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FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report

Introduction

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!

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!

Projects

Documentation

Kernel

Architectures

Ports

Vendor / 3rd Party Software

Miscellaneous

ALTQ

URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~mlaier/ALTQ_driver/
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=altq&manpath=FreeBSD+6.0-current&format=html

Contact: Max Laier <mlaier@FreeBSD.org>

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.

Open tasks:

  1. Convert/test more NIC drivers.
  2. Write documentation.

ATA Driver Status Report

Contact: Søren Schmidt <sos@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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

There is also support coming for a few new chipsets as usual.

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

Atheros Wireless Support

Contact: Sam Leffler <sam@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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.

Work is actively going on to add Atheros' SuperG capabilities.

Common Address Redundancy Protocol - CARP

URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~mlaier/CARP/

Contact: Max Laier <mlaier@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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.

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.

Open tasks:

  1. Please test and send feedback!
  2. Write documentation.
  3. Import newest OpenBSD changes.

CPU Cache Prefetching

URL: http://www.nrg4u.com/freebsd/tcp_reass+prefetch-20041216.patch

Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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.

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.

The final patch will include documentation and a guide to evaluate and assess the use of CPU cache prefetch instructions in the kernel.

Cronyx Adapters Drivers

URL: http://www.cronyx.ru/software

Contact: Roman Kurakin <rik@FreeBSD.org>

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.

Open tasks:

  1. Now all these drivers and sppp(4) are using recursive lock. So the first task is to make these locks non recursive.
  2. Second task is to check/make drivers workable in netgraph/async mode.
  3. I think about ability to switch between sppp/netgraph mode at runtime. For now you should recompile module/kernel to change mode.

Dingo Monthly Report

URL: http://www.freebsd.org/projects/dingo/index.html

Contact: George Neville-Neil <gnn@FreeBSD.org>

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.

EuroBSDCon 2004 submitted papers are online

URL: http://www.eurobsdcon2004.de/papers.html

Contact: Patrick M. Hausen <hausen@punkt.de>

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.

EuroBSDCon 2005 - Basel / Switzerland

URL: http://www.eurobsdcon.org/

Contact: Max Laier <mlaier@FreeBSD.org>

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.

FreeBSD GNOME Project Status Report

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

Contact: Joe Marcus <marcus@FreeBSD.org>

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.

The GNOME Tinderbox is still cranking away, and producing packages for both the stable and development releases of GNOME for all supported i386 versions of FreeBSD.

Thanks to Michael Johnson, the FreeBSD GNOME team has recently been given permission to use the Firefox and Thunderbird names , 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.

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.

Open tasks:

  1. Need help porting HAL to FreeBSD (contact marcus@FreeBSD.org )
  2. Need help porting libburn to FreeBSD (contact bland@FreeBSD.org )
  3. Anyone interested in reviving Gnome Meeting should contact kwm@FreeBSD.org

FreeBSD on Xen

URL: http://www.fsmware.com/xenofreebsd/
URL: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/

Contact: Kip Macy <kmacy@fsmware.com>

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.

Open tasks:

  1. FreeBSD support for running in Domain 0 (host)
  2. FreeBSD support for VM checkpoint and migration

FreeBSD profile.sh

URL: https://projects.fsck.ch/profile

Contact: Tobias Roth <ports@fsck.ch>

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.

Proper integration into the acpi/apm and several small improvements are underway. More testing with different system configurations is needed.

FreeBSD Release Engineering

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

Contact: Scott Long <re@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

FreeBSD Security Officer and Security Team

URL: http://www.freebsd.org/security/
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/security/charter.html
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/staff-listing.html#STAFF-SECTEAM
URL: http://vuxml.freebsd.org/
URL: http://cvsweb.freebsd.org/ports/security/portaudit/

Contact: Jacques Vidrine <nectar@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Security Officer <security-officer@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Security Team <security-team@FreeBSD.org>

During 2004, there were several notable changes and events related to the FreeBSD Security Officer role and Security Team.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

17 Security Advisories were published in 2004, covering 8 issues specific to FreeBSD and 9 general issues.

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.

FreeBSD Source Repository Mirror for svn/svk

URL: http://svn.clkao.org/svnweb/freebsd/
URL: http://svn.clkao.org/svnweb/freebsd/rss/fromcvs/branches/RELENG_5/
URL: http://svn.clkao.org/svnweb/freebsd/rss/fromcvs/trunk/
URL: http://svk.elixus.org/

Contact: Kao Chia-liang <clkao@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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.

FreeBSD/arm status report

URL: http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/arm

Contact: Olivier Houchard <cognet@FreeBSD.org>

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.

