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Technical Contact: Robert Watson The FreeBSD FAT implementation, msdosfs, offers scope for a number of
projects: It is unclear to what extent the last of these items, arguably the most
useful, will require modifying surrounding infrastructure such as BIO,
GEOM, and VM. Requirements: A performance evaluation of the split cache (as is) and an unified cache
(like e.g. NetBSD) would be interesting. More details in
this mail to the hackers mailing list. Additional improvements are
welcome too. Requirements: Fix MDFS lockups when using async operation modes. Revision 1.115 of
md.c has a discussion of the problem. Requirements: Technical contact: Alexander Leidinger At the moment FreeBSD includes a memory-based file system called mfs.
mfs is just an implementation of the regular ffs - designed for
persistent storage - on top of the (volatile) virtual memory system.
This means that it uses the same data structures as the on-disk
implementation, rendering less than optimal performance and memory
usage. With tmpfs, FreeBSD would gain a memory file system which uses
less memory and is faster. Goals: Rohit Jalan has begun porting
the NetBSD tmpfs to FreeBSD. The source and some benchmarks can be found
here. Before it can enter the
tree locking has to be added. There are also some bugs to take
care of. Rohit has no time to work on it in the next months, any volunteer is
welcome to continue his work. Requirements:
In some recent operating systems, it is common that crashes are automatically reported to its vendor, which is very helpful for finding hidden problems that can not be easily triggered by usual test cases. Newer GNOME applications also has similar functionalities.
This project would consist two parts. One is some improvements over the current savecore rc.d script to teach it how to collect necessary information (of course, automatic reporting has to be explicitly enabled by individual system administrators, and should have at least three options: not to send out anything at all as a default, send out after administrator confirmation, and automatically send all necessary information)
Another part is the server side one, which will keep a database of backtraces where similar (call stack minus addresses) reports are kept together and be considered as a "vote", to make it possible for developers and release engineers to focus on the most commonly triggered issues.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Kris Kennaway
setproctitle() calls are a serious performance bottleneck in a default pgsql configuration (they are called at least once per query, which might be thousands of times per second - I measured a performance impact of about 33% on sysbench).
One idea for avoiding the syscall (and global sysctl lock) overhead for this kind of thing would be a memory page shared between kernel and userland which libc could read/write to access things like the process title. There are potentially many other data values that could be optimized by a similar method. This is presumably a well established technique in other OSes.
This project requires mentoring/review/planning with someone with significant VM experience to make sure this approach works properly. Done incorrectly, this could result in fairly massive security holes, performance issues (perhaps not visible in simple benchmarks), etc.
Requirements:
The current kernel statistics do not know how to calculate the CPU usage of threaded processes. A volunteer has to understand the current statistics model, design a new statistics model and implement it. This problem only occurs with M:N threading on libpthread.
Requirements:
Technical contacts: Mathieu Arnold, Brad Davis
The sysctl(8) utility retrieves kernel states and allows processes with appropriate privilege to change kernel states. On request it is able to display description lines which document the kernel state. Unfortunately not every sysctl is documented. This task is possible to share with other volunteers. mat has done some development in Perforce, in the mat_sysctl_cleanup branch.
Requirements:
Technical contacts: Alexander Leidinger, Ariff Abdullah
Requirements:
Technical contact: John Birrell
URL: Perforce repository, DTrace for FreeBSD
DTrace is a dynamic tracing facility designed by Sun Microsystems and released in Solaris 10. They have since released the major part of Solaris under the banner of OpenSolaris and the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) 1.0. John Birrell has created an initial port and should be contacted for information on what tasks remain to be done.
Requirements:
A debug kernel is not able to show stack traces with cross exceptions anymore. This is because we do not emit any dwarf2 call frame information for any assembler code, since gdb switched to the dwarf2 format. A volunteer should annotate every assembler file [*.[sS]] with dwarf2 call frame information.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Sam Leffler
Kernel modules may have dynamic references created during operation. For example net80211 key entries reference functions in the crypto module that implements the key's cipher. Presently there is no standard mechanism for expressing this dependency so that module unloading is disallowed; instead modules must track references and implement their own semantics. This task is to define and implement a general mechanism for tracking these references and use them in handling module unload requests.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Luigi Rizzo
Recently, a project was started to compile linux device drivers on FreeBSD through an in-kernel emulation layer, which implements part of the linux kernel API on top of the FreeBSD kernel API. The initial implementation was good enough to support a few USB webcam drivers, and is documented here.
