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Introduction

This report covers FreeBSD related projects between October and December 2007. AsiaBSDCon 2008 is approaching and will be held at the Tokyo University of Science in Tokyo, Japan on the 27th - 30th of March 2008. The FreeBSD Foundation has released a Newsletter detailing their activities over the past few months.

FreeBSD 7.0 is nearing release and the 2nd Release Candidate is ready for testing and is available for download now.

Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! We hope you enjoy reading.

Projects

FreeBSD Team Reports

Kernel

Documentation

Userland Programs

Ports

Miscellaneous

    Bug Busting

    URL: http://www.freebsd.org/support.html#gnats
    URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/BugBusting/Resources
    URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/Bugathons/January2008

    Contact: Mark Linimon <bugmeister_at_FreeBSD_dot_org>

    As a result of a posting on freebsd-current@ complaining about a communication gap between users and developers, there has been a great deal of new interest in working on bugbusting -- in particular, we brainstormed on ideas on how non-committers can help. The two main ideas that are being discussed are incoming bug triage (classifying, rating, and so forth), and working with users (helping users to work through problems that aren't classical Problem Reports.

    As a result of this, we held our first Bugathon in quite some time (on #freebsd-bugbusters on EFNet). Over 30 people participated. As a result of this, over 120 PRs were closed, and dozens more were put into the 'feedback' state. Most of these PRs were in the kern/ and bin/ categories, which are the two that need the most work. (The new arrival rate was over 40/day during this time, including ports, so there was a significant net decrease.)

    Several new wiki pages were created to support this effort, and finally capture a lot of the previous discussions from both the mailing list and the IRC channel. There are even more good ideas which Mark Linimon has promised to work up and investigate, including:

    • a web page to show "last N days of PRs"
    • some way for committers to only view PRs that have been in some way 'vetted' or 'confirmed'
    • more publicity for what we've already got in place, and for what we intend to do next
    • new categories, classifications, and states for PRs, that will better match our workflow

    Note: at this time we are not yet looking to replace GNATS. The idea right now is to see what we can learn about how our workflow does (and ought to) work, and experiment with some low-cost changes to get various people's reactions. Linimon's feeling is that any of these kinds of changes would carry over to a new system, if we were to change over.

    rwatson also created a wiki page to put down some thoughts about how to work on the various kernel problems that are reported. Although preliminary, this captures some expertise and puts it into a place where prospective volunteers can more easily find it.

    The overall PR count is back up to just under 5300. Although this is net increase from the previous report, there were long periods of src and ports freeze during this time, which creates a spike in the overall count. (src and ports both remain in slush during that time). The peak number was approaching 5500.

    Overall, we seem to have some momentum and new volunteers interested in working on user-reported problems. bugmeister is hopeful that we can capitalize on this and make some good progress in the rest of 2008.

    Coda

    Contact: Robert Watson <[email protected]>

    A large number of bugs have been fixed in the FreeBSD "coda" kernel module over the past six months, and a man page has been added to describe the module. Many of these bugs were the result of the coda module failing to keep up with the many enhancements to FreeBSD VFS over the last few years. As a result of these fixes, it is now possible to use Coda with FreeBSD 7.x and 8.x without immediate panics, and possibly for an extended period. The new man page does clarify that Coda is an experimental distributed file system and not yet appropriate for production use on FreeBSD, but things are looking a lot better than they were.

    DDB scripting, output capture, and textdumps

    Contact: Robert Watson <[email protected]>

    The kernel DDB facility has been enhanced to add several new features:

    DDB scripting allows the user to define a set of simple scripts from within the debugger or userspace using the new ddb(8) tool to automate debugging steps. Scripts can be automatically executed when the debugger is entered ("kdb.enter.panic", "kdb.enter.break", ...) or manually using the DDB "run" command.

    DDB output capture allows the user to request that the output of DDB be captured into a buffer for access from user space or to be written out in a textdump.

    DDB textdumps, a new dump format that writes out a tarball of text-based debugging information, such as the kernel message buffer, panic message, kernel configuration, kernel version, and DDB capture buffer to the swap partition, to be extracted via savecore(8). This provides a compact, portable, and kernel compile independent debugging package.

