not only was this worth celebrating, but was worth hosting an ad-hoc meeting. With the joys of modern technology, a video conference was setup with Florent Thoumie (flz@), Ion-Mihai Tectcu (itetcu@), and Martin Wilke (miwi@). Yet another first. In this meeting, we were able to share the success stories of the Ports Working Group, libpkgng, plus talk other business.

Every night after supper, I took the opportunity to return to the Hacker Lounge for a time of visiting and hacking. This was a great relaxed venue to just sit back and do as much or as little as you wanted! Human nature what it is, hackers in the lounge flocked together based on their commit bits, src guys there, doc guys there, and ports guys here. One could do an interesting sociological study in there!

Prior to BSDCan, I organised a Facebook event called “portmgr appreciation week”. This was a self serving event to encourage committers to close PRs, perform an act of hospitality for a portmgr or whatever people felt appropriate. Friday night a group of us brought beverages into the lounge and took up a collection. We declared this the “portmgr appreciation week donation fund” and turned over the proceeds at the Foundation Desk Saturday morning.

If BSDCan 2011 had ended on Thursday for me, I could still have considered the event an overwhelming success. But this was just the pre-conference, the real thing was to start on Friday! As usual Dan Langille and friends did a great job organizing the event.

With some assistance from my portmgr peers, we composed a little thank you to the FreeBSD Foundation for their generous grants which brought us together. I would personally like to thank the Board for this wonderful opportunity to be able to travel to Ottawa and participate in this year's BSDCan.

BSDCan Trip Report: Sergio Ligregni

2011-06-08T05:23:00.000-07:00

The Foundation recently sponsored Sergio Ligregni to attend BSDCan 2011. Here is his trip report:

The travel started at Mexico City's International Airport, flying to Montreal and then to Ottawa.

The first day of BSD activity was Wednesday, May 11th, when the FreeBSD DevSummit took place at the University of Ottawa. We arrived, got our badges and started discussing development stuff. I was invited by Robert Watson to the Capsicum DevSummit. Unfortunately he was not there in person, instead of that, we talked to the Watson Box (Robert via Skype); I think this will remain famous through the years.

The DevSummit was interesting. It was my first Summit and I thought it would be like other conferences but with more participation from the audience. I was happily surprised when I found that there were opinions and really technical discussions on how to follow the development of the Capsicum framework. Pawel Dawidek explained how he performs some process "jailing" and how Capsicum is helping to achieve his goal, but also what he does not like too much and some ideas how to improve it. I felt surrounded by really serious security people, like my mentor in GSoC 2010, Stacey Son, who I finally was able to meet in person.

After that Summit I had the opportunity to talk to Dru Lavigne and ask her some final questions before taking my BSDA Certification Exam, like if it is needed to know all about the four BSDs regarding the certification goals (the answer: yes!).

In the second day of the Summit, Justin Gibbs gave a FreeBSD Foundation Report. I learned how the Foundation helps to spread the word on FreeBSD by sponsoring events and attendees. I analyzed that there's a gap in the Latin America area (north and central). I asked Justin how can the Foundation help to get a BSDCon in Latin American north area (since there a couple of events in South America). I think that Justin's answer changed the purpose of my trip to Ottawa: "the FreeBSD Foundation would help to get a BSDCon there, but we need a local contact to organize it". I started thinking on a next BSDCon in Mexico that covers the Mexico & Central America area.

The seed is set, it's just a matter of getting the elements to bring BSD to Mexico. I decided to give my mobile phone a better use than texting friends and I started interviewing people, important *BSD people, like:

* Michael Lucas - BSD books author
* Pawel Dawidek - FreeBSD commiter
* Stacey Son - FreeBSD/TrustedBSD developer
* Matt Olander
* Dan Langille - BSDCan organizer
* Brett Davis - iXsystems sales manager (I am trying to get more FreeBSD users by letting they know they will have strong support services)
* Dru Lavigne
* Josh Paetzel - FreeBSD developer (iXsystems)
* Julio Merino - NetBSD developer
* George Neville-Neil

The goal is to let the Universities know that *BSD is serious, in order to get some sponsorship and a venue. Also to let the company managers know that the OS is not only a learning OS or a hobby. BSD can be used in a really serious way and it is not just saving money, it's about investing in improving the product and giving back to the community.

After the FreeBSD Foundation report, I saw how FreeBSD is "cooked". I was in the "kitchen" looking at how the new ideas and features are discussed, and the greatest part: once the board is full of items, it is time to assign them to the developers. I'd like to say "me" next time I am there. I want to be more prepared as I know there is a release in 4 months.

The first day of the BSDCan conference was on Friday. I was a little nervous since I was taking my BSDA Certification Exam in a couple of hours. We started with a talk about UNICS in an architectural view. It was more than the non-technical view of UNIX development and it was fun and interesting to hear that from someone that actually lived it.

Then I took my certification exam. I asked Dru how many BSDA certified professionals are out there and it was great to hear that more than 150 professionals are certified. I think, however, we need to keep pushing to get more people certified. I can speak from my experience that the test is not impossible, but it really tests you. I found it really interesting, actually. I am still waiting for my result and hope to pass the exam.

I attended some other conference sessions at BSDCan, both ones where I know about the topic and others where I didn't know it actually existed. It was great to meet such professionals and to learn about new features.

Some of the talks I remember were the Kris Moore talk about the new PBI format for PC-BSD/FreeBSD. I think that will help newcomers to get involved using the system by its simplicity but at the same time its robustness. Also, Josh Paetzel's talk about a project I am currently working on, the new installer pc-sysinstall. It felt great to know that my code will impact a lot of systems.

There were these talks of previously unknown but interesting things: like the new SQL for monitoring systems and the Superpages for memory management. I found those really interesting and will read and digest their papers.

About the conference: I can say that I met great and interesting people and became curious about a lot of stuff. I am willing to get a project finished and present it to the community at a future BSD conference.

I also have a lot of materials to start moving things in Latin America, such as the videos I recorded. There is already a guy in Mexico that started the FreeBSD community and its website. BSD is getting stronger here: in the last Latin American Open Source Install Festival, PC-BSD was the second most asked for OS. I am sure that with a lot of effort, the help from the community and Foundation, and a little bit of luck, we will plan the next Mexico BSDCon. I talked with a guy in the hostel about the conference I was attending and the plan to get one in Mexico, and he proposed SalsaBSDCon. I think that name is great and will help attract people here in Latin America. I think I can help to bring BSD to Mexico even though we are "so close Berkeley, so far BSD".

FreeBSD Foundation and iXsystems Announce IPv6-only Testing Versions of FreeBSD and PC-BSD

2011-06-06T04:49:00.000-07:00

The Foundation is pleased to announce that Bjoern Zeeb has made good progress in the Improved IPv6 Support project and that testing snapshots for both FreeBSD and PC-BSD are now available in time for World IPv6 Day. From the press release:

The FreeBSD Foundation and iXsystems announced today their commitment to support the efforts of World IPv6 Day to accelerate global IPv6 deployment. Earlier this year, the FreeBSD Foundation and iXsystems jointly awarded Bjoern Zeeb a grant to create an IPv6-only version of the FreeBSD and PC-BSD open source operating systems.

FreeBSD is well-known as a network stack research and reference platform and its KAME-based reference implementation appeared over a decade ago. With the help of the community, FreeBSD 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 is used by critical Internet infrastructure such as root name servers, routers, firewalls and some of the world's busiest and most reliable web sites. PC-BSD is a complete desktop operating system, based on FreeBSD, having the casual computer user in mind.

Bjoern Zeeb explains the work as follows: "Similar to many modern operating systems, IPv6 in FreeBSD was an optional feature that implied IPv4 support. Since most "IPv6-ready" applications rely on dual-stack behavior, broken IPv6 support often goes unnoticed given the IPv4 fallback option. Providing an implementation of an IPv6-only kernel without IPv4 support provides the FreeBSD Project with the ability to test and fix such regressions while encouraging other software developers to improve their code for true IPv6 readiness. With PC-BSD serving the desktop community and FreeBSD targeting the server, infrastructure and embedded markets, we have created an ideal development and test platform for other open source and proprietary IPv6-aware application software."

Kris Moore, founder and lead developer of the PC-BSD Project notes that "PC-BSD, with its FreeBSD base, makes an ideal platform for the testing of end-user desktop applications and utilities in an IPv6 environment. We are proud to be able to offer an IPv6 desktop testing environment for World IPv6 Day."

FreeBSD testing snapshots are available here and PC-BSD testing snapshots are available here.

BSDCan Trip Report: Daichi Goto

2011-05-26T08:13:00.000-07:00

The FreeBSD Foundation recently provided a travel grant to Daichi Goto to attend BSDCan and the FreeBSD Developer Summit. He has provided the following trip report:

What have you accomplished by attending this conference?

I have written thirteen BSDCan 2011 related articles for the "FreeBSD Daily Topics" section of gihyo.jp. The articles describe BHyVe, virtualization, FreeBSD on Amazon EC2, BSDInstall, PKGng, tool-chains, PCI Express hot-plug, Chromium, UFS2/SUJ, GEOM performance, and FreeBSD vendors. Articles will be posted one per day and the complete list can be found here.

I will also write about the new features of FreeBSD 9 and 10 for the MYCOM Journal and about IPv6 and HAST for @IT. Both are major Japanese IT news sites and the articles will be written in Japanese.

What did you learn by attending BSDCan and the DevSummit?

Many many things. BSD Hypervisor BHyVE and virtualization situation are very hot. The FreeBSD DevSummit is a great opportunity to get fresh FreeBSD news and developers thinking. I was able to travel with my mentor, Hiroki Sato, from whom I have learned many things. I also learned new things from the IPv6 tutorial attendees and other FreeBSD developers.

Thanks again to the Foundation for your support!

FreeBSD portmgr thank you to the FreeBSD Foundation

2011-05-25T23:40:00.000-07:00

The FreeBSD Ports Management Team wrote a thank you note to the Foundation for providing travel grants to several developers who therefore were able to attend the very successful Ports Working Group session.

We would like to publicly thank the FreeBSD Foundation for granting Baptiste Daroussin and Julien Laffaye a travel grant to travel to BSDCan 2011 for the Ports and Packages Working Group held at in Ottawa last week. The working group itself was a huge success and a number of improvements with regard to automated binary package creation and distribution to ease upgrade procedures for our users were discussed and will hopefully be implemented over the next few months.

None of these improvements, however, would be possible without a long overdue rewrite of the package tools provided by FreeBSD. Over last few years, a number of attempts were made to enhance the current tools, but none have been as all-compassing as the PKGNG project by Baptiste and Julien. The presentation given by Baptiste at the packages summit and summariszed at the DevSummit track of BSDCan showed a comprehensive new tool that can completely replace the current tools, and provide a clear migration path from the old to the new tool. It also provides a large number of new features while keeping the old ones and is a lot more flexible to be able to add more features later. As you may have heard, Baptiste has also joined the ports management team as a result of his efforts.

Thanks again to the Foundation for sponsoring Baptiste, Julien, Simon Nielsen (Deputy Security Officer) and Thomas Abthorpe (Ports Management Team) who all were instrumental into making the ports working group such a success.

libcxxrt C++ Runtime Now Available Under BSD License

2011-05-23T07:54:00.000-07:00

The FreeBSD Foundation and the NetBSD Foundation announced today that they have acquired a non-exclusive copyright license to the libcxxrt C++ runtime software from PathScale, a leader in high performance Fortran, C and C++ compiler products for AMD64, Intel64 and MIPS. The press release, available from the FreeBSD Foundation, Pathscale, and PRWeb websites, is as follows:

The FreeBSD Foundation and the NetBSD Foundation announced today that they have acquired a non-exclusive copyright license to the libcxxrt C++ runtime software from PathScale, a leader in high performance Fortran, C, and C++ compiler products for AMD64, Intel64, and MIPS. This software is an implementation of the C++ Application Binary Interface originally developed for Itanium and now used for the x86 family by BSD operating systems. Libcxxrt will be available under the 2-clause BSD license.

This implementation is a full replacement for the GNU libsupc++ library for platforms that use the Itanium C++ ABI, including i386 and x86-64, and will replace portions of the C++ stack previously only available under the GPL. It provides implementations of the dynamic features of C++, including dynamic casting, exception handling, and thread-safe static initializers, and will continue the gradual replacement of GNU toolchain and runtime components, furthering the aim of a purely BSD-licensed system.

"This work complements other work done in the community and is a further step in letting us adopt alternative toolchains in FreeBSD," said Robert Watson, a FreeBSD committer and Director at the FreeBSD Foundation.

"There are already a number of STL implementations with other licenses, but libcxxrt is the missing link for a BSD licensed C++ compiler and the C++ runtime," said NetBSD developer Joerg Sonnenberger.

"It's great to work with the BSD community and help provide these core parts of the toolchain," said Christopher Bergström, CTO at PathScale. "This is a first step to PathScale offering first class support for both NetBSD and FreeBSD."

