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FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report

Introduction

This months report covers activity during the second half of October, and the month of November. During these months, substantial work was performed to improve system performance and stability, in particular addressing concerns regarding regressions in network performance for the TCP protocol, and via the introduction of polled network device driver support. Work continues on long-term architectural projects for 5.0, including KSEs, NEWCARD, and TrustedBSD, as well as the cleaning up of long-standing problems in FreeBSD, such as PAM integration. Administrative changes are also documented, including work to redefine and formalize the release engineering process, and the approval of a new portmgr group which will administer the ports collection.

FreeBSD users and developers are strongly encouraged to attend the USENIX BSD Conference in February of next year; it is expected that this will be a useful forum both for learning about FreeBSD and on-going work, as well as providing an opportunity for developers to work more closely and act as a vehicle for discussion and round-the-clock hacking. More information is available at the USENIX web site.

Robert Watson

ATA Project Status Report

Contact: Søren Schmidt <[email protected]>

Work is underways to support failing mirror disks better and handle hotswapping in a new replacement disk and have it rebuild automagically.

Support for the Promise TX4 is now working in my lab, seems they did the PCI-PCI bridging in the not so obvious way.

Plans are in the works to backport the -current ATA driver to -stable with hotswap and the works. Now that -current is delayed I'm working on ways to give me time to get this done, since I've had lots of requests lately and we really can't let down our customers :).

SMART support is being worked on, but no timelines yet.

Although not strictly ATA, Promise has equipped me with a couple SuperTrak sx6000 RAID controllers, they take 6 ATA disks and does RAID0-5 in hardware. I have done a driver (its an I2O device) for both -current and -stable and it works beautifully with hotswap the works. It will enter the tree when it is more mature, and I have an agreement with Promise on how we handle userland control util etc. BTW it seems it can also be used as a normal 6 channel PCI ATA controller, a bit on the expensive side maybe...

Device Polling

URL: http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/polling/

Contact: Luigi Rizzo <[email protected]>

This work uses a mixed interrupt-polling architecture to handle network device drivers, giving the system substantial improvements in terms of stability and robustness to overloads, as well as the ability to control the sharing of CPU between network-related kernel processing and other user/kernel tasks. Last not least, you might even see a moderate (up to 20-30%, machine dependent) performance improvement.

Fibre Channel Support

URL: http://www.feral.com/isp.html

Contact: Matthew Jacob <[email protected]>

Ongoing bug fixes. Work is underway, to be integrated shortly, that makes the cross platform endian support easier and will prepare the FreeBSD version for eventual sparc64 and PowerPC usage.

FreeBSD 4.5 Release Engineering

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/internal/releng.html
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/internal/releng45.html

Contact: Murray Stokely <[email protected]>

Release engineering activities for FreeBSD 4.5 have begun. An overview of the entire process has been added to the FreeBSD web site, along with a specific schedule for 4.5. The code freeze is scheduled to start on December 20. The team responsible for responding to MFC requests sent to [email protected] for this release is: Murray Stokely, Robert Watson, and John Baldwin. Some of our many goals for this release include closing more installation-related problem reports, being more conservative with our approval of changes during the code freeze, and continuing to document the entire process. For suggestions or questions about FreeBSD 4.5 release activities, please subscribe to the public [email protected] mailing list.

FreeBSD C99 & POSIX Conformance Project

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

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

Work on the FreeBSD C99 & POSIX Conformance Project is progressing nicely. Since the last status report, two new headers have been added [<stdint.h> and <inttypes.h>], several new functions implemented [atoll(3), imaxabs(3), imaxdiv(3), llabs(3), lldiv(3), strerror_r(3), strtoimax(3), and strtoumax(3)], and changes to assert(3) and printf(3) were made to support C99. More printf(3) changes are in the works to support the remaining C99 and POSIX requirements. Additionally, research was done into our POSIX Utility conformance and a list of tasks was derived from that research.

Several other interesting events occurred during November and the beginning of December. The project mailing list was moved to the FreeBSD.org domain, and is now available at [email protected]. On December 6, 2001, the IEEE Standards Board approved the Austin Group Specification as IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, thus making the work we're doing ever more important.

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.

Bulgarian locale support has been committed to FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT (and later merged into 4.x-STABLE on December 10th). A local CVS repository for the translation of the FreeBSD documentation into Bulgarian has been created.

FreeBSD NVIDIA Driver Port

URL: ftp://ftp.jurai.net/users/winter/nvidia/NEWS
URL: ftp://ftp.jurai.net/users/winter/nvidia/

Contact: Matthew N. Dodd <[email protected]>

The port of the driver is around 90% feature complete. AGP support and "Registry" support via sysctl need to be finished/implemented. The NVIDIA guys are working on a build of the X11 libs and extensions for FreeBSD; once this is done hardware accelerated direct rendering should work. The previous version this driver is no longer available. I'm planning on making a snapshot of my code once I chase out a few more bugs.

