FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report, July-September 2012.

Mon Mar 4 13:49:55 UTC 2013

Introduction

   This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between July and September
   2012. This is the third of the four reports planned for 2012.

   Highlights from this quarter include successful participation in Google
   Summer of Code, major work in areas of the source and ports trees, and
   a Developer Summit attended by over 30 developers.

   Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! This report
   contains 12 entries and we hope you enjoy reading it.
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Projects

     * FreeBSD on Altera FPGAs
     * Native iSCSI Target
     * Parallel rc.d execution

FreeBSD Team Reports

     * FreeBSD Bugbusting Team
     * FreeBSD Foundation
     * The FreeBSD Core Team

Kernel

     * FreeBSD on ARMv6/ARMv7

Documentation

     * The FreeBSD Japanese Documentation Project

Ports

     * KDE/FreeBSD
     * Ports Collection

Miscellaneous

     * FreeBSD Developer Summit, Cambridge, UK

FreeBSD in Google Summer of Code

     * Google Summer of Code 2012
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FreeBSD Bugbusting Team

   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/support.html#gnats
   URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/BugBusting

   Contact: Eitan Adler <eadler at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Gavin Atkinson <gavin at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Oleksandr Tymoshenko <gonzo at FreeBSD.org>

   In August, Eitan Adler (eadler@) and Oleksandr Tymoshenko (gonzo@)
   joined the Bugmeister team. At the same time, Remko Lodder and Volker
   Werth stepped down. We extend our thanks to Volker and Remko for their
   work in the past, and welcome Oleksandr and Eitan. Eitan and Oleksandr
   have been working hard on migrating from GNATS, and have made
   significant progress on evaluating new software, and creating scripts
   to export data from GNATS.

   The bugbusting team continue work on trying to make the contents of the
   GNATS PR database cleaner, more accessible and easier for committers to
   find and resolve PRs, by tagging PRs to indicate the areas involved,
   and by ensuring that there is sufficient info within each PR to resolve
   each issue.

   As always, anybody interested in helping out with the PR queue is
   welcome to join us in #freebsd-bugbusters on EFnet. We are always
   looking for additional help, whether your interests lie in triaging
   incoming PRs, generating patches to resolve existing problems, or
   simply helping with the database housekeeping (identifying duplicate
   PRs, ones that have already been resolved, etc). This is a great way of
   getting more involved with FreeBSD!

Open tasks:

    1. Further research into tools suitable to replace GNATS.
    2. Get more users involved with triaging PRs as they come in.
    3. Assist committers with closing PRs.
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FreeBSD Developer Summit, Cambridge, UK

   URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/201208DevSummit

   Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson at FreeBSD.org>

   In the end of August, there was an "off-season" Developer Summit held
   in Cambridge, UK at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.
   This was a three-day event, with a documentation summit scheduled for
   the day before. The three days of the main event were split into three
   sessions, with two tracks in each. Some of them even involved ARM
   developers from the neighborhoods which proven to be productive, and
   led to further engagement between the FreeBSD community and ARM.

   The schedule was finalized on the first day, spawning a plethora of
   topics to discuss, followed by splitting into groups. A short summary
   from each of the groups was presented in the final session and then
   published at the event's home page on the FreeBSD wiki. This summit
   contributed greatly to arriving to a tentative plan for throwing the
   switch to make clang the default compiler on HEAD. This was further
   discussed on the mailing list, and has now happened, bringing us one
   big step closer to a GPL-free FreeBSD 10. As part of the program, an
   afternoon of short talks from researchers in the Cambridge Computer
   Laboratory involved either operating systems work in general or FreeBSD
   in particular. Robert Watson showed off a tablet running FreeBSD on a
   MIPS-compatible soft-core processor running on an Altera FPGA.

