Index: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-10-2015-12.xml =================================================================== --- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-10-2015-12.xml (revision 48005) +++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-10-2015-12.xml (revision 48006) @@ -1,2144 +1,2209 @@ October-December 2015
Introduction

This is a draft of the October–December 2015 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 2015. This is the last of four reports planned for 2015.

The fourth quarter of 2015 was another productive quarter for the &os; project and community. [...]

Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work!

The deadline for submissions covering the period from January to March 2016 is April 7, 2016.

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team &os; Team Reports proj Projects kern Kernel arch Architectures bin Userland Programs ports Ports doc Documentation misc Miscellaneous Linux Kernel as a Library Added to the Ports Collection Conrad Meyer cem@FreeBSD.org Upstream LKL Github repository

LKL ("Linux Kernel as a Library") is a special "architecture" of the full Linux kernel that builds as a userspace library on various platforms, including &os;. One application of such a library is using Linux's filesystem drivers to implement a FUSE backend.

fusefs-lkl's lklfuse binary is such a FUSE filesystem. It can mount ext4/3/2, XFS, and BTRFS read-write, using the native drivers from Linux.

The sysutils/fusefs-lkl port may now be installed from packages or ports, providing access to these filesystems on &os; via FUSE.

 Style(9) enhanced to allow C99 'bool' Bruce Evans brde@optusnet.com.au Conrad Meyer cem@FreeBSD.org Bruce's email requesting bool be added to style(9) Differential Revision for the change

Use of bool is now allowed. It was allowed previously, as well, but now it's really allowed. Party like it's 1999!

EMC / Isilon Storage Division

Specify style(9)'s opinion on iso646.h.

Fix intmax_t to be 128-bit on platforms where __int128_t is used.

 Sysctl enhancements Conrad Meyer cem@FreeBSD.org Ravi Pokala rpokala@FreeBSD.org Marcelo Araujo araujo@FreeBSD.org Wikipedia Entry on C99 Fixed-Width Integer Types sysctl(8) -t Submission PR

This quarter, support was added for fixed-width sysctls (signed and unsigned 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit integers). The new KPIs are documented in the sysctl(9) manual page. The sysctl(8) command line tool supports all of the new types.

sysctl(8) gained the '-t' flag, which prints sysctl type information (the original patch was submitted by Yoshihiro Ota). This support includes the newly added fixed-width types.

EMC / Isilon Storage Division ioat(4) driver enhancements Conrad Meyer cem@FreeBSD.org Wikipedia on I/OAT Last quarter's ioat(4) report

I/OAT DMA engines are bulk memory operation offload engines built into some Intel Server/Storage platform CPUs.

This quarter, several enhancements were made to the driver. The driver now avoids memory allocation in locked paths, which should avoid deadlocking in memory pressure scenarios. Support for Broadwell-EP devices has been added. The "blockfill" operation and a non-contiguous 8 KB copy operation have been added to the API. The driver can recover from various programming errors by resetting the hardware.

EMC / Isilon Storage Division

XOR and other advanced ("RAID") operation support.

 ntb_hw(4)/if_ntb(4) driver synced up to Linux Conrad Meyer cem@FreeBSD.org Jon Mason's NTB wiki Intel NTB whitepaper

ntb_hw(4) is now up-to-date with the Linux NTB driver as of the work-in-progress 4.4 kernel (and actually, contains some fixes that haven't landed in the mainline Linux tree yet but will land in 4.5). Only Back-to-back ("B2B") configurations are supported at this time. Going forward, newer hardware may only support the B2B configuration.

if_ntb(4) is mostly up-to-date with the Linux NTB netdevice driver. Notably absent is support for changing the MTU at runtime.

EMC / Isilon Storage Division

Improving if_ntb(4) to avoid using the entire Base Address Register (BAR) when very large BAR sizes are configured (e.g., 512 GB).

Improving pmap_mapdev(9) to somehow allocate only superpage mappings for large BARs, on platforms that support superpages. (NTB BARs can be as large as 512 GB.)

 &os; on newer ARM boards John Wehle john@feith.com Ganbold Tsagaankhuu ganbold@FreeBSD.org &os; on Odroid-C1 Commit adding glue driver

This quarter, we made the changes necessary to support the Amlogic Meson Ethernet controller on the Hardkernel ODROID-C1 board which has an Amlogic aml8726-m8b SoC. The main effort needed was to write a glue driver for the Ethernet controller — the Amlogic Meson Ethernet controller is compatible with Synopsys DesignWare 10/100/1000 Ethernet MAC (if_dwc).

