FreeBSD Status Report - Fourth Quater 2023

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From: Lorenzo Salvadore <salvadore_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2024 17:32:52 UTC

FreeBSD Status Report Fourth Quarter 2023

Here is the fourth 2023 status report, with 18 entries.

This is the last 2023 quarter. As you have probably noticed, this status report
comes later than usual and with fewer reports than the preceding quarter.
Indeed, please keep in mind that the last quarter of every year is for many
members of our community the quarter of the celebrations for Christmas and for
the New Year, which implies that those members will spend more time with their
families and will have less time for their favorite voluntary software
projects. Thus there is less to report and reports tend to arrive later. But
finally, here they are.

Have a nice read.

Lorenzo Salvadore, on behalf of the Status Team.

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A rendered version of this report is available here:
https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2023-10-2023-12/

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Table of Contents

• FreeBSD Team Reports
□ FreeBSD Core Team
□ FreeBSD Foundation
□ FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
□ Cluster Administration Team
□ Continuous Integration
□ Ports Collection
□ Bugmeister Team and Bugzilla
• Userland
□ Service jails — Automatic jailing of rc.d services
• Kernel
□ Packrat - NFS client caching on non-volatile storage
• Architectures
□ armv7 Ports Quality Assurance
□ SIMD enhancements for amd64
• Cloud
□ OpenStack on FreeBSD
□ FreeBSD on Microsoft HyperV and Azure
□ FreeBSD on EC2
• Documentation
□ Documentation Engineering Team
□ FreeBSD Online Editor and Man Page Editor
□ FreeBSD Wiki
• Ports
□ KDE on FreeBSD
□ State of GNOME 44
□ GCC on FreeBSD
• Third Party Projects
□ Containers and FreeBSD: Pot, Potluck and Potman

FreeBSD Team Reports

Entries from the various official and semi-official teams, as found in the
Administration Page.

FreeBSD Core Team

Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <core@FreeBSD.org>

The FreeBSD Core Team is the governing body of FreeBSD.

Along the release engineering team, the project dedicates the 14.0-RELEASE to
the memory of Hans Petter Selasky.

14.0-RELEASE

FreeBSD 14.0 was released at the end of 2023Q4.

The release notes can be found at

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/relnotes/

New Release Engineering Team

After years of serving as the release engineer gjb@ stepped down.

cperciva@ took over as the new release engineer. karels@ is serving as the new
deputy release engineer.

Core would like to thank gjb@ for his long tenure and the many timely releases
he created.

FreeBSD 2024 Community Survey

In the end of 2023, Core Team works with the Foundation to do the 2024
community survey.

FreeBSD Foundation

Links:
FreeBSD Foundation URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/
Technology Roadmap URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/technology-roadmap/
Donate URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/donate/
Foundation Partnership Program URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/
freebsd-foundation-partnership-program/
FreeBSD Journal URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/journal/
Foundation Events URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/events/

Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb@FreeBSDFoundation.org>

The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to
supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and worldwide community, and
helping to advance the state of FreeBSD. We do this in both technical and
non-technical ways. We are 100% supported by donations from individuals and
corporations and those investments help us fund the:

• Software development projects to implement features and functionality in
FreeBSD

• Sponsor and organize conferences and developer summits to provide
collaborative opportunities and promote FreeBSD

• Purchase and support of hardware to improve and maintain FreeBSD
infrastructure,

• Resources to improve security, quality assurance, and continuous
integration efforts.

• Materials and staff needed to promote, educate, and advocate for FreeBSD,

• Collaboration between commercial vendors and FreeBSD developers,

• Representation of the FreeBSD Project in executing contracts, license
agreements, and other legal arrangements that require a recognized legal
entity.

We supported FreeBSD in the following ways during the last quarter of 2023:

OS Improvements

During the fourth quarter of 2023, 236 src, 47 ports, and 33 doc tree commits
identified The FreeBSD Foundation as a sponsor. Some of this
Foundation-sponsored work is described in separate report entries:

• OpenStack on FreeBSD

• SIMD enhancements for amd64.

Three new contractors started. Cheng Cui began working full-time on wireless
networking. A main goal for Cheng’s project is to assist Bjoern Zeeb with
802.11ac support in iwlwifi. Tom Jones began work to port the Vector Packet
Processor (VPP) to FreeBSD. VPP is an open-source, high-performance user space
networking stack that provides fast packet processing suitable for
software-defined networking and network function virtualization applications.
Olivier Certner joined the FreeBSD Foundation as a general FreeBSD developer.
Some of Olivier’s contributions so far include:

• reviewing, fixing, and hardening several security policies aimed at
limiting process visibility, policies that are based on user identity,
group membership, or sub-jail membership

• committing fixes in the login class code, including one that allowed
unprivileged users to bypass resource limits

• implementing a secure hardware fix for the Zenbleed issue affecting AMD
Zen2 processors.

Here is a sampling of other Foundation-sponsored work completed over the last
quarter of 2023:

• arm64: Add Armv8 rndr random number provider

• net80211, LinuxKPI, and iwlwifi fixes and improvements

• OpenSSL: updates to 3.0.11 and 3.0.12

• Various freebsd-update fixes in preparation for 14.0

• ssh: Update to OpenSSH 9.5p1

• Various iommu fixes

• Various makefs/zfs fixes

Learn more about our software development work for all of 2023 at
https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/2023-in-review-software-development/.

