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This report covers FreeBSD related projects for the period between
October and December, and is the fourth of four planned reports for 2020.
This quarter had quite a lot of work done, including but certainly not
limited to, in areas relating to everything from multiple architectures
such as x86, aarch64, riscv, and ppc64 for both base and ports, over kernel
changes such as vectored aio, routing lookups and multipathing, an
alternative random(4) implementation, zstd integration for kernel
dumps, log compression, zfs and preparations for pkg(8), along with
wifi changes, changes to the toolchain like the new elfctl utility,
and all the way to big changes like the git migration and moving the
documentation from DocBook to Hugo/AsciiDoctor, as well as many other
things too numerous to mention in an introduction.
This report with 42 entries, which don't hold the answer to life, the
universe and everything, couldn't have happened without all the people
doing the work also writing an entry for the report, so the quarterly
team would like to thank them, as otherwise, we wouldn't have anything
to do.
Please note that the deadline for submissions covering the period
between January and March is March 31st.
We hope you'll enjoy reading as much as we enjoyed compiling it. The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to
supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide. Funding
comes from individual and corporate donations and is used to fund and manage
software development projects, conferences and developer summits, and provide
travel grants to FreeBSD contributors. The Foundation purchases and supports
hardware to improve and maintain FreeBSD infrastructure and provides resources
to improve security, quality assurance, and release engineering efforts;
publishes marketing material to promote, educate, and advocate for the FreeBSD
Project; facilitates collaboration between commercial vendors and FreeBSD
developers; and finally, represents the FreeBSD Project in executing contracts,
license agreements, and other legal arrangements that require a recognized
legal entity.
Here are some highlights of what we did to help FreeBSD last quarter:
Like most organizations, we transitioned all of our staff to work from home.
We also put a temporary ban on travel for staff members, which didn't affect
our output too much, since most conferences went virtual. We continued
supporting the community and Project, even though some of our work and
responses may have been delayed because of changes in some of our priorities
and the impact of limited childcare for a few of our staff members.
We help facilitate collaboration between commercial users and FreeBSD
developers. We also meet with companies to discuss their needs and bring that
information back to the Project. Not surprisingly, the stay at home orders,
combined with our company ban on travel during Q4 made in-person meetings
non-existent. However, the team was able to continue meeting with our partners
and commercial users virtually. These meetings help us understand some of the
applications where FreeBSD is used.
An event we help plan and organize, that helps with vendor/developer
engagement, is the annual Bay Area Vendor Summit. We weren't going to let a
pandemic stop us from holding this invaluable yearly event, so we went virtual!
From the feedback we received from the vendor community on how we should run
this, so it would be beneficial for them, we decided to hold this over 3 half
days in November. One unexpected result was that more commercial users from
around the world attended. Since a Vendor/Developer Summit is typically
invitation only, we opened this up to FreeBSD contributors from around the
world to watch the livestream. Because of the success and excitement of this
event, we are planning to hold another one around June or July.
We want to take a moment to say thank you to all the individuals and
corporations that stepped up to help fund our efforts last year. As of this
writing, we raised $1,235,926, and will have the final tally by mid-January.
The companies that gave generous financial contributions include Arm, NetApp,
Netflix, Juniper Networks, Beckhoff, VMware, Stormshield, Tarsnap, and Google.
We also want to say thank you to the Koum Family Foundation for awarding us a
large grant, and to "the employees of Ngnix" who also made generous financial
contributions.
We truly appreciate these large contributions, which makes the most impact on
how much we can contribute back to the Project. However, it's the individual
donations that have the most meaning to us. Those are the folks who are giving
because they trust we will invest their personal donations, whether large or
small, into improving the operating system and Project. As stewards of your
donations, we want to thank you for your trust in us and your commitment to
making FreeBSD the best platform for products, education, research, computing,
and more.
You'll find out how we used your donations for Q4 in our report, as well as in
individual reports throughout this status report.
Though we know this is a Q4 status report, we are excited about our plans for
2021, including growing our software development team! We'll be posting two
job descriptions for a Senior Software Developer and Project Coordinator soon.
Please consider making a donation to help us continue and increase our support
for FreeBSD in 2021: https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/donate/.
We also have the Partnership Program, to provide more benefits for our larger
commercial donors. Find out more information at
https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/FreeBSD-foundation-partnership-program/
and share with your companies!
The Foundation provided many project grants over the last quarter, and you
can read about OpenZFS Zstd support, Linuxulator application compatibility
improvements, LLDB target support, test lab infrastructure, and WiFi projects
in other entries in this quarterly report.
The Foundation hired six co-op students from the University of Waterloo during
the 2020 fall term, as well as one intern. Former co-op student Tiger
returned, and new students Yang and Zac joined us for the first time.
Tiger worked on improvements to the code-coverage guided kernel fuzzing tool
Syzkaller, adding new system call definitions so that Syzkaller can expand the
code it tests. A number of FreeBSD kernel bug fixes have already resulted from
this work. Tiger also contributed a number of improvements to the ELF Tool
Chain set of binary utilities, and worked on tooling to run tests from other
tool suites against ELF Tool Chain.
Zac worked on an improvement to the pkg package management tool, investigating
and upstreaming patches for FreeBSD support in FreePBX, and investigating
compiler support for addressing the stack clash vulnerability.
Yang investigated and fixed a compilation bug with the kernel's Skein-1024
assembly implementation (used by ZFS), and then a number of projects related to
Capsicum: applying Capsicum to sort(1), implementing a Capsicum service to
execute utilities, and finally working with developers of the Game of Trees
(got) version control system to adapt it for Capsicum support.
Our intern Ka Ho focused on improving the desktop experience of the FreeBSD.
He fixed and improved many items of OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) on
FreeBSD, worked on FreeBSD native audio support on Firefox, adding a facility
that user-space audio programs could make use of to enumerate a list of audio
devices. He also ported the fcitx5 input method framework.
The five Foundation staff members continued contributions in 2020 in both
ongoing operational tasks (including the Git working group and security team)
and software development for a number of projects.
Staff members responded to reported security vulnerabilities and release
errata, prepared patches, and participated in the security advisory process.
We also worked on proactive security vulnerability mitigations. Syzkaller
also provided many reports of kernel issues that resulted in
Foundation-sponsored bug fixes. We worked on several issues relating to
FreeBSD/arm64 to move it along the path of being a Tier-1 architecture.
We participated in code reviews and supported community members in integrating
changes into FreeBSD, and triaged incoming bug reports.
We contributed enhancements to many kernel and userland subsystems, including
the x86 pmap layer, ELF run-time linker and kernel loader, the Capsicum
sandboxing framework and Casper services, the threading library, some RISC-V
changes, the build system, tool chain and freebsd-update, network stack
stability improvements, machine-dependent optimizations, new kernel interfaces,
DTrace bug fixes, documentation improvements, and others.
The Foundation provides a full-time staff member and funds projects on
improving continuous integration, automated testing, and overall quality
assurance efforts for the FreeBSD Project.
During the fourth quarter of 2020, Foundation staff continued improving and
monitoring the Project's CI infrastructure, and working with experts to fix
the failing builds and the regressions found by tests. The work was focused
on pre-commit tests and development of the CI staging environment. The other
main working item is working on the VCS migration to change the src and doc
source from Subversion to Git. There are also many work-in-progress tasks like
analysis and improve the tests of non-x86 platforms.
See the FreeBSD CI section of this report for completed work items and detailed
information.
The Foundation provides hardware and support to improve the FreeBSD
infrastructure. Last quarter, we continued supporting FreeBSD hardware located
around the world. We coordinated efforts between the new NYI Chicago facility
and clusteradm to start working on getting the facility prepared for some of
the new FreeBSD hardware we are planning on purchasing. NYI generously
provides this for free to the Project. We also worked on connecting with the
new owners of the NYI Bridgewater site, where most of the existing FreeBSD
infrastructure is located.
Some of the purchases we made for the Project last quarter to support
infrastructure includes:
5 application servers to run tasks like bugzilla, wiki, website, cgi,
Phabricator, host git, etc.
1 server to replace the old pkg server, which will provide a lot more IOPS
to avoid the slowdowns seen during peak times of the day where the disks
simply cannot keep up with the request volume.
1 server for exp-runs and to make them faster.
1 server to build packages more frequently.
