diff --git a/en/projects/ideas/index.sgml b/en/projects/ideas/index.sgml index 2e423f399a..c76934274a 100644 --- a/en/projects/ideas/index.sgml +++ b/en/projects/ideas/index.sgml @@ -1,1343 +1,1421 @@ - + %navincludes; %includes; %developers; vi(1)"> wi(4)"> ]> &header;

Introduction

The FreeBSD project has hundreds of active developers spread all over the world, and many of them have their own parts of the source-tree that they work on. However, there are always a lot of new interesting projects and ideas that needs to be investigated and evaluated, and this is where the FreeBSD project relies on heroic efforts from volunteers. The following list of possible projects is in no way complete, but it should serve as a nice starting point for volunteers who would like to become committers in the future.

Please note that we cannot guarantee that your work will be included in the FreeBSD source tree. This is because people tend to disagree about specifics in the implementation of new features or functionality. However, if you can find a developer who is interested in your work, and you can get him or her to review it, then you are pretty far on your way to get your code into the FreeBSD source tree.

If you have any non-technical questions about this list, please contact &a.netchild; and &a.joel;. Technical questions should be directed to the Technical contact for each project, or to the hackers mailinglist.

File System

Kernel

Networking

Ports

+

Security

Userland / Installation Tools

Additional Information

AutoFS

Technical contact: &a.alfred;

Create the autofs file system from a specification. Kernel transport and interaction with the "amd" automounter needs to be completed.

Requirements:

Magic Symlinks

Technical contact: &a.jwd;

Patches: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~jwd/magiclinks.tgz

Experimental patches exist against 4-STABLE, though the DragonFly implementation using the setvar utility should be examined (interesting files in the DragonFly CVS: sys/kern/init_sysent.c, sys/kern/kern_varsym.c, sys/kern/syscalls.c, sys/kern/syscalls.master, sys/kern/vfs_lookup.c, sys/sys/syscall-hide.h, sys/sys/syscall.h, sys/sys/syscall.mk, sys/sys/sysproto.h, sys/sys/sysunion.h, bin/varsym/varsym.1, bin/varsym/varsym.c).

Andrey V. Elsukov has begun porting this to FreeBSD, and some initial patches for CURRENT can be found here. There is also some on-going development in Perforce.

Requirements:

MDFS lockups

Fix MDFS lockups when using async operation modes. Revision 1.115 of md.c has a discussion of the problem.

Requirements:

TMPFS

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. More information about the current status and progress is available here.

Requirements:

Extend UFS2 dump/restore support for UFS2

The UFS2 file system in FreeBSD supports extended attributes. Extended attributes are meta-data associated with vnodes representing files and directories. Unfortunately dump and restore do not backup or restore such attributes. People interested in this should contact &a.mckusick;.

Requirements:

ZFS

References: What is ZFS?, Porting ZFS

OpenSolaris™ gained support for a new file system called ZFS (Zettabyte File System) as of build 27a. ZFS is a new approach to file system design and data management, and includes several interesting features such as transactional semantics, snapshots and good scalability. Porting ZFS to FreeBSD is highly encouraged, but should be considered a difficult task since the current implementation of ZFS is very Solaris-specific.

Requirements:

4Front Technologies OSS v4 API

Technical contact: &a.netchild;

References: 4Front Technologies

4Front Technologies will go live with an improved OSS API in the near future and we are discussing syncing with this API at the freebsd-multimedia mailing list. 4Front Technologies offered assistance. A volunteer would have to:

Requirements:

Cache detection support for sparc64

Technical contact: &a.netchild; (Page coloring)

Mailing list: freebsd-sparc64@FreeBSD.org

The current page coloring algorithm in the VM does auto tuning of the number of colors based upon cache size and associativity. On sparc64 the corresponding variables are not set. The goal of this entry is to detect the cache size and associativity (this information may already be available, or at least not much code has to be written) and set the corresponding variables.

Requirements:

CAM layer locking

Technical contact: &a.scottl;

&a.scottl; has been working on this for a while, and he has patches in Perforce.

Requirements:

CPU usage display in top

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.

Requirements:

Document all sysctls

Technical contacts: &a.mat;, &a.brd;

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. &a.mat has done some development in Perforce, in the mat_sysctl_cleanup branch.