   In association with the event, a dinner was hosted by St. John's
   college and co-sponsored by Google and the FreeBSD Foundation. The day
   after the conference, a trip was organized to Bletchley Park, which was
   celebrating Turing's centenary in 2012.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Foundation

   URL: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2012Jul-newsletter.shtml

   Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb at FreeBSDFoundation.org>

   The Foundation hosted and sponsored the Cambridge FreeBSD developer
   summit in August 2012.

   We were represented at the following conferences: OSCON July 2012,
   Texas LinuxFest, and Ohio LinuxFest.

   We negotiated/supervised Foundation funded projects: Distributed
   Security Audit Logging, Capsicum Component Framework, Native iSCSI
   Target Scoping, and Growing UFS Filesystems Online.

   We negotiated, supervised, and funded hardware needs for FreeBSD
   co-location centers.

   We welcomed Kirk McKusick to our board of directors. He took over the
   responsibility of managing our investments.

   We visited companies to discuss their FreeBSD use and to help
   facilitate collaboration with the Project.

   We managed FreeBSD vendor community mailing list and meetings.

   We created a high quality FreeBSD 9 brochure to help promote FreeBSD.

   Published our semi-annual newsletter that highlighted Foundation funded
   projects, travel grants for developers, conferences sponsored and other
   ways the Foundation supported the FreeBSD Project.

   We hired a technical writer to help with FreeBSD marketing/promotional
   material.

   We began work on redesigning our website.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD on Altera FPGAs

   URL: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/
   URL: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri.html

   Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Bjoern Zeeb <bz at FreeBSD.org>

   In the course of developing the CHERI processor as part of the CTSRD
   project SRI International's Computer Science Laboratory and the
   University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory have developed support for
   a number of general purpose IP cores for Altera FPGAs including the
   Altera Triple Speed Ethernet (ATSE) MAC core, the Altera University
   Program SD Card core, and the Altera JTAG UART. We have also added
   support for general access to memory mapped devices on the Avalon bus
   via the avgen bus. We have implemented both nexus and flattened device
   tree (FDT) attachments for these devices.

   In addition to these softcore we have developed support for the Terasic
   multi-touch LCD and are working to provide support for the Terasic HDMI
   Transmitter Daughter Card. Both of these work with common development
   and/or reference boards for Altera FPGAs. They do require additional IP
   cores which we plan to release to the open source community in the near
   future.

   With exception of the ATSE and HDMI drivers we have merged all of these
   changes to FreeBSD-CURRENT. We anticipate that these drivers will be
   useful for users who with to run FreeBSD on either hard or soft core
   CPUs on Altera FPGAs.

   This work has been sponsored by DARPA, AFRL, and Google.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD on ARMv6/ARMv7

   Contact: freebsd-arm mailing list <freebsd-arm at FreeBSD.org>

   Support for ARMv6 and ARMv7 architecture has been merged from project
   branch to HEAD. This code covers the following parts:
     * General ARMv6/ARMv7 kernel bits (pmap, cache, assembler routines,
       etc...)
     * ARM Generic Interrupt Controller driver
     * Improved thread-local storage for cpus >=ARMv6
     * Driver for SMSC LAN95XX and LAN8710A ethernet controllers
     * Marvell MV78x60 support (multiuser, ARMADA XP kernel config)
     * TI OMAP4 and AM335x support (multiuser, no GPU or graphics support,
       kernel configs for Pandaboard and Beaglebone)
     * LPC32x0 support (multiuser, frame buffer works with SSD1289 LCD
       controller. Embedded Artists EA3250 kernel config)

   This work was a result of a joint effort by many people, including but
   not limited to: Grzegorz Bernacki (gber@), Aleksander Dutkowski, Ben R.
   Gray (bgray@), Olivier Houchard (cognet@), Rafal Jaworowski (raj@) and
   Semihalf team, Tim Kientzle (kientzle@), Jakub Wojciech Klama (jceel@),
   Ian Lepore (ian@), Warner Losh (imp@), Damjan Marion (dmarion@), Lukasz
   Plachno, Stanislav Sedov (stas@), Mark Tinguely and Andrew Turner
   (andrew@). Thanks to all, who contributed by submitting code, testing
   and giving valuable advice.