 Mellanox Drivers Hans Petter Selasky hselasky@FreeBSD.org Hardware Information Commit Adding the Driver

The Mellanox &os; team is proud to announce support for the ConnectX-4 series of network cards in &os; 11-current and &os; 10-stable. These devices deliver top performance, with up to 100GBit/s of raw transfer capacity, and support both Ethernet and Infiniband. Currently, the Ethernet driver is ready for use and the Infiniband support for ConnectX-4 is making good progress. We hope that it will be complete before &os; 11.0 is released. For more technical information, refer to the mlx5en(4) manual page in 11-current. The new driver for ConnectX-4 cards is called mlx5 and is put under /sys/dev and not under /sys/ofed as was done for the previous mlx4 driver. The mlx5en(4) kernel module is compiled by default in GENERIC kernels.

Mellanox Technologies "FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems" early access version now available Michael Lucas mwlucas@michaelwlucas.com Book site Early access version

FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems is now in copyediting. The ebook should be available by the end of January at all major vendors, and the print in February.

The book covers everything from removable media, to FUSE, NFSv4 ACLs, iSCSI, CIFS, and more.

If you act really quickly, you can get the electronic early access version at a 10% discount. You'll get the final ebook when it comes out as well. (This offer evaporates when the final version comes out.)

 Updates to GDB John Baldwin jhb@FreeBSD.org New 1:1-only thread target for &os;

The KGDB option is now on by default in the devel/gdb port.

The changes to support cross-debugging of crashdumps in libkvm were committed to HEAD in r291406.

A new thread target for &os; that is suitable for merging upstream has been written and lightly tested. However, it is not yet available as an option in the port. This thread target uses ptrace(2) directly rather than libthread_db and as such supports threads on all ABIs (such as &os;/i386 binaries on &os;/amd64 and possibly Linux binaries, though that is not yet tested). It also requires less-invasive changes in the MD targets in GDB compared to the libthread_db-based target.

Add a port option for the new 1:1-only thread target.

Test the new 1:1-only thread target.

Figure out why the powerpc kgdb targets are not able to unwind the stack past the initial frame.

Add support for more platforms (arm, mips, aarch64) to upstream gdb for both userland and kgdb.

Add support for debugging powerpc vector registers.

 iMX.6 video output support Oleksandr Tymoshenko gonzo@FreeBSD.org Commit Adding Basic Video Support

iMX.6 is a family of SoC used in multiple hobbyist ARM boards such as the Hummingboard, RIoTboard, and Cubox. Most of these products have HDMI output, but until recently, &os; did not benefit from it. As of r292574, there is basic video output support so you can use the console on iMX6-based boards and probably run Xorg (not yet tested).

Due to the lack of some kernel functionality (see open tasks), the only supported mode is 1024x768.

Proper pixel clock initialization (relies on a clock framework).

More flexible video output path (support multiple IPUs and DIs).

 Touchscreen support for Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone Black Oleksandr Tymoshenko gonzo@FreeBSD.org Beaglebone Black with 4DCAPE-43T Demo Input Stack Plans evdev Port

There are two working proof-of-concept drivers for the AM335x touchscreen and for the official Raspberry Pi's touchscreen LCD.

Proper touchscreen support would consist of a userland event reading API, a kernel event reporting API, and kernel hardware drivers for specific devices. There is an ongoing effort to port the Linux evdev API to &os; so applications that use libraries like libinput or tslib could be used without any major changes. Since it is not yet complete, I created a naive evdev-like API for both kernel and tslib and was able to run a demo on a Beaglebone Black with 4DCAPE-43T.

Once evdev makes it into the tree, both hardware drivers can be modified to include "report events" portions and committed.

 Kernel Vnode Cache Tuning Kirk McKusick mckusick@mckusick.com Bruce Evans bde@FreeBSD.org Konstantin Belousov kib@FreeBSD.org Peter Holm pho@FreeBSD.org Mateusz Guzik mjg@FreeBSD.org MFC to stable/10

This completed project includes changes to better manage the vnode freelist and to streamline the allocation and freeing of vnodes.

Vnode cache recycling was reworked to meet free and unused vnodes targets. Free vnodes are rarely completely free; rather, they are just ones that are cheap to recycle. Usually they are for files which have been stat'd but not read; these usually have inode and namecache data attached to them. The free vnode target is the preferred minimum size of a sub-cache consisting mostly of such files. The system balances the size of this sub-cache with its complement to try to prevent either from thrashing while the other is relatively inactive. The targets express a preference for the best balance.

