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-<!-- $FreeBSD: www/en/news/status/report-mar-2003-sep-2003.xml,v 1.2 2004/04/04 21:46:14 phantom Exp $ -->
-
-<report>
- <date>
- <month>March-September</month>
- <year>2003</year>
- </date>
-
- <section>
- <title>Introduction:</title>
-
- <p>The FreeBSD Bi-monthly status reports are back! In this edition, we
- catch up on seven highly productive months and look forward to
- the end of 2003.</p>
-
- <p>As always, the FreeBSD development crew has been hard at work. Support
- for the AMD64 platform quickly sprang up and is nearly complete. KSE
- has improved greatly since the 5.1 release and will soon become the
- default threading package in FreeBSD. Many other projects are in the
- works to improve performance, enhance the user experience, and expand
- FreeBSD into new areas. Take a look below at the impressive summary of
- work!</p>
-
- <p>Scott Long, Robert Watson</p>
- </section>
-
-<project>
- <title>VideoBSD</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>John-Mark</given>
- <common>Gurney</common>
- </name>
- <email>jmg@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <links>
- <url href="http://people.FreeBSD.org/~jmg/videobsd.html">Documentation of
- VideoBSD</url>
- </links>
-
- <body>
- <p>Still in the planning stage. Working on creating an extensible
- interface that is usable for both userland and kernel implementations
- for device drivers. Deciding on how to interface userland implemented
- device drivers with applications.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>KSE</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Dan</given>
- <common>Eischen</common>
- </name>
- <email>deischen@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
-
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>David</given>
- <common>Xu</common>
- </name>
- <email>davidxu@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <links>
- <url href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/kse/index.html">KSE Project
- Page</url>
- </links>
-
- <body>
- <p>KSE seems to be working well on x86, amd64, and ia64. The
- alpha userland bits are done, but a couple of functions are
- unimplemented in the kernel. For sparc64, the necessary
- functions are implemented in the kernel, but the userland
- context switching functions need more attention.</p>
-
- <p>Since 5.1, efficient scope system threads (no upcalls when they block)
- have been implemented, and KSE based pthread library can have both POSIX
- scope process threads and scope system threads. It is also possible
- that KSE based pthread library can implement pthread both in 1:1 and M:N
- mode, I know Dan has such Makefile file patch for libkse not yet
- committed.</p>
-
- <p>KSE program now can work under ULE scheduler, its efficient should be
- improved under the new scheduler in future. BSD scheduler is still the
- best scheduler for current KSE implement.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>FreeBSD/ia64</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Marcel</given>
- <common>Moolenaar</common>
- </name>
- <email>marcel@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <links>
- <url href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/platforms/ia64/index.html">Project home
- page.</url>
- </links>
-
- <body>
- <p>Much has happened since the last bi-monthly report, which was more
- than half a year ago. FreeBSD 5.0 and FreeBSD 5.1 have been released
- for example. With FreeBSD 5.2 approaching quickly, we're not going
- to look back too far when it comes to our achievements. There's too
- much ahead of us...</p>
- <p>Two milestones have been reached after FreeBSD 5.1. The first is the
- ability to support both Intel and HP machines with sources in CVS.
- This due to a whole new driver for serial ports, or UARTs. Unfortunately
- this still implies that syscons is not configured. That's another task
- for another time, but keep an eye on KGI/FreeBSD...
- The second milestone is the completion of KSE support. Both M:N and
- 1:1 threading is functional on ia64 and the old libc_r library has been
- obsoleted. Testing has shown that KSE (i.e. M:N) may well become the
- default threading model. It's looking good.</p>
- <p>The ABI hasn't changed after 5.1 and the expectation is that it won't
- change much. This means that we can think about becoming a tier 1
- platform. This also means we need gdb(1) support. Work on it has been
- started but the road is bumpy and long.
