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FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report

Introduction

This bi-monthly report covers development activities on the FreeBSD Project for December 2001 and January 2002. A variety of accomplishments have been made over the last couple of months, including strong progress relating to the KSE project, which brings Scheduler Activations to the FreeBSD kernel, as well as less visible infrastructure projects such as improvements to the mount interface, PAM integration work, and translation efforts. Shortly following the deadline for this status report, the BSD Conference and FreeBSD Developer Summit were held, and will be covered in the next bi-monthly report at the end of March. Plans are already under way for the USENIX Annual Technical Conference in Monterey, CA, later this year, and all and sundry are encouraged to attend to get further insight in FreeBSD development.

Robert Watson

"GEOM" - generalized block storage manipulation

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/~phk/Geom/

Contact: Poul-Henning Kamp <[email protected]>

This project is now finally underway, thanks to DARPA and NAI getting a sponsorship lined up. The infrastructure code and data structures are currently taking form inside a userland simulation harness. Basic MBR and BSD methods have been written and device attach/taste/dettach algorithms been implemented and validated.

Bluetooth stack for FreeBSD (Netgraph implementation)

Contact: Maksim Yevmenkin <[email protected]>

The project is making progress. The goal is to design and implement Host Controller Interface (HCI) and Link Layer Control and Adaptation Protocol (L2CAP) layers using Netgraph framework. More distant goal is to write support for Service Discovery Protocol (SDP) and RFCOMM protocol (Serial port emulation over Bluetooth link) . All information was obtained from Bluetooth Specification Book v1.1.

Project status: In progress. 1) Design: mostly complete, there are some minor issues to be resolved. 2) Implementation: Kernel - HCI and L2CAP Netgraph nodes have been implemented; 3) User space (API, library, utilities) - in progress. 4) Testing: In progress. I do not have real Bluetooth hardware at this point, so i wrote some tools that allow me to test the code. Some of them will be used as foundation for future user space utilities.

Issues: 1) Bluetooth hardware; I do not have real Bluetooth hardware, so if people can donate hardware/specs it would be great. I promise to write all required drivers and make them available. I also promise to return hardware/specs on first request. 2) Project name; I would like to see the name that reflects the following: it is a Bluetooth stack, implementation is for FreeBSD and implementation is based on Netgraph framework

FreeBSD C99 & POSIX Conformance Project

URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~mike/c99/

Contact: Mike Barcroft <[email protected]>
Contact: FreeBSD-Standards Mailing List <[email protected]>

A significant amount of progress was made in December and January, particularly in the area of utility conformance. Several utilities were updated to conform to SUSv3, they include: at(1), mailx(1), pwd(1), split(1), and uudecode(1). Several patches have been submitted to increase conformance in other utilities, they include: fold(1), patch(1), m4(1), nice(1), pr(1), renice(1), wc(1), and xargs(1). These are in the process of being reviewed and committed. Two new utilities have been written, specifically pathchk(1) and tabs(1). These are also being reviewed and will be committed shortly.

A patch which implements most of the requirements of scanf(3) is being reviewed and is expected to be committed shortly. This will allow us to MFC a number of new functions and headers. Additionally, work has started on wide string and complex number support.

FreeBSD in Bulgarian

URL: http://www.FreeBSD-bg.ringlet.net/
URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~roam/bg/

Contact: Peter Pentchev <[email protected]>

The FreeBSD in Bulgarian project aims to bring a more comfortable working environment to Bulgarian users of the FreeBSD OS. This includes, but is not limited to, font, keymap and locale support, translation of the FreeBSD documentation into Bulgarian, local user groups and various forms of on-line help channels and discussion forums to help Bulgarians adopt and use FreeBSD.

A guide for using FreeBSD with Bulgarian settings has been put up on the project's website. The CVS repository will be made public shortly, linked to on the URL's above.

An independent project for making FreeBSD easier to use by Bulgarians has appeared, http://www.FreeBSD-bg.org/. It also hosts a mailing list for discussions of FreeBSD in Bulgarian, [email protected]. For more information about the mailing list, send an e-mail with "help" in the message body to [email protected].

FreeBSD Java Project

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/java

Contact: Greg Lewis <[email protected]>

The past two months have been an exciting time in the FreeBSD Java Project with the signing of a license between the FreeBSD Foundation and Sun allowing us access to updated JDK source code and the Java Compatibility Kit (JCK). This license will also allow the project to release a binary version of both the JDK and JRE once JCK testing is complete. Work on this testing is under way with the project hopeful of being able to make a binary release in the not too distant future.