"Above" this target there are 2 further targets (watermarks) related to the recyling of free vnodes. In the best-operating case, the cache is exactly full, the free list has size between vlowat and vhiwat above the free target, and recycling from the free list and normal use maintains this state. Sometimes the free list is below vlowat or even empty, but this state is even better for immediate use, provided the cache is not full. Otherwise, vnlru_proc() runs to reclaim enough vnodes (usually non-free ones) to reach one of these states. The watermarks are currently hard-coded as 4% and 9% of the available space. These, and the default of 25% for wantfreevnodes, are too large if the memory size is large. E.g., 9% of 75% of MAXVNODES is more than 566000 vnodes to reclaim whenever vnlru_proc() becomes active.

The vfs.vlru_alloc_cache_src sysctl is removed. New code frees namecache sources as the last chance to satisfy the highest watermark, instead of selecting source vnodes randomly. This provides good enough behaviour to keep vn_fullpath() working in most situations. Filesystem layouts with deep trees, where the removed knob was required, is thus handled automatically.

As the kernel allocates and frees vnodes, it fully initializes them on every allocation and fully releases them on every free. These are not trivial costs: it starts by zeroing a large structure, then initializes a mutex, a lock manager lock, an rw lock, four lists, and six pointers. Looking at vfs.vnodes_created, these operations are being done millions of times an hour on a busy machine.

As a performance optimization, this code update uses the uma_init and uma_fini routines to do these initializations and cleanups only as the vnodes enter and leave the vnode zone. With this change, the initializations are done kern.maxvnodes times at system startup, and then only rarely again. The frees are done only if the vnode zone shrinks, which never happens in practice. For those curious about the avoided work, look at the vnode_init() and vnode_fini() functions in sys/kern/vfs_subr.c to see the code that has been removed from the main vnode allocation/free path.

 Improvements to QLogic HBA driver Alexander Motin mav@FreeBSD.org

The QLogic HBA driver isp(4) received a substantial set of changes. Their primary goal was to make Fibre Channel target role work well with CTL, but many other things were also fixed/improved:

The code is committed to &os; head and stable/10 branches.

iXsystems, Inc.

NVRAM data reading is hackish and requires rework.

FCoE support for 26xx cards was not tested yet.

 Raspberry Pi: VideoCore userland application packaging Mikaël Urankar mikael.urankar@gmail.com Oleksandr Tymoshenko gonzo@FreeBSD.org

The Raspberry Pi SoC consists of two parts: ARM and GPU (VideoCore). Many interesting features like OpenGL, video playback, and HDMI controls are implemented on the VideoCore side and can be accessed from the OS through libraries provided by Broadcom (userland repo). These libraries were ported to &os; some time ago, so Mikaël created the port misc/raspberrypi-userland for them. He also created a port for omxplayer (a low-level video player that utilizes VideoCore APIs) and is working on a port for Kodi (ex-XBMC), a more user-firendly media player software with Raspberry Pi support.

 LXQt on &os; Olivier Duchateau olivierd@FreeBSD.org &os; LXQt Project LXQt Devel Repository

LXQt is the Qt port of and the upcoming version of LXDE, the Lightweight Desktop Environment. It is the product of the merge between the LXDE-Qt and the Razor-qt projects.

The porting effort remains heavily a work in progress: it needs some components of Plasma 5 (the new major KDE's workspace).

Currently, only the 0.10 branch is functional. See our wiki page for a complete list of applications.

We also sent updates for some components of LXDE (required for the LXQt desktop):

Binary packages are available (only for test purposes) which are regularly tested with the KDE development repository.

Port libsysstat to BSD systems.

Fix some issues that need to be resolved, especially the shutdown and reboot commands.

 Node.js Modules Olivier Duchateau olivierd@FreeBSD.org Node.js Modules Repository

Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. It uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient — perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

The goal of this project is to make it easy to install the modules available in the npm package registry.

Currently, the repository contains slightly fewer than 300 new ports, in particular:

We have improved the USES framework:

Each port is up-to-date.

Update the pre-draft documentation.

Bring in grunt.js (and modules), the JavaScript task runner.

 Xfce on &os; &os; Xfce Team xfce@FreeBSD.org &os; Xfce Project &os; Xfce Repository

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.

During this quarter, the team has kept these applications up-to-date:

We also follow the unstable releases (available in our experimental repository) of:

Propose a patch to upstreamto fix Xfdashboard with our version of OpenGL (it currently coredumps).