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 NetBSD Foundation

The NetBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the NetBSD Project and community. Under its education and research mandate, it supports development of the NetBSD operating system which supports over fifty different computer architectures from a single, unified set of kernel and userland source files. The NetBSD codebase is used by commercial embedded developers, educational institutions, and individual end-users. Through donations received from individuals and corporations the Foundation is able to fund substantial work undertaken by developers. More information about The NetBSD Foundation is available on the web.

About PathScale

PathScale Inc. has developed industry leading high performance Fortran, C and C++ compiler products for AMD64, Intel® 64, MIPS processors and provides support to users desiring the highest level of performance from their applications. The PathScale EKOPath Compiler Suite has the world's most advanced optimization infrastructure and can fully exploit the potentials of many-core architectures. The company’s goal is to deliver robust and high performance compilers tailored to clustered, GPGPU and multi-core computing environments. More information about PathScale is available on the web.

New Funded Project: Improved IPv6 Support

2011-04-13T13:37:00.000-07:00

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has awarded Bjoern Zeeb a grant to improve the maturity of IPv6 support in FreeBSD and PC-BSD. This project is jointly sponsored with iXsystems.

FreeBSD's KAME-based reference implementation of IPv6 first appeared in FreeBSD 4.0, and can be found in a broad range of FreeBSD-derived commercial products. To date, IPv6 has been an optionally configured feature present in the default FreeBSD kernel; however, IPv6 configuration has implied configuration of IPv4. With much "IPv6-ready" application software relying on dual-stack behavior, broken IPv6 applications go unnoticed. Adding support for an IPv6 kernel without IPv4 will make FreeBSD and PC-BSD an ideal test and development platform for both open source and proprietary IPv6-aware application software.

"Narrowing down the code base to not rely on legacy IP will help us to identify OS and application components requiring improvement to work well in an IPv6 environment. This project will help to ensure a bright IPv6 future, as FreeBSD is used throughout the Internet: root name servers, storage appliances, routers, firewalls, TVs, desktop and mobile systems, and many of the world's busiest web sites," said Mr. Zeeb. FreeBSD Foundation director and FreeBSD core team member Robert Watson described the project as critical to the future of FreeBSD, "Bjoern's work will not only improve the maturity of our IPv6 implementation, but also motivate improvement of applications used in million of deployed FreeBSD and FreeBSD-derived systems." The project will also improve the quality and performance of FreeBSD's IPv6 stack.

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, and was recently awarded the Itojun Service Award for his work on IPv6 in FreeBSD.

FOSDEM Trip Report: Brooks Davis

2011-03-31T16:03:00.000-07:00

Brooks Davis has provided the following trip report for FOSDEM 2011; it includes some interesting notes on clang/llvm.

I attended the FOSDEM 2011 conference in Brussels, Belgium on the weekend of February 5th and 6th.

As usual FOSDEM kicked off with the massive beer event on Friday night. An absurd number of geeks packed four bars and consumed tremendous amounts of beer until the wee hours of the night.

The next morning the conference started off with an opening session at 10 including the (in)famous FOSDEM Dance followed by keynotes at 10:45 and 11:45.

The first keynote was by Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center. He argued for the creation of decentralized alternatives to systems like Facebook and promoted the creation of mesh based alternative networks using plug computers. He also promoted his new FreedomBox Foundation which aims to create and promote these devices.

The second key note was a talk by Chris Lattner of the LLVM project. He provided an overview of the LLVM project and the various tools developed under its umbrella. What once started as a toolkit of compiler building blocks has become an umbrella project encompassing tools including a C/C++/Objective-C compiler, a debugger, code analysis tools, and support libraries. He also mentioned ongoing work to replace many other pieces of binutils with a LLVM derived version. He promoted several advantages of LLVM over its competitors including a modern code base, faster generation of code that also runs faster (in some cases), and the library approach to tool building allowing tool reuse in interesting and new ways. One example is the use of the clang compiler libraries to parse expressions in the lldb debugger so you can be certain they evaluate exactly as the compiler would have evaluated them. I had seen some of the slides in the talk before, but the amount of progress since the last time was remarkable with several new sub-projects and production quality C++ support.

After the keynotes I took a lunch break while Martin Matuska's ZFS in Open Source Operating Systems talk packed the BSD Devroom. I then attended the next talk by Aleksey Cheusov on a system called mk-configure which is a bmake derived build and configuration system aimed at replacing autotools. He has some interesting ideas and the system looks like it would be comfortable for a BSD developer to use, but it seems like there are limits on the number of autoconf alternatives the world can handle. The next talk was unfortunately canceled due to the speakers' inability to leave Egypt due to the turmoil there. In the 4pm slot Marc Balmer talked about the import of Lua into NetBSD. He proposed a number of potential uses for Lua in the base system including as an extension language in place of things like the script dhclient runs to configure things when leases change and the use of Lua scripts as configuration files. One thing I found interesting was that NetBSD decided to import Lua based on its potential usefulness rather than based on an actual application. While I could see FreeBSD bringing it in, I can't see it happening without a specific use case. Another interesting point that was raised was what sort of error handling the interpreter had when Lua was used as a configuration language. One person rightly pointed out that you won't want your daemon to hang forever if a configuration file has an infinite loop in it.

The next session was my mini-summit on BSD licensed toolchains. We didn't quite fill the room but attendance was quite good. I had solicited input from a number of projects on their use of BSD licensed tools and got status reports from NetBSD and Minix 3. I started out with an update from FreeBSD including the fact that we were nearly able to build and run 100% clang/LLVM worlds on i386 and amd64 and that we have imported them into the tree. I also talked about the things we are missing including cross compilation driver support in clang, C++ exception handling for libgcc, a port of libc++, a linker, and a debugger. Marc Balmer gave a short toolchain status presentation from NetBSD. With their support for legacy architecture like VAX they are interested in tools like clang, but have also imported recent versions of GCC. On Sunday Marc mentioned to me that they had imported clang and LLVM over night which was interesting timing. Minix 3 also
talked about their efforts to move from ATK to clang and LLVM. They are in the early stages and are also planning an a.out to ELF transition in a similar time frame.

After the status reports we had a general discussion and Q&A. One audience member mentioned that he had done a port of the Apache C++ standard library to IA64 along with exception handling code. He said that starting with the BSD licensed libunwind it is maybe a week's work to implement which was good to hear. Another audience member mentioned that he was interested in pursuing cross compiler support in clang. Chris Lattner mentioned that he thought it should be quite easy to do. All the code generation machinery is there, the driver just needs to learn about the paths to all the tools, headers, and libraries when passed a non-native target architecture. Chris also mentioned a developer who is working on a number of projects including a linker. It's not clear where the linker is on his project list, but Chris feels confident it's well within his grasp. Over all there was a lot of optimism about bringing LLVM based tools to non-Apple platforms and the
momentum and breadth of those efforts seem to be growing.

The slides from my intro and status report can be found here.

After my session I hit the hallway track and checked out the BSD booth where fliers and FreeBSD DVDs were moving quickly. Dinner with fellow developers followed.

Sunday was more of a hallway track day as nearly all the sessions I was interested in were scheduled at 11am. The session I did attend was Axel Beckert's talk on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. He gave a general overview of the project and the status including the fact that along with Debian's 6.0 release the night before Debian GNU/kFreeBSD was now an official Debian port. The current port is considered a Technology Preview due to some key pieces not yet being ported. For example the Linux compatible wrapper to the BSD ifconfig command does not yet support IPv6. Over all it sounds like the community is supportive and the number of packages that build approach that of many other Debian ports. At the end of the talk one FreeBSD developer joked that this is clearly a sign that Linux is dying and that Debian GNU/kFreeBSD provides a transition plan.

At the end of the day I attended Jonathan Corbet's talk titled "How kernel development goes wrong and why you should be a part of it anyway." My main takeaway from the talk was that it's crucial to provide a solid reason from a kernel developer's perspective why a feature should be adopted before proposing it to Linux. While I can see some problems with a world where this is a requirement, it still seem like a good idea overall when proposing a major change to any operating system kernel.

After the conference wrapped up and the my brief Belgian vacation commenced.

Foundation at ILF and FlourishConf

2011-03-22T10:55:00.000-07:00

I'll be representing the Foundation at the BSD booth at Indiana LinuxFest this upcoming weekend and at FlourishConf on the following weekend. If you're near Indianapolis or Chicago, drop by and say hi as registration is free for both events. Dropping by the booth provides an opportunity to discuss what the Foundation has been up to, check out the Foundation swag, and/or make a donation to the Foundation.

Accepting Travel Grant Applications for BSDCan 2011

2011-03-19T05:07:00.000-07:00

Calling all FreeBSD developers needing assistance with travel expenses to BSDCan 2011.

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 April 15, 2011 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.

You request funding 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 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 direct request to us.

We review your application and if approved, authorize you to seek reimbursement up to a limit. We consider several factors, including our overall and per-event budgets, and (quite importantly) the benefit to the community by funding your travel. Most rejected applications are rejected because of an over-all limit on travel budget for the event or year, due to unrealistic or uneconomical costing, or because there is an unclear or unconvincing argument thatfunding the applicant will directly benefit the FreeBSD Project. Please take these points into consideration when writing your application.

We reimburse costs based on actuals (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 and on 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.

Ground Labs Announces FreeBSD Support

2011-03-14T05:10:00.000-07:00

From the press release:

Ground Labs, a global leader in the development of security and auditing software for the payment card industry, recently announced the introduction of native support for FreeBSD within its cardholder data discovery products for PCI compliance.

"Our goal is to provide support for all major operating systems that are used to store, transmit or process cardholder data," said Stephen Cavey, director of corporate development for Ground Labs. "FreeBSD is used in mission-critical environments worldwide. It is therefore a perfect addition to our portfolio of supported platforms."

Many large organisations, including large web hosting providers rely on FreeBSD to achieve high levels of uptime. "FreeBSD is known for being a reliable and robust operating system," said Peter Duthie, chief architect for Ground Labs. "By offering native support for FreeBSD within our cardholder data discovery products we can enable more organisations to identify non-compliant instances of cardholder data storage and facilitate compliance with PCI DSS 2.0."

Ground Labs’ flagship products, Card Recon and Enterprise Recon, previously supported 5 operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX and HPUX. Card Recon can now be used on FreeBSD systems to perform accurate cardholder data discovery scans. Enterprise Recon users will also benefit now that Enterprise Recon Node Agents can be deployed on remote FreeBSD systems within larger environments to achieve centralised monitoring and visibility of PCI compliant cardholder data storage practices.

"We’re very pleased to have Ground Labs offer FreeBSD support within its cardholder data discovery products," said Erwin Lansing, FreeBSD developer and member of the Ports Management team. "While FreeBSD is widely deployed throughout the industry, enterprise-grade commercially supported software tools are only just starting to appear. Given the growing importance of the PCI Compliance Standards, Ground Labs products add valuable tools for FreeBSD users, who will benefit from this new level of support."

FreeBSD versions of Card Recon and Enterprise Recon Node Agents are available at no additional charge for download by existing and new customers.

About Ground Labs

Ground Labs is a global leader in the development of security and auditing software solutions for PCI compliance. Its flagship products, Card Recon and Enterprise Recon, identify and analyze cardholder data storage risks on thousands of computer systems worldwide. Merchants, acquirers and schemes use Ground Labs products to achieve and maintain PCI compliance, while QSAs use those same products to validate compliance and produce accurate reports.

Summary of Five New TCP Congestion Control Algorithms Project

2011-03-08T04:55:00.000-08:00

Grenville Armitage has provided a summary of the completed TCP Congestion Control Algorithms project:

Background

TCP is a crucial part of any modern operating system. FreeBSD's standard "NewReno" congestion control (CC) is not able to fully utilize the high capacity links available today. A range of newer CC algorithms have emerged (and continue to emerge) from the networking research community over the past 15+ years. These include traditional loss-based algorithms (where packet losses indicate network congestion) and delay-based algorithms (where changes in Round Trip Time, RTT, are used to infer network congestion).

However, to date FreeBSD's TCP stack has not had an easy-to-use mechanism for introducing new CC algorithms. In recent years the Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures (CAIA) at Swinburne University of Technology has (with the support of the Cisco University Research Program Fund at Community Foundation Silicon Valley) been developing a range of extensions to the FreeBSD TCP stack. These included a modular framework for adding new CC algorithms and new modular implementations of the existing NewReno algorithm, four other algorithms from the literature (H-TCP, CUBIC, Vegas and HD) and a novel algorithm developed at CAIA (CHD). In mid-2010 the FreeBSD Foundation funded CAIA to complete, tidy up and commit a number of these key enhancements to the FreeBSD TCP stack.