- Kernel stability also has improved significantly and we typically have
- one kernel panic remaining: VM fault on no fault entry. This will be
- addressed with the long awaited PMAP overhaul (see below).</p>
- <p>Most work for FreeBSD 5.2 will be "sharpening the saw". Get those
- loose ends tied. This is a slight change of plan made possible by a
- slip in the release schedule. The 5.2 release is not going to be the
- start of the -stable branch; it has been moved to 5.3. So, we use the
- extra time to prepare the ground for 5.3.</p>
- <p>The planned PMAP overhaul will probably be finished after 5.2. This
- should address all known issues with SMP and fix those last panics.
- As a side-effect, major performance improvements can be expected. More
- news about this in the next status reports.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>Disk I/O</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Poul-Henning</given>
- <common>Kamp</common>
- </name>
- <email>phk@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <body>
- <p>The following items are in progress in the Disk I/O area:
- Turn scsi_cd.c into a GEOM driver. (Patch out for review).
- Turn atapi-cd.c into a GEOM driver.
- Turn fd.c into a GEOM driver.
- Move softupdates and snapshot processing from SPECFS to UFS/FFS.
- Move userland access to device drivers out of vnodes.</p>
- <p>Once these preliminaries are dealt with, scatter/gather and
- mapped/unmapped support will be added to struct bio/GEOM.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>Binary security updates for FreeBSD</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Colin</given>
- <common>Percival</common>
- </name>
- <email>cperciva@daemonology.net</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <links>
- <url href="http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-update/" />
- </links>
-
- <body>
- <p>FreeBSD Update is a system for tracking the FreeBSD release
- (security) branches. In addition to being faster and more
- convenient than source updates, FreeBSD Update also requires
- less bandwidth and is more secure than source updates via
- CVSup. However, FreeBSD Update is limited; it can only
- update files which were installed from an official RELEASE
- image and not recompiled locally. Right now I'm publishing
- binary updates for 4.7-RELEASE and 4.8-RELEASE; since my
- only available box takes 3.5 hours to buildworld, I don't
- have enough resources to do any more than that.</p>
-
- <p>In the near future, I'd like to: Find someone who is
- willing to donate a faster buildbox; start building updates
- for other releases (at a minimum, for all "supported" FreeBSD
- releases); add warnings if a file would have been updated
- but can't be updated because it was recompiled locally; add
- code to compare the local system against a list of "valid"
- MD5 hashes for intrusion detection purposes; and add support
- for cross-signing, whereby several machines could build
- updates independently to protect against buildbox
- compromise.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>Porting OpenBSD's pf</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Max</given>
- <common>Laier</common>
- </name>
- <email>max@love2party.net</email>
- </person>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Pyun</given>
- <common>YongHyeon</common>
- </name>
- <email>yongari@kt-is.co.kr</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <links>
- <url href="http://pf4freebsd.love2party.net">
- http://pf4freebsd.love2party.net</url>
- <url href="http://www.benzedrine.cx/pf.html">PF homepage</url>
- <url href="http://openbsd.org/faq/pf/index.html">PF FAQ</url>
- </links>
-
- <body>
- <p>The project started this spring and released version 1.0 with a port
- installation (security/pf) in may 2003. Version 2.0 is on the doorstep
- as OpenBSD 3.4 will be released. Due to the porting efforts we were
- able to reveal some bugs in the OpenBSD code and provided locking for
- the PFIL_HOOKS, which we utilize. Tarball installation of a loadable
- kernel module for testing can be found on the project homepage, a
- patchset is in the making.</p>
-
- <p>PF was started at OpenBSD as a substitute for ipfilter and provides
- the same function set. However, in the two years it exists now, it has
- gained many superior features that no other packet filter has. For a
- impression take a look at the pf FAQ.</p>
-
- <p>We hope to be eventually integrated into the base system. Before that
- we have to resolve some issues with tcpdump and kame.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>
- Bluetooth stack for FreeBSD (Netgraph implementation)
- </title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Maksim</given>
- <common>Yevmenkin</common>
- </name>
- <email>m_evmenkin@yahoo.com</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <links>
- <url href="http://www.geocities.com/m_evmenkin/">Latest snapshot</url>
- <url href="http://bluez.sf.net">Linux BlueZ stack</url>
- <url href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/openobex/">OpenOBEX</url>
- </links>
-
- <body>
- <p>I'm very pleased to announce that another release is available for
- download at
- http://www.geocities.com/m_evmenkin/ngbt-fbsd-20030908.tar.gz.