 Supporting Variants in the Ports Framework Brendan Molloy brendan+freebsd@bbqsrc.net Poudriere PoC with Variants Ports Makefile PoC with Examples

I recently became involved with &os; (as in, the last 2-3 weeks), and found myself quickly involved with Ports development. What quickly struck me was the difficulty in providing a Python package that was depended upon by multiple versions of Python. As it turns out, poudriere can currently only generate one package per port, meaning that a Python version-neutral (compatible with 2.x and 3.x) port cannot simultaneously be packaged for each variant at the same time.

I discussed the issue with &a.koobs;, who suggested that I look into implementing a "variants protocol" within the Ports framework and the necessary changes to poudriere in order to allow a port to generate more than one package.

Support for variants is strongly needed in Ports and provides significant benefits.

For a simple example, editors/vim-lite could be folded into the editors/vim port, while still generating a vim and vim-lite package. For Python, VARIANTS can be derived from the already used USES flags and generate compatible packages. py27-foobar and py34-foobar could now be consistently generated by poudriere without issue.

Fortunately, this is not a wishful thinking piece. I dug in my heels and have implemented a proof-of-concept implementation of variants in the Ports framework, including the necessary modifications to poudriere in order to support it. It was mildly upsetting to find that poudriere is mostly written in Bourne shell scripts, but press on I did nonetheless.

I started with the prototype made by &a.bapt; as a base, and built from there. The poudriere PoC aims to limit changes as much as possible to merely adding support for the new variants flags, while also at the request of &a.koobs; making the logging output more package-centric (as opposed to port-centric) as a result of these changes.

This is a work in progress, and I would love to hear your feedback. I've enjoyed my first few weeks working on &os;, and I hope to stay here for quite some time.

Any constructive feedback on the implementation would be very welcome!

Hopefully the code will be of sufficient quality to be considered for formal review in the coming months.

 New tools to enhance the porting experience Brendan Molloy brendan+freebsd@bbqsrc.net pytoport: Generate &os; Ports from Python modules on PyPI bandar: Create Development Overlays for the Ports tree skog: Generate Visual Dependency Trees for &os; Ports spdx-lookup: SPDX License List Query Tool

When I starting working on ports for &os; in the last couple of weeks, I found that my workflow was not as efficient as it could be, using just the available tools, so I made a few that could be useful to the development community at large. All of these have been added to the Ports tree, or otherwise will soon be added, so you can play with them today!

pytoport is a command-line application that generates a skeleton port for a given PyPI package name. It attempts to generate the correct dependencies, makes a good attempt at guessing the license using spdx-lookup, and generates a pkg-descr. This made generating the fifteen or so ports I was working on a complete breeze.

While doing this, however, I noticed that some ports were bringing in dependencies that I did not expect, and I needed some way to visualise this. skog builds a dependency tree from the depends lists output by the Ports framework, and displays it on the command line (with extra shiny output if you are using UTF-8). No more pesky example and documentation dependencies being dragged in when you clearly toggled that OPTION as far off as it would go.

While doing all of this, I found it cumbersome to be copying ports back and forth between my small development tree living in git and the larger upstream SVN tree I was using in poudriere. I built a tool called bandar that takes advantage of the FUSE version of unionfs to easily overlay my dev tree on the upstream tree, run linting, poudriere and generate archives with ease.

I'm very impressed with how easy it was to build more tooling for &os;. I hope some of these tools will be of some use to you, and as always, I'd love to hear your feedback!

Improve skog to support searching a tree for a certain port.

Get the bandar port completed.

Continue to improve pytoport, adding trove support and better depedency handling.

Patches welcome for all of the above!

 Out of Memory Handler Rewrite Konstantin Belousov kib@FreeBSD.org

The Out of Memory (OOM) code is intended to handle the situation where the system needs free memory to make progress, while no memory can be reused. Most often, the situation is that to free memory, the system needs more free memory. Consider a case where the system needs to page-out dirty pages, but needs to allocate structures to track the writes. OOM "solves" the problem by killing some selection of user processes. In other words, it trades away system deadlock by suffering a partial loss of user data. The assumption is that it is better to kill a process and recover data in other processes, than lose everything.

Free memory in the &os; Virtual Memory (VM) system appears from two sources. One is the voluntary reclamation of pages used by a process, for example unmapping private anonymous regions, or the last unlink of an otherwise unreferenced file with cached pages. Another source is the pagedaemon, which forcefully frees pages which carry data, of course, after the data is moved to some other storage, like swap or file blocks. OOM is triggered when the pagedaemon definitely cannot free memory to satisfy the requests.