Requirements:

Document the sound subsystem

Technical contacts: &a.netchild;, &a.ariff;

Requirements:

DTrace

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.

Requirements:

DWARF2 call frame information

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:

Dynamic module references

Technical contact: &a.sam;

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:

Extend ktrace/kdump output

Technical contact: &a.netchild;

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.

Requirements:

FPU subsystem overhaul

Port DragonFly's MMX/XMM optimized memcpy/bcopy/bzero/copyin/copyout code (this includes an FPU subsystem overhaul). Interesting files in the DragonFly CVS are sys/i386/gnu/fpemul/fpu_system.h, sys/i386/i386/bcopy.s, sys/i386/i386/genassym.c, sys/i386/i386/globals.s, sys/i386/i386/machdep.c, sys/i386/i386/math_emu.h, sys/i386/i386/mp_machdep.c, sys/i386/i386/pmap.c, sys/i386/i386/support.s, sys/i386/i386/swtch.s, sys/i386/i386/trap.c, sys/i386/i386/vm86bios.s, sys/i386/i386/vm_machdep.c, sys/i386/include/asmacros.h, sys/i386/include/globaldata.h, sys/i386/include/md_var.h, sys/i386/include/npx.h, sys/i386/include/pcb.h, sys/i386/include/thread.h sys/i386/isa/npx.c, sys/i386/i386/bcopy.s and sys/i386/i386/bzero.s. A more detailed writeup can be found in this compressed file. This includes a mail from Matthew Dillon with suggestions on how to do this in FreeBSD (including a small benchmark which shows 35%-55% speed improvement for at least those benchmarks).

Attilio Rao has almost completed this work, but he would like to receive more feedback.

Requirements:

Generic input device layer

Technical contact: &a.philip;

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 (&a.philip; 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:

High Definition Audio (HDA) support

Technical contact: freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.org (mailing list)

URL: HDA Specification

Some work has been done, but progress is slow. More manpower is needed. Stephane E. Potvin has begun implementing HDA support to our sound system and a patch is available here. This is very experimental, and should not be considered stable code.

Requirements:

Implement and profile algorithms for powerd

Technical contacts: &a.njl;, &a.bruno;

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 &a.bruno; has some early patches.

Requirements:

iSCSI

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:

Linuxulator with native amd64 support

FreeBSD provides Linux binary compatibility through a Linux system call table that is invoked when Linux ELF binaries are executed. The implementation on amd64 machines only provides support for 32bit (x86) executables. This needs to be coordinated with the emulation mailinglist regarding the userland part of the linuxulator.

Requirements:

PCI-Hotplug support

Technical contact: &a.bms;

Requirements:

Pluggable Disk Scheduler

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:

Process checkpointing

Technical contact: &a.bruno;

Process checkpointing allows to migrate some processes to other machines or to let some processes "survive" a reboot (subject to some constraints). Interesting files in the DragonFly CVS repository are sys/sys/ckpt.h, sys/checkpt/* and sys/kern/imgact_elf.c.

Requirements:

Remove procfs dependencies

Technical contact: &a.mux;

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:

Rewrite the in-kernel file system syncer

References: mail #1, mail #2

Goals:

Requirements:

Suspend to disk

Technical contacts: &a.njl;, &a.bruno;

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:

Sync FreeBSD i386 boot code with DragonFly

Technical contact: &a.jhb;

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:

Sync USB code with NetBSD

Mailing list: freebsd-usb@FreeBSD.org

There are various improvements and fixes to the USB code in NetBSD which have not found their way into FreeBSD yet.

Requirements:

Syscons modularization

Separate the syscons code into distinct parts for input, output, console handling (switching, screen savers etc.) and terminal emulation. 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:

Update the Linuxulator

Technical contact: &a.cracauer;

FreeBSD provides Linux binary compatibility through a Linux system call table that is invoked when Linux ELF binaries are executed. This implementation should be compared with an up-to-date Linux kernel so that important missing syscalls can be added to ensure that all mainstream applications continue to work on FreeBSD.

