Index: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2016-04-2016-06.xml =================================================================== --- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2016-04-2016-06.xml (revision 49096) +++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2016-04-2016-06.xml (revision 49097) @@ -1,1744 +1,1815 @@ April-June 2016
Introduction

The second quarter of 2016.

—Insert name here

Please submit status reports for the third quarter of 2016 by insert date here.

team &os; Team Reports proj Projects kern Kernel arch Architectures bin Userland Programs ports Ports doc Documentation misc Miscellaneous &os; Release Engineering Team &os; Release Engineering Team re@FreeBSD.org &os; 10.3-RELEASE schedule &os; 11.0-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.

The &os; Release Engineering Team completed the 10.3-RELEASE cycle late April, led by &a.marius;. The release was one week behind the original schedule, to accommodate for a few last minute critical issues that were essential to include in the final release.

The &os; 11.0-RELEASE cycle started late May, one month behind the original schedule. The schedule slip was primarily to accommodate for packaging the &os; base system with the pkg(8) utility. However, as work on this progressed, it became apparent that there were too many outstanding issues. As a result, packaged base will be a "beta" feature for 11.0-RELEASE, with the goal of promoting it to a first-class feature in 11.1-RELEASE, with additional provisions to ensure a seamless transition for earlier supported releases.

Despite the fact that packaged base is not going to be a prime feature for &os; 11.0-RELEASE, the Release Engineering Team would like to thank everyone who tested, provided patches, provided ideas and feedback, and in some cases, shot themselves in the foot due to bugs.

The &os; Foundation Obsoleting Rails 3 Torsten Zühlsdorff tz@FreeBSD.org

Ruby on Rails is the base for most of the rubygems in the Ports Collection. Currently, versions 3.2 and 4.2 coexist. Since Rails 3.2 is running out of support, the time has come to switch to 4.2.

While there is ongoing progress to remove Rails 3.2 from the ports tree, there are some major updates blocking this process. The most recent blocker was the outstanding update of www/redmine from 2.6 to 3.2. This has completed successfully, so we can now move on.

To help with porting or testing, feel free to contact me or the ruby@FreeBSD.org mailing list.

 ARM Allwinner SoC Support Jared McNeill jmcneill@freebsd.org Emmanuel Vadot manu@freebsd.org Allwinner FreeBSD Wiki

Allwinner SoCs are used in multiple hobbyist devboards and single board computers. Recently, support for these SoCs received many updates.

Theses tasks were completed during the second quarter of 2016:

Ongoing work:

SPI driver LCD Support Any unsupported hardware device that might be of interest. Robust Mutexes Konstantin Belousov kib@FreeBSD.org Ed Maste emaste@FreeBSD.org

Now that the process-shared locks are implemented for our POSIX threads implementation library, libthr, the only major lacking feature for POSIX compliance is robust mutexes. Robust mutexes allow the application to detect, and theoretically, recover from crashes which occur while modifying the shared state. The supported model is to protect shared state by a pthread_mutex, and the crash is detected as the thread termination while owning the mutex. A thread might terminate alone, or it could be killed due to the termination of the containing process. As such, the robust attribute is applicable to both process-private and -shared mutexes.

An application must be specifically modified to handle and recover from failures. The pthread_mutex_lock() function may return new error EOWNERDEAD, which indicates that the previous owner of the lock terminated while still owning the lock. Despite returning the non-zero value, the lock is granted to the caller. In the simplest form, an application may detect the error and refuse to operate until the persistent shared data is recovered, such as by manual reinitialization. More sophisticated applications could try to automatically recover from the condition, in which case pthread_mutex_consistent(3) must be called on the lock before the unlock. However, such recovery can be considered to be very hard. Still, even the detection of inconsistent shared state is useful, since it avoids further corruption and random faults of the affected application.