The old criteria to trigger OOM action was a combination of low free swap space and a low count of free pages (the later is expressed precisely with the paging targets constants, but this is not relevant to the discussion). That test is mostly incorrect, e.g., a low free page state might be caused by a greedy consumer allocating all pages freed by the page daemon in the current pass, but this does not preclude the page daemon from producing more pages. Also, since page-outs are asynchronous, the previous page daemon pass might not immmediately produce any free pages, but they would appear some short time later.

More seriously, low swap space does not necessarily indicate that we are in trouble: lots of pages may not require swap allocations to freed, e.g., clean pages or pages backed by files. The last notion is serious, since swap-less systems were considered as having full swap.

Instead of trying to deduce the deadlock from looking at the current VM state, the new OOM handler tracks the history of page daemon passes. Only if several consequtive passes failed to meet the paging target is an OOM kill considered neccessary. The count of consequent failed passes was selected empirically, by testing on small (32M) and large (512G) machines. Auto-tuning of the counter is possible, but requires some more architectural changes to the I/O subsystem.

Another issue was identified with the algorithm which selects a victim process for OOM kill. It compared the counts of pages mapping entries (PTEs) installed into the machine paging structures. For different reasons, machine-dependent VM code (pmap) may remove the pte for a memory-resident page. Under some circumstances, related to other measures to prevent low memory deadlock, very large processes which consume all system memory, could have few or no ptes, and the old OOM selector ignored the process which caused the deadlock, killing unrelated processes.

A new function vm_pageout_oom_pagecount() was written which applies a reasonable heuristic to estimate the number of pages which would be freed by killing the given process. This eliminates the effect of selecting small unrelated processes for OOM kill.

The rewrite was committed to HEAD in r290917 and r290920.

The FreeBSD Foundation Chelsio iSCSI Offload Driver (Initiator and Target) Navdeep Parhar navdeep@chelsio.com Commit Adding Hardware Acceleration Support

A new driver, cxgbei, that enables hardware accelerated iSCSI with Chelsio's T5- and T4-based offload-capable cards, has been committed to HEAD. Both Initiator and Target are supported. The wire traffic is standard iSCSI (SCSI over TCP as per RFC 3720, etc.) so an Initiator/Target using this driver will interoperate with all other standards-compliant implementations.

Hardware assistance provided by the T5 and T4 ASICs includes:

Chelsio Communications

The cxgbei(4) man page is missing but will be committed shortly.

The driver is in advanced stage QA and will see some bugfixes and performance enhancements in the very near future. MFC is possible as soon as the QA cycle completes.

 OpenBSM Christian Brueffer brueffer@FreeBSD.org Robert Watson rwatson@FreeBSD.org TrustedBSD audit mailing list trustedbsd-audit@TrustedBSD.org OpenBSM: Open Source Basic Security Module (BSM) Audit Implementation OpenBSM on GitHub &os; Audit Handbook Chapter

OpenBSM is a BSD-licensed implementation of Sun's Basic Security Module (BSM) API and file format. It is the user-space side of the CAPP Audit implementations in &os; and Mac OS X. Additionally, the audit trail processing tools are expected to work on Linux.

Progress has been slow but steady this quarter, culminating in OpenBSM 1.2 alpha 4, the first release in three years. It features various bug fixes and documentation improvements; the complete list of changes is documented in the NEWS file on GitHub. The release was imported into &os; HEAD and merged to &os; 10-STABLE. As such it will be part of &os; 10.3-RELEASE.

Test the new release on different versions of &os;, Mac OS X and Linux. In particular, testing on Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) and newer would be greatly appreciated.

Fix problems that have been reported via GitHub and the &os; bug tracker.

Implement features mentioned in the TODO list on GitHub.

 &os; on Marvell Armada38x Marcin Wojtas mw@semihalf.com Michal Stanek mst@semihalf.com Bartosz Szczepanek bsz@semihalf.com Jan Dabros jsd@semihalf.com

&os; has been ported to run on the Marvell Armada38x platform. This SoC family boasts single/dual high-performance ARM Cortex-A9 CPUs.

The multi-user SMP system is fully working and has been tested on Marvell DB-88F6288-GP and SolidRun ClearFog development boards.

The root filesystem can be hosted on a USB 3.0/2.0 drive or via NFS using a PCIe network card. Experimental support is available for on-chip Gigabit Ethernet (NETA).

Additional features:

The port is under community review and will be integrated into HEAD soon.

Stormshield Semihalf

Optimize performance of NETA and prepare for submission.

 Bringing GitLab into the Ports Collection Torsten Zühlsdorff ports@toco-domains.de PR for the new Port Installation Guide Upstream GitLab website

GitLab is a web-based Git repository manager with many features that is used by more than 100.000 organizations including NASA and Alibaba. It also is a very long-standing entry on the "Wanted Ports" list of the &os; Wiki.