Delivered

Our project, "Five New TCP Congestion Control Algorithms for FreeBSD", has delivered
the following enhancements to FreeBSD's TCP stack:

Modular congestion control framework.
Khelp (Kernel Helper) and Hhook (Helper Hook) frameworks.
Basic Khelp/Hhook (Kernel help/hook) integration with the TCP stack.
ERTT (Enhanced Round Trip Time) Khelp module for delay-based TCP algorithms.
Modularised implementations of NewReno, CUBIC and HTCP loss-based TCP CC algorithms.
Modularised implementations of Vegas, "HD" and "CHD" delay-based TCP CC algorithms.
Technical report comparing the computational overhead associated with TCP before and after integrating the new frameworks and modularised NewReno algorithm

Benefits

Each congestion control algorithm is implemented as a loadable kernel module. Algorithms can be selected to suit the application/network characteristics and requirements of the host's installation. The modular CC framework also makes it much easier for developers to implement new algorithms, allowing FreeBSD's TCP to be at the forefront of advancements in this area, while still maintaining the stability of its network stack.

CUBIC and HTCP are variants of TCP that provide significant performance improvements (relative to NewReno) over high bandwidth, high latency paths. Vegas, HD, and CHD utilise RTT fluctuations to provide a more timely indication of network congestion -- by not forcing network queues to overflow, delay-based CC algorithms can help to keep queuing delays low along a network path. CHD is also tolerant of packet losses that are unrelated to congestion (such as can occur over wireless links).

In addition, the Khelp/Hhook frameworks provide useful kernel infrastructure which are not specific to the TCP stack and we anticipate they will be used elsewhere in the kernel in the future to provide other unrelated enhancements to FreeBSD.

Participants

Code development, testing, and documentation: David Hayes and Lawrence Stewart

Editorial review of code and documentation: Rui Paulo and Bjoern Zeeb

Project supervision: Grenville Armitage

Project URL: http://caia.swin.edu.au/freebsd/5cc/

Juniper Network's EX Series Enhances the FreeBSD Project's Infrastructure

2011-03-01T07:52:00.000-08:00

We're pleased to announce the donation of EX4200 switches from Juniper Networks to the Project's new US East Coast site. From the press release:

The FreeBSD Foundation announced today that it has deployed Juniper Networks® EX4200 Ethernet Switches with Virtual Chassis technology as the high-performance communication infrastructure for the FreeBSD Project's new US East Coast site. The Virtual Chassis technology provided by the EX4200 switches, which were donated to The FreeBSD Foundation by Juniper Networks, ensures that the high availability and bandwidth demands of the FreeBSD Project are met through a scalable stackable chassis form factor.

The East Coast site will allow the FreeBSD Project to mirror critical systems from their US West Coast sites and also support more services for end-users and developers. Juniper's donation helps to extend and enhance the Project's ability to provide pre-built packages to users by enlarging the pool of package-building systems. Perhaps most importantly, it decreases latency and increases accessibility of key FreeBSD infrastructure for the many users and developers on the East Coast of the United States as well as in Europe.

“Juniper is proud to be working with The FreeBSD Foundation to enhance the accessibility, innovation and scalability of the FreeBSD Project,” Michael Bushong, Senior Director of Junos® OS Product Management at Juniper Networks. “FreeBSD provides a stable and scalable platform for the Junos® operating system, and we are pleased to support this project building new functionality to enable its extensive development community.”

According to Robert Watson, a core team member for the FreeBSD Project and Director of the FreeBSD Foundation, "This donation establishes Juniper as one of our leading hardware donors and builds on its track record of community involvement." Robert noted that Juniper's community involvement includes "their contribution of the Junos MIPS architecture port of FreeBSD." The FreeBSD Foundation helped to coordinate Juniper's hardware donation and Juniper engineers worked with members of the FreeBSD system administration team to integrate the EX4200 switches into the East Coast site.

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 Juniper Networks:

Juniper Networks is in the business of network innovation. From devices to data centers, from consumers to cloud providers, Juniper Networks delivers the software, silicon and systems that transform the experience and economics of networking. Additional information can be found at Juniper Networks.

Juniper Networks and Junos are registered trademarks of Juniper Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries. The Juniper Networks and Junos logos are trademarks of Juniper Networks, Inc. All other trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.

FreeBSD Foundation Announces New Project

2011-02-16T10:03:00.000-08:00

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Konstantin Belousov has been awarded a grant to implement support of GEM, KMS, and DRI for Intel Drivers. This project is being co-sponsored by iXsystems.

The project is to implement GEM, port KMS, and write new DRI drivers for Intel Graphics, including the latest Sandy Bridge generation of integrated graphic units. The work should allow the latest Intel open-source driver to run on FreeBSD, expanding the range of hardware where FreeBSD is suitable for the desktop.

"The Foundation's sponsored project will allow me to spend much more time on this interesting work, and hopefully resolve the big issue for continuing use of FreeBSD on the desktop," said Konstantine.

"Adding support for GEM/KMS will allow both FreeBSD and PC-BSD to run with enhanced native graphic support on forthcoming advanced architectures with integrated, 3d accelerated graphical capabilities," says Matt Olander, Chief Technology Officer at iXsystems, Inc. "FreeBSD has long been dominant in the server market and this is one more step towards making FreeBSD a complete platform for netbooks, laptops, desktops, and servers. We are very pleased to be a part of this project."

Konstantine is a software developer, living in Kiev, Ukraine. He was given a src commit bit in 2006, and since then has spent most of his free time on the OS, making bug fixes and implementing things he considers interesting. He currently is also serving the project as release engineer and core team member.

Quarterly Status Report

2011-01-26T05:14:00.000-08:00

The FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report, covering the period of October to December 2010, has been published. The FreeBSD Foundation's status was reported as follows:

We raised $325,000 towards our goal of $350,000 for 2010! This will allow us to increase our project development and equipment spending for 2011.

We were proud to be a sponsor for EuroBSDCon 2010, BSDDay Argentina 2010, MeetBSD California 2010, and NYBSDCon 2010.

Completed the Foundation funded projects: DAHDI Project by Max Khon and BSNMP Improvements by Shteryana Sotirova.

We kicked off a new project by the University of Melbourne called Feed-Forward Clock Synchronization Algorithms Project. The Five New TCP Congestion Control Algorithms for FreeBSD Project by Swinburne University also officially started.

We continued our work on infrastructure projects to beef up hardware for package-building, network-testing, etc. This includes purchasing equipment as well as managing equipment donations.

Stop by and visit with us at FOSDEM (Feb 5-6), SCALE (Feb 26), AsiaBSDCon (March 17-20), and Indiana Linuxfest (March 26).

Read more about how we supported the project and community by reading our end-of-year newsletter.

We are fund-raising for 2011 now!

Accepting Travel Grant Applications for AsiaBSDCon 2011

2011-01-17T10:10:00.000-08:00

Calling all FreeBSD developers needing assistance with travel expenses to AsiaBSDCon 2011.

The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please download, fill out and submit the Travel Grant Request Application by February 11, 2011 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.

You request funding based on a realistic and economical estimate of travel costs, accommodations, and registration or tutorial fees. If there are other sponsors willing to cover costs, such as your employer or the conference, we prefer 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 direct request to us.

We review your application and if approved, authorize you to seek reimbursement up to a limit. We consider several factors, including our overall and per-event budgets, and (quite importantly) the benefit to the community by funding your travel.

Most rejected applications are rejected because of an over-all limit on travel budget for the event or year, due to unrealistic or uneconomical costing, or because there is an unclear or unconvincing argument that funding the applicant will directly benefit the FreeBSD Project. Please take these points into consideration when writing your application.

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.

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.

Requesting Project Proposal Submissions‏

2011-01-13T17:52:00.000-08:00

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that we are soliciting the submission of proposals for work relating to any of the major subsystems or infrastructure within the FreeBSD operating system. Proposals will be evaluated based on desirability, technical merit and cost-effectiveness.

To find out more about the proposal process please read this PDF which is available for download from our website.

The deadline for proposal submissions is February 15, 2011. Notification of acceptance or denial of proposals will be by March 17, 2011.

Proposals are open to all developers, including non-FreeBSD committers, but developers without access to commit to the source tree must provide details about how the completion guidelines will achieved.

FreeBSD Foundation at FOSDEM

2011-01-13T06:36:00.000-08:00

Erwin Lansing from the FreeBSD Foundation will be available at the FreeBSD booth during FOSDEM, to be held in Brussels, Belgium, February 5-6. If you're at this event, drop by to say hi, discuss the Foundation's work, pick up a Foundation flyer, check out the swag, or make a donation. FOSDEM is free to attend.

There will be a BSD devroom during FOSDEM with network/internet connectivity and projectors. DevRooms are a place for teams to discuss, hack and publicly present latest directions, lightning talks, news and discussions.

Philip Paeps, a FOSDEM organizer and FreeBSD committer, will be proctoring the BSDA examination. More information about the examination is available here.

EuroBSDCon2010 Trip Report: Lars Engels

2011-01-01T09:37:00.000-08:00

Lars Engels recently submitted his trip report for EuroBSDCon. He writes:

This year's annual EuroBSDCon took place in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany in October. As usual there was a Developer Summit the two days before the conference.
Thanks to the help of the FreeBSD Foundation, who sponsored the conference fee for me, I could attend both the summit and the conference.

I arrived on Thursday morning at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) where the Summit took place. On my way to the right building I stumbled upon Warner Losh who was also looking for the place of the event. Just after we found the others the 15 minute talks started.

There were some interesting talks about the USB subsystem and USB 3.0 in FreeBSD, the state of FreeBSD's jail implementation and a new virtualization mode called Virtual Private Systems which lets one live migrate servers from one instance to another.

After the talks and lunch there were some breakout sessions. I attended hps' USB session where we worked on some non-working USB devices.

The second day of the Summit again started with talks. The most interesting ones to me were the cooperation with PC-BSD by Dru, FreeNAS by Warner, and Alexander Motin's work on a new event timer subsystem which can be very useful on mobile devices because with it it is possible to reduce the number of interrupts and so let the CPU stay longer in sleep states which consumes less of your battery's power.

After lunch I joined the PC-BSD breakout session where Kris Moore was collecting ideas for the upcoming 9.0 version of PC-BSD. Kris and I were also working out a concept of a new GUI for creating 3G mobile connections for the next PCBSD release. In the evening we had a delicous dinner at a local restaurant and had some beverages at the hotel bar afterwards.

On Saturday the actual conference began with a keynote from Poul-Henning Kamp who provokingly stated that the long tradition of text processing in Unix is dying and needs to get refined to support modern techniques like XML. With his talk he left a thoughtful audience behind.

James Gritton's talk on his ongoing work on FreeBSD's jails was very informative. When the work is finished, the jails will have a complete new way of configuring them with config files and new options.

After the lunch break I attended the longer version of the VPS talk that was already held at the Summit.

As the following talks weren't too interesting to me I worked on patching some ports with Ed Schouten.

In the evening there was an excellent buffet in the hotel followed by a mobile discotheque whose DJ tried to animate a horde of geeks which led to a fire alarm because the smoke machine activated the fire detector. :-)

On Sunday Kris Moore gave a talk on PC-Sysinstall which could replace FreeBSD's time-honored sysinstall installation program. PC-Sysinstall is already used in PC-BSD and seems to be mature. Meanwhile its backend was committed to FreeBSD's source tree but is still waiting for other frontends to be developed because the only existing frontend is a graphical one which cannot be used on devices without a screen.

Martin Matuska's talk on the future of ZFS in FreeBSD was also very enlightening. On the one hand he explained the legal hurdles of ZFS' implementation in FreeBSD and why ZFS's CDDL license is compatible to our BSD license but not to the GPL. On the other hand he gave an outlook on the development of future ZFS versions now that Oracle no longer develops ZFS publicly.

After the talk I continued to assist Kris Moore to develop the 3G part of the PC-BSD network manager.

The last talk was a restrospective of the BSD projects (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and PC-BSD) on their work during the last months. OpenBSD seems to have made big progress in suspending and resuming notebooks while NetBSD concentrated on developing the pcc compiler.

Brooks Davis presented several completed and nearly completed projects like the work on an alternative compiler (CLANG/LLVM) which was committed to FreeBSD base some time ago.

To sum up, I'd like to say that this year's EuroBSDCon was a nice and well organized conference. Thanks to punkt.de for the organization and to the FreeBSD Foundation for funding my conference ticket.

Foundation End-of-Year Fund Raising Drive Final Plea

2010-12-29T05:11:00.000-08:00

Thank you for all of your generous donations! We have raised $226,066 so far this year. We have three days left to meet our goal of $350,000. So, we are making one last plea for donations this year.

Why do we need to raise so much money? Here is a list of some of our accomplishments and where our money went this year:

Provided $100,000 in grants for projects that improve FreeBSD in the areas of:
- DTrace support
- High availability storage
- Enhanced SNMP reporting
- Virtualization and resource partitioning
- Embedded device support
- Networking stack improvements

Allocated $50,000 for equipment to enhance FreeBSD project infrastructure.

Sponsored 8 FreeBSD related conferences.

Funded 16 travel grants giving increased community and developer access to conferences.

Provided legal support to the FreeBSD project.