A large part of our efforts are dedicated to advocating for the Project. This
includes promoting work being done by others with FreeBSD; producing advocacy
literature to teach people about FreeBSD and help make the path to starting
using FreeBSD or contributing to the Project easier; and attending and getting
other FreeBSD contributors to volunteer to run FreeBSD events, staff FreeBSD
tables, and give FreeBSD presentations.
The FreeBSD Foundation sponsors many conferences, events, and summits around
the globe. These events can be BSD-related, open source, or technology events
geared towards underrepresented groups. We support the FreeBSD-focused events
to help provide a venue for sharing knowledge, to work together on projects,
and to facilitate collaboration between developers and commercial users. This
all helps provide a healthy ecosystem. We support the non-FreeBSD events to
promote and raise awareness of FreeBSD, to increase the use of FreeBSD in
different applications, and to recruit more contributors to the Project.
While we were still unable to attend in-person meetings due to COVID-19, we
were able to attend virtual events at new venues and facilitate the first
online FreeBSD Vendor Summit. In addition to attending and planning virtual
events, we are continually working on new training initiatives and updating our
selection of how-to guides to facilitate getting more folks to try out FreeBSD.
Check out some of the advocacy and education work we did last quarter:
Continued our FreeBSD Fridays series of 101 classes. Topics included an
Introduction to Capsicum, Introduction to Bhyve, Introduction to DTrace, and
more. Videos of the past sessions can be found here. We'll be back with new
sessions in early 2021.
Gave a FreeBSD talk at the nerdear.la conference on October 20th.
Participated in the podcast: What the Dev: A Dive into the FreeBSD Foundation on its 20th Anniversary
Promoted the Foundation's 20th Anniversary in the FossBytes article:
20 Years of The FreeBSD Foundation
Continued to promote the FreeBSD Office Hours series. Videos from the one hour
sessions can be found on the Project's YouTube Channel. See the Office Hours
section of this report for more information.
Added two new How-To Guides: Contributing FreeBSD Documentation
and How to Submit a Bug Report.
Worked with the organizing committee to host the November 2020 Vendor Summit
Promoted the use of FreeBSD in regards to CHERI and ARM's Morello Processor
Authored a Beginners Guide to FreeBSD for Fosslife.
Sponsored All Things Open as a Media Sponsor.
Sponsored OpenZFS Developers Summit at the Bronze level.
Applied for a virtual stand at FOSDEM 2021.
Committed to attend the online Apricot 2021.
Keep up to date with our latest work in our newsletters:
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/newsletter/
Netflix provided an update on how and why they use FreeBSD in our latest
Contributor Case Study.
We help educate the world about FreeBSD by publishing the professionally
produced FreeBSD Journal. As we mentioned previously, the FreeBSD Journal is
now a free publication. Find out more and access the latest issues at
https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/journal/
You can find out more about events we attended and upcoming events at
https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/news-and-events/.
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 http://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org to find out how we support FreeBSD and
how we can help you!
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 2020, the Release Engineering Team completed
work on 12.2-RELEASE, the third release from the stable/12 branch, released
on October 27. Thank you to all involved for the hard work that went into
this release.
Additionally throughout the quarter, several development snapshots builds
were released for the head, stable/12, and stable/11 branches.
Development snapshot builds for 13.0-CURRENT have recently been built from
the Git tree within the project, while further snapshot builds for 12.x and
11.x will continue to be built from Subversion. As we approach the end of
2020, continued preparations are being put in place for the upcoming 13.0
release, which will be the first release from Git.
Much of this work was sponsored by Rubicon Communications, LLC (netgate.com)
and the FreeBSD Foundation.
The FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team consists of the people responsible for
administering the machines that the Project relies on for its distributed work
and communications to be synchronised. In this quarter, the team has worked
on the following:
Finished setting up the Malaysia mirror site, generously hosted by the
Malaysian Research & Education Network. Traffic
from Oceania and parts of Asia is now going to this mirror instead of
farther away sites like Japan and California.
Upgraded the package building machines to a version of head from
mid-October 2020.
Upgraded developer machines in the cluster (freefall, ref* and universe*) to
a version of head from mid-October 2020.
Installed eight new x86 servers in our New Jersey site:
five application servers, two package builders and one mirror server.
The new mirror server is in production (pkg0.nyi.freebsd.org).
The two package builders are in production.
Two of the application servers have been put into production as the Git
source of truth and the cgit web frontend, respectively.
Installed two new aarch64 servers in our New Jersey site. Both are now
building aarch64 packages.
Fixed package mirror synchronisation for powerpc64 packages.
Rebuilt the ZFS pool on the UK mirror server (pkg0.bme.freebsd.org) for
better I/O parallelism. This should improve download performance
especially at peak times.
Ongoing systems administration work:
Accounts management for committers.
Backups of critical infrastructure.
Keeping up with security updates in 3rd party software.
Hardware refreshing for web services, backup version control system in NYI
Upgrading production machines in the FreeBSD cluster to 12.2
Most machines have been upgraded as of mid-December 2020
Remaining machines will be decommissioned / repurposed after services
migrate to newer hardware
Supporting Git migration and infrastructure setup
powerpc pkgbuilder/ref/universal machines
Preparations for a new mirror site in Australia, to be hosted by
IX Australia.
Setup Brazil (BRA) mirror.
Review the service jails and service administrators operation.
Searching for more providers that can fit the requirements for a
generic mirrored layout
or a
tiny mirror.
Contact: freebsd-testing Mailing List The FreeBSD CI team maintains the continuous integration system
of the FreeBSD project. The CI system firstly checks the committed changes
can be successfully built, then performs various tests and analysis over the
newly built results.
The artifacts from those builds are archived in the artifact server for
further testing and debugging needs. The CI team members examine the
failing builds and unstable tests and work with the experts in that area to
fix the code or adjust test infrastructure. The details of these efforts
are available in the weekly CI reports.
During the fourth quarter of 2020, we continued working with the contributors and
developers in the project to fulfil their testing needs and also keep
collaborating with external projects and companies to improve their products
and FreeBSD.
Important changes:
doc jobs were changed to use git to follow VCS migration:
https://ci.freebsd.org/job/FreeBSD-doc-main-igor/
Thanks Brandon Bergren (bdragon@)
head and stable/12 build environment have been upgraded to 12.2-RELEASE
Follow VCS migration, change src jobs to use Git - PRs are
available
Thanks Brandon Bergren (bdragon@)
Collecting and sorting CI tasks and ideas
here
Testing and merging pull requests in the
the FreeBSD-ci repo
Designing and implementing pre-commit CI building and testing
Reducing the procedures of CI/test environment setting up for contributors and
developers
Setting up the CI stage environment and putting the experimental jobs on it
Setting up public network access for the VM guest running tests
Implementing automatic tests on bare metal hardware
Adding drm ports building tests against -CURRENT
Planning to run ztest and network stack tests
Adding more external toolchain related jobs
Improving the hardware lab to be more mature and adding more hardware
Helping more software get FreeBSD support in their CI pipeline
Wiki pages: 3rdPartySoftwareCI,
HostedCI
Working with hosted CI providers to have better FreeBSD support
The build and test results will be sent to the
dev-ci mailing list
soon. Feedback and help with analysis is very appreciated!
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
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.
For the last quarter the dashboard looks like:
41500 ports (including flavors)
2516 open PRs of which 625 are unassigned
8715 commits to the HEAD branch by 164 committers
420 commits to the 2020Q4 branch by 59 committers
were slightly fewer commits by the same number of people. The number of ports
again grew steadily, this time by almost 4 percent.
During the last quarter, we welcomed Juray Lutter (otis@) as a new ports
committer and said goodbye to cpm, jadawin, knu, araujo, mmokhi and scottl.
Traditionally merges to the quarterly ports branches, which are more
conservative versions of the HEAD tree, required approval of either the
Ports Security Team (ports-secteam@) or portgmr@. There were already a number
of blanket approvals for tested commits, ranging from fixing typing mistakes to
upgrading web browsers to their latest version. As of last December, all
ports committers are free to merge on their own, lessening the burden on
ports-secteam@.
Patent limitations have been disconnected from the license framework, given
that patents are a complex topic with implications varying from one jurisdiction
to another.