Open tasks:

    1. More hardware bring-ups and more drivers
    2. Finish SMP support
    3. VFP/NEON support
     __________________________________________________________________

Google Summer of Code 2012

   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/projects/summerofcode.html
   URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2012

   Contact: FreeBSD Summer of Code Administrators <soc-admins at FreeBSD.org>

   Over the Summer of 2012, FreeBSD were once again granted a place to
   participate in the Google Summer of Code program. We received a total
   of 32 project proposals, and were ultimately given 15 slots for
   university students to work on open source projects mentored by
   existing FreeBSD developers.

   We were able to accept a wide spread of proposals, covering both the
   base system and the ports infrastructure. We had students working on
   file systems, file integrity checking, and parallelization in the ports
   collection. Students worked on kernel infrastructure, including one
   project to support CPU resource limits on users, processes and jails,
   and one student improving the BSD callout(9) and timer facilities. Two
   students worked on the ARM platform, widely used in embedded systems
   and smart phones; one student worked on a significant cleanup and
   improvements to the Flattened Device Tree implementation code, while
   the other ported FreeBSD to the OMAP3-based BeagleBoard-xM device. One
   student worked on improving IPv6 support in userland tools, whilst
   another worked on BIOS emulation for the BHyVE BSD-licensed hypervisor,
   new in FreeBSD 10. Other students worked on EFI boot support, userland
   lock profiling and an automated kernel crash reporting system.

   Overall, a significant proportion of the code produced has or will be
   integrated into FreeBSD in one form or another. All of the work is
   available in our Summer Of Code Subversion repository, and some of the
   work has already been merged back into the main repositories.

   FreeBSD is once again grateful to Google for being selected to
   participate in Summer of Code 2012.
     __________________________________________________________________

KDE/FreeBSD

   URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org
   URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org/area51.php

   Contact: KDE FreeBSD <kde at FreeBSD.org>

   The KDE/FreeBSD team have continued to improve the experience of KDE
   software and Qt under FreeBSD. The latest round of improvements
   include:
     * Fixes for building Qt with libc++ and C++11
     * Fixes for Solid-related crashes
     * Fix battery detection in battery monitor plasmoid

   The team has also made many releases and upstreamed many fixes and
   patches. The latest round of releases include:
     * KDE SC: 4.9.1 (area51) and 4.8.4 (ports)
     * Qt: 4.8.3 (area51)
     * PyQt: 4.9.4 (area51); QScintilla 2.6.2 (area51); SIP: 4.13.3
       (area51)
     * Calligra: 2.4.3, 2.5-RC2, 2.5.0. 2.5.1, 2.5.2 (area51) and 2.4.3,
       2.5.0, 2.5.1 (ports)
     * Amarok: 2.6.0 (area51)
     * CMake: 2.8.9 (ports)
     * Digikam (and KIPI-plugins): 2.7.0, 2.8.0, 2.9.0 (area51) and 2.7.0,
       2.9.0 (ports)
     * QtCreator: 2.6.0-beta (area51)
     * many smaller ports

   The team is always looking for more testers and porters so please
   contact us at kde at FreeBSD.org and visit our home page at
   http://FreeBSD.kde.org.

