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FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report

Introduction

This report covers FreeBSD development activities from February, 2002 through April, 2002. It's been a busy few months -- BSDCon in San Francisco, the FreeBSD Developer Summit, a first development preview of 5.0-CURRENT, not to mention lots of progress on the 5.0 feature set (SMPng, sparc64, GEOM, ... the list goes on).

In the next two months, the USENIX ATC occurs (highly recommended event for both developers and users), and a number of new software components will hit the tree, including UFS2 and the TrustedBSD MAC framework. We'll also complete the elections for the FreeBSD Core Team, and should have the next Core Team online by the time the next report rolls around. Stay tuned for more!

Robert Watson

"GEOM" - generalized block storage manipulation

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

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

The GEOM code has gotten so far that it beats our current code in some areas while still lacking in others. Work continues on a generalized interface for "magic data" (boot blocks, disklabels MBR's etc) manipulation from userland.

With GEOM enabled in the kernel any FreeBSD platform will now recognize PC style MBR's, i386 disklabels, alpha disklabels, PC98 extended MBRs and SUN/Solaris style disklabels.

Athlon MTRR Problems

Contact: David Malone <[email protected]>

The FreeBSD MTRR code has been made more robust against unexpected values sometimes found in the Athlon's Memory Type Range Registers. Problems with these values had prevented XFree 4.2 running on some motherboards. Experimentation indicates that these undocumented values may control the mapping of BIOS/ROMs or have something to do with SMM. If anyone can provide details of what these values mean, can they please let me know, so the MTRR code can be completed.

Bluetooth stack for FreeBSD (Netgraph implementation)

Contact: Maksim Yevmenkin <[email protected]>

I'm slowly making progress. The second engineering release is available for download at http://www.geocities.com/m_evmenkin/ngbt-fbsd-20020506.tar.gz

This release includes support for H4 UART transport layer, Host Controller Interface (HCI), Link Layer Control and Adaptation Protocol (L2CAP) and Bluetooth sockets layer. It also comes with several user space utilities that can be used to configure and test Bluetooth devices.

I'm currently working on RFCOMM protocol implementation (Serial port emulation over Bluetooth link). My next goal is to port Service Discovery Protocol (SDP) implementation from BlueZ (http://bluez.sf.net). I'm also thinking about adding USB device support (as soon as i find/buy hardware).

Issues: 1) Bluetooth hardware; I have couple PC-CARDs that i use for development and testing purposes, but i'd love to have more. 2) Time; My regular day job kicked in, so i will be spending more time doing stuff i'm getting paid for.

Fibre Channel

URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~mjacob/fibre_channel.html

Contact: Matthew Jacob <[email protected]>

Continued bug fixing and hardening for this last few months.

Future work will include making target mode work correctly and fast.

The LSI-Logic chipset's MPT Fusion driver is also being evaluated.

FreeBSD ARM Port

URL: http://pages.infinit.net/sepotvin

Contact: Stephane E. Potvin <[email protected]>

Since the last progress report, the initialization code was much cleaned (thanks to NetBSD's acort32 port) and partial DDB support as been added. I'm now struggling to put the pmap module into a working state. The latest patch set only includes the initialization changes. I did some tries to get what I had so far working on my iPAQ without much successes (downloading a kernel over a serial link is way too painful). If anyone has had success in getting any iPAQ to work as a USB storage device under *BSD please contact me.

FreeBSD C99 & POSIX Conformance Project

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/c99/

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

Since the last status report, two developers working on utility conformance were given commit access to the FreeBSD CVS repository to help expedite development. As a result, the following utilities have been brought up to conformance, they include: csplit(1), env(1), expr(1), fold(1), join(1), m4(1), mesg(1), paste(1), patch(1), pr(1), uuencode(1), uuexpand(1), and xargs(1). The printf(1) utility was brought up to conformance with the 1992 edition of POSIX.2, with further development planned.