By meeting our fund-raising goal, we will be able to increase our project development funding, purchase more needed equipment for the Project's infrastructure, and support more FreeBSD related conferences.

Please help us continue to support the FreeBSD Project and community by making a donation to The FreeBSD Foundation.

To make a donation, please go to:

Thank you for your continued support of the FreeBSD Foundation.

Feed-Forward Clock Synchronization Algorithms Project

2010-12-21T09:09:00.000-08:00

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Julien Ridoux and Darryl Veitch at the University of Melbourne have been awarded a grant to implement support of feed-forward clock synchronization algorithms.

The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is widely used for synchronization over the network and the ntpd daemon is the current reference synchronization algorithm. The system clock in FreeBSD is currently designed with ntpd in mind, leading to strong feedback coupling between the kernel and the synchronization daemon.

The RADclock is an example of an alternative class of synchronization algorithms based on feed-forward principles. This project will provide the core support for feed-forward algorithms, so that alternatives to ntpd can be developed and tested. The central motivation for this is the strong potential of such approaches for highly robust and accurate synchronization.

Beyond this, virtualization is one of the next major challenges faced by time keeping systems. The current feedback synchronization model is complex and introduces its own dynamics, an approach that is not suited to the requirements of virtualization. Feed-forward based synchronization offers a cleaner and simpler approach, which is capable of providing accurate time keeping over live migration of virtual machines.

This project will conclude in March 2011.

End-of-Year Newsletter

2010-12-17T05:27:00.000-08:00

We are pleased to announce the publication of the FreeBSD Foundation's End-of-Year Newsletter which contains examples of how we have supported the FreeBSD Project and community this year.

It's not to late to make a donation to the Foundation for 2010. Thank you to everyone for their support and we wish you a happy holiday season and best wishes for the new year.

Five new TCP Congestion Control Algorithms Project

2010-12-04T05:35:00.000-08:00

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Swinburne University's Technology's Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures has been awarded a grant to implement five new TCP congestion control algorithms in FreeBSD.

Correctly functioning congestion control (CC) is crucial to the efficient operation of the Internet and IP networks in general. CC dynamically balances a flow's throughput against the inferred impact on the network, lowering throughput to protect the network as required.

The FreeBSD operating system's TCP stack currently utilizes the defacto standard NewReno loss-based CC algorithm, which has known problems coping with many aspects of modern data networks like lossy or large bandwidth/delay paths. There is significant and ongoing work both in the research community and industry to address CC related problems, with a particular focus on TCP because of its ubiquitous deployment and use.

Swinburne University of Technology's ongoing work with FreeBSD's TCP stack and congestion control implementation has progressively matured. This project aims to refine their prototypes and integrate them into FreeBSD.

The project will conclude in January 2011.

Addendum:

The five protocols are:

H-TCP for high bandwidth-delay product paths
CUBIC for fast long-distance networks
Vegas for end to end congestion avoidance
and 2 new algorithms Hamilton Delay and CAIA-Hamilton Delay

End-of-Year Fundraising Campaign‏

2010-11-25T05:21:00.000-08:00

Justin Gibbs, President of the FreeBSD Foundation, writes about the end-of-year fundraising campaign:

As the year is winding down I'm writing this note to remind you of the motivation behind the FreeBSD Foundation's work, its benefits to you, and to ask for your financial assistance in making our work possible.

Ten years ago, I created the FreeBSD Foundation to repay a debt I owe to the FreeBSD project. While working on FreeBSD I learned the fundamentals of sound software design, how to successfully manage a large code base, and experienced the challenges of release engineering. Beyond the benefits of this education, FreeBSD has provided a robust platform that has allowed me to build several successful commercial products while being well paid to work on an operating system I love.
Today, through my volunteer work with the FreeBSD Foundation, I'm still paying down this debt.

This year, despite the slow pace of the economic recovery, the FreeBSD Foundation has an impressive list of accomplishments:

Provided $100,000 in grants for projects that improve FreeBSD in the areas of:
- DTrace support
- High availability storage
- Enhanced SNMP reporting
- Virtualization and resource partitioning
- Embedded device support
- Networking stack improvements
Allocated $50,000 for equipment to enhance FreeBSD project infrastructure.
Sponsored 8 FreeBSD related conferences.
Funded 16 travel grants giving increased community and developer access to conferences.
Provided legal support to the FreeBSD project.

How do our activities benefit you? If you are a company using FreeBSD, our work to strengthen the FreeBSD community ensures the continued viability of FreeBSD and a large pool of developers to tap into. If you are an end user, our work brings you new features and access to conferences. And if you are a FreeBSD developer, the FreeBSD Foundation is providing the resources needed to make your next innovation possible.

The FreeBSD project thrives through the hard work of our community, but it also requires financial backing. This year we set a fund-raising goal of $350,000. We are pleased to report that we are half way there, but we need your help to reach our goal. Every donation, no matter its size, helps to make our work possible. As a non-profit with very low overhead, your donation is the best way to invest in FreeBSD. Please make that investment today.

You can make a donation (including recurring subscriptions) here.

Bjoern Zeeb Awarded International Itojun Service Award

2010-11-10T09:26:00.000-08:00

FreeBSD developer Bjoern Zeeb, who recently completed the FreeBSD Jail Based Virtualization Project, has been awarded the Itojun Service Award. From the press release:

The second Itojun Service Award was presented today at this week’s Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting in Beijing, China. Bjoern A. Zeeb received the award for his dedicated work to make significant improvements in open source implementations of IPv6. IPv6 is the next generation of Internet protocol that will help ensure the continued rapid growth of the Internet as a platform for innovation.

First awarded last year, the Itojun Service Award honours the memory of Dr. Jun-ichiro “itojun” Hagino, who passed away in 2007, aged just 37. The award, established by the friends of itojun and administered by the Internet Society (ISOC), recognises and commemorates the extraordinary dedication exercised by itojun over the course of IPv6 development.

“For many years, Bjoern has been a committed champion of, and contributor to, implementing IPv6 in open source operating systems used in servers, desktops, and embedded computer platforms, including those used by some of the busiest websites in the world,” said Jun Murai of the Itojun Service Award committee and Founder of the WIDE Project. “On behalf of the Itojun Service Award committee, I am extremely pleased to present this award to Bjoern for his outstanding work in support of IPv6 development and deployment.”

The Itojun Service Award is focused on pragmatic contributions to developing and deploying IPv6 in the spirit of serving the Internet. The award, expected to be presented annually, includes a presentation crystal, a US$3,000 honorarium, and a travel grant.

“This is a great honour, and I would like to thank the people who recommended me for the award and the committee for believing my work was valuable. I never met Itojun but he was one of the people helping me, and I have the highest respect for his massive foundational work,” said Bjoern A. Zeeb. “As the Internet community works to roll out IPv6 to more and more people all around the globe, we also need to help others–developers, businesses, and users–understand and use the new Internet protocols so that the vision Itojun was working so hard for comes true.”

Each Internet-connected device uses an IP address and, with the number of Internet-connected devices growing rapidly, the supply of unallocated IPv4 addresses is expected to be exhausted within the next year. To help ensure the continued rapid growth of the Internet, IPv6 provides a huge increase in the number of available addresses. And, while the technical foundations of IPv6 are well established, significant work remains to expand the deployment and use of IPv6.

IPv6 was developed within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet’s premier standards-making body responsible for the development of protocols used in IP-based networks. IETF participants represent an international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers involved in the technical operation of the Internet and the continuing evolution of Internet architecture.

EuroBSDCon 2010 Trip Report: Efstratios Karatzas

2010-10-26T10:08:00.000-07:00

Efstratios Karatzas, the 2010 Google Summer of Code student who worked on the Audit Kernel Events project, has sent in his trip report for the EuroBSDCon DevSummit. This was his first FreeBSD conference and his first opportunity to meet other FreeBSD developers in person. He writes:

Attending the conference was a great way for me to get more involved with the FreeBSD project. The most significant part of the trip was getting to know all sorts of people actively working on the project, from kernel hackers to bugmeisters and doc people.

The 15 minute length presentations at the Dev Summit were helpful in getting informed about what other people are working on at the moment and also provided an understanding of how different teams operate in the scope of the FreeBSD project. Unfortunately, there weren't any people actively involved with parts of my work besides our pf maintainer, but I still had some very interesting talks with all sorts of people: a dinner with andre@ giving a mini lecture on kernel architecture and a talk with hps@ about memory mapping pop into mind. Another positive impact that the trip had on me was to encourage me to work harder and support the project to the best of my abilities. All in all, it was a great trip indeed.

MeetBSD California unConference and DevSummit

2010-10-26T06:08:00.000-07:00

The FreeBSD Foundation is a proud sponsor of MeetBSD California, which will be held in Mountain View, California November 5-6. There will be a Foundation booth at this event with lots of swag and informational brochures. Be sure to stop by to say hi, get your questions answered, suggest ideas for future funded projects, and consider making a donation.

If you are in the California area and have a commit bit (src, ports, or docs) or have participated in a FreeBSD Google Summer of Code project, you're welcome to sign up for the DevSummit the day before the conference. If you need to be sponsored (i.e. don’t have a FreeBSD commit bit), let Kris know and he’ll add you to the wiki page.

Report from KyivBSD

2010-10-21T11:49:00.000-07:00

The Foundation was a sponsor of this year's KyivBSD, held in Kiev, Ukraine on September 25. Alexander Yerenkow, the conference organizer, provided this report on the conference:

KyivBSD was the second installment in a newly created series of BSD-related conferences held in the Ukraine. The conference was attended by people from the Ukraine as well as Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. The Foundation's financial support helped to make both this and last year's conference possible.

This year we were able to attract new partners and sponsors. Last year it was difficult to attract local companies as many were unfamiliar with BSD. This year, having last year's success as an example, was a lot easier. The local branch of D-Link was interested in sponsoring the conference and gave away three brand new WiFi routers. We received proposals from a few companies to place advertisements at the conference for money, but at the moment, we have no need for additional funds. We saw first-hand that many companies, individuals, and users have become more aware of FreeBSD and believe that the conference played a role in raising this awareness.

During the conference we ran a lottery with donated placards, books and routers for prizes. The funds raised from the lottery will be donated back to the Foundation at the end of this year.

The day after the conference we proctored the BSDA certification, which was the nearest certification event this fall for exam candidates from Russia and Kazakhstan. We were happy to provide them with the opportunity to take the exam.

Looking forward to next year, we hope to attract even more companies and attendees.

Update on DAHDI Project

2010-10-18T06:10:00.000-07:00

Max Khon has completed the DAHDI Project and provides the following report:

I am pleased to announce the completion of the DAHDI/FreeBSD project.

DAHDI (Digium/Asterisk Hardware Device Interface) is an open-source device driver framework and a set of HW drivers for E1/T1, ISDN digital and FXO/FXS analog cards.

The main goal of this funded project was to make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions.

Currently, most of the DAHDI bits have been ported, including the DAHDI framework itself, HW drivers, TDMoE drivers, drivers for software and HW echo cancellation (Octasic, VPMADT032) and HW transcoding (TC400B). The project is hosted in the official DAHDI SVN repository.

misc/dahdi in the FreeBSD ports collection now contains the most recent bits of DAHDI/FreeBSD and also some stuff that is not available in DAHDI/FreeBSD SVN due to licensing and copyright restrictions. These include the OSLEC echo canceller and the experimental zaphfc driver.

I will continue periodic merges from DAHDI/Linux SVN on a regular basis and roll out new DAHDI/FreeBSD releases. These will most likely be synchronized with DAHDI/Linux releases.

EuroBSDCon2010 Trip Report: Brooks Davis

2010-10-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

The Foundation sponsored several developers and summer of code students to attend last week's EuroBSDCon. We'll publish the trip reports as they come in. Brooks has already sent his and his report is as follows:

EuroBSDCon 2010 was a small, productive conference with a well organized developers summit. I arrived on Wednesday, October 6th and met a group of developers for dinner. The next morning we headed to the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology for the developers summit. The format was 15-minute talk & discussion sessions in the morning and longer meetings in the afternoon. In the morning we heard about and discussed USB, toolchains, documentation, NanoBSD, pf, jails, and virtual private servers. In the toolchain session I provided a quick review of the current state of affairs followed by a general discussion. The progress of clang's integrated assembler was of particular interest.

Useful outcomes from the initial discussion included identification of the need for people to drive both libgcc and libc++ replacement efforts. Much of libgcc has been replaced by compiler-rt, but we may need to write a few components and we need to package it appropriately. More work will be required for libc++, but there are patches available to make it work on Linux.

After lunch, topics for larger discussion were solicited and we broke up into groups. I lead a small discussion of toolchain issues. Koop Mast reported that nearly half of the ports collection now builds with clang and three ports have fixes in the works which will unblock over 5000 more ports. Ed Schouten volunteered to work on a libgcc replacement. As a prototype we decided to start by replacing all the parts of libgcc which have counterparts in compiler-rt and then see what's left. Koop expressed interest in trying to to get libc++ building as a port. One long pole dependency we found is support for POSIX 1003.1-2008 per-thread locales. Functions such as newlocale(), uselocale(), and freelocale() will need to be added to libc. Another issue we discussed was if we actually need a /usr/bin/as. It's not clear that anything in the base system needs it and most things that use an assembler directly actually use something like NASM. If we don't need it in the base that will make things easier since currently there isn't a gas replacement as part of llvm/clang.

