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Introduction:

At long last, FreeBSD 5.0 is here. Along with putting the final polish on the tree, FreeBSD developers somehow found the time to work on other things too. IA64 took some major steps towards working on the Itanium2 platform, an effort was started to convert all drivers to use busdma and ban vtophys(), hardware crypto support and DEVD hit the tree, NewReno was fixed and effort began on locking down the network layer of the kernel. Also high performance, modular scheduler started taking shape and will be a welcome addition to the kernel soon.

Looking forward, the focus will be on stabilizing and improving the performance of 5.0. The RELENG_5 (aka 5-STABLE) branch will be created once we've reached our goals in this area, so hopefully we will get there quickly. Meanwhile, preparations for the next release from the 4.x series, 4.8, will begin soon. Of course, the best way to get 5.x to stabilize os to install and run it!

Thanks,

Scott Long, Robert Watson

Bluetooth stack for FreeBSD (Netgraph implementation)

URL: http://www.geocities.com/m_evmenkin/
URL: http://bluez.sf.net
URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openobex

Contact: Maksim Yevmenkin <m_evmenkin@yahoo.com>

I'm very pleased to announce that all kernel modules and few userland tools made it to the FreeBSD source tree. Many thanks to Julian Elischer.

Unfortunately no big changes since the last report. Some minor problems have been discovered and patches are available on request. I will prepare all the patches and submit them to Julian for review.

OBEX server and client (based on OpenOBEX library) is almost complete. I'm currently doing interoperability testing. If anyone has hardware and time please contact me. The HCI security daemon has been implemented and tested with Sony Ericsson T68i cell phone and Windows stack. It is now possible to setup secure Bluetooth connections.

A few people have complained about RFCOMM daemon. These individuals want to use GPRS and Bluetooth enabled cell phone to access Internet. If you have this problem please contact me for possible workaround. My next goal is to get robust RFCOMM implementation to address all these issues.

busdma driver conversion project

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

Contact: Maxime Henrion <mux@FreeBSD.org>

This project has been coming along pretty well. The amd(4) and xl(4) drivers have now been converted to use the busdma API, sparc64 got the bus_dmamap_load_mbuf() and bus_dmamap_load_uio() functions, and the gem(4) and hme(4) drivers have been updated to use bus_dmamap_load_mbuf() instead of bus_dmamap_load().

A lot more still needs to be done, as shown on the project's page. A fair number of conversions are on their way though, and we can expect a fair number of drivers to be converted soon, thanks to all the developers who are working on this project.

DEVD

Contact: Warner Losh <imp@FreeBSD.org>

Devd has been integrated into FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE. The integrated code supports a range of configuration options. The config files are fully parsed now and their actions are performed.

Future work in this area is likely to be limited to improving the devctl interface. /dev/devctl likely will be a cloneable device in future versions. Individual device control via devctl is also planned.

Donations Team Status Report

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/donations/
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/donations/wantlist.html
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/donations/donors.html

Contact: Michael Lucas <donations@FreeBSD.org>

The Donations project expedited several dozen donations during 2002, and was able to place most of what was offered. We still are in dire need of SMP and Sparc systems. You can see information on our needs and donations that have been handled by the team on the donations web page.

We are relying increasingly upon the developer wantlist to place items offered to the Project, and using the commit statistics to help place items. As such, active committers who ask for what they want beforehand have a decent chance of getting it. Less active committers, and committers who do not ask for what they want, will be lower in our priorities but will not be excluded.

We are in the process of streamlining the tax deduction process for donations, and hope to have news on that shortly. We are also always working to accelerate and reduce our internal processes, to get the most equipment in the hands of the most people as quickly as possible.

I especially want to thank David O'Brien and Tom Rhodes for stepping up and making the team far more successful. Also, the FreeBSD Foundation has been quite helpful in handling tax-deductible contributions.

Fast IPsec Status

Contact: Sam Leffler <sam@FreeBSD.org>

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

This work will be part of the 5.0 release. Performance has been improved due to work on the crypto subsystem.

FFS volume label support

URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~gordon/patches/volume.diff

Contact: Gordon Tetlow <gordon@FreeBSD.org>

The goal of the project is to use a small amount of space in the FFS superblock to store a volume label of the user's choice. A GEOM module will then expose the volume labels into a namespace in devfs. The idea is to make it easier to manage filesystems across disk swaps and movement from system to system.