It is curious but not unexpected that this interface is not used widely. The only real-life application which utilizes it is Samba. Using Samba with an updated FreeBSD base uncovered minor bugs both in the FreeBSD robustness implementation, and in Samba itself.

It is believed that libthr in FreeBSD 11 is POSIX-compliant for large features. Further work is planned to look at the lock structures inlining to remove overhead and improve performance of the library.

Most of the implementation of the robustness feature consisted of making small changes in the lock and unlock paths, both in libthr and in kern_umtx.c. This literally required reading all of the code dealing with mutexes and conditional variables, which was something I wanted to help future developers with. In the end, with the help of Ed Maste, the man pages for umtx(2) and all thr*(2) syscalls were written and added to the base system's documentation set.

The FreeBSD Foundation Use the implementation in real-word applications and report issues. EFI Refactoring, GELI Support Eric McCorkle eric@metricspace.net GELI Support Branch EFI Refactoring Branch

The EFI bootloader has undergone considerable refactoring to make more use of the EFI API. The filesystem code in boot1 has been eliminated, and a single codebase for filesystems now serves both boot1 and loader. This codebase is organized around the EFI driver model and it should be possible to export any filesystem implementation as a standalone EFI driver without too much effort.

Both boot1 and loader have been refactored to talk through the EFI_SIMPLE_FILE_SYSTEM interface. In loader, this is accomplished with a dummy filesystem driver that is just a translation layer between the loader filesystem interface and EFI_SIMPLE_FILE_SYSTEM. A reverse translation layer allows the existing filesystem drivers to function as EFI drivers.

The EFI refactoring by itself exists in this branch.

Additionally, GELI support has been added using the EFI refactoring. This allows booting from a GELI-encrypted filesystem. Note that the EFI system partition, which contains boot1, must be a plaintext msdosfs partition. This patch adds an intake buffer to the crypto framework, which allows injection of keys directly into a loaded kernel, without the need to pass them through arguments or environment variables. This patch only uses the intake buffer for EFI GELI support as legacy BIOS GELI support still uses environment variables.

EFI GELI support depends on the efize branch.

These patches have been tested and used and should be able to handle use by early adopters. Note that the LOADER_PATH variable has been changed to /boot/loader.tst, to facilitate safe testing.

IMPORTANT:

As this is an encrypted filesystem patch, an error can potentially leave data inaccessible. It is strongly recommended to use the following procedure for testing:

  1. Back up your data!

  2. Do not forget to back up your data!

  3. Install an EFI shell on the ESP.

  4. Install the patched boot1 on the ESP to something like /boot/efi/BOOTX64.TST.

  5. Install the patched loader to /boot/loader.tst on your machine.

  6. Create a GELI partition outside of the normal boot partition.

  7. First, try booting /boot/efi/BOOTX64.TST and make sure it properly handles the encrypted partition.

  8. Copy a boot environment, including the patched loader, to the encrypted partition.

  9. Use the loader prompt to load a kernel from the encrypted partition.

  10. Try switching over to an encrypted main partition once everything else has worked.

Testing is needed. Code will need review and some style(9) normalization must occur before this code goes into FreeBSD. Updates to GDB John Baldwin jhb@FreeBSD.org Luca Pizzamiglio luca.pizzamiglio@gmail.com

The port has been updated to GDB 7.11.1.

Support for system call catchpoints has been committed upstream. Support for examining ELF auxiliary vector data via info auxv has been committed upstream. Both features will be included in GDB 7.12.

Figure out why the powerpc kgdb targets are not able to unwind the stack past the initial frame. Add support for more platforms, such as arm, mips, and aarch64, to upstream gdb for both userland and kgdb. Add support for debugging powerpc vector registers. Add support for $_siginfo. Implement info proc commands. Implement info os commands. VIMAGE Virtualized Network Stack Update Bjoern A. Zeeb bz@FreeBSD.org Projects workspace (all merged to head now).

VIMAGE is a virtualization framework on top of FreeBSD jails that was introduced to the kernel about eight years ago with the vnet virtualized network stack.