FreeBSD Infrastructure

We approved over $100,000 for a cluster refresh that began in late 2023 and
will carry over into the new year by purchasing and shipping 15 new servers to
4 racks generously donated by NYI in their new Chicago facility. The systems
specifications were determined by the Cluster Administration team and consist
of:

• 5 package builders

• 3 web servers

• 2 package mirrors

• 2 CI servers

• 2 firewall/router

• 1 admin bastion

More on our 2023 infrastructure support can be found at:
https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/2023-in-review-infrastructure/.

Continuous Integration and Workflow Improvement

As part of our continued support of the FreeBSD Project, the Foundation
supports a full-time staff member dedicated to improving the Project’s
continuous integration system and the test infrastructure. The full update can
be found within the quarterly status report.

Partnerships and Research

In Q4 I connected with the following people, companies, and organizations: Phil
Shafer, who works at Juniper Networks, and I met at All Things Open. He told me
about the libxo library and his continuing work on related issues, like
rewriting and filtering output to allow richer options that regular expressions
provide. Sticking with Juniper, I also met Simon Gerraty at the Vendor Summit
and heard his talk on SecureBoot. In alphabetical order, I also met with AMD,
Ampere, Center for Internet Security (CIS), Innovate UK, Michael Dexter,
Metify, Microsoft, several people at NetApp when I attended their annual
conference (Thank you for the invitation!!), NetScaler, NIST, Nozomi Networks,
NVIDIA, members of the Open Container Initiative community, OpenSSF, RG Nets,
Doug Rabson.

I greatly appreciated the opportunity to attend NetApp’s annual conference in
October. I heard from and connected with experts at NetApp and their partners
and customers on topics such as AI and seamless AI data pipelines, hybrid
cloud, and green computing. I took the opportunity to hand out some FreeBSD
lapel pins 🙂 and I connected with a FreeBSD user and member of the Enterprise
WG whose company is a NetApp Customer.

In Q4 we announced the new FreeBSD SSDF Attestation program to help commercial
users of FreeBSD comply with new US Government procurement regulations. This
program was informed by valuable feedback from NetApp, Metify, and NIST, and
the genesis of the idea came thanks to my involvement with open source policy
experts, in particular via the OSI’s Open Policy Alliance.

The Open Container Initiative Technical Oversight Board voted in December to
approve Doug Rabson’s proposal to create a Working Group to extend the OCI
runtime specification to support FreeBSD. Huge thanks to all involved! An OCI
runtime extension for FreeBSD is one of the most frequently requested
capabilities and I was happy to play a small role in helping to coordinate this
effort so far.

The Vendor Summit in November was a great event. Huge props to John Baldwin and
Anne Dickison for all the work to organize and orchestrate. I got a lot out of
the event. Personal highlights were conversations with a diversity of users,
the CHERI talk, the end user panel, and Allan’s talk on being an upstream first
company. For a full recap on our efforts to strengthen partnerships and
increase funding in 2023, check out:
https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/2023-in-review-partnerships-and-research/.

Advocacy

From organizing and attending events, to creating technical content that
educates, and expanding the coverage of FreeBSD in the media, here is a sample
of what we did last quarter to support FreeBSD.

• Helped organize and sponsor the November 2023 Vendor Summit held at NetApp
in San Jose. Many consider this one of the best summits to date. Be sure to
check out the videos.

• Introduced FreeBSD to new and returning folks at All Things Open in North
Carolina.

• Provided an overview of FreeBSD 14: Security, Performance, and
Interoperability; Introducing FreeBSD 14

• In collaboration with the Core team, released the 2024 FreeBSD Community
Survey

• Participated in an interview about FreeBSD: What the Dev Podcast: The
Evolution of the FreeBSD Project

• Release the September/October 2023 issue of the FreeBSD Journal now with
HTML versions of the articles.

For a full recap of what we did to advocate for FreeBSD in 2023, please check
out the Advocacy Year in Review:
https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/2023-in-review-advocacy/
or the monthly newsletters:
https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/latest-updates/?filter=newsletter.

Fundraising

Thank you to everyone who gave us a financial contribution last quarter to help
fund our work to support the Project. You brought us even closer to our goal
and we are grateful for your investment in FreeBSD! We are still receiving
donations in the mail and will post the final number in mid-February.

Please consider supporting our efforts in 2024 by making a donation here:
https://freebsdfoundation.org/donate/.

Or, check out our Partnership opportunities here:
https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/freebsd-foundation-partnership-program/.

Legal/FreeBSD IP

The Foundation owns the FreeBSD trademarks, and it is our responsibility to
protect them. We also provide legal support for the core team to investigate
questions that arise.

Go to https://freebsdfoundation.org to find more about how we support FreeBSD
and how we can help you!

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team

Links:
FreeBSD 13.3-RELEASE schedule URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.3R/schedule/
FreeBSD releases URL: https://download.freebsd.org/releases/ISO-IMAGES/
FreeBSD development snapshots URL: https://download.freebsd.org/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/

Contact: FreeBSD Release Engineering Team, <re@FreeBSD.org>

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is responsible for setting and publishing
release schedules for official project releases of FreeBSD, announcing code
freezes and maintaining the respective branches, among other things.

During the fourth quarter of the year, the Team continued work on 14.0-RELEASE,
leading to the final RELEASE build and announcement in November. Planning has
started for the upcoming 13.3-RELEASE and 14.1-RELEASE cycles.

The Release Engineering Team continued providing weekly development snapshot
builds for the main and stable/13 branches, and (after 14.0-RELEASE) started
weekly builds for stable/14.

