Index: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2014-01-2014-03.xml =================================================================== --- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2014-01-2014-03.xml (revision 44401) +++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2014-01-2014-03.xml (revision 44402) @@ -1,380 +1,448 @@ January-March 2014
Introduction

This report covers &os;-related projects between January and March 2014. This is the first of four reports planned for 2014.

Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! This report - contains 6 entries and we hope you enjoy reading it.

+ contains 7 entries and we hope you enjoy reading it.

The deadline for submissions covering between April and June 2014 is July 7th, 2014.

team &os; Team Reports + kern + + Kernel + + + ports Ports doc Documentation Chromium Chromium on &os; Team freebsd-chromium@FreeBSD.org Chromium website Development repository on GitHub Chromium on &os; wiki

Chromium is the open source web browser project from which Google Chrome draws its source code. The browsers share the majority of code and features, though there are some minor differences in features and they have different licensing. Over the last four years, the Chromium team has been busy with porting Chromium to &os;. This involves patching the browser so that it runs on &os;, tracking and documenting security updates, and merging patches back upstream.

While there are already several browsers available for &os;, advantages of Chromium are:

George Liaskos and &a.rene; are currently busy with submitting the remaining patches specific to &os; back upstream. Apart from making future updates easier, it sometimes also improves the overall code quality.

&a.jonathan; recently updated the Capsicum patches for Chromium and is talking to upstream about them.

Advocate &os;. While patches are getting accepted by both humans and bots, it is not an official platform so attitude varies from developer to developer. While &a.rene; thinks it is a bit early, it might be fruitful to investigate what is required to make &os; (and possibly OpenBSD) an official platform in terms of both hardware and procedures. If you feel comfortable with large source trees, you can try to build the Git version of Chromium on &os;. If you are also comfortable with signing Googles Contributor License Agreement, you can join testing and submitting patches upstream. ZFS Chapter of the Handbook Allan Jude freebsd@allanjude.com Benedict Reuschling bcr@FreeBSD.org Warren Block wblock@FreeBSD.org Preview ZFS Handbook Slides from AsiaBSDCon 2014

ZFS is one of the premier features of &os;. The current documentation in the Handbook and elsewhere online is severely lacking. Much of the original documentation from Sun and Oracle has disappeared, moved, or is about the proprietary version of ZFS.

New users have many questions about ZFS and yet there exists a great deal more bad advice about ZFS than proper documentation. The current ZFS chapter of the &os; Handbook starts off with the required steps to configure an i386 machine to run ZFS. This is more likely to scare off a new user than to educate them about how to properly use ZFS.

At BSDCan 2013, the process of writing an entirely new chapter of the Handbook on ZFS was started. Currently this chapter consists of approximately 16,000 words covering all subcommands of the zpool(8) and zfs(8) utilities, delegation, tuning and a section devoted to defintions and explainations of the terms and features of ZFS.

The remaining section is the FAQ. To help users address the most common problems they might run into with ZFS. It would be useful to hear experiences, questions, misconceptions, gotchas, stumbling blocks and suggestions for the FAQ section from other users. Also, a use cases section that highlights some of the cases where ZFS provides advantages over traditional file systems.

Please send suggestions to the freebsd-doc mailing list.

ScaleEngine, Inc Technical review by Matt Ahrens (co-creator of ZFS). Improve delegation section. Improve tuning section, add new sysctls added in head. Add section on jails and the jailed property. Add FAQ section. Add Use Cases section. General editing and review. &os; Release Engineering Team &os; Release Engineering Team re@FreeBSD.org &os; 9.3-RELEASE schedule &os; 9.3-RELEASE todo list &os; development snapshots

In early January, the &os; Release Engineering Team became aware of several last-minute showstopper issues in &os; 10.0, which lead to an extension in the final release builds. &os; 10.0-RELEASE was announced on January 20, two months behind the original schedule.

The schedule for the &os; 9.3-RELEASE cycle has been written and posted to the website, and the release cycle will begin early May.

There is ongoing work to integrate support for embedded architectures as part of the release build process. At this time, support exists for a number of ARM kernels, in particular the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, and WandBoard.

