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|
<!-- $FreeBSD: www/en/news/status/report-jan-2003-feb-2003.xml,v 1.4 2003/04/13 16:31:52 hrs Exp $ -->
<report>
<date>
<month>January-February</month>
<year>2003</year>
</date>
<section>
<title>Introduction:</title>
<p>Another busy two months have passed in the FreeBSD project. With
5.0 released, attention is focusing on making it faster via more
fine-grained locking, adding more high-end features like large
memory (PAE) support for i386, and further progress on many other
projects. FreeBSD 5.1 is expected to ship in late May or early
June, with 5.2 following at the end of summer. A roadmap for
the push to 5-STABLE is available at <a
href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en/articles/5-roadmap">
http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en/articles/5-roadmap</a>. Although
the 5.x series isn't expected to fully stabilize until the 5.2
release, 5.1 promises to be an exciting release and a significant
improvement over 5.0 in terms of speed and stability.</p>
<p>Not to be forgotten, FreeBSD 4.8, the latest in the 4-STABLE
series, is nearing release. Lots of last minute work is going
into to it to deliver features like XFree86 4.3.0, Intel
HyperThreading(tm) support, and of course many more bug fixes.
Don't forget to support the FreeBSD vendors and developers by
buying a copy of the CD set when it comes out!.</p>
<p>Thanks,</p>
<p>Scott Long, Robert Watson</p>
</section>
<project>
<title>FreeBSD/MIPS Status Report</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Juli</given>
<common>Mallett</common>
</name>
<email>jmallett@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/mips/">FreeBSD/MIPS project
page.</url>
<url href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/platforms/mips.html">FreeBSD/MIPS
platform page.</url>
</links>
<body>
<p>Large portions of headers have been filled in, all have been stubbed
out. Minimal functions and data elements have been stubbed out or
filled in. Machinery added to support some requisite tunables for
building real kernels. GCC fixed to generate correct local label
prefixes making it possible to link real kernels. Work begun on
providing enough to create and boot real kernels, on real hardware.
Decision to only support MIPS-III and above made.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>BSDCon 2003</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Gregory</given>
<common>Shapiro</common>
</name>
<email>gshapiro@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<!-- A hypertext link with a description... -->
<url href="http://www.usenix.org/events/bsdcon03/cfp/">BSDCon 2003 Call For Papers</url>
</links>
<body>
<p>The BSDCon 2003 Program Committee invites you to contribute
original and innovative papers on topics related to BSD-derived
systems and the Open Source world. Topics of interest include
but are not limited to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Embedded BSD application development and deployment</li>
<li>Real world experiences using BSD systems</li>
<li>Using BSD in a mixed OS environment</li>
<li>Comparison with non-BSD operating systems; technical, practical, licensing (GPL vs. BSD)</li>
<li>Tracking open source development on non-BSD systems</li>
<li>BSD on the desktop</li>
<li>I/O subsystem and device driver development</li>
<li>SMP and kernel threads</li>
<li>Kernel enhancements</li>
<li>Internet and networking services</li>
<li>Security</li>
<li>Performance analysis and tuning</li>
<li>System administration</li>
<li>Future of BSD</li>
</ul>
<p>Submissions in the form of extended abstracts are due by
April 1, 2003. Be sure to review the extended abstract
expectations before submitting. Selection will be based on the
quality of the written submission and whether the work is of
interest to the community.</p>
<p>We look forward to receiving your submissions!</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>
Bluetooth stack for FreeBSD (Netgraph implementation)
</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Maksim</given>
<common>Yevmenkin</common>
</name>
<email>m_evmenkin@yahoo.com</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://www.geocities.com/m_evmenkin/">Latest snapshot</url>
<url href="http://bluez.sf.net">Linux BlueZ stack</url>
<url href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/openobex/">OpenOBEX</url>
</links>
<body>
<p>I'm very pleased to announce that another release is available for
download at <a
href="http://www.geocities.com/m_evmenkin/ngbt-fbsd-20030305.tar.gz">
http://www.geocities.com/m_evmenkin/ngbt-fbsd-20030305.tar.gz</a></p>
<p>This release features new in-kernel RFCOMM implementation that
provides SOCK_STREAM sockets interface. This makes old user-space
RFCOMM daemon obsolete. People should not use old user-space
RFCOMM daemon any longer. The release features new RFCOMM PPP
daemon that supports DUN and LAN profiles. Note: PPP patch
(support for chat scripts in -direct mode) is required for DUN