The goal of this project is to extend this emulation layer to cover more of the linux kernel API. Two areas that need further work are the API used by network/communication device drivers (e.g. many USB wired and wireless device drivers; telephony cards), and the API used by memory-mapped devices and drivers (e.g. analog or DVB video acquisition cards, both USB and PCI).
A Summer of Code applicant would be required to choose a significant set of extensions to the existing work (e.g. one of those indicated above), and select at least two linux device drivers to be ported to FreeBSD using the newly implemented functions.
Before the start of the project a Summer of Code applicant is expected to have studied the above URL and understood the emulation technique used, and to have/acquire access to at least some of the hardware involved, so that actual functionality tests can be performed in addition to the compile tests.
Technical contact: Alexander Leidinger
The ktrace(1) facility allows to monitor what running processes do. It allows to determine if a process is stuck or if it still does useful work. The goal of this item is to look at the kernel interfaces, add missing "pieces" (e.g. syscall's) to the ktrace output and to extend the output with "decoded" (translating hex/dec values into human readable information, e.g. O_RDONLY in the case of open(2)) information. Some work has been completed and committed, but a few parts still remains. More information is available here.
Also, a related project would be to modify ktrace to write to pipes. Currently the ktrace infrastructure requires the dump output go to a file. It would be useful to be able to instead have it write to pipe, or in fact any type of file descriptor.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Attilio Rao
The instruction pair sysenter and sysexit can contribute to certain performance improvements when a syscall is made on IA32. There is however no implementation of this available for FreeBSD, so a volunteer would have to add sysenter/sysexit support to the kernel. This needs to be properly evaluated and benchmarked though, so a complete implementation should therefore also contain informative benchmarks which shows a clear improvement in performance. It is also important to stress the fact that this project is of research quality and measures should be taken to ensure that no regressions are introduced. Another interesting extension to this project would be to investigate and evaluate the possibility to use mmx/xmm registers to gather syscalls arguments. David Xu has some work in progress in his sysenter branch in the perforce repository.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Philip Paeps
The kernel is lacking a generic input device layer analogous to the Linux 'input core' layer. Having such a layer would make it easy to write e.g. touchscreen support (Philip Paeps has some work-in-progress regarding pointer devices and touchscreen support, but not enough time to also cover keyboard support or other generic features).
Requirements:
Technical contacts: Nate Lawson, Bruno Ducrot
Implement a range of predictive algorithms (and perhaps design your own) and profile them for power usage and performance loss. The best algorithm will save the most power while losing the least performance. This has been discussed on the ACPI mailing list and Bruno Ducrot has some early patches.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Luigi Rizzo
The USB stack in FreeBSD suffers from a few problems, including lack of functionality (e.g. isochronous support for USB2 devices), lack of documentation (most of the code is undocumented and derives from other BSD implementations), lack of support (there is not, to our knowledge, active development of the stack), and the fact that it is still running under the Giant lock.
There is an alternate USB stack under development but it also suffers from its own share of problems: while it supports isochronous transfers for USB2 and does not run under Giant, it is also almost completely undocumented, and it exports a different API from the current one, which in turn causes portability problems for device drivers that run on top of USB. Additionally, it is not in widespread use.
The goal of this project is to improve the FreeBSD stack in one of the following ways:
The production of suitable documentation in the source is a key requirement of the project.
Technical contact: Danny Braniss
Danny Braniss has been working on an iSCSI stack for FreeBSD for some time now. His work is in Perforce, and he has posted several patch sets and had numerous discussions on the mailing lists.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Hidetoshi Shimokawa
The IEEE1394 (a.k.a. FireWire) device driver in FreeBSD is still under the Giant lock. The FireWire driver consists of several parts (fwohci, firewire, sbp, fwe and fwip) and they all need to be locked.
