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Introduction

This is a draft of the October–December 2017 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 2017. This is the fourth of four reports planned for 2017.

The fourth quarter of 2017 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 2018 is April 7, 2018.

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team &os; Team Reports

Entries from the various official and semi-official teams, as found in the Administration Page.

 proj Projects

Projects that span multiple categories, from the kernel and userspace to the Ports Collection or external projects.

 kern Kernel

Updates to kernel subsystems/features, driver support, filesystems, and more.

 arch Architectures

Updating platform-specific features and bringing in support for new hardware platforms.

. bin Userland Programs

Changes affecting the base system and programs in it.

 ports Ports

Changes affecting the Ports Collection, whether sweeping changes that touch most of the tree, or individual ports themselves.

 doc Documentation

Noteworthy changes in the documentation tree or new external books/documents.

 misc Miscellaneous

Objects that defy categorization.

 third Third-Party Projects

Many projects build upon &os; or incorporate components of &os; into their project. As these projects may be of interest to the broader &os; community, we sometimes include brief updates submitted by these projects in our quarterly report. The &os; project makes no representation as to the accuracy or veracity of any claims in these submissions.

 LibreNMS Zane Bowers-Hadley vvelox@vvelox.net LibreNMS ZFS Addition

LibreNMS is an autodiscovering PHP/MySQL/SNMP-based network monitoring solution which includes support for a wide range of network hardware and operating systems, including Cisco, Linux, &os;, Juniper, Brocade, Foundry, HP and many more.

Among other things, it can monitor applications and other functionality running on a server via SNMP extensions. This has been the area of focus for my present work.

ZFS support has been committed towards the end of December, which was too late to make the December release, but it will be in the January release.

This brings the ability to monitor ARC and pool information, with each pool having its own separate set of graphs.

The ARC graphing is as below.

The pool tracking is comparatively much simpler, using the output from zpool list.

Suggestions are needed for additional statistics or other information to monitor, whether &os;-specific or otherwise. RDMA stack update based on Linux v4.9 Mellanox Drivers Team FreeBSD-drivers@mellanox.com Subversion Commit Adding the Driver

An update to the &os; RDMA stack based on code from Linux v4.9 was merged into &os; 12-CURRENT on November 4th, including many bug fixes and new features with a focus on RoCEv2 — Routable RoCE.

RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) is a network protocol that leverages Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capabilities to accelerate communications between applications hosted on clusters of servers and storage arrays. RoCE incorporates the IBTA RDMA semantics to allow devices to perform direct memory to memory transfers at the application level without involving the host CPU. Both the transport processing and the memory translation and placement are performed by hardware resulting in lower latency, higher throughput, and better performance compared to software based protocols.

RoCEv2 is the most recent version of RoCE, adding some routing capabilities as both IP and UDP headers are included in the packet format. To complete the RoCEv2 solution, Support for ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification, lossy fabric) and PFC (Priority Flow Control, lossless fabric) protocols with rate limiting options will be added in the first quarter of 2018.

This project also introduces the following updates:

Important notes:

Mellanox Technologies Add ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification) and PFC (Priority Flow Control) support. Ports Collection René Ladan portmgr-secretary@FreeBSD.org &os; Ports Management Team portmgr@FreeBSD.org About &os; Ports Contributing to ports &os; Ports Monitoring Ports Management Team &os; Ports Managemnet Team on Twitter (@FreeBSD_portmgr) &os; Ports Management Team on Facebook &os; Ports Management Team on Google+

The last quarter of 2017 ended with over 27,000 ports in the repository. There are currently just under 2,800 open ports PRs with 685 of them unassigned. There were 6,700 commits made by 178 committers. The statistics did not change much since last quarter, however the number of unassigned PRs dropped slightly.

This quarter, we welcomed Yuri Victorovich (yuri@), Jason Bacon (jwb@), and Wolfram Scheider (wosch@) as new or returning port committers. No commit bits were taken in for safekeeping.

Portmgr, together with postmaster@, changed the policy of the FreeBSD-ports@ mailing list. It is now required to be subscribed to the list before one can post to it. This will help in reducing spam on this list and help users finding better questions to their answers while browsing the list archive.

This quarter ports "flavors" went live. Flavors can be used to build multiple variations of a port, for example py27-sarge and py36-sarge. All Python ports and some other ports are now flavored. Other uses of flavors could be including or excluding X11 (foo vs foo-x11 or foo-nox11) or selecting the printer paper size (A4 vs letter).

USES=fmake has been removed as it was no longer useful.

Some default versions got updated: Ruby to 2.4 and Samba to 4.6. Firefox got updated to version 57.0.3 and pkg to 1.10.3.

During the last quarter, antoine@ ran 33 exp-runs to validate changes to the base system, fix Qt5 ports, test Python flavors and other port updates, and make rubygem port builds reproducible.

Clang 6 is being imported into base. There is a PR that keeps track of ports failing with this compiler, see PR 224669. If you use any ports mentioned here, please consider fixing them. &os; on PowerNV (ppc64) Patryk Duda pdk@semihalf.com Wojciech Macek wma@FreeBSD.org wma@semihalf.com Michal Stanek mst@semihalf.com Nathan Whitehorn nw@FreeBSD.org Semihalf PowerNV Official Repository Skiboot Repository with the Latest OPAL Firmware

Semihalf is happy to announce that &os; is running on an IBM Power8 processor. This project is a continuation of work done by Nathan Whitehorn, who provided a basic support for a PowerNV emulator.