After over a decade as Release Engineering Lead, Glen Barber has retired from
the role; his Deputy, Colin Percival, has moved into the Lead role, while Mike
Karels has assumed the position of Deputy Release Engineer.

Cluster Administration Team

Links:
Cluster Administration Team members URL: https://www.freebsd.org/administration/#t-clusteradm

Contact: Cluster Administration Team <clusteradm@FreeBSD.org>

FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team members are responsible for managing the
machines the Project relies on to synchronize its distributed work and
communications.

In this quarter, the team has worked on the following:

• Regular support for FreeBSD.org user accounts.

• Regular disk and parts support (and replacement) for all physical hosts and
mirrors.

• Enable mirroring of https://www.FreeBSD.org and https://docs.FreeBSD.org in
the FreeBSD project-managed mirrors.

• Cluster refresh, upgrading all hosts and jails to the most recent versions
of 15-CURRENT, 14-STABLE, 13-STABLE, and 12-STABLE.

• Begin sunsetting 12-STABLE infrastructure as the branch approaches its end
of life.

In addition to these projects, with Modirum generously sponsoring Philip’s time
for most of October, we were able to bring pkgbase into "preview" production in
time for 14.0-RELEASE in November.

We also installed a new European mirror site in Sjöbo, Sweden, sponsored by
Teleservice Skåne AB. Traffic in Europe is now directed roughly equally between
our existing mirror in Frankfurt (sponsored by Equinix) and the new mirror in
Sweden. After well over ten years in service, we plan to decommission our
mirror site in the UK during first quarter of 2024. We would like to thank
Bytemark Hosting for supporting this mirror for all this time.

Next quarter, supported by the FreeBSD Foundation, we plan to bring up a new
primary cluster site in Chicago.

FreeBSD Official Mirrors Overview

Current locations are Australia, Brazil, Germany, Japan (two full mirror
sites), Malaysia, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan, United Kingdom (full mirror
site), United States of America — California, New Jersey (primary site), and
Washington.

The hardware and network connection have been generously provided by:

• Bytemark Hosting (decommissioned during 2024Q1)

• Cloud and SDN Laboratory at BroadBand Tower, Inc

• Department of Computer Science, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

• Equinix

• Internet Association of Australia

• Internet Systems Consortium

• INX-ZA

• KDDI Web Communications Inc

• Malaysian Research & Education Network

• Metapeer

• NIC.br

• Your.Org

• 365 Data Centers

• Teleservice Skåne AB (new since 2023Q4)

Continuous Integration

Links:
FreeBSD Jenkins Instance URL: https://ci.FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD CI Tinderbox view URL: https://https://tinderbox.freebsd.org
FreeBSD CI artifact archive URL: https://artifact.ci.FreeBSD.org
Hosted CI wiki URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/HostedCI
3rd Party Software CI URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/3rdPartySoftwareCI
Tickets related to freebsd-testing@ URL:
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=open&email1=testing%40FreeBSD.org&emailassigned_to1=1&emailcc1=1&emailtype1=equals
FreeBSD CI Repository URL: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ci
dev-ci Mailing List URL: https://lists.FreeBSD.org/subscription/dev-ci

Contact: Jenkins Admin <jenkins-admin@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: freebsd-testing Mailing List
Contact: IRC #freebsd-ci channel on EFNet

In the fourth quarter of 2023, we worked with the project contributors and
developers to address their testing requirements. Concurrently, we collaborated
with external projects and companies to enhance their products by testing more
on FreeBSD.

Important completed tasks:

• Adding job to build amd64 architecture with GCC 13. (Thanks jhb@)

• Adding powerpc64le jobs config for stable-14 (Thanks alfredo@)

• Updating the build env of jobs of main and stable/14 branches to
14.0-RELEASE

Work in progress tasks:

• Designing and implementing pre-commit CI building and testing and pull/
merged-request based system (to support the workflow working group)

• Proof of concept system is in progress.

• Designing and implementing use of CI cluster to build release artifacts as
release engineering does, starting with snapshot builds

• Simplifying CI/test environment setting up for contributors and developers

• Setting up the CI stage environment and putting the experimental jobs on it

• Redesigning the hardware test lab and adding more hardware for testing

• Merge https://reviews.freebsd.org/D38815

• Merge https://reviews.freebsd.org/D36257

Open or queued tasks:

• Collecting and sorting CI tasks and ideas

• Setting up public network access for the VM guest running tests

• Implementing use of bare-metal hardware to run test suites

• Adding drm ports building tests against -CURRENT

• Planning to run ztest tests

• Helping more software get FreeBSD support in its CI pipeline (Wiki pages:
3rdPartySoftwareCI, HostedCI)

• Working with hosted CI providers to have better FreeBSD support

Please see freebsd-testing@ related tickets for more WIP information, and do
not hesitate to join the effort!

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Ports Collection

Links:
About FreeBSD Ports URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
Contributing to Ports URL:
https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/contributing/#ports-contributing

+ Ports Management Team URL: https://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/
Ports Tarball URL: http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/ports/

Contact: Tobias C. Berner <portmgr-secretary@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: FreeBSD Ports Management Team <portmgr@FreeBSD.org>

The Ports Management Team is responsible for overseeing the overall direction
of the Ports Tree, building packages, and personnel matters. Below is what
happened in the last quarter.