Goals:
Requirements:
Technical contact: Warner Losh
Recently, bus_alloc_resources has been added to the kernel. This, coupled with the bus_space_{read,write} family of functions can significantly reduce the setup needed for driver resource allocation. Unfortunately, most of the drivers in the tree have not yet been converted, thus ensuring that the old, bad way continues. What is needed is for someone to go through the drivers in the tree and convert them. After conversion, they need to ensure that they still work on at least some hardware and work with someone to get them committed. Warner Losh is available for review and coordination of committing.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Bruce M. Simpson
Requirements:
Technical contact: Emiliano Mennucci
References: The Pluggable Disk Schedulers SoC project, Patches
Our "Pluggable Disk Schedulers" SoC 2005 project resulted in code which solved the problem where large sequential I/O requests, or certain access patterns from one or a few processes, might almost completely starve other processes. It is available as a patch for RELENG_4 and RELENG_5. Unfortunately the code in FreeBSD-current (and RELENG_6) changed too much, so that the patches can not be committed. The goal of this project is to port the pluggable disk schedulers to the GEOM framework.
Requirements:
References: Overview, http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.sbin/sensorsd/, http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sbin/bioctl/, http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/scsi/safte.c
The OpenBSD sensors framework is an unified way of handling any kind of hardware sensor one can image. A sensor driver collects data from system sensors, SAS devices, harddisks, ... and allows an administrator to query the data with the unified management interface.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Maxime Henrion
Someone needs to finish the support for PT_SYSCALL in the ptrace() subsystem, and add support for another ptrace() command that will replace the PIOCWAIT and PIOCSTATUS ioctls of procfs (should probably be named PT_WAIT), in order for truss(1) to be able to work without procfs(5). Removing the procfs(5) dependency from ps -e is also desirable.
Requirements:
Goals:
Requirements:
Technical contacts: Nate Lawson, Bruno Ducrot
Implement a suspend/resume from disk mechanism. Possibly use the dump functions to dump pages to disk, then use ACPI to put the system in S4 or power-off. Resume would require changes to the loader to load the memory image directly and then begin executing again.
Requirements:
Technical contact: John Baldwin
DragonFly invested a lot of time to clean up and document it. Additionally they fixed some bugs. Interesting files in the DragonFly CVS are sys/boot/i386/bootasm.h, sys/boot/i386/bootasmdef.c, sys/boot/boot0/*, sys/boot/boot2/*, sys/boot/i386/btx/*, sys/boot/i386/cdboot/*, sys/boot/i386/libi386/amd64_tramp.S, sys/boot/i386/libi386/biosdisk.c and sys/boot/i386/loader/main.c. An interested volunteer has to compare and evaluate both implementations and port interesting/good parts.
Requirements:
Separate the syscons code into distinct parts for input, output, console handling (switching, screen savers etc.) and terminal emulation. Introduce fine-grained locking. Also implement vt100 and vt220 emulation to supplement the existing SCO emulation. Add a gettytab(5) capability for specifying the terminal emulation, and add entries to /etc/gettytab for the alternative emulations.
Optionally implement xterm emulation. The top line of the screen should serve as a title bar, displaying the title set with the \e]0; escape sequence as well as the vty number.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Jeff Roberson
Sysenter is an optional feature on x86 processors that significantly reduces the cost of calling system calls. Implementing support for this feature would require run-time selection of syscall code, most likely using a page which is always mapped into each process that contains the system call code. This would also require some minor infrastructure in the kernel to provide the correct entry points and stacks for kernel entry. If there is enough time remaining other features could be added to this global shared page to improve performance of other syscalls.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Maxime Henrion
URL's: csup homepage, CVSweb
Maxime Henrion is working on a rewrite of CVSup in C, called csup, and he has imported csup into the FreeBSD base system. It should be ready for use in a stable environment, but there are however still several missing features. The following list should be a good starting point:
Requirements:
Technical contact: Robert Watson
Implementing HTTP support for pxeboot would allow us to boot a machine using PXE and pull down a kernel from a web server rather than NFS. This will allow us to install from DHCPD + Apache or even just DHCPD + a remote web server. As PXE does not provide an integrated TCP stack, at least a minimal TCP implementation would need to be present in the FreeBSD PXE loader.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Alfred Perlstein
Requirements:
Technical contact: Alfred Perlstein
Moving the lockd implementation into the kernel provides several key performance and semantic improvements.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Max Laier
Teach pf to talk to the netgraph subsystem. Requires a design on how to express this in pf.conf and implementation. Being able to use divert sockets would be interesting as well and should be largely parallel with regards to the design.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Poul-Henning Kamp
IP can be tunneled over IP, UDP, TCP, SSH, DNS, HTTP and many other protocols, and this means that it is often possible to get a connection out through a firewall, but each of these encapsulations require prior setup of a specific program for each encapsulation, and the user must experiment to decide which one to use at any one time. The super tunnel daemon should implement pluggable encapsulations and make it automatically select the most efficient encapsulation that works at any one time. The user should not notice transitions from one encapsulation to another, apart from maybe a small delay.