Over the last few years, many people started to use VIMAGE in production, production-like setups, and appliances. This adoption increased the urgency to finish the work to avoid panics on network stack teardown and to avoid memory leaks.

The vnet teardown has been changed to be from top to bottom, trying to tear down layer by layer. This is preferable to removing interfaces first and then cleaning everything up, as no more packets could flow. Along with this work, various parts with potential memory leaks were plugged. Lastly, vnet support was added to formerly unvirtualized components, such as the pf and ipfilter firewalls and some virtual interfaces.

The FreeBSD Foundation Please test FreeBSD 11.0-ALPHA6 or later. When reporting a problem, use the vimage keyword in the FreeBSD bug tracker. IPv6 Promotion Campaign Torsten Zühlsdorff tz@FreeBSD.org Wiki Page

Half a year ago, I started a promotion campaign to improve support for fetching ports via IPv6. Research performed in December, 2015 showed that 10,308 of 25,522 ports are not fetchable when using IPv6-only as these ports ignore the FreeBSD.org pkg mirror.

As a result of the campaign, the following servers now successfully support IPv6:

  1. mirror.amdmi3.ru
  2. vault.centos.org
  3. mirror.centos.org
  4. gstreamer.freedesktop.org
  5. people.freebsd.org

This enables 711 more ports to be fetched via IPv6.

I would like to thank Wolfgang Zenker who is very active in supporting the adoption of IPv6. During the latest RIPE meeting, he brought up the topic of non-support of IPv6 being a hindrance to business. I am hopeful that his talk changed some more minds and will help widen the support of IPv6.

 FreeBSD on Hyper-V and Azure Sepherosa Ziehau sepherosa@gmail.com Hongjiang Zhang honzhan@microsoft.com Dexuan Cui decui@microsoft.com Kylie Liang kyliel@microsoft.com FreeBSD Virtual Machines on Microsoft Hyper-V Supported Linux and FreeBSD virtual machines for Hyper-V on Windows

During BSDCan 2016, Microsoft announced the global availability of FreeBSD 10.3 images in Azure. There are many FreeBSD-based Azure virtual appliances in the Azure Marketplace, including Citrix Systems' NetScaler and Netgate's pfSense. Microsoft also made an in-depth technical presentation to introduce how the performance of the Hyper-V network device driver was optimized to reach full line rate on 10Gb networks and achieved decent performance on 40Gb networks. The slides and video from the presentation are available from the BSDCan website.

Microsoft continues to strive to further optimize the performance of Hyper-V network and storage device drivers. Work is ongoing to replace the internal data structure in the LRO kernel API from a singly-linked list to a double-linked list, to speed up the LRO lookup by hash table, and to compare the performance with tcp_lro_queue_mbuf().

The handling of SCSI inquiry in the Hyper-V storage driver is enhanced to make sure disk hotplug and smartctl(8) work reliably. Refer to PR 210425 and PR 209443 for details.

BIS test cases are available on GitHub for Hyper-V and for Azure.

Microsoft Ceph on FreeBSD Willem Jan Withagen wjw@digiware.nl Ceph main site Main repository My Fork The git PULL with all changes

Ceph is a distributed object store and file system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability, and scalability. It provides the following features:

  1. Object Storage: Ceph provides seamless access to objects using native language bindings or radosgw, a REST interface that is compatible with applications written for S3 and Swift.
  2. Block Storage: Ceph’s RADOS Block Device (RBD) provides access to block device images that are striped and replicated across the entire storage cluster.
  3. File System: Ceph provides a POSIX-compliant network file system that aims for high performance, large data storage, and maximum compatibility with legacy applications.

I started looking into Ceph as using HAST with CARP and ggate did not meet my requirements. My primary goal with Ceph is to run a storage cluster of ZFS storage nodes where the clients run bhyve on RBD disks stored in Ceph.

