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FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report

Introduction

Throughout July and August, the FreeBSD Project has been working on pulling together the last few major pieces of new functionality for FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE. At this point, the release appears to be on track for late November or early December. Work on fine-grained locking continues, especially in the VFS, as with improved support for threading through the KSE work; features such as GEOM, UFS2, and TrustedBSD MAC are maturing, and the new ia64 and sparc64 hardware ports are approaching production quality. In the next two months, we have a lot to look forward to: additional 5.0 developer preview snapshots, additional locking and threading improvements, and many cleanups on the new supported architectures. Firewire support has been imported into the main tree, and substantial cleanup of the ACPI/legacy PCI code is also in the works. Also, expect the import of new IPsec hardware acceleration support in the near future.

When new developer previews are posted, please give them a try! While we know that 5.0-RELEASE will be for "early adopters", the more testing we get out of the way now, the less we have to tidy up later. The new features are extremely exciting, and understanding when and how to deploy them properly will be important. In the next two months, among other things, the release engineering team will post updated release schedules, as well as guidance for FreeBSD consumers as to how to decide what releases of FreeBSD will be right for them. Keep an eye out for this, and provide us with feedback.

Also, for those of you in Europe -- we look forward to seeing you at BSDCon Europe in a couple of months!

Scott Long, Robert Watson

Bluetooth stack for FreeBSD (Netgraph implementation)

URL: http://www.geocities.com/m_evmenkin/ngbt-fbsd-20020909.tar.gz
URL: http://bluez.sf.net

Contact: Maksim Yevmenkin < [email protected] >

I'm very pleased to announce that another engineering release is available for download at http://www.geocities.com/m_evmenkin/ngbt-fbsd-20020909.tar.gz

This release features several major changes and includes support for H4 UART and H2 USB transport layers, 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. Also there are several man pages.

Service Discovery Protocol (SDP) is now supported. This release includes SDP daemon, configuration tool and user space library (ported from BlueZ-sdp-0.7).

RFCOMM is now supported. This release includes rfcommd daemon that provides RFCOMM service via pseudo ttys. Not very useful for legacy application, but it is possible to run PPP over Bluetooth now. This was ported from old BlueZ-rfcommd-1.1 (no longer supported by BlueZ) and still has some bugs in it.

Next step is to fix current RFCOMM support and work on new in-kernel RFCOMM and BNEP (Bluetooth Network Encapsulation Protocol) implementation. Also user space need more work (better tools, libraries, documentation etc.).

ATAPI/CAM Status Report

URL: http://www.cuivre.fr.eu.org/~thomas/atapicam/

Contact: Thomas Quinot <[email protected]>

The ATAPI/CAM module allows ATAPI devices (CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD drives, floppy drives such as Iomega Zip, tape drives) to be accessed through the SCSI subsystem (CAM). ATAPI/CAM has been integrated in -CURRENT. The code should be fairly functional (it has been used by many testers as patches against -STABLE and -CURRENT over the past eight months), but there are pending issues on SMP machines. Testers most welcome.

A MFC of this feature will probably happen after the end of the 4.7 code freeze.

BSDCon 2003

URL: http://www.usenix.org/events/bsdcon03/cfp/

Contact: Gregory Shapiro <[email protected]>

The BSDCon 2003 Program Committee invites you to contribute original and innovative papers on topics related to BSD-derived systems and the Open Source world. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Embedded BSD application development and deployment
  • Real world experiences using BSD systems
  • Using BSD in a mixed OS environment
  • Comparison with non-BSD operating systems; technical, practical, licensing (GPL vs. BSD)
  • Tracking open source development on non-BSD systems
  • BSD on the desktop
  • I/O subsystem and device driver development
  • SMP and kernel threads
  • Kernel enhancements
  • Internet and networking services
  • Security
  • Performance analysis and tuning
  • System administration
  • Future of BSD

Submissions in the form of extended abstracts are due by April 1, 2003. Be sure to review the extended abstract expectations before submitting. Selection will be based on the quality of the written submission and whether the work is of interest to the community.