    Various interesting formulas for use are described in ddb(4) and textdump(4); the facilities are separable, so you can, for example, run a few DDB commands and capture their output, then write a regular dump and extract that output using kgdb, or you can do the same and write it out as a textdump. Likewise, scripts can be used to automate manual debugging, or implement textdumps by enabling output capture, running a series of commands, and forcing a textdump to be written before rebooting.

    Support for these facilities has been merged into 8-CURRENT, and will be merged to 7-STABLE after the release of FreeBSD 7.0.

    Open tasks:

    1. Improve semantics of combining textdumps with KDB_UNATTENDED.
    2. Allow scripts to use the DDB "continue" command when the script has been started automatically as a result of a KDB enter event, such as "kdb.enter.sysctl" or "kdb.enter.break".

    DTrace

    URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~jb/reasons/reasons.html

    Contact: John Birrell <[email protected]>

    Thanks to support from Cisco Systems, Inc, the port of the DTrace dynamic tracing framework from OpenSolaris to FreeBSD is active again. A solution to the integration issues surrounding the CDDL and BSD licenses has been found. There is an entirely BSD licensed set of hooks/shims which are optionally compiled into the kernel. This option can be included in the GENERIC kernel and shipped without any CDDL patent encumberance. The CTF (Compact C Type Format) tools now work across all architectures enabled in a 'make universe'. A BSD licensed DWARF library has been developed. The kernel DTrace support is limited to amd64 and i386 at the moment. It currently passes 822 of the tests in the DTrace Test Suite. It is expected that the initial commit to FreeBSD-CURRENT will occur within the next month after review. Refer to the change summary page for details of the proposed changes.

    FreeBSD Greek Documentation Team

    URL: http://hg.hellug.gr/freebsd/doc-el/

    Contact: Giorgos Keramidas <[email protected]>

    The Greek doc translation team has grown significantly since we started the translations. Most of the Handbook has already been translated to Greek (and committed to the CVS tree), as a collaborative effort of Manolis Kiagias, Nikos Kokkalis, Panagiotis Kritikakos, Vaggelis Typaldos, Stylianos Sideridis and others. Manolis has started translating the FAQ too, and we also tagged most of the Greek documents with their original, English revision ID. There are also plans for a translation of www/en , but these may have to be deferred until we find the time to complete the Handbook, which is our primary target right now.

    Open tasks:

    1. Finish the Handbook translation
    2. Carefully review the translated text
    3. Resync the rest of the SRCID tags with English file revisions
    4. Keep translating more parts of the FAQ
    5. Start updating the articles to the latest English versions too
    6. As time permits, start a www translation too

    FreeBSD Installer

    URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~mtm/fin.tar.bz2

    Contact: Mike Makonnen <[email protected]>

    The FreeBSD Installer project (FIN) is yet another attempt to replace the aging sysinstall(8). I am attempting to keep the best parts of sysinstall(8) and combine them with the framework provided by the BSDInstaller (bsdinstaller.org) to create an installation program for FreeBSD that is multi-lingual, supports multiple installation media, supports remote installation, and is easily extensible to other installation types (gui, cgi, etc). The current implementation will slice disks, install your choice of base distributions, and set hostname and root password.

    Open tasks:

    1. Setting date, time, and time zone information
    2. Choosing and installing packages
    3. Support for installation media other than IDE CD-Rom (HTTP, FTP, etc)
    4. Integration with devel/gettext

    FreeBSD Mirror Site Status

    URL: http://www.mavetju.org/unix/ftp-stats.php

    Contact: Edwin Groothuis <[email protected]>

    There are several websites already with overview of the FreeBSD FTP mirrror sites, but they all seem to have one problem: They are not manually updated with the list of sites. For example, http://mirrorlist.freebsd.org/FBSDsites.php, despite being hosted by an Australia, doesn't have the Australian mirrors on it, while http://people.freebsd.org/~kuriyama/mirrors/ doesn't tell you which files are available from there. The data on my page shows the availability of the ISO images on all FTP mirror sites. The list of FTP mirror sites is obtained from DNS by either doing a zone-transfer or by just trying the standard names. The first data block shows a quick overview of the availability of the ISO image directories per server, architecture and mirror site. The second data block shows a verbose availability of the contents of the ISO image directories per server.