Please note that development is taking place under -CURRENT right now; a port to -STABLE will be available at some later time.

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.

Improving FreeBSD startup scripts

URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FreeBSD-rc/
URL: http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~lukem/bibliography.html
URL: http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/rc/

Contact: Doug Barton Committer <[email protected]>
Contact: Gordon Tetlow Contributor <[email protected]>

<-- from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FreeBSD-rc/ -->

This group is for discussion about the startup scripts in FreeBSD, primarily the scripts in /etc/rc*. Primary focus will be on improvements and importation of NetBSD's excellent work on this topic.

<-- from Gordon Tetlow's ranting -->

Due to personal commitments by the folks working on this project we have been unable to spend much time porting the rc.d infrastructure into the FreeBSD boot framework.

Currently, the system will boot (with a little fudging) just before network utilization. There are patches floating around for this (see the -arch list from September).

Intel Gigabit Driver: wx desupported

Contact: Matthew Jacob <[email protected]>

The wx driver is desupported and removed from -current. No further support for wx in -stable is planned. Newer and better drivers are now in the tree.

jp.FreeBSD.org daily SNAPSHOTs project

URL: http://snapshots.jp.FreeBSD.org/
URL: ftp://snapshots.jp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/i386/

Contact: Makoto Matsushita <[email protected]>

jp.FreeBSD.org daily SNAPSHOTs project is yet another snapshots server that provides latest 4-stable and 5-current distribution. You also find installable ISO image, live filesystem, HTMLed source code with search engine, and more; please check project webpage for more details.

jpman project

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

Contact: Kazuo Horikawa <[email protected]>

Targeting 4.5-RELEASE, we continued to revising doc/ja_JP.eucJP/man/man[1256789] to catch up with RELENG_4. Section 3 updating has 45% finished.

KSEs

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

Contact: Julian Elischer <[email protected]>

I have been working behind the scenes on design rather than programming for this last month. I have been working however in the p4 tree to make the system run with the thread structure NOT a part of the proc structure (a prerequisite for threading)

LOMAC Status Report

URL: http://opensource.nailabs.com/lomac/

Contact: Brian Feldman <[email protected]>

A FreeBSD -CURRENT snapshot with LOMAC is currently being prepared, with aid of Perforce on the "green_lomac" branch. Very soon there should be a working demonstration installation CD of FreeBSD with LOMAC, including the ability to enable LOMAC in rc.conf with sysinstall, being a legitimate "out-of-the-box" FreeBSD experience. Actual release build is pending debugging issues with program start-up (especially xdm).

Network interface cloning and modularity

Contact: Brooks Davis <[email protected]>

Support for VLAN cloning has been merged from current and will ship with 4.5-RELEASE. Additionally, new rc.conf support for cloning interfaces at boot has been MFD'd. Work is ongoing to MFC stf and faith cloning as well as adding cloning for ppp devices and enhancing VLAN modularity.

New mount(2) API

URL: http://www.sneakerz.org/~mux/mount.diff

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

There is now some code ready for the new mount API, which has to be reviewed and tested. If it is adopted, we will probably start converting all the filesystems, as well as other code in the kernel, to make them use it. If you want to play with it, the patch is available at the above URL.

NEWCARD/OLDCARD Status report

Contact: Warner Losh <[email protected]>

Not much to report. A number of minor bugs in OLDCARD have been corrected. A larger number of machines now work. Additional work on ToPIC support has been committed, but continued lack of a suitable ToPIC machine has left the author unable to do much work. A few stubborn machines still need to be supported (the author has an example of one such machine, so there is hope for it being fixed. Some pci related issues remain for both OLDCARD and NEWCARD.

NEWCARD work is ramping up, while OLDCARD work is ramping down. A number of things remain to be done for NEWCARD, including suspend/ resume support, generic device arrival/removal daemon and hopefully automatic loading of drivers. A number of current pccard drivers still need to be converted to NEWBUS. Several Chipset issues remain, as does the merging of isa pccard bridge code with the pccbb code.

Pluggable Authentication Modules

URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~des/diary/2001.html

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

On the code side, a number of libpam bugs have been fixed; a new PAM module, pam_self(8) , has been written; and preparations have been made for the transition from /etc/pam.conf to /etc/pam.d .

On the documentation side, new manual pages have been written for pam_ssh(8) , pam_get_item(3) and pam_set_item(3) , and work has started on a longer article about PAM which is expected to be finished by the end of the year.