At this point, everything pretty much works. I've submitted parts of the patch to respective subsystem maintainers for review. There are some issues with namespace collision that I haven't addressed yet, but the basic functionality is there

FreeBSD C99 & POSIX Conformance Project

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/c99/
URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~schweikh/posix-utilities.html

Contact: Mike Barcroft <mike@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: FreeBSD-Standards Mailing List <standards@FreeBSD.org>

The POSIX Utility Conformance in FreeBSD list (link above) has been updated to reflect current reality. Not much work remains to complete base utility conformance.

On the API front, grantpt(), posix_openpt(), unlockpt(), wordexp(), and wordfree() were implemented. The header <wordexp.h> was added.

There are currently about 40 unassigned tasks on our project's status board ranging from documentation, utilities, to kernel hacking. We would encourage any developers looking for something to work on to check out the status board and see if anything interests them.

FreeBSD GNOME Project

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

Contact: Joe Marcus <marcus@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Maxim Sobolev <sobomax@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Adam Weinberger <adamw@FreeBSD.org>

Since the ports tree has been frozen for most of this reporting period, there have not been too many GNOME updates going into the official CVS tree. However, development has not stopped. GNOME 2.2 is nearing completion, and quite a few FreeBSD users have stepped up to test the GNOME 2.1 port sources from the MarcusCom CVS repository. If anyone else is interested, follow the instructions on the aforementioned cvsweb URL, and checkout the "ports" module.

The upcoming FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE will be the first release to have the GNOME 2.0 desktop as the default GNOME desktop choice. During the previously mentioned ports freeze, all the GNOME 2 ports were fixed up so that they build and package on both i386 and Alpha platforms. Alas, the one port that will not make the cut for Alpha is Mozilla. There are still problems with the xpcom code, but work is ongoing to get a working Alpha port.

Finally, the FreeBSD Mono (an OpenSource C# runtime) port has also received some new life. Mono has been updated to 0.17 (the latest released version), and Juli Mallett has ported gtk-sharp (GTK+ bindings for C#).

FreeBSD Package Cluster work

URL: http://bento.FreeBSD.org/

Contact: Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org>

The 3 FreeBSD package clusters (i386, alpha, sparc64) have been unified to run from the same master machine, instead of using 3 separate masters. This has freed up some machine resources to use as additional client machine, as well as simplifying administrative overheads. Build logs for all 3 architectures can now be found on the http://bento.FreeBSD.org webpage. The sparc64 package cluster now has 3 build machines (an u5 and two u10s), and an ia64 cluster is about to be created.

Package builds now keep track of how many sequential times a port has failed to build (html summaries are available on the bento website). This allows tracking of ports which have suddenly become broken (e.g. due to a bad upgrade, or due to changes in the FreeBSD source tree), and in the future will be used to send out notifications to port maintainers when their port fails to build 5 times in a row. This feature is currently experimental, and further code changes will be needed to stabilize it.

FreeBSD Release Engineering

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

Contact: Scott Long <re@FreeBSD.org>

November and December were especially busy for the release engineering team. Scott Long joined the team to help with secretary and communications tasks while Brian Somers bowed out to focus on other projects.

FreeBSD 5.0-DP2 was released in November after much delay and anticipation, and marked the final milestone needed for 5.0 to become a reality. Shortly after that, we imposed a code freeze on the HEAD branch of CVS and released 5.0-RC1. Creation of the RELENG_5_0 branch came next, followed by the release of 5.0-RC2 from this branch. At this point, enough critical problems still existed that we scheduled an RC3 release for the new year, and pushed the final 5.0-RELEASE date to mid-January. By the time this is published, FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE should be a reality.

For the time being, there will not be a RELENG_5 (aka 5-STABLE) branch. FreeBSD 4.x releases will continue, with 4.8 being scheduled for March 2003. Release in the 4.x series will be lead by Murray Stokely, and releases in the 5.x series will be lead by Scott Long. Once HEAD has reached acceptable performance and stability goals, the RELENG_5 branch will be created and HEAD will move towards 6.0 development. We hope to reach this with the 5.1 release this spring.

