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This report covers FreeBSD related projects between July and
October 2007. The sixth EuroBSDCon was held in Denmark in September.
The Google Summer of Code project came to a close and lots of
participants are working getting their code merged back into
FreeBSD. The bugs in the FreeBSD HEAD branch are being shaked out and it is
being prepared for the FreeBSD 7 branching. If your are curious about
what's new in FreeBSD 7.0 we suggest reading Ivan Voras' excellent
summary
here
. Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! We hope you
enjoy reading. IP can easily be tunneled over a plethora of network protocols
at various layers, such as IP, ICMP, UDP, TCP, DNS, HTTP, SSH.
While a direct connection may not always be possible due to a
firewall, the IP packets could be encapsulated as payload in other
protocols, which would get through. However, each such
encapsulation requires the setup of a different program and the
user has to manually probe different encapsulations to find out
which of them works in a given environment. MTund is a tunneling daemon using run-time loadable plugins for
the different encapsulations. It automagically selects the best
encapsulation in each environment and can fail over to another
encapsulation. Several plugins have been implemented and the daemon
supports multiple concurrent clients. Note that the project originally started under the name of Super
Tunnel Daemon, but was later renamed to Magic Tunnel Daemon
(MTund). After a long break in this project, we started reviewing and
refreshing our translations. We have to update the content to
reflect the current state of the English version. There are a few
parts written in a poor style, another task is to improve these a
bit. Any kind of help is highly welcome. We have a new volunteer, Gabor Pali, who provided us some
high-quality contributions. As a result, we have been able to add 5
new articles since the last status report. There is also an ongoing effort in the Perforce repository to
translate the FreeBSD Handbook to Hungarian. Any kind of support is
highly welcome. The sixth EuroBSDCon went well. 215 people attended the
conference. Feedback has been very positive. At the conference we had a Best Talk contest. Steven Murdoch,
Isaac Levy and Pawel Jakub "zfs-man" Dawidek each received a prize
for their fantastic talks. Also over 300 pictures from the conference has been uploaded to
Flickr with the tag
EuroBSDCon2007
Videos and slides from the talks are now online at the
conference website. We thank our speakers for graciously having permitted recording
and publication of their talks EuroBSDCon 2008 will take place in Strassbourg. The "finstall" project is about the new graphical installer for
FreeBSD. The basic frameworks (both client-side and server-side)
are done during the SoC 2007 and it's ready for major new features
to be implemented. This project should yield an usable installer
for 7.0-RELEASE. With the leaving of bsd@, we lost the GNATS statistics webpages.
On this URL I generate a new set of graphs, right now a subset of
what bsd@ had, hopefully a superset of that in the future. We're happy to report the successful conclusion of our third
consecutive Google Summer of Code. By all accounts, the FreeBSD
participation in this program was an unqualified success. We
narrowed down the many impressive applications to 25 that were
selected for funding and 92% of these completed successfully and
were awarded the full $4,500 stipend. The FreeBSD Foundation was
also granted $500 per student from Google for a total of
$12,500. These student projects included security research, improved
installation tools, new utilities, and more. Many of the students
have continued working on their FreeBSD projects even after the
official close of the program. Three students have already been
granted full src/ commit access to CVS and more are expected. At
least 2 of our FreeBSD mentors will be meeting with Google
organizers in Mountain View this month to discuss the program at
the Mentor Summit. GEOM_VIRSTOR (virtual disk space / over-commit GEOM class) has
been committed to 7-CURRENT and will ship in 7.0-RELEASE. Thanks to
Pawel Jakub Dawidek and others who have made this possible. During the last three months there has been a flush of changes
going into the FreeBSD USB P4 project. The changes mainly consern
the ability to support the USB device side and multi frame USB
transfers. Up to date the FreeBSD USB stack has only supported the
USB Host Side. Before Christmas 2007 the P4 USB project will offer
USB device support and some simple USB device side implementations.