The IBM Power8 family of CPUs offers superior performance compared to previous CPUs in the Power series. It provides complete NUMA support with up to 128 execution threads in two-socket system (2 sockets, 8 cores per socket, 8 threads per core). All I/O communication is handled by an integrated PCIe interface equipped with multiple IOMMU engines.

The support for Power8 system running &os; in a non-virtualized environment contains:

All work is available in the linked GitHub repository. The process of getting this work into the official repository has already started and eventually, all commits will be integrated into &os;-12 CURRENT.

IBM The FreeBSD Foundation QCM Technologies Semihalf Limelight Networks (Kevin Bowling) + + + The &os; Core Team + + + + &os; Core Team + core@FreeBSD.org + + + + +

The most significant action by Core during the final quarter of + 2017 was the approval of the new Code of Conduct after a long + period of development and review. Core added a preamble to the + text emphasizing the principles behind the Code of Conduct over + detailed interpretation of the rules. The new code delegates + the handling of complaints to a Code of Conduct review board; we + are currently finalizing practical arrangements around setting + up the review board before announcing the adoption of the new + code.

+ +

John Hixson of iXsystems was proposed, and accepted, as the + first new Project Member under the new rules adopted earlier + this year. Core feels that John is an excellent choice as the + first member, and looks forwards to adding many other project + members in the future.

+ +

There have been some significant changes around the Security + Officer and secteam. Gordon Tetlow has formally taken over the + role of Security Officer from Xin Li. Xin remains an active + member of secteam, and Ed Maste has now joined secteam as well. +

+ +

Gordon joined Secteam at a point where they were struggling + with handling the widely publicised WPA2 vulnerability + (&os;-SA-17:07.wpa), and had an immediate impact simply by + making a public response, even though the technical fixes were + not entirely ready. Gordon's remit from Core is to examine how + Secteam operates and work out how to manage their case-load while + avoiding the problems of burn-out and overload that have impeded + Secteam's effectiveness in the past.

+ +

One of the key problems is that security problems are handled + in a completely separate bug handling system to general PRs. + This is unusual compared to most similar OS projects, and leads + to difficulties in bringing in available talent from amongst the + entire body of &os; developers in order to be able to share + the load and react quickly. Secteam is working with Bugmeister + to enable suitable access controls within our main Bugzilla + instance, so that we can both conform to bug embargoes and other + confidentiality requirements but also make it easy to solicit + fixes from a wider range of developers and to transition + security bugs to open handling like any other bug once there is + no more need for secrecy.

+ +

This quarter also saw the creation of a 10.4-RELEASE branch, + and the extension of the lifetime of 11.0-RELEASE by one month. + The former was in response to requests from a number of + prominent &os; consumers, who needed access to new + functionality but could not immediately upgrade to 11.0-RELEASE. + Releasing 10.4 permitted this without making a significant + extension to the lifetime of the 10.x release series.

+ +

The extension to 11.0-RELEASE EoL was a consequence of failing + to communicate the impending switch to 11.1-RELEASE in good + time. Since this was the first minor version transition under + the new release schedule, in discussion with Secteam and Release + Engineering, we concluded that a delay was necessary to allow + the userbase sufficient warning to upgrade before 11.0-RELEASE + went out of support. This was not a cost-free decision: as + Portmgr reminded us, this affected package building and delayed + implementation of some important updates.

+ +

&os; will be participating in Google Summer of Code again in + 2018. This has become one of our most important routes for + recruiting the new, young developers vital for ensuring the + longevity of the project.

+ +

Pedro Giffuni proposed adopting the SPDX license tagging system + as used by many other projects, including the Linux kernel, in + order to facilitate programatic license management by downstream + consumers. Core agreed enthusiasticly.

+ +

Core has agreed to promote the MIPS architecture to Tier-2 + status.

+ +

A proposal to enhance security by discontinuing HTTP or other + unencrypted channels for all &os; services was not something + Core could approve for the immediate future. While switching to + HTTPS has obvious security benefits, we would need to distribute + appropriate CA certificates as part of the base system and make + certain other changes before this could be achieved relatively + seamlessly. All &os; services are already available over + secure channels, but our documentation did not necessarily + present secure access methods as the preferred routes. Action + is being taken to address the documentation, and this question + will be revisited once the necessary groundwork is in place.

+ +

The fortune(6) program has long been a focus for controversy, + and previous Cores have needed to impose a lock on updates to + the fortune data files. The argument blew up again over the + re-deletion of a number of apparently pro-Nazi quotations. Core + decided that enough was enough and removed all of the fortune + data files except for FreeBSD-tips.dat from the base system. + The tacit approval of many questionable or controversial + opinions by shipping them as a part of the base system is a + liability the project simply cannot afford.

+ +

No new commit bits were issued during this quarter, but we did + see two former committers: Sean Eric Fagan and Wolfram + Schneider, reactivate their commit bits. One committer, Ngie + Cooper, has handed back their bit.

+ +