    Open tasks:

    1. The next addition will be the availability of the pre-build packages.

    FreeBSD SMP network stack scalability

    Contact: Robert Watson <[email protected]>
    Contact: Kris Kennaway <[email protected]>

    There are a variety of on-going projects relating to improving SMP scalability of the FreeBSD network stack post-7.0. These include:

    Detailed profiling of application workloads such as BIND9, MySQL, PgSQL and Apache have been used to identify performance bottlenecks and to guide changes to the source code.

    rwlock(9) use for pcbinfo and inpcb locking , allowing the acquisition of only read locks for pcbinfo and inpcb during UDP receive and transmit--this is highly desirable in order to improve BIND9 performance, which sends and receives from many threads at a time on a single UDP socket.

    Breaking out pcbinfo into a series of parallel data structures , where the particular pcbinfo instance is selected using a hash of the connection tuple (and where ambiguous cases are present in all instances). This would allow greatly reducing pcbinfo contention for parallel input cases, which are increasingly likely with multiple input queue network devices, such as the Chelsio cxgb 10gbps driver.

    Investigation of use opportunities for rmlock(9) -- rmlocks provide very lightweight acquisition for read, but expensive acquisition for write, and may be an appropriate replacement for rwlocks where significantly more reads than writes take place -- such as for firewall rule list protection, pf hook registration, address lists, etc.

    Weak connection affinity , in which the effective affinity of a connection, determined by its hash/rss work assignment to a particular input queue by the network stack or network card, is tracked and exposed to user space so that work associated with that connection can be performed on or close to the CPU where the kernel will be processing input for the connection. Software work placement has been done using the netisr2 implementation, which creates per-CPU netisr threads and assigns work based on connection properties.

    There are also many other pieces of related work going on, especially relating to 10gbps network drivers, and workloads of particular interest include BIND9, MySQL, pgsql, Apache, and general TCP parallelism.

    FreeBSD/mips

    Contact: Warner Losh <[email protected]>
    Contact: Oleksandr Tymoshenko <[email protected]>
    Contact: Ollivier Houchard <[email protected]>
    Contact: Randall Stewart <[email protected]>

    FreeBSD/mips boots to multiuser using gxemul on the MALTA board with a 4Kc based CPU. The port is targeting MIPS32 and MIPS64 release 1 and release 2 based systems. Work is underway to support multicore systems.

    Preliminary ports to adm 5120, the IDT RC32434, the Sentry 5, and a few other targets have started. These ports are in various stages of stability.

    Juniper Networks has donated a generic MIPS FreeBSD port. This port doesn't run on any real hardware, but contains the necessary parts to run on idealized MIPS hardware. The FreeBSD/mips workers have been merging the current base and the Juniper code into a unified base. In addition, Cavium Networks has donated code supporting their multicore mips64r2 platform. This code is also being merged into the tree and cleaned up as well. The merged code base presently is making it to the first (or maybe second) call to cpu_switch before dying. Active work is underway in this area.

    if_nxge -- Neterion Xframe 10GbE Server/Storage adapter driver

    Contact: Robert Watson <[email protected]>

    The if_nxge driver, contributed by Neterion, has been merged into FreeBSD 8-CURRENT and FreeBSD 7-STABLE, and will appear in FreeBSD 7.0.

    The nxge driver provides support for Neterion Xframe-I and Xframe-II adapters. The driver supports TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO/LSO), Large Receive Offload (LRO), Jumbo Frames (5 buffer mode), Header Separation (Rx 2 buffer mode), VLAN, and Promiscuous mode.

    For general information and support, please visit the Neterion support page http://www.neterion.com/support/support.html.

    The nxge driver supports Neterion Xframe 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters listed in http://www.neterion.com/how/pricing.html.