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Fast IPsec Status

Contact: Sam Leffler <[email protected]>

The main goal of this project is to modify the IPsec protocols to use the kernel-level crypto subsystem imported from OpenBSD (see elsewhere). A secondary goal is to do general performance tuning of the IPsec protocols.

Recent work focused on increasing performance. Support is still limited to IPv4 protocols, with IPv6 support coded but not yet tested.

Import of this work into the -current tree has started. A publicly available patch against 4.7 will be released once 4.7 ships.

FreeBSD C99 & POSIX Conformance Project

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

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

On the API front, fmtmsg(3) was implemented, glob(3) was given support for new flags, ulimit(3) was implemented, and wide character/string support was significantly improved with the addition of 30 new functions (see the project status board for details). Work is progressing on adding the C99 restrict type-qualifier to functions throughout the system. This allows the compiler to make additional optimizations based on the knowledge that a restrict-qualified argument is the only reference to a given object (ie. it doesn't overlap with another argument).

Several headers have been brought up to conformance with POSIX.1-2001, they include: <fmtmsg.h>, <poll.h>, <sys/mman.h>, and <ulimit.h>. The header <cpio.h> was implemented. The headers <machine/ansi.h> and <machine/types.h> were merged into a single header to help simplify the way variable types are created.

The sh(1) built-in, command(1), was reimplemented to conform with POSIX. Additionally, several utilities which were previously brought up to conformance were merged into the 4-STABLE branch.

FreeBSD Donations Team

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/donations/index.html

Contact: Michael Lucas <[email protected]>

The Donations team started rolling in the last couple of months. Offers of equipment are coming in, and we are allocating them to FreeBSD committers as quickly as possible. We now have a "Committer Want List" available in our section of the Web site. Several small items, such as network cards, have been routed to people who are willing to write the code to support them. We have a few larger donations (i.e., actual servers) ready to go to developers, once shipping information is straightened out.

FreeBSD GNOME Project

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

Contact: Joe Marcus <[email protected]>
Contact: Maxim Sobolev <[email protected]>

The GNOME 2 desktop port has reach version 2.0.2rc1 with an expected 2.0.2 release before 4.7-RELEASE. Mozilla 1.1 has been ported, and is resident in the tree with Mozilla 1.0.1. The GNOMENG porting effort is going well. A good deal of ports have been moved to the new infrastructure with the help of Edwin Groothuis. We are now working on smoothing out some of the rough edges, then, once all the work is done, make GNOMENG the default.

A long-standing annoyance in Nautilus has also been recently corrected. The desktop is no longer cluttered with volume icons, and removable media (such as CDs) should now be handled correctly.

FreeBSD Security Officer Team

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

Contact: Jacques Vidrine <[email protected]>

The Security Team continues to be very busy. The security-officer mailing list traffic for the months of June, July, and August consisted of 1,230 messages (over 13 messages a day). This is well over 50% of the freebsd-hackers traffic volume in the same period!

Since June (the time of our last report), 9 new Security Advisories were published, and one Security Notice was published covering 25 Ports Collection issues.

FreeBSD 4.6.2-RELEASE was released on August 15th. This marked the first time a point release was created from the security branch. The process went smoothly from the Security Team perspective, despite a schedule slippage due to newly discovered bugs, and a snafu which resulted in 4.6.1-RELEASE being skipped.

In September, the FreeBSD Security Officer published a new PGP key (ID 0xCA6CDFB2, found on the FTP site and in the Handbook). This aligned the set of those who possess the corresponding private key with the membership of the security-officer alias published on the FreeBSD Security web site. It also worked around an issue with the deprecated PGP key being found corrupted on some public key servers.

French FreeBSD Documentation Project

URL: http://www.freebsd-fr.org
URL: http://www.freebsd-fr.org/index-trad.html
URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~blackend/doc/fr_FR.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/

Contact: Sebastien Gioria <[email protected]>
Contact: Marc Fonvieille <[email protected]>
Contact: Stephane Legrand <[email protected]>

We've got currently almost 50% of the new handbook translated (all the installation part is translated). Most of the articles are translated too.