- I have also prepared patch for the FreeBSD source tree. The patch
- was submitted for review to the committers.</p>
-
- <p>Fixed few bugs in kernel modules. The ng_hci(4) and ng_l2cap(4)
- modules were changed to fix issue with Netgraph timeouts. The
- ng_ubt(4) module was changed to fix compilation issue on -current.</p>
-
- <p>Improved user-space utilities. Implemented new libsdp(3). Added
- new sdpcontrol(8) utility. The rfcomm_sppd(1), rfcomm_pppd(8) and
- obexapp(1) were changed and now can obtain RFCOMM channel via SDP
- from the server. The hccontorol(8) utility now has four new
- commands. The hcsecd(8) daemon now saves link keys on the disk.</p>
-
- <p>I've been recently contacted by few individuals who whould like to
- port current FreeBSD Bluetooth code to other BSD systems (OpenBSD
- and NetBSD). The work is slowly progressing towards
- un-Netgraph'ing current code. In the mean time Netgraph version
- will be the primary supported version of the code.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-
-<project>
- <title>Rescue build infrastructure</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Gordon</given>
- <common>Tetlow</common>
- </name>
- <email>gordon@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
-
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Tim</given>
- <common>Kientzle</common>
- </name>
- <email>kientzle@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <body>
- <p>The rescue build infrastructure has been committed. There is one
- known issue with make using both the '-s' and '-j' flags that appears
- to be a bug in make. Anyone interested in tracking down should contact
- us.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>Dynamically Linked Root Support</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Gordon</given>
- <common>Tetlow</common>
- </name>
- <email>gordon@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <body>
- <p>Support for a dynamically linked /bin and /sbin has been committed,
- although it is not turned on by default. Adventurous users can try it
- out by building /bin and /sbin using the WITH_DYNAMICROOT make flag.
- More testing is needed to determine if this is going to be default for
- 5.2-RELEASE. If anyone would like to benchmark worldstones with and
- without dynamically linked /bin and /sbin, please feel free to do so
- and submit the results.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>ACPI Status Report</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Nate</given>
- <common>Lawson</common>
- </name>
- <email>njl@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <links>
- <url href="http://www.root.org/~nate/freebsd/" />
- </links>
-
- <body>
- <p>Work is continuing on updating ACPI with new features as well
- as bugfixing. A new embedded controller driver was written in
- July with support for the ACPI 2.0 ECDT as well as more robust
- polling support. Also, a buffer overflow in the ACPICA resource list
- handling that caused panics for some users was fixed. Marcel
- helped get acpidump(8) tested and basically working on ia64.</p>
-
- <p>Upcoming work includes integrating ACPI notifies with devd(8),
- committing user-submitted drivers for ASUS and Toshiba hotkeys,
- Cx processor sleep states (so my laptop doesn't burn my lap), and
- power resource support for intelligently powering down unused or idle
- devices.</p>
-
- <p>Users who have problems with ACPI are encouraged to submit a PR
- and email its number to acpi-jp@jp.FreeBSD.org. Bug reports
- of panics or crashes have first priority and non-working features
- or missing devices (except suspend/resume problems) second.
- Reports of failed suspend/resume should NOT be submitted as PRs
- at this time due to most of them being a result of incomplete
- device support that is being addressed. However, feel free
- to mail them to the list as any information is helpful.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>uart(4)</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Marcel</given>
- <common>Moolenaar</common>
- </name>
- <email>marcel@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <body>
- <p>The uart(4) project was born out of the need to have a working
- serial interface (i.e. an RS-232-C interface) in a legacy-free
- configuration and after an unsuccessful attempt to convert sio(4).