The last quarter saw a number of updates to default versions of ports:
librsvg2: "rust" on supported platforms, "legacy"
otherwise
Mono: 5.10
FPC switched to 3.2.0
GCC switched to 10 for powerpc64le
Lazarus switched to 2.0.10
Ruby switched to 2.7.X
Samba switched to 4.12
that for instance help the user to learn about a certain topic or help
facilitating examinations.
The @shell and @sample keywords have been rewritten in Lua which makes root-dir
compliant (see pkg -r) and ensures they are Capsicum-sandboxed.
The last quarter also saw updates to several user-facing ports:
Firefox 84.0.1
Firefox-esr 78.6.0
Chromium 87.0.4280.88
Ruby 2.7.2
Qt5 5.15.2
XFce 4.16
various ports upgrades
changing sys/cdefs.h in base
adding "set pipefail" to most framework scripts to catch errors earlier
changing the default locale to C.UTF-8 in base
using bsdgrep as /usr/bin/grep
During the final quarter of 2020 three office hours sessions were held.
The first was hosted by the core team in a time slot conducive to Asia and
Australia, covering topics including the transition to git, recruiting for
project teams, and core's todo list.
The second was hosted by the git transition team, and answered attendee
questions about the transition to git and how it would impact the project's
workflows.
The third session was hosted by bhyve maintainers Peter Grehan and John Baldwin
to present recent development efforts and answer questions about bhyve.
The project is looking for volunteers to host future office hours sessions, as
well as taking topic suggestions. We also hope to improve the system to allow people
to submit questions ahead of time, so that we can take maximum advantage of
subject matter experts when we have them for these calls.
You can find the schedule for future office hours, and videos of past
office hours on the FreeBSD Wiki
Sponsor: ScaleEngine Inc.
A long-standing goal of the FreeBSD project is for the base system to migrate
to modern, copyfree or more permissively licensed components. In this quarter,
the following components have been successfully removed or replaced:
gdb (removed in favor of lldb in base or devel/gdb in ports)
gnugrep (replaced with bsdgrep)
libgnuregex (removed)
may be listed on the above-linked wiki page. Interested parties are welcome to
evaluate the options to restart the discussion:
dialog
gcov (kernel)
Note that partial completion likely means that a component is partially
compatible, but could use evaluation and patches to bring parity with the
component that it is replacing.
diff3 (Contact bapt@ if interested)
The Git working group largely completed the migration of the doc and src
(base system) trees from Subversion to Git in December 2020. We are currently
working on some minor outstanding issues and preparing for the ports tree
migration.
We set up new hosts to serve as the Git repositories and mirrors, and developed
commit hooks for restrictions on commits to various branches, generation of
commit mail, and similar needs.
The doc tree migration occurred on December 8th and 9th. After the conversion
some minor changes to the documentation build infrastructure were necessary.
The src tree migration occurred between December 20th and 23rd for the main
branch; some additional tasks occurred over the next week or so. These
included enabling the stable branches, vendor (contrib) code updates, and
the git->svn gateway. We are translating stable branch commits to Subversion
for the stable/11 and stable/12 branches and associated release branches. This
allows FreeBSD users who follow stable branches or releases to continue using
existing processes and tooling.
An experimental Git conversion of the ports tree is available at the link
above. There are some unique challenges in the ports tree (that do not impact
the doc or src repos in the same way), so additional work is ongoing. The
window for migrating the ports tree is immediately prior to a quarterly
branch, so we anticipate a migration at the end of March 2021. Over the next
few months testing of the experimental ports repo is very welcome.
Process documentation for developer and user interaction with FreeBSD's
repositories is currently available in Warner's GitHub repository at the link
above. It will be moved to the FreeBSD developer's handbook and/or other
suitable locations following the documentation project's asciidoc conversion.
The working group is experimenting with two permissively-licensed tools that
are compatible with Git servers or repositories. Game of Trees is a version
control system that is compatible with Git repositories. It is being developed
by Stefan Sperling along with some OpenBSD developers and other contributions.
John Mehr's gitup is a minimal, dependency-free program that clones and
synchronizes a local tree with a remote repository. It is intended for use
cases that would otherwise be served by tools like portsnap.
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation (in part)
Linuxulator improvements have been ongoing for the last two years,
with support from the FreeBSD foundation over a few distinct project
grants as well as contributions from the community.
The goal of this project is to improve FreeBSD's ability to execute
unmodified Linux binaries.
Current status is being tracked at Linux app status Wiki page.
The work has now shifted from command-line apps to desktop applications.
There wasn't much Foundation-sponsored work done during this quarter,
apart from extending fuse(4) to make it possible to run Linux FUSE
servers, which is one of the things required to run AppImages.
The Foundation-sponsored effort will continue into the first quarter
of 2021 in order to make sure the 13.0-RELEASE ships with Linuxulator in a good shape.
There was a very significant contribution from Conrad Meyer in the form
of Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
The LLDB project builds on libraries provided by LLVM and Clang to provide a
great modern debugger. It uses the Clang ASTs and the expression parser, LLVM
JIT, LLVM disassembler, etc so that it provides an experience that “just
works”. It is also blazing fast and more permissively licensed than GDB, the
GNU Debugger.
LLDB is the default debugger in Xcode on macOS and supports debugging C,
Objective-C, and C++ on the desktop and iOS devices and the simulator.
FreeBSD includes LLDB in the base system. At present, it has some limitations
in comparison with the GNU GDB debugger, and does not yet provide a complete
replacement. It used to rely on an obsolete plugin model in LLDB that was a
growing technical debt. This project aimed to bring LLDB closer to a fully
featured replacement for GDB, and therefore for FreeBSD to feature a modern
debugger for software developers.
The legacy monolithic target support executed the application being debugged in
the same process space as the debugger. The modern LLDB plugin approach, used
on other supported targets, executes the target process under a separate
lldb-server process. This improves reliability and simplifies the process /
thread model in LLDB itself. In addition, remote and local debugging is now
performed using the same approach.
After the migration to the new process model on 32 and 64-bit x86 CPUs, the
project focused on reviewing the results of LLDB’s test suite and fixing tests
as time permits.
During the Moritz Systems work, the FreeBSD Project gained numerous important
improvements: in the kernel, userland base libraries (the dynamic loader) and
the LLVM toolchain FreeBSD support.
The introduced changes are expected to be shipped with LLDB 12.0, and where
applicable in FreeBSD 13.0.
The overall experience of FreeBSD/LLDB developers and advanced users on this
rock solid Operating System reached the state known from other environments.
Furthermore, the FreeBSD-focused work also resulted in generic improvements,
enhancing the LLDB support for Linux and NetBSD.
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation NetApp has started an effort to upstream bug fixes and other improvements from
the ONTAP code line into FreeBSD. These changes benefit the FreeBSD
community by providing many fixes that NetApp has made over the past few years,
while allowing NetApp to reduce the number of customizations needed when
bringing in the latest FreeBSD changes back into the ONTAP tree.
NetApp has partnered with Klara to facilitate this project, to help identify
interesting and useful changes to send upstream, to rework and generalize those
changes as required to make them suitable for upstreaming, and to shepherd them
through the FreeBSD code review process.
During the fourth quarter, Klara has made 40 upstream fixes in the FreeBSD
kernel in various subsystems including geom, dev, amd64, net, kern, netinet, and
several other areas of the tree on behalf of NetApp.
NetApp intends to continue to sponsor this effort throughout 2021.
Sponsor: NetApp
In an effort to improve NFS security, an Internet Draft titled
"Towards Remote Procedure Call Encryption By Default" specifies
use of TLS 1.3 to encrypt all data traffic on a Sun RPC
connection used for NFS.
Although NFS has been able to use sec=krb5p to encrypt data
on the wire, this requires a Kerberos environment and, as
such, has not been widely adopted.
It also required that
encryption/decryption be done in software, since only the
RPC message NFS arguments are encrypted.
Since Kernel TLS is capable of using hardware assist to
improve performance and does not require Kerberos, NFS
over TLS may be more widely adopted, once implementations
are available.
The coding for this project has now been completed.
All required changes to the NFS and kernel RPC code have
been committed to the head/current kernel and will be in FreeBSD13.
The daemons can now be built from a port that depends
upon the security/openssl-devel port of Openssl3 that
includes patches for support of ktls.
The port for the daemons is called sysutils/nfs-over-tls
and should be committed to the ports framework soon.