The web site in on the way, see the Web Server. We need now to integrate it on the US CVS tree.

One of the big job now, is to translate the latest FAQ and the very big project will be the manual pages

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. The goal is for GEOM to be the default in 5.0-RELEASE.

Currently work on a cryptographic module which should be able to protect a diskpartition from practically any sort of attack is progressing.

Hardware Crypto Support Status

Contact: Sam Leffler <[email protected]>

The goal of this project is to import the OpenBSD kernel-level crypto subsystem. This facility provides kernel- and user-level access to hardware crypto devices for the calculation of cryptographic hashes, ciphers, and public key operations. The main clients of this facility are the kernel RNG (/dev/random), network protocols (e.g. IPSEC), and OpenSSL (through the /dev/crypto device).

OpenSSL 0.9.7 beta 3 was imported and patched with fixes from OpenBSD's source tree. This permits any user-level application that use -lcrypto to automatically get hardware crypto acceleration. Otherwise the core crypto support is stable and has been in production use on -stable machines for several months.

Import of this work into the -current tree has started. A publicly available patch against 4.7 will be released once 4.7 ships. Integration of this work into the -stable source tree is planned for 4.8.

jp.FreeBSD.org daily SNAPSHOTs project

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

Contact: Makoto Matsushita <[email protected]>

The project runs as it should be. New security-branch snapshots are available for both 4.5 and 4.6(.2). I've update buildboxes OS to the latest 5-current/4-stable without any errors. Also current problem, less CPU power for the future, is not solved yet -- but situation is not so bad, I hope I'll show a good news in the next report.

jpman project

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

Contact: Kazuo Horikawa <[email protected]>

We have been updating RELENG_4 targeting for 4.7-RELEASE. When port ja-man-1.1j_5 was broken around the end of July, Kumano-san and Mori-san tried to update the port to be based on a newer FreeBSD base system's man commands. But, we decided only to fix the port ja-man-1.1j_5 to be buildable, as the new one was not complete at that time.

KSE

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

Contact: Julian Elischer <[email protected]>
Contact: Jonathon Mini <[email protected]>
Contact: Dan Eischen <[email protected]>

David Xu and I have been working on cleaning up some of the work done in KSE-III and Jonathon and Dan have been working on the userland interface. The userland library will be committed soon in a prototypical state and a working test program using that interface will hopefully accompany it. I have just committed a rework of the run states for kernel threads that simplifies or solves some problems that were being seen recently.

Hopefully in the next few weeks we will be able to run threads on separate processors. The basics of Signal support are presently evolving. Archie Cobbs will also be assisting with some of this work. I have a mail alias for all the developers at [email protected]. It is managed by hand at the moment.

Libh Status Report

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

Contact: Antoine Beaupré <[email protected]>
Contact: Alexander Langer <[email protected]>

The primary libh development box, where the CVS repo and development webpage was living, is dead. The server has crashed after a system upgrade and has never came back to life. We had to pull the drives out of it to make proper backups. We will setup another box in place of this one and hope for the best. So right now, the port is broken because the CVS is unaccessible, as the development web page. We're working on it, please bear with us.

On a brighter note, Max started implementing the changes he proposed to the build system and the TCL API; LibH is switching to SWIG for its TCL bindings, which should simplify the system a lot, and shorten build times. The Hui subsystem is therefore being completely re-written. On my side, I made a few tests in building and running LibH under rhtvision, and it didn't fulfill the promises I thought it would, so I just put aside that idea. Work on libh stalled during July because I completely lost network access for the whole month. So right now, LibH is in a bit of a mess, but we have high hopes of settling everything down to a new release pretty soon, which will make full use of the new SWIG bindings.