In the last quarter, there was steady progress in the project itself and the porting. The current release of GitLab 8.3 is now based on Rails 4.2, which obsoletes the need for around 50 new ports. Now there are only 5 dependencies left to be committed!

While the new version of GitLab 8.3 eases the porting, there are big changes between the last working port of GitLab 7.14. Nonetheless, it could be expected to see the next working port in the first quarter of 2016

anyMOTION GRAPHICS GmbH, Düsseldorf, Germany

Update the patches from GitLab 7.14 to 8.3.

Update the documentation.

Provide an updated patch.

 IPv6 Promotion Campaign Torsten Zühlsdorff ports@toco-domains.de

There are more and more machines on the internet that only support IPv6. I manage some of them, and was regularly hit by missing IPv6 support when building ports.

I did some research into the impact of missing IPv6 support on the ports tree. The results are that 10.308 of 25.522 ports are not fetchable when using IPv6. This renders — through dependencies — a total of 17.715 ports unbuildable from IPv6-only systems. All you can do than is wait and hope that distcache.FreeBSD.org caches the distfile. But this will take some time, which may not be a luxury available when a piece of software in use is hit by a security issue.

Based on the research, a promotion campaign for IPv6 was started. Some volunteers will contact the relevant system administrators and try to convince them to support IPv6. This will start in January 2016 and will hopefully create some progress soon.

 KDE on &os; KDE on &os; team kde@FreeBSD.org KDE on &os; website Experimental KDE ports staging area KDE on &os; Wiki KDE/&os; Mailing List Development Repository for Integrating KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5

The KDE on &os; team focuses on packaging and making sure that the experience of KDE and Qt on &os; is as good as possible.

The team kept busy during the last quarter of 2015. Quite a few big updates were committed to the ports tree, and a few more are being worked on in our experimental repository.

As in previous quarters, we would like to thank several people who have contributed with machines, patches and general help. Tobias Berner, &a.madpilot; (madpilot@), Adriaan de Groot, Ralf Nolden, &a.swills; (swills@), and &a.jpaetzel; (jpaetzel@) have been essential to our work.

The following big updates were landed in the ports tree this quarter. In many cases, we have also contributed patches to the upstream projects.

Work on updating the Qt5 ports to their latest version, as well as porting KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 to &os;, is well underway in our experimental area51 repository. At the moment, it contains Qt5 5.5.1, KDE Frameworks 5.17.0, Plasma 5.5.1 and KDE Applications 15.12.0.

Users interested in testing those ports are encouraged to follow the instructions in our website and report their results to our mailing list. Qt5 5.5.1 is in our "qt-5.5" branch, and Plasma 5 and the rest is in the "plasma5" branch (which also contains Qt 5.5.1).

Commit the Qt5 5.5.1 update.

Land the KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 ports to the tree.

Investigate what needs to be done to make QtWebEngine, the Chromium-based replacement for QtWebKit, work on &os;.

 Ports Collection Frederic Culot portmgr-secretary@FreeBSD.org Frederic Culot culot@FreeBSD.org &os; Ports Management Team portmgr@FreeBSD.org Ports Collection Landing Page Contributor's Guide Ports Monitoring Service Ports Management Team Website Portmgr on Facebook

As of the end of Q4 the ports tree holds a bit more than 25,000 ports, and the PR count is around 2,000. The activity on the ports tree remains steady, with about 7,000 commits performed by almost 120 active committers.

On the problem reports front, figures show an encouraging trend, with a significant increase in the number of PRs fixed during Q4. Indeed, almost 1,800 reports were fixed, which makes an increase of about 20% compared to Q3.

In Q4 8 commit bits were taken in for safekeeping, following an inactivity period of more than 18 months (lioux, lippe, simon, jhay, max, sumikawa, alexey, sperber). Three new developers were granted a ports commit bit (Kenji Takefu, Carlos Puga Medina, and Ian Lepore), and one returning committer (miwi) had his commit bit reinstated.

Also related to the management of ports commit bits, nox's grants were revoked, since the &os; developers learnt that Juergen Lock passed away.

On the management side, no changes were made to the portmgr team during Q4.

On QA side 33 exp-runs were performed to validate sensitive updates or cleanups. Amongst those noticeable changes are the update to GCC 4.9, CMake to 3.4.1, PostgreSQL to 9.4, and ruby-gems to 2.5.0. Some infrastructure changes included the usage of a WRKSRC different from WRKDIR when NO_WRKSUBDIR is set, the removal of bsd.cpu.mk from sys.mk, and the move of QT_NONSTANDARD to bsd.qt.mk.

