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diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2004-07-2004-12.xml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2004-07-2004-12.xml deleted file mode 100644 index df61fa8911..0000000000 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2004-07-2004-12.xml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,2341 +0,0 @@ -<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?> -<!DOCTYPE report PUBLIC "-//FreeBSD//DTD FreeBSD XML Database for Status Report//EN" - "http://www.FreeBSD.org/XML/share/xml/statusreport.dtd"> - -<!-- $FreeBSD$ --> - -<report> - <date> - <month>July-December</month> - - <year>2004</year> - </date> - - <section> - <title>Introduction</title> - - <p>The FreeBSD status report is back again after another small break. The - second half of 2004 was incredibly busy; FreeBSD 5.3 was released, the - 6-CURRENT development branch started, and EuroBSDCon 2004 was a huge - success, just to name a few events. This report is packed with an - impressive 44 submissions, the most of any report ever!</p> - - <p>It's also my pleasure to welcome Max Laier and Tom Rhodes to the status - report team. They kindly volunteered to help keep the reports on time - and help improve their quality. Max in particular is responsible for - the reports being divided up into topics for easier browsing. Many - thanks to both for their help!</p> - </section> - - <category> - <name>proj</name> - - <description>Projects</description> - </category> - - <category> - <name>doc</name> - - <description>Documentation</description> - </category> - - <category> - <name>kern</name> - - <description>Kernel</description> - </category> - - <category> - <name>arch</name> - - <description>Architectures</description> - </category> - - <category> - <name>ports</name> - - <description>Ports</description> - </category> - - <category> - <name>vendor</name> - - <description>Vendor / 3rd Party Software</description> - </category> - - <category> - <name>misc</name> - - <description>Miscellaneous</description> - </category> - - <project cat='proj'> - <title>Project Frenzy (FreeBSD-based Live-CD)</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Sergei</given> - - <common>Mozhaisky</common> - </name> - - <email>technix@ukrpost.com.ua</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://frenzy.osdn.org.ua/">Official web site</url> - - <url href="http://frenzy.osdn.org.ua/eng/">English version</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>Frenzy is a "portable system administrator toolkit," Live-CD - based on FreeBSD. It generally contains software for hardware - tests, file system check, security check and network setup and - analysis. Current version 0.3, based on FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE, - contains almost 400 applications in 200MB ISO-image.</p> - - <p>Tasks for next release: script for installation to HDD; unified - system configuration tool; updating of software collection.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='vendor'> - <title>ALTQ</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Max</given> - - <common>Laier</common> - </name> - - <email>mlaier@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://people.freebsd.org/~mlaier/ALTQ_driver/" /> - - <url - href="http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=altq&manpath=FreeBSD+6.0-current&format=html"> - ALTQ(4) man-page.</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>ALTQ is part of FreeBSD 5.3 release and can be used to do - traffic shaping and classification with PF. In CURRENT IPFW gained - the ability to do ALTQ classification as well. A steadily - increasing number of NIC drivers has been converted to support - ALTQ. For details see the ALTQ(4) man-page.</p> - </body> - - <help> - <task>Convert/test more NIC drivers.</task> - - <task>Write documentation.</task> - </help> - </project> - - <project cat='kern'> - <title>TCP Reassembly Rewrite and Optimization</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Andre</given> - - <common>Oppermann</common> - </name> - - <email>andre@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url - href="http://www.nrg4u.com/freebsd/tcp_reass-20041213.patch" /> - - <url - href="http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2004-December/005918.html" /> - </links> - - <body> - <p>Currently TCP segment reassembly is implemented as a linked list - of segments. With today's high bandwidth links and large - bandwidth*delay products this doesn't scale and perform well.</p> - - <p>The rewrite optimizes a large number of operational aspects of - the segments reassembly process. For example it is very likely that - the just arrived segment attaches to the end of the reassembly - queue, so we check that first. Second we check if it is the missing - segment or alternatively attaches to the start of the reassembly - queue. Third consecutive segments are merged together (logically) - and are skipped over in one jump for linear searches instead of - each segment at a time.</p> - - <p>Further optimizations prototyped merge consecutive segments on - the mbuf level instead of only logically. This is expected to give - another significant performance gain. The new reassembly queue is - tracking all holes in the queue and it may be beneficial to - integrate this with the scratch pad of SACK in the future.</p> - - <p>Andrew Gallatin was able to get 3.7Gb/sec TCP performance on - dual-2Gbit Myrinet cards with severe packet reordering (due to a - firmware bug) with the new TCP reassembly code. See second - link.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='kern'> - <title>TTCPv2: Transactional TCP version 2</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Andre</given> - - <common>Oppermann</common> - </name> - - <email>andre@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url - href="http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-all/2004-November/089939.html" /> - </links> - - <body> - <p>The old TTCP according to RFC1644 was insecure, intrusive, - complicated and has been removed from FreeBSD >= 5.3. Although - the idea and semantics behind it are still sound and valid.</p> - - <p>The rewrite uses a much easier and more secure system with 24bit - long client and server cookies which are transported in the TCP - options. Client cookies protect against various kinds of blind - injection attacks and can be used as well to generally secure TCP - sessions (for BGP for example). Server cookies are only exchanged - during the SYN-SYN/ACK phase and allow a server to ensure that it - has communicated with this particular client before. The first - connection is always performing a 3WHS and assigning a server - cookie to a client. Subsequent connections can send the cookie back - to the server and short-cut the 3WHS to SYN->OPEN on the - server.</p> - - <p>TTCPv2 is fully configurable per-socket via the setsockopt() - system call. Clients and server not capable of TTCPv2 remain fully - compatible and just continue using the normal 3WHS without any - delay or other complications.</p> - - <p>Work on implementing TTCPv2 is done to 90% and expected to be - available by early February 2005. Writing the implementation - specification (RFC Draft) has just started.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='kern'> - <title>CPU Cache Prefetching</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Andre</given> - - <common>Oppermann</common> - </name> - - <email>andre@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url - href="http://www.nrg4u.com/freebsd/tcp_reass+prefetch-20041216.patch" /> - </links> - - <body> - <p>Modern CPU's can only perform to their maximum if their working - code is in fast L1-3 cache memory instead of the bulk main memory. - All of today's CPU's support certain L1-3 cache prefetching - instructions which cause data to be retrieved from main memory to - the cache ahead of the time that it is already in place when it is - eventually accessed by the CPU.</p> - - <p>CPU Cache Prefetching however is not a golden bullet and has to - be used with extreme care and only in very specific places to be - beneficial. Incorrect usage can lead to massive cache pollution and - a drop in effective performance. Correct and very carefully usage - on the other can lead to drastic performance increases in common - operations.</p> - - <p>In the linked patch CPU cache prefetching has been used to - prefetch the packet header (OSI layer 2 to 4) into the CPU caches - right after entering into the network stack. This avoids a complete - CPU stall on the first access to the packet header because packets - get DMA'd into main memory and thus never are already pre-cache in - the CPU caches. A second use in the patch is in the TCP input code - to prefetch the entire struct tcpcb which is very large and used - with a very high probability. Use in both of these places show a - very significant performance gain but not yet fully quantified.</p> - - <p>The final patch will include documentation and a guide to - evaluate and assess the use of CPU cache prefetch instructions in - the kernel.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='kern'> - <title>TCP Cleanup and Optimizations</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Andre</given> - - <common>Oppermann</common> - </name> - - <email>andre@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/tcpcleanup.html" /> - </links> - - <body> - <p>The TCP code in FreeBSD has evolved significantly since the fork - from 4.4BSD-Lite2 in 1994 primarily due to new features and - refinements of the TCP specifications.</p> - - <p>The TCP code now needs a general overhaul, streamlining a - cleanup to make it easily comprehensible, maintainable and - extensible again. In addition there are many little optimizations - that can be done during such an operation propelling FreeBSD back - at the top of the best performing TCP/IP stacks again, a position - it has held for the longest time in the 90's.</p> - - <p>This overhaul is a very involved and delicate matter and needs - extensive formal and actual testing to ensure no regressions - compared to the current code. The effort needed for this work is - about two man-month of fully focused and dedicated time. To get it - done I need funding to take time off my day job and to dedicate me - to FreeBSD work much the way PHK did with his buffer cache and - vnode rework projects.</p> - - <p>In February 2005 I will officially announce the funding request - with a detailed description of the work and how the funding works. - In general I can write invoices for companies wishing to sponsor - this work on expenses. Tax exempt donations can probably be - arranged through the FreeBSD foundation. Solicitations of money are - already welcome, please contact me on the email address above.</p> - </body> - - <help> - <task>Funding for two man-month equivalents of my time.</task> - - <task>If you want or intend to sponsor US$1k or more please contact - me in advance already now.</task> - </help> - </project> - - <project cat='kern'> - <title>Move ARP out of routing table</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Andre</given> - - <common>Oppermann</common> - </name> - - <email>andre@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - - <person> - <name> - <given>Qing</given> - - <common>Li</common> - </name> - - <email>qingli@speackeasy.net</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url - href="http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2004-April/026380.html" /> - </links> - - <body> - <p>The ARP IP address to MAC address mapping does not belong into - the routing table (FIB) as it is currently done. This will move it - to its own hash based structure which will be instantiated per each - 802.1 broadcast domain. With this change it is possible to have - more than one interface in the same IP subnet and layer 2 broadcast - domain. The ARP handling and the routing table will be quite a bit - simplified afterwards. As an additional benefit full MAC address - based accounting will be provided.</p> - - <p>Qing Li has become the driver and implementor of this project - and is expected to post a first patch for comments shortly in - February 2005.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='kern'> - <title>Layer 2 PFIL_HOOKS</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Andre</given> - - <common>Oppermann</common> - </name> - - <email>andre@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url - href="http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-all/2004-August/079811.html" /> - </links> - - <body> - <p>IPFW2 has been converted to use PFIL_HOOKS for the IP[46] - in/output path. (See link.) Not converted yet is the Layer 2 - Etherfilter functionality of IPFW2. It is still directly called - from the ether_input/output and bridging code.</p> - - <p>Layer 2 PFIL_HOOKS provide a general abstraction for packet - filters to hook into the Layer 2 packet path and filter or - manipulate such packets. This makes it possible to use not only - IPFW2 but also PF and others for Layer 2 filtering.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='proj'> - <title>Common Address Redundancy Protocol - CARP</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Max</given> - - <common>Laier</common> - </name> - - <email>mlaier@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://people.freebsd.org/~mlaier/CARP/" /> - </links> - - <body> - <p>CARP is an alternative to VRRP. In contrast to VRRP it has full - support for IPv6 and uses crypto to protect the advertisements. It - was developed by OpenBSD due to concerns that the HSRP patent might - cover VRRP and CISCO might defend its patent. CARP has, since then, - improved a lot over VRRP.</p> - - <p>CARP is implemented as an in-kernel multicast protocol and - displays itself as a pseudo interface to the user. This makes - configuration and administration very simple. CARP also - incorporates MAC based load-balancing.</p> - - <p>Patches for RELENG_5 and recent HEAD are available from the URL - above. I plan to import these patches in the course of the next two - to four month. RELENG_5 has all necessary ABI to support CARP and I - might MFC it for release 5.4 or 5.5 - depending how well the HEAD - import goes.</p> - </body> - - <help> - <task>Please test and send feedback!</task> - - <task>Write documentation.</task> - - <task>Import newest OpenBSD changes.</task> - </help> - </project> - - <project cat='misc'> - <title>FreeBSD Source Repository Mirror for svn/svk</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Kao</given> - - <common>Chia-liang</common> - </name> - - <email>clkao@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://svn.clkao.org/svnweb/freebsd/">Repository - browser.</url> - - <url - href="http://svn.clkao.org/svnweb/freebsd/rss/fromcvs/branches/RELENG_5/"> - RSS for RELENG_5 commits.</url> - - <url href="http://svn.clkao.org/svnweb/freebsd/rss/fromcvs/trunk/"> - RSS for CURRENT commits.</url> - - <url href="http://svk.elixus.org/">svk homepage.</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>A public Subversion mirror of the FreeBSD repository is provided - at svn://svn.clkao.org/freebsd/. This is intended for people who - would like to try the svk distributed version control system.</p> - - <p>svk allows you to mirror the whole repository and commit when - offline. It also provides history-sensitive branching, merging, and - patches. Non-committers can easily maintain their own branch and - track upstream changes while their patches are being reviewed.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='proj'> - <title>Secure Updating</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Colin</given> - - <common>Percival</common> - </name> - - <email>cperciva@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://www.daemonology.net/portsnap/">Portsnap</url> - - <url href="http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-update/">FreeBSD - Update</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>In my continuing quest to secure the mechanisms by which FreeBSD - users keep their systems up to date, I've added a new tool: - Portsnap. Available as sysutils/portsnap in the ports tree, this - utility securely downloads and updates a compressed snapshot of the - ports tree; this can then be used to extract or update an - uncompressed ports tree. In addition to operating in an end-to-end - secure manner thanks to RSA signatures, portsnap operates entirely - over HTTP and can use under one tenth of the bandwidth of cvsup for - users who update their ports tree more than once a week.</p> - - <p>FreeBSD Update -- my utility for secure and efficient binary - tracking of the Security/Errata branches -- continues to be widely - used, with over 100 machines downloading security or errata updates - daily.</p> - - <p>At some point in the future I intend to bring both of these - utilities into the FreeBSD base system, probably starting with - portsnap.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='vendor'> - <title>Cronyx Adapters Drivers</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Roman</given> - - <common>Kurakin</common> - </name> - - <email>rik@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://www.cronyx.ru/software">Cronyx Software download - page.</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>Currently FreeBSD supports three family of Cronyx sync adapters: - Tau-PCI - cp(4), Tau-ISA - ctau(4) and Sigma - cx(4). All these - drivers were updated (in 6.current) and now they are Giant free. - However, this is true only for sppp(4). If you are using Netgraph - or async mode (for Sigma) you may need to turn mpsafenet off for - that driver with appropriate kernel variable.</p> - </body> - - <help> - <task>Now all these drivers and sppp(4) are using recursive lock. - So the first task is to make these locks non recursive.</task> - - <task>Second task is to check/make drivers workable in - netgraph/async mode.</task> - - <task>I think about ability to switch between sppp/netgraph mode at - runtime. For now you should recompile module/kernel to change - mode.</task> - </help> - </project> - - <project cat='misc'> - <title>EuroBSDCon 2005 - Basel / Switzerland</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Max</given> - - <common>Laier</common> - </name> - - <email>mlaier@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://www.eurobsdcon.org/">EuroBSDCon Homepage</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>This year's EuroBSDCon will be held at the University of Basel, - Switzerland from 25th through 27th November. The call for papers - should happen shortly. Please consider attending or even - presenting. Check the conference homepage for more information.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='proj'> - <title>FreeSBIE Status Report</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>FreeSBIE</given> - - <common>Staff</common> - </name> - - <email>staff@FreeSBIE.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://www.FreeSBIE.org">FreeSBIE Website</url> - - <url href="http://liste.gufi.org/mailman/listinfo/freesbie"> - FreeSBIE Mailing List</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>FreeSBIE is a Live-CD based on the FreeBSD Operating system, or - even easier, a FreeBSD-based operating system that works directly - from a CD, without touching your hard drive.</p> - - <p>On December, 6th, 2004, FreeSBIE Staff released FreeSBIE 1.1, - based on FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE. Some of the innovations are: a - renewed series of scripts to support power users in the use of - FreeSBIE 1.1, an installer to let users install FreeSBIE 1.1 on - their hard drives, thus having a powerful operating system such as - FreeBSD, but with all the personalizations FreeSBIE 1.1 carries, - the presence of the best open source software, chosen and - personalized, such as X.Org 6.7, XFCE 4.2RC1, Firefox 1.0 and - Thunderbird 0.9.2.</p> - - <p>For a complete list of the included software, please consult: - <a - href="http://www.freesbie.org/doc/1.1/FreeSBIE-1.1-i386.pkg_info.txt"> - http://www.freesbie.org/doc/1.1/FreeSBIE-1.1-i386.pkg_info.txt</a> - </p> - - <p>At EuroBSDCon 2004 in Karlsruhe, Germany, people from the - FreeSBIE staff gave a talk, deeping into FreeSBIE scripts - implementation and use.</p> - </body> - - <help> - <task>Translating website and documentation</task> - </help> - </project> - - <project cat='arch'> - <title>PowerPC Port</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Peter</given> - - <common>Grehan</common> - </name> - - <email>grehan@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://www.freebsd.org/~grehan/miniinst.iso">Miniinst - ISO.</url> - - <url href="http://www.freebsd.org/~grehan/miniinst.txt">Miniinst - relnotes.</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>A natively built 6.0-CURRENT miniinst ISO is available at the - above link. It runs best on G4 Powermacs, but may run on other - Newworld machines. See the release notes for full details.</p> - - <p>As usual, lots of help is needed. This is a great project for - those who want to delve deeply into FreeBSD kernel internals.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='proj'> - <title>Dingo Monthly Report</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>George</given> - - <common>Neville-Neil</common> - </name> - - <email>gnn@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://www.freebsd.org/projects/dingo/index.html"> - Network Stack Cleanup Project.</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>In the last month we set up the project page noted above and - also created a p4 branch for those of us who use p4 to do work - outside of CVS.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat="ports"> - <title>FreeBSD GNOME Project Status Report</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Joe</given> - - <common>Marcus</common> - </name> - - <email>marcus@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome/">FreeBSD GNOME - Project</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>We haven't produced a status report in a while, but that's just - because we've been busy. Since our last report in March 2004, we - have added three new team members: Koop Mast (kwm), Jeremy - Messenger (mezz), and Michael Johnson (ahze). Jeremy has been quite - helpful in GNOME development porting while Michael and Koop have - been focusing on improving GNOME multimedia, especially GStreamer. - The stable release of GNOME is now up to 2.8.2, and we are actively - working on the GNOME 2.9 development branch with is slated to - become 2.10 on March 9 of this year.</p> - - <p>The - <a href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome/docs/faq2.html#q21">GNOME - Tinderbox</a> - - is still cranking away, and producing packages for both the stable - and development releases of GNOME for all supported i386 versions - of FreeBSD.</p> - - <p>Thanks to Michael Johnson, the FreeBSD GNOME team has recently - been given - <a - href="http://people.FreeBSD.org/~ahze/firefox_thunderbird-approved.txt"> - permission to use the Firefox and Thunderbird names</a> - - , official icons, and to produce officially branded builds. Mozilla - has also been very interested in merging our local patches back - into the official source tree. This should greatly improve the - quality of Firefox and Thunderbird on FreeBSD moving forward.</p> - - <p>Finally, Adam Weinberger (adamw) has been pestering the team - for photos so that we can finally show the community who we are. It - is still unclear as to whether or not this will attract more - FreeBSD GNOME users, or land us on the Homeland Security no-fly - list.</p> - </body> - - <help> - <task>Need help porting - <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fhal">HAL</a> - - to FreeBSD (contact - <a href="mailto:marcus@FreeBSD.org">marcus@FreeBSD.org</a> - - )</task> - - <task>Need help porting - <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fburn"> - libburn</a> - - to FreeBSD (contact - <a href="mailto:bland@FreeBSD.org">bland@FreeBSD.org</a> - - )</task> - - <task>Anyone interested in reviving - <a href="http://www.gnomemeeting.org/">Gnome Meeting</a> - - should contact - <a href="mailto:kwm@FreeBSD.org">kwm@FreeBSD.org</a> - </task> - </help> - </project> - - <project cat='kern'> - <title>SMPng Status Report</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>John</given> - - <common>Baldwin</common> - </name> - - <email>jhb@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - - <person> - <email>smp@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links/> - - <body> - <p>Lots of changes happened inside the network stack that will - hopefully be covered by a separate report. Outside of the network - stack, several changes were made however including changes to proc - locking, making the kernel thread scheduler preemptive, fixing - several priority inversion bugs in the scheduler, and a few - performance tweaks in the mutex implementation.</p> - - <p>Locking work on struct proc and its various substructures - continued with locking added where needed for struct uprof, struct - rusage, and struct pstats. This also included reworking how the - kernel stores process time statistics to store the raw struct - bintime and tick counts internally and only compute the more user - friendly values when requested via getrusage() or wait4().</p> - - <p>Support for kernel thread preemption was added to the scheduler. - Basically, when a thread makes another thread runnable, it may - yield the current CPU to the new thread if the new thread has a - more important priority. Previously, only interrupt threads - preempted other threads and the implementation would occasionally - trigger spurious context switches. This change exposed bugs in - other parts of the kernel and was turned off by default in - RELENG_5. Currently, only the i386, amd64, and alpha platforms - support native preemption.</p> - - <p>Several priority inversion bugs present in the scheduler due to - various changes to the kernel from SMPng were also fixed. Most of - the credit for these fixes belongs Stephan Uphoff who has recently - been added as a new committer. Fixes include: closing a race in the - turnstile wakeup code, changing the sleep queue code to store - threads in FIFO order so that the sleep queue wakeup code properly - handles having a thread's priority changes, and abstracting the - concept of priority lending so that the thread scheduler is now - able to properly track priority inheritance and handle priority - changes for threads blocked on a turnstile.</p> - - <p>Works in progress include separating critical sections from spin - mutexes some so that bare critical sections become very cheap as - well as continuing to change the various ABI compatibility layers - to use in-kernel versions of system calls to reduce stackgap usage - and make the system call wrappers MPSAFE.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='kern'> - <title>i386 Interrupt Code & PCI Interrupt Routing</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>John</given> - - <common>Baldwin</common> - </name> - - <email>jhb@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <body> - <p>The ACPI PCI link support code was reworked to work around some - limitations in the previous implementation. The new version more - closely matches the current non-ACPI $PIR link support. - Enhancements include disabling unused link devices during boot and - using a simpler and more reliable algorithm for choosing ISA IRQs - for unrouted link devices.</p> - - <p>Support for using the local APIC timer to drive the kernel - clocks instead of the ISA timer and i8254 clock is currently being - worked on in the jhb_clock perforce branch. It is mostly complete - and will probably hit the tree in the near future. By letting each - CPU use its own private timer to drive the kernel clocks, the - kernel no longer has to IPI all the other CPUs in the system every - time a clock interrupt occurs.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='kern'> - <title>Low-overhead performance monitoring for FreeBSD</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Joseph</given> - - <common>Koshy</common> - </name> - - <email>jkoshy@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url - href="http://people.freebsd.org/~jkoshy/projects/perf-measurement/"> - A best-in-class performance monitoring system for FreeBSD built - over the hardware performance monitoring facilities of modern - CPUs.</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>System-wide and process-virtual counting-mode performance - monitoring counters are now supported for the AMD Athlon and Intel - P4 CPUs. SMP works, but is prone to freezes. Immediate next steps - include: (1) implementing the system-wide and process-virtual - sampling modes, (2) debugging, (3) writing a test suite and (4) - improving the project's documentation.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='misc'> - <title>Wiki with new software</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Josef</given> - - <common>El-Rayes</common> - </name> - - <email>josef@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://wiki.freebsd.org/">Wiki</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>After experiencing spam attacks on the old wiki-engine caused by - non-existent authentification mechanism, I had to replace it with a - more advanced software. Instead of usemod, we now run moinmoin. As - a consequence it's no longer just a 'browse & edit', but you - have to sign up and let someone who is already in the ACL group - 'developers' add you to the group. So it is a 'developers-only' - resource now. The old wiki is found at - <a href="http://wiki2.daemon.li">http://wiki2.daemon.li</a> - </p> - </body> - - <help> - <task>Move content from old wiki to new one.</task> - </help> - </project> - - <project cat='kern'> - <title>kgi4BSD</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">Homepage</url> - - <url href="http://wiki.daemon.li/moin.cgi/KGI" /> - </links> - - <body> - <p>The project was very quiet (but still alive!) and mostly - dedicated to testing by volunteers. New documentation at - <a href="http://wiki.daemon.li/moin.cgi/KGI"> - http://wiki.daemon.li/moin.cgi/KGI</a> - - .</p> - </body> - - <help> - <task>Help improving the documentation</task> - </help> - </project> - - <project cat='ports'> - <title>OpenOffice.org port status</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Maho</given> - - <common>Nakata</common> - </name> - - <email>maho@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/">FreeBSD - OpenOffice.org porting status page</url> - - <url - href="http://ooomisc.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/ooomisc/FreeBSD/"> - Stable OOo Packages for FreeBSD</url> - - <url href="http://sourceforge.jp/projects/waooo/files/">Some - volatile WIP status of packages</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>OpenOffice.org 2.0 status - <ul> - <li>OpenOffice.org 2.0 is planned to be released in March 2005. - Currently developer snapshot versions are available. Now one of - the developer version has been ported, and committed to ports - tree (/usr/ports/editors/openoffice-2.0-devel).</li> - - <li>Packages for 5.3-RELEASE are available at - <a - href="http://sourceforge.jp/projects/waooo/files/asOOo_1.9m71_FreeBSD53Intel_install_en-US.tbz"> - http://sourceforge.jp/projects/waooo/files/asOOo_1.9m71_FreeBSD53Intel_install_en-US.tbz</a> - - etc., and soon it will also available at : - <a - href="http://ooomisc.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/ooomisc/FreeBSD/"> - http://ooomisc.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/ooomisc/FreeBSD/</a> - - with the language pack.</li> - - <li>Almost all of the patches required to build will be - integrated to master. - <a href="http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=40187"> - http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=40187</a> - </li> - - <li>Now we have three external ports : lang/gcc-ooo, - devel/bison-devel and devel/epm. To avoid regressions and bugs of - gcc, we use the exactly same gcc as Hamburg team (former - StarDivision) uses. We need bison later than 1.785a. Note this - port CONFLICTS with devel/bison. Epm is a package manager which - now OpenOffice.org uses.</li> - </ul> - - OpenOffice.org 1.1 status - <ul> - <li>1.1.4 has been ported and committed to ports tree.</li> - - <li>Packages are available at - <a - href="http://ooomisc.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/ooomisc/FreeBSD/"> - http://ooomisc.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/ooomisc/FreeBSD/</a> - - .</li> - - <li>Now recognizes Linux version of Java JDKs.</li> - </ul> - - General - <ul> - <li>Invoking OpenOffice.org from command line has been changed. - Now `.org' is mandatory. e.g. openoffice-1.1.4 -> - openoffice.org-1.1.4. Since the name of the software is - OpenOffice.org, not OpenOffice. We are also considering the name - of the ports (/usr/ports/editors/openoffice-2.0-devel -> - openoffice.org2-devel etc)</li> - - <li>Now marked as BROKEN OOo ports for prior than 5.3-RELEASE and - 4.11-RELEASE. These ports have been suffering from a minor - implementation difference of rtld.c between FreeBSD and Linux, - Solaris, NetBSD. We have been applying a patch adding _end in - mapfile. We need this since rtld depend on existence of _end - symbol in obj_from_addr_end, unfortunately this seem to induce - hard-to-solve errors. A great progress has been made kan, rtld - now do not depend on _end. A fix was committed 2004/02/25 - 17:06:16, - <a - href="http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/libexec/rtld-elf/rtld.c.diff?r1=1.91&r2=1.92&f=h"> - http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/libexec/rtld-elf/rtld.c.diff?r1=1.91&r2=1.92&f=h</a> - - .</li> - - <li>Benchmark test! Building OOo requires huge resources. We just - would like to know the build timings, so that how your machine is - well tuned for demanding jobs. - <a href="http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/benchmark.html"> - http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/benchmark.html</a> - - . Currently, GOTO daichi (daichi)'s Pentium 4 3.0GHz machine - build fastest. Just 1h25m22.42s for second build of OOo 1.1.4, - using ccache.</li> - - <li>SDK tutorial is available at - <a href="http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/sdk.html"> - http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/sdk.html</a> - </li> - - <li>Still implementation test and quality assurance have not yet - been done. Even systematic documentations are not yet available - for FreeBSD. - <a href="http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/testing.html"> - http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/testing.html</a> - - and - <a href="http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/QA.html"> - http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/QA.html</a> - - for details.</li> - </ul> - - Acknowledgments Two persons contributed in many aspects. Pavel - Janik (reviewing and giving me much advice) and Kris Kennaway - (extremely patient builder). and (then, alphabetical order by first - name). daichi, Eric Bachard, kan, lofi, Martin Hollmichel, nork, - obrien, Sander Vesik, sem, Stefan Taxhet, and volunteers of - OpenOffice.org developers (esp. SUN Microsystems, Inc.) for - cooperation and warm encouragements.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='vendor'> - <title>OpenBSD packet filter - pf</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Max</given> - - <common>Laier</common> - </name> - - <email>mlaier@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - - <person> - <name> - <given>Daniel</given> - - <common>Hartmeier</common> - </name> - - <email>dhartmei@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://pf4freebsd.love2party.net/">PF4FreeBSD - Homepage</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>FreeBSD 5.3 is the first release to include PF. It went out - okay, but some bugs were discovered too late to make it on the CD. - It is recommend to update `src/sys/contrib/pf' to RELENG_5. The - specific issues addressed are:</p> - - <ul> - <li>Possible NULL-deref with user/group rules.</li> - - <li>Crash with binat on dynamic interfaces.</li> - - <li>Silent dropping of IPv6 packets with option headers.</li> - - <li>Endless loops with `static-port' rules.</li> - </ul> - - <p>Most of these issues were discovered by FreeBSD users and got - fed back to OpenBSD. This is a prime example of open source at - work.</p> - - <p>The Handbook's Firewall section was modified to mention PF as an - alternative to IPFW and IPF.</p> - </body> - - <help> - <task>Write more documentation/articles.</task> - - <task>Write an IPFilter to PF migration guide/tool.</task> - </help> - </project> - - <project cat='kern'> - <title>New Modular Input Device Layer</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Philip</given> - - <common>Paeps</common> - </name> - - <email>philip@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url - href="http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-src/2004-November/035462.html" /> - </links> - - <body> - <p>Following a number of mailing lists discussions on the topic, - work has been progressing on the development of a new modular input - device layer for FreeBSD. The purpose of this is twofold:</p> - - <ul> - <li>Easier development of new input device drivers.</li> - - <li>Support for concurrent use of multiple input devices, - particularly the hot-pluggable kind.</li> - </ul> - - <p>Currently, implementing support for new input devices is a - painful process and there is great potential for code-duplication. - The new input device layer will provide a simple API for developers - to send events from their hardware on to the higher regions of the - kernel in a consistent way, much like the 'input-core' driver in - the Linux kernel.</p> - - <p>Using multiple input devices at the moment is painful at best. - With the new input device layer, events from different devices will - be properly serialized before they are sent to other parts of the - kernel. This will allow one to easily use, for instance, multiple - USB keyboards in a virtual terminal.</p> - - <p>The work on this is still in very rudimentary state. It is - expected that the first visible changes will be committed to - -CURRENT around late February or early March.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='proj'> - <title>Funded FreeBSD kernel development</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Poul-Henning</given> - - <common>Kamp</common> - </name> - - <email>phk@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url - href="http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2004-December/000971.html"> - Long winded status report.</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>A longish status report for the 6 months of funded development - was posted on announce, rather than repeat it here, you can find it - at the link provided.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='doc'> - <title>The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Team</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Remko</given> - - <common>Lodder</common> - </name> - - <email>Remko@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://www.evilcoder.org/content/section/6/39/">The - project's webpage.</url> - - <url href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/nl/books/handbook/">The - officially released documentation.</url> - - <url href="http://www.evilcoder.org/freebsd_html/">Preview of the - documentation.</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project is a ongoing project to - translate the documentation into the Dutch language. Currently we - are mainly focused on the Handbook, which is progressing pretty - well. However, lots need to be translated and checked before we - have a 'complete' translation ready. So if you are willing to help - out, please checkout our website and/or contact me.</p> - </body> - - <help> - <task>Translating the Handbook</task> - - <task>Checking the grammar of the Dutch Handbook</task> - - <task>Translate the rest of the documentation</task> - </help> - </project> - - <project cat='ports'> - <title>Ports Collection</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Mark</given> - - <common>Linimon</common> - </name> - - <email>linimon_at_FreeBSD_dot_org</email> - </person> - - <person> - <name> - <given>Erwin</given> - - <common>Lansing</common> - </name> - - <email>erwin@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/">The FreeBSD ports - collection</url> - - <url href="http://portsmon.firepipe.net/index.html">FreeBSD ports - monitoring system</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>Since the last report on the Ports Collection, much has changed. - Organizationally, the portmgr team saw the departure of some of the - long-term members, and the addition of some newer members, Oliver - Eikemeier, Kirill Ponomarew and Mark Linimon. Later on, portmgr - also had to say goodbye to Will Andrews. In addition, we have - gained quite a few new ports committers during this time period, - and their contributions are quite welcome!</p> - - <p>Most effort was devoted to two releases. The 5.3 release saw an - especially long freeze period, but due to the good shape of the - ports tree, the freeze for the 4.11 could be kept to a minimum. - Several iterations of new infrastructure changes were tested on the - cluster and committed. Also, the cluster now builds packages for - 6-CURRENT, increasing the total number of different build - environment to 10.</p> - - <p>Additionally, several sweeps through the ports tree were made to - bring more uniformity in variables used in the different ports and - their values, e.g. - <tt>BROKEN</tt> - - , - <tt>IGNORE</tt> - - , - <tt>DEPRECATED</tt> - - , - <tt>USE_GCC</tt> - - , and others.</p> - - <p>In technical terms, the largest change was moving to the X.org - codebase as our default X11 implementation. At the same time, code - was committed to be able to select either the X.org code or the - XFree86 code, which also saw an update during that time. Due to - some hard work by Eric Anholt, new committer Dejan Lesjak, and Joe - Marcus Clarke, all of this happened more smoothly than could have - reasonably been expected.</p> - - <p>As well, GNOME and KDE saw updates during this time, as did Perl - and the Java framework. Further, there were some updates to the - Porter's Handbook, but more sections are still in need of updates - to include recent changes in practices. Also, during this time, - Bill Fenner was able to fix a bug in his - <a href="http://people.FreeBSD.org/~fenner/portsurvey">distfile - survey</a> - - .</p> - - <p>Shortly before the release for 4.11 our existing linux_base was - marked forbidden due to security issues. A lot of effort was spent - to upgrade the default version to 8 from 7 to ship 4.11 with a - working linuxolator.</p> - - <p>Due to stability problems in the April-May timeframe, the - package builds for the Alpha were dropped. After Ken Smith and - others put some work into the Alphas in the build cluster, package - builds for 4.X were reenabled late in 2004.</p> - - <p>Ports QA reminders -- portmgr team members are now sending out - periodic email about problems in the Ports Collection. The current - set includes: - <ul> - <li>a public list of all ports to be removed due to security - problems, build failures, or general obsolescence, unless they - are fixed first</li> - - <li>private email to all maintainers of the affected ports - (including ports dependent on the above)</li> - - <li>private email to all maintainers of ports that are marked - <tt>BROKEN</tt> - - and/or - <tt>FORBIDDEN</tt> - </li> - - <li>private email to maintainers who aren't committers, who have - PRs filed against their ports (to flag PRs that might never have - been Cc:ed to them)</li> - - <li>public email about port commits that break building of - <tt>INDEX</tt> - </li> - - <li>public email about port commits that send the revision - metadata backwards (and thus confuse tools like portupgrade)</li> - </ul> - - The idea behind each of these reminders is to try to increase the - visibility of problems in the Ports Collection so that problems can - be fixed faster.</p> - - <p>Finally, it should be noted that we passed yet another milestone - and the Ports Collection now contains over 12,000 ports.</p> - </body> - - <help> - <task>The majority of our build errors are still due to compilation - problems, primarily from the gcc upgrades. Thanks to the efforts of - many volunteers, these are decreasing, but there is still much more - work to be done.</task> - - <task>The next highest number of build errors are caused by code - that does not build on our 64-bit architectures due to the - assumption that "all the world's a PC." - <a - href="http://portsmon.firepipe.net/ploticus/uniqueerrorcounts.html"> - Here is the entire list</a> - - ; the individual bars are clickable. This will become more and more - important now that the amd64 port has been promoted to tier-1 - status.</task> - - <task>A lot of progress has been meed to crack down on ports that - install files outside the approved directories and/or do not - de-install cleanly (see "Extra files not listed in PLIST" on - <a href="http://pointyhat.FreeBSD.org/errorlogs/">pointyhat</a> - - ) and this will remain a focus area.</task> - </help> - </project> - - <project cat="doc"> - <title>Hardware Notes</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Simon L.</given> - - <common>Nielsen</common> - </name> - - <email>simon@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - - <person> - <name> - <given>Christian</given> - - <common>Brueffer</common> - </name> - - <email>brueffer@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url - href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.3R/hardware-i386.html"> - FreeBSD/i386 5.3-RELEASE Hardware Notes</url> - - <url - href="http://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/CURRENT/hardware/i386/article.html"> - FreeBSD/i386 6.0-CURRENT Hardware Notes</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>The FreeBSD Hardware Notes have been (mostly) converted to being - directly generated from the driver manual pages. This makes it much - simpler to maintain the Hardware Notes, so they should be more - accurate. The Hardware Notes for FreeBSD 5.3 use this new - system.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='ports'> - <title>Update of the Linux userland infrastructure</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Alexander</given> - - <common>Leidinger</common> - </name> - - <email>netchild@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <body> - <p>The default linux_base port port was changed from the RedHat 7 - based emulators/linux_base to the RedHat 8 based - emulators/linux_base-8 just in time for FreeBSD 4.11-Release - because of a security problem in emulators/linux_base. In the - conversion process several problems where fixed in some Linux - ports.</p> - - <p>Both RedHat 7 and 8 are at their end of life, so expect an - update to a more recent Linux distribution in the future. For QA - reasons this update wasn't scheduled before FreeBSD - 4.11-Release.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='misc'> - <title>FreeBSD Security Officer and Security Team</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Jacques</given> - - <common>Vidrine</common> - </name> - - <email>nectar@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - - <person> - <name> - <common>Security Officer</common> - </name> - - <email>security-officer@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - - <person> - <name> - <common>Security Team</common> - </name> - - <email>security-team@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://www.freebsd.org/security/">FreeBSD Security - Information</url> - - <url href="http://www.freebsd.org/security/charter.html">FreeBSD - Security Officer Charter</url> - - <url - href="http://www.freebsd.org/administration.html#t-secteam"> - FreeBSD Security Team members</url> - - <url href="http://vuxml.freebsd.org/">FreeBSD VuXML web site</url> - - <url href="http://cvsweb.freebsd.org/ports/security/portaudit/"> - portaudit</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>During 2004, there were several notable changes and events - related to the FreeBSD Security Officer role and Security Team.</p> - - <p>The charter for the Security Officer (SO) as approved by Core in - 2002 was finally published on the web site. This document describes - the mission, responsibilities, and authorities of the SO. (The - current SO is Jacques Vidrine.)</p> - - <p>The SO is supported by a Deputy SO and the Security Team. In - April, Chris Faulhaber resigned as Deputy SO and Dag-Erling - Smorgrav was appointed in his place. Also during the year, the - following team members resigned: Julian Elischer, Bill Fumerola, - Daniel Harris, Trevor Johnson, Kris Kennaway, Mark Murray, Wes - Peters, Bruce Simpson, and Bill Swingle; while the following became - new members: Josef El-Rayes, Simon L. Nielsen, Colin Percival, and - Tom Rhodes. A huge thanks is due to all past and current members! - The current Security Team membership is published on the web - site.</p> - - <p>With the release of FreeBSD 4.8, the SO began extended support - for some FreeBSD releases and their corresponding security - branches. "Early adopter" branches, such as FreeBSD 5.0 - (RELENG_5_0), are supported for at least six months. "Normal" - branches are supported for at least one year. "Extended" branches, - such as FreeBSD 5.3 (RELENG_5_3), are supported for at least two - years. The currently supported branches and their estimated "end of - life" (EoL) dates are published on the FreeBSD Security Information - web page. In 2004, four releases "expired": 4.7, 4.9, 5.1, and - 5.2.</p> - - <p>With the releases of FreeBSD 4.10 and 5.3, the SO and the - Release Engineering team extended the scope of security branches to - incorporate critical bug fixes unrelated to security issues. - Currently, separate Errata Notices are published for such fixes. In - the future, Security Advisories and Errata Notices will be merged - and handled uniformly.</p> - - <p>17 Security Advisories were published in 2004, covering 8 issues - specific to FreeBSD and 9 general issues.</p> - - <p>2004 also saw the introduction of the Vulnerabilities and - Exposures Markup Language (VuXML). VuXML is a markup language - designed for the documentation of security issues within a single - package collection. Over 325 security issues in the Ports - Collection have been documented already in the FreeBSD Project's - VuXML document by the Security Team and other committers. This - document is currently maintained in the ports repository, path - ports/security/vuxml/vuln.xml. The contents of the document are - made available in a human-readable form at the FreeBSD VuXML web - site. The "portaudit" tool can be used to audit your local system - against the listed issues. Starting in November, the popular - FreshPorts.org web site also tracks issues documented in VuXML.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='kern'> - <title>Sync Protocols (SPPP and NETGRAPH)</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Roman</given> - - <common>Kurakin</common> - </name> - - <email>rik@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://www.freebsd.org/~rik">My FreeBSD home page. You - could find here some results of my work. Unfortunately I do not - update this page often.</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>sppp(4) was updated (in 6.current) to be able to work in mpsafe - mode. For compatibility if an interface is unable to work in mpsafe - mode, sppp will not use mpsafe locks.</p> - - <p>Support of FrameRelay AnnexD was added as a historical commit. - Many of Cronyx users were expecting this commit for a long long - time, and most of them still prefer sppp vs netgraph because of - simplicity of its configuration (especially for ppp (vs mpd) and fr - (vs a couple of netgraph modules). After MFCing this I'll finally - close a PR 21771, from 2000/10/05</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat="proj"> - <title>Improved Multibyte/Wide Character Support</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Tim</given> - - <common>Robbins</common> - </name> - - <email>tjr@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <body> - <p>Support for multibyte characters has been added to many more - base system utilities, including basename, col, colcrt, colrm, - column, fmt, look, nl, od, rev, sed, tr, and ul. As a result of - changes to the C library (see below), most utilities that perform - regular expression matching or pathname globbing now support - multibyte characters in these aspects.</p> - - <p>The regular expression matching and pathname globbing routines - in the C library have been improved and now recognize multibyte - characters. Various performance improvements have been made to the - wide character I/O functions. The obsolete 4.4BSD "rune" interface - and UTF2 encoding have been removed from the 6-CURRENT branch.</p> - - <p>Work is progressing on implementations of the POSIX iconv and - localedef interfaces for potential inclusion into the FreeBSD 6.0 - release.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='arch'> - <title>FreeBSD/arm status report</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Olivier</given> - - <common>Houchard</common> - </name> - - <email>cognet@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/arm">FreeBSD/arm - project page.</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>FreeBSD/arm made some huge progress. It can boot multiuser, and - run things like "make world" and perl on the IQ31244 board. It also - now has support for various things, including DDB, KTR, ptrace and - kernel modules. A patch is available for early gdb support, and the - libpthread almost works.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='kern'> - <title>ATA Driver Status Report</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Søren</given> - - <common>Schmidt</common> - </name> - - <email>sos@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <body> - <p>The ATA driver is undergoing quite a few important changes, - mainly it is being converted into modules so it can be - loaded/unloaded at will, and just the pieces for wanted - functionality need be present.</p> - - <p>This calls for ata-raid to finally be rewritten. This is almost - done for reading metadata so arrays defined in the BIOS can be - used, and its grown quite a few new metadata formats. This also - paves the way for ataraid to finally be able to take advantage of - some of the newer controllers "RAID" abilities. However this needs - more work to materialize but now its finally possible</p> - - <p>There is also support coming for a few new chipsets as - usual.</p> - - <p>The work is just about finished enough that it can be released - as patches to sort out eventual problems before hitting current. - The changes are pretty massive as this touches all over the driver - infrastructure, so lots of old bugs and has also been spotted and - fixed during this journey</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project> - <title>Atheros Wireless Support</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Sam</given> - - <common>Leffler</common> - </name> - - <email>sam@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <body> - <p>The ath driver was updated to support all the new features added - to the net80211 layer. As part of this work a new version of the - Hardware Access Layer (HAL) module was brought in; this version - supports all available Atheros parts found in PCI and Cardbus - products. Otherwise, adhoc mode should now be usable, antenna - management has been significantly improved, and soft LED support - now identifies traffic patterns.</p> - - <p>The transmit rate control algorithm was split out of the driver - into an independent module. Two different algorithms are available - with other algorithms (hopefully) to be added.</p> - - <p>Work is actively going on to add Atheros' SuperG - capabilities.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project> - <title>New DHCP Client</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Sam</given> - - <common>Leffler</common> - </name> - - <email>sam@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <body> - <p>The OpenBSD dhcp client program has been ported and enhanced to - listen for 802.11-related events from the kernel. This enables - immediate IP address acquisition when roaming (as opposed to the - polling done by the old code). The main change from the previous - client is that there is one dhclient process per interface as - opposed to one for the entire system. This necessitates changes to - the system startup scripts.</p> - - <p>Incorporation into the base system is waiting on a volunteer who - will shepherd the changes into the tree and deal with bugs.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='misc'> - <title>EuroBSDCon 2004 submitted papers are online</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Patrick M.</given> - - <common>Hausen</common> - </name> - - <email>hausen@punkt.de</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://www.eurobsdcon2004.de/papers.html"> - Papers/Presentations Download Page</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>Finally all of the papers and presentations are online for - download from our conference website. Thanks again to all who - helped make EuroBSDCon 2004 a success.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project> - <title>ifconfig Overhaul</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Sam</given> - - <common>Leffler</common> - </name> - - <email>sam@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <body> - <p>The ifconfig program used to configure network interfaces was - overhauled. Over the years ifconfig has grown into a complex and - often contorted piece of software that is hard to understand and - difficult to maintain. The primary motivation for this work was to - enable minimal configurations (for embedded use) without changing - the code and to support future additions in a modular way. - Functionality is now broken out into separate files and operations - are registered with the central ifconfig code base. Features are - configured simply by specifying which code is to be included when - building the program.</p> - - <p>In the future the plan is for ifconfig to auto-load - functionality through dynamic libraries. This mechanism will allow, - for example, third party software packages to provide kernel - services and ifconfig add-on code without changing the base - system.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='kern'> - <title>Network Stack Locking</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Robert</given> - - <common>Watson</common> - </name> - - <email>rwatson@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://www.freebsd.org/projects/netperf/">FreeBSD - Project Netperf project web page.</url> - - <url href="http://www.watson.org/~robert/freebsd/netperf/">Robert - Watson's personal Netperf web page.</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>The netperf project is working to enhance the performance of the - FreeBSD network stack. This work grew out of the SMPng Project, - which moved the FreeBSD kernel from a "Giant Lock" to more - fine-grained locking and multi-threading. SMPng offered both - performance improvement and degradation for the network stack, - improving parallelism and preemption, but substantially increasing - per-packet processing costs. The netperf project is primarily - focused on further improving parallelism in network processing - while reducing the SMP synchronization overhead. This in turn will - lead to higher processing throughput and lower processing latency. - Tasks include completing the locking work, optimizing locking - strategies, amortizing locking costs, introducing new - synchronization primitives, adopting non-locking synchronization - strategies, and improving opportunities for parallelism through - additional threading.</p> - - <p>Between July, 2004, and December, 2004, the Netperf project did - a great deal of work, for which there is room only to include - limited information. Much more information is available by visiting - the URLS above, including information on a variety of on-going - activities. Accomplishments include:</p> - - <p>July, 2004: A variety of improvements to PCB locking in the IPv6 - implementation; locking for the if_xl driver; socket locking for - the NFS client; cleanup of the soreceive() code path including - structural improvements, assertions, and locking fixes; cleanup of - the IPX/SPX code in preparation for locking; additional locking and - locking assertions for the TCP implementation; bug fixes for - locking and memory allocation in raw IP; - <em>netatalk cleanup and locking merged to FreeBSD CVS</em> - - ; - <em>locking for many netgraph nodes merged to FreeBSD CVS</em> - - ; SLIP structural improvements; experimental locking for netatalk - ifaddrs; BPF locking optimizations (merged); Giant assertions for - VFS to check VFS/network stack boundaries; UNIX domain socket - locking optimizations; expansion of lock order documentation in - WITNESS, additional NFS server code running MPSAFE; pipe locking - optimizations to improve pipe allocation performance; Giant no - longer required for fstat on sockets and pipes (merged); Giant no - longer required for socket and pipe file descriptor closes - (merged); - <em>IFF_NEEDSGIANT interface flag added to support compatibility - operation for unlocked device drivers (merged)</em> - - ; merged accept filter locking to FreeBSD CVS; documented uidinfo - locking strategy (merged); Giant use reduced in fcntl().</p> - - <p>August, 2004: UMA KTR tracing (merged); UDP broadcast receive - locking optimizations (merged); TCP locking cleanup and - documentation; IPv6 inpcb locking, cleanup, and structural - improvements; - <em>IPv6 inpcb locking merged to FreeBSD CVS</em> - - ; KTR for systems calls added to i386; - <em>substantial optimizations of entropy harvesting synchronization - (merged)</em> - - ; callout(9) sampling converted to KTR (merged); inpcb socket - option locking (merged); GIANT_REQUIRED removed from netatalk in - FreeBSD CVS; - <em>merged ADAPTIVE_GIANT to FreeBSD CVS, resulting in substantial - performance improvements in many kernel IPC-intensive - benchmarks</em> - - ; prepend room for link layer headers to the UDP header mbuf to - avoid one allocation per UDP send (merged); a variety of UDP bug - fixes (merged); additional network interfaces marked MPSAFE; UNIX - domain socket locking reformulated to protect so_pcb pointers; - <em>MP_WATCHDOG, a facility to dedicate additional HTT logical CPUs - as watchdog CPUs developed (merged)</em> - - ; annotation of UNIX domain socket locking merged to FreeBSD CVS; - <em>kqueue locking developed and merged by John-Mark Gurney</em> - - ; task list for netinet6 locking created; conditional locking - relating to kqueues and socket buffers eliminated (merged); NFS - server locking bugfixes (merged); in6_prefix code removed from - netinet6 by George Neville-Neil, lowering the work load for - netinet6 (merged); unused random tick code in netinet6 removed - (merged); - <em>ng_tty, IPX, KAME IPSEC now declare dependence on Giant using - compile-time declaration NET_NEEDS_GIANT("component") permitting - the kernel to detect unsafe components and automatically acquire - the Giant lock over network stack operation if needed (merged)</em> - - ; additional locking optimizations for entropy code (merged); Giant - disabled by default in the netperf development branch (merged).</p> - - <p>September, 2004: bugs fixed relating to Netgraph's use of the - kernel linker while not holding Giant (merged); - <em>merged removal of Giant over the network stack by default to - FreeBSD CVS</em> - - ; races relating to netinet6 and if_afdata corrected (merged); - annotation of possible races in the BPF code; BPF code converted to - queue(3) (merged); race in sopoll() corrected (merged).</p> - - <p>October, 2004: IPv6 netisr marked as MPSAFE; TCP timers locked, - annotated, and asserted (merged); IP socket option locking and - cleanup (merged); Netgraph ISR marked MPSAFE; netatalk ISR marked - MPSAFE (merged); some interface list locking cleanup (merged); use - after free bug relating to entropy harvesting and ethernet fixed - (merged); soclose()/sofree() race fixed (merged); IFF_LOCKGIANT() - and IFF_UNLOCKGIANT() added to acquire Giant as needed when - entering the ioctls of non-MPSAFE network interfaces.</p> - - <p>November, 2004: cleanup of UDPv6 static global variables - (merged); - <em>FreeBSD 5.3 released! First release of FreeBSD with an MPSAFE - and Giant-free network stack as the default configuration!