The &os; build process can build most of the tools in Ceph. However, the RBD-dependent items do not work since &os; does not yet provide RBD support.

Since the last quarterly report, the following progress was made:

  1. The changeover from using CMake to Automake results in a much cleaner development environment and better test output. The changes can be found in the wip-wjw-freebsd-cmake branch.
  2. Throttling code has been overhauled to prevent live locks. These mainly occur on &os; but also manifest on Linux.
  3. Fixed a few more tests. On one occasion, I was able to complete the full test set without errors.

11-CURRENT is used to compile and build test Ceph. The Clang toolset needs to be at least version 3.7 as Clang 3.4 does not have all of the capabilities required to compile everything.

This setup will get things running for &os;:

Parts Not Yet Included:

Tests Not Yet Included:

The current and foremost task it to get the test set to complete without errors. Build an automated test platform that will build ceph/master on &os; and report the results back to the Ceph developers. This will increase the maintainability of the &os; side of things as developers are signaled that they are using Linux-isms that will not compile or run on &os;. Ceph has several projects that support this: Jenkins, teuthology, and palpito. But even a while { compile } loop that reports the build data on a static webpage is a good start. Run integration tests to see if the &os; daemons will work with a Linux Ceph platform. Get the currently excluded Python tests to work. Compile and test the user space RBD (Rados Block Device). Investigate if an in-kernel RBD device could be developed ala ggate. Investigate the keystore which currently prevents the building of Cephfs and some other parts. Integrate the &os; /etc/rc.d init scripts in the Ceph stack for testing and for running Ceph on production machines. Bringing GitLab into the Ports Collection Torsten Zühlsdorff tz@FreeBSD.org GitLab port PR: not starting on boot

After being in the &os; Ports Collection for three months, GitLab continues to mature and gain adoption. Most of its starting problems have been resolved, with one known issue left: it does not start on boot. Any help in solving this issue is welcome.

Staying in sync with upstream is now easy for minor versions. But, some of the monthly major releases create a big workload by introducing a number of new dependencies. This makes testing and updating an expensive process.

The GitLab project itself now mentions native support on &os;, which is quite a commendation.

Current work aims to fix the open problems, get the latest major version into the port, and create the documentation for the update progress.

 ASLR Interim State Konstantin Belousov kib@FreeBSD.org Patch home

This is an interim report on the technical state of the ASLR patch.

The proccontrol(1) utility was written to manage and query ASLR enforcement on a per-process basis. It is required for analyzing ASLR failures in specific programs. This utility leverages the procctl(2) interface which was added to the previous version of the patch, with some bug fixes.

With r300792, ASLR settings are reset to system-wide defaults whenever a setuid binary is executed.

The command's syntax is:

proccontrol -m (trace|aslr) [-q] [-s (enable|disable)] [-p pid | command]

-m (specifies trace mode to control debugger attachments)

-q (queries the state of the specified mode for the process with the PID specified by -p option)

-e (toggles the feature on or off for the given process or itself)

If the command is specified, it inherits the applied settings from proccontrol. For instance, to start a build of a program with ASLR disabled, use proccontrol -m aslr -s disable make.

The ports exp run was done with ASLR tuned up to the most aggressive settings. The results can be found in PR 208580.

SBCL is an interesting case which illustrates several points. It is much smaller than JDK, and its build system is easier to work with. The code provides a very non C-ish language runtime which utilizes a lot of corner cases and non-standard uses of VM, at least from the point of view of a typical C programmer.

SBCL compiles Lisp forms into the machine native code and manages its own arena for objects. The precompiled Lisp runtime is mapped from the core file. SBCL relies on the operating system's C runtime for the initial load of Lisp, and needs a functional libc to issue many system calls, including syscalls, as well as the dynamic loader. The end result is that there are unfixed mmap(2) calls during both startup and runtime, interfering with the MAP_FIXED mmaps. The core file loading and arenas are hard-coded to exist at fixed addresses.