In the meantime, the port can easily be fetched,
as described in
https://people.freebsd.org/~rmacklem/nfs-over-tls-setup.txt.
To support clients such as laptops, the daemons that perform the TLS
handshake may optionally handle client X.509 certificates from a
site local CA.
There are now exports(5) options to require client(s) to
provide a valid X.509 certificate.
The case where a "user" name is stored in the certificate and is used
to map all RPC credentials to that user is probably in violation of
the Internet Draft.
This is only enabled when the "-u" command line
option is provided to rpc.tlsservd(8).
The code is now available for testing. See:
https://people.freebsd.org/~rmacklem/nfs-over-tls-setup.txt
Setting up system(s) for testing still requires building a custom kernel
with "options KERN_TLS" from recent head/FreeBSD13 sources plus installing
the port for the daemons, as explained by the above document.
The main limitation in the current implementation is that it uses TLS1.2
and not TLS1.3, as required by the Internet Draft.
This should change once the KERN_TLS rx patch includes TLS1.3 support.
Third party testing would be appreciated.
OpenBSM is a crucial part of FreeBSD, which provides auditing features for
the operating system. OpenBSM is incorporated into FreeBSD and macOS.
Both Apple and FreeBSD have currently made changes to the OpenBSM framework,
which weren't upstreamed. This small project aims to consolidate
these changes and upstream them to the OpenBSM github repository, so that
both development efforts can be merged to FreeBSD later on. The tricky part
of this project is the manual comparison, since Apple doesn't provide any
changelogs.
I am currently working on on the macOS Catalina sources and hopefully Apple
will release the sources of macOS Big Sur in time for FreeBSD 13.
In October Clang/LLVM was updated to 11.0.0, followed by a number of bug fixes
from upstream, including improvements for a number of Tier-2 architectures.
We also enabled the Upstream LLDB support for FreeBSD improved substantially over the last quarter,
as detailed elsewhere in this report. These improvements will make it into the
FreeBSD base system early in 2021 when LLVM is next updated to 12.0. As also
mentioned elsewhere, we removed the obsolete copy of GDB 6.1.1.
The ELF Tool Chain received a number of bug fixes, as well as support for
There are a number of open issues and opportunities for improvements in various
ELF Tool Chain components. Contributions in these areas are very welcome,
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation (in part)
ENA (Elastic Network Adapter) is the smart NIC available in the
virtualized environment of Amazon Web Services (AWS). The ENA
driver supports multiple transmit and receive queues and can handle
up to 100 Gb/s of network traffic, depending on the instance type
on which it is used.
Completed since the last update:
MFC of the ENA v2.3.0 driver to the FreeBSD 11-STABLE branch
MFC of the ENA v2.3.0 driver to the upcoming FreeBSD 12-STABLE branch
Add feature that allows reading extra ENI (Elastic Network Interface)
metrics about exceeding BW/pps limits
Add SPDX license tag to the ENA driver files
Add Rx offsets (hardware feature) support for the ENA driver
Fix completion descriptors alignment for the ENA device - on some of
the platforms ENA needs alignment to 4k
Introduce full kernel RSS API support.
Allow reconfiguration of the RSS indirection table and hash key
Prototype the driver port to the iflib framework
The Intel Wireless driver update project aims to bring support for
newer chipsets and also get station side to 11ac in a first step.
During the last months connection code between net80211 and the
Linux driver KPI was implemented and scanning is working.
Currently the focus is on sending and driving one state machine
from the other and syncing state between net80211 and the
Linux compat code.
In addition the driver and firmware was updated from upstream sources
to include support for the AX210 hardware generation, which was already
tested to attach.
The hope is that by the time the status report gets published
authentication and association are working and basic data packet passing
will work soon.
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
Since FreeBSD 11, the default In 2019, Ferguson (at Microsoft) published a whitepaper on the design of the
Windows 10 system random number generator. Fenestras X is a The Fenestras X / Windows 10 design is similar to Fortuna, so it is
probably most interesting to describe their differences:
Fenestras X has per-CPU generators seeded from a root generator.
Fortuna only has the root generator. This change eliminates lock
contention between Generators in Fenestras X form a tree from the root RNG. When read,
generators efficiently check if their parent generator has been seeded with
newer entropy. If so, child generators reseed themselves before serving
the read operation. This is integrated with Fenestras X generators are buffered. Requests smaller than some
arbitrary threshold (currently 128 bytes) are served from the buffer.
Bytes read from the buffer are securely erased when they are consumed. The
buffer is refreshed if the request consumes more bytes than were available
in the buffer. This amortizes the cost of rekeying and generating output
from a cryptographic CTR-mode cipher, which is especially slow with AES.
should read Ferguson's whitepaper. It is short and accessible. For more
information on the FreeBSD implementation, please see the SVN commit messages
— especially The Fenestras X implementation is available in Future work and call to action:
Additional design review, implementation review, and testing is welcome.
Additional entropy sources: we could use implementations of some of the
sources described in the whitepaper, in both Fortuna and Fenestras X.
In particular, we're missing a jitter entropy source.
The performance of pf was not as good as it could be. Some investigation with the
invaluable hwpmc tooling eventually pointed to very poor cache behaviour.
The longest_lat_cache.miss event was very informative.
This turned out to be due to pf doing packet and byte counting in states, rules and
interfaces.
The pf code took the very straightforward approach of having a simple uint64_t
variable and incrementing it for every packet. The downside of this is that
when multiple cores do it simultaneously the CPU ends up having to write this
to memory very often, slowing packet processing down greatly. Happily the
counter(9) framework is designed for this exact situation.
One additional complication is that pf uses the same structure definitions for
its internal data as it uses for configuration from user space. To avoid
breaking user space these data structures have been decoupled. That is, where
pf_rule used to be used both to set rules via the ioctl() interface and to
evaluate rules while processing packets we now only use pf_rule for
configuration. The new pf_krule structure is used when evaluating packets.
This allows us to change the pf_krule structure, to change uint64_t to
counter_u64_t, without affecting user space.
Olivier Cochard-Labbé tested the full set of changes, and found (depending on
hardware) substantial improvements in throughput:
Sponsor: Orange Business Services
This work adds a fib lookup framework, allowing to attach custom IP lookup algorithms to any routing table on the fly. It allows to use more performant and efficient lookup algorithms, dynamically selected based on the number of routes in the routing table. Finally, it provides an implementation of modified DIR-24-8 for IPv4/IPv6, speeding IP lookups for the large-fib use case.
This work is a part of a larger effort to modernise the routing subsystem.
FreeBSD runs diverse workloads on both low-end and high-end devices, resulting in different networking/memory requirements for each case.
Small boxes with a couple of routes are different from routers with full-view.
IPv4 lookups are different from IPv6 ones.
Conditions can change dynamically: one may easily reconfigure a system to receive full view instead of a default route.
Currently, FreeBSD uses radix (compressed binary tree) to perform all unicast route manipulations, including routing lookups.
Radix implementation requires storing key length in each item, allowing to use sockaddrs, transparently supporting virtually any address family.
This flexibility comes at a cost: radix is relatively slow, cache-unfriendly and adds locking to the hot path.
Finally, radix is closely coupled to the rest of the system, making it hard to switch to something else.
Modular fib IP lookup framework has been designed to address flexibility and performance requirements.
It keeps system radix as the "control plane" source of truth, simplifying actual algorithms implementation.
It allows dynamic load new algorithms as the kernel modules and abstracts most OS-specific details, reducing algorithm "glue" code.
It automatically adapts to the current system state by picking the best matching algorithm for the routing table on-the-fly.
The following algorithms are provided by default.
IPv4:
bsearch4 (lockless binary search in a specially-crafted IP array), tailored for small-fib (less than 16 routes)
radix4_lockless (lockless immutable radix, re-created on every routing table change), tailored for small-fib (less than 1000 routes)
radix4 (base system radix backend)
dpdk_lpm4 (DPDK DIR24-8-based lookups), lockless datastructure optimised for large-fib ( D27412 )
radix6_lockless: lockless immutable radix, re-created on every routing table change, tailored for small-fib (less than 1000 routes)
radix6: wrapper around existing system radix
dpdk_lpm6: DPDK DIR24-8-based lookups, lockless datastructure optimised for large-fib ( D27412 )
Micro benchmarks (i7-7660U, single-core lookups, 2048 destinations, benchmark code in D27604).
