Testimonial: Experts Exchange

Andrew Alsup, Site Director of Experts Exchange recently provided the following testimonial:

Experts Exchange is a technology help site. We've developed a patented Q&A system that makes finding solutions easier. People ask questions and experts from around the world provide reliable answers.

Since 2009, Experts Exchange has used FreeBSD as its operating system of choice for all external facing web servers and internal tools hosting.

About 3 years ago, Experts Exchange did extensive performance testing of our website on several flavors of Linux and UNIX, including FreeBSD 7. FreeBSD outperformed all other tested operating systems in both page load time metrics and Lucene search index performance testing.  Since that time, we’ve migrated our developer, test and production servers to FreeBSD.  We’ve also used FreeBSD jails to host our developer test servers and have come to rely on FreeBSD throughout our local office datacenter and our co-location datacenter stack.

Because of our investment in FreeBSD, we continue to have several system administrators working on FreeBSD enhancements to improve our production environment and their changes hopefully help other companies and users as well.

A big thank you to the FreeBSD community for your open, friendly attitude and how much you’ve contributed to the growth of Experts Exchange!

New Funded Project: Grow Mounted Filesystems

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Edward Tomasz Napierala has been awarded a grant to implement the ability to grow filesystems while they are mounted.

"Users of FreeBSD in a virtualized environment will be pleased with the increased ease of deployment afforded by the ability to grow mounted filesystems," said Ed Maste, Director, The FreeBSD Foundation.

This project will add GEOM and filesystem changes that are necessary to increase the size of both UFS and ZFS filesystems while a filesystem is mounted read-write. This project will provide the additional benefit of online provisioning of virtual instances.

The Foundation is pleased to be working with Edward again. He was previously awarded a grant to implement resource containers and a simple per-jail resource limits mechanism. This work was
included in FreeBSD 9.0 RELEASE.

This project is expected to be completed by October 2012.

George Neville-Neil Joins Board of Directors

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce the addition of George Neville-Neil to its board of directors.

George has been dabbling in the BSD world since his undergraduate days in the mid-1980s. He was granted his commit bit in 2004, and has served two terms on the FreeBSD Core team between 2006 and 2010.

In 2011, he started organizing the semi-annual FreeBSD Vendor Summits that gather commercial customers of FreeBSD along with project members in order to facilitate the movement of technologies between the Project and its customers.

George co-authored "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System." His technical contributions are mostly within the FreeBSD network stack with occasional forays into other parts of the system.

"The Foundation is at a pivotal point in our growth as a company," said Deb Goodkin, Secretary/Treasurer, The FreeBSD Foundation. "We believe with George's previous and current involvement in FreeBSD, that he will be a significant contributor in helping us achieve our ambitious goals this year."

Trip Report: FOSDEM 2012

The Foundation recently sponsored travel expenses for Brooks Davis to attend FOSDEM 2012. Brooks provided the following trip report:

I arrived in Brussels the afternoon of Thursday the 2nd.  After checking in to my hotel I headed into the city center and met up with a group of FreeBSD and Étoilé developers for dinner.  On Friday I toured the city and worked on my presentation for Sunday before joining the crowd at Delrium Cafe for the FOSDEM Beer Event and made some new friends.

Saturday began with the traditional opening talk followed by an interesting talk by Robert Dewar or AdaCore on how they are a profitable company selling a rather expensive GPL licensed product to a very conservative client base (mostly defense and safety critical applications). Other than avoiding costs associated with source escrow, it wasn't clear that being open source gave them much advantage, but he had a compelling argument that it didn't hurt either.

In the afternoon I attended a number of talks in the Vitalization and Cloud track. The Aeolus Project and Open Cloud Interoperability with CompatibleOne covered some related efforts to provide interoperability and portability between cloud providers. Both were definitely works in progress, but showed promise. A more interested talk in that track was "Infrastructure as an open-source project" by Ryan Lane of Wikimedia Labs. He talked about the way the had placed most of their infrastructure definition for system setup, configuration management, and monitoring into a git repository to allow project contributors to view and submit patches to the infrastructure. This appears to be growing the number of volunteer contributors to the admin of Wikimedia infrastructure, but has shifted the bottleneck for support staff so now they spend a significant portion of their time review patches to the infrastructure. After that talk a group of FreeBSD Developers adjourned to a local restaurant for dinner and drinks.