Other topics of the afternoon included inet6, USD, documentation, and cluster administration.

The next day followed the same format with morning talks on PC-BSD; FreeNAS; kernel event timers; problem reports; ports tinderboxes; GSoC projects: NFS event auditing, optional kernel subsystem registration,ringmap, and accessing subsystems via libraries; and finally a general GSoC discussion. In the GSoC discussion there seemed to be general agreement that recent FreeBSD additions including the soc-status mailing list and the multidimensional ranking system we used for proposals this year were good ideas. There was a suggestion that we should make sure mentors instruct their students to provided some overall context in their soc-status proposals.

In the afternoon, discussions covered ports, pc-bsd, bugbusting, ringmap, cluster administration, event timers, and freenas. I joined the cluster administration discussion and working session where we talked about the status of the various clusters as well as some possibilities for new mirror systems as well as the fact that we're nearly ready to go with the things required to let us build ports with
quarterly releases.

After the days summit we adjourned to the developers summit dinner which was quite excellent. Over all the summit was well organized and the format worked well. My only complaints where a catering error which left us without snacks on the second day and that soliciting ideas for breakout sessions with a quick meeting before they started probably wouldn't scale to a larger group such as the BSDCan devsummit. For something like that some of the techniques from un-conferences would be appropriate.

The main conference was a normal two track format with a keynote at the beginning. Saturday began with an opening speech and then phk give a provocative overview of the system tools philosophy where he argued that we need to bring the power to Unix tools like grep to structured data (primarily XML). I think he made a good case and it certainly stirred up a good bit of controversy. I then attended the next four talks on Track 1. Three of those were virtualization with Bjoern Zeeb talking about jails and vimage, Jamie Gritton talking about his new jail management framework which includes config file support, and Klaus Ohrhallinger talking about his work on virtual private systems (VPS) which is essentially VIMAGE taken to the logical extreme and includes support for live migration of virtual instances. The fourth talk was on netpgp and the ability to use ssh host and user keys to sign and
encrypt data. I left the talk knowing that you could do that, but with no idea why you would want to. The final session I attended was on recent developments in pf on OpenBSD. It sounds like they greatly simplified some aspects of the code at the cost of breaking most users configuration files. If FreeBSD were to adopt this code it would need to be as yet another firewall. The day ended with the conference organizers asking me to give a FreeBSD status report on Sunday.

On Sunday I worked on slides for the status report during early talks. I did catch Martin Matuska's talk on ZFS which included detailed coverage of the current state of ZFS both technically and politically along with upcoming features in v28. While attending that talk I missed a talk on binary package updates which I would have liked to hear. In the afternoon I wrapped up my slides and the presented a FreeBSD status report along with reports on NetBSD, OpenBSD, and PC-BSD. Between the projects there were both sharp distinctions on some things like the toolchain and near total agreement on others like moving to mandoc for manpage rendering. On the toolchain front, OpenBSD is beginning to move from gcc 2 and 3 to various pre-GPLv3 versions of 4. NetBSD has been spending a fair bit of time on pcc, but has also imported a GPLv3 binutils and plans to import gcc 4.5 soon. While putting slides together I found it that pretty impressive to pull together a set of features from the last several months as well as works in progress. It was also interesting to see how many of the features were partially funded by the foundation.

All in all the conference came off well. I do fear that if we had more attendees in the future that we would need a different venue, but that will be many years away. I'm looking to next year's conference in the Netherlands.

EuroBSDCon

2010-10-04T07:00:00.000-07:00

The FreeBSD Foundation is a proud sponsor of EuroBSDCon. Several of the Foundation Directors will be at the conference later this week. We'll have a booth in the booth area with Foundation brochures and swag and you're welcome to drop by to give feedback, ask questions, and/or make a donation. Hope to see some of you there!

Summary of DTrace Project

2010-09-25T05:54:00.000-07:00

Rui Paulo recently committed to FreeBSD HEAD the userland DTrace support, marking the completion of this FreeBSD Foundation sponsored project. Rui summarizes his work as follows:

DTrace, which originated on Solaris 10, is a comprehensive tracing framework that allows the instrumentation of software. FreeBSD has had DTrace support since 7.0, but until now tracing userland programs was not possible. Now that this project is complete, anyone can use DTrace with userland programs.

Tracing and instrumenting userland programs is very important because it allows the understanding of what's going on, especially on highly complex systems such as databases, web servers, and language interpreters. Since DTrace on FreeBSD now has the ability to instrument both the kernel and the userland program, you can get very meaningful data on how your program is behaving and why.

Companies building products on FreeBSD now have the ability to create better products and find about problems faster then before.

This project focused on allowing the creation of DTrace pid probes, userland statically defined probes (aka USDT), importing plockstat (a DTrace utility to measure lock contention in the pthread library), importing dtruss (a system call tracing utility similar to ktrace) and enabling FreeBSD DTrace support on MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Merges to upcoming FreeBSD releases (8.2 and 7.4) are being thought out, but it's likely they will happen.

FreeBSD Foundation at Ohio LinuxFest

2010-09-06T15:21:00.000-07:00

The FreeBSD Foundation will be represented at the *BSD booth during Ohio Linuxfest this upcoming Saturday in Columbus, Ohio. This conference is free, but you need to register by midnight this Wednesday.

The *BSD booth will be available from 8:30 to 19:30 and we'll have Foundation pamphlets and swag available and can accept cash donations. As always, donations will be recorded on the Foundation website.

Update on FreeBSD Jail Based Virtualization Project

2010-08-26T04:54:00.000-07:00

Bjoern Zeeb has provided a summary regarding the completion of the funded portion of the FreeBSD Jail Based Virtualization Project:

I am happy to report that the funded parts of the FreeBSD Jail Based Virtualization project are completed. Some of the results have been shipping with 8.1-RELEASE while others are ready to be merged to HEAD.

Jails have been the well known operating system level virtualization technique in FreeBSD for over a decade. The import of Marko Zec's network stack virtualization has introduced a new way for abstracting subsystems. As part of this project, the abstraction framework has been generalized. Together with Jamie Gritton's flexible jail configuration syscalls, this will provide the infrastructure for, and will ease the virtualization of, further subsystems without much code duplication. The next subsystems to be virtualized will likely be SYSV/Posix IPC to help, for example, PostgreSQL users. This will probably be followed by the process namespace.

Along with the framework, debugging facilities, such as the interactive kernel debugger, have been enhanced so that every new subsystem will be able to immediately make use of these improvements without modifying a single line of code. Libjail and jls can now work on core dumps and netstat is able to query individual live network stacks attached to jails.

For the virtual network stack, work was focused on network stack teardown, a concept introduced with the network stack virtualization. The primary goal was to prototype a shutdown of the (virtual) network stacks from top to bottom, which means letting interfaces go last rather than first and still being able to cleanly shutdown TCP connections. Good progress was made, but a lot of code over the last two decades was never written in a way to be cleanly stopped. Work on this will have to continue, along with virtualizing the remaining network subsystems to allow long term stability and a leak and panic free shutdown. As a side effect, users of non-virtualized network stacks will also benefit, as other general network stack problems are identified and fixed along the way.

I am happy to see more early adopters, former OpenSolaris users, and people contributing code or reporting problems and would like to encourage people to further support this project.

My special thanks go the FreeBSD Foundation and CK Software GmbH for having sponsored this project, as well as to John Baldwin and Philip Paeps for helping with review and excellent suggestions.

FreeBSD Foundation Turns to NYI for East Coast US Mirror

2010-08-10T05:08:00.000-07:00

From this morning's joint press release (available for PDF download):

Deployment Adds Enterprise-Grade Redundancy for Improved Reliability, Reduced Latency, High-Speed Backups and Other Efficiencies

BOULDER, CO, August 10, 2010 — The FreeBSD Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD Project and community, today announced that NYI, a New York City-based, mission-critical data services provider, will be mirroring key West coast infrastructure at NYI's 999 Frontier Road data center in Bridgewater, New Jersey, a recently opened 40,000 square foot facility.

In addition to providing enterprise-grade redundancy and reliability for the Project's infrastructure, the East coast mirror will reduce latency during heavy download times, distribute load between the two coasts, and allow for up-to-date backups of all Project data that can be synchronized via high-speed Internet connections.

"Having a well-connected, secondary site with NYI's amenities to host FreeBSD project infrastructure means that we can move services between sites when doing scheduled maintenance to improve reliability for FreeBSD developers and users," said Simon L. Nielsen, FreeBSD.org administrative team. He added, "The new site also enables us to expand significantly the available hardware for FreeBSD package building, allowing the FreeBSD ports team to perform QA test builds and quickly produce binary FreeBSD packages for end-users."

"We are long-time open-source advocates," said Phillip Koblence, VP Operations, NYI. "The FreeBSD Foundation in particular represents everything that got us into technology in the first place. With this deployment, we take our commitment to a new level in the hope that what we are doing lays the foundation for next-generation data centers built around FreeBSD. As many people in the community know, NYI's 999 Frontier Road facility features many of the Project's efforts, as everything from PDUs to the servers run FreeBSD."

The East coast mirror at 999 Frontier is also notable because it replaces aging and inadequate hardware; provides dual-configuration so that experimental vs. production runs can be separated out, allowing changes to the ports system to be evaluated continuously rather the interrupting production flow; deploys to multiple sites, providing resiliency in the event of a failure; provides build capacity required to support the ports ABI changes required to improve the foundations for binary package support while maintaining ports-stable regression testing.

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to have been able to fund the purchase of the hardware. Brad Davis, Mark Linimon, and Simon Nielsen from the FreeBSD Project worked on the configuration, along with key members of the NYI team.

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 NYI
Established in 1996, NYI is headquartered in the heart of the Wall Street area and owns and maintains its own data centers, including 999 Frontier, a newly opened 40,000 square foot facility in Bridgewater, New Jersey. The company's core services include colocation, dedicated servers, web and email hosting, and managed services, as well as turnkey disaster recovery and business continuity solutions from its Bridgewater location. With high-bandwidth connectivity partners AboveNet, Verizon Business, Optimum Lightpath, and AT&T, NYI specializes in mission-critical data services for the financial services industry, in addition to customers from a broad range of industries, including media, law, fashion, architecture, life sciences and real estate. NYI is SAS 70 Type II-compliant, in additon to being both PCI and HIPAA compliant. For more information, visit.

Accepting Travel Grant Applications for EuroBSDCon 2010‏

2010-08-08T11:49:00.000-07:00

The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please download, complete, and submit the Travel Grant Request Application by September 3, 2010 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.

You request funding based on a realistic and economical estimate of travel costs, accommodations, and registration or tutorial fees. If there are other sponsors willing to cover costs, such as your employer or the conference, we prefer 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 direct request to us.

Once received, we review your application and, if approved, 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. If approved, we require you to submit a report on your trip, which we may show to current or potential sponsors, and may include here and in our semi-annual newsletter.

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.

FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter

2010-07-28T07:24:00.000-07:00

Our Semi-Annual Newsletter is now available. There's a lot of information in this edition, including:

DAHDI FreeBSD Driver Project

2010-07-19T14:27:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce that Max Khon has been awarded a grant to finish the DAHDI (formerly known as Zaptel) FreeBSD driver port.

The purpose of the DAHDI/FreeBSD project is to make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions.

DAHDI (Digium/Asterisk Hardware Device Interface) is an open-source device driver framework and a set of hardware drivers for E1/T1, ISDN digital and FXO/FXS analog cards. Asterisk is one of the most popular open source software PBX solutions.

This funded project includes porting the DAHDI framework and hardware drivers for E1/T1, FXO/FXS analog, and ISDN digital cards to FreeBSD. This also includes TDMoE support, software and hardware echo cancellation (Octasic, VPMADT032) and hardware transcoding support (TC400B). The work is ongoing in the official DAHDI SVN repository with the close collaboration with DAHDI folks at Digium.

The project is nearing its completion: DAHDI framework and HW drivers telephony cards has been ported and tested. There are a number of success stories from early adopters who use E1/T1 and FXO/FXS cards on FreeBSD for several months.

This project will be completed in September 2010.

SIFTR Committed

2010-07-15T05:07:00.000-07:00

On July 3, Lawrence Stewart committed SIFTR (Statistical Information For TCP Research) to HEAD. SIFTR was part of the Improvements to the FreeBSD TCP Stack project that the Foundation funded last year. SIFTR is a kernel module that logs a range of statistics on active TCP connections to a log file. It provides the ability to make highly granular measurements of TCP connection state, aimed at system administrators, developers and researchers.