We would like to remind everyone that the ports tree is built and run by volunteers, and any help is greatly appreciated. While Q4 saw a significant increase in the number of problem reports fixed, we encourage all ports committers to have a look at the issues reported by our users and try to fix as many as possible. Many thanks to all who made a contribution during Q4, and keep up the good work in 2016!

 Issue Tracking (Bugzilla) Bugmeisters bugmeister@FreeBSD.org Kubilay Kocak koobs@FreeBSD.org Mahdi Mokhtari mokhi64@gmail.com Bugzilla Home Page

This quarter, the bugmeister team has gained a new member, Mahdi Mokhtari (mokhi64@gmail.com). Mahdi has been contributing to the &os; Project for just over one month. After getting started by creating ports for Chef-Server and MySQL 5.7 (With Bernard Spil's help), an introduction to &a.koobs; led to guidance on appropriate projects, such as Bugzilla development, helping Bugmeister, the Bugzilla Triage team, Developers, and the Community by making issue tracking better. This is how things are going so far:

Issue Tracking can be either "Defect Tracking for Systems" or "Bug-Tracking for Systems". System Defect Tracking is to allow individual or groups of developers to keep track of outstanding issues in their product effectively. We use Bugzilla to manage issues for the &os; project.

We are pleased to announce some developments on our issue management systems:

Major improvements to templates for usability and simplicity.

Further improvements to automation (for example, additional processing of commit logs).

 Root Remount Edward Tomasz Napierala trasz@FreeBSD.org

One of the long-missing features of &os; was the ability to boot up with a temporary rootfs, configure the kernel to be able to access the real rootfs, and then replace the temporary root with the real one. In Linux, this functionality is known as pivot_root. The reroot projects provides similar functionality in a different, slightly more user-friendly way: rerooting. Simply put, from the user point of view it looks like the system performs a partial shutdown, killing all processes and unmounting the rootfs, and then partial bringup, mounting the new rootfs, running init, and running the startup scripts as usual.

The project is finished. All the relevant code has been committed to &os; 11-CURRENT, and is expected to ship with &os; 11.0.

The FreeBSD Foundation RCTL Disk IO Limits Edward Tomasz Napierala trasz@FreeBSD.org

An important missing piece of the RCTL resource limits mechanism was the ability to limit disk throughput. This project aims to fill that hole by making it possible to add RCTL rules for read bytes per second (BPS), write BPS, read I/O operations per second (IOPS), and write IOPS. It also adds a new throttling mechanism, to delay process execution when a limit gets hit.

The project is at the late implementation stage. The major piece of work left, apart from testing, is to integrate it with ZFS. The project is expected to ship with &os; 11.0.

The FreeBSD Foundation &os; Release Engineering Team &os; Release Engineering Team re@FreeBSD.org &os; 10.3-RELEASE schedule &os; Development Snapshots

The &os; Release Engineering Team is responsible for setting and publishing release schedules for official project releases of &os;, announcing code freezes and maintaining the respective branches, among other things.

During the last quarter of 2015, the Release Engineering team added support for three additional &os;/arm systems: BANANAPI, CUBIEBOARD, and CUBIEBOARD2.

In addition to regular development snapshot builds for &os; 11.0-CURRENT and &os; 10.2-STABLE, several changes and enhancements were made to the release build code. Of note, the release build code no longer produces MD5 checksums, in favor of SHA512.

Toward the end of the year, much of the primary focus was centered around the upcoming &os; 10.3 release cycle, which will begin during January 2016.

As always, help testing development snapshot builds is crucial to producing quality releases, and we encourage testing development snapshots whenever possible.

The FreeBSD Foundation MMC Stack Under CAM Framework Ilya Bakulin ilya@bakulin.de Project Information Source Code Patch for Review

The goal of this project is to reimplement the exisitng MMC/SD stack using the CAM framework. This will permit utilizing the well-tested CAM locking model and debug features. Additionally, it will be possible to process interrupts generated by the inserted card, which is a prerequisite for implementing the SDIO interface.

The first version of the code was uploaded to Phabricator for review. The new stack is able to attach to the SD card and bring it to an operational state, so it is possible to read and write to/from the card.

The only supported SD controller driver is ti_sdhci, which is used on the BeagleBone Black. Modifying other SDHCI-compliant drivers should not be difficult.

Rework bus/target/LUN enumeration and the locking model — I don't really understand the CAM locking and am likely to do it incorrectly.