FreeBSD/ia64 Status

URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~peter/ia64.diff
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/platforms/ia64/

Contact: Peter Wemm <peter@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Marcel Moolenaar <marcel@FreeBSD.org>

The ia64 port is up and running on the new Itanium2 based hp machines thanks to a lot of hard work by Marcel Moolenaar. So far we are running on the hp rx2600 as these were the machines graciously donated by Hewlett-Packard and Intel. We had a prototype Intel Tiger4 system for a while, but we had to return the machine and we do not know if it currently runs. Most of the changes necessary to run these are sitting in the perforce tree and are not in the -current or RELENG_5 cvs tree. As a result, the cvs derived builds (-current and the 5.0-RC series and presumably 5.0-RELEASE) are only usable on obsolete Itanium1 systems.

Lots of other stability and functionality fixes have been made over the last few months, including initial libc_r support. The OS appears to be stable enough for sustained workloads - it is building packages now, for example. We still do not have gdb support, even for reading core files.

French FreeBSD Documentation Project

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

Contact: Sebastien Gioria <gioria@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Marc Fonvieille <blackend@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Stéphane Legrand <stephane@FreeBSD.org>

Most of the articles are translated too. Marc is still translating the handbook, 60% is currently translated. Stéphane has began the integration of our French localization web site in the US CVS Tree. Sébastien is still maintaining the Release Notes.

We launched a new site, www.FreeBSD-fr.info, consisting in a French Daemon News like site. Netasq have donated our new server; we will install it in a new hosting provider in the few next weeks. One of the big job now is the translation of the FAQ, and the big project will be the manual pages.

Hardware Crypto Support Status

Contact: Sam Leffler <sam@FreeBSD.org>

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

This work will be part of the 5.0 release and has been committed to the -stable source tree for inclusion in the 4.8 release.

Recent work has focused on improving performance. System statistics are now maintained and an optional profiling facility was added for analyzing performance. Using this facility the overhead for using the crypto API has been significantly reduced.

The ubsec (Broadcom) driver was changed to significantly improve performance under load. In addition several memory leaks were fixed in the driver and the public key support was enabled for use.

Upcoming work will focus on load-balancing requests across multiple crypto devices and integrating OpenSSL 0.9.7 which will automatically enable application use of crypto hardware.

jpman project

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

Contact: Kazuo Horikawa <horikawa@FreeBSD.org>

We have been updating our Japanese translated manual pages to RELENG_5 based. All existing entries have been updated, but 15 exceptions are not, most of which require massive update. We will also need to add translations which did not exist on RELENG_4.

KGI/FreeBSD Status Report

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/~nsouch/ggiport.html
URL: http://www.kgi-project.org

Contact: Nicholas Souchu <nsouch@FreeBSD.org>

KGI (Kernel Graphic Interface) is a kernel infrastructure providing user applications with means to access hardware graphic resources (dma, irqs, mmio). KGI is already available under Linux as a separate standalone project. The KGI/FreeBSD project aims at integrating KGI in the FreeBSD kernel.

KGI/FreeBSD has been recently donated 2 PCI graphic cards (Matrox Millennium II and a coming Mach64) and other have been proposed. Please see the FreeBSD web pages for details. Thanks to donation@ for organizing and promoting donations. Thanks to the donators for their contribution to KGI/FreeBSD.

KGI/FreeBSD progressed fine the last months. Most of the VM issues for mapping HW resources in user space have been addressed and a first attempt of coding was made. This prototyping raised some API compatibility problems with the current Linux implementation and was discussed heavily on the kgi devel lists. Ask if you're interested in such issues, I'll be pleased to share them.

Most of coding is now done. Let's start debugging!

SMP aware scheduler

Contact: Jeff Roberson <jeff@FreeBSD.org>

A new scheduler will be available as an optional component along side the current scheduler in the 5.1 release. It has been designed to work well with KSE and SMP. Some ideas have been borrowed from solaris and linux along with many novel approaches. It has O(1) performance with regard to the number of processes in the system. It also has cpu affinity which should provide a speed boost for many applications.

The scheduler has a few loose ends and lots of tuning before it is production quality although it is quite stable. Please see the post to arch and subsequent discussion for more details.