Open tasks:

    1. Please see 2012 Q4 Status Report
    2. Updating out-of-date ports, see PortScout for a list
     __________________________________________________________________

Native iSCSI Target

   Contact: Edward Tomasz Napieral/a <trasz at FreeBSD.org>

   During the July-September time period, the Native iSCSI Target project
   was officially started under sponsorship from the FreeBSD Foundation.
   Before the end of September I've written ctld(8), the userspace part of
   the target, responsible for handling configuration, accepting incoming
   connections, performing authentication and iSCSI parameter negotiation,
   and handing off connections to the kernel. For the time being, I've
   reused some parts of protocol-handling code from the istgt project;
   since ctld(8) only handles the Login phase, the code can be rewritten
   in a much simpler and shorter way in the future.
     __________________________________________________________________

Parallel rc.d execution

   URL: https://github.com/buganini/rcexecr
   URL: https://github.com/kil/rcorder

   Contact: Kuan-Chung Chiu <buganini at gmail.com>
   Contact: Kilian <kklimek at uos.de>

   There are two implementations to make rc.d execution parallel. Compared
   to Kil's rcorder, rcexecr brings more concurrence and provides more
   flexibility than older "early_late_divider" mechanism but require more
   invasive /etc patch. Both implementations have switch to toggle
   parallel execution. Further modification/integration needs more
   discussion.

Open tasks:

    1. Refine /etc/rc.d/* to eliminate unnecessary waiting.
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Ports Collection

   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
   URL:
   http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing-ports/
   URL: http://portsmon.freebsd.org/index.html
   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/index.html
   URL: http://blogs.freebsdish.org/portmgr/
   URL: http://www.twitter.com/freebsd_portmgr/
   URL: http://www.facebook.com/portmgr

   Contact: Thomas Abthorpe <portmgr-secretary at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Port Management Team <portmgr at FreeBSD.org>

   The ports tree approaches 24,000 ports, while the PR count still is
   above 1000.

   In Q3 we added 2 new committers and took in two commits bit for safe
   keeping.

   The Ports Management team had performed multiple -exp runs, verifying
   how base system updates may affect the ports tree, as well as providing
   QA runs for major ports updates.

   Beat Gaetzi took over the role of sending out fail mails, a role that
   Pav Lucistnik had previously held. Beat also undertook the task of
   converting the Ports tree from CVS to Subversion.

   Florent Thoumie stepped down from his role on portmgr, he was
   instrumental in maintaining the legacy pkg_* code.

Open tasks:

    1. Most ports PRs are assigned, we now need to focus on testing,
       committing and closing.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Core Team

   Contact: Core Team <core at FreeBSD.org>

   Along with the change in the Core Team membership, several related
   roles changed hands. Gabor Pali assumed the role of core secretary from
   Gavin Atkinson, and David Chisnall replaced Robert Watson as liaison to
   the FreeBSD Foundation. The Core Team felt there was no longer a need
   for a formal security team liaison, so that role was retired.

   In the third quarter, the Core Team granted access for 2 new committers
   and took 2 commit bits into safekeeping.

   The Core Team worked with the Port Management Team and Cluster
   Administrators to set a date to stop providing CVS exports for the
   ports repository, which is February 28, 2013. In the meantime, the CVS
   export for 9.1-RELEASE was restored.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Japanese Documentation Project

   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ja/
   URL: http://www.jp.FreeBSD.org/doc-jp/

   Contact: Hiroki Sato <hrs at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Ryusuke Suzuki <ryusuke at FreeBSD.org>

   Web page (htdocs): Newsflash and some other updates in the English
   version were translated to keep them up-to-date. Especially "security
   incident on FreeBSD infrastructure" was translated and published in a
   timely manner.

   FreeBSD Handbook: Big update in the "advanced-networking". With this
   update, merging translation results from the handbook in the local
   repository of Japanese documentation project into the main repository
   was completed. This chapter is still outdated and needs more work. The
   other sections have also constantly been updated. Especially, new
   subsection "Using pkgng for Binary Package Management" was added to
   "ports" section and "Using subversion" subsection was added to
   "mirrors" section.

   Article: Some progress was made in "Writing FreeBSD Problem Reports"
   and "Writing FreeBSD Problem Reports" articles.

Open tasks:

    1. Further translation work of outdated documents in the ja_JP.eucJP
       subtree.
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