• According to INDEX, there are currently 31,942 ports in the Ports
Collection. There are currently ~3,100 open ports PRs. The last quarter saw
9,424 commits by 157 committers on the main branch and 781 commits by 71
committers on the 2023Q4 branch. Compared to last quarter, this means a
hefty decrease in the number of commits on the main branch (down from
11,454) and slightly fewer backports to the quarterly branch (down from
828). The number of ports also fell a bit (down from 34,600).

In Q4 there were around 9424 commits to main. The most active committers where:
sunpoet 2946 yuri 861 bofh 793 jbeich 419 fuz 324 eduardo 168 fernape 160 jhale
153 thierry 146 diizzy 123

During Q4 we welcomed Michael Osipov (michaelo) and Timothy Beyer (beyert) as
new committers, but sadly also had to say goodbye to bland, sbruno, hselasky
and gjb.

We invited arrowd, flo and riggs to be part of portmgr-lurkers for the next
months.

Support for FreeBSD 12.x was removed at the end of the quarter.

The end of Q4 also saw the introduction of subpackages to the ports tree.
Similar to when flavors were introduced, new subpackages will require an
approval by portmgr before being pushed to the tree. With subpackages it is
possible to create multiple packages from a single build of a port.

The following happened on the infrastructure side: * Packages for 14.0-RELEASE
were built * Poudriere was updated to release-3.4

• Support for FreeBSD 12.x was removed.

• The no-longer maintained www/qt5-webkit was removed.

• postgresql11, php80, mysql57, percona57, ghostscript9 were removed.

• The following default versions changed:

• perl to 5.36

• ghostcript to 10

• corosync to 3

• Updates to major ports that happened were:

• ports-mgmt/pkg to 1.20.9

• ports-mgmt/poudriere to 3.4.0 (subpackage support)

• KDE-bits to plasma-5.27.10, frameworks-5.112, gear-23.08.4, and beta-2

• www/chromium to 120.0.6099.129

• www/firefox to 121.0 (rc1)

• lang/rust to 1.74.1

• … and many more …

During the last quarter, pkgmgr@ ran 26 exp-runs to test various ports
upgrades, updates to default versions of ports, subpackage support and base
system changes.

Bugmeister Team and Bugzilla

Links:
Bugmeister team URL: https://www.freebsd.org/administration/#t-bugmeister
FreeBSD Bugzilla URL: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/

Contact: Bugmeister <bugmeister@FreeBSD.org>

Some recent maintenance has been done on our Bugzilla instance:

• the weekly reminder emails now include the correct values for mfc-* Flags
queries;

• the Dashboard page has had an obsolete query removed. (We no longer use the
'patch-ready' Keyword; it was too much paperwork. Thus, the query on that
field was useless.);

• the limit that capped the maximum number of reported PRs at 10000 has been
raised to 12500.

In addition, the Wiki documentation on our Bugzilla has been updated:

• the page https://wiki.freebsd.org/Bugzilla/SearchQueries has been
substantially reworked:

□ In particular, documentation about how to search on Flag values has
been added. (This may not have been done before.) Example: search for
PRs with Flag 'mfc-stable14' set;

□ This page may be of interest to all committers and contributors;

• the page https://wiki.freebsd.org/Bugmeister/BugmeisterQA has also been
updated; While similar to the above, it is of more specific interest to
bugmeister and triagers.

As well, PRs that are specific to FreeBSD 12 are being culled, as 12 has gone
out of support as of 20231231.

A further effort is being made to document our setup of Bugzilla itself,
especially with respect to our customizations. This is needed to bring our own
repository up to date with what is running on production.

The number of PRs over the past quarter (and year) has remained consistent.
However, we do seem to be closing incoming PRs more quickly these days. For
reference: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/page.cgi?id=dashboard.html&days=90
.

The overall number of PRs remains around 11,400.

Bugmeister is also working towards restarting the Bugathons. See the updated
page https://wiki.freebsd.org/Bugathons.

Bugmeister would like to thank a number of people who have assisted with
bugbusting, including Mina Galić, Graham Perrin, Lorenzo Salvadore, and
Fernando Apesteguìa, among others.

In addition, bugmeister would like to thank all the FreeBSD committers who help
process the PRs as they come in. Over the last few months we seem to be much
closer to steady-state.

Userland

Changes affecting the base system and programs in it.

Service jails — Automatic jailing of rc.d services

Links:
D40370: Infrastructure for automatic jailing of rc.d-services URL:
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D40370
D40371: automatic service jails: some setup for full functionality of the
services in automatic service jails URL:
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D40371
D42779: Handbook / rc-article update for Service Jails URL:
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D42779

Contact: Alexander Leidinger <netchild@FreeBSD.org>

Service jails extend the rc(8) system to allow automatic jailing of rc.d
services. A service jail inherits the filesystem of the parent host or jail,
but uses all other limits of the jail (process visibility, restricted network
access, filesystem mounting permissions, sysvipc, …) by default. Additional
configuration allows inheritance of the IPs of the parent, sysvipc, memory page
locking, and use of the bhyve virtual machine monitor (vmm(4)).

If you want to put e.g. local_unbound into a service jail and allow IPv4 and
IPv6 access, simply change rc.conf(5) to have:

local_unbound_svcj_options=net_basic
local_unbound_svcj=YES

Note: all base system services are covered in the patches with either
name_svcj_options or a hard-coded disabling of the service jails feature where
it does not make sense (e.g. pure services which change the runtime
configuration but do not start daemons, or where things are run which can not
be run in a sensible way inside a jail). As such the local_unbound_svcj_options
line above is superfluous and serves just as an example about the amount of
configuration needed in total.