On the header front, much progress has been made. Specifically, infrastructure to control visibility of components of a header, based on the standard requested by an application, has been added to <sys/cdefs.h>. Some work has been completed on renovating the way types are defined. This has lead to the creation of <sys/_types.h>. Further improvements such as the merger of <machine/ansi.h> and <machine/types.h> are planned. Additionally, the headers: <strings.h>, <string.h>, and <sys/un.h> have been made to conform to POSIX.1-2001.

On the API front, scanf(3) has received support for 5 new length modifiers (hh, j, ll, t, and z). A patch to implement two additional conversion specifiers (j and z) has been developed for printf(9) and is expected to be committed soon.

In other news, the project's web site has been moved to the main FreeBSD site. It is now available at the URL at the top of this status report. Please update your bookmarks.

FreeBSD Developer Summit

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/events/2002/bsdcon-devsummit.html

Contact: Robert Watson <[email protected]>

The second FreeBSD Developer Summit, held following the BSD Conference in San Francisco in February, was a great success. Around 40 developers attended in person, another five by phone, and many others by webcast. During a marathon-esque eight hour session, a variety of development topics were discussed, including adding inheritance to the KOBJ system, ports to new architectures, adaptations of the toolchain for new architectures, the GEOM extensible storage device framework, upcoming changes to the network stack, TrustedBSD features, KSE, SMPng, and the release engineering schedule. This event was sponsored by DARPA and NAI Labs, with webcasting provided by Joe Karthauser, bandwidth provided by Yahoo!. Planning for future such events is now underway; a summary/transcript of discussion may be found at the URL above.

FreeBSD Package-building Cluster

Contact: Kris Kennaway <[email protected]>

Packages are built from the FreeBSD Ports Collection on a cluster of i386 and alpha machines using scripts available in /usr/ports/Tools/portbuild/. Over the past few months I have been cleaning up and extending these scripts to improve efficiency and allow for greater flexibility in how package builds are performed. Major improvements so far have been: cleaning up and modularizing the scripts to avoid code duplication and reduce the need for ongoing maintenance; optimizing the build process and making it much more robust against client machine failure; and allowing package builds to be restarted if they are interrupted. The i386 package cluster is currently running FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT, and it has proven to be a useful testing ground for exposing kernel bugs, especially those which only manifest under system load.

Future plans include the ability to perform incremental package rebuilds which only build packages that have changed since the last run. This will allow packages to be made available on the FTP site within an hour or two of the CVS commit to the ports collection. We also hope to set up a sparc64 package cluster in the near future, but this is contingent on suitable hardware.

FreeBSD/KGI

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/~nsouch/ggiport.html

Contact: Nicholas Souchu <[email protected]>

FreeBSD/KGI started last year after the port of GGI to VGL. KGI (Kernel Graphic Interface) is a kernel infrastructure providing user applications with access to hardware graphic resources (dma, irqs, mmio). KGI is already available under Linux as a separate project. The FreeBSD/KGI project aims at integrating KGI in the FreeBSD kernel. Mostly a port for now, but optimized for FreeBSD in the future. Currently FreeBSD/KGI is under development and the code is only available for reading, compiling but not running. More interesting are design hints found at the project URL.

GCC 3.1

Contact: David O'Brien <[email protected]>

As of Thur May 9th, 2002 FreeBSD 5-CURRENT is now using a GCC 3.1 prerelease snapshot as the system C compiler. At this time of cutting over, the compiler is working well on i386, Alpha, Sparc64, and IA-64 for building world. There is a known problem with our atomic ops on Alpha that prevents a GCC 3.1 built kernel from booting.

Currently the C++ support libraries (libstdc++, et.al.) does not build and thus prevents the system C++ compiler from being used.

GNOME Project

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

Contact: Joe Marcus <[email protected]>

The GNOME project has seen quite a few changes lately. For one, the author of this update has recently been given "The Bit." Joe Marcus Clarke now has CVS access, and is working primarily on the GNOME project. Joe has been closing a good deal of GNOME PRs, as well as patching some of the existing GNOME 1.4 components.