This happens to work on the default address map, which is not changed often, so the SBCL choices of the base addresses evolved to work. But any significant distortion of the standard map results in SBCL mmap(MAP_FIXED) requests to override memory from other allocators.

&os; uses the MAP_EXCL flag to mmap(2), which must be used in MAP_FIXED|MAP_EXCL form to cause mmap(2) failure if the requested range is already used. I tried to force MAP_FIXED requests from SBCL to implicitely set MAP_EXCL, but this did not go well since SBCL sometimes pre-allocates regions for later use with MAP_FIXED. So, MAP_EXCL mappings failed, dumping the process into ldb.

On Linux, if a kernel is detected in AS-randomization mode, the initial SBCL runtime sets personality to non-random and re-execs. This might be a solution for &os; as well, after the ASLR patch is committed, so that the procctl(2) knob is officially available.

SBCL still has issues on Linux, even with re-exec, when more aggressive randomization from PaX patch is applied, as seen in bug 1523213.

The Emacs build procedure involves loading the temacs image with the compiled Emacs Lisp files and then dumping the memory to recreate the image with the preloaded content, in order to shrink the start time.

Recent Emacs sources seem to generally avoid MAP_FIXED, except in some situations. When Emacs does use the flag, it carefully checks that the selected region is not busy. In fact, Emacs would benefit from MAP_EXCL.

I tried several runs of building Emacs and running the dumped binary, but was not able to reproduce the issue. It seems that the code improved enough to tolerate ASLR both in Linux and NetBSD without turning it off.

In my opinion, it is not reasonable to fight the issues in the kernel as most of it is not fixable from the kernel side. The procctl(2) interface and proccontrol(1) utilities provide the override when needed, but are not automated.

The set of ports which cannot be built with ASLR turned on should be limited but fluid. However, exp-runs may not reliably uncover all problems due to randomization, as seen in the Emacs example. In the route to enable ASLR by default in non-aggressive settings, the ports framework should provide an option like ASLR_UNSAFE=yes which spawns proccontrol -m aslr -s disable make for the build stages of the unsafe port. Users would still need to be aware of proccontrol(1) in order to run the resulting binary.

A recommended approach is a flag in the ELF binary to mark it as not compatible with non-standard AS layouts. This frees users from having to use proccontrol(1), but still requires patching and upstreaming. This approach is also useful outside the context of ASLR. However, the mechanism is not yet ready, and developing it is a larger work than ASLR itself.

The FreeBSD Foundation The Graphics Stack on &os; &os; Graphics team freebsd-x11@FreeBSD.org Matthew Macy mmacy@nextbsd.org GitHub Repository Graphics Stack Roadmap and Supported Hardware Matrix Ports Development Repository DRM 4.6 Development Repository GSoC 2016: link /dev entries to sysctl nodes GSoC 2016: Redesign libdevq Graphics Team Blog

In the Ports tree, Mesa was updated to 11.2.2. The next major release, 12.0.0 release candidate 4, is ready for testing in our development tree.

The GSoC project about being able to connect a /dev entry to sysctl nodes is making progress. After some fruitful discussons on the freebsd-arch@ mailing-list, Kiloreux finished the design and is now implementing the solution. The GSoC project on libdevq was abandoned.

All Intel GPUs up to and including the unreleased Kaby Lake are supported. The xf86-video-intel driver will be updated soon. Updating this driver requires updating Xorg, which in turn is blocked on Nvidia updates.

Several problems remain to be solved:

Matt Macy is hoping to be able to diagnose the first two issues, along with others, by updating Linux support to the point where the Intel GPU Tools work on &os;.

The Radeon AMD/ATI has been updated to GCN 1.0. This has only been tested on an R7 240. 2D-accelerated X works. Due to apparent issues with user library support, X does not recognize the KMS driver as being 3D-capable and reports it as "not DRI2 capable". The OpenCL benchmark clpeak fails in drm/ttm, so there may in fact be issues in the underlying 3D support.

