diff --git a/en/platforms/xbox.sgml b/en/platforms/xbox.sgml index 78e1fb23b7..f57088078e 100644 --- a/en/platforms/xbox.sgml +++ b/en/platforms/xbox.sgml @@ -1,62 +1,62 @@ - + %developers; ]> &header;
FreeBSD/xbox is a port of FreeBSD which aims to run on Microsoft® Xbox® systems. This project was started by &a.rink;, who did most of the patching - and coding. Ed Schouten helped with + and coding. Ed Schouten helped with reviewing patches and he also provided details on certain Xbox internals.
FreeBSD/xbox is supported in FreeBSD 6-STABLE and FreeBSD 7-CURRENT. The framebuffer, Ethernet, sound and USB devices (such as an USB keyboard for the console) are all supported.
In order to aid people in installing the FreeBSD/xbox port, a combined install/livecd has been created. It is available here.
In order to boot FreeBSD 7-CURRENT from CVS, you must have an up-to-date version of the Linux/xbox BIOS, called Cromwell (failure will result in your kernel crashing immediately after loading). A Cromwell with FreeBSD UFS patches (this will make it able to load a kernel directly from an UFS file system) is available in the ports tree at /usr/ports/sysutils/cromwell; it can be flashed to the EEPROM using the /usr/ports/sysutils/raincoat port (as long as your Xbox is below version 1.6).
Note: Several Xbox drives are known to reject certain types of media. Should you experience random hangs, panics or corruption during installation, try a different known-working DVD/CD-ROM.
You can do an installation using the Live CD's, but you will need to do everything manually. It is suggested to prepare your disk using an FreeBSD/i386 installation and set up the /boot/xboxlinux.cfg configuration file yourself, so Cromwell can determine which kernel to load.
Technical Contact: Warner Losh
In the Linux world, there are a number of packages available which will grab a bunch of software, including Linux, the tool chains, packages, etc and create a firmware image for popular devices. Since FreeBSD is an integrated system, many of these elements are present in the base system or the ports tree.
There have been attempts at this problem over the years: nanobsd, picobsd, and tinybsd are in the tree, Sam Leffler has his own custom scripts, etc. This project would pick an approach and use the existing scripts to make it simple to create images that could be loaded into the firmware of these devices. Many of the newer devices have 8MB or 16MB flash parts, so that would be a good size to target for the kernel and ram disk image. A good way to think of this project is openwrt for FreeBSD images.
Requirements:
Technical Contact: Warner Losh
The FreeBSD kernel has been optimized over the years for a server or workstation environment. Memory is plentiful in these environments, so little attention was given to the size of the kernel. There's a number items in the kernel that can be made optional without reducing affecting the functionality needed in an embedded environment. These include things like not compiling in strings into the kernel, less agressively inlining code, making some non-optional features optional and investigating compile time flags. This task requires identifying potentially optional kernel content and building the infrastructure to make that content optional.
requirements:
Technical Contact: Warner Losh
Add support for nand flash support.
Requirements:
Technical Contact: Warner Losh
There's about a dozen busses in the tree now that manage resources and activate children. They are far too hard to create. We need to abstract out the basics for these buses and provide a way to allow these buses to be a subclass of this new base class.
Requirements:
Technical Contact: Warner Losh
Often times in the embedded world, you know what kind of built-in devices are on a SoC (System on a Chip) only because you know the specific model of that SoC. It is desirable to have a mechanism that code on these machines can use to load one of several sets of hints, which can then be used to populate the bus.
Requirements:
Technical Contact: Warner Losh
Adding a new board to the arm code is a lot harder than it needs to be. A lot of benefit could be had by creating tables for memory ranges, etc, and having more generic initialization code. Much of this can also be Machine Independent (MI).
Requirements:
Technical Contact: Warner Losh
There's a number of SoCs that are in consumer grade routers, etc that have chips that are supported by FreeBSD, or nearly supported by FreeBSD. Pick one and bring FreeBSD up on it. Integrate it into the tree.
Requirements:
Technical Contact: Warner Losh
Right now the kernel is built twice: once for the static modules in the kernel, and once for the dynamically loaded. There's also inconsistent dependency tracking. We should fix this. Bikeshed included, along with three colors of paint.
Requirements:
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.
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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.