support. Look for it in the mailing list archive or contact me
directly. People with Bluetooth enabled cell phones can now
use them to access Internet.</p>
<p>The Bluetooth sockets layer has been cleaned up. People should not
see any WITNESS complaints with new code. Locking issues have been
revisited and code in much better shape now, although it probably
is not 100% SMP ready just yet. The code should work on SMP system
anyway because sockets layer is still under Giant.</p>
<p>The simple OBEX server and client (based on OpenOBEX library) is
complete. OBEX File Push and OBEX File Transfer profiles work and
have been tested with Sony Ericsson T68i cell phone and Bluetooth
3COM stack on Windows2K. It is now possible to send pictures,
address book and calendar entries from the cell phone via
Bluetooth. Minor bug in OpenOBEX library has been fixed and OPEX
Put-Empty command now works.</p>
<p>Due to changes in API userland tools must be in sync with the
kernel. People should install new include files, recompile and
reinstall all userland tools as part of upgrade. I'm sorry about
that.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>FreeBSD 4.8 Release Engineering</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Murray</given>
<common>Stokely</common>
</name>
<email>re@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.8R/schedule.html">FreeBSD
4.8 Release Schedule.</url>
</links>
<body>
<p>The FreeBSD 4.8 Release Process is well underway. The RELENG_4
branch has been under code freeze since February 15, and
the first release candidates were made available in early March.
A testing guide has been put together and is available from
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.8R/qa.html.</p>
<p>Developers should coordinate with re@FreeBSD.org about any
changes they would like to include in this release, and users
are encouraged to try out the release candidates and help find
as many bugs as possible now, before the final release is
made.</p>
<p>FreeBSD 4.8 represents the newest production release from the
stable '4.X' branch. It does not include all of the features
that were made available in the "new technology" 5.0
release in January.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>New Doceng Body Formed</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Murray</given>
<common>Stokely</common>
</name>
<email>doceng@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/internal/doceng.html" />
</links>
<body>
<p>The doceng@ team is a new body to handle some of the
meta-project issues associated with the FreeBSD Documentation
Project. The main responsibilities of this team are to grant
approval of new doc committers, to manage the doc release
process, to ensure the documentation toolchains are functional,
to maintain the doc project primer, and to maintain the sanctity
of the doc/ and www/ trees. The current members of this team
are Nik Clayton, Ruslan Ermilov, Jun Kuriyama, Bruce A. Mah, and
Murray Stokely.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>KGI/FreeBSD Status Report</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Nicholas</given>
<common>Souchu</common>
</name>
<email>nsouch@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/~nsouch/ggiport.html" />
<url href="http://kgi-wip.sf.org" />
</links>
<body>
<p>The later months have been very busy on KGI. Most of the framework
has been debugged for typical usage (fb, no accel). I got
KII (the input interface) connected to syscons through atkbd. Opening
/dev/graphic works and framebuffer resource access is permitted.
Finally, the KGIM (KGI module) framework has a better building
tree for board / monitor drivers and board drivers are now loading
with resource allocation.</p>
<p>Most important on the TODO list:
5.0-RELEASE move (I currently work with a May-2002 5.0-current).
Most of debug is now done. Let's validate!</p>
<p>Note that KGI project homepage has changed since the last report.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>jpman project</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Kazuo</given>
<common>Horikawa</common>
</name>
<email>horikawa@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://www.jp.FreeBSD.org/man-jp/">jpman project</url>
<url href="ftp://daemon.jp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD-jp/man-jp/packages-5.0.0/ja-man-doc-5.0.tbz">package ja-man-doc-5.0.tbz</url>
</links>
<body>
<p>We have released Japanese translation of 5.0-RELEASE online manual
pages on February 2nd. Most of entries which did not exist on RELENG_4
were not yet translated. I hope we can finish such entries soon.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>Disk I/O improvements</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Poul-Henning</given>
<common>Kamp</common>
</name>
<email>phk@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
</links>
<body>
<p>We have the first disk device driver (aac) out from under Giant
now, and in certain scenarios it gives improvements up to 20%.