    LVM geom class

    Contact: Andrew Thompson <[email protected]>

    glvm is a geom class which reads the metadata from a LVM2 (Linux volume manager) disk and creates a geom provider for each logical volume. An example is the logs lv on a volume group called vg0 appearing as /dev/lvm/vg0-logs, this can be mounted as a disk.

    The code is working and will be posted for testing soon.

    Major TCP Code Cleanup and Rewrite

    URL: http://perforce.freebsd.org/changeList.cgi?CMD=changes&FSPC=//depot/projects/tcp_new/...
    URL: http://perforce.freebsd.org/fileViewer.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/tcp_new/netinet/tcp_input.c

    Contact: Andre Oppermann <[email protected]>

    The FreeBSD TCP code has evolved a lot over time and many new features were added. However over time it got crufty, complex and hard to read and track. In some places functionality was moved away but the corresponding code in the main TCP functions was not or not fully removed.

    The main purpose of of the TCP code cleanup and rewrite is to make the code:

    • Easily readable again;
    • Easily trackable again;
    • A lot simpler to maintain;
    • Verifiably correct and RFC conforming;
    • Easily extendable for new congestion control algorithms;
    • Increase in performance.

    Quite a bit of code is already (re)written but a lot still remains to be done.

    Open tasks:

    1. Integration of code from private branch into public perforce repository.
    2. Completion of code and rewrite. Integration with pluggable congestion control algorithms.
    3. Full code behavior check against all TCP RFCs and drafts of upcoming RFCs.
    4. Extended testing and full code review by other TCP developers.

    malloc(3)

    Contact: Jason Evans <[email protected]>

    malloc(3) has been enhanced in several ways to reduce lock contention when multi-threaded programs concurrently use the malloc(3) functions. The primary enhancements are lazy deallocation and dynamic arena load balancing.

    Lazy deallocation is designed to reduce contention for programs that use the producer-consumer model, where a thread produces (allocates) objects, and a pool of worker threads consumes (deallocates) those objects. As a side benefit, lazy deallocation also substantially reduces lock contention if multiple unrelated threads are using the same arena.

    Allocation activity patterns can change throughout the lifetime of a program. Dynamic arena load balancing monitors arena lock contention and re-assigns threads to other arenas as necessary, thus smoothing out allocator performance.

    In order to monitor lock contention in support of arena load balancing, I had to switch to using pthreads mutexes. This all by itself smoothed out allocator performance under high load, since the internal libc "spinlocks" aren't really spinlocks, whereas malloc now spins for a bit before blocking.

    I plan to MFC these changes to RELENG_7, hopefully in time for the FreeBSD 7.1 release.

    Multi-IPv4/v6 jails

    Contact: Bjoern A. Zeeb <[email protected]>

    The multi-IPv4/v6 jails project was resumed in early January after previous work had been abandoned in 2006.

    As an alternate solution to full network stack virtualization, this work shall provide a lightweight solution for multi-IP virtualization. The changes are even more important because of the emerging demand for IPv6.

    The current status includes updated user space utilities. Kernel side has grown support for multiple IP addresses for both address families in jails, while the old kernel internal lookup/checking functions were kept and can be compiled in during the transition period limiting jails to one IP address. Additionally a show jails DDB command was added to ease debugging.

    As an auxiliary project the last suser(9) checks were replaced in netinet6/ to support optional raw IPv6 sockets with jails. The new priv(9) checks were committed to HEAD.

    Open tasks:

    1. Check for proper v4-mapped v6 address handling.
    2. Review/add SCTP jail checks.
    3. Think of enhanced lookups for jails with lots of IP addresses (preserving the "primary" IPv4 address).
    4. Regression tests and review.

    Opensource Solutions '08

    URL: http://www.solutionslinux.fr/en/

    Contact: Mathieu Arnold <[email protected]>
    Contact: Ollivier Robert <[email protected]>
    Contact: Thierry Thomas <[email protected]>
    Contact: Rodrigo Osorio <[email protected]>

    Like every year for the past few years is held what in France is mostly called "Solutions Linux" in Paris La Défense. The exhibition will take place the 29, 30 and 31st of January in the CNIT.