Wanted features (not sorted or prioritized):
Requirements:
Technical contact: Robert Watson, George V. Neville-Neil
Design and implement a wire level regression test suite to exercise various states in the TCP/IP protocol suite. Ideally with both IPv4 and IPv6 support.
Requirements:
Many new and useful features (e.g. crypto protocols like WPA) of the WLAN infrastructure in the kernel are not used in wi(4). While wi(4) cards are old and can not compete with recent wireless cards, they are still in use in a lot of places. The goal of this item is to examine the WLAN infrastructure and other WLAN drivers in the tree for nice features and port/use them in the wi(4) driver.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Sam Leffler
WPA2 is the authentication protocol defined as part of the IEEE 802.11i specification. This protocol is now commonly used to authenticate wireless stations to access points. Part of this protocol is the ability to pre-authenticate a station with one or more access points so that roaming can happen quickly. FreeBSD lacks support for this aspect of the protocol in the hostapd program used to construct a WPA-enabled access point. This task would port the Linux code that exists to support pre-authentication in hostapd. This mostly involves rewriting some user-mode multicast code and testing the result.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Kris Kennaway
pkg_create(1) and friends use flat databases (aka ordinary files and directories in /var/db/pkg) to maintain their data. This makes it cumbersome and/or impossible to do efficient lookups of data on installed packages and makes certain operations very slow. portupgrade has the right idea of hashing this into a berkeley db file, but it uses tools that are not in the base system (ruby).
A self-contained project would be to add similar (preferably compatible) code into pkg_tools directly, possibly also extending the data that is stored and allowing for more flexible querying with tools like pkg_info (e.g. replicating the pkg_which utility of portupgrade). Adding mutual exclusion to protect concurrent pkg_add/delete operations from corrupting database state is also important.
Requirements:
Some sort of mechanism for adding/removing users/groups automatically, rather than using home-brew pkg-install scripts. It would need to be a bit more sophisticated than only registering the UID/GID, to deal with setting the other passwd(5) fields; a port might need more than one user; some ports might want a specific ID, others just the next available one, etc, etc.
Perhaps ports that have UIDs registered in the handbook could also be registered in a file inside /usr/ports, which the framework would use in UID creation requests.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Erwin Lansing
Make these more consistent. WITH_* should be user-settable variables while USE_* only is for internal use in the ports.
Requirement:
Technical contact: Pav Lucistnik
Collect the pkg-message output of dependencies and print them together after the whole build finishes.
Details: Change the current ad-hoc way of including pkg-message in the stdout of the build process. Automatically display pkg-message in post-install, if present. For the dependencies, save the copies of pkg-messages, as displayed in post-install, in /var/db/pkg, and display them collectively once the whole build finishes. Also allow for manual review by user later (new flag to pkg_info(1)).
Requirements:
Technical contact: Ed Schouten
Some ports may break when removing COMPAT_43TTY from the kernel configuration since they assume old ioctl's when they identify FreeBSD. The goal of this entry is to:
Note: Ed is working on this. Please coordinate with him.
Requirements:
The current OPTIONS infrastructure can be improved in several ways.
Requirements:
The pkg_* tools, which deal with the installation of pre-build binary package of ports, could do with a code cleanup or maybe even a rewrite from scratch. Some features of the ports tree are not supported by the pkg_* tools, e.g. versioned dependencies.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Pav Lucistnik
Add locking of write access to PKG_DBDIR (/var/db/pkg), to allow several port builds run in parallel without clobbering the package data. Should be done both in makefiles and in C tools like pkg_install and pkg_delete. A simple flock(2) approach over the whole database comes to mind.
The next step is the parallelization of dependency building. Have the port build it's dependencies in parallel, automatically depending on number of CPUs in the machine, or manually specified by user (make -j3 install clean). Some kind of split screen should be devised, so user can easily watch the process and interact with it (make config screens, for example). Attention must be paid to prevent deadlocks.
Allow for situation when two ports want to build and install common dependency. One of the ports have to wait on the other to install it before proceeding.