The GNOME 2 porting effort continues on. We have completed porting of the GNOME 2.0 API, and are 75% complete on porting the full GNOME 2.0 desktop. When complete, GNOME 1.4 and GNOME 2.0 will be co-resident in the ports tree. Both APIs can be installed concurrently in the same PREFIX, but the respective desktops will remain mutually independent. Maxim Sobolev is working on adapting bsd.gnome.mk to handle both versions of the desktop in an elegant fashion.

Not to be left out, the existing GNOME 1.4 components have received numerous updates to keep them in sync with the stable distfiles on gnome.org. We have seen many "1.0" milestone releases including the most recent AbiWord 1.0.0. In the next few weeks, we will be making sure all the GNOME 1.4 components build correct packages on bento so that GNOME 1.4 will be on the 4.6-RELEASE CD.

IA64 Port

Contact: Peter Wemm <[email protected]>

IA64 has had a busy few months. Aside from gcc, we are now fully self hosting on IA64. Doug Rabson has performed his magic and implemented the execution of 32 bit i386 application binaries although more work remains to be done to make ld-elf.so.1 happy with the different underlying page size. We have been using the i386 perforce binary to do actual development work and submit from the ia64 systems themselves. Marcel Moolenaar has been working on SMP and machine-check support. We have been running SMP kernels amazingly reliably on our development boxes for quite some time now. syscons is now functional. We have produced a self-booting run-root-on-cdrom ISO image (idea taken from the sparc64 folks) that has been used to manually self install an IA64 system from a blank disk. Aside from a few minor loose ends we now have complete 'make world' functionality. sysinstall works on ia64. We plan on producing a semi-respectable boot/install cdrom image shortly.

Improving FreeBSD Startup Scripts

URL: http://home.pacbell.net/makonnen/rcng.html
URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FreeBSD-rc/
URL: http://www.mewburn.net/luke/bibliography.html
URL: http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/rc/

Contact: Doug Barton <[email protected]>

Contact: Mike Makonnen <[email protected]>

Contact: Gordon Tetlow <[email protected]>

Mike Makonnen has done quite a bit of excellent work on porting the scripts from FreeBSD into the NetBSD framework. The next step seems to be to try to reduce the amount of diffs between our implementation and the original set from NetBSD.

IPMI Tools for FreeBSD

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/~dwhite/ipmi/

Contact: Doug White <[email protected]>

IPMI Tools for FreeBSD is a collection of C and Python applications and modules for exploring the information available via the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), as implemented on server motherboards by Intel and HP. IPMI is an open standard with patent protection for adopters which defines standard interfaces to on-board management hardware. The management hardware consists of a CPU, sensors such as temperature probes and fan speeds, and repositories such as the System Event Log and Field-Replaceable Unit (FRU) inventory, and other system information.

A basic set of tools was recently made available which uses the KCS and SMIC system interfaces to retrieve the System Event Log, FRU repository, and system sensors. Additional features are currently under research. Suggestions for additional features and programs are greatly appreciated.

jp.FreeBSD.org daily SNAPSHOTs project

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

Contact: Makoto Matsushita <[email protected]>

There are several new topics, including: Source Code Tour is now separated into kernel part and userland part, yet another snapshots from RELENG_4_x branch (currently 4.5-RELEASE-p4), add several packages including XFree86 4.x to installation CD-ROM, new cdboot-only ISO image, fix breakage of duplex.iso, etc. See also the project webpage for more detail. Also, I have a plan to add FreeBSD/alpha distribution to this project -- stay tuned.

jpman project

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

Contact: Kazuo Horikawa <[email protected]>

4.5-RELEASE Japanese manpage package, ja-man-doc-4.5.tgz, once published with OpenSSH 2.3 (as reported by previous status report) on January 31, is replaced with new package with OpenSSH 2.9 based manpages on March 3. Since then, we have been updating Japanese manpages for 4.6-RELEASE. For new translation and massive update, we have been making a lot of effort.