Technically an USB device side driver will look very similar to an
USB host side driver. Infact there will be very few differences.
Support for multi frame USB transfers opens up the possibility to
transfer multiple short-packet terminated USB frames to/from
different memory locations resulting in only one interrupt on the
USB Host Controller. More specific: I have implemented support for
the "alt_next" pointer in the EHCI Transfer Descriptor. This should
give a noticable increase in the maximum number of short-packet
terminated BULK frames that can be transferred per second. I regularly get questions from people asking about when the USB
P4 project will be merged into FreeBSD-current. The answer is not
simple, but probably something like another year. The reason is not
that the current code in the USB P4 project is not usable, but
rather that the quality needs to be raised in means of making
already good solutions more technically excellent, writing more
documentation and styling the code. Ideas and comments with regard to the new USB API are welcome at
freebsd-usb@freebsd.org.
Linux KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a software package
that can be used to create virtual machines fully emulating x86
hardware on top of machines supporting Intel VT-x or AMD-V
virtualization extensions, available on newer AMD and Intel
processors, e.g., recent Athlon64, Core 2 Duo, Xeon and so
on. Linux KVM has been ported to FreeBSD as a loadable kernel
module, using the linux-kmod-compat port (in /usr/ports/devel/)
to reuse as much as possible of the original source code, plus an
userspace client consisting in a modified version of qemu, that
uses KVM for the execution of its guests. The porting has been completed, many of the limitations
present at the end of the Summer of Code have been removed and
the known bugs have been fixed. Some configurations have been
tested, FreeBSD-CURRENT i386 guests have been booted on Intel and
AMD processors, both in i386 and amd64 (host) installations. Only
one client at a time is supported by now and performance is not
that exciting, but the project seems to be ready to receive wider
testing.
The Summer of Code project went well and we reached interesting results. At least the Mac Mini should be fully supported by now. Regarding the other Apple systems, we still need to polish some edges.
The project (started out as a GSoC 2007 project) aims to provide a complete Multicast DNS and Service Discovery suite. Much progress have been made since the last status report and the project is slowly reaching a usable state. Most features are complete and the current focus is on fixing outstanding bugs, fine tuning and testing. However, there are still a few open tasks (see below). More information and snapshots can be found at the wiki page.
New mpd-5.x branch has been started and first public release is planned soon. The main goal of the new branch is to implement new operation principles based on dynamic on-demand links/bundles creation. There are several benefits received from new design:
The network stack virtualization project aims at extending the FreeBSD kernel to maintain multiple independent instances of networking state. This allows for networking independence between jail-like environmens, each maintaining its private network interface set, IPv4 and IPv6 network and port address space, routing tables, IPSec configuration, firewalls, and more.
The prototype, which is kept in sync with FreeBSD -CURRENT, should be sufficiently stable for testing and experimental use. The project's web page includes weekly code snapshots, as well as a virtualized FreeBSD system installed on a VMWare disk image available for download.
The short-term goal is to deliver production-grade kernel support for virtualized networking for FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE (as a snap-in kernel replacement), while continuing to keep the code in sync with -CURRENT for possible merging at a later date.
The GSoC2007/cnst-sensors project was about porting the sysctl hw.sensors framework from OpenBSD to FreeBSD. The project was - successfully completed + successfully completed, - , - committed into DragonFly BSD - - , and is now pending final review and integration into the - FreeBSD's CVS tree (subject to the tree being unfrozen).
- -The - sensors framework - - provides a unified interface for storing, registering and accessing - information about hardware monitoring sensors. Sensor types - include, but are not limited to, temperature, voltage, fan RPM, - time offset and logical drive status. In the OpenBSD base system, - the framework spans - sensor_attach(9) - - , - sysctl(3) - - , - sysctl(8) - - , - systat(1) - - , - sensorsd(8) - - , - ntpd(8) - - and more than 50 drivers, ranging from I2C temperature sensors and + committed into DragonFly BSD, and is now pending final review and integration + into the FreeBSD's CVS tree (subject to the tree being unfrozen).