- The biggest problem with sio(4) is that it has been intertwined
- in many ugly ways into the kernel's core. Conversion could not
- happen without breaking something that invariably affects some
- group of people negatively. With sio(4) as a good bad example
- and a strong desire to solve multiple problems at once, the
- idea of an UART (Universal Asynchronuous Receiver/Transmitter)
- device that, given its generic name, could handle different
- flavors of UART hardware started to settle firmly in the authors
- mind.</p>
- <p>The biggest challenge was of course solving the problem of the
- low-level console access prior to the initialization of the bus
- infrastructure and still have a driver that uses the bus access
- exclusively. Along the way the problem of having an UART function
- as the keyboard on sparc64 was solved with the introduction of
- system devices, which also encapsulated the console as a system
- device.</p>
- <p>The uart(4) driver can be enhanced to support the various UART
- hardware on pc98 and this is currently being worked on. Keyboard
- support on sparc64 is underway as well. Plans exist for a rewrite
- of the remote gdb support that uses a generic interface to allow
- various drivers, including uart(4), to register itself as a
- communications channel. And since uart(4) does not support multi-
- port cards by itself, we likely need to either enhance puc(4) or
- otherwise introduce other umbrella drivers</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>Compile FreeBSD with Intels C compiler (icc)</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Alexander</given>
- <common>Leidinger</common>
- </name>
- <email>netchild@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <links>
- <url href="http://www.Leidinger.net/FreeBSD/">Some patches.</url>
- </links>
-
- <body>
- <p>Since I ported icc to FreeBSD I wanted to build FreeBSD with icc. Now
- with icc 7.1 (and some patches) it is possible. There are still some bugs,
- e.g. NFS doesn't work with an icc compiled kernel, IP seems to be fragile,
- and some advanced optimizations trigger an ICE (Intel is working on it).
- At the moment I'm waiting for our admins to install icc on the FreeBSD
- cluster (we got a commercial license from Intel, so we are allowed to
- distribute binaries which are compiled with icc), after that I will try
- to convince some people with more knowledge of the IP and NFS parts of
- the kernel to debug the remaining problems. When the icc compiled kernel
- seems to work mostly bugfree the userland will get the porting focus.
- Interested people may try to do a build of the ports tree with icc
- independently from the status of the porting of the userland... if this
- happens at the FreeBSD cluster, we would also be allowed to distribute
- the binaries.</p>
- <p>Benefits include: another set of compiler errors (debugging help),
- more portable source, and code which is better optimized for a P4 (gcc
- has some drawbacks in this area)</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>KDE FreeBSD Project</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>KDE-FreeBSD</given>
- <common>Mailinglist</common>
- </name>
- <email>kde@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <links>
- <url href="http://freebsd.kde.org/" />
- </links>
-
- <body>
- <p>The FreeBSD ports were updated to KDE 3.1.4, another bug- and
- security-fixes release. With this update, the QT port was updated
- to version 3.2. Both will be included in FreeBSD 4.9.
- Significant work was spent to fix KDE on FreeBSD-CURRENT after the
- removal of the gcc -pthread Option. Automatic package builds from
- KDE CVS continued to ensure and improve the quality of the upcoming
- KDE 3.2 release.</p>
-
- <p>Future: Work is in progress to setup a new server for hosting the
- KDE-FreeBSD Website, Repository and another KDE CVS mirror. With
- help from Marcel Moolenaar the project will try to make KDE compile
- and working on the Intel IA64. And last but not least efforts are
- being made to fix the currently broken kdesu program.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-
-<project>
- <title>WifiBSD Status Report</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Jon</given>
- <common>Disnard</common>
- </name>
- <email>masta@wifibsd.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <links>
- <url href="http://www.wifibsd.org">www.wifibsd.org</url>
- </links>
-
- <body>
- <p>WifiBSD is a miniture version of FreeBSD for wireless applications.