FreeSBIE Status Report

URL: http://www.FreeSBIE.org
URL: http://liste.gufi.org/mailman/listinfo/freesbie

Contact: FreeSBIE Staff <staff@FreeSBIE.org>

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.

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.

For a complete list of the included software, please consult: http://www.freesbie.org/doc/1.1/FreeSBIE-1.1-i386.pkg_info.txt

At EuroBSDCon 2004 in Karlsruhe, Germany, people from the FreeSBIE staff gave a talk, deeping into FreeSBIE scripts implementation and use.

Open tasks:

  1. Translating website and documentation

Funded FreeBSD kernel development

URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2004-December/000971.html

Contact: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@FreeBSD.org>

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.

Hardware Notes

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.3R/hardware-i386.html
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/CURRENT/hardware/i386/article.html

Contact: Simon L. Nielsen <simon@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Christian Brueffer <brueffer@FreeBSD.org>

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.

i386 Interrupt Code & PCI Interrupt Routing

Contact: John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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.

ifconfig Overhaul

Contact: Sam Leffler <sam@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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.

Improved Multibyte/Wide Character Support

Contact: Tim Robbins <tjr@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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.

Work is progressing on implementations of the POSIX iconv and localedef interfaces for potential inclusion into the FreeBSD 6.0 release.

kgi4BSD

URL: http://www.freebsd.org/~nsouch/kgi4BSD
URL: http://wiki.daemon.li/moin.cgi/KGI

Contact: Nicholas Souchu <nsouch@FreeBSD.org>

The project was very quiet (but still alive!) and mostly dedicated to testing by volunteers. New documentation at http://wiki.daemon.li/moin.cgi/KGI .

Open tasks:

  1. Help improving the documentation

Layer 2 PFIL_HOOKS

URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-all/2004-August/079811.html

Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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.

Low-overhead performance monitoring for FreeBSD

URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~jkoshy/projects/perf-measurement/

Contact: Joseph Koshy <jkoshy@FreeBSD.org>

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.

Move ARP out of routing table

URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2004-April/026380.html

Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Qing Li <qingli@speackeasy.net>

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.

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.

Network Stack Locking

URL: http://www.freebsd.org/projects/netperf/
URL: http://www.watson.org/~robert/freebsd/netperf/

Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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:

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; netatalk cleanup and locking merged to FreeBSD CVS ; locking for many netgraph nodes merged to FreeBSD CVS ; 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); IFF_NEEDSGIANT interface flag added to support compatibility operation for unlocked device drivers (merged) ; merged accept filter locking to FreeBSD CVS; documented uidinfo locking strategy (merged); Giant use reduced in fcntl().

August, 2004: UMA KTR tracing (merged); UDP broadcast receive locking optimizations (merged); TCP locking cleanup and documentation; IPv6 inpcb locking, cleanup, and structural improvements; IPv6 inpcb locking merged to FreeBSD CVS ; KTR for systems calls added to i386; substantial optimizations of entropy harvesting synchronization (merged) ; callout(9) sampling converted to KTR (merged); inpcb socket option locking (merged); GIANT_REQUIRED removed from netatalk in FreeBSD CVS; merged ADAPTIVE_GIANT to FreeBSD CVS, resulting in substantial performance improvements in many kernel IPC-intensive benchmarks ; 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; MP_WATCHDOG, a facility to dedicate additional HTT logical CPUs as watchdog CPUs developed (merged) ; annotation of UNIX domain socket locking merged to FreeBSD CVS; kqueue locking developed and merged by John-Mark Gurney ; 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); 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) ; additional locking optimizations for entropy code (merged); Giant disabled by default in the netperf development branch (merged).

September, 2004: bugs fixed relating to Netgraph's use of the kernel linker while not holding Giant (merged); merged removal of Giant over the network stack by default to FreeBSD CVS ; 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).

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.

November, 2004: cleanup of UDPv6 static global variables (merged); FreeBSD 5.3 released! First release of FreeBSD with an MPSAFE and Giant-free network stack as the default configuration! ; additional TCP locking documentation and cleanup (merged); 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) ; an accept bug is fixed (merged) experimental network polling locking introduced; substantial measurement and optimization of mutex and locking primitives (merged) ; 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 ; 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); 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) ; 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.

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); IPX/SPX marked MPSAFE (merged) ; IP socket options locking merged to FreeBSD; SPPP locked by Roman Kurakin (merged); UNIX domain socket locking fixes by Alan Cox (merged).

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.

New DHCP Client

Contact: Sam Leffler <sam@FreeBSD.org>

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.

Incorporation into the base system is waiting on a volunteer who will shepherd the changes into the tree and deal with bugs.