Lottery Scheduler for FreeBSD -STABLE

Contact: Mário Sérgio Fujikawa Ferreira <[email protected]>

Yet another implementation of Lottery Scheduling devised by Carl Waldspurger et. al. is being developed against FreeBSD -STABLE branch. It is being developed as part of a graduation project in Computer Science at Universidade de Brasília in Brazil. Therefore, other implementations have not yet been verified to avoid plagiarization but will be checked in a later stage of this project searching for better implementation ideas. Currently, part of the necessary scheduling kernel structure has been mapped and work has progressed despite the general lack of kernel documentation. Further outcomes of this project will be a simple documentation of the kernel scheduler structure of -STABLE branch, a port of the Lottery Scheduler to -CURRENT branch and additional implementations of other scheduling disciplines from Carl Waldspurger et. al. Members of the FreeBSD community have been and will continue to be instrumental in both testing and providing feedback for ideas implemented here.

Netgraph ATM

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

Contact: Harti Brandt <[email protected]>

Version 1.2 has been released recently. It should compile and work an any recent FreeBSD-current. Support to manipulate SUNI registers has been added to the ATM drivers (to switch between SONET and SDH modes, for example). The ngatmsig package now includes a small and simple call control module that may be used to build a simple ATM switch. The netgraph stuff has been patched to use the official netgraph locking.

Network interface cloning and modularity

Contact: Brooks Davis <[email protected]>

Cloning support for ppp(4) and disc(4) interfaces has been committed. A man page for disc has been created and the disc devices now appear as disc# instead of ds#. Some work is still needed on pppd to make it understand cloning though it should work as long as the devices are created beforehand.

On the API front, management of mandatory interfaces (i.e. lo0) is handled by the generic cloning code so if_clone_destroy has the same API as NetBSD again and <if>_modevent doesn't need to create the necessary devices manually.

At this point, all pseudo interfaces have been converted to the cloning API or already did their own cloning (sl(4) for example uses it's own mechanism). Some devices such as tun(4) and tap/vmware should probably be converted to use the cloning API instead of their current ad-hoc, devfs based cloning system. This would be a good junior kernel hacker task. Also, the handbook and FAQ could use some general cloning documentation prior to 5.0 release.

New SCSI Target Emulator

URL: http://www.root.org/~nate/freebsd/

Contact: Nate Lawson <[email protected]>

The existing SCSI target code has been rewritten. The kernel driver is much simpler, deferring all functionality to usermode and simply passing CCBs to and from the SIM. The supplied usermode emulates a disk (RBC) with IO going to a backing file. It replaces /sys/cam/scsi/scsi_target* and /usr/share/examples/scsi_target.

The code is definitely alpha quality and has known problems on -current although it appears to work ok on -stable. See the included README for how to install and test. Feedback is welcome!

RAIDFrame for FreeBSD

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

Contact: Scott Long <[email protected]>

Work on RAIDFrame stalled for quite a bit, then it picked up in early summer, then it stalled, and now it's going again. A significant amount of work has been done to make the locking SMPng-friendly and to cut down on kernel stack abuse. I'm happy to say that it's starting to work reliably when used with file- backed 'md' disks. Even more exciting is that it's finally starting to work on real disks, too. A lot of cleanup is still needed, and a few gross hacks still exist, but it might actually be ready for the FreeBSD 5.0 release. Patches for FreeBSD 5-current and 4-stable are available from the website. The 4-stable patches are a year old but still apply and perform well.

Release Engineering

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

Contact: <[email protected]>

The Release Engineering (RE) Team completed and released FreeBSD 4.6.2. This ``point release'' fixes several important bugs in the ATA subsystem, as well as addressing a number of security issues in the base system that surfaced shortly after FreeBSD 4.6 was released. The release documentation distributed with FreeBSD 4.6.2 contains more details. (Note: Some earlier documents and reports referred to this release as version 4.6.1.) The next release in the 4.X series will be FreeBSD 4.7, which has a scheduled release date of 1 October 2002.

Concurrently, work is continuing on the 5.0-DP2 developer preview snapshot, an important milestone along the release path of FreeBSD 5.0, which is scheduled for release on 20 November. As 5.0 draws closer, we are focusing more on getting the system stabilized, as opposed to adding new functionality. To help us with this effort, developers should discuss with us any new features planned for -CURRENT, beginning 1 October.