Resource Containers Project

2010-07-02T07:40:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce that Edward Tomasz Napierala has been awarded a grant to implement resource containers and a simple per-jail resource limits mechanism.

Unlike Solaris zones, the current implementation of FreeBSD Jails does not provide per-jail resource limits. As a result, users are often forced to replace jails with other virtualization mechanisms. The goal of this project is to create a single, unified framework for controlling resource utilisation, and to use that framework to implement per-jail resource limits. In the future, the same framework might be used to implement more sophisticated resource controls, such as Hierarchical Resource Limits, or to implement mechanisms similar to AIX WLM. It could also be used to provide precise resource usage accounting for administrative or billing purposes.

"It's great that the Foundation decided to fund this project", Edward noted. "It will make jail-based virtualization a much better choice in many scenarios, for example for Virtual Private Server providers."

This project will be completed December, 2010.

Booth at MeetBSD Poland

2010-06-29T14:40:00.000-07:00

There will be a FreeBSD Foundation booth during MeetBSD Poland this Friday and Saturday. Feel free to drop by the booth to learn more about the Foundation's efforts, check out the cool Foundation swag (baseball caps and toques), pick up our latest brochure, and/or make a donation to the Foundation.

Dtrace Userland Project

2010-06-29T14:29:00.000-07:00

Rui Paulo has been awarded a grant to add DTrace userland support to FreeBSD.

DTrace is a general purpose and lightweight tracing framework that allows administrators, developers and users to investigate causes of system failure or performance bottlenecks. The FreeBSD operating system has had support for kernel-only DTrace since FreeBSD 8.0, but DTrace userland support was missing. Having userland support in DTrace allows inspection of userland software itself and its correlation with the kernel, thus allowing a much better picture of what exactly is going on behind the scenes.

This project will first concentrate on adding libproc support for symbol to address mapping, address to symbol mapping, breakpoint setup and the rtld interactions with DTrace. Next it will focus on DTrace process control, importing the pid provider and adapting it to FreeBSD and porting the userland statically defined probe provider (usdt). Finally it will bring in the plockstat provider.

"By having userland DTrace support, companies can make their products perform much better on FreeBSD due to the fact that they now have access to this amazing tool," said FreeBSD developer Rui Paulo. He also said, "When we mix the userland support with the kernel side DTrace support, we can also make FreeBSD a better operating system because we can investigate performance bottlenecks much easier."

The project should be completed by September 2010.

BSNMP Improvements Project

2010-06-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Shteryana Shopova has been awarded a grant to make improvements to BSNMP.

This project includes several enhancements to the existing FreeBSD SNMP framework, including SNMPv3-compliant user authentication, packet encryption and view-based access control. In addition, the project also includes a new module that will allow full SNMP management and monitoring of the FreeBSD wireless networking stack. When the project is completed, FreeBSD should be the OS of choice when building open source-based embedded wireless appliances due to the advanced capabilities of its wireless network stack, and the light-weight, secure and complete management solution that bsnmpd(1) will provide out of the box. Existing FreeBSD installations that use bsnmpd(1) for monitoring will also benefit from the added security and finer-grained access-control to SNMP data.

"SNMP is the defacto standard for network monitoring," said Shteryana Shopova, FreeBSD developer. She also added, "SNMP is used everywhere - in network servers, switches, routers, firewalls, workstations, ip phones, printers, UPSs, all sorts of embedded appliances. I am happy to have the opportunity to work on several additions to bsnmpd(1) that have been requested by the FreeBSD community."

This project will be completed in October 2010.

FreeBSD and PostgreSQL

2010-06-12T17:20:00.000-07:00

Last month the FreeBSD DevSummit was once again held the two days prior to BSDCan. While the DevSummit is aimed primarily at FreeBSD Developers, some invitees were from other organizations that use, contribute to, or are otherwise interested in the development of FreeBSD. Such a mix offers opportunities to discuss pain points and ways to collaborate.

One of the invited speakers was Greg Smith from 2ndQuadrant, a company that provides professional services and support for PostgreSQL. Greg wrote about his experience at the DevSummit on the 2ndQuadrant blog and has given permission to repost that entry here. It should be noted that the FreeBSD Foundation is currently funding a project for userspace DTrace.

This week I did something I'd prefer to never repeat: I left the country, did something useful, and made it back again in the same day. The occasion was the FreeBSD Developer Summit, held just before BSDCan--the convention that happens in Ottawa the week before PGCon every year. So I get to head right back again next week, but stay a while that time.

The FreeBSD developers were nice enough to sponsor my trip so that we could talk about both the business and technical hurdles that I felt were keeping the sort of companies I work with from deploying their databases on FreeBSD more often than they do. My slightly updated slides are available on our talks page, I cleaned up a couple of things from what was presented (the most important rewording I'll talk about below).

I was very pleased at how friendly and receptive the developers were even to some of my critical comments. FreeBSD and PostgreSQL have very like minded communities: open for any purpose BSD license, academic roots, developers focused on stability, and even a strong documentation culture. There's been plenty of cross-over too.

Much of the PostgreSQL infrastructure has been run using FreeBSD jails for quite some time (although plans are moving to use more Debian in its place, details on why at Inside the PostgreSQL Project Infrastructure). My running joke during the talk was that if PostgreSQL developers are eating their own dog food by deploying critical infrastructure that depends on the database, much of that has been served in a FreeBSD bowl. (The lunch at the conference session was pizza, much better choice)

And there's been plenty of FreeBSD development that's used PostgreSQL benchmarking as a measuring stick for the success of their advances. The very popular Introducing FreeBSD 7.0 slides that not only showed their achieving performance parity against Linux during that release, it doubled as a document showing how PostgreSQL outscales MySQL. Cheers all around for community driven, BSD licensed code.

One bit of audience contention during my talk came from my assertion that not having support for Emulex fiber channel cards in FreeBSD was preventing a significant amount of "big iron" adoption for databases, due to their perception as the market leader for connecting up expensive hardware like SANs. The guys from FreeBSD hardware and support vendor iXsystems called me out on that, suggesting that the alternative vendor here--QLogic--is both completely trusted by the big boys and has top notch FreeBSD driver quality.

I did a bit more research into whether I was suffering from sampling bias from the set of people I'd talked to about this, and it looks like that was the case. While Emulex claims they've been named Sun's "Best-in-Class Supplier for OEM products", and all the Sun FC cards I've personally run into came from them, there are tons of Sun rebrands of both Emulex and QLogic cards. Same thing is true at all the other vendors I mentioned in my talk; you can get FC cards from both manufacturers via HP and Dell too. I think my general point, that not supporting both Emulex and QLogic hurts the perception of FreeBSD as a serious choice for large businesses, still stands; it's just not quite as bad as I'd feared. Accordingly, I tweaked the wording in the slides I'm publishing, to better match reality here than the ones I presented.

In additional to the solid core they've been growing for years, FreeBSD's license has allowed them to incorporate two very valuable features Sun released as open-source, ZFS and DTrace, into their operating system, both of which are incompatible with Linux's license and are extremely valuable for PostgreSQL deployments. It's still not ideal yet; FreeBSD DTrace can currently be used only by root for example. Limitations such as these have in the past kept me from being particularly motivated to work with FreeBSD. The existence of a free commercial Solaris that ran on generic hardware, combined with the steady progress and open enough community around OpenSolaris, satisfied my needs better. While not many of my PostgreSQL installations have been on Solaris, its has a monopoly share for hosting the terabyte scale databases I've worked with. High quality filesystem snapshots via ZFS and the additional piece of mind you get from disk block checksums alone justified those platform decisions.

The problem today is that hating everything about how Oracle does business is what got me working with PostgreSQL in the first place, and now that they own Sun they're doing the same things to Solaris. No more Solaris on non-Sun hardware, serious cutbacks on the open-source version (OpenSolaris looks like a walking corpse to me), cutting off even basic OS patches unless you have a support contract--that's what we've seen just in the first round from Oracle here. Solaris isn't free in any sense of the word again, we're right back to the same dynamics that pushed me away from them and toward Linux fifteen years ago.

But I continue to be dissapointed at how little focus there is on quality control in Linux. How poorly the filesystem mechanics work for the sorts of database work I do doesn't help either. The Linux OOM killer might as well be named the Linux PostgreSQL Hater for how it acts on my servers. And those sexy Solaris features I know work so well for databases, still not there (even if SystemTap is getting better at DTrace emulation).

Meanwhile, FreeBSD has the whole "free" thing sorted out right in their name, and their quality control paranoia is similar to that of your typical good DBA. It looks to me like they're very close to fully assimilating ZFS and DTrace to the point where they can start improving them, rather than just working on getting the original feature set Solaris already had complete and the matching code stable. I think all of us who work on business critical PostgreSQL deployments and who value free software should do a sanity check on just what dog food we're chewing on, and start making sure there's a FreeBSD bowl there at least sometimes. From what I heard this week, the FreeBSD developers are gearing for another round of chewing on ours too. They're looking into database oriented performance improvements as part of future development, and they're not any happier about using MySQL for that than I am about running PostgreSQL on Solaris. Looks like it might be bowls of dog food all around. Nobody said that leading the software industry was going to be tasty.

MeetBSD Poland

2010-06-12T04:25:00.000-07:00

The Foundation is pleased to be a sponsor for MeetBSD, to be held in Krakow, Poland July 2-3. Tomasz Dudzisz, one of the organizers of MeetBSD, recently sent a thank you to the FreeBSD Foundation Board of Directors:

We would like to thank you for your generous donation which we received a few days ago. Your contribution makes it possible for us to organize the best BSD event in our part of Europe. With the help of donations from supporters such as you, we can give a great chance for participants to talk to the FreeBSD project's contributors in person.

We believe that high-calibre technical content of the offered lectures and unforgettable atmosphere of the side talks make meetBSD one of the greatest UNIX-oriented conference not only in Poland but world wide.

We hope for your continued support in the future. Once again thank you for your generous donation.

Thanks! We agree that sponsoring conferences provides many benefits to the FreeBSD community.

Update on Jail Based Virtualization Project

2010-06-09T07:44:00.000-07:00

One of the proposals selected for funding earlier this year was for jail based virtualization. Bjoern Zeeb, the developer being funded, recently provided an update on the progress of this project:

Bjoern A. Zeeb has been awarded a grant to improve FreeBSD's jail based virtualization infrastructure and to continue to work on the virtual network stack. His employer, CK Software GmbH is matching the Foundation's funding with hours.

FreeBSD has been well known for its jail based virtualization during the last decade. With the import of the virtual network stack, FreeBSD's operating system level virtualization has reached a new level.

This project includes cleanup of two years of import work and development and, more notably, brings the infrastructure for a network stack teardown. Cleanly shutting down a network stack in FreeBSD will be the major challenge in the virtualization area to get the new feature to production ready quality for the 9.x release
lifecycle.

Further, the project includes generalization of the virtual network stack framework, factoring out common code. This will provide an infrastructure and will ease virtualization of further subsystems like SYSV/Posix IPC with minimal overhead. All further virtualized subsystems will immediately benefit from shared debugging facilities, an essential feature for early adopters of the new technology.

Improved jail based virtualization support, that continues to be very lightweight and as easily manageable as classic jails, will be a killer feature for the next few years. It will allow people to partition their FreeBSD server, run simulations
without racks of hardware, or provide thousands of virtual instances in hosting environments fairly easy and efficiently. While this follows the trend of green computing, it also adds to FreeBSD's virtualization portfolio with Xen or other more heavyweight hypervisor support, which can be mixed with jails as needed.

While work in this area will have to continue, the funding for this project will end mid-July 2010.

BSDCan Trip Report: Barry Steyn

2010-06-03T10:19:00.000-07:00

Barry Steyn, Software Development Manager at RedButton, writes the following in his BSDCan trip report:

Let me start by saying that I am from Africa, South Africa to be exact. Free software is very advantageous as South Africa is not a rich country. I am using FreeBSD as a server due to its incredible stability in such an environment. Whilst I have been on the FreeBSD mailing lists for sometime, I have always wanted to meet the community. South Africa is quite far away (geographically) from the first world countries; this compounded with the price of airfare makes it very infrequently that South Africans travel. I was very fortunate to be able to attend BSDCAN 2010 with the support of the FreeBSD foundation.

There were several very interesting talks. For me, the four most interesting talks were the talks on Clang BSD, Security implications of Ipv6, Colin Percival's cryptography overview and wireless meshing under FreeBSD. The ClangBSD talk introduced me to LLVM – something that I was unfamiliar with, and am now very excited about. Ipv6 is the way of the future; after this talk, I realise that it may not happen all that smoothly! The highlight for me was Doctor Percival's talk. It was informative and humorous – the perfect combination. My business in South Africa has to do with WiFi hotspots, so I felt that the wireless meshing talk was put there just for me!

All in all, a fantastic conference. I would like to thank the coordinators of the conference (Dan Langille comes to mind, not to forget about all the volunteers) for organising such a wonderful event.