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Technical Contact: David Malone
The section
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FreeBSD has an implementation of the ext2fs filesystems but it contains some files under the GPL which make it undesirable, among other things, to use it in the GENERIC kernel. Ext2fs is a rather simple but practical filesystem and NetBSD has had for a while an implementation based on UFS1 sources. The NetBSD implementation needs to be analyzed regarding features and performance. If it is on par or better with our GPLed implementation, it should be ported to FreeBSD.
Requirements:
While FreeBSD's FFS implementation is pretty much state-of-the-art, in addition to softupdates, Greg Granger proposed other strategies that would be useful, especially when working with small files. Quoting Greg Ganger: "The key insight for why current file systems perform poorly is that locality is insufficient - exploiting disk bandwidth for small data objects requires that they be placed adjacently". Explicit grouping, in particular, seems to provide important performance improvements without less implementation complexity than embedded inodes. As this changes the on-disk structure, care needs to be taken that the implementation is backwards compatible.
Requirements:
Fix MDFS lockups when using async operation modes. Revision 1.115 of md.c has a discussion of the problem.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Kris Kennaway
Take a filesystem and MPSAFE it. e.g. ext2fs, ntfs, coda, etc.
Technical contact: Kris Kennaway
The goal would be to develop scripts that automatically run a standard suite of useful debugging commands in DDB upon panic and save in a textdump. Might be too short on its own, so could be combined with a project to write gdb macro equivalents of the DDB command set, extending the macros John Baldwin has. New DDB commands and macros could also be implemented, e.g. for inspecting other common data structures.
Technical contact: Kris Kennaway
Evaluate the possibility of merging the FIFO implementation with the pipe implementation for improved performance. Care would need to be taken to avoid regressions, so part of this project should be attention to previous and existing FIFO bug reports, and writing of conformance testing to verify correct behaviour. Possible extensions might include a re-evaluation of some of the performance tradeoffs made in the pipe code in light of modern CPUs.
Technical contact: Josef Koshy
Part of this project would be to add support to PMC for running on modern x86 CPUs. This is a relatively self-contained project but requires a bit of immersion in the code and the CPU manuals.
Technical contact: Kris Kennaway
The gettimeofday syscall is a performance bottleneck in certain applications. An approach taken by other operating systems is to export the time counter to userland via a shared page, and to update it periodically (a prototype implementation is available). For some time consumers this is sufficient resolution. Other consumers need higher resolution. On the x86 architecture the TSC timecounter can be read from userland. However depending on the hardware there may be issues with synchronization between CPUs, as well as interaction with CPU frequency changes. With care it can be used as a delta against the timestamp updated by the kernel to provide improved resolution and avoid the need for the syscall.
Technical contact: Xin LI, Howard SU
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). The FreeBSD kernel in 8-current has the textdump feature which may be interesting to use for this part
Another part after the first one is finished 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:
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
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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; two possible areas of work are:
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, Jeff Roberson
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
WIP: http://wiki.freebsd.org/GenericInputDeviceLayer
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). This project was worked on as part of Google Summer of Code 2007, and you can find more information on the FreeBSD.org wiki
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:
Improve upon / replace the existing static VESA splash screen support in FreeBSD, with a script-driven back-end, which allows animation in the loading graphics. This would greatly improve the bootup experience for desktop users, while providing graphical feedback to the startup of the kernel / system services. Additionally this could be used to replace the beastie.4th menu, with a VESA driven graphical loader screen.
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: 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.
Interested people should also have a look at a mail thread about this (Ulf is not working on this) and further discussion of the corresponding GEOM aspects.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Maxime Henrion
Someone needs to finish the support for PT_SYSCALL in the ptrace() subsystem and remove the need for procfs in gcore. Removing the procfs(5) dependency from ps -e is also desirable.
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: Kris Kennaway
Currently there is no way for e.g., a port makefile to tell whether things like FreeBSD 5.x compatibility are present on the system (just installing the compat5x port is not enough, you need a kernel built with COMPAT_FREEBSD5). All such optional kernel features need to register themselves with the FEATURE macro so that the userland can easily query whether a given feature is present. So far not all kernel features are using this infrastructure.
There needs also to be a way to spoof those values, e.g., when the ports build cluster is building for older FreeBSD versions in a jail. Suport for this is not available in the FEATURE macro.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Jeff Roberson, Alan Cox
The vm uses a splay tree to lookup pages associated with an offset and a file. This tree structure is space inefficient and cache inefficient for large objects. This project will be to replace the splay with a dynamic depth page-table like structure similar to a radix tree. This will improve large object performance and reduce the size of the vm_page.