Continuing section 3 updating has 73% finished.

KAME

URL: http://www.kame.net/
URL: http://www.kame.net/roadmap-2002.html

Contact: Shinsuke SUZUKI <[email protected]>

KAME Project has been extended until March 2004, and we decided the project roadmap for these two years. The first one year is for implementation, and the remaining year is for feedback of our results into other BSD projects (please refer to the above URL for further detail). Great change is lack of NAT-PT support due to a lack of human resource, although KAME snap still contains it as it is.

SUZUKI Shinsuke ([email protected]) has begun working for KAME and FreeBSD merge task in cooperation with Umemoto-san ([email protected]). Some of KAME stuff (critical bug fix, newest ports for pim6sd and racoon, etc) has been merged into 4-stable in this April.

KSE

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

Contact: Julian Elischer <[email protected]>
Contact: Jonthan Mini <[email protected]>

The KSE project had floundered due to lack of development time for awhile, but has been picked up recently by Jonathan Mini. Currently, the main focus is to prepare the "milestone 3" code for inclusion into -CURRENT.

The project is still working towards "milestone 4" (allowing threads from the same process to run on multiple CPUs), which should be significantly easier now due to work done by the SMPng project over the past several months.

Help could be used in several areas of the project, especially with porting the libc_r (pthreads) library to KSE's threading model.

Libh

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/libh.html

Contact: Antoine Beauprş <[email protected]>
Contact: Alexander Langer <[email protected]>
Contact: Nathan Ahlstrom <[email protected]>

We now have a loadable mfsroot floppy. It contains just the diskeditor (which is really a disk partitioner) which has been enhanced and is probably in its final form. It's been geared towards making the newfs(1) and mount(1) steps separate dialogs, so it reduceed its complexity. A basic fstab class has been implemented to manipulate /etc/fstab and mountpoint. This might find a use outside libh, by the way. Libh package format is still incomplete and somehow buggy, so it's my next target.

There is a API documentation effort underway with the help of doxygen(1), so there's now more documentation for people that want to get started with libh.

All this lead me to prepare the release of another alpha preview of libh that will shortly be available in the ports collection (0.2.2). Also, a new committer (okumoto) has joined the project (as well as I) and he is currently working on cleaning up the build system. It's been a few months without news, so this probably seemed a bit long, but don't worry, we still need your help to really get this going!

locking up pcb's in the networking stack

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

Contact: Jeffrey Hsu <[email protected]>

I've been mentoring someone on locking up the protocol control blocks in the networking stack. She has already finished TCP and UDP and I'm currently reviewing the patch with her and going over some networking lock order issues. Locking up raw protocol interface control blocks follows next.

Netgraph ATM

URL: http://www.fokus.fhg.de/research/cc/cats/employees/hartmut.brandt/ngatm/index.html

Contact: Harti Brandt <[email protected]>

Version 1.1 for FreeBSD-current is now available. It includes the SNMP-daemon package bsnmp, the driver package ngatmbase, the UNI4.0 signaling package ngatmsig and the network emulation package ngatmnet. NgAtm allows both to build applications running directly on top of ATM and to use ATM-Forum LAN emulation to use IP over ATM. Currently we are working on a simple switch module, that implements the network side signaling and ILMI as well as simple routing and call admission control.

Network interface cloning and modularity

Contact: Brooks Davis <[email protected]>

Support for stf(4), faith(4), and loopback interfaces has been committed to current. The stf and faith support has been MFC'd. In current the API has changed to move unit allocation into the generic cloning code reducing the amount of support code required in each driver. Code improvements to increase our API compatibility with NetBSD will be committed soon along with cloning support for discard interfaces and ppp(4) interfaces.

Thanks to [email protected] for the loopback support and unit allocation cleanups.

