BSDCan Trip Report: Daichi Goto

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

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

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.