- Originally for the Soekris Net45xx line of main-boards, but is now
- capable of being targeted to any hardware/architecture FreeBSD itself
- supports. Although not feature complete, WifiBSD is expected to be
- ready for 5.2-RELEASE. The design goal is to meet, or exceed, the
- functionality of commercial/consumer 802.11 wireless gear. Features
- that need attention (to name just a few) are: http interface, consol
- menu interface, and installation. Volunters are welcome.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>PowerPC Port</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Peter</given>
- <common>Grehan</common>
- </name>
- <email>grehan@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <body>
- <p>Work has restarted after a hiatus. Current focus is on getting
- loadable modules working, NEWBUSing the NetBSD dbdma code, and
- completing the BMAC ethernet driver.</p>
-
- <p>There is a huge amount of work to do. Volunteers more than welcome!</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>AMD64 Porting</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Peter</given>
- <common>Wemm</common>
- </name>
- <email>peter@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <body>
- <p>The last known bug that prevented AMD64 machines completing a
- full release has been fixed - one single character error that
- caused ghostscript to crash during rendering diagrams. SMP work
- is nearing completion and should be committed within the next few
- days. The SMP code uses the ACPI MADT table based on John Baldwin's
- work-in-progress there for i386. We need to spend some time on
- low level optimization because there are several suboptimal places
- that have been ignored for simplicity, context switching in
- particular. MTRR support has been committed and XFree86 can use
- it. cvsup now works but the ezm3 port has not been updated yet.
- The default data segment size limit is 8GB instead of 512M, and
- the (primitive) i386 binary emulation support knows how to lower
- the rlimits for executing 32 bit binaries.</p>
-
- <p>Notable things missing still: Hardware debug register support
- needs to be written; gdb is still being done as an external
- set of patches relative to the not-yet-released FSF gdb tree;
- DDB does not disassemble properly; DDB cannot do stack traces
- without -fno-omit-frame-pointer - a stack unwinder is needed;
- i386 and amd64 linux binary emulation is needed, and the i386
- FreeBSD binary emulation still needs work - removing the
- stackgap code in particular.</p>
-
- <p>The platform in general is very reliable although a couple of
- problems have been reported over the last week. One appears to
- be a stuck interrupt, but all that code has been redone for SMP
- support.</p>
-
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>bsd.java.mk version 2.0</title>
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Ernst</given>
- <common>De Haan</common>
- </name>
- <email>znerd@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Herve</given>
- <common>Quiroz</common>
- </name>
- <email>herve.quiroz@esil.univ-mrs.fr</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
- <links>
- <url href="http://www.esil.univ-mrs.fr/~hquiroz/freebsd/bsd.java.mk-2.0.html">Project homepage</url>
- </links>
- <body>
- <p>The FreeBSD Java community has started an effort to improve the
- current framework for Java-based ports. The main objective is the
- automation of JDK/JRE build and run dependency checking.</p>
- <p>The original version was aimed to ease the life of porters. Although
- it has proved to be useful and reliable to a great extend, we are
- currently working on a new version. We intend to reach a high degree
- of flexibility to cope with the recent increase of available JDK/JRE
- flavors. Furthermore, the new version will be easier to maintain,
- which means improved reliability, and hopefully more frequent
- updates.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>FreeBSD Java Project</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Greg</given>
- <common>Lewis</common>
- </name>
- <email>glewis@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <links>
- <url href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/java/">FreeBSD Java Project</url>
- </links>
-
- <body>
- <p>The BSD Java Porting Team has recently reached an exciting milestone