BSDCan Trip Report: Florent Thoumie

2010-06-02T05:51:00.000-07:00

Florent Thoumie recently blogged about his trip to BSDCan:

First I’d like to start this post by thanking the FreeBSD Foundation for funding my trip. I’ve been contemplating attending BSDCan for years and without their financial support I would have missed it this year again.

I’ve been a FreeBSD ports committer since 2006. In 2007, my commit privileges were extended to the src tree. In 2008, Pav approached me to become part of the Ports Management Team.

I’ve had the chance to meet up with a few people (Ed Maste, Garrett Cooper, Tim Kientzle) and discuss the coordination of the work that is being done and will be done on package tools as part of Google Summer of Code. During the developer summit, Mark Linimon, Erwin Lansing and myself held a discussion about the current state of packages and how to improve the user experience. A few people offered suggestions and
portmgr took good note of them. I did take some time to go through the problem reports assigned to portmgr. I also attended a chat about FreeBSD mirrors along with some members of core, admins and portmgr.

There were a lot of interesting talks during the conference and obviously choices had to be made on which ones I would go see. I really enjoyed Will Backman’s keynote. The talk about the PCBSD installer was very interesting and it looked like there could be a drop-in replacement for sysinstall in the very near future. Lawrence Stewart’s talk was a good summary of what tools to use when doing FreeBSD developement work.

BSDCan 2010 was a great time, I really enjoyed it and I feel it was time spent in a productive fashion. I would like to thank the following people: Dan Langille and his volunteers for the brilliant conference they put together, Sam Leffler / Philip Paeps / Gavin Atkinson / Jonathan Anderson for sharing a room with me, Jordan Hubbard for a memorable meal in the Works Burger in Glebe and Kevin Van Vechten for the invaluable insight on American Sports and the FreeBSD Foundation, once again, for sponsoring my trip.

Attending conferences makes the difference between being a contributor and being part of a community. It is the perfect opportunity to meet new people with similar interests, meet people you’ve been exchanging emails with (putting a face on a name) and make sure you stay updated with the works in progress.

BSDCan Trip Report: Ivor Prebeg

2010-05-25T15:25:00.000-07:00

Recently, the Foundation sponsored Ivor Prebeg from the University of Zagreb to attend BSDCan and the FreeBSD Developer Summit. Ivor had this to say about his experiences at the conference:

I managed to make contacts and find commiters who might be willing to review and eventually commit patches I have. I had the chance to chat with Bjoern Zeeb (bz@) about VIMAGE stuff and how are we going to proceed with merging the code into HEAD and after that. Had a really great time with nice people who made me look forward to working with and meeting them again.

Besides multicast routing virtualization and IGMP snooping extensions, I learned a lot about other areas of *BSD development that I had no clue about, like packet scheduling, ClangBSD branch, mesh networks... I was also thinking about joining the ClangBSD team if I have enough free time.

I had a great time hanging out with Roman Divacky, Ed Schouten, Alexander Motin, Gavin Atkinson, Bjoern Zeeb, Marc Balmer and all the other wonderful people that made my stay in Canada even more delightful.

Open Source Foundations

2010-05-25T08:02:00.000-07:00

Gabor Szabo recently did a series of blog posts on various open source foundations. His entry for the FreeBSD Foundation is here.

For comparison purposes, he also wrote entries for the GNOME Foundation, the Python Software Foundation, and the Apache Software Foundation.

BSDCan Update

2010-05-25T07:55:00.000-07:00

The Foundation is pleased to have been able to provide travel grants for 13 developers to attend BSDCan. Travel reports are starting to come in and we'll post them here as they arrive.

The Foundation also raised $845.24 in cash donations at the booth during BSDCan. Thanks to all who dropped by the booth to donate.

We're at BSDCan

2010-05-13T08:26:00.000-07:00

Most of the Directors of the FreeBSD Foundation are here at BSDCan. If you're attending, drop by the FreeBSD Foundation booth to say hi, look at the cool swag, and/or make a donation.

User Thank You

2010-04-14T06:21:00.000-07:00

Brandon Gooch, a system administrator at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, recently wrote the Foundation to express his gratitude towards FreeBSD developers in general and the recent wireless work in particular. The Foundation is always looking to collect appreciations and success stories, as well as pain points, that if addressed, could assist in FreeBSD adoption. When was the last time you pinged a developer on IRC or sent them a quick email to let them know how much you appreciate their work? It only takes a minute to let someone know that their hard work is being put to good use by others.

With Brandon's permission, his email text is re-posted here:

I'd like to thank Rui Paulo and Bernhard Schmidt, and Sam Leffler SO much for working so hard on the 802.11 stack and driver support. In my observations, wireless networking support (or lack of) from the OS seems to be one of the biggest deal-breakers when people I know try FreeBSD (from Linux or even Windows).

Driver support in general is a Good Thing and when one of my co-workers installs FreeBSD and his or her wireless card "just works" -- it looks really good for the project.

I'm sure there are still many issues left to resolve and still more features to implement. I believe that even better support is on the way. I also know that an OS can't be "all things to all people", but the solid code and great support from the developers and community make it a real pleasure to take part in the FreeBSD ecosystem.

I'm also very proud of the efforts of the FreeBSD Xorg devs (Robert Noland in particular) and the VirtualBox devs (Bernhard Froehlich and Co.). They have helped me implement several FreeBSD-based solutions at work due the the excellent features and performance of both Xorg and VirtualBox.

I look forward to opportunities to evangelize the FreeBSD project both in my professional and personal life. Thank you for making that task much easier.

FreeBSD Lectures Captioning Project Complete

2010-03-15T05:28:00.000-07:00

Murray Stokely has completed his captioning project, which was funded by the FreeBSD Foundation, and provides the following update:

A pilot project to improve the machine generated captions of technical conference lectures from the BSD Conferences YouTube channel has been completed. The 73 videos in this channel have been viewed over 200,000 times since the channel launched in late 2008, and the addition of human-edited transcripts to some of our most popular videos makes this content more accessible to people around the world.

In addition to the benefits to the hearing impaired, captions are very useful for international viewers as well as for the improved discoverability of this content by search engines. The improved quality of the English language transcripts also improves the quality of the automated translation of the captions into over 45 different languages. It is also now possible to search for words and phrases in the audio transcripts and get a link directly to videos that contain spoken content of that word or phrase.

For example, try searching for a famous line from one of Dr. Kirk McKusick's FreeBSD Kernel Internal Lectures. The above link will take you to the Google Video Search Result page where one of Dr. McKusick's lectures containing the phrase as long as dinosaurs and mainframes is the first result, along with a snippet of the transcript from his lecture, just as you would see the snippet from text content on a web page. A dozen of our most popular videos of FreeBSD technical content are now captioned and fully indexed allowing users to search for very technical terms and get access to lecture material from BSD Conferences.

The captions were improved by two passes of human editing paid for hire through Amazon Mechanical Turk.

New Director

2010-03-14T06:34:00.000-07:00

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Erwin Lansing has joined the Board of Directors. For those of you who haven't met Erwin, here is his bio:

Erwin previously worked for an rapidly expanding webhosting startup and now holds a position as Network Systems Engineer at the Danish incumbent ISP, TDC. He joined the FreeBSD Ports Development Team in 2003 and has been a member of the Ports Management Team since 2005. He is mainly working on the package building cluster, creating and distributing ready-to-install binary packages of 3rd party software for FreeBSD, in addition to regression testing the integration of FreeBSD with 3rd party software projects.

Accepting Travel Grant Applications for BSDCan

2010-02-21T19:19:00.000-08:00

The FreeBSD Foundation is now accepting travel grant applications for BSDCan 2010. If interested, please fill out the Travel Grant application by April 9, 2010 to apply for this grant.

HAST Project is Complete!

2010-02-19T12:49:00.000-08:00

Late yesterday, Paweł Jakub Dawidek committed HAST to HEAD, marking the completion of this Foundation sponsored project. We asked Pawel to write a few words about the project. He says:

HAST is ready!

I'm very happy to report to FreeBSD users that the HAST project I was working on for the last three months is ready for testing and already committed to the HEAD branch.

I'll describe what HAST does in few words. HAST allows for synchronous block-level replication of any storage media (called GEOM providers, using FreeBSD nomenclature) over a TCP/IP network for fast failure recovery. HAST provides storage using the GEOM infrastructure, meaning it is file system and application independent and can be combined with any existing GEOM class. In case of a primary node failure, the cluster will automatically switch to the secondary node, check and mount the UFS file system or import the ZFS pool, and continue to work without missing a single bit of data.

I must admit the project was quite challenging, not only from the technical point of view, but also because it was sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation. The FreeBSD Foundation has a great reputation and is known to select the projects it funds very carefully. I felt strong pressure that should I fail, the FreeBSD Foundation's reputation might be hurt. Of course, not a single dollar would be spent on a failed project, but the FreeBSD community's expectations were very high and I really wanted to do a good job.

During the work a number of people contacted me privately offering help, explaining how important HAST is for FreeBSD and giving me the motivation to soldier on.

I hope that HAST will meet the community's expectations and I myself am looking forward to using it :)

Once again, I'd like to thank the HAST sponsors: the FreeBSD Foundation, OMCnet Internet Service GmbH, and TransIP BV.

Accepting Project Proposals

2010-01-25T14:42:00.000-08:00

The FreeBSD Foundation is soliciting the submission of proposals for work relating to any of the major subsystems or infrastructure within the FreeBSD operating system. Proposals will be evaluated based on desirability, technical merit, and cost-effectiveness. Download the PDF of the complete Guidelines if you are interested in a submission.

Proposals must include the following:

A detailed description of what is being proposed, how it will benefit the FreeBSD project, and why the work is needed. Also include your name, email address, mailing address, phone number, and involvement in the FreeBSD Project.

You need to include a timeline and costing for the project. This includes your fees, compensation for reviewer, and taxes. We would also like you to include a rough estimated breakdown of how the money will be spent. Also include the estimated man hours.

Technical reviewers are very important to the project. It lends to accountability on the project. The Foundation does not have the staffing resources to provide detailed source code review, but feels that detailed technical review of funded projects as they proceed is extremely important. The reviewer may request to be compensated for their time they spend on the project. It is important that the reviewer is familiar with what you plan to accomplish. The person should be a recognized FreeBSD contributor. Include in your proposal the name of the reviewer and what criteria you used to select this person. Please include this cost in your final project cost.

Proposals must include milestones for which partial payments can be made. In addition to the milestones, a completion target date must be proposed with the completed project placed into the FreeBSD source repository. A proposal will be rejected if a target completion date is not submitted. Payments will only be made when milestones are reached and the project has been completed.

All proposals must be in US dollars.

Proposals are open to all developers, including non-FreeBSD committers, but developers without access to commit to the source tree must provide details about how the completion guidelines will achieved.

Please email your proposal to the FreeBSD Foundation Board.

Accepting Travel Grant Applications for AsiaBSDCon 2010

2010-01-22T10:27:00.000-08:00

Calling all FreeBSD developers needing assistance with travel expenses to AsiaBSDCon 2010.

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 January 29, 2010 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.

(1) You request funding 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 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 direct request to us.

(2) We review your application and if approved, authorize you to seek reimbursement up to a limit. We consider several factors, including our overall and per-event budgets, and (quite importantly) the benefit to the community by funding your travel.

Most rejected applications are rejected because of an over-all limit on travel budget for the event or year, due to unrealistic or uneconomical costing, or because there is an unclear or unconvincing argument that funding the applicant will directly benefit the FreeBSD Project. Please take these points into consideration when writing your application.

(3) We reimburse costs based on actuals (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.

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.

How the FreeBSD Project's Processes Help Companies Build Products

2010-01-01T07:43:00.000-08:00

George Neville-Neil has written the lead article for the January issue of the Open Source Business Resource (OSBR) and the FreeBSD Foundation is the sponsor for this month's issue. The entire issue is available as a PDF and George's article is also available in HTML. You are welcome to host/translate a copy of the PDF or article elsewhere as long as you attribute George as the author and the OSBR as the original publication source.

From the article's abstract:

The processes that open source projects use to produce new work and maintain the quality of their code base is a subject that comes up infrequently in discussions of open source. One reason for this is that engineers and programmers are usually loathe to deal with issues that are not directly related to the piece of code or technology that they are working on.

Successful businesses know that good processes lead to continued success. The attributes that attract a business to an open source project are stability, reliability, and longevity. Stability gives a business the confidence to invest time into developing products on the project's platform, safe in the knowledge that the next incremental step in development won't be torpedoed by some unforeseen change. Reliability is often not associated with open source and many projects are perceived as being too cutting edge for a business to build upon. Longevity is of value as many businesses are inherently conservative in their approaches, attempting to reduce the risks of adopting any technique or technology. One way to reduce risk is to work with an open source project that has a proven track record of delivering quality products, on schedule.

This article attempts to dispel the myth of the perceived tension between a formally run business and the apparently less formally run open source projects with which a business interacts. We describe how one particular open source project has developed processes which provide its users, customers, and partners with a product that is stable, reliable, and long lived.