In lieu of the binary release which was hoped for with FreeBSD 4.5 the project will release an updated source patchset this weekend. This patchset will feature further work on the FreeBSD "native" threads subsystem from Bill Huey. Also, thanks to hard work by Joe Kelsey and Fuyuhiko Maruyama, the patchset will for the first time feature a working Java browser plugin!

jp.FreeBSD.org daily SNAPSHOTs project

URL: http://snapshots.jp.FreeBSD.org/
URL: http://www.jp.FreeBSD.org/snapshots/notes.html

Contact: Makoto Matsushita <[email protected]>

I've update OS of buildboxes to the latest FreeBSD 5-current and 4-stable. Everything goes fine. From January 2002, I've started a webzine, SNAPSHOTS Notes (only Japanese version is available). SNAPSHOTs Notes pickups tips and information especially for the people living with FreeBSD 5-current/4-stable. Article or idea for SNAPSHOTs notes are always welcome (you don't need to write in Japanese :-).

jpman project

URL: http://www.jp.FreeBSD.org/man-jp/

Contact: Kazuo Horikawa <[email protected]>

For 4.5-RELEASE, port ja-man-doc-4.5.tgz is in sync with base system except for OpenSSH pages (OpenSSH 2.3 based instead of 2.9) and perl5 pages (jpman project do not maintain). Section 3 updating has 55% finished.

OKAZAKI Tetsurou has incorporated changes on base system's groff into port japanese/groff. MORI Kouji has fixed two bugs of port japanese/man.

KAME

URL: http://www.kame.net/

Contact: KAME core team <[email protected]>

The KAME project is currently focusing on the scoped addressing architecture, the advanced API implementation, NATPT and the mobile ipv6 implementation. Though these stuffs are not stable enough to be merge into the FreeBSD tree, you can get and try them from the above URL.

KSE Status Report

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/~julian/
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jasone/kse/

Contact: Julian Elischer <[email protected]>

The KSE project (an attempt to support scalable thread in FreeBSD using kernel support), has reached What I call "milestone 3". At this milestone it is possible to run a multithreaded program on a single CPU but with full concurrency of threads on that CPU. In other words the kernel supports the fact that one thread can block by allowing another thread to run in its place. A test program that demonstrates this is available at the above website.

Milestone 4 will be to allow threads from the same program to run on multiple CPUs but may require more input from the SMPng project. I am at the moment (Feb 6) getting ready to commit a first set of changes for milestone 3, that have no real effect but serve to drastically reduce the complexity of the remaining diff so that others can read it more easily. After changes to libkvm to support this diff have been added it should be possible to run 'ps' and look at multiple threads in a treaded process. I will be demonstrating KSE/M3 at BSDcon.

Netgraph ATM

URL: ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/cc/cats/usr/harti/ngatm/

Contact: Harti Brandt <[email protected]>

The Netgraph ATM package has been split into a number of smaller packages: bsnmp is a general-purpose SNMP daemon with support for loadable modules. Two modules come with it: one implementing the standard network-interface and IP related parts of MIB-2 and one for interfacing other modules to the NetGraph sub-system. ngatmbase contains the drivers for the ATM hardware, the ng_atm netgraph type and a few test tools. This package allows one to use ATM PVCs. It should be possible, for example, to do PPP over ATM with this package. Both bsnmp and ngatmbase are available in version 1.0 under the link above. Two other modules will be released in February: ngatmsig containing the UNI-4.0 signalling stack as netgraph nodes and ngatmip containing CLIP and LANE-2.0.

New mount(2) API

Contact: Poul-Henning Kamp <[email protected]>
Contact: Maxime Henrion <[email protected]>

Now that the patch has been mailed to the [email protected] mailing list, and that there were no objections, the commit will happen soon. Poul is currently testing it in his own tree. After it has been committed, it will be time to modify the filesystems in the tree to use VFS_NMOUNT instead of VFS_MOUNT. Mount(8) will also need some modifications. Some new manpages -- nmount(2) and kernel_vmount(9) -- are being created in the meantime.