Requirements:

csup improvements

Technical contact: &a.mux;

URL's: csup homepage, CVSweb

&a.mux; 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:

Flight mode for the loader

Not every airline allows to use radio transmitters like WLAN-NIC's in airplanes (yet). The goal of this entry is to provide an entry in the loader which prohibits drivers for devices which transmit radio signals to attach to the device. One way of providing this functionality would be to add a menu entry to the loader which sets a "flight mode" loader tunable which would have to be queried by every driver which is able to transmit radio signals to decide if the normal operation is allowed or if the device has to be disabled. The loader-menu should be able to detect this tunable in loader.conf and indicate which way of booting is the current default (in case the user adds it there to be on the safe side in the airplane).

Requirements:

IAPP preauthentication in hostapd

Technical contact: &a.sam;

IAPP is the Inter-Access Point Protocol, a protocol by which cooperating access points communicate about associated wireless stations. 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 IAPP in hostapd. This mostly involves rewriting some user-mode multicast code and testing the result.

Requirements:

NFS Lockd (improve semantics)

Technical contact: &a.alfred;

Requirements:

NFS Lockd (kernel implementation)

Technical contact: &a.alfred;

Moving the lockd implementation into the kernel provides several key performance and semantic improvements.

Requirements:

Super tunnel daemon

Technical contact: &a.phk;

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:

Update wi

Many new and useful features (e.g. crypto protocols like WPA) of the WLAN infrastructure in the kernel are not used in &man.wi.4;. While &man.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 &man.wi.4; driver.

Requirements:

WPA2 preauthentication in hostapd

Technical contact: &a.sam;

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:

Zeroconf

URL: NetBSD zeroconf SoC project

Add Zeroconf (Rendezvous/Bonjour) support to FreeBSD.

Requirements:

+ +

Automatic registering of UID and GID

+

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.

+

Requirement:

+ + +
+ + +

Cleanup of USE and WITH variables

+

Make these more consistent. WITH_* should be user-settable + variables while USE_* only is for internal use in the ports.

+

Requirement:

+ + +
+ + +

Improvements of OPTIONS

+

The current OPTIONS infrastructure can be improved in several ways.

+ +

Requirement:

+ + +
+ + +

Package tools improvements

+

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.

+

Requirement:

+ + +
+

Build options improvements

Technical contact: &a.netchild;

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:

Import NSS LDAP

Since LDAP is very popular today, it would be beneficial to have NSS-LDAP support available by default. The license of the NSS LDAP module should however be investigated first.

Benefits:

Requirements:

Move HESIOD to a NSS module

Currently HESIOD is build statically into libc. Since LDAP is more popular today, it is not necessary to provide this name service to every consumer of libc by default.

Benefits:

Requirements:

Move NIS/YP to a NSS module

Currently NIS/YP is build statically into libc. Since LDAP is more popular today, it is not necessary to provide this name service to every consumer of libc by default.

Benefits:

Requirements:

Multibyte collation support

Currently FreeBSD supports only single byte collation. Multibyte collation support would be nice.

Benefits:

Requirements:

NDMP data server

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:

Performance tracking

Technical contact: &a.brooks;

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:

Port libumem to FreeBSD

Solaris 9 and later versions include libumem, a user space slab allocator that includes debugging features we may want to have on FreeBSD too.

Online references for libumem are (in suggested reading order):

Requirements:

PXE Installer

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.

Requirements:

Regression testing system

Technical contact: &a.nik;

&a.nik; has written a regression test infrastructure using Perl. More of the regression tests should be made to work with libtap.

Requirements:

RFC3442 support

Technical contact: &a.emaste;

URL's: RFC3442

Add support for RFC3442, the Classless Static Route option, to the DHCP client. The original DHCP specification includes a route option but it supports only class-based routes, which are not very useful today. RFC3442 adds support for specifying the netmask width for each static route. Note that the ISC dhcp server does not natively support RFC3442, but custom options of arbitrary byte strings can be encoded in its configuration file.

Requirements:

Sysinstall

Requirements:

Unicode support in vi

Many base system utilities grew multibyte support in 2004. It would be nice to continue this trend by teaching &man.vi.1; to display and edit documents in UTF-8 encoding.

Requirements:

Projects at FreeBSD.org

Additional projects may be found by browsing the FreeBSD Development Projects page. The most prominent projects are:

Do not forget to have a look at the other projects too or by viewing some of the recent Developer Status Reports.

Technical contacts

If you are interested in working on a project not explicitly mentioned above, you may want to contact one of the potential technical contacts below:

Additionally, there are a lot of interesting mailing lists that can be used when searching information about specific subjects.

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