IPv4:
8 routes: radix4: ~20mpps, radix4_lockless: ~25mpps, bsearch4: ~69mpps, dpdk_lpm4: ~67 mpps
700k routes: radix4_lockless: 3.3mpps, dpdk_lpm4: 46mpps
8 routes: radix6_lockless: ~20mpps, dpdk_lpm6: ~70mpps
100k routes: radix6_lockless: ~14mpps, dpdk_lpm6: ~57mpps
+10-15% IPv4: small-fib, bsearch4
+25% IPv4: full-view, dpdk_lpm4
+20% IPv6: full-view, dpdk_lpm6
This work targets implementing scalable routing multipath support and enabling it by default.
It closes the long-standing feature gap with other modern networking OSes.
This work is a part of on-going efforts to modernize the routing subsystem.
Initial FreeBSD multipath implementation, Multipath-related change changes are based on the introduction of the concept of next hops. Nexthops are separate data structures, containing the necessary information to perform packet forwarding. They are shared among the routes, providing more pre-computed cache-efficient data while requiring less memory.
Interested readers can find a more detailed description in D24141. They can find another overview in Nexthop objects talk describing Linux kernel implementation.
Multipath implementation extends the nexthop concept further by introducing nexthop groups. Nexthop group is simply an array of nexthops, compiled according to each nexthop relative weight.
Each route has a pointer to either nexthops or a nexthop group, decoupling lookup algorithm from the routing stack internals. Both nexthops and nexthop groups are immutable and use epoch(9)-backed reclamation.
Nexthop objects (D24232) [ DONE ]
Introduction of nexthop objects [ DONE ]
Conversion of old KPI users to the new one [ DONE ]
Conversion of route caching to nexthop caching [ DONE ]
Conversion of struct Eliminating old lookup KPI and hiding struct rtentry [ DONE ]
Multipath routing (D26449) [ DONE ]
Switch control plane customers to use (rtentry, nexthop) pairs instead of rtentry to allow multipath changes happen transparently [ DONE ]
Introduce nexthop group objects [ DONE ]
Add multipath support for the rib (routing information base) manipulation functions [ DONE ]
Add flowid generation for outbound traffic to enable load balancing [ DONE ]
Routing daemon support
Add net/bird support for multipath routing [ NOT STARTED ]
Add explicit nexthop/nexthop groups control via rtsock [ IN PROGRESS ]
Work with FRR developers to add nexthop-based route control [ NOT STARTED ]
This project implements a driver stack for Thunderbolt3 and USB4. These
technologies differ radically from USB3 and prior, and require completely new
drivers for the host interface adapter and topology as well as configuration
management layers. At their most fundamental level, a TBT3/USB4 topology
appears as PCI bridges and buses, and attached devices appear as either PCI
devices, USB3 devices, or DisplayPort devices. Early TBT3 controllers don't
even appear in the system topology unless a TBT3 device is plugged in. These
early TBT3 systems also implement a security policy meant to protect against
unauthorised or malicious devices, though that scheme has been proven to not
be effective and has been removed from later TBT3 and USB4 implementations.
Besides security control, the TBT3/USB4 stack controls power management and
topology hotplug.
The FreeBSD driver currently supports Alpine Ridge and Ice Lake TBT3
controllers, and can perform basic security validation and topology awareness.
USB4 support as well as full connection manager and power management support is
still being worked on. The current driver will be committed to FreeBSD in
early January 2021.
Though this work is not sponsored, it has been done with the encouragement and
support of the FreeBSD Foundation and Netgate.
POSIX AIO is a facility for asynchronous I/O to files and devices. FreeBSD's
implementation is efficient, especially when writing to disk files. But a
long-standing defect in the standard API is a lack of vectored functions. That
is, there is no asynchronous equivalent of This quarter I added two new syscalls: Zstandard (ZSTD) is a modern high-performance compression
algorithm designed to provide the compression ratios of gzip
while offering much better performance. ZSTD has been adopted
in FreeBSD for a number of other uses, including compressing
kernel crash dumps, as a replacement for gzip or bzip for
compressing log files, and for future versions of pkg(8).
This effort to complete the integration of ZSTD into ZFS is
funded by the FreeBSD Foundation.
During the four quarter the final tasks in the project to integrate
ZSTD into OpenZFS were completed.
Completed milestones in this project:
Integrated ZSTD in the FreeBSD boot loader (Warner Losh imp@freebsd.org)
Added a section to the FreeBSD Handbook ZFS chapter explaining ZSTD
Wrote a FreeBSD Journal Article explaining considerations when selecting a suitable compression level
Monitored for bug reports after the changes were integrated into -CURRENT
compressed with zstd or zstd-fast. For comparison, a standard installation of
FreeBSD 13 (without debug symbols) uncompressed is 1175 MB, and when compressed
with LZ4, is only 570 MB (2.15x) but when compressed with ZSTD's default level
of 3 is only 417 MB (3.00x), and with the maximum level, 19,
only 374 MB (3.36x).
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation In the interest of seeing the arm64 architecture promoted to Tier-1 status, an
effort was undertaken to test building and serving of release and patch-level
updates via Added this quarter was arm64 support for the new Finally, work was done to add the necessary machine-dependent bits for the
kernel's Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
Contact: freebsd-riscv Mailing List The FreeBSD/RISC-V project is providing support for running FreeBSD on the
RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture.
This quarter saw a number of improvements and bugfixes from committers and
contributors alike. A few small items from this quarter:
Added riscv64 LINT kernel config plus CI job ( Switched Created Improved SBI extension support
runtime issues with large dependencies Finally, December saw the arrival of the first The venerable ping command has until now only supported IPv4. A separate
utility, ping6, was originally written by WIDE as a research tool to develop
IPv6. As a research tool, it didn't need IPv4 support, but since then, it's
been put to practical use by countless developers and sysadmins everywhere.
The ping/ping6 split has been a perennial complaint. It's annoying that two
separate commands are needed, even though they do almost exactly the same
thing. This quarter, I merged Ján Sučan's GSoC work, which merged the two
commands. Now ping can handle either protocol, based on the -4 and -6
switches, or based on the format of the target. A ping6 hard link is provided
for backwards compatibility.
Sponsor: Google Summer of Code In search of new contributors an article was published in the
September/October 2020 issue of the FreeBSD Journal about How to Become a
FreeBSD Translator.
During the whole year we received new contributors to the effort; numbers are
still growing and we are receiving translations almost daily on our Weblate
platform.
11 languages (1 new language)
116 registered users (69 new users since 2020q1)
Chinese (Simplified) (zh_CN)
Chinese (Traditional) (zh_TW)
Dutch (nl_NL) - Added
French (fr_FR)
German (de_DE)
Italian (it_IT)
Norwegian (nb_NO)
Persian (fa_IR)
Portuguese (pt_BR)
Spanish (es_ES)
Turkish (tr-TR)
And please, help promote this effort on your local user group, we always need
more volunteers.
The Doc New Generation project is finished. The switch-over date will be Saturday, January 23rd.
The objective of using Hugo and AsciiDoctor is to reduce the
learning curve and let people to start quickly contributing to our documentation
system. Other benefits of using Hugo is that we can use other
technologies aside from AsciiDoctor, like MarkDown, RST, Pandoc, etc.
You can find a work in progress on updating the FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer to Hugo/AsciiDoctor.
The KDE on FreeBSD project aims to package all of the software
produced by the KDE Community for the FreeBSD ports tree.
The software includes a full desktop environment called KDE Plasma,
graphics applications, instant-messengers, a video-editing suite,
as well as a tea timer
and hundreds of other applications that can be used on
any FreeBSD machine.
The KDE team (kde@) is part of desktop@ and x11@ as well,
building the software stack to make FreeBSD beautiful and usable
as a daily-driver graphics-based desktop machine.
This quarter the kde@ team:
Landed the October, November and December updates to KDE Applications
and to KDE Plasma
Landed all of the bi-weekly KDE Frameworks releases
Updated Qt to 5.12.2, including Qt5 WebEngine
Followed up with two cmake patch releases
Followed up one ninja patch release
updates and a new Matrix client from the KDE community
as well, which we typically fail to administer and write about
so this report is fairly short with mostly big-ticket items.
We had fun, we chased the things that are most useful to
us, and got through the year. Here's to next year with
actually seeing FreeBSD people again.
