FreeBSD Foundation Accepting Travel Grant Applications for BSDCan 2014

Calling all FreeBSD developers needing assistance with travel expenses to BSDCan 2014.

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 7th, 2014 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. More details are available in the announcement.

The FreeBSD Journal is Now Available!

We are pleased to announce the FreeBSD Journal is now available! This is a new, FreeBSD focused, online publication. 

You can find out how to subscribe to the Journal by going to www.freebsdjournal.com. Or, go to the following links for the device you'd like to download to:

To get the Kindle App click here 
To get the Apple app click here 
To get the Android App click here

Here's the letter the editorial board wrote for this inaugural issue:

Welcome to the first issue of the FreeBSD Journal. A brand new, professionally produced, on-line magazine available from the various app stores, including Apple iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon Kindle.

What you will find in the upcoming issues are feature-length articles and columns that address the entirety of the FreeBSD community. Coverage will be diverse with topics including: managing large scale system deployments, application development, systems programming, embedded systems, academic research, and general software development. All using FreeBSD.

Issue #1 is dedicated to FreeBSD 10, the latest in the FreeBSD Project's line of major releases.  The release of FreeBSD 10 brings many new features not seen in other open source operating systems, including a brand new compiler toolchain based on LLVM, as well as mature support for ZFS as a first class kernel-based filesystem.

The Journal is guided by an editorial board made up of people from across the FreeBSD community, including, John Baldwin, Daichi Goto, Joseph Kong, Dru Lavigne, Michael Lucas, Marshall Kirk McKusick, George Neville-Neil, Hiroki Sato, and Robert Watson.  The editorial board is responsible for the acquisition and vetting of content for the magazine.  The editor is Jim Maurer who is the person with whom our authors work most closely getting their pieces into shape for publishing.  Jim has a long history in the technical publishing business, having worked with Scientific American and the Association for Computing Machinery.

The magazine will publish six issues per year.  The editorial board has planned the first year of issues that will cover topics including Networking, Virtualization, Development Tools, Support for new Hardware Features, and the new software packaging system for FreeBSD, pkgng.

The FreeBSD Journal is financially supported by the FreeBSD Foundation, the 501(c)3 charitable organization whose sole purpose is to help the FreeBSD Project grow and flourish.  Your subscriptions and the advertising revenue the Journal receives help to offset the money the Foundation needs to put in to support the Journal.

We know you'll like what you see in the Journal and hope that you'll let everyone you know about our new magazine.

Sincerley,
FreeBSD Journal Editorial Board

FreeBSD Foundation Announces 2013 Fundraising Results

The board of directors had a very productive meeting in Berkeley in January. We worked on our strategic plan and other topics that greatly benefited by working together at an in-person meeting.

We thank you, the FreeBSD community and consumers, who support FreeBSD in many ways.  Thank you for your donations ranging from $5 to over $200,000. Thank you for your tireless efforts of supporting the Project by developing code, writing for and about FreeBSD, helping with conferences and summits, and advocating for FreeBSD.

We have our final fundraising results from 2013 and are pleased with the results. In 2013 we raised $768,562 from 1659 donors. If you compare the number with 2012, of $771,193 from 1855 donors, it was a little lower. The difference is primarily because 2012 blew out its goal of raising $500,000.

We have already started our 2014 fundraising efforts. As of the end of January we are just under $40,000. Our goal is to raise $1,000,000. We are currently finalizing our 2014 budget. We plan to publish both our 2013 financial report and our 2014 budget soon.

Please consider making a donation in 2014! It's easy, just click here to make your donation!

Thank you again for your support! We look forward to continuing our support of the FreeBSD Project and community in 2014.

FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE Now Available

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE.  This is the first release of the stable/10 branch.

Some of the highlights:

• GCC is no longer installed by default on architectures where clang(1) is the default compiler.
• Unbound has been imported to the base system as the local caching DNS resolver.
• BIND has been removed from the base system.
• make(1) has been replaced with bmake(1), obtained from the NetBSD Project.
• pkg(7) is now the default package management utility.
• pkg_add(1), pkg_delete(1), and related tools have been removed.
• Major enhancements in virtualization, including the addition of bhyve(8), virtio(4), and native paravirtualized drivers providing support for FreeBSD as a guest operating system on Microsoft Hyper-V.
• TRIM support for Solid State Drive has been added to ZFS.
• Support for the high-performance LZ4 compression algorithm has been added to ZFS.

See the full 10.0-RELEASE announcement here.

FreeBSD 10.0-RC5 Now Available

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

This is expected to be the final RC build of the 10.0-RELEASE cycle.

The image checksums follow at the end of this email.

Important note to freebsd-update(8) users:  Please be sure to follow the instructions in the following FreeBSD Errata Notices before upgrading the system to 10.0-RC5:

• EN-13:04.freebsd-update
• EN-13:05.freebsd-update

Pre-installed virtual machine images for 10.0-RC5 are also available for amd64 and i386 architectures.

Changes between -RC4 and -RC5 include:

• Fix an IPv4 multicast regression.
• Fixes OpenSSL for CVE-2013-4353, CVE-2013-6449, CVE-2013-6450.
• Revert a change to the kinfo_file structure to preserve ABI.
• Fix a race condition which could prevent the file descriptor table from being properly updated.

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

# freebsd-update upgrade -r 10.0-RC5

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

# freebsd-update install

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

# shutdown -r now

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

# freebsd-update install

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

# shutdown -r now

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

# freebsd-update install

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

FreeBSD 10.0-RC4 Now Available

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

This is expected to be the final RC build of the 10.0-RELEASE cycle.

The image checksums follow at the end of this email.

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

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

Important note to freebsd-update(8) users:  Please be sure to follow the instructions in the following FreeBSD Errata Notices before upgrading the system to 10.0-RC4:

• EN-13:04.freebsd-update
• EN-13:05.freebsd-update

Pre-installed virtual machine images for 10.0-RC4 are also available for amd64 and i386 architectures.

Changes between 10.0-RC3 and 10.0-RC4 include:

• Tighten default restrictions for ntpd(8) server.
• Fix kernel crash discovered with recent Java port update.

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

Last Day to Make 2013 Donation to The FreeBSD Foundation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for your support!

Deb Goodkin
Secretary/Treasurer
The FreeBSD Foundation

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