While this does not have the same security benefits as a manual jail setup with
a separate filesystem and IP/VNET, it is much easier to set up, while providing
some of the security benefits of a jail like hiding other processes of the same
user.

Since the previous service jails status report, the following were added:

• support for NFS inside jails in the service jails framework (untested),

• the possibility of jailing other service commands than start and stop,

• service jails options / config for all base system services in the patch in
D40371,

• a first step at documenting the service jails in the Handbook.

Not all services are tested, but all services are covered with a config.

Any testing and feedback (even as simple as "service X works in a service
jail") is welcome.

Kernel

Updates to kernel subsystems/features, driver support, filesystems, and more.

Packrat - NFS client caching on non-volatile storage

Contact: Rick Macklem <rmacklem@FreeBSD.org>

NFSv4.1/4.2 provides support for a feature called delegations. When a NFSv4.1/
4.2 client holds a delegation, the client has certain rights to a file,
including a guarantee that no other client will make changes to the file unless
the delegation is recalled. As such, when a client holds a delegation for a
file, it can aggressively cache the file’s data, knowing that it will not be
modified by other clients until it returns the delegation.

This project is intended to allow the NFSv4.1/4.2 client to aggressively cache
file data on client local non-volatile storage, when the client holds a
delegation for the file. I created a patch long ago to try and do this for
NFSv4.0, but it was never at a stage where it was worth using. This project is
a complete rewrite of the patch, done in part because NFSv4.1/4.2 plus other
recent NFSv4-related changes make doing this more feasible.

I now have code running fairly well and hope to have a patch ready for others
to test this winter. Early testing shows promise. For a test run of "make
buildkernel", the test with and without packrat enabled performed as follows:

Table 1. NFS operation counts
NFS operation counts Getattr Lookup Read Write Total RPCs
with packrats 433506 99254 0 0 371736

without packrats 2359913 97954 10748 0 2318810

Table 2. Elapsed Run Time
Elapsed Run Time (sec) with packrat without packrat
5561 6203

As you can see, the packrat case ran a little faster and with fewer RPCs.
Although this test was run on my little LAN, it is hoped that a NFSv4.1/4.2
mount over a WAN would show a larger difference in performance. I will note
that the packrat cache was primed by unrolling a tarball of FreeBSD’s /usr/src
into the NFSv4.1/4.2 mount.

This will be very much an experimental feature, but it is hoped it will allow
NFS mounts to be used more effectively, particularly in WAN situations, such as
a mobile laptop.

There is still work to be done, particularly with respect to recovery of
delegations after a NFSv4.1/4.2 client restart. Hopefully, the next status
report will include a URL that allows downloading of a patch for user testing.

Architectures

Updating platform-specific features and bringing in support for new hardware
platforms.

armv7 Ports Quality Assurance

Contact: Robert Clausecker <fuz@FreeBSD.org>

As part of a long term project to improve the quality of the FreeBSD ports
collection for the armv7 architecture, a number of issues in the base system
and in various ports have been fixed. Through this action, the number of binary
packages that could be successfully built from the 2023Q4 branch of the ports
collection was increased from 30018 (as of 2023-10-04) to 31118 (as of
2023-11-24).

Two kernel bugs affecting package builds (PR 267788 and PR 274705) were
identified and addressed, with these two alone being responsible for around 900
failed packages. The most common other causes for build failures include

• lack of FreeBSD-specific armv7 support code

• data alignment issues (armv7 being one of the few architectures for which
we do not support unaligned memory accesses)

• address space exhaustion during the build processes (usually LTO related;
PR 274705 addressed many cases)

• lack of OpenMP support on armv7 FreeBSD

If you are a user of the FreeBSD ports collection on armv7, do not hesitate to
file a bug report on our bug tracker should there be any issues.

SIMD enhancements for amd64

Links:
FreeBSD Foundation blog post URL:
https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/a-sneak-peek-simd-enhanced-string-functions-for-amd64/
simd(7) URL:
https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=simd&sektion=7&manpath=FreeBSD+15.0-CURRENT
Work currently under acceptance testing URL:
https://github.com/clausecker/freebsd-src/commits/acceptance-testing

Contact: Robert Clausecker <fuz@FreeBSD.org>

The project to enhance the libc with SIMD implementations of string functions
for amd64 has now concluded. In total, SIMD implementations for 17 libc
functions have been written, complemented by scalar implementations where
needed. Through this rewrite, performance of these functions on strings with an
average length of 64 characters was improved by an average factor of 5.54. In
addition, 9 other library functions were rewritten to call into the
SIMD-enhanced routines, conveying benefits without requiring additional
assembly implementations. Please see the FreeBSD Foundation blog post linked
above for more details.

Parts of the SIMD work are already found in the CURRENT branch. The rest is
currently undergoing acceptance testing and will be merged if no problems
emerge. It is planned to back port all improvements to 14-STABLE for inclusion
into FreeBSD 14.1.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Cloud

Updating cloud-specific features and bringing in support for new cloud
platforms.

OpenStack on FreeBSD

Links:
OpenStack URL: https://www.openstack.org/
OpenStack on FreeBSD URL: https://github.com/openstack-on-freebsd

Contact: Chih-Hsin Chang <starbops@hey.com>
Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu@FreeBSD.org>

In the fourth quarter, we successfully migrated the originally virtualized
OpenStack platform to physical machines running FreeBSD 14.0-STABLE. The ported
OpenStack components include Keystone, Glance, Placement, Neutron, and Nova. As
part of this process, we took the opportunity to update the installation
documentation and the list of dependencies.