- with the release of the first "Diablo" JDK and JRE courtesy of the
- FreeBSD Foundation. The release of Diablo Caffe and Diablo Latte
- 1.3.1 was the first binary release of a native FreeBSD JDK since
- 1.1.8 and marks an important step forward in FreeBSD Java support.</p>
-
- <p>The team is continuing development work, with a focus on achieving
- a compliant JDK 1.4 release in the near future.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>ATAPI/CAM Status Report</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Thomas</given>
- <common>Quinot</common>
- </name>
- <email>thomas@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <body>
- <p>With the introduction of ATAng, some users of ATAPI/CAM have
- experienced various problems. These have been mostly tracked down
- to issues in the new ATA code, as well as two long-standing problems
- in portions of the CAM layer that are rarely exercised with
- "real" SCSI SIMs. This has also been an occasion to cleanup
- ATAPI/CAM to make it more robust, and to enable DMA for devices
- accessed through it, resulting in improved performances.</p>
-
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>jpman project</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Kazuo</given>
- <common>Horikawa</common>
- </name>
-
- <email>horikawa@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <links>
- <url href="http://www.jp.FreeBSD.org/man-jp/">jpman project</url>
- <url href="ftp://daemon.jp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD-jp/man-jp/packages-5.1.0/ja-man-doc-5.1.tbz">package ja-man-doc-5.1.tbz</url>
- </links>
-
- <body>
- <p>We have released Japanese translation of 5.1-RELEASE online manual
- pages on June 10.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>FreeBSD ports monitoring system</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Mark</given>
- <common>Linimon</common>
- </name>
- <email>linimon_at_lonesome_dot_com</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <links>
- <url href="http://lonesome.dyndns.org:4802/bento/errorlogs/index.html">
- FreeBSD ports monitoring system</url>
- </links>
-
- <body>
- <p>Several months ago, I took it upon myself to to try present the
- information contained on <a href="http://bento.FreeBSD.org">the bento
- build cluster</a> to be presented in a more user-friendly fashion; that
- is, to be browsed by error type, by maintainer, and so forth. An early
- addition was code to attempt to classify ports PRs by either "existing
- port" (after assiging the most likely category and portname); "new port";
- "framework" (e.g. bsd.port.mk changes); and "unknown". Various columns
- about the ports PRs were added to the reports.</p>
-
- <p>The initial intent of this was to make life easier for ports
- maintainers; however, the "general" reports are also useful to anyone who
- just wants to, e.g., find out if a particular port is working on their
- particular architecture and OS combination before downloading it. Those
- with that general interest should start with the
- <a href="http://lonesome.dyndns.org:4802/bento/errorlogs/portoverview.py">
- overview of one port</a>.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>kgi4BSD Status Report</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Nicholas</given>
- <common>Souchu</common>
- </name>
- <email>nsouch@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <links>
- <url href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/~nsouch/kgi4BSD"> Project URL</url>
- </links>
-
- <body>
- <p>A lot of work done since last report: site reworked completly (see new
- URL), console design with console message in text or graphic modes
- implemented, implementation of a compatibility layer to compile Linux
- fbdev drivers with more or less changes in the original driver
- (experimental).</p>
-
- <p>Except some memory allocation bugs, X (XGGI based on XFree 3.3.6) is
- now working with the same driver as the console. A basic terminal has
- now to be implemented.</p>
-
- <p> Volonteers are welcome to the project...</p>
-
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>Device_t locking</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Warner</given>
- <common>Losh</common>
- </name>
- <email>imp@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <body>
- <p>A number of races have been identified in locking device_t.