I (adridg@) would like to especially thank Kai Knoblich (kai@) for chasing WebEngine:
that's a huge and painful codebase to deal with, and here we
are, all up-to-date.
The FreeBSD Office team works on a number of office-related software suites
and tools such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Work during this quarter focused on providing the latest stable release of
LibreOffice suite and companion apps to all FreeBSD users.
Latest and quarterly ports branches got a series of updates of the LibreOffice suite
from 7.0.1 thru 7.0.4 releases, compilation patches for all Tier 1 architectures,
and updates of all companion libraries. Some of our local and critical to build patches
were sent to and accepted by upstream.
Meanwhile, our WIP repository was moved to new home under official github.org/freebsd resources.
The WIP repository also has a major update with development versions of the LibreOffice suite,
version 7.1.0.0.beta1 for now. Release will be planned in March, 2021.
We are looking for people to help the project.
All unstable work with LibreOffice snapshots is staged in our WIP repository. It has been some time since the last report on the status of FreeBSD
ports on non-x86 architectures.
Traditionally, we have referred to these as "tier-2 architectures".
However, aarch64 and powerpc64 have aspirations for tier-1. Also,
although riscv64 is currently tier-3, it has aspirations for tier-2.
The big news is that, thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation (and the
assistance of Philip Paeps), FreeBSD now has two new aarch64 boxes,
which have replaced the previous, badly-aging, alternatives. For
the first time since August, we once again have up-to-date aarch64
packages.
Thanks to the above, and the work of Emmanuel Vadot and others, some
bitrot in aarch64 ports has been reversed.
Piotr Kubaj (pkubaj@) continues QA on powerpc64 (big-endian) ports.
Almost everything that is buildable now does so. The Linux ports and
some of the graphics drivers are excluded. Otherwise, powerpc64 is
up to parity with amd64.
Piotr has also begun the task of bringing powerpc64le (little-endian)
up to parity with powerpc64. Although several of the powerpc64 src
committers (and your author) have a fondness for big-endian, the fact
is that our most feasible path to getting graphics capability anywhere
near parity with x86 is via the little-endian choice.
Mark Linimon (linimon@) has begun his own test-builds of ports on
riscv64 just to ascertain overall buildability. Surprisingly, many
ports do indeed build. Thanks to contributions from several people
already working on riscv64, including John Baldwin (jhb@) with an LLVM
fix, we are now able to build around 20,000 packages. NB: these packages
are unofficial and not guaranteed.
The work of Kyle Evans (kevans@) on chasing bitrot in qemu has been key
to work on both aarch64 and riscv64. All users are encouraged to
update to the latest version.
Unfortunately mips/mips64 are badly in need of work. The fact that
devel/libffi does not build on mips64 blocks nearly half the ports
tree.
We need users of riscv64 to actually test the packages that have been
built (so far, they have only been tested for buildability). Contact
linimon@ if you are interested.
If anyone is still using mips/mips64 for other than the most trivial
tasks, we would welcome patches.
As of January 2020, Python 2.7 reached its end-of-life after several years of extensions.
Portmgr subsequently started the project of phasing Python 2.7 out of the Ports Tree by tagging lang/python27 for expiration on 2020-12-31.
Last year, some 740 ports were removed from the Ports Tree as they were incompatible with Python 3, mostly because these ports were either unmaintained or abandoned upstream.
During this process, there were several instances of an upstream still being active but where the upstream have not had the resources yet to upgrade their software to Python 3.
A noticeable example of this is www/chromium and derived software, such as devel/electron7 and www/qt5-webengine.
Portmgr is currently looking into ideas on how to minimize the impact of Python 2.7 on the Ports Tree while keeping Chromium and KDE 5 functional.
As various software packages on the FreeBSD cluster itself also use Python 2.7, portmgr started coordinating with affected parties on upgrade plans.
Currently there are 40 ports left that directly depend on Python 2.7 to build or run, and an unknown number of indirect ports.
All those ports should eventually be upgraded to Python 3 or be removed too, ideally some time this year.
Portmgr is currently cleaning up (unused) Python 2.7 code from ports which do not need Python 2.7.
New ports should not be using Python 2.7 anymore, i.e. they should not have USES=python but instead something like USES=python:3.6+.
So while this all looks rather invasive, it is not feasible to keep Python 2.7 around for much longer.
Over time security vulnerabilities might show up which will likely no longer be fixed, because the Python Software Foundation no longer supports Python 2.7.
Other problems are that the software gets outdated over time and thereby loses its usefulness as part of a development kit.
Help needed:
Coordinate with postmaster on isolating or migrating away from mail/mailman
Coordinate with clusteradm (?) for upgrading svnweb and our wiki
The FreeBSD Xfce team (xfce@) work to ensure the Xfce desktop environment
is maintained and fully functional on FreeBSD.
This quarter the Xfce team are pleased to welcome Xfce 4.16
to the FreeBSD ports tree!
Some of the highlights of this Xfce 4.16 release:
The panel now supports dark mode (enabled by default) and an animated autohide transition
A new panel plugin dubbed "statustray" which combines both StatusNotifier and legacy Systray items
Fractional scaling support was added to the display dialog (helpful on HiDPI displays)
A new tab in the "About Xfce" dialog shows basic system information like CPU or GPU type
The settings manager has improved search and filter capabilities
All settings dialogs now use window decorations drawn by Gtk (client side decorations)
The "Mime Settings" and "Preferred Applications" dialogs were merged into the "Default Applications" dialog
The Thunar file manager now supports pause for copy/move operations, and queued file transfer
Generating thumbnails for .epub (e-book format) was added to tumbler
A new default wallpaper and icon theme
The application finder now allows for sorting applications by "frecency" - a combination of frequency and recency
Dropped GTK2 support from all components and plugins
Due to GTK2 and libxfce4gui support being removed, some panel plugins
and libraries will be removed since they no longer work with Xfce 4.16:
deskutils/orage
deskutils/xfce4-volumed
print/xfce4-print
science/xfce4-equake-plugin
x11/xfce4-embed-plugin
x11/xfce4-quicklauncher-plugin
x11/xfce4-wmdock-plugin
x11-toolkits/libxfce4gui
cause files from the libexo package to be absent after upgrade.
To avoid the issue, upgrade the libexo package by itself before
the rest of the packages, as described in UPDATING entry 20210102.
Thanks also to riggs@, Olivier Duchateau duchateau.olivier@gmail.com,
woodsb02@, Sergey Dyatko sergey.dyatko@gmail.com, and ehaupt@ for their help and
contributions.
VMWare is a company that produces a commercial hypervisor known
as vSphere ESXi for AMD64 and i386. In early October, they
released a tech demo hypervisor for ARM Aarch64 which runs
on ARM ServerReady hardware as well as single board computers
such as the Raspberry Pi 4b (4GB and 8GB models). This new
hypervisor is known as VMWare ESXi-ARM Fling.
Since the release of ESXi-ARM Fling, work has been done on
both the hypervisor as well as FreeBSD, to make the two more
compatible with one another. Even though the work was
initially done to make these two work better together, the
work overall has been more general purpose for FreeBSD
in support of both bare-metal Aarch64 installations as well
as running FreeBSD under other hypervisors such as QEMU.
An example of others building off of this work is When ESXi-ARM Fling first released, to get FreeBSD to work
under it, the process required taking the Aarch64 premade
VMDK file, uploading it to the hypervisor storage, and then
running a series of CLI commands to convert the disk image
to a supported file format. The initial work done was to
get the FreeBSD Aarch64 ISO bootable and with the required
drivers to complete the install process. With this, users
can do fresh installs of FreeBSD Aarch64 using the same
methods they would use for AMD64 or i386 under ESXi.
The CD-ROM driver's inclusion into FreeBSD 12 barely missed
the cut-off date for 12.2-RELEASE. However, the very first
12.2-STABLE build published for Aarch64 includes the CD-ROM
driver. FreeBSD 13-CURRENT also includes this driver. Due
to this, only 12-STABLE and 13-CURRENT support fresh CD ISO
installations.
The next step was getting the major pieces of virtual
hardware working. This included adding more USB controllers,
the vmxnet virtual network card, and pvscsi para-virtual
SCSI drivers added to Aarch64 GENERIC.