Letter from the President

2009-12-29T07:21:00.000-08:00

From the December Foundation Newsletter:

In 2009, the FreeBSD project had the misfortune of losing two long time contributors: John Birrell and Jean-Marc Zucconi. I chatted with John recently, during this year's BSDCAN, so his death was all the more shocking. It forced me to recognize my own mortality and to consider what contributions from our lives remain after we pass away. Reviewing the heritage of FreeBSD it becomes clear that our work on this project takes on a life of its own. John and Jean-Marc's efforts live on in FreeBSD.

The value of the FreeBSD legacy has become even more apparent to me with my return, after an almost 10 year break, to working on FreeBSD during my day job. The kernel has the familiarity of an old friend, even though it has been improved in countless ways by dozens of new contributors. Although the principles and best practices engendered by the FreeBSD project have changed little in the last decade, they are no less relevant today. The faces and challenges may have changed, but the qualities of FreeBSD - solid design, high performance, stability - have not.

Trying to communicate this real value of FreeBSD can be difficult. Valuations typically take current features into account, but neglect to consider the community that created and will support those features. And what value can you place on future, community driven, improvements to FreeBSD? There is no guarantee that every feature you need will be added to the system in the time frame you need it, but the collaborative environment created by the FreeBSD project makes it very likely. The greatest asset of FreeBSD is our community. If we continue to invest in the FreeBSD community, I have every confidence that the FreeBSD legacy will endure.

The FreeBSD Foundation is doing its part to continue FreeBSD's legacy. Through conservative management and careful planning we have improved our financial position even when faced with the most severe recession in 50 years. Our growing strength and capabilities, all made possible by your generous donations, are proof that the FreeBSD Foundation will be a faithful supporter of FreeBSD for many years to come. Together, building on the legacy left by John, Jean-Marc, and the countless contributors before them, we will ensure the future of FreeBSD.

FreeBSD Project Receives Bad Code Offset

2009-12-28T14:43:00.000-08:00

The Bad Code Offsets project of The Alliance for Code Excellence is "a way to undo the bad code other people have written without actually replacing the bad code. Much like carbon offsets, money used to buy Bad Code Offsets goes towards open-source projects which not only produce good code, but produce software that helps developers build good software".

The FreeBSD Project was recently added as a supported project and the FreeBSD Foundation will be receiving a check for $500. Thanks to those who suggested the FreeBSD project be added and to the Alliance for supporting good code!

Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2009

2009-12-28T14:30:00.000-08:00

Brooks Davis recently reported on his trip to the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2009. The Foundation assisted in some of his travel costs to this event. Brook writes:

The Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit was held at the Google campus in Mountain View October 24th and 25th. I represented the FreeBSD project at the event along with Tim Kientzle who was one of our other program admins.

Google runs the Mentor Summit as an un-conference which means that attendees pick topics they want to discuss, others indicate interest in them, and then rooms are allocated based on demand. Sessions were about things including general open source process issues, education, technical collaborations, and individual project meetings.

One of the highlights of Saturday was a session on multi-core and other acceleration technologies like GPUs. The session didn't come to a strong consensus other than incorporating these technologies is difficult. The most concrete thing that came up was the idea of putting the technologies behind widely used APIs so they automatically provide benefit. Another topic of discussion was debugging tools and
techniques. I think that is an area where FreeBSD is sometimes ahead with technologies like witness and now DTrace.

The other session of interest was an impromptu session of non-Linux OSes including DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, Haiku, and NetBSD. It was mostly people talking about current status. One thing other projects seemed to want was a way to take advantage of FreeBSD network drivers by providing more common interfaces. In concept this was interesting, but probably isn't some thing that would make a whole lot of sense for FreeBSD given that we're rethinking and redesigning the interfaces we have to meet modern performance requirements.

The most useful session on Sunday was when Tim and I grabbed a small conference room and started reviewing our GSoC admin materials for next year. Based on that information, we plan to start engaging with FreeBSD developers in January in anticipation of a 2010 program.

Over all the conference was interesting and fun. It was good to talk to
people from other projects that don't often attend the BSD conference.
I'm not sure anything concrete came of those interactions, but it was
probably useful nonetheless.

Thank You!

2009-12-17T14:50:00.000-08:00

We would like to thank everyone who has donated to the FreeBSD Foundation this year. We have raised $182,778 towards our 2009 goal of $300,000! We are almost 2/3 of the way to reaching our goal! Oh, and BTW, we have had 663 donors this year. This is compared to just over 300 this time last year. This is important not only to help us keep our Public Charity Status, but it shows there are many users who are passionate about FreeBSD and want to show their support.

With the weakened economy we have been very conservative with our spending this year. But, like each previous year we have increased the amount we have spent on the FreeBSD Project and community. We were blown away with the number of project proposals we received this year. We were able to fund 7 projects this year. Unfortunately we didn't have the budget to fund all the proposals we received.

This coming year we want to double the amount we spend on project development. In order to accomplish this, we need to meet our fund-raising goal.

Why do we need donations?

The goal of the FreeBSD Project is to provide software that may be used for any purpose -- and without strings attached. Our mission is to support the FreeBSD Project and community. Our funding comes from people like you – those who are determined to keep FreeBSD free!

How have we spent the money this year?

• Sponsored FreeBSD related conferences like BSDCan, EuroBSDCon, AsiaBSDCon, KyivBSD, and DCBSDCon.

• Provided 15 travel grants and funding to individuals to attend these and other conferences this year.

• Provided grants for projects that improve FreeBSD, like wireless mesh support, FreeBSD TCP stack improvements, new console driver, safe removal of disk devices, flattened device tree, and high available storage projects.

• Provided equipment for developers working to improve FreeBSD and projects like the NetPerf cluster. We purchased servers, USB analyzers, power controllers, and parts for computer repairs for the Project. We also paid for shipping of equipment to various projects.

• Provided legal support for the project on issues like understanding the GPLv3 impact on FreeBSD, providing a privacy policy, trademark ownership and permission, and other legal issues that come up.

How can you help?

Your financial support is critical for the FreeBSD Project. Please help us keep FreeBSD free. Any amount you can donate will help. And thank you for your continued support of the FreeBSD Foundation.

Update on HAST Project

2009-12-13T17:46:00.000-08:00

Pawel Jakub Dawidek has completed the first milestone for the High Available Storage Project. He writes:

I want to report that first milestone of the HAST project is complete.

Summary of the work that have been done:

Implementation of hastd daemon.
Implementation of hastctl utility to manage hastd daemons.
GEOM_GATE class was extended so that the caller can specify the name of GEOM provider. Before only /dev/ggateX names were supported. HAST will use /dev/hast/<resource_name> names.
Implementation of communication protocol. There is abstraction layer on top and below there are three protocols implemented currently:

proto_tcp4 - It is used for communication between primary and secondary nodes.
proto_uds - (UDS - UNIX Domain Socket) It is used for communication between hastctl and hastd.
proto_socketpair - It is used for communication between main hastd daemon and worker processes forked from it.

Implementation of nv (name-value) API, which allows to easy create packets containing name-value pairs. It is used for entire communication through the protocols above. It is also responsible for managing correct byte-order.
Implementation of ebuf (extendable buffer) API, which provides a way to extend given buffer by adding data at the back, but also at the front without reallocating it and copying the data very often (or never).
Implementation of logging API (pjdlog). The API decides if messages should be logged on standard output/error (before going into background) or to syslog (when we daemonize). It also provides some shortcuts for logging a message and exiting, etc. It supports notion of debug level and can skip messages intended for higher debug level than requested.
Implementation of configuration file parser in lex/yacc. Configuration file is designed in a way that it can be kept identical on both nodes.
Checksumming and compression for the data is not one of the project's goal, but the stubs are there, so this can be added easly.
A lot of care was taken to be able to handle more nodes in the future. This is not implemented and in not project goal, but I wanted to make it ready for future improvements.

HAST can be used by starting hastd daemons on both nodes:

# hastd -h
hastd: [-dh] [-c config]

Then on the secondary node we mark all resources as secondary:

# hastctl -h
hastctl: [-d] [-c config]
hastctl: [-d] [-c config] status [all | name ...]

# hastctl secondary all

On the primary node we mark all resources as primary:

# hastctl primary all

The hastd daemon running on primary node will connect to the secondary node and fork a child to handle communication. There is a socketpair between parent and child so that they can communicate. Primary node creates two connections: one for incoming data and one for outgoing data. There are seven threads in total for each working resource:

1. ggate_recv

Thread receives ggate I/O requests from the kernel and passes them to appropriate threads:
WRITE - always goes to both local_send and remote_send threads
READ (when the block is up-to-date on local component) -only local_send thread
READ (when the block isn't up-to-date on local component) -only remote_send thread
DELETE - always goes to both local_send and remote_send threads
FLUSH - always goes to both local_send and remote_send threads

2. local_send

Thread reads from or writes to local component.
If local read fails, it redirects it to remote_send thread.

3. remote_send

Thread sends request to secondary node.

4. remote_recv

Thread receives answer from secondary node and passes it to ggate_send thread.

5. ggate_send

Thread sends answer to the kernel.

6. ctrl

Thread handles control requests from the parent.

7. guard

Thread guards remote connections and reconnects when needed, handles signals, etc.

On the secondary node when both connections are successfully established it forks a worker process, which operates using four threads:

1. recv

Thread receives requests from the primary node.

2. disk

Thread reads from or writes to local component and also handles DELETE and FLUSH requests.

3. send

Thread sends requests back to primary node.

4. ctrl

Thread handles control requests from the parent.

At this point primary and secondary nodes can communicate and requests are properly replicated. IO errors on local read failure are handled by redirecting read request to remote node. Replicated storage can be accessed through /dev/hast/<resource_name> GEOM provider.

I'm confident that the first milestone is complete. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them. If you have any suggestions or comments, I'll also be happy to hear them.

Colin Percival on Supporting the Foundation

2009-12-09T16:42:00.000-08:00

Developers not only benefit from the work done by the Foundation, they also help to financially support it. Colin Percival writes about donating to the Foundation on his blog. His blog post begins:

As a FreeBSD user and developer, I obviously care about the success of FreeBSD. I make a small contribution towards this success via my role as Security Officer; but the time I spend working on my Tarsnap online backup service prevents me from making as much of a direct contribution as I would like. Fortunately the FreeBSD Foundation does an excellent job of supporting FreeBSD development; but like most such organizations, they are funded entirely by donations and are always in need of more. In light of this, I am pleased to announce that I will be donating all of the profits made by Tarsnap for the month of December to the FreeBSD Foundation.

Much of the work done by the FreeBSD Foundation is done behind the scenes, but the importance of the work they do is undeniable. They sponsor a range of important FreeBSD development which would likely not get done otherwise; in the past year this has included...

In Memory of Donations

2009-12-07T12:53:00.000-08:00

It is with sadness that we note the passing of long time FreeBSD committer, John Birrell. Many in the FreeBSD community had the opportunity to interact with John online and perhaps meet him in person at a BSDCan. He will be missed.

It is now possible to make a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation in memory of someone. Select the "in memory of" button on the donation page and type in the name of the person the donation is being made in memory of.

AsiaBSDCon 2010

2009-11-18T07:00:00.000-08:00

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to once again be a sponsor of AsiaBSDCon 2010. This conference will be held in Tokyo, March 11-14, 2010.

If you are considering speaking at this conference, the call for papers ends on December 20.

End-of-Year Fund Raising Drive

2009-11-18T06:55:00.000-08:00

We're kicking off our End-of-Year Fund Raising Drive! Our goal this year is to raise $300,000. So far, we have raised just over $159,000 so we are little more than half way towards our goal. Please consider making a donation and help us to spread the word by tweeting and blogging about the drive.

Click here to find out how to make a donation.

Another New Funded Project

2009-10-22T12:42:00.000-07:00

Rafal Jaworowski and Semihalf have been awarded a grant to provide FreeBSD with support for the flattened device tree (FDT) technology. This project allows for describing hardware resources of a computer system and their dependencies in a platform-neutral and portable way.

The main consumers of this functionality are embedded systems whose hardware resources assignment cannot be probed or self-discovered.

The FDT idea is inherited from Open Firmware IEEE 1275 device-tree notion (part of the regular Open Firmware implementation), and among other deployments is used as a basis for Power.org's embedded platform reference specification (ePAPR).

"Thanks to this project, embedded FreeBSD platforms will grow in a uniform and extensible way of representing hardware devices, compliant with industry standards (ePAPR, Open Firmware), independent of architecture and platform (portable across ARM, MIPS, PowerPC etc.)," said Rafal Jaworowski, FreeBSD Developer.

Semihalf is a privately owned company, based in Krakow, Poland. They specialize in embedded systems design and development, with expertise in both software and hardware. Among their portfolio are FreeBSD ports to high-end embedded processors (including multi-core) with a wide range of peripheral drivers (storage, networking, pattern matching, security engines etc.); most of this work is publicly available from the FreeBSD repository.

This project will complete by February 2010.