The device driver API was pruned to reflect that NO_GEOM
compatibility is unnecessary, this resulted in approx 1000
lines less source code, the majority of which were removed
from the device drivers. The new API for cdevsw is a lot simpler
and hopefully less likely to confuse people. The ability to
automatically allocate a device major number has been introduced
and is already used by a handful of drivers. Checks introduced
with this facility has shown that the uniqueness of manually
allocated major numbers had already broken down.<p>
</p>Work continues on the statistics collection API and on a unified
API for manual configuration of GEOM nodes.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>Support for PAE and >4G ram on x86</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Jake</given>
<common>Burkholder</common>
</name>
<email>jake@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>Support for PAE is mostly complete, and has been checked into the
jake_pae branch. The approach that is being taken to add support for
PAE is to allow the pmap module to view the page table directory as 4
pages instead of 1, and to avoid using the 3rd level structure, the page
directory pointer table, as much as possible. Due to its small size, 32
bytes, the PDPT cannot be uniformly recursively mapped, and as such does
not provide a regular multi level structure like the page tables used by
the alpha or x86-64 architectures. What remains to be done for PAE
support is to develop an API for manipulating page table entries which
will allow idempotent 64 bit loads and stores to be used where
necessary.</p>
<p>Experimental support for >4G ram using PAE has been developed and
checked into the jake_pae_test branch in Perforce. This involved adding
a physical address type separate from virtual addresses, for use by the
vm system and bus code which needs to use physical addresses directly.
Initial testing has shown good results with device drivers that can dma
to 64 bit physical addresses.</p>
<p>Funding for this project is being provided by DARPA and Network
Associate Laboratories, and hardware support by
<a href="http://www.freebsdsystems.com">FreeBSD Systems</a>.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>FreeBSD Security Officer Team</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Jacques</given>
<common>Vidrine</common>
</name>
<email>nectar@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/security/"/>
</links>
<body>
<p>In the period from September 2002 through February 2003, the
FreeBSD Security Team email aliases saw 1297 messages, a much
smaller volume than over the summer (remember the Apache and OpenSSL
worms? 4.6.1 oops I mean 4.6.2-RELEASE?).</p>
<p>Also during this period: 95 items were added to the SO
issue-tracking database; 39 of these involved the FreeBSD base
system while the rest involved ports. 9 new Security Advisories
were published, 2 of which covered issues unique to FreeBSD.</p>
<p>In January, the SO published a new PGP key (ID 0xCA6CDFB2, found
on the FTP site and in the Handbook). This aligned the set of those
who possess the corresponding private key with the membership of the
security-officer alias published on the FreeBSD Security web site.
It also worked around an issue with the deprecated PGP key being
found corrupted on some public key servers.</p>
<p>In February, Mike Tancsa of Sentex donated two machines to
the Security Officer. These have been a great help already in
testing the security branches, preparing patches, and generating
updated binaries. Thank you very much, Mike!</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>FreeBSD GNOME Project</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Joe</given>
<common>Marcus</common>
</name>
<email>marcus@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
<person>
<name>
<given>Maxim</given>
<common>Sobolev</common>
</name>
<email>sobomax@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
<person>
<name>
<given>Adam</given>
<common>Weinberger</common>
</name>
<email>adamw@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome/">FreeBSD GNOME Project
Homepage.</url>
</links>
<body>
<p>FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE will continue in the tradition of
5.0-RELEASE, and include GNOME 2 as the default GNOME desktop.
This means that 4.8 will ship with GNOME 2.2.</p>
<p>Following on the heels of the recent GNOME 2.2 release, GNOME 2.3
snapshots are gearing up. The development schedule is
available from <a href="http://www.gnome.org/start/2.3/">
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.3/</a>. Ports will be
made available the same way they were for the 2.1 development
releases. Stay tuned to freebsd-gnome@ for more details.</p>
<p>We are currently in another ports freeze in preparation for
4.8-RELEASE. Following the freeze, a new bsd.gnome.mk will
be committed that effectively removes the USE_GNOMENG macro.