Pluggable Authentication Modules

URL: http://openpam.sourceforge.net/

Contact: Mark Murray <[email protected]>
Contact: Dag-Erling Smørgrav <[email protected]>

OpenPAM, a new library intended to replace Linux-PAM in FreeBSD, has been written and is undergoing integration testing. It is available for download from the URL listed above.

In addition to this, a couple of new modules have been written (pam_lastlog(8), pam_login_access(8)), and the pam_unix(8) module has been extended to perform most of the tasks normally performed by login(1), which is now fully PAMified.

The PAM FDP article has been put on hold until OpenPAM replaces Linux-PAM in CVS, to avoid wasting effort on soon-to-be obsolete documentation.

Revised {mode,log}page support for camcontrol

Contact: Kelly Yancey <[email protected]>

Extending camcontrol's page definition file format to include both modepage and logpage definitions; adding support to camcontrol to query and reset log page parameters. Consideration is being made to possibly include support for diagnostic and vital product data pages, but that is outside the current project scope. New page definition file format includes capability to conditionally include page definitions based on SCSI INQUIRY results allowing vendor-specific pages to be described also. Approximately 90% complete.

SMPng

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/smp/

Contact: [email protected] <[email protected]>

Alfred Perlstein committed file descriptor locking code which was definitely a good push towards trying to lock down some important pieces of global data. Peter Wemm has made progress on pmap cleanups for x86 SMP TLB shootdowns. Matt Dillon and John Baldwin have made progress on getting patches done for moving accesses to ucred's out from under Giant's protection. John Baldwin has also made some commits in order to get the alpha port's SMP working. Matt Dillon has plans for hunting down fileops locking issues in order to continue his previous Giant pushdown work.

TrustedBSD ACLs

URL: http://www.fxp.org/jedgar/ACL/

Contact: Chris Faulhaber <[email protected]>

Patches for cp(1), ls(1), and mv(1) to bring in POSIX.1e-compliant Access Control List support have been updated to patch against builds of -CURRENT. Other system utilities are currently being evaluated for ACL support including install(1) (patch available) and mtree(8). Work is in progress to verify the native getfacl(1), setfacl(1), and other utilities build and work correctly on other ACL-enabled systems (e.g. Linux w/ACL patches) and to help verify POSIX-compliance of the continuing TrustedBSD work along with other systems. Finally, experimental Perl and PHP modules are available allowing limited access to native ACLs for languages other than C.

TrustedBSD Audit

URL: http://www.TrustedBSD.org/

Contact: trustedbsd-discuss <[email protected]>

Robert Watson created the TrustedBSD audit perforce tree, which is a branch from the TrustedBSD base tree, in order to start pushing development efforts towards using a revision control system. Andrew Reiter started to merge in some framework related code for generation of audit records, enqueueing writes, and handling data writing. There is a great deal of work to be done with updates and discussion on the [email protected] mailing list.

TrustedBSD MAC Implementation

URL: http://www.TrustedBSD.org/

Contact: Robert Watson <[email protected]>

Substantial progress has been made towards a working MAC implementation. The focus over the last two months has been moving from a hard-coded series of MAC policies to a more flexible implementation. A pluggable policy framework has been created (and is still under development), supporting Biba, MLS, TE, a "BSD Extended" model, and a sample mac_none module. Some modules must be compiled in or loaded prior to boot; others may be introduced at run-time. Support for networking has improved, with improved handling of IP fragmentation in IPv4, support for various pseudo-interfaces such as if_tun and if_tap, improved integration into userland, NFS-related fixes, moving the VFS enforcement out of individual filesystems, support for a 'multilevel' mount flag, support for explicit labeling in procfs and devfs, addition of an 'extattrctl lsattr' argument to list EAs on a filesystem, support for label ranges in the Biba and MAC policies, and much more.

Targets for the next two months include more universal enforcement of VFS-related calls, improved support for alternative ABIs, improved flexibility of in-kernel subject and object labels, support for IPv6 and IPsec, and improved support for NFS serving.

Development continues in the FreeBSD Perforce repository, which may be accessed using cvsup.

USB stack maintenance

Contact: Josef Karthauser <[email protected]>

I've been working to integrate recent improvements in the NetBSD usb stack to FreeBSD -current. Both NetBSD and OpenBSD currently share the same source, as FreeBSD did too at once point before it diverged. The goal is to get back to that state, but there are many improvements on both sides that need to be merged before this is complete.

I'm currently looking for someone to help maintain usb in -stable. Please let me know if you're interested.

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