    The interesting thing about this event is that 80% of the floor is taken by companies (IBM, Novell, Oracle), and the remaining 20% is given freely to associations and non-profit organizations, where you'll find many (if not most) french LUGs, *BSDs, most Linux distributions, Mozilla, OOo...

    This year, FreeBSD will once again have a booth, and we'll be showing what FreeBSD is, why it's the damn best OS out there. We'll also be distributing flyers and CD's for the whole three days

    Admission to the exhibitions is free, so if you ever happen to pass by, come and see us, we'll be at booth A39.

    Performance Monitoring Project

    URL: http://littlebit.dk:5000/

    Contact: Erik Cederstrand <[email protected]>

    As part of my thesis, I've been working on a framework to monitor the performance of CURRENT over time. The project is now in a state where a server and a slave are producing benchmark results and publishing the results to a web page for testing. Already, the setup has detected regressions. Lots of improvements can be made, but it is already quite useful. Over the next month I'll be adding a few features, fixing bugs and writing documentation.

    Open tasks:

    1. Decide on a useful set of benchmarks
    2. Find a more permanent home for the database and webserver
    3. Go live

    Ports 2.0

    Contact: Aryeh Friedman <[email protected]>
    Contact: Alejandro Pulver <[email protected]>
    Contact: David Southwell <[email protected]>

    Completed initial requirements gathering. Selection of development tools complete. General internal design complete.

    Ports 2.0 goals are:

    • Re-engineer/modernize the ports build process using graph theory and more flexible depends calculations.
    • Better document ports 1.0 and 2.0
    • Maintain 100% user level compatibility with ports 1.0
    • After a long trial period replace ports 1.0 in the "base system"

    Open tasks:

    1. Create engine
    2. Combine ports 1.0 docs from porters guide and the handbook into a single guide
    3. Create a proof of concept by building xorg (including all dependanicies) under the new system
    4. Create mailing list and web site

    Ports Collection

    URL: http://www.freebsd.org/ports/
    URL: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing-ports/
    URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~fenner/portsurvey/
    URL: http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/index.html
    URL: http://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/index.html
    URL: http://tinderbox.marcuscom.com

    Contact: Mark Linimon <[email protected]>

    The ports count continues to accelerate and is now over 18,000. The PR count, which had dipped to around 750 before the 6.3/7.0 freeze, is now back up to about 1000, due to the fact that we remain in ports slush.

    Because of the freeze/slush, no experimental ports runs have been committed since the last report. Although 2 more -exp runs have been completed, we are waiting for 7.0R to commit them.

    Once 7.0R happens, a lot of chaos is going to happen in the Ports Collection. This has built up during the long release cycle. Get ready for the following changes, among others:

    • upgrade of KDE to 4.0 (being tested)
    • upgrade to gettext
    • upgrade to libtool
    • introduction of perl 5.10
    • final removal of XFree86 (deprecated for quite some time)
    • removal of other expired ports

    Most of the portmgr activity was related to the QA process for the releases. In addition, linimon spent quite some time trying to get the sparc64 ports into better shape, and sent out a request for more people to help test sparc64 ports. Some people have responded with offers for letting committers get accounts on their machines.

    Unfortunately during this time period, we became unable to build packages for ia64-7. As a result, we are not currently building packages for ia64 any more. If any one wants to step up to work on this architecture, let portmgr know.

    We are currently building packages for amd64-5, amd64-6, amd64-7, amd64-8, i386-5, i386-6, i386-7, i386-8, sparc64-6, and sparc64-7. Note, however, that RELENG_5 will reach the end of its supported life on May 31, and package builds for those 2 buildenvs will stop as of that date. (8 buildenvs * 18,000 ports should be enough to keep us busy.)

    Other than that, the packages are in the best shape that they have been in for some time. linimon continues to work on package analysis tools for portsmon.

    We have added 2 new committers since the last report.

