Index: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2014-10-2014-12.xml =================================================================== --- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2014-10-2014-12.xml (revision 46137) +++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2014-10-2014-12.xml (revision 46138) @@ -1,133 +1,202 @@ July-September 2014
Introduction

This is a draft of the October–December 2014 status report. Please check back after it is finalized, and an announcement email is sent to the &os;-Announce mailing list.

This report covers &os;-related projects between October and December 2014. This is the last of four reports planned for 2014.

The fourth quarter of 2014... was a very busy and productive time

Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work!

The deadline for submissions covering the period from January to March 2015 is April 7th, 2015.

team &os; Team Reports proj Projects kern Kernel arch Architectures bin Userland Programs ?> ports Ports doc Documentation misc Miscellaneous &os; Forum Software Migration &os; Forums Administration Team forum-admins@

With funding from the &os; Foundation, the &os; forums were migrated to XenForo software. The new software is far more capable and easy to use. While the entire forum team contributed, &a.danger; did a particularly excellent job importing existing users and messages and bringing back the often-requested "Thanks" feature. The upgrade was completed in time to be ready for the influx of new users from the release of &os; 10.1, and we have already seen an increase in usage.

Developers with an @FreeBSD.org address can contact forum administrators to obtain the highly-desired "@" suffix on their forum user name along with a Developer flag.

We want to thank the Foundation for making this possible, and the users for their patience and continued presence on the forums!

The &os; Foundation

Encourage more developers and users to try the new forums.

Continue getting feedback from users for tuning and improvements.

 + + Process management + + + + + Konstantin + Belousov + + kib@FreeBSD.org + + + + Peter + Holm + + pho@FreeBSD.org + + + + +

There were several improvements made to the FreeBSD process + management last quarter.

+ +

Reaper. The facility to allow a process to reliably track the + running and exiting state of the whole subtree of the processes, + was added. It is intended to improve tools like timeout(1) or + poudriere, by making it impossible for the runaway granchild to + escape the controlling process. Feature was designed based on + similar facility in the DragonFlyBSD and Linux, with some + references to the Solaris contracts. Committed to HEAD in + r275800.

+ +

Total stop. Right now, the FreeBSD suspension code does not + ensures that the system, both from software and from hardware + view, is in the steady and consistent state. One aspect is the + usermode process activity which is not stopped, continuing to + making requests to the hardware. It is not realistic to expect + drivers to be able to correctly handle the calls after + SUSPEND_CHILD.

+ +

Together with Peter Holm, we developed a facility to stop + usermode threads at the safe points, where they are known to not + own and to not wait for kernel resources, in particular, not + waiting for device requests finishing. It is based on the + existing single-threading code, but extending it to allow external + thread to put some process into stopped state. Also, a facility + to sync filesystems before suspend was added, to ensure that + consistent metadata and as much as possilbe of the cached user + data are on stable storage, to minimize damage of failed + resume.

+ +

The code stressed some parts of the system and lead to + discovery of the unusual numbers of bugs in the different parts of + the system, including process management, buffer cache and syscall + handlers. The bugs were fixed, fixes and the features commmitted + by a series culminating in r275745.

+ +

Process spinlock changes. During the work described above, it + was noted that process spinlock duties are significantly + overloaded (the same is true for the process lock). The spinlock + was split into per-feature lock, see r275121. Also, as result, it + was possible to eliminate recursion on it, r275372.

+ + + The FreeBSD Foundation + + +