And finally, unrelated to previous steps, but also desirable. Add parallelization inside single builds, ie. enable -jX flag inside vendor makefiles. This will allow us to exploit the power of multi-core systems when building single port. Because a lot of vendor code does not work correctly when built with -jX flag, some kind of whitelist or blacklist must be implemented.
Requirements:
Write a small C/shell app that will scan the installed ports and show all UPDATING entries that affect one of the installed ports, and are relevant on the given machine (ie. user haven't already performed the update). Possibly the UPDATING format will have to be expanded to record the versions of affected ports, like:
gettext<0.16 -> gettext>=0.16
The app will be used standalone, and called from pkg_version or portupgrade.
Requirements:
Also known as rewrite portupgrade in C.
Write a new utility for the pkg_install suite, possibly named pkg_upgrade(1), implementing a subset of existing portupgrade functionality. The required functionality is:
Anything that existing portupgrade can do is a desired functionality. It would be nice to be command line compatible with portupgrade, but it's not a requirement.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Robert Watson
A number of kernel security subsystems, such as IPFW and pf, generate security log data. This task involves identifying potential sources of security event information in the kernel and modifying kernel subsystems to log that information using the kernel security event auditing system. User and programmer documentation of audit may be found on the TrustedBSD Documentation Page. There are also extensive manual pages relating to audit in FreeBSD. This project will require careful security analysis and kernel programming, and will likely need some re-working of the kernel audit framework (which is currently entirely focused on gathering user and kernel system call audit data).
Requirements:
Technical contact: Robert Watson
Create a tool that manages per-machine audit records and submits them to a central site for processing and long-term archiving/management. Ideally with support for SSL (or the like) so they do not travel on the wire in the clear.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Poul-Henning Kamp
Currently libfetch only supports basic HTTP authentication, which is generally frowned upon because it transmits the username and password on the wire (base64 encoded). Add RFC2617 digest authentication.
Technical contact: Robert Watson
FreeBSD 5.0 was the first FreeBSD release to ship with support for Mandatory Access Control (MAC), an access control technology allowing system administrators to implement multi-level security, integrity protection, and other "mandatory" policies. Policies may be compiled into the kernel, or loaded as loadable kernel modules. Later revisions of FreeBSD and the MAC Framework enhanced MAC support, and additional policy modules were made available, such as a port of the SELinux FLASK/TE framework available as a third party policy module. However, many of the sample MAC modules included with FreeBSD are considered experimental examples of what the technology can be used for, rather than production policies. For example, the Biba integrity policy can be deployed in production, but requires significant tuning to do so effectively.
This task involves a general review of the MAC Framework and Policy modules, with the goal of identifying improvement areas. It also involves specific cleanups, optimizations, and completeness work on specific policy modules -- most importantly, the Biba and MLS sample labeled policy modules. Work there includes improving memory overhead and efficiency; for example, moving from allocating complete labels for every labeled object to referencing common label storage where labels are identical, which occurs a great deal of the time in most systems. Other cleanups include moving towards a canonical/extensible on-disk label storage format, adding regression tests, investigating interactions with user applications, and writing documentation.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Robert Watson
FreeBSD is undergoing constant and active improvement to all of its critical subsystems, from file systems to the network stack. With any change, there is a risk of introducing bugs or regressions. The goal of this task is to produce a security regression test suite, which encapsulates requirements regarding system security properties and tests that they (still) hold. Areas to test include file system access control, privilege, authentication, cryptography, process containment, and more. There are some current tests along these lines in the FreeBSD regression test tree, but they are both incomplete and and inadequate. New tests must be created; existing tests must be completed and updated.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Joseph Koshy
Create BSD-licensed versions of ELF processing tools (e.g., ld, nm, as and others) using the ELF(3) and GELF(3) API set in FreeBSD -CURRENT.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Diomidis Spinellis
Create/port BSD-licensed versions of one or more of the text processing tools that are currently missing from the FreeBSD distribution: sort, diff, and the grep family. Licensed versions of some or all of these tools are already included in OpenBSD, so this task involves more porting and feature completion than development from scratch. Emphasis should be placed on performance, standards-compliance, and support for handling wide character sets.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Alexander Leidinger, Gardner Bell
The new "delete-old" and "delete-old-libs" target in /usr/src for 6.1 and -CURRENT should be extended to support the WITHOUT_* knobs, e.g. WITHOUT_RESCUE or WITHOUT_CRYPT, and delete files which are covered by those knobs. Some switches have already been covered. You can view a list of all switches and what effect they have here.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Colin Percival
The freebsd-update(8) utility is used to fetch, install, and rollback binary updates to the FreeBSD base system. A nice project would be to develop at graphical front-end for freebsd-update(8), using the GTK and/or QT toolkits.