    Open tasks:

    1. Most of the remaining ports PRs are "existing port/PR assigned to committer". Although the maintainer-timeout policy is helping to keep the backlog down, we are going to need to do more to get the ports in the shape they really need to be in.
    2. Although we have added many maintainers, we still have over 4,000 unmaintained ports (see, for instance, the list on portsmon). We are always looking for dedicated volunteers to adopt at least a few unmaintained ports. As well, the packages on amd64 and sparc64 lag behind i386, and we need more testers for those.

    procstat(1)

    Contact: Robert Watson <[email protected]>

    A new command line tool, procstat(1), allows detailed inspection and printing of process properties, including file descriptors, threads, kernel thread stacks, credentials, and virtual memory mappings of processes. Several new sysctls have been added to the kernel in order to export this information cleanly, and the stack(9) facility has been enhanced to allow the capture of kernel stacks from threads other than curthread. None of these features depends on procfs, continuing the effort to remove a requirement for procfs in order to print process information, as well as adding new types of information not available with procfs. Kernel stack printing is particularly useful as it provides much more detailed information on why a thread is blocked in kernel beyond the useful but limited wmesg context provided to date. This is helpful in debugging both user process problems and kernel problems. procstat has been merged into FreeBSD 8-CURRENT, and will be merged to 7-STABLE after FreeBSD 7.0 is released.

    Open tasks:

    1. Merge to RELENG_7.
    2. Add a mode to print process signal disposition.

    Security Officer and Security Team

    URL: http://www.freebsd.org/security/
    URL: http://www.freebsd.org/administration.html#t-secteam
    URL: http://vuxml.freebsd.org/

    Contact: Security Officer <[email protected]>
    Contact: Security Team <[email protected]>

    In the time since the last status report, four security advisories have been issued concerning problems in the base system of FreeBSD; one of these problems was in "contributed" code maintained outside of FreeBSD. The FreeBSD Vulnerabilities and Exposures Markup Language (VuXML) document has continued to be updated; since the last status report, 61 new entries have been added, bringing the total up to 1023. Many of these new VuXML entries were made by members of the "ports-security" team.

    The "ports-security" team is still looking for more committers who can periodically help with fixing ports security issues and documenting them in the FreeBSD VuXML document. Committers who wish to help with this effort can contact simon@ for details.

    The following FreeBSD releases are supported by the FreeBSD Security Team: FreeBSD 5.5, FreeBSD 6.1, FreeBSD 6.2, and FreeBSD 6.3. The respective End of Life dates of supported releases are listed on the web site; it is expected that the upcoming FreeBSD 7.0 release will be supported for one year after its release.

    TCP ECN

    URL: http://p4web.freebsd.org/@md=d&cd=//depot/projects/&c=DN2@//depot/projects/tcpecn/?ac=83
    URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2007-November/016007.html
    URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~rpaulo/tcp_ecn.diff

    Contact: Rui Paulo <[email protected]>

    Completed and tested. Awaiting review from other committers.

    TCP Reassembly Queue Optimization

    URL: http://perforce.freebsd.org/changeList.cgi?CMD=changes&FSPC=//depot/projects/tcp_reass/...
    URL: http://perforce.freebsd.org/fileViewer.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/tcp_reass/netinet/tcp_reass.c

    Contact: Andre Oppermann <[email protected]>

    The FreeBSD TCP reassembly queue system has reached its limits with today's high speed links over long distances and large socket buffers. The old code is almost unchanged compared to 4.4BSD and gets quite inefficient with large mbuf chains.

    The new code aggregates consecutive segments into blocks and inserts the blocks into a tail queue. The insertion points for a newly arrived segment are checked in order of their probability. This prevents full chain traversals and is very efficient.

    To prevent easy resource exhaustion attacks the effective mbuf usage is accounted for and limited by the size of socket buffer. This way the reassembly queue can't be abused with many holes among small segments.

    A further addition is the combination of received SACK block tracking with the reassembly queue. The reassembly queue now tracks all blocks of segments. This makes tracking it again for SACK unnecessary. Additionally the limitation to six SACK blocks is lifted and the size of the inpcb structure is reduced quite a bit.

    The new code is stable and in testing correctly handles the download of a full set of FreeBSD CDROM images and 180 ports distfiles from widely distributed sites around the world at 2% packet loss.

    Open tasks:

    1. Additional small performance and space optimizations.
    2. Extended testing with new ipfw tcptruncate option to chop up TCP segments and feed them with full and partial loss into reassembly.
    3. Full code review by other TCP developers.