New mount(2) API

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

The patch for the new mount API has now been committed to the tree. Several filesystems also have been converted to this new mount API, namely procfs, linprocfs, fdescfs and devfs. I'm working on converting more filesystems to nmount, and actually already have UFS done. It has not been committed yet to avoid conflicting with the UFS2 work, but it should hit the tree soon. Manpages are still missing at the moment because I had to modify the API slightly. I hope to have them done soon now.

NEWCARD

Contact: Warner Losh <[email protected]>

NEWCARD support tried to merge CardBus functions with PCI functions, but that failed to properly route interrupts. A branch for the merge was created and will be merged into the main line at a later date. Too many other things going on in my life to make much progress.

OpenSSH

Contact: Dag-Erling SmŲrgrav <[email protected]>

OpenSSH has been upgraded to 3.1, and the kinks seem to have been worked out by now. OpenSSH will now use PAM for both ssh1 and ssh2 authentication.

PAM

URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~des/pam/pam-2002-03.html
URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~des/pam/pam-2002-04.html

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

The painful parts are now completed, with all authentication- related utilities converted to PAM (except for those cases where it doesn't make sense, like Kerberos- or OPIE-specific commands). OpenPAM is complete (except for a few missing man pages) and seems to work well.

For more details, see the activity reports linked to above.

PowerPC Port

URL: http://jeamland.net/~benno/powerpc-boot.txt

Contact: Benno Rice <[email protected]>

The PowerPC port is moving ahead. It can now mount a root file system and exec init, but fails when trying to map init's text segment in. I'm hoping to have it starting my fake "Hello, world!" init soon, after which I plan to try and get some libc bits in place so that I can build /bin and /sbin and try to get to actual single-user.

ppp RADIUS/MS-CHAP support

Contact: Brian Somers <[email protected]>

libradius now supports RADIUS vendor attribute extensions and user-ppp is now capable of doing MS-CHAP authentication via a RADIUS server. A new net/freeradius port has been created for support of MS-CHAP in a RADIUS server.

MS-CHAPv2 support will be added soon.

The work is sponsored by Monzoon.

Release Engineering

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

Contact: Release Engineering <[email protected]>

The release engineering team released FreeBSD 5.0-DP1 on 8 April 2002. This Developer Preview gives developers and other interested parties a chance to help test some of the new features to appear in 5.0-RELEASE. This distribution has known bugs and areas of instability, and should only be used for (non-production) testing and development.

The next releases of FreeBSD will be 4.6-RELEASE (scheduled for 1 June 2002) and 5.0-DP2 (scheduled for 25 June 2002). Information on the release schedules and more can be found on the team's new area on the FreeBSD Web site (see the URL above).

Finally, the team has gained two new members: Brian Somers and Bruce A. Mah.

SMPng

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

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

The SMPng project has been picking up steam in the last few months thankfully. In February, Seigo Tanimura-san committed the first round of process group and session locking. Alfred Perlstein also added locking to most of the pipe implementation. In March, Alfred fixed several problems with the locking for select() and pushed down Giant some in several system calls. Andrew Reiter added locking for kernel module metadata, and Jeff Roberson wrote a new SMP-friendly slab allocator to replace both the zone allocator and the in-kernel malloc(). The use of the critical section API was cleaned up to not be abused as replacements for disabling and enabling interrupts. Also, Matt Dillon optimized the MD portion of the critical section code on the i386 architecture. Several other subsystems were also locked in April as well. See the SMPng website and todo list for more details.

Some of the current works in progress include locking for the kernel linker by Andrew Reiter and light-weight interrupt threads for the i386 by Bosko Milekic. Seigo Tanimura-san, Alfred Perlstein, and Jeffrey Hsu are also working on locking down various pieces of the networking stack. Alan Cox has started working on fixing the existing locking in the VM subsystem and moving bits of it out from under Giant. John Baldwin has written an implementation of turnstiles as well as adaptive mutexes in the jhb_lock Perforce branch. The adaptive mutexes appear to be stable on i386, alpha, and sparc64, but the turnstile code still contains several tricky lock order reversals. John also plans to commit the p_canfoo() API change to use td_ucred in the very near future and then finish the task of making ktrace(4) use a worker thread.