The FreeBSD Brazilian Portuguese Documentation Project

URL: http://www.fugspbr.org/

Contact: Edson Brandi <[email protected]>
Contact: Mário Sérgio Fujikawa Ferreira <[email protected]>
Contact: Ricardo Nascimento Ferreira <[email protected]>
Contact: Diego Linke <[email protected]>
Contact: Jean Milanez Melo <[email protected]>
Contact: Patrick Tracanelli <[email protected]>
Contact: Alexandre Vasconcelos <[email protected]>

The FreeBSD Brazilian Portuguese Documentation Project is merging with a translation group formed by members of the FUG-BR FreeBSD Brazilian user group. The Brazilian Project decided to become an official group under FUG-BR after receiving continued excellent contributions from them. They have managed to complete the translation of the FreeBSD FAQ which is currently undergoing both proofing and SGML"fication" stages. Work is progressing fast: the Handbook has been half translated and articles are under way. The previous Brazilian Project is proud to become part of such a dedicate group. The contacts above represent the current official contacts for the new translation group. We hope to have at least part of this work ready for the FreeBSD 4.7 Release.

TrustedBSD Mandatory Access Control (MAC)

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

It's been a busy few months, with a variety of development, documentation, and public relations activities. The MAC Framework, our pluggable kernel access control mechanism for FreeBSD, has matured substantially, and large parts of it were merged to the main FreeBSD tree over July and August.

A variety of entry point changes were made, including: component names are now passed to VFS namespace VOPs; aggressive caching of MAC labels in vnodes; mmap memory access downgrades on subject relabel; check for access()/eaccess(); checks for vnode read, write, ioctl, pool, permitting revocation post-open() by aware policies; labeling and access control checks for pipe IPC objects, clean up of socket/visibility checks; checks for socket bind, connect, listen, ....; many locking improvements and assertions, especially for vnodes, processes; framework now supports partial label updates on subjects and objects; credential management in 'struct file' improved so that active_cred and file_cred are more carefully distinguished and passed to MAC framework explicitly; accounting system uses cached credentials for write operations now; socreate() can use cached credential to label sockets fixing deferred nfs socket connections and reconnections with TCP; kse interactions with proc1 fixed; IO_NOMACCHECK flag to vn_rdwr() for internal use to avoid redundant or incorrect MAC checks on aio vnode operations; mac_syscall() policy function demux; su no longer changes MAC labels by default; mac_get_pid() to support ps and getpmac -p pid; mmap revocation defaults to "fail stop"; MAC_DEBUG wraps atomic label counters; UFS2 extended attributes supported; initial port of LOMAC to the MAC framework; update all policies for all these changes; merge of KSE III; merge of nmount(); upgrade of ugidfw to speak user and group names; libugidfw; many namespace and naming consistency improvements; module dependencies on MAC framework; large scale merging of MAC functionality to the main FreeBSD tree. KDE interfaces to common management activities.

Wrote and taught full-day MAC framework tutorial at STOS BSD and Darwin Security Symposium; first draft of MAC framework architecture and API guide. This is now in the Developer's Handbook.

Next couple of months will bring continued maturity improvements, labeling and protection of more objects; VFS performance improvements; better support for UFS2 EAs and separate EA entries for each policy; improved support for LOMAC; MLS compartments; IPsec security association labeling; improved SEBSD FLASK/TE port; and much more.

UFS2 - 64bit UFS with native extended attributes

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

The UFS2 filesystem approaches feature completion: Extended attribute functionality have been added, including a new compound modification API and basic testing has been passed.

VM issues in -stable

URL: http://apollo.backplane.com/FreeBSD/wiring_patch_03.diff

Contact: Matthew Dillon <[email protected]>

Work is in progress to MFC a number of bug fixes related to vm_map corruption into -stable. This work is probably too involved to make it into the 4.7 release but is expected to be committed just after the freeze is lifted. The corruption in question typically occurs in large-memory systems under heavy loads and typically panics or KPFs (kernel-page-fault's) the machine in a vm_map related function.

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