There is a known bug in ESXi-ARM Fling's virtual UEFI that
prevents booting from pvscsi, so for the time being the boot
device must be on a virtual disk attached to the SATA
controller inside the VM.
ESXi-ARM Fling uses a new virtual SVGA device which
currently does not have working drivers on any platform, as
the specifications are not finalized yet. Due to this, only
efi-fb/scfb is available for console and Xorg for the time
being.
The VMCI driver is currently not compiling at all. This
driver has sections of x86 assembly code that will need to be
converted over to ARM. This would be a great area for
anyone to look into that is experienced with converting assembly
language!
At ESXi-ARM Fling launch, there was a hypervisor bug
preventing more than 1 vCPU from working inside FreeBSD.
This has since been fixed, allowing up to 8 vCPUs. Going
beyond this requires a a patch to FreeBSD,
which was authored by VMWare developer Cypou.
Things that are currently fixed/working:
Booting from CD ISO image
Virtual USB 2.0 controller
Virtual USB 3.1 controller
Virtual USB Keyboard
Virtual USB Mouse
vmxnet3 Virtual Network Card
pvscsi Para-Virtual SCSI Storage Controller
open-vm-tools Guest Virtual Machine Tools
Xorg Enhanced Mouse Driver (untested)
Multi-Core CPU (up to 8 vCPUs inside guest)
Booting from pvscsi
Xorg SVGA Driver
vmci Virtual Machine Communication Interface
Multi-Core CPU (more than 8 vCPUs)
collection easier by having a high quality virtualization
environment for development and testing. This environment
has already been used to update the ZeroTier port and
Facebook's RocksDB used in the MariaDB port.
FreeBSD now has a Discord chat! Discussion about FreeBSD
on Aarch64 in general takes place in our
#embedded channel. Despite
the name, we discuss all levels of ARM development, from
large servers, to virtualized environments, all the way down
to single board computers.
Bastille is an open-source system for automating deployment and management of
containerised applications on FreeBSD.
Bastille Templates automate container setup allowing you to easily reproduce
containers as needed.
Bastille is available in ports as In Q4 2020 Bastille merged some exciting new features. Changes include:
full adoption of the previously experimental Bastillefile format
new default templates included and applied by default
support for -CURRENT jails on -CURRENT hosts
support for 32bit containers on 64bit hosts
support in templates for dynamic arguments & defining variables
over two dozen bug fixes and general improvements
upstream was updated to CheriBSD extends FreeBSD to implement memory protection and software
compartmentalization features supported by the CHERI instruction-set
extensions. There are three architectural implementations of the
CHERI protection model: CHERI-MIPS, CHERI-RISC-V, and Arm's forthcoming
experimental Morello processor (due late 2021). CheriBSD is a research
operating system with a stable baseline implementation into which
various new research features have been, or are currently being, merged:
Arm Morello - In October, we released a developer preview of CheriBSD
ported to Arm's Morello architecture. This release supports a
dynamically linked runtime and is generally functional. It was cut
from a development branch and work is in progress to merge the contents
of this branch with the CheriBSD main line. We anticipate producing a
new release from this branch in early 2021.
Kernel spatial memory safety (pure-capability kernel) - The current
CheriBSD kernel is a hybrid C program where only pointers to userspace
are CHERI capabilities. This ensures that the kernel follows the
intent of the application runtime and cannot be used to defeat
bounds on application pointers. We have developed and will soon
merge a pure-capability kernel where all pointers in the kernel are
appropriately bounded capabilities. This vastly reduces the opportunity
for buffer overflows. This spatial memory safety lays the
groundwork for future work such as device driver compartmentalization
and kernel temporal safety.
Userspace heap temporal memory safety (Cornucopia) - CHERI
capabilities provide the necessary features to enable
robust and efficient revocation of freed pointers. With Cornucopia
we have implemented a light-weight revocation framework providing
protection from use-after-reallocation bugs with an average cost below
2%. We aim to bring these overheads down further over the next year and
merge this functionality into the mainline CheriBSD.
Syncing with upstream FreeBSD - We spent considerable time this
quarter catching up with FreeBSD-CURRENT. As of the beginning of
December, we had caught up. Merges are currently paused while we
work to land Morello and pure-capability kernel changes. In the
interim, we have performed a test merge between our tree based on
the legacy export of the FreeBSD tree to git and the new FreeBSD
git repository. The process went smoothly and is expected to have
few impacts.
We have been working on updating the arm64 bhyve from Politehnica
University of Bucharest to have it committed to FreeBSD. We have been
upstreaming initial changes to help support this.
The Embedded Lab Project's goal is to make SBCs and other devices more
accessible to developers. Despite SBCs often being inexpensive, it is
not inexpensive to maintain them, in terms of the cost of time to keep
them up to date, infrastructure to support them, etc.
The goal of this project is to support and enhance the existing CI work
but also make it easier for developers to test their code and changes
on one, or many different boards.
Once the work is [mostly] complete, I will host a lab that will be freely
available to everyone who has a FreeBSD.org account. Information about
this will be sent once it is closer to launch.
The core part of the architecture is each time a board is reserved via
the API, a new jail is created which contains the serial console tty,
an interface for internet access, and an interface that is connected
to the board's ethernet port (assuming it has one). This allows a
clean system for each run, and allows complete control over the network
interfaces to support netbooting and other development. The jail will
have a basic set of FreeBSD packages installed that matches the board.
Part of the API will also allow power cycling the board to aid in
debugging. This part is relatively extensible, so adding additional
modules to provide additional support should not be difficult.
The API includes support for running interactive commands in the jail.
This will make it easy to script control of the environment, such as
directly running an expect script against the serial console, or even
just running a script in the jail.
The work is progressing well, and currently a single board, a Pine64
A64-LTS, is integrated and working. Board reserves and releases are
working, along with the ability to run commands in the jail via the API.
Power control is functional, and is currently using a PoE smart switch
to control power.
Work has stalled on being able to use the SDWire
with an environment due to power issues. USB is not made for power
isolation, which is causing issues w/ power control. The existing
board, the A64-lTS, is using a USB serial console adapter that is
opto-isolated, ensuring that there is no problems w/ power control. But
there I have not found a solution for high speed USB. I believe that
cutting the VBUS (power) line of a USB cable would allow fine grain
power control, but tests have not been conducted yet.
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
+
Daniel Ebdrup Jensen, on behalf of the quarterly team.
COVID-19 Impact to the Foundation
Partnerships and Commercial User Support
Fundraising Efforts
OS Improvements
Continuous Integration and Quality Assurance
Supporting FreeBSD Infrastructure
FreeBSD Advocacy and Education
Legal/FreeBSD IP
Work in progress:
Contact: IRC #freebsd-ci channel on EFNet
New jobs added:
Work in progress:
Please see freebsd-testing@ related tickets for more WIP information, and don't hesitate to join the effort!
Compared to the third quarter, the PR statistics mostly stayed the same. There
During the last quarter, a new virtual category was added: "education" for ports
As always, antoine@ was busy running exp-runs, 37 this quarter, testing:
The following component(s) have yet to be claimed. Some replacement prospects
The following component(s) have a principal investigator to coordinate work.
SO_PASSCRED
setsockopt(2) support, PR_SETDUMPABLE
and PR_GETDUMPABLE
prctl(2) flags, and also CLONE_FS
and CLONE_FILES
handling. This,
along with some more cleanups and improvements, leads to working Linux
Chromium; it has been tested with Netflix and Spotify clients. It still
requires three flags (--no-sandbox --no-zygote --in-process-gpu
)
to be passed on the command line to work around missing functionality, though. Also,
the name_to_handle_at(2) and open_by_handle_at(2) syscalls are now supported.
There are also much better debug messages for unrecognized socket options.
-fstack-clash-protection
flag to enable compiler
mitigation for the "stack clash" vulnerability and are coordinating with
upstream.
readelf -z
(handling compressed ELF debug sections) and an improvement
to addr2line to report based on labels when other debug information is not
available. We are working to upstream these changes to the ELF Tool Chain
project.
Work in progress:
Sponsor: Amazon.com Inc
Newer Intel Wireless device support
random(4)
implementation is based on the
Fortuna (2003) design by Ferguson and Schneier. At a high level, Fortuna
accumulates entropy into a series of pools, and reseeds a single generator from
some of these pools according to some criteria.
random(4)
implementation based on the published Windows 10 design.