    The Hungarian Documentation Project

    URL: http://www.freebsd.org/hu/
    URL: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/hu_HU.ISO8859-2/articles/
    URL: http://perforce.freebsd.org/changeList.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/docproj%5fhu/books/handbook/...%2b//depot/projects/docproj%5fhu/share/...

    Contact: Gábor Kövesdán <[email protected]>
    Contact: Gábor Páli <[email protected]>

    We have added the translation of the FreeBSD Flyer and maintained the existing translations. A huge progress is being made to provide a Hungarian translation of the FreeBSD Handbook. Also, there is an ongoing effort to provide Hungarian release notes for the upcoming FreeBSD releases.

    Open tasks:

    1. Translate Handbook
    2. Add release notes for HEAD and RELENG_7

    The Spanish Documentation Project

    URL: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/es_ES.ISO8859-1/articles/fdp-es/

    Contact: José Vicente Carrasco Vayá <[email protected]>
    Contact: Gábor Kövesdán <[email protected]>

    Since the last status report we have made a nice progress about the website translation. The structure of the translated sites is polished and we have brought a significant set of pages up-to-date. New pages with important content have also been translated. Apart from the good progress, there is a still a lot to do. Some pages are still seriously outdated and some important parts are missing.

    At the same time, we have added one new article translation and one is still awaiting review before being committed.

    Open tasks:

    1. Continue synchronizing the website with the English one and translate further important parts
    2. Synchronize the articles and the Handbook
    3. Add new translations

    TrustedBSD Audit

    URL: http://www.TrustedBSD.org/audit.html
    URL: http://www.TrustedBSD.org/openbsm.html
    URL: http://www.TrustedBSD.org/bsmtrace.html

    Contact: Robert Watson <[email protected]>
    Contact: Christian Peron <[email protected]>
    Contact: TrustedBSD Audit Mailing List <[email protected]>

    The TrustedBSD Project was proud to release OpenBSM 1.0, the first production release of OpenBSM, which is shipped with FreeBSD 6.3 and will ship with FreeBSD 7.0. This release represents largely polishing, bug fixing, and cleanup over the previous alpha release, but for FreeBSD 6.x introduced features such as XML audit trail printing, new token types, and new event identifiers.

    A variety of development work continues on audit, including initial work on OpenBSM 1.1 alpha, work on improving the performance and semantics of audit pipes, and the experimental bsmtrace host intrusion detection package.

    Open tasks:

    1. Improve performance for live intrusion detection by introducing additional buffering and multi-record copying for audit pipes.
    2. Improve flexibility for live intrusion detection and monitoring by adding finer-grained record matching support for audit pipes, such as by-pid and by-pid-tree.
    3. Introduce multi-host network support for experimental bsmtrace intrusion detection package, allowing central monitoring and alarms on live bsm traces from many hosts.
    4. Continue analysis of CC audit requirements to flesh out missing event sources, such as user admin tools that don't currently generate audit records.

    VM Overcommit

    URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~kib/overcommit

    Contact: Konstantin Belousov <[email protected]>
    Contact: Peter Holm <[email protected]>

    The patch to account the possibly required swap space and limit it by total amount of configured swap or per-uid limit is revived, ported to the 8-CURRENT. Now it is intensively tested by Peter Holm. Please, give it a run in the diverse workloads. Your comments are welcome!

    Xen

    URL: http://www.fsmware.com/xenofreebsd/7.0/download/

    Contact: Kip Macy <[email protected]>

    The port will only run as a guest (i.e. domU) right now, on i386/PAE platforms. Status:

    • domU is self-hosting on 8-CURRENT (can compile world + kernel in a VM).
    • Xen 3.0.3 and earlier are not supported.
    • Device structure needs to be cleaned up, it's not conformant to newbus.
    • SMP and amd64 are targeted for support by May for RELENG_6 and RELENG_7.
    • dom0 support is not currently on the roadmap.

    Open tasks:

    1. Substantial cleanup needed, talk with Kip Macy or Scott Long if you are interested in helping
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