SMP locking for network stack

Contact: Jeffrey Hsu <hsu@FreeBSD.org>

Work is ongoing to continue to lock up the network stack. Recently, the focus has been on the IP stack. The plan there involves a series of inter-related pieces to lock up the ifaddr ref count, the inet list, the ifaddr uses, the ARP code, the routing tree, and the routing entries. We are over 3/5 of the way done down this path.

In addition to TCP and UDP, the other networking protocols such as raw IP, IPv6, AppleTalk, and XNS need to be locked up. Around 1/4 these remaining protocols have been locked and will be committed after the IP stack is locked.

The protocol independent socket layer needs to be locked and operating correctly with the protocol dependent locks. This part is mostly done save for much needed testing and code cleanup.

Finally, a pass will be need to be made to lock up the devices drivers and various statistics counters.

TCP congestion control

Contact: Jeffrey Hsu <hsu@FreeBSD.org>

This effort fixes some outstanding problems in our TCP stack with regard to congestion control. The first item is to fix our NewReno implementation. Following that, the next urgent correction is to fix a problem involving window updates and dupack counts. When that stabilizes, we will then change the recovery code to make use of SACK information. Eventually, this project will update the BSD stack to add Limited Transmit and other new internet standards and standards-track improvements.

TrustedBSD Project: Access Control Lists

URL: http://www.TrustedBSD.org/

Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: TrustedBSD Discussion List <trustedbsd-discuss@TrustedBSD.org>

Largely bug-fixing and userland application tweaks; new interfaces were added to manipulate ACLs on extended attributes; bugs were fixed in ls relating to ACL flagging. Patches to teach cp, mv, gzip, bzip, and other apps about ACL preservation are in testing and review. tunefs flags were added to ease configuration of ACLs, especially on UFS2 file systems.

Possible changes to make use of Linux/Solaris umask semantics are under consideration: right now we implement verbatim POSIX.1e/IRIX merging of the umask, ACL mask, and requested creation mode during file, device, fifo, and directory creation. Solaris and the most recent Linux patches ignore the umask in the context of a default ACL; this requires some rearrangement of umask handling in our VFS, although the results would be quite useful. We're exploring how to do this in a low impact way.

TrustedBSD Project: MAC Framework

URL: http://www.TrustedBSD.org/

Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: TrustedBSD Discussion List <trustedbsd-discuss@TrustedBSD.org>

Framework changes:

Instrument KLD system calls (module and kld load, unload, stat) Instrument NFSd system call. Instrument swapoff(2). Instrument per-architecture privileged parts of sysarch(). Make use of condition variables to allow callers to wait for the framework to "unbusy" when loading/unloading policies, rather than returning EBUSY. Store mount pointer in devfs_mount structure for use by policies. Improve handling of labels in loopback interface "re-align" packet copy case. Provide full paths on devfs object creations to help policies label them properly (not merged). Experimentation with moving MAC labels into m_tags (not merged). NFS server now uses real ucreds, not hacked up ucreds, meaning we can start laying the groundwork for enforcement on NFS operations. (not merged)

Policy changes

LOMAC: mac_lomac replaces lomac (LOMAC now uses the MAC Framework), SEBSD: Improved support for devfs labeling based on SELinux genfs. Handling of hard link checks. Support export of process transition information for login and others using sysctl. Login now prompts for roles. Allow policy reload. TTY labeling. Locking adaptation from Linux. Many, many policy adaptations and fixes. We can now boot in enforcing mode! mac_bsdextended: fix a bug in which VAPPEND wasn't mapped to VWRITE, so opens with the O_APPEND bug failed improperly.

Userland changes

setfmac(8) now supports a setfsmac(8) execution mode, which accepts initial labeling specification files. Supports an SELinux compatibility mode so it can accept SELinux label specfiles using the SEBSD module. sendmail(8) now sets user labels as part of the context switch for mail delivery.

Documentation changes

Man page updates for MAC command line tools, modules, admin hints, etc. Updates to the FreeBSD Developer's Handbook chapter on MAC policies and entry points. MAC section in FreeBSD Handbook.

Wireless Networking Status

Contact: Sam Leffler <sam@FreeBSD.org>

The goal of this project is to improve the wireless networking support in the system. By the time of this report the 802.11 link layer code should be committed. A version of the wi driver that uses this code should be committed shortly. Conversion of other drivers is planned as are drivers for new devices.

Support for 802.1x/EAP is the next planned milestone (both as a supplicant and authenticator).

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