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: Poul-Henning Kamp, Matus Harvan
WIP: http://wiki.freebsd.org/mtund
IP can be tunnelled 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:
Technical contact: Andre Opperman.
Listens on an interface and tracks all TCP sessions it sees. In the normal case only general information is carried forward (seq#/ack#, negotiated SYN/ACK features, etc). Whenever an anomaly happens - that is a duplicate ACK, SACK response, out-of-order segment, retransmission or others; it captures those packets into a tcpdump file for later deep inspection with Wireshark or other tools. This tool is to be deployed on live hosts and passive monitors to collect reliable condensed data about real-world behavior of TCP on the global Internet. Currently no such quantitative data exist and contribution of such a tool that can be easily run is a significant step in helping further development of TCP algorithms.
Difficulty: Medium, good familiarity with the TCP RFCs is necessary and detection of many edge cases has to be implemented correctly.
Technical contact: Sam Leffler
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: Sam Leffler
Build a "packet fuzzer" tool that can be used to build test suites to improve reliability of the 802.11 code against garbage data. There are various tools out but we're not aware of any good ones that work with 802.11 and are generally available. The basic idea is to write a packet injector/playback tool that's driven by a scripting language. Then you need to build up a database of test cases. It's also possibly important to do time-based playback.
Requirements:
SCPS is a protocol suite designed to allow communication over challenging environments. Originally developed jointly by NASA and DoD's USSPACECOM, these protocols are used for commercial, educational, and military environments. A student project in this area would involve implementing various network protocols according to specification (SCPS File Protocol, similar to FTP; SCPS-Transport Protocol, based on TCP; and others.)
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:
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
+ href="mailto:ed@FreeBSD.org">Ed SchoutenSome 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.
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The current OPTIONS infrastructure can be improved in several ways.
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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.
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: Kris Kennaway, Brooks Davis
Develop and deploy infrastructure for annotating license conditions that apply to third party software in the ports collection. For example, identifying ports provided under the GPL version 3 license, or under licenses that do not permit redistribution or which impose non-standard requirements. Part of this project will involve exploring methods for automatically classifying licenses using HP's fossology tool (http://www.fossology.org/) or other mechanisms.
Requirements:
Technical contact: Brooks Davis
When bootstrapping systems it would be useful to be able to create a single package file that contains one or more packages and all the required dependent packages. This is conceptually similar to, but different from PC-BSD's PBI package format. PBI's contain a private copy of all dependencies, fat packages would contain each individual package and once installed it would be as though each package was individually installed in the usual manner.
This project would consist of additions to the pkg_tools to support creation and installation of a new package file format and to ports to build these packages.
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
WIP: http://wiki.freebsd.org/DistributedAuditDaemon
Create a tool to securely and reliably ship log files to remote hosts. The main focus is to manage per-machine audit records and submit 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: Robert Watson, Pawel Jakub Dawidek
The NFSv4 RFC and follow-on drafts specify a new Access Control List (ACL) format loosely based on NTFS ACLs. This format is not directly compatible with existing POSIX.1e ACLs, but has been adopted by a number of recent UNIX file systems (including Apple's HFS+ and Sun's ZFS file systems) in order to improve Windows compatibility. This project is multi-part:
Requirements:
Technical contact: Robert Watson, Christian Peron
The TrustedBSD Audit implementation allows fine-grained monitoring of processes in a FreeBSD install. This task extends the Audit implementation to have specific support for Jails:
Requirements:
Technical contact: Joseph Koshy, Kai Wang
Create BSD-licensed versions of ELF processing tools (e.g., ld, dbx, as and others) using the ELF(3) and GELF(3) API set. Identify overlapping functions in those tools and create a library out of the common functions. Identify parts which can be generated by tools (e.g., machine code parser generators) to support our Tier-1 and Tier-2 architectures.
References:
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, groff/troff 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.
Regarding groff/troff, there exist the OpenSolaris versions at SourceForge which at least do not come with a viral license like the current GNU versions we use. Additionally this implementation has support for common vector fonts and unicode. If those utilities are option-compatible or not has to be analyzed. A port of this is already available as textproc/heirloom-doctools.
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.