Moving forward, we encourage users and developers interested in this project to
effortlessly recreate the OpenStack platform in their FreeBSD environments
following this documentation. Any issues or difficulties encountered are
welcome to be reported on the GitHub project page. Your contributions will
contribute to the refinement of our installation documentation and the overall
porting efforts.

In the upcoming quarter, our focus will shift towards incorporating various
patches and workarounds generated during the migration process into the project
in a more structured code form. Additionally, we plan to develop FreeBSD ports
for each OpenStack component, further streamlining the installation process.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

FreeBSD on Microsoft HyperV and Azure

Links:
Microsoft Azure article on FreeBSD wiki URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/
MicrosoftAzure
Microsoft HyperV article on FreeBSD wiki URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/HyperV

Contact: Microsoft FreeBSD Integration Services Team <bsdic@microsoft.com>
Contact: freebsd-cloud Mailing List
Contact: The FreeBSD Azure Release Engineering Team <releng-azure@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Wei Hu <whu@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Souradeep Chakrabarti <schakrabarti@microsoft.com>
Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu@FreeBSD.org>

In this quarter, we have solved all the blocking issues and published the
14.0-RELEASE on Azure Marketplace, with complete architecture (amd64, arm64)
and VM generation (gen1, gen2) support, available in both UFS and ZFS as the
root file system.

Work in progress tasks:

• Automating the image building and publishing process and merging to src/
release/.

• Building and publishing snapshot builds to Azure community gallery.

The above tasks are sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation, with resources
provided by Microsoft.

Open tasks:

• Update FreeBSD related doc at Microsoft Learn

• Support FreeBSD in Azure Pipelines

• Update Azure agent port to the latest version

• Upstream local modifications of Azure agent

• Port Linux Virtual Machine Extensions for Azure

Sponsor: Microsoft for people in Microsoft, and for resources for the rest
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation for everything else

FreeBSD on EC2

Links:
FreeBSD/EC2 Patreon URL: https://www.patreon.com/cperciva

Contact: Colin Percival <cperciva@FreeBSD.org>

FreeBSD is available on both amd64 (Intel and AMD) and arm64 (Graviton) EC2
instances. Work continues to ensure that upcoming instance types will be
supported; most recently, changes were needed to support "7th generation" Intel
and AMD instances.

FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE shipped with experimental ZFS-root AMIs and "cloud-init"
AMIs. Additional "flavored" FreeBSD AMIs are planned, including "AMI Builder"
and "minimal" (no debug symbols).

A bug in the release-building process which resulted in 14.0-RELEASE AMIs
shipping with duplicate lines in /etc/rc.conf has been corrected and future
releases should not be affected.

A bug in the ec2-aws-imdsv2-get utility which resulted in 14.0-RELEASE AMIs not
supporting binary user-data files has been corrected and future releases should
not be affected.

This work is supported by Colin’s FreeBSD/EC2 Patreon.

Documentation

Noteworthy changes in the documentation tree, manual pages, or new external
books/documents.

Documentation Engineering Team

Link: FreeBSD Documentation Project URL: https://www.freebsd.org/docproj/
Link: FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer for New Contributors URL:
https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/fdp-primer/
Link: Documentation Engineering Team URL:
https://www.freebsd.org/administration/#t-doceng

Contact: FreeBSD Doceng Team <doceng@FreeBSD.org>

The doceng@ team is a body to handle some of the meta-project issues associated
with the FreeBSD Documentation Project; for more information, see FreeBSD
Doceng Team Charter.

During the last quarter:

Glen Barber stepped down from doceng. doceng would like to thank gjb@ for his
service.

Ceri Davies' commit bit was taken for safekeeping as per his request. doceng
would like to thank ceri@ for his contributions.

mhorne@ to be mentored by carlavilla@ to obtain a documentation commit bit.

FreeBSD Handbook:

The Handbook was updated to show that FreeBSD 14.0 is the latest release.

FreeBSD Translations on Weblate

Link: Translate FreeBSD on Weblate URL:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Doc/Translation/Weblate
Link: FreeBSD Weblate Instance URL: https://translate-dev.freebsd.org/

Q4 2023 Status

• 17 team languages

• 203 registered users

Languages

• Chinese (Simplified) (zh-cn) (progress: 7%)

• Chinese (Traditional) (zh-tw) (progress: 3%)

• Dutch (nl) (progress: 1%)

• French (fr) (progress: 1%)

• German (de) (progress: 1%)

• Indonesian (id) (progress: 1%)

• Italian (it) (progress: 5%)

• Korean (ko) (progress: 33%)

• Norwegian (nb-no) (progress: 1%)

• Persian (fa-ir) (progress: 2%)

• Polish (progress: 1%)

• Portuguese (progress: 0%)

• Portuguese (pt-br) (progress: 22%)

• Spanish (es) (progress: 35%)

• Turkish (tr) (progress: 2%)

We want to thank everyone that contributed, translating or reviewing documents.

And please, help promote this effort on your local user group, we always need
more volunteers.

FreeBSD Handbook working group

Contact: Sergio Carlavilla <carlavilla@FreeBSD.org>

• The Network chapter has been rewritten

• The Jails chapter has been rewritten

• The next section to work on will be the file systems part: UFS, ZFS, Other
File Systems

FAQ Working Group

Contact: Sergio Carlavilla <carlavilla@FreeBSD.org>

A new FAQ was released alongside FreeBSD 14.0.