There are other important differences, and readers interested in system CSPRNGs
random(4)
readers running on multiple cores.
arc4random(9)
, as well as
userspace arc4random(3)
.
r366620
.
CURRENT
, but disabled by
default. (The default remains Fortuna.) At this time, you must set the
RANDOM_FENESTRASX
option in your custom kernel configuration and rebuild your
kernel to use the new design. There are no known bugs or weaknesses relative
to the Fortuna implementation.
Background
Implementation overview
Overview
IPv6:
Performance changes
IPv6:
Forwarding performance:
Status
Background
RADIX_MPATH
, was added back in 2008. It was based on the radix changes and represented multipath routes as a linked-list of chained paths. It was not fully finished and tested, resulting in many crash reports.
Implementation overview
Status
rtentry
field access to nhop field access [ DONE ]
pwritev(2)
and preadv(2)
. A
common workaround is to use lio_listio(2)
instead. However, that has several
drawbacks. It's more effort for the programmer, it might return early with
only a subset of the operations completed, it requires more total syscalls, and
there is no guarantee that the operations will complete in-order.
aio_writev(2)
and aio_readv(2)
.
They work just like their non-vectored counterparts, but they take an array of
iovec
elements, just like pwritev
and preadv
. You can't use them in
combination with lio_listio
, but that could be added in the future.
With all of these changes in place, it is now possible to boot from pools
freebsd-update(1)
. The conclusion of this investigation is that
the process works with very few changes required; a small tweak is needed for
the update build scripts, and a minor bugfix in the bsdiff(1)
utility was
committed. The hope is that the project can begin providing security updates for
the platform with the release of FreeBSD 13.0, removing the requirement that
users compile these updates from source.
ossl(4)
crypto driver. This
driver provides acceleration of SHA-1 and SHA-2 cryptographic operations by
leveraging OpenSSL's assembly routines. These routines will detect and use
optimized instructions, as supported by the CPU. This support benefits userland
applications via the cryptodev(4)
device, and in-kernel consumers of the
crypto(9)
interface, such as the IPSec Authentication Header protocol and
kernel TLS.
gdb(4)
interface. This enables remote debugging of the kernel with
gdb(1)
over a serial line.
Contact: IRC #freebsd-riscv on freenode
Further progress was made this quarter in building ports for RISC-V. Build and
FreeBSD-head-riscv64-LINT
)
emulators/riscv-isa-sim
to official upstream and updated to
2020-11-02 snapshot
sysutils/u-boot-sifive-fu540
, a u-boot port for the HiFive
Unleashed
devel/python-setuptools
and
devel/glib20
were fixed, enabling several thousand skipped ports. There is
some in-progress work to address failures in other significant ports, such as
devel/nspr
and databases/sqlite3
. By addressing some of these small-effort
issues, some 15000+ ports can now be built for the platform with
qemu-user-static.
riscv64
weekly development
snapshots. This includes the usual memstick installer, a virtual machine image,
and a generic SD card image. There are still some minor tweaks to be made, but
this marks a significant step forward for the platform, and lowers the barrier
of entry for running a FreeBSD/RISC-V system. This also means that FreeBSD 13
will likely be the first downloadable release for the architecture. For those
interested in trying out the VM image for themselves, see
Q4 2020 Status
Languages
We want to thank everyone that contributed, translating or reviewing documents.
There was lots of infrastructural work and individual application
The open bugs list
contains all filed issues which need some attention.
Patches, comments and objections are always welcome in the mailing list and bugzilla.
Tasklist:
For further details, refer to the Xfce 4.16 upstream release announcement.
WARNING: Unfortunately this update can reveal a bug in pkg which can
Things that are still broken:
With all of this done, it has made working on the Aarch64 ports
What is Bastille?
sysutils/bastille
.
Q4 2020 Status
More details about Bastille Releases.
config
sub-command
0.8.202010101
(latest).
ports (sysutils/bastille
) was updated to 0.7.20200414
.
FreshPorts, and its sister site, FreshSource, have reported upon FreeBSD commits for 20 years. They cover all commits, not just ports.
FreshPorts tracks the commits and extracts data from the port Makefiles to create a database of information useful to both port developers and port users.
For example, https://www.freshports.org/security/acme.sh/ shows the history of this port, back to its creation in May 2017.
The work to become git-ready is mostly complete. Both src and doc commits are flowing into devgit.freshports.org. Some work is required on various issues, but nothing that stops the flow of commits into the database.
Amazon have donated enough to try FreshPorts on AWS. I need help with the following:
getting IPv6 working
working with RDS
Thank you
Contact: #helloSystem
on irc.freenode.net
, mirrored to #helloSystem:matrix.org
on Matrix
helloSystem is FreeBSD preconfigured as a desktop operating system with a focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability. Its design follows the “Less, but better” philosophy. It is intended as a system for “mere mortals”, welcoming to switchers from a world in which a global menu bar exists, the Command key is used rather than Control, and applications are contained in .app bundles.
helloSystem grew out of frustration with usability shortcomings of existing open source desktop environments. FreeBSD was chosen as the base because it offers one consistent base system rather than a fragmented landscape of distributions lacking a common platform.
helloSystem aims at providing a "it just works" out-of-the-box user experience in which a non-technical user can just use the system without ever opening the terminal, without having to configure anything, and without ever seeing white text on a black background scroll by during system boot. Technologies embraced include DNS-SD/Zeroconf (also known as Bonjour), IPP Everywhere (also known as AirPrint), eSCL (also known as AirScan), etc.
Prerelease installable Live ISO images are available.
Help is needed in a number of areas, especially:
FreeBSD/kernel: allowing to put the system into a read-only disk image with a writable overlay, e.g., using unionfs
Qt, Python: writing various easy-to use frontends for FreeBSD/OpenZFS functionality, e.g., Disk Utility.app
Testing and bugfixing
K8S-bhyve is opensource project concentrating primarily on deploying and use of kubernetes on FreeBSD/bhyve in a more agile and more comfortable manner. We are going to provide distributed multi-DC environment or just stand-alone clusters with native PV/PVC support.
For 2020Q4 we made and published a k8s-bhyve image which you might install with ISO/memstick, as well as with bsdinstall.
Since our last status report a few months ago, the FreeBSD ports tree has seen the addition of the Choria (sysutils/choria) orchestration tool, and the Puppet Platform 7 with the Puppet Agent (sysutils/puppet7), Puppet Server (sysutils/puppetserver7) and PuppetDB (databases/puppetdb7).
Older versions of Puppet (5 and 6) are still in the ports tree, allowing a smooth transition, but please note that Puppet 5 will reach EOL soon, and as it is not compatible with the recent ecosystem provided by FreeBSD (i.e. it is not compatible with the latest version of Ruby and depends on old FreeBSD primitives not available anymore), it is recommended to update at least to Puppet 6 as soon as possible.
Ports depending on Puppet (e.g. sysutils/rubygem-bolt) have been updated to add options allowing to choose which version of Puppet to depend on. For now, the default is Puppet 6, but we plan to switch the default to Puppet 7 in a few weeks, probably when Puppet 5 will have reached EOL.
FreeBSD's nfsstat(8) utility provides a wealth of statistics, but I wanted to monitor them with Prometheus. Screen-scraping the --libxo output would've been possible, but some of the stats are preprocessed in a way that interferes with my Prometheus processing. So I wrote a separate utility that publishes the raw stats provided by the kernel. Along the way I found and fixed a few bugs in nfsstat, too. If anybody is interested, I can add a port for it.
Sponsor: Axcient
Entries from the various official and semi-official teams, as found in the Administration Page.
Projects that span multiple categories, from the kernel and userspace to the Ports Collection or external projects.
Updates to kernel subsystems/features, driver support, filesystems, and more.
Updating platform-specific features and bringing in support for new hardware platforms.
.Changes affecting the base system and programs in it.
Changes affecting the Ports Collection, whether sweeping changes that touch most of the tree, or individual ports themselves.
Noteworthy changes in the documentation tree, in manpages, or in external books/documents.
Objects that defy categorization.
Many projects build upon &os; or incorporate components of &os; into their project. As these projects may be of interest to the broader &os; community, we sometimes include brief updates submitted by these projects in our quarterly report. The &os; project makes no representation as to the accuracy or veracity of any claims in these submissions.