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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 a graphical front-end for freebsd-update(8), using the QT toolkit. A GTK frontend was developed as part of GSoC 2007 and exists at berlios; the QT frontend could maybe share common functions/classes and design ideas.
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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.
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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.
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Technical Contact: Diomidis Spinellis
Currently FreeBSD supports only single byte collation. Multibyte collation support would be nice. This might involve implementing the Unicode Collation Algorithm (see http://unicode.org/reports/tr10/), writing a tool to compile the Default Unicode Collation Element Table (http://www.unicode.org/Public/UCA/latest) into an efficient lookup format, and integrating the corresponding conformance tests (http://www.unicode.org/Public/UCA/latest/CollationTest.html) into the FreeBSD regression testing framework.
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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.
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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.
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A proxy auto-config (PAC) file contains a JavaScript function "FindProxyForURL(url, host)" that determines which HTTP or SOCKS proxy, if any, to use to access a given URL. In most application the file may be specified manually or discovered using the Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol. Support for PAC files in libfetch would make fetch more versitle.
Supporting PAC files nominally requires a fairly complete JavaScript implementation. There appear to be no BSD Licensed JavaScript implementations so one will likely need to be written. A minimalist implementation of the language with commonly used constructs such as if/else, string comparison, and functions would be sufficient in many cases.
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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.
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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.
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Technical contact: Jeff Roberson
Schedgraph is a tool for analyzing scheduling events and visually 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.
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Technical contact: Colin Percival, Tim Kientzle
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.
Bsdtar now (8-current, 20080101) has a feature that allows it to create a tar archive from a description provided in the form of an mtree file. This description can specify owner, permissions, and contents for each entry and does not require the files on disk to already have correct ownership. This should make it possible to build a FreeBSD distribution as a non-root user. Talk to Tim Kientzle for details of the new bsdtar features and look at NetBSD, which has a similar facility, for ideas about how to proceed.
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Technical info:: on J.R. Oldroyd's Unicode Support on FreeBSD page
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. The above referenced page contains info of what is needed to improve the Unicode support in vi(1).
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Currently, cron(8) and atrun(8) are outdated in their implementation. Here are some directions for improvement:
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Technical contact: Kris Moore
This last summer Tijl Coosemans did excellent work getting wine to a very usable point on FreeBSD. However, there are some issues which still need to be addressed at http://wiki.freebsd.org/Wine. This would be a big improvement for our desktop users.
Technical contact: Shteryana Shopova, Bjoern A. Zeeb
BSNMP is a portable SNMP framework consisting of a daemon, modules and tools. It includes libraries that ease the development of loadable modules for configuring and monitoring various subsystems. You can find more information about BSNMP on the wiki. Some project ideas, but not limited to that list, can be found here..
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Technical contact: Jeff Roberson
This task would create an extension to the threading library that would allow application developers to measure and locate lock ordering and lock contention problems within their application. Such a tool is invaluable in debugging application deadlocks and creating high-performance multithreaded software. Existing lock ordering and profiling tools exist in the FreeBSD kernel, and could be used as the model for the userspace implementation. We would recommend beginning with profiling due to its immediate usefulness in optimizing performance, and to allow improvements in kernel scheduling to better manage user application lock contention.
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Technical contact: Harlan Stenn (NTP Project)
This task is to create an SNTP implementation; this program will be a "reference" implementation of SNTP, based on the latest NTPv4 document. SNTP is first and foremost a lightweight NTP client. It will use GNU AutoGen (like the rest of the NTP programs) for its options processing. While an SNTP implementation may talk directly to a reference clock, the core requirement for this effort is to be a simple client implementation. We have an existing implementation based on an older specification. It contains functionality that is obsolete. You could write a ground-up implementation or take the existing one and hack it in to shape, or some combination of the two.
Related topics: draft-ietf-ntp-ntpv4-proto-09.txt
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Technical contact: Joe Marcus Clarke
This task is to port NetworkManager to FreeBSD. Porting NetworkManager will also require some core userland changes to FreeBSD, especially to ifconfig.
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Technical contact: Joe Marcus Clarke
This task is to fix FreeBSD support in sysutils/system-tools-backends.
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Technical contact: Joe Marcus Clarke
This task is to add hal support for some additional subsystems. In particular FreeBSD is lacking support for the ieee1394 (i.e. Firewire), bluetooth, and printer. Adding support for these subsystems will require changes to the FreeBSD kernel. Those interested should use the latest HAL Specification as a guide.
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