The Amdgpu AMD/ATI driver has been updated to GCN 1.1 and higher. The KMS driver loads and attaches on discrete GPUs, though problems still exist on the Carizzo APU. X will not start due to unimplemented functions in libdrm. Koop Mast is actively working on this and should have it fixed soon.

None of the required patches to src/sys were committed in time for &os; 11. Although the plan is to ultimately make linuxkpi, drm, i915, radeon, and amdgpu updates available as ports, this will likely not happen until development has slowed to the point where it is economical to backport them to &os; in svn. Until that time, modern GPU support will be available in PC-BSD snapshots and in the drm-next-4.6 branch on GitHub.

 &os; IRC Admin Team IRC Admin Team irc@FreeBSD.org Kubilay Kocak koobs@FreeBSD.org Eitan Adler eadler@FreeBSD.org &os; IRC Wiki

The &os; IRC Admin team manages the &os; Project's IRC presence on the freenode IRC network, looking after:

In order to facilitate a constructive and positive environment for all members of the &os; community, IRC Admin over the past 3-9 months has established and consolidated a consistent baseline with respect to the management of its channels on freenode. This report is a summary of what has happened so far and things to come.

These activities were completed over the last few quarters:

The goals for the next few quarters are to:

Users are invited to /join #freebsd-irc on the freenode IRC network. The IRC Admin team welcomes ideas, contructive criticism, and feedback on how the &os; Project can improve the service and experience it provides to the community.

While the vast majority of the broader community interacts on the freenode IRC network, the &os; developer presence there needs to be significantly improved.

There are many opportunities to be had by increasing the amount and quality of interaction between &os; users and developers, both in terms of developers keeping their finger on the pulse of the community and in encouraging and cultivating greater contributions to the Project over the long term.

It is critical to have a strong developer presence amongst users and IRC Admin would like to call on all developers to join the &os; freenode channels to help support that presence. We are the &os; giants on whose shoulders the future contributors stand. It is important to be there, in force.

 GNOME on FreeBSD FreeBSD GNOME Team freebsd-gnome@FreeBSD.org FreeBSD GNOME Website Development Repository Upstream Build Bot USE_GNOME Porter's Handbook Chapter GNOME/Gtk+ 3.20 update bug

The &os; GNOME Team maintains the GNOME, MATE, and CINNAMON desktop environments and graphical user interfaces for &os;. GNOME 3 is part of the GNU Project. MATE is a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop. CINNAMON is a desktop environment using GNOME 3 technologies, but with a GNOME 2 look and feel.

GNOME 3.20 was ported with help from Ruslan Makhmatkhanov and Gustau Perez. Work is being done on updating GDM from the old 3.16 version to the 3.20 version. For some reason, scrollbars in Firefox are no longer working, though this has not been investigated.

With Gtk+ 3.20, theme support was again changed, and the changes are not backwards compatible. If you have a theme update that requires the new Gtk+ version, feel free to add it as a blocker bug to the GNOME/Gtk+ 3.20 update bug. This bug will be used for the exp-run of GNOME 3.20, when it is ready, and to track the theme-related ports. Also, there is a problem with the open and save dialog content going invisible.

Finish GDM 3.20 porting. Investigate why the scrollbars in Firefox are missing and why the open/save dialog content is missing. The &os; Core Team &os; Core Team core@FreeBSD.org

The highlight of Core's second quarter has been the regular biennial election of a new Core team. Core would like to thank Dag-Erling Smøgrav and Glen Barber for running the vote. Despite an initially slow uptake on nominations, fourteen candidates eventually stood, including four incumbent members of core. The ninth &os; Core team will be:

The new Core Team would like to thank the departing members for their many years of service. Members stepping down are:

The second most notable achievement this quarter was the successful conclusion of an issue that had been on Core's agenda for many years. With the creation of planet.freebsd.org, the &os; Project finally has an official blog aggregation service.