- Most of the races have been identified in making device_t have to
- do with how drivers are written. Efforts are underway to identify
- all the races, and to contact the authors of subsystems that can
- help the drivers. Of special concern is the need for the driver
- to ensure that all threads are completely out of the driver code
- before detach() finishes. Of additional concern is making sure
- that all sleepers are woken up before certain routines are called
- so that other subsystems can ensure the last condition and leave
- no dangling references. Locking device_t is relatively straight
- forward apart from these issues. Towards the end of proper
- locking, sample strawmen drivers are being used to work out what,
- exactly proper is. Once these issues are all known and documented
- in the code, efforts will be made to update relevant documentation
- in the tree. There are many problems with driver locking that has
- been done to date, but until we nail down how to write a driver in
- current, it will be premature to contact specific driver writers
- with specific concerns.</p>
-
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>Cryptographic Support</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Sam</given>
- <common>Leffler</common>
- </name>
- <email>sam@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <body>
- <p>Support for several new crypto devices was added. The SafeNet 1141 is a
- medium performance part that is not yet available on retail products. The
- Hifn 7955 and 7956 parts are starting to appear on retail products that
- should be available by the end of the year. Both devices support AES
- encryption. Support for public key operations for the SafeNet devices was
- recently done for OpenBSD and will be backported. Public key support for
- the Hifn parts is planned.</p>
-
- <p>A paper about the performance work done on the cryptographic subsystem
- was presented at the Usenix BSDCon 2003 conference and received the best
- paper award.</p>
-
- <p>NetBSD recently imported the cryptographic subsystem.</p>
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>Release Engineering Status</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Scott</given>
- <common>Long</common>
- </name>
- <email>re@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <body>
- <p>The release of 4.9 is just around the corner and offers Physical Address
- Extensions (PAE) for x86 along with the same world-class stability and
- performance that is expected from the 4-STABLE series. As always, don't
- forget to purchase a copy of the CD set from your favorite FreeBSD
- vendor.</p>
-
- <p>FreeBSD 5.1 was released in June and offered vastly improved
- stability over 5.0 along with a working implementation of Kernel
- Scheduled Entities, allowing for true multithreading of applications
- across multiple CPUs. FreeBSD 5.2 will be released by the end of 2003
- and will focus on improved network and overall performance.</p>
-
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>Wireless Networking Support</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Sam</given>
- <common>Leffler</common>
- </name>
- <email>sam@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <body>
- <p>Numerous bugs have been fixed since the last status report (and of
- course a few new ones added). Progress on improved security has been
- slowed by other work. But new features and fixes are coming in from
- other groups that are now sharing the code. In particular NetBSD
- recently imported the revised 802.11 layer and the Linux-based MADWIFI
- project is using it too (albeit in an older form). The MADWIFI users
- have already contributed features such as fragmentation reassembly of
- 802.11 frames and improved signal monitoring. Power save polling and
- an improved rate control algorothm are expected to come in from the
- NetBSD folks. WPA support is still in the plans; the best estimate is
- that work on that will start in January.</p>
-
- </body>
-</project>
-
-<project>
- <title>Network Subsystem Locking and Performance</title>
-
- <contact>
- <person>
- <name>
- <given>Sam</given>
- <common>Leffler</common>
- </name>
- <email>sam@FreeBSD.org</email>
- </person>
- </contact>
-
- <body>
- <p>The purpose of this project is to improve performance of the network
- subsystem. A major part of this work is to complete the locking of the
- networking subsystem so that it no longer depends on the "Giant lock"
- for proper operation. Removing the use of Giant will improve
- performance and permit multiple instances of the network stack to
- operate concurrently on multiprocessor systems.</p>
-
- <p>This project started in August. The emphasis has been on locking the
- "lower half" of the networking code so that packet forwarding through the
- IPv4 path can operate without the Giant lock as part of the 5.2 release.
- To this end locking was added to several network interface drivers and
- much of the "middleware" code in the network was locked (e.g. ipfw,
- dummynet, then routing table, multicast routing support, etc). Work
- towards this goal is still ongoing but should be ready for 5.2. A
- variety of test systems have been running for several months without the
- Giant lock in the network drivers and IP layer.</p>
-
- <p>Past the 5.2 release Giant will be removed from the "upper half" of the
- network subsystem and the socket layer. Once this is done the plan is to
- measure and improve performance (though some work of this sort is always
- happening). The ultimate goal is a system that performs at least as well
- as 4.x for normal use on uniprocessor systems. On multiprocessor systems
- we expect to see significantly better performance than 4.x due to greater
- concurrency and reduced latency.</p>
-
- </body>
-</project>
-
-</report>