+ +The sensors framework provides a unified interface for + storing, registering and accessing information about hardware + monitoring sensors. Sensor types include, but are not limited to, + temperature, voltage, fan RPM, time offset and logical drive + status. In the OpenBSD base system, the framework spans + sensor_attach(9), sysctl(3), sysctl(8), + systat(1), sensorsd(8), ntpd(8) and + more than 50 drivers, ranging from I2C temperature sensors and Super I/O hardware monitors to IPMI and RAID controllers. Several third-party tools are also available, for example, a plug-in for Nagios and ports/sysutils/symon.
As a part of this Google Summer of Code project, all core components of the framework were ported, including sysctl, systat and sensorsd. Some drivers for the most popular Super I/O Hardware - Monitors were ported, too: - it(4) - - , supporting most contemporary ITE Tech Super I/O, and - lm(4) - - , supporting most contemporary Winbond Super I/O. Moreover, some - existing FreeBSD drivers were converted to utilise the framework, - for example, - coretemp(4) - - .
+ Monitors were ported, too: it(4), supporting most + contemporary ITE Tech Super I/O, and lm(4), supporting + most contemporary Winbond Super I/O. Moreover, some existing + FreeBSD drivers were converted to utilise the framework, for + example, coretemp(4).The PC-BSD derivative of FreeBSD is becoming increasingly popular for new users of BSD. Much of the content in the existing FreeBSD Handbook is directly applicable to PC-BSD. We are writing PC-BSD specific installation and port/packages chapters (PBI). These chapters will be checked into docs/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/pcbsd-handbook and will include some of the same chapters as the Handbook does, but with a different &os entity and possibly with some conditional changes in those chapter files.
The ports count is over 17,700. The PR count has decreased a bit to just over 700.
There have been 6 experimental runs on the build cluster. The resulting commits include the fixup of last year's DESTDIR changes, the refactoring of perl bits into bsd.perl.mk, the update of xorg from 7.2 to 7.3, the upgrade of all of the autoconf dependencies to the latest version (wherever possible), and the upgrade of Python to 2.5. This effort has resulted in the fewest number of 'open' portmgr PRs in quite some time. portmgr appreciates all the people who worked with us on these patches, and people's patience as we catch up.
As well, lofi@ committed the upgrade of QT to 4.3.1.
We have added 3 new committers since the last report.
The freebsd-update front end is able to wait for freebsd-update to download a new set of patches to apply. It can then install and rollback the patches on either the local computer or over a SSH tunnel.
Since the end of the Summer of Code work has moved to BerliOS. The focus has been on writing tests for the front end, back end and communication library. The library has had tests written for most of it while the front and back ends have none.
The two most important parts of this Summer of Code projects have been accomplished.
The DESTDIR support for the Ports Collection has been rewritten to use a chrooted install. Now it is much more lightweight and easier to understand, but it works well for the most common cases, where it is supposed to be useful.
The Perl parts of the Ports Collection infrastructure have been extracted into an own module. At the same time, a new version handling has been invented. You can find more info on the Wiki.
Over the last couple of months several FreeBSD.org systems have been experiencing hardware issues. This included the main web-server www.FreeBSD.org which had a bad fan. The bad fan has been replaced so it should hopefully be stable again. In general we are working on replacing older hardware with newer systems and consolidating machine functions in the process.
Since August most FreeBSD.org services have been available via IPv6 with connectivity provided from ISC using a tunnel.
To honor the "Eat your own dog-food" principle the first two FreeBSD.org infrastructure systems have been upgraded to FreeBSD 7 and more are being upgraded as time permit.
Due to heavy load on the project's Perforce and CVS server the two services are being moved to seperate systems to improve performance of both CVS and Perforce.