Core spent a significant amount of time reviewing licensing and ensuring that the &os; source remains unencumbered by onerous license terms. This quarter involved approving Adrian Chadd's plan to import GPLv2 licensed code, allowing bwn(4) to be built as a loadable module with support for 802.11n networking. This required confirmation that the license terms on the latest dummynet AQM patches were acceptable and that its variant on the BSD 2-clause license is suitable for use in the &os; base system.

Core applied for, and received, a project-wide license for the use of the JetBrains static analysis tool suite, at the behest of Mathieu Previot.

Another of Core's important functions is to ensure good relations amongst developers. To that end, members of Core provided oversight over the backing-out of disputed blacklistd related patches to OpenSSH, and acted to smooth over ruffled tempers.

This quarter saw the usual quota of gentle reminders to avoid intemperate language and other counter-productive behavior. Core had to take immediate action about death threats appearing on some of the mailing lists. The culprit was immediately banned from the mailing lists and reported to their email service provider. That person will be similarly removed should they be identified as having rejoined under a different alias.

Other activities included:

During this quarter, four new commit bits were awarded and none were taken in. Please welcome Emmanuel Vadot, Landon Fuller, Mike Karels, and Eric Badger as new src committers. Yes, that is the same Mike Karels who was once a member of the CSRG at Berkeley and co-author of The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System.

 &os; Issue Triage Team Vladimir Krstulja vlad-fbsd@acheronmedia.com Kubilay Kocak koobs@freebsd.org Bugmeister bugmeister@freebsd.org

Since the Triage Team was introduced in the October-December 2015 report, it has been working on the following three major aspects of issue triage:

Our efforts have almost exclusively focused on issues in the "Ports & Packages" component as that is the easiest starting point. Other categories like "Base System" require more knowledge and experience with problem content and workflow.

During this time, Rodrigo was inactive due to lack of available time and Vladimir was unable to commit enough time during the first quarter of the year, but provided active contribution during the second. It became obvious that the Issue Triage Team must concentrate on additional recruitment in the coming quarter.

In the last two quarters, several problems were identified and the formulated solutions will be published on our upcoming Wiki page. A summary of those issues is given here:

  1. Issue triage, defined as "ensure an issue is summarized, classified, and assigned to appropriate people", is too time consuming. Bugzilla automation through auto-assign helps, but is insufficient. If the triage process is extended to include "track the issue through its entire life to resolution", the time and effort required grows exponentially. Fortunately, there are many things the community can do, with minimum effort, that help greatly. Part of the recruitment and education process is educating users on how to properly treat their own issues and issues they interact with in order to maximize the efficiency of issue tracking and problem resolution.
  2. Various timeouts are inadequate. For example, the maintainer timeout is too long and does not differentiate between classes of issues, such as a non-security and a security timeout. Other timeouts are not covered, such as assignee timeouts, when an issue has been assigned with no follow-up activity. Another example is a timeout where additional information was requested but never provided. We will be recommending several changes and documenting these in our Wiki.
  3. Partially as a consequence of inadequate timeouts and inadequate ability to efficiently track issues through their entire lifecycle, a great number of issues are open for too long. We have identified several classes of those issues and will document the solutions to each in the near future.
  4. Bugzilla is not perfect and at times it can hinder the ability to properly track issues clearly and accurately, in order to resolve them quickly. However, changing bug tracking software is a tremendous effort, so we will instead recommend technical and workflow improvements in order to improve the user experience as much as possible. For example, we identified additional saved searches to help track and quickly find issue categories and, more importantly, their states. Another example is ensuring that various flags and keywords are unambiguous and well understood. For instance, "patch" and "patch-ready", can often be misunderstood or misapplied.
  5. Issue statistics are lacking and for the next quarter we intend to change that. Statistics help to provide insight into potential bottlenecks and inform the priority of improvements to the issue tracker and workflows.
Recruit more suitable triagers into the team, both committers and community members. Gather and present some interesting statistics for the next report. Set up the Wiki page with identified problems and recommended guidelines and policies. Find common use patterns and add more saved searches to Bugzilla. Using <tt>lld</tt>, the LLVM Linker, to Link &os; Rafael Espíndola rafael.espindola@gmail.com Davide Italiano dccitaliano@gmail.com Ed Maste emaste@FreeBSD.org &os; lld wiki page Status report on linking FreeBSD/amd64 with lld BSDCan 2016 talk on lld for &os;