Sunday I ran the BSD License Operating System Devroom. We had a room in the new K building at ULB which was very nice. All the equipment was built in and just worked. We had a total of ten talks with topics including MINIX 3 and BSD, an Introduction to pkgng (FreeBSD's new package system), four talks on pkgsrc and related topics, two talks on FreeBSD toolchain work, one on tablet support in NetBSD, and one on Lua in the NetBSD kernel. The latter was the best attended talk of the day with the room being just about full.  After the talks we attempted a brief brainstorming session on ways we could collaborate.  Unfortunately we were pressed for time and while we got a discussion going, we didn't have the necessary time to develop concrete ideas. While most of our talks were on BSD OSes, we did talk about expanding the focus of the room a bit further to include other non-Linux OSes next year and received generally positive vibes about that idea.  All in all we had a good set of presentations and I learned quite a bit about other projects so it was personally successful.  Further information on the devroom talks can be found here.

After cleaning up the devroom I met up with a FreeBSD developer for dinner and then joined a group of Étoilé developers at Delirum Cafe. Monday morning I returned to London and proceeded to Cambridge for two weeks of FreeBSD hacking, mostly focused on the toolchain.

New Project: NAND Flash Support

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Semihalf, an embedded solutions company, has been awarded a grant to bring their comprehensive NAND Flash file system and storage stack to FreeBSD. This technology enables FreeBSD to natively manage NAND Flash devices, satisfying a crucial requirement for many applications needing access to fast, reliable, non-volatile storage.

FreeBSD is widely used as the OS foundation of embedded appliances both small and large. Semihalf's NAND Flash stack opens new opportunities for FreeBSD in this space, where size, cost, or performance, mandate the use of direct attached NAND Flash.

Made possible by matching funds from Juniper Networks, this FreeBSD Foundation grant covers the costs of transferring technology developed for Juniper Networks by Semihalf to the FreeBSD project. This will ensure that the NAND framework meets community standards and can be easily maintained and enhanced.

Highlighting the return on investment offered by this kind of technology transfer, FreeBSD Foundation president Justin T. Gibbs, noted: "Open sourcing enhancements that do not expose 'business critical intellectual property' reduces the cost of managing a FreeBSD distribution that has been customized for a product. The NAND subsystem is a perfect example of how technology transfer benefits both the FreeBSD community and its commercial users. We'd like to thank Semihalf and Juniper for partnering with us to make the code available under a BSD license"

The NAND Flash subsystem consists of a driver framework for NAND controllers and memory chips, a NAND device simulator and a fault tolerant, log-structured file system, tailored to meet the unique challenges of NAND flash storage. The package includes all the tools, utilities and documentation needed to deploy this technology in custom applications.

"A reliable file system that supports NAND Flash is critical for Juniper's ongoing success," said Marcel Moolenaar, Distinguished Engineer, Juniper Networks. "But since storage isn't Juniper's core business, we were eager to find a solution that would put the implementation and support of the file system in the most capable hands. We reached out to Semihalf and ultimately the Foundation to help us achieve our goals. Juniper cannot be more pleased to have the NAND Flash file system and NAND Flash framework present in the next major FreeBSD version as a standard feature and under the care of the community."

"We are very glad to have the NAND framework made available for the general FreeBSD audience, reaffirming the system as a versatile platform for appliances and other embedded and industrial designs," said Rafal Jaworowski of Semihalf.

The Foundation is pleased to be working with Semihalf again. They were previously awarded a grant to bring "Flattened Device Tree" support to FreeBSD. This new feature in FreeBSD 9.0 has been well received by the FreeBSD community.

Foundation Flyers at Open Source Days

This year's Open Source Days will take place at Copenhagen Business School (in Denmark) on March 10 and 11. Sven Esbjerg will be bringing a supply of Foundation flyers to give away--you can find him at the BSD booth in the "hallway track". Erwin Lansing from the Foundation will also be available to answer questions regarding funded projects and the Foundation's work.

FreeBSD Foundation one of 12 Initial Affiliates for OSI

Earlier this year, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) switched from a Board-only organization focused largely on licensing to a member-led organization of affiliates. The OSI Board invited the FreeBSD Foundation to its initial set of Affiliates and Justin Gibbs and Dru Lavigne from the FreeBSD Foundation have agreed to act as delegates.

Simon Phipps from the OSI announced the 12 initial affiliates at FOSDEM. In addition to the FreeBSD Foundation, the initial affiliates include: KDE, the Apache Software Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, the Plone Foundation, Creative Commons, the Linux Foundation, Joomla, the Sahana Software Foundation, Drupal, the Eclipse Foundation, and the Wikiotics Foundation.