A lot of work still remains to be done to integrate PAM more tightly with the FreeBSD base system—particularly the passwd(1) , chpass(1) etc. utilities—and ports collection.

Ports Manager Team (portmgr)

URL: http://bento.FreeBSD.org/

Contact: Will Andrews <[email protected]>

After a discussion with the Core Team about our status regarding the ports collection, we heard from them that they'd decided to recognize us as the final authority for approving ports committers. We've spent the last few weeks working on our ports build cluster (see the link) and trying to find ways to improve it for the ports development community. We've also handled a few minor issues in the ports collection.

RELNOTESng

URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~bmah/relnotes/
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/relnotes.html

Contact: Bruce Mah <[email protected]>

I've been working on making the Hardware Notes less i386-centric. This will be especially important for -CURRENT as the ia64 and sparc ports reach maturity; most of this work should be completed in time to be MFC-ed for FreeBSD 4.5-RELEASE. I encourage any interested parties to review the release documentation and send me comments or patches.

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 80% complete.

SMPng Status Report

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

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

October ended up being a bit busier than November for SMPng. During October, Peter Wemm finally finished the ambitious task of unwinding all the macros in NFS and splitting it up into two halves: client and server. Andrew Reiter also submitted some code to add locks to taskqueues, and the folks working on the TTY subsystem designed the locking strategy they will be using. Per-thread ucred references were also added for user traps and syscalls. Once the necessary locking on the process ucred references is committed, this will allow kernel code to access the credentials of the current thread without needing locks while also ensuring that a thread has constant credentials for the lifetime of a syscall. November only saw a few small bug fixes unfortunately, but December is already shaping up to be a very active month, so next month's report should be a bit more interesting.

In non-coding news, the website for the SMPng project has moved from its old location to the new location above. Also, I have completed a paper I am presenting for BSDCon regarding the SMPng project. The paper will be available in the conference proceedings and will be available online after the conference as well.

Status Report: mb_alloc (-CURRENT mbuf allocator)

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/~bmilekic/code/mb_alloc/

Contact: Bosko Milekic <[email protected]>

Presently re-style(9)ing mbuf code with the help of Bruce (bde). The next larger step is approaching: to better performance, as initially planned, not have reference counters for clusters allocated separately via malloc(9). Rather, use some of the [unused] space at the end of each cluster as a counter; since this space is totally unused and since ref. counter <--> mbuf cluster is a one-to-one relationship, this is most convenient.

TCP Performance Improvements

Contact: Matthew Dillon <[email protected]>

A number of serious TCP bugs effecting throughput snuck into the system over the last few releases and have finally been fixed. TCP performance should be greatly improved for a number of cases, including TCP/NFS.

TrustedBSD Audit

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

Contact: John Doe <[email protected]>

Currently, we are exploring a variety of strategies to learn about the implementation and performance issues in order to have a solid design. One of our main goals will be to use a standardized interface to the system, whether it be POSIX.1e, or another of the other standards, because as they say "Standards are great because you have so many to choose from." Hopefully within the next month or so, we will populate the perforce TrustedBSD tree with an agreed upon framework that is ready for serious final work.

TrustedBSD Project

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

Contact: Robert Watson <[email protected]>

The TrustedBSD Project continued focusing development efforts on fine-grained Capabilities and Mandatory Access Control this month. Kernel support for capabilities is essentially complete, and efforts are underway to adapt userland applications to use Capabilities. The login process has been updated to allow users to run with additional privilege based on /etc/capabilities. The MAC implementation work has also been active, with improved support for the labeling of IPC objects, including better integration into the network stack. Both development trees have been updated to work with recent KSE-related developments, as well as exist more happily in a fine-grained SMP kernel. Initial audit-related work appears in a separate entry.

Development of TrustedBSD source code was moved to the FreeBSD Perforce repository, permitting better source code management. As such, the TrustedBSD development trees will now be available via cvsup.

UDF Filesystem

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

Contact: Scott Long <[email protected]>

Modest gains have been made on the UDF filesystem since the last report. Reading of files from DVD-ROM now works (and is fast, according to some reports), and there is preliminary support for reading from CD-RW media. The CD-RW support has only been tested against CD's created with Adaptec/ Roxio DirectCD, and much, much more testing is needed. Once this support is solid, I plan to check it into the tree and start work on making the filesystem writable.

Web site conversion to XML

Contact: Nik Clayton <[email protected]>

Work is (slowly) progressing on converting the web site to use pages marked up in a simple XML schema, and then generating HTML and other output formats using XSLT style sheets. The work so far can be tested by doing "cvs checkout -r XML_XSL_XP www" and then "cd www/en; make index.html". Take a look at index.page in the same directory to see the source XML. The CVS logs for index.page contain detailed instructions explaining how index.page was generated from its earlier form.

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