Requirements:
Technical contact: George V. Neville-Neil
Many userland network utilities do not work correctly with IPv6.
This project could also include a broader survey of other network services in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin to make sure they're all IPv6 clean.
OpenBSD has some improvements to lint(1) which may be beneficial to have.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Robert Watson
Create, similar to libmemstat, wrapper libraries to support monitoring and management applications to avoid direct use of kvm. Three parts to the project: for each of the above, add kernel support to export data in a less ABI-sensitive way using sysctl, write a library to present the information in an extensible way to applications, and update applications to use the library instead of reaching directly into kernel memory / consuming sysctls. The goal is to allow the kernel implementation to change without breaking applications and requiring them to be recompiled, and to allow monitoring functions to be extended without breaking applications. This should also facilitate writing new classes of monitoring and profiling tools.
Requirements:
Currently FreeBSD supports only single byte collation. Multibyte collation support would be nice.
Benefits:
Requirements:
URL: The NDMP Initiative
The NDMP initiative was launched to create an open standard protocol for network-based backup for network-attached storage. Major commercial storage systems come with a compliant service. This allows major commercial backup systems to backup such NAS devices. Including a NDMP disk server into FreeBSD would allow to play nice out of the box (modulo some configuring) regarding backups in a corporate environment.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Brooks Davis
The "performance tracking" entry is meant to monitor the performance of FreeBSD itself over the development time, e.g. someone makes a change to the kernel and the tracking system is able to show the performance impact to various subsystems (microbenchmarks) or to real world applications like apache or mysql (macrobenchmarks). The tracking system should be able to do this with multiple machines and multiple configurations (while the goal is not to compare configurations or machines (but different FreeBSD versions) we would not mind if it is also able to do this. This does not need to be implemented from scratch, it is allowed/encouraged to reuse existing free software.
Requirements:
Solaris 9 and later versions include libumem
, a user
space slab allocator that includes debugging features we may want to
have on FreeBSD too.
Yen-Ming Lee has a port of the Linux port. He is looking for someone who is interested in benchmarking, testing, or evaluating his port.
Jason Evans has a benchmark suite at here. A description of the benchmark can be found in his jemalloc paper
Online references for libumem
are (in suggested reading
order):
Requirements:
The OpenBSD prebind is a secure implementation of prelinking that is compatible with address space randomization. Prelinking allows to speed up application startup when a lot of libraries are involved. This should show a noticeable effect with e.g. GNOME/KDE.
Requirements:
It would be great to have a bundled PXE installer. This would allow one to boot an install server from a FreeSBIE live CD-ROM on one box, set the BIOS on subsequent boxes to PXE boot, and then have the rest happen by magic. This would be very helpful for installing cluster nodes, etc.
Markus Boelter is working on a bundled PXE installer as part of his BSDInstaller project within the Google Summer of Code 2006. The PXE Installer is working but some non-PXE related issues have to be solved before it can enter the tree.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Alexander Leidinger, Nik Clayton
Nik has written a regression test infrastructure using Perl. More of the regression tests should be made to work with libtap.
Porting LTP might also be a good idea.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Jeff Roberson
Schedgraph is a tool for analyzing scheduling events and visualy displaying them in such a way that they reveal interesting kernel and application performance problems. It is written in python/tkinter and interfaces with the kernel via the generic KTR kernel tracing system. Schedgraph is in need of many features and general improvements such as the ability to synchronize timestamps in SMP systems, plotting time spent spinning on spinlocks, improved visual appearance, faster graphing time, and many other features. Access to an 8 processor FreeBSD machine will be provided to implement advanced SMP features.
Requirements:
Requirements:
Technical contact: Robert Watson, Colin Percival
Instead of installing using install, mkdir, mtree, etc, directly construct a tarball. This would allow creating install distributions without root access, as setuid etc would never hit the local disk. This would require some retrofitting of our installation mechanisms.
Requirements:
Many base system utilities grew multibyte support in 2004. It would be nice to continue this trend by teaching vi(1) to display and edit documents in UTF-8 encoding.
Requirements: