Contributed by &a.jkh;.

So you want to contribute something to FreeBSD? That is great! We can always use the help, and FreeBSD is one of those systems that relies on the contributions of its user base in order to survive. Your contributions are not only appreciated, they are vital to FreeBSD's continued growth!

Contrary to what some people might also have you believe, you do not need to be a hot-shot programmer or a close personal friend of the FreeBSD core team in order to have your contributions accepted. The FreeBSD Project's development is done by a large and growing number of international contributors who's ages and areas of technical expertise vary greatly, and there is always more work to be done than there are people available to do it.

Since the FreeBSD project is responsible for an entire operating system environment (and its installation) rather than just a kernel or a few scattered utilities, our "TODO" list also spans a very wide range of tasks, from documentation, beta testing and presentation to highly specialized types of kernel development. No matter what your skill level, there is almost certainly something you can do to help the project!

Commercial entities engaged in FreeBSD-related enterprises are also encouraged to contact us. Need a special extension to make your product work? You will find us receptive to your requests, given that they are not too outlandish. Working on a value-added product? Please let us know! We may be able to work cooperatively on some aspect of it. The free software world is challenging a lot of existing assumptions about how software is developed, sold, and maintained throughout its life cycle, and we urge you to at least give it a second look. What is needed

The following list of tasks and sub-projects represents something of an amalgam of the various core team TODO lists and user requests we have collected over the last couple of months. Where possible, tasks have been ranked by degree of urgency. If you are interested in working on one of the tasks you see here, send mail to the coordinator listed by clicking on their names. If no coordinator has been appointed, maybe you would like to volunteer? High priority tasks

The following tasks are considered to be urgent, usually because they represent something that is badly broken or sorely needed: 3-stage boot issues. Overall coordination: &a.hackers

Autodetect memory over 64MB properly. Move userconfig (-c) into 3rd stage boot. Do WinNT compatible drive tagging so that the 3rd stage can provide an accurate mapping of BIOS geometries for disks. Filesystem problems. Overall coordination: &a.fs Fix the MSDOS file system. Clean up and document the nullfs filesystem code. Coordinator: &a.gibbs Fix the union file system. Coordinator: &a.dyson Fix the LFS file system. Coordinator: &a.dyson Implement kernel and user vm86 support. Coordinator: &a.hackers Implement Int13 vm86 disk driver. Coordinator: &a.hackers SCSI driver issues. Overall coordination: &a.hackers

Support tagged queuing generically. Requires a rewrite of how we do our command queing, but we need this anyway to for prioritized I/O (CD-R writers/scanners). Better error handling (Busy status and retries). Merged Scatter-Gather list creation code. Kernel issues. Overall coordination: &a.hackers

Complete the eisaconf conversion of all existing drivers. Change all interrupt routines to take a (void *) instead of using unit numbers. Merge EISA/PCI/ISA interrupt registration code. Split PCI/EISA/ISA probes out from drivers like bt742a.c (WIP) Fix the syscons ALT-TAB/vt switching hangs. Coordinator: &a.sos Mouse support for syscons. Merged keyboard code for all console drivers. Rewrite the Intel Etherexpress 16 driver. Merge the 3c509 and 3c590 drivers (essentially provide a PCI probe for ep.c). Support Adaptec 3985 (first as a simple 3 channel SCSI card) Coordinator: &a.gibbs Support Advansys SCSI controller products. Coordinator: &a.gibbs Medium priority tasks

The following tasks need to be done, but not with any particular urgency: DOS emulator (for DOS executables) Coordinator: Port AFS (Andrew File System) to FreeBSD Coordinator: MCA support? This should be finalized one way or the other. Full LKM based driver support/Configuration Manager.

Devise a way to do all LKM registration without ld. This means some kind of symbol table in the kernel. Write a configuration manager (in the 3rd stage boot?) that probes your hardware in a sane manner, keeps only the LKMs required for your hardware, etc. PCMCIA/PCCARD. Coordinator: &a.phk Reliable operation of the pcic driver. Recognizer and handler for sio.c Recognizer and handler for ed.c Recognizer and handler for ep.c User-mode recognizer and handler. Advanced Power Management. Coordinator: &a.phk APM sub-driver. IDE/ATA disk sub-driver. syscons/pcvt sub-driver. Low priority tasks

The following tasks are purely cosmetic or represent such an investment of work that it is not likely that anyone will get them done anytime soon:

The first 20 items are from Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> Ability to make BIOS calls from protected mode using V86 mode on the processor and return the results via a mapped interrupt IPC mechanism to the protected mode caller. Drivers built into the kernel that use the BIOS call mechanism to allow them to be independent of the actual underlying hardware the same way that DOS is independent of the underlying hardware. This includes NetWork and ASPI drivers loaded in DOS prior to BSD being loaded by a DOS-based loader program, which means potential polling, which means DOS-not-busy interrupt generation for V86 machines by the protected mode kernel. An image format that allows tagging of such drivers data and text areas in the default kernel executable so that that portion of the kernel address space may be recovered at a later time, after hardware specific protected mode drivers have been loaded and activated. This includes separation of BIOS based drivers from each other, since it is better to run with a BIOS based driver in all cases than to not run at all. Abstraction of the bus interface mechanism. Currently, PCMCIA, EISA, and PCI busses are assumed to be bridged from ISA. This is not something which should be assumed. A configuration manager that knows about PNP events, including power management events, insertion, extraction, and bus (PNP ISA and PCMCIA bridging chips) vs. card level event management. A topological sort mechanism for assigning reassignable addresses that do not collide with other reassignable and non-reassignable device space resource usage by fixed devices. A registration based mechanism for hardware services registration. Specifically, a device centric registration mechanism for timer and sound and other system critical service providers. Consider Timer2 and Timer0 and speaker services as one example of a single monolithic service provider. A kernel exported symbol space in the kernel data space accessible by an LKM loader mechanism that does relocation and symbol space manipulation. The intent of this interface is to support the ability to demand load and unload kernel modules. NetWare Server (protected mode ODI driver) loader and subservices to allow the use of ODI card drivers supplied with network cards. The same thing for NDIS drivers and NetWare SCSI drivers. An "upgrade system" option that works on Linux boxes instead of just previous rev FreeBSD boxes. Splitting of the console driver into abstraction layers, both to make it easier to port and to kill the X and ThinkPad and PS/2 mouse and LED and console switching and bouncing NumLock problems once and for all. Other kernel emulation environments for other foreign drivers as opportunity permits. SCO and Solaris are good candidates, followed by UnixWare, etc. Processor emulation environments for execution of foreign binaries. This is easier than it sounds if the system call interface does not change much. Streams to allow the use of commercial streams drivers. Kernel multithreading (requires kernel preemption). Symmetric Multiprocessing with kernel preemption (requires kernel preemption). A concerted effort at support for portable computers. This is somewhat handled by changing PCMCIA bridging rules and power management event handling. But there are things like detecting internal vs. external display and picking a different screen resolution based on that fact, not spinning down the disk if the machine is in dock, and allowing dock-based cards to disappear without affecting the machines ability to boot (same issue for PCMCIA). Reorganization of the source tree for multiple platform ports. A "make world" that "makes the world" (rename the current one to "make regress" if that is all it is good for). A 4M (preferably smaller!) memory footprint. How to contribute

Contributions to the system generally fall into one or more of the following 6 categories: Bug reports and general commentary

If you have a bug to report or a suggestion to make: An idea or suggestion of general technical interest should be mailed to the &a.hackers;. Likewise, people with an interest in such things (and a tolerance for a high volume of mail!) may subscribe to the hackers mailing list by sending mail to &a.majordomo;. See for more information about this and other mailing lists. An actual bug report should be filed by using the send-pr(1) program. This will prompt you for various fields to fill in. Simply go to the fields surrounded by <>'s and fill in your own information in place of what is suggested there. You should receive confirmation of your bug report and a tracking number. Keep this tracking number and use it in any subsequent correspondence. If you do not receive confirmation in a timely fashion (3 days to a week, depending on your email connection) or are, for some reason, unable to use the send-pr(1) command, then you may also file a bug report by sending mail to the &a.bugs;. Changes to the documentation

Changes to the documentation are overseen by the &a.doc;. This does not generally include changes to manual pages, which should be considered under the category of "changes to existing source code." Changes to existing source code

An addition or change to the existing source code is a somewhat trickier affair and depends a lot on how far out of date you are with the current state of the core FreeBSD development. There is a special on-going release of FreeBSD known as ``FreeBSD-current'' which is made available in a variety of ways for the convenience of developers working actively on the system. See for more information about getting and using FreeBSD-current. Working from older sources unfortunately means that your changes may sometimes be too obsolete or too divergent for easy re-integration into FreeBSD. Chances of this can be minimized somewhat by subscribing to the &a.announce and the &a.current lists, where discussions on the current state of the system take place. Assuming that you can manage to secure fairly up-to-date sources to base your changes on, the next step is to produce a set of diffs to send to the FreeBSD maintainers. This is done with the diff(1) command, with the `context diff' form being preferred. For example: diff -c oldfile newfile or diff -c -r olddir newdir would generate such a set of context diffs for the given source file or directory hierarchy. See the man page for diff(1) for more details. Once you have a set of diffs (which you may test with the patch(1) command), you should bundle them up in an email message and send it, along with a brief description of what the diffs are for, to the &a.hackers;. Someone will very likely get back in touch with you in 24 hours or less, assuming of course that your diffs are interesting! :-) If your changes do not express themselves well as diffs alone (e.g. you have perhaps added, deleted or renamed files as well) then you may be better off bundling any new files, diffs and instructions for deleting/renaming others into a tar file and running the uuencode(1) program on it before sending the output of that to the &a.hackers;. See the man pages on tar(1) and uuencode(1) for more information on bundling files this way. If your change is of a potentially sensitive nature, e.g. you are unsure of copyright issues governing its further distribution or you are simply not ready to release it without a tighter review first, then you should send it to rather than the &a.hackers The core mailing list reaches a much smaller group of people who do much of the day-to-day work on FreeBSD. Note that this group is also very busy and so you should only send mail to them in cases where mailing to hackers is truly impractical. New code or major value-added packages

In the case of a significant contribution of a large body work, or the addition of an important new feature to FreeBSD, it becomes almost always necessary to either send changes as uuencoded tar files or upload them to our ftp site . When working with large amounts of code, the touchy subject of copyrights also invariably comes up. Acceptable copyrights for code included in FreeBSD are: The BSD copyright. This copyright is most preferred due to its ``no strings attached'' nature and general attractiveness to commercial enterprises. Far from discouraging such commercial use, the FreeBSD Project actively encourages such participation by commercial interests who might eventually be inclined to invest something of their own into FreeBSD. The GNU Public License, or ``GPL''. This license is not quite as popular with us due to the amount of extra effort demanded of anyone using the code for commercial purposes, but given the sheer quantity of GPL'd code we currently require (compiler, assembler, text formatter, etc) it would be silly to refuse additional contributions under this license. Code under the GPL also goes into a different part of the tree, that being /sys/gnu or /usr/src/gnu, and is therefore easily identifiable to anyone for whom the GPL presents a problem.

Contributions coming under any other type of copyright must be carefully reviewed before their inclusion into FreeBSD will be considered. Contributions for which particularly restrictive commercial copyrights apply are generally rejected, though the authors are always encouraged to make such changes available through their own channels. To place a ``BSD-style'' copyright on your work, include the following text at the very beginning of every source code file you wish to protect, replacing the text between the `%%' with the appropriate information. Copyright (c) %%proper_years_here%% %%your_name_here%%, %%your_state%% %%your_zip%%. All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer as the first lines of this file unmodified. 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgment: This product includes software developed by %%your_name_here%%. 4. The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY %%your_name_here%% ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL %%your_name_here%% BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. $Id: submitters.sgml,v 1.2.4.3 1996-06-19 20:28:25 jkh Exp $ For your convenience, a copy of this text can be found in /usr/share/examples/etc/bsd-style-copyright. &porting; Money, Hardware or Internet access

We are always very happy to accept donations to further the cause of the FreeBSD Project and, in a volunteer effort like ours, a little can go a long way! Donations of hardware are also very important to expanding our list of supported peripherals since we generally lack the funds to buy such items ourselves. Donating funds

While the FreeBSD Project is not a 501(C3) (non-profit) corporation and hence cannot offer special tax incentives for any donations made, any such donations will be gratefully accepted on behalf of the project by FreeBSD, Inc.

FreeBSD, Inc. was founded in early 1995 by &a.jkh and &a.davidg with the goal of furthering the aims of the FreeBSD Project and giving it a minimal corporate presence. Any and all funds donated (as well as any profits that may eventually be realized by FreeBSD, Inc.) will be used exclusively to further the project's goals. Please make any checks payable to FreeBSD, Inc., sent in care of the following address: FreeBSD, Inc. c/o Jordan Hubbard 4041 Pike Lane, suite #D. Concord CA, 94520 [temporarily using the Walnut Creek CDROM address until a PO box can be opened] Wire transfers may also be sent directly to: Bank Of America Concord Main Office P.O. Box 37176 San Francisco CA, 94137-5176 Routing #: 121-000-358 Account #: 01411-07441 (FreeBSD, Inc.) If you do not wish to be listed in our section, please specify this when making your donation. Thanks! Donating hardware

Donations of hardware in any of the 3 following categories are also gladly accepted by the FreeBSD Project: General purpose hardware such as disk drives, memory or complete systems should be sent to the FreeBSD, Inc. address listed in the donating funds section. Hardware for which ongoing compliance testing is desired. We are currently trying to put together a testing lab of all components that FreeBSD supports so that proper regression testing can be done with each new release. We are still lacking many important pieces (network cards, motherboards, etc) and if you would like to make such a donation, please contact &a.davidg for information on which items are still required. Hardware currently unsupported by FreeBSD for which you would like to see such support added. Please contact the before sending such items as we will need to find a developer willing to take on the task before we can accept delivery of them. Donating Internet access

We can always use new mirror sites for FTP, WWW or sup. If you would like to be such a mirror, please contact for more information. Donors Gallery

The FreeBSD Project is indebted to the following donors and would like to publically thank them here! has generously donated funding to the further development of FreeBSD has generously donated funding to FreeBSD. in Japan has graciously donated a portion of their profits from the sale of their FreeBSD for PC98'ers CD, a port of FreeBSD to the NEC PC98. has donated almost more than we can say (see the document for more details). In particular, we would like to thank them for the hardware used for freefall.FreeBSD.ORG, our primary development machine, and for thud.FreeBSD.ORG, our testing and build box. We are also indebted to them for funding various contributors over the years and providing us with unrestricted use of their T1 connection to the Internet.