FreeBSD Website Revamp - WebApps working group

Contact: Sergio Carlavilla <carlavilla@FreeBSD.org>

Working group in charge of creating the new FreeBSD Documentation Portal and
redesigning the FreeBSD main website and its components. FreeBSD developers can
follow and join the working group on the FreeBSD Slack channel #wg-www21. The
work will be divided into three phases:

1. Redesign of the Manual Pages on web

Scripts to generate the HTML pages using mandoc. (Complete, Approved by
Doceng, Deploy Date Not Decided Yet) Public instance on
https://man-dev.FreeBSD.org

2. Redesign of the FreeBSD main website

New design, responsive and dark theme. (Almost Complete, Presented at
EuroBSDCon)

3. Redesign of the Ports page on web

Ports scripts to create an applications portal. (Work in progress)

FreeBSD Online Editor and Man Page Editor

Links:
FreeBSD Online Document Editor URL:
https://github.com/Wang-Yan-Hao/FreeBSD-Online-Document-Editor
FreeBSD Online Man Page Editor URL:
https://github.com/Wang-Yan-Hao/man_page_editor

Contact: Yan-Hao Wang <bses30074@gmail.com>
Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu@FreeBSD.org>

This report provides a continued overview of the FreeBSD online editor and man
page editor project, outlining recent efforts to enhance the documentation and
manual page editing processes. In order to optimize the project’s structural
integrity, we enlisted the expertise of a professional front-end programmer. We
plan to release the editor soon and currently have some tasks that require
additional support.

1. We are actively seeking a qualified individual to conduct a comprehensive
front-end security review of the project.

2. A meticulous inspection of the JavaScript code is imperative to ensure its
robustness and efficiency. We are looking for someone with expertise to
thoroughly examine the codebase, identify any issues, and propose
enhancements for optimal performance.

3. Since there is currently no existing JavaScript library for rendering
mandoc, I had to create my own. However, there are still some hidden errors
that emerge during the editing process. We are seeking assistance to fix
these rendering issues.

FreeBSD Wiki

Links:
Wiki URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org

Contact: Wiki administration <wiki-admin@FreeBSD.org>

Plans are underway to familiarize our audience on Discord with the wiki (there
are too many "silos" in our FreeBSD community). Contact Setesh on the FreeBSD
Discord for more information.

Preliminary work is being done on updating the wiki software itself. Continuing
to run MoinMoin requires a jail with a downrev version of Python. The MoinMoin
project itself seems to have stalled in the middle of a redesign; at a minimum,
a complete upgrade of the backend database would be needed.

Alternatives that are under consideration include MediaWiki and DocuWiki; see
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Wiki/NextGeneration. Most of the discussion is
occurring on Matrix; please contact wiki-admin@FreeBSD.org if you would like to
participate.

Ports

Changes affecting the Ports Collection, whether sweeping changes that touch
most of the tree, or individual ports themselves.

KDE on FreeBSD

Links:
KDE/FreeBSD initiative URL: https://freebsd.kde.org/
FreeBSD — KDE Community Wiki URL: https://community.kde.org/FreeBSD

Contact: Adriaan de Groot <kde@FreeBSD.org>

The KDE on FreeBSD project packages CMake, Qt, and software from the KDE
Community, for the FreeBSD ports tree. The software includes a full desktop
environment called KDE Plasma (for both X11 and Wayland) and hundreds of
applications that can be used on any FreeBSD machine.

The KDE team is part of desktop@ and x11@, building the software stack to make
FreeBSD beautiful and usable as a daily-driver graphical desktop workstation.
The notes below describe mostly ports for KDE, but also include items that are
important for the entire desktop stack.

Infrastructure

CMake was updated several times and is now version 3.28.1, the latest upstream
release. FreeBSD ports are once again fully up-to-date.

Qt5 is now on long-term support and updates only rarely. The KDE patch
collection is a community-supported branch of Qt which pulls in upstream
patches and fixes from the KDE community, and updated to 5.15.12. There were
several deprecations (see below) in the Qt5 ports.

Qt6 and KDE’s upcoming megarelease of KDE Plasma 6 (scheduled for 2024q1) are
the next major milestone for the KDE team. Qt6 was updated to version 6.6.1
along with the Python bindings for Qt, PySide. An alpha-release of KDE
Frameworks 6 was added to the ports tree.

KDE Stack

KDE Gear releases happen every quarter, KDE Plasma updates once a month, and
KDE Frameworks have a new release every month as well. These (large) updates
land shortly after their upstream release and are not listed separately.

• KDE Frameworks reached version 5.112. The KDE Frameworks 5 series is
winding down, although it will a few months still until it enters long-term
support upstream.

• KDE Plasma Desktop was updated to version KDE Plasma 5.27.10.

• KDE Gear updated to 23.08.4.

• KDE Frameworks 6 (alpha) 5.247 was updated in the ports tree.

• KDE Plasma Desktop 6 (beta 2) 5.91.0 was updated in the ports tree.

Related Ports

The KDE ecosystem includes a wide range of ports — most maintained by kde@, all
building on a shared base of Qt and KDE Frameworks. The KDE team updates them
all as needed. This quarter the KDE team would like to thank Tobias C. Berner,
Gleb Popov and Jason E. Hale again for keeping things up-to-date.