</em> - - ; additional TCP locking documentation and cleanup (merged); - <em>optimization to use file descriptor reference counts instead of - socket reference counts for frequent operations results in - substantial performance optimizations for high-volume send/receive - (merged)</em> - - ; an accept bug is fixed (merged) experimental network polling - locking introduced; - <em>substantial measurement and optimization of mutex and locking - primitives (merged)</em> - - ; - <em>experimental modifications to UMA to use critical sections to - protect per-CPU caches instead of mutexes yield substantial - micro-benchmark benefits when combined with experimental critical - section optimizations</em> - - ; FreeBSD Project Netperf page launched; performance - micro-benchmarks benchmarks reveal IP forwarding latency in 5.x is - measurably better than 4.x on UP when combined with optional - network stack direct dispatch; several NFS server locking bugfixes - (merged); - <em>development of new mbufqueue primitives and substantial - experimentation with them permits development of amortized cost - locking APIs for handoff between the network stack and network - device drivers (work in collaboration with Sandvine, Inc)</em> - - ; Linux TCP_INFO API added to allow user-space monitoring of TCP - state (merged); SMPng task list updated; UDP static/global fixes - merged to RELENG_5.</p> - - <p>December, 2004: UDP static/global fixes developed for - multi-threaded in-bound UDP processing (merged); socket buffer - locking fixes for urgent TCP input processing (merged); lockless - read optimizations for IF_DEQUEUE() and IF_DRAIN(); Giant-free - close for sockets/pipes/... merged to FreeBSD CVS; optimize - mass-dequeues of mbuf chains in netisr processing; netrate tool - merged to RELENG_5; TCP locking fixes merged to RELENG_5; "show - alllocks" added to DDB (merged); IPX locking bugfixes (merged); - IPX/SPX __packed fixes (merged); IPX/SPX moved to queue(9) - (merged); TCP locking fixes and annotations merged to FreeBSD CVS; - IPX/SPX globals and pcb locking (merged); - <em>IPX/SPX marked MPSAFE (merged)</em> - - ; IP socket options locking merged to FreeBSD; SPPP locked by Roman - Kurakin (merged); UNIX domain socket locking fixes by Alan Cox - (merged).</p> - - <p>On-going work continues with regard to locking down network - stack components, including additional netinet6 locking, mbuf queue - facilities and operations; benchmarking; moving to critical - sections or per-CPU mutexes for UMA per-CPU caches; moving to - critical sections or per-CPU mutexes for malloc(9) statistics; - elimination of separate mbuf allocator statistics; additional - interface locking; a broad variety of cleanups and documentation of - locking; a broad range of optimizations.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='proj'> - <title>FreeBSD profile.sh</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Tobias</given> - - <common>Roth</common> - </name> - - <email>ports@fsck.ch</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="https://projects.fsck.ch/profile">FreeBSD profile.sh - site</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>FreeBSD profile.sh is targeted at laptops. It allows to define - multiple network environments (eg, home, work), and will then - detect in which environment the laptop is started and configure it - accordingly. Almost everything from under /etc can be configured - per environment, and only the overrides to the default /etc have to - be defined. Suspending in one environment and resuming in a - different one is also supported.</p> - - <p>Proper integration into the acpi/apm and several small - improvements are underway. More testing with different system - configurations is needed.</p> - </body> - </project> - - <project cat='proj'> - <title>FreeBSD Release Engineering</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Scott</given> - - <common>Long</common> - </name> - - <email>re@FreeBSD.org</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng" /> - </links> - - <body> - <p>At long last, FreeBSD 5.3 was released in November of 2004. This - marked the start of the RELENG_5/5-STABLE branch and the beginning - of the 6-CURRENT development branch. Many thanks to the tireless - efforts of the FreeBSD developer and user community for making this - release a success.</p> - - <p>FreeBSD 4.11 release engineering is also now in progress. This - will be the final release from the 4.x series and is mainly - incremental bug fixes and a handful of feature additions. Of note - is that the IBM ServeRAID 'IPS' driver is now supported on 4.x and - will be included in this release, and the Linux emulation layer has - been updated to support a RedHat 8.0 userland. The release is - expected to be available on January 24.</p> - - <p>Looking forward, there will be several FreeBSD 5.x releases in - the coming year. FreeBSD 5.4 release engineering will start in - March, and FreeBSD 5.5 release engineering will likely start in - June. These releases are expected to be more conservative than - previous 5.x releases and will follow the same philosophy as - previous -STABLE branches of fixing bugs and adding incremental - improvements while maintaining API stability.</p> - - <p>For the 6-CURRENT development branch as well as all future - development and stable branches, we are planning to move to a - schedule with fixed timelines that move away from the uncertainty - and wild schedule fluctuations of the previous 5.x releases. This - means that major branches will happen at 18 month intervals, and - releases from those branches will happen at 4 month intervals. - There will also be a dedicated period of testing and bug fixing at - the beginning of each branch before the first release is cut from - that branch. With the shorter and more defined release schedules, - we hope to lessen the problem of needed features not reaching users - in a reasonable time, as happened too often with 5.x. This is a - significant change in our strategy, and we look forward to - realizing the benefits of it. This will kick off with the RELENG_6 - branch happing in June of 2005, followed by the 6.0 release in - August of 2005.</p> - - <p>Also on the roadmap is a plan to combine the live-iso disk2 and - the install distributions of disk1 into a single disk which can be - used for both installation and for recovery. 3rd party packages - that currently reside on disc1 will be moved to a disk2 that will - be dedicated to these packages. This move will allow us to deal - with the ever growing size of packages and also provide more - flexibility to vendors that wish to add their own packages to the - releases. It also opens the door to more advanced installers being - put in place of sysinstall. Anyone interested in helping with this - is encouraged to contact us.</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>The wireless networking layer was updated to support the 802.1x, - WPA, and 802.11i security protocols, and the WME/WMM multi-media - protocol. As part of this work extensible frameworks were added for - cryptographic methods, authentication, and access control. - Extensions are implemented as loadable kernel modules that hook - into the net80211 layer. This mechanism is used, for example, to - implement WEP, TKIP, and CCMP crypto protocols. The Atheros driver - (ath) is currently the only driver that uses the full set of - features. Adding support to other drivers is simple but waiting on - volunteers. Ports of the wpa_supplicant and hostapd programs enable - use of the new security protocols.</p> - - <p>The support for tracking stations in a bss (managed or adhoc) - and stations found when scanning was overhauled. Multiple tables - are now used, each with different management policies, reference - counting is now done consistently, and inactivity processing is - done more intelligently (e.g. associated stations are probed before - removal). This is the first step towards proper roaming support and - other advanced features.</p> - - <p>AP power save support was added. Associated stations may now - operate in power save mode; frames sent to them will be buffered - while they are sleeping and multicast traffic will be deferred - until after the next beacon (per the 802.11 protocol). Power save - support is required in a standards-compliant access point. Only the - ath driver currently implements power save support.</p> - - <p>Work is actively going on to add Atheros' SuperG capabilities, - WDS, and for multi-bss support (ssid and/or bssid) on a single - device.</p> - </body> - - <help> - <task>Drivers other than ath need updates to support the new - security protocols</task> - - <task>hostapd needs work to support the IAPP and 802.11i - preauthentication protocols (these are simple conversion of - existing Linux code)</task> - </help> - </project> - - <project cat='arch'> - <title>FreeBSD on Xen</title> - - <contact> - <person> - <name> - <given>Kip</given> - - <common>Macy</common> - </name> - - <email>kmacy@fsmware.com</email> - </person> - </contact> - - <links> - <url href="http://www.fsmware.com/xenofreebsd/">binaries + source + - slightly out of date HOWTO</url> - - <url href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/">Xen - project page</url> - </links> - - <body> - <p>FreeBSD 5.2.1 is stable on the stable branch of Xen as a guest. - FreeBSD 5.3 runs on the stable branch of Xen as a guest, but a - couple of bugs need to be tracked down.</p> - </body> - - <help> - <task>FreeBSD support for running in Domain 0 (host)</task> - - <task>FreeBSD support for VM checkpoint and migration</task> - </help> - </project> -</report> - |