This new version will add support for GNOME 2 as well as
setup backward compatibility for ports that have not yet
been converted to the new GNOME infrastructure. People
interested in testing this new Mk file, can check out
the ``ports'' module following the instructions at
<a href="http://www.marcuscom.com:8080/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi">
http://www.marcuscom.com:8080/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi</a>.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>PowerPC Port</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Peter</given>
<common>Grehan</common>
</name>
<email>grehan@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>Work on PowerPC is progressing steadily. The system can now boot
multi-user from the net and disk. ATA-DMA is being integrated with
the ATAng code, and support for older G3 machines is being added.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>FreeBSD C99 & POSIX Conformance Project</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Mike</given>
<common>Barcroft</common>
</name>
<email>mike@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
<person>
<name>
<common>FreeBSD-Standards Mailing List</common>
</name>
<email>standards@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/c99/" />
<url href="http://people.FreeBSD.org/~schweikh/posix-utilities.html" />
</links>
<body>
<p>January and February were quiet months that saw with them the
addition of some C99 math functions and macros, which include:
fpclassify(), isfinite(), isgreater(), isgreaterequal(), isinf(),
isless(), islessequal(), islessgreater(), isnan(), isnormal(),
and signbit(). Additional C99 math library support is in the
works.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>Buffer Cache lockdown</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Jeff</given>
<common>Roberson</common>
</name>
<email>jeff@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>Most of the file system buffer cache has been reviewed and protected.
The vnode interlock was extended to cover some buffer flag fields so
that a separate interlock was not required. The global buffer queue
data structures were locked and counters were converted to atomic ops.
The BUF_*LOCK functions grew an interlock argument so that buffers
could be safely removed from the vnode clean and dirty lists. The
lockmgr lock is now required for all access to buf fields. This was
not strictly followed before because splbio provided the needed
protection.</p>
<p>There are a few areas of code that need to be protected and cleaned up
before giant can be pushed down. Most notably the background write
code is currently unsafe without giant. Also, many of the VM bits that
the buffer cache relies on are not safe. This work has been done with
the expectation that the VM and VFS subsystems will be giant free
soon.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>ULE Scheduler</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Jeff</given>
<common>Roberson</common>
</name>
<email>jeff@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>The ULE scheduler has been committed to the 5.0-CURRENT branch. Early
adopters and experimenters are welcome to try it and submit bug
reports. It has shown noticeable performance improvements over the old
scheduler under some workloads. There are currently problems with
nice fairness but otherwise the interactive performance is very good.
More work to improve the load balancing algorithm is required as well.
This should be ready for use by the general FreeBSD user base in the
next month or so.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>Read-ahead performance</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Jeff</given>
<common>Roberson</common>
</name>
<email>jeff@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>Some improvements have been made to the clustered read ahead code. They
allow for many more outstanding IO requests when an application does
sequential access. This has a larger impact on RAID systems than on
single disk systems. The maximum number of file system blocks that we
will read ahead is tunable via the 'vfs.read_max' sysctl. This
optimization has shown a 20% improvement in simple tests.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>Status Report for Newbus lockdown</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Warner</given>
<common>Losh</common>
</name>
<email>imp@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>Locking of the non-obj parts of newbus is nearing completion.
A single lock is used for the device tree. Minimal changes to
subr_bus have so far been necessary to make this work, however
some lock order issues remain. After this
work, it will no longer be necessary to hold Giant to call
device_* routines safely. kobj work is being done by others and
will likely require more extensive design work to make SMP
friendly.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>TCP congestion control</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Jeffrey</given>
<common>Hsu</common>
</name>
<email>hsu@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
</links>
<body>
<p>The objective of this effort is to improve the performance, stability,
and correctness of the BSD networking stack by adding support for
new standards and standards track proposals while maintaining compliance
with existing specifications. The upcoming 4.8 and 5.1 releases will
be the first ones using the new NewReno logic. Recently, we
implemented the Limited Transmit algorithm (RFC 3042) which benefits
connections with small congestion windows, as happens, for example,
on many short web connections. We also recently added support for larger
sized starting congestion windows as described in RFC 3390. This helps
short TCP connections as well as those with large round-trip delays,
such as those over satellite links.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>SMP locking for network stack</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Jeffrey</given>
<common>Hsu</common>
</name>
<email>hsu@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
</links>
<body>
<p>The list of subsystems locked up include IP, UDP, TCP,
ifaddr reference counting, syncache, the ifnet list, routing
radix trees, and ARP. These have already been committed into the tree.
In addition, SMP locking for raw IP, divert socket processing,
and Unix domain sockets have also recently been completed and tested.
Work is currently being done in some of the subsystems required
to make parallel networking processing SMP-safe.</p>
</body>
</project>
</report>
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