The &os; Foundation &os; Documentation Engineering Team &os; Documentation Engineering Team doceng@FreeBSD.org Announcement of Warren Block's addition

The &os; Documentation Engineering Team is responsible for defining and following up documentation goals for the committers in the Documentation project. The team is pleased to announce a new member — &a.wblock;. In early March, the &os; Documentation Engineering Team members assumed responsibility for the &os; Webmaster Team.

 &os; Ada Ports John Marino marino@FreeBSD.org SPARK 2014

Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, wide-spectrum, and object-oriented high-level computer programming language, extended from Pascal and other languages, originally targeted at embedded and real-time systems. The number of Ada ports in the collection has grown significantly since the last report six months ago. There are almost 50 Ada-related ports now, with new ones getting added the time.

The previous plan was to move from the GCC 4.7-based GNAT compiler to a GCC 4.8-based one, but finally GCC 4.8 was skipped and now a GCC 4.9-based GNAT is the standard Ada compiler, which fully supports the new ISO standard, Ada 2012. Moving to a newer compiler allowed several important ports like PolyOrb and GPRBuild to be upgraded to the latest available versions. In fact, almost every Ada port is currrently at its most recent upstream version.

For non-Windows-based Ada development, &os; and DragonFly are now undisputed as the go-to platforms. The other candidates are Debian and Fedora, but there are few Ada software on those platforms that are not also in &os; ports tree, but the versions are much older. The Ports Collection also features software not found anywhere else such as the USAFA's Ironsides DNS server, libsparkcrypto, matreshka, GNATDroid (Android cross-compiler) and several developer libraries.

A desired addition to the Ada ports will be SPARK 2014 (see links), which should cement &os; as an option for professional, safety-critical application development. This package should have its first release by early summer.

 Xfce/&os; &os; Xfce Team xfce@FreeBSD.org Development repository ports/183690

Xfce is a free software desktop environment for Unix and Unix-like platforms, such as &os;. It aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and easy to use. The Xfce team continues to keep up-to-date each piece of the Xfce Desktop.

The latest commits concerned:

We also follow development of core components (available in your repository). See link for documentation on how to upgrade those libraries.

Add support of DragonFly for xfce4-taskmanger. Finish to replace Tango icons theme by GNOME, in order to close ports/183690 (see links, it remains Midori). + + + + PCI SR-IOV Infrastructure + + + + + Ryan + Stone + + rstone@FreeBSD.org + + + + + Work in progress on GitHub + + + +

PCI Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) is an optional part + of the PCIe standard that provides hardware acceleration for the + virtualization of PCIe devices. When SR-IOV is in use, a + function in a PCI device (known as a Physical Function, or PF) + will present multiple Virtual PCI Functions (VF) on the PCI bus. + These VFs are fully independent PCI devices that have + access to the resources of the PF. For example, on a network + interface card VFs could transmit and receive packets + independent of the PF.

+ +

The most obvious use case for SR-IOV is virtualization. A + hypervisor like bhyve could instantiate a VF for every VM and + use PCI passthrough to assign the VFs to the VMs. This would + allow multiple VMs to share access to the PCI device without + having to do any expensive communication with the hypervisor, + greatly increasing performance of performing I/O from a VM.

+ +

There are two parts to this project. The first is implementing + an API in the PCI subsystem for the creating VFs and configuring + standard PCI features like BARs. The second part is updating + individual drivers for PCI devices that support SR-IOV to + configure their VFs. For example, a network interface driver + will typically have to assign a MAC address to a VF and + configure the interface to route packets destined for that MAC + address to the VF.

+ +

At this point only SR-IOV support for the ixgbe(4) + driver is planned. The PCI subsystem API is designed to be + generic and should support SR-IOV on any device, but fairly + extensive driver work is necessary to support SR-IOV, which is + currently not planned due to lack of time and hardware.

+ +

At present, ixgbe(4) is able to create VFs and the + ixgbevf driver is able to pass traffic. There is still + a fair amount of work to support VLAN tags, multicast addresses + and other features on the VFs. Also, the VF configuration needs + to be better integrated with the PF initialization path to + ensure that resets of the PF do not interrupt operation of the + VFs.

+ + + Sandvine, Inc