lld is the linker in the LLVM family of projects. It is intended to be a high-performance linker and supports the ELF, COFF, and Mach-O object formats. Where possible, lld maintains command-line and functional compatibility with the existing GNU BFD ld and gold linkers. However, the authors of lld are not constrained by strict compatibility where it would hamper performance or desired functionality.

Over the last quarter, the lld project implemented version script support sufficient to handle the &os; base system. This is an important milestone on the path to having lld as a viable system linker.

lld still lacks comprehensive linker script expression evaluation support, and therefore cannot yet be used to link the &os; kernel.

The &os; Foundation Develop linker script expression improvements in the upstream lld project. Import a newer lld snapshot into the vendor area, add the build infrastructure, and connect it to the world build, installed as ld.lld. Request a ports exp-run with /usr/bin/ld a symlink to ld.lld. Extensive testing. Reproducible Builds in &os; Ed Maste emaste@FreeBSD.org Base System Reproducible Builds wiki page Ports Reproducible Builds wiki page BSDCan 2016 Reproducible Builds in FreeBSD talk Reproducible Builds website Diffoscope home page Diffoscope results from the BSDCan Reproducible Builds talk

Reproducible builds are a set of software development practices which create a verifiable path from human readable source code to the binary code used by computers. In brief, the idea is that building the same binary, software package, document, or other binary artifact twice from the same source produces identical output. The reproducible-builds.org website provides background information and documentation on making builds reproducible.

Many folks have contributed to the reproducible build effort in &os; src and ports over the last decade. There are many practical benefits of reproducible builds, such as bandwidth and storage savings. However, there is a growing interest in the broad open source and free software communities, primarily from a software and toolchain integrity perspective. Over the last few years, some members of the Debian Project have led a comprehensive and structured reproducible builds effort.

Baptiste Daroussin and Ed Maste attended the first Reproducible Builds Summit in Athens last year. Since then, Ed investigated the state of build reproducibility in the ports tree, and presented Reproducible Builds in &os; at BSDCan 2016. With some work in progress patches, over 80% of the &os; ports tree builds reproducibly.

The Diffoscope tool performs in-depth comparison of files, archives, or directories to understand why a binary artifact does not build reproducibly. Diffoscope results for the nonreproducible builds in Ed's talk are available at one of the links above.

The &os; Foundation Integrate &os; ports builds into the reproducible-builds.org continuous integration infrastructure. Integrate reproducible build patches into the ports tree. Investigate sources of nonreproducibility in individual ports. + + + KDE on FreeBSD + + + + KDE on FreeBSD team + kde@FreeBSD.org + + + + + KDE on FreeBSD website + KDE ports staging area + KDE on FreeBSD wiki + KDE/FreeBSD mailing list + Development repository for integrating KDE 5 + Development repository for integrating Qt 5.6 + Development repository for integrating Qt 5.7 + + + +

The KDE on &os; team focuses on packaging and improving the + user experience of KDE and Qt on &os;.

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Many updates were committed to the ports tree this quarter, + and even more were committed to our experimental ports + repository. Tobias Berner, Adriaan de Groot, and Ralf Nolden + were responsible for most of the work.

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The following notable updates landed in the ports tree this + quarter:

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The following work occurred in our development + repository:

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