Modify the SDHCI driver on at least one x86 platform — this will make development and collaboration easier.

Begin implementing SDIO-specific bits.

 The Graphics stack on &os; &os; Graphics team freebsd-x11@freebsd.org Graphics Stack Roadmap and Supported Hardware Matrix Ports Development Tree on GitHub

Several important ports were updated: Mesa to 11.0.8, the X.Org server to 1.17.4, libdrm to 2.4.65, as well as many applications and libraries. The latest release of the X.Org server, 1.18, is being tested in our Ports development tree.

On the kernel side, the i915 update is almost ready to land. There are a couple known regressions for currently supported GPUs that we want to fix before committing.

We started a discussion on the FreeBSD-x11@ mailing list to organize future contributions to the kernel drivers. We have already received some valuable comments. We are confident that future updates will happen at a faster pace, thanks to several motivated people!

FOSDEM is held in Brussels on the 30th and 31st of January. We will attend this conference. It will be a perfect time to see people again from &os; and from the XDC. On Sunday, we will give a talk about how to contribute to the Graphics Stack.

Our blog is currently down because the service was discontinued. We hope to get a dump of our data to put it back online elsewhere. Unfortunately, there is no ETA for this item.

See the "Graphics" wiki page for up-to-date information.

 Encrypted Kernel Crash Dumps Konrad Witaszczyk def@FreeBSD.org Technical Details Patch Review

Kernel crash dumps contain information about currently running processes. This can include sensitive data, for example passwords kept in memory by a browser when a kernel panic occurred. An entity that can read data from a dump device or a crash directory can also extract this information from a core dump. In order to prevent this situation, the core dump should be encrypted before it is stored on the dump device.

This project allows a kernel to encrypt a core dump during a panic. A user can configure the kernel for encrypted dumps and save the core dump after reboot using the existing tools, dumpon(8) and savecore(8). A new tool decryptcore(8) was added to decrypt the core files.

A patch has been uploaded to Phabricator for review. The project is currently being updated to address the review comments, and should be committed as soon as it is accepted. For more technical details, please visit the FreeBSD-security mailing list archive or see the Phabricator review.

 The &os; Issue Triage Team Bugmeister bugmeister@FreeBSD.org Kubilay Kocak koobs@FreeBSD.org Vladimir Krstulja vlad-fbsd@acheronmedia.com Rodrigo N. Hernandez rodrigo.FreeBSD@minasambiente.com.br Issue Triage Team's Brainstorming Pad

By the end of the Q4 2015 period, &a.koobs; (koobs@) started an initiative to form an experimental Bugzilla Triage Team. The main goals of the team are to increase community involvement (addition/training of new triagers) and enhance current procedures and tools, among others. This experiment was started with the participation of Vladimir (blackflow on irc/freenode) and Rodrigo (DanDare on irc/freenode), who approached koobs@ with a desire to contribute and get more involved with the &os; Project. This experimental pilot project has the task of setting up procedures for enhanced Issue (Problem Report) management that include better classification/prioritization, eventually leading to faster resolution of the issues.

We are now happy to report on the progress of this experimental team:

Since the Issue Triage Team is very young, we expect more information be available and more actions be reported upon in the next Status report.

Set up the Wiki namespace and organize the brainstorm document into a meaningful set of documents.

Recruit more suitable triagers into the team.

 + + + relaunchd + + + + + Mark + Heily + + mark@heily.com + + + + + Development tree on GitHub + + + +

The relaunchd project provides a service + management daemon that is similar to the original + launchd + introduced in Apple OS X.

+ +

It is not limited to the original features of + launchd, however: interesting work is being done to add + support for launching programs in jails, passing socket + descriptors from the host to a jail, and launching programs within + a preconfigured capsicum(4) sandbox. Additionally, + relaunchd uses UCL for its configuration files, so jobs + can be defined in JSON or other formats supported by UCL.

+ +

While there is still work to be done, most of the important + features of the original launchd have been implemented, + and relaunchd has been made available in the &os; Ports + Collection. It should still be considered experimental and not + ready for production use, but everyone is welcome to try it, + report issues, and contribute code or ideas for improvement.

+ + + + +

Add support for restarting jobs if they crash.

+ + + +

Implement the cron(8) emulation feature.

+ + + +

Add support for monitoring files and directories for + changes, and launching jobs when changes are detected.

+ + + +

Finish things that are incomplete, such as support for + jails and passing open socket descriptors to child processes.

+ + + +

Improve the documentation and providing more examples of + how to use it.

+ + +