TrustedBSD Audit

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

Contact: Andrew Reiter <[email protected]>
Contact: TrustedBSD Audit Mailing List <[email protected]>

Over the past couple of months, progress has pretty much stopped until very recently. The past few changes to the audit code were update the usage of zones to UMA zones, cleanup some old cruft, and start toying with the idea of having an audit write thread implemented as an ithd. The next step is to decide two realistic approaches to the where the records will be dumped -- whether that is to a local disk or fed up to userland and then dealt with. After that, the goal will be to expand the number of events that are being audited, while also working in some performance testing procedures. I will be posting to trustedbsd-audit about the recent changes shortly.

TrustedBSD MAC

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

Contact: Robert Watson <[email protected]>
Contact: TrustedBSD Discussion Mailing List <[email protected]>

Over the last three months, there has been a lot of activity in the TrustedBSD MAC tree. An initial commit of the SEBSD code (NSA FLASK and SELinux implementation) was made; many MAC policies previously linked directly to the kernel via kernel options were moved to kernel modules; the flexibility of the framework was improved relating to the life cycle of object labels; additional labeling and access control hooks were introduced; new policies were introduced to demonstrate the flexibility of the framework (including a cleanup of inter-process authorization, additional VFS hooks, improved support for multilabel filesystems, network booting, IPv6, IPsec, support for "peer" labels on stream sockets). Current modules include Biba integrity policy, MLS confidentiality policy, Type Enforcement, "BSD Extended" (permitting firewall-like rulesets for filesystem protection), "ifoff" (limit interface communication by policy), mac_seeotheruids (limit visibility of processes/etc of other users), "babyaudit" (a simple audit implementation), and SEBSD (FLASK/SELinux port).

Over the next month, a final move to completely dynamic labeling will be made, permitting policies to introduce new state relating to process credentials, vnodes, sockets, mounts, interfaces, and mbufs at run-time, allowing a broad range of flexible label-driven policies to be developed. In addition, application APIs will be re-designed and re-implemented so as to better support a fully dynamic policy framework. We plan to make an initial prototype patchset available for review in June, with the intent of committing that patchset in mid-June.

Updated prototype code may be retrieved from the TrustedBSD CVS trees on cvsup10.FreeBSD.org.

UMA

Contact: Jeff Roberson <[email protected]>

FreeBSD's new kernel memory allocator has been committed to 5.0. UMA is a slabs derived allocator that supports memory reclaiming, object caching, type stable storage, and per CPU free lists for optimal SMP performance. It has both a malloc(9) interface and a zone style interface for specific object types. uma(9) will be available shortly.

Universal Disk Filesystem for FreeBSD

URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~scottl/udf

Contact: Scott Long <[email protected]>
Contact: Jeroen Ruigrok <[email protected]>

Read-only support for UDF filesystems was checked into the 5-CURRENT branch in April. Backporting for 4-STABLE is being conducted by Jeroen. The next phase is to write a newfs_udf, then move on to adding write support to the filesystem. I'm still looking for a volunteer to handle read and write support for write-once media (e.g. CD-R).

Wi Hostap

Contact: Warner Losh <[email protected]>

Work on the host access point support for the Prism2 and Prism2.5 based wireless cards has been integrated into the kernel. This work is largely based on Thomas Skibo's initial implementation.

Zero Copy Sockets

URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~ken/zero_copy/

Contact: Ken Merry <[email protected]>

I have released a new zero copy sockets snapshot, the first since November, 2000. The code has been ported up to the latest -current, and the jumbo code now has mutex protection. Also, zero copy send and receive can be selectively turned on and off via sysctl to make it easier to compare performance with and without zero copy. Reviews and comments are welcome.

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