FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter

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

• Letter From the President
• Fundraising Update
• Flattened Device Tree Project
• Userland DTrace Project
• FreeBSD Jail Based Virtualization Project
• Resource Containers Project
• HA Storage Project
• BSNMP Improvements
• DAHDI FreeBSD driver port
• FreeBSD Lectures Captioning Project
• Upgrades to the Ports Building Cluster
• AsiaBSDCon 2010
• BSDCan 2010
• BSD Toolchain Summit
• MeetBSD Poland 2010
• 2010 Grant and Travel Grant Recipients
• Testimonial - Building a Business on FreeBSD
• Financials

DAHDI FreeBSD Driver Project

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

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

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

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

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

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.