Many ports have been "flavorized" to support a Qt5 and a Qt6 flavor in the
ports tree.

Special mention to:

• New port x11/xwaylandvideobridge. By design, X11 applications can’t access
window or screen contents for Wayland clients. The video bridge improves
Wayland support for screen sharing tools like Discord, MS Teams, Skype, and
more. Screen sharing is fully under the control of the Wayland user.

• Update for multimedia/mlt7 which was updated to 7.20.0.

• Update for sysutils/bsdisks which was updated to 0.33.

• Bugfix for devel/llvm15 to make devel/kdevelop work again.

• Security fixes for www/qt5-webengine and www/qt6-webengine.

Deprecations

Web browsers are huge, and have a considerable security surface. The venerable
www/qt5-webkit WebKit port was removed on the last day of 2023.

State of GNOME 44

Links:
GNOME URL: https://www.gnome.org/
Development repository URL: https://codeberg.org/olivierd/freebsd-ports-gnome

Contact: FreeBSD GNOME Team <gnome@FreeBSD.org> Contact: Olivier Duchateau <
duchateau.olivier@gmail.com>

GNOME is a full desktop environment which is mainly based on GLib, GTK3/GTK4,
and libadwaita. It provides two window managers or compositors: x11-wm/mutter
and x11-wm/metacity.

Currently in the ports collection, x11/gnome-shell is not supported by upstream
anymore. As it is a lot of work, in order to have GNOME 44 available for users,
I decided to split this update, because it impacts several ports.

As a maintainer of x11/budgie and Pantheon desktop (a window manager based on
x11-wm/mutter, developed for elementary OS) I need more recent versions of some
GNOME libraries.

Firstly I worked on WebKitGTK. The 4.0 "legacy" API is almost not used by
GNOME’s libraries. The bare minimum is the 4.1 API. I created webkit.mk for the
Mk/Uses framework, in order to flavorize www/webkit2-gtk3. There is an ongoing
effort, but currently it is too unstable. Often applications such as Epiphany,
mail clients (Geary, Evolution), or the online accounts panel in
package:sysutils/gnome-control-center dump core.

Nonetheless, remainder of desktop is usable and the latest release (44.7) of
GNOME Shell is functional. I have begun sending my first patches for review (as
well as those in Bugzilla).

• D43183

• D43230

• D43244

• D40489

I have also ported the GNOME Flashback session module. It depends on x11-wm/
metacity and x11-toolkits/libwnck3.

I also maintain a documentation, and we can see various desktops available.

GNOME 45 is almost finished, except for GNOME Shell extensions. For this
release I will focus on Wayland support (bug #258042 and bug #271836).

Tests and patches are welcomed, especially for WebKitGTK.

Next months I plan to work on:

• Allowing selecting a session in display manager (gdm), it is regression
with our patches.

• Fixing sharing network (VNC, SSH) panel in gnome-control-center and
backport for bug #275900.

• Continuing to update applications and libraries for GNOME 45.

GCC on FreeBSD

Links:
GCC Project URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/
GCC 10 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-10/
GCC 11 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-11/
GCC 12 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-12/
GCC 13 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-13/

Contact: Lorenzo Salvadore <salvadore@FreeBSD.org>

Updating GCC default version to 13 is moving ahead. Thanks to Antoine Brodin
who ran the exp-runs and to all other developers and ports maintainers
involved.

As you might remember from last quarter, additional patches were tested
together with the default version updates. Some of them have already been
merged:

• lang/gcc11 has switched back to STANDARD_BOOTSTRAP and has been updated to
11.4.0;

• lang/gcc13 has been updated to version 13.2.0.

About half of the open bugs have been fixed, but another half remains. If you
maintain any of the affected ports, please try to fix your port(s) and/or get
your port buildable with the compiler in base.

This quarter many bug reports have also been opened about GCC. As soon as the
default GCC version update is finished, all of those bugs will be addressed.

Third Party Projects

Many projects build upon FreeBSD or incorporate components of FreeBSD into
their project. As these projects may be of interest to the broader FreeBSD
community, we sometimes include brief updates submitted by these projects in
our quarterly report. The FreeBSD project makes no representation as to the
accuracy or veracity of any claims in these submissions.

Containers and FreeBSD: Pot, Potluck and Potman

Links:
Pot organization on GitHub URL: https://github.com/bsdpot

Contact: Luca Pizzamiglio (Pot) <pizzamig@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Bretton Vine (Potluck) <bv@honeyguide.eu>
Contact: Michael Gmelin (Potman) <grembo@FreeBSD.org>

Pot is a jail management tool that also supports orchestration through Nomad.

During this quarter, Pot 0.16.0 was released containing a number of features
and fixes, including a new setting to prevent direct traffic between VNET pots
and new attributes to configure pot stop behavior. There were also maintenance/
stability releases to potnet (0.5.0) and a nomad-pot-driver (0.10.0).

Potluck aims to be to FreeBSD and Pot what Dockerhub is to Linux and Docker: a
repository of Pot flavours and complete container images for usage with Pot and
in many cases Nomad.

One of the new container images that have been added during the last quarter is
Zincsearch, a more light-weight alternative to Elasticsearch written in Go.

The Mastodon container is meanwhile powering the public mastodon.africa
instance.

Also, we got some more publicity: BSD Now Episode 536 is titled "Pot-flavored
Jails".

As always, feedback and patches are welcome.

Sponsors: Nikulipe UAB, Honeyguide Group