New Modular Input Device Layer

URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-src/2004-November/035462.html

Contact: Philip Paeps <philip@FreeBSD.org>

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:

  • Easier development of new input device drivers.
  • Support for concurrent use of multiple input devices, particularly the hot-pluggable kind.

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.

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.

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.

OpenBSD packet filter - pf

URL: http://pf4freebsd.love2party.net/

Contact: Max Laier <mlaier@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Daniel Hartmeier <dhartmei@FreeBSD.org>

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:

  • Possible NULL-deref with user/group rules.
  • Crash with binat on dynamic interfaces.
  • Silent dropping of IPv6 packets with option headers.
  • Endless loops with `static-port' rules.

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.

The Handbook's Firewall section was modified to mention PF as an alternative to IPFW and IPF.

Open tasks:

  1. Write more documentation/articles.
  2. Write an IPFilter to PF migration guide/tool.

OpenOffice.org port status

URL: http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/
URL: http://ooomisc.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/ooomisc/FreeBSD/
URL: http://sourceforge.jp/projects/waooo/files/

Contact: Maho Nakata <maho@FreeBSD.org>

OpenOffice.org 2.0 status

OpenOffice.org 1.1 status General
  • 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)
  • 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, http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/libexec/rtld-elf/rtld.c.diff?r1=1.91&r2=1.92&f=h .
  • 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. http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/benchmark.html . 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.
  • SDK tutorial is available at http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/sdk.html
  • Still implementation test and quality assurance have not yet been done. Even systematic documentations are not yet available for FreeBSD. http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/testing.html and http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/QA.html for details.
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.

Ports Collection

URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
URL: http://portsmon.firepipe.net/index.html

Contact: Mark Linimon <linimon_at_FreeBSD_dot_org>
Contact: Erwin Lansing <erwin@FreeBSD.org>

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!

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.

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. BROKEN , IGNORE , DEPRECATED , USE_GCC , and and others.

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.

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 distfile survey .

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.

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.

Ports QA reminders -- portmgr team members are now sending out periodic email about problems in the Ports Collection. The current set includes:

  • a public list of all ports to be removed due to security problems, build failures, or general obsolescence, unless they are fixed first
  • private email to all maintainers of the affected ports (including ports dependent on the above)
  • private email to all maintainers of ports that are marked BROKEN and/or FORBIDDEN
  • 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)
  • public email about port commits that break building of INDEX
  • public email about port commits that send the revision metadata backwards (and thus confuse tools like portupgrade)
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.

Finally, it should be noted that we passed yet another milestone and the Ports Collection now contains over 12,000 ports.

Open tasks:

  1. 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.
  2. 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." Here is the entire list ; the individual bars are clickable. This will become more and more important now that the amd64 port has been promoted to tier-1 status.
  3. 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 pointyhat ) and this will remain a focus area.

PowerPC Port

URL: http://www.freebsd.org/~grehan/miniinst.iso
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/~grehan/miniinst.txt

Contact: Peter Grehan <grehan@FreeBSD.org>

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.

As usual, lots of help is needed. This is a great project for those who want to delve deeply into FreeBSD kernel internals.

Project Frenzy (FreeBSD-based Live-CD)

URL: http://frenzy.osdn.org.ua/
URL: http://frenzy.osdn.org.ua/eng/

Contact: Sergei Mozhaisky <technix@ukrpost.com.ua>

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.

Tasks for next release: script for installation to HDD; unified system configuration tool; updating of software collection.

Secure Updating

URL: http://www.daemonology.net/portsnap/
URL: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-update/

Contact: Colin Percival <cperciva@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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.

At some point in the future I intend to bring both of these utilities into the FreeBSD base system, probably starting with portsnap.

SMPng Status Report

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

Contact: John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: <smp@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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().

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.

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.

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.

Sync Protocols (SPPP and NETGRAPH)

URL: http://www.freebsd.org/~rik

Contact: Roman Kurakin <rik@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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

TCP Cleanup and Optimizations

URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/tcpcleanup.html

Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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.

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.

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.

Open tasks:

  1. Funding for two man-month equivalents of my time.
  2. If you want or intend to sponsor US$1k or more please contact me in advance already now.

TCP Reassembly Rewrite and Optimization

URL: http://www.nrg4u.com/freebsd/tcp_reass-20041213.patch
URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2004-December/005918.html

Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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.

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.

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.

The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Team

URL: http://www.evilcoder.org/content/section/6/39/
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/nl/books/handbook/
URL: http://www.evilcoder.org/freebsd_html/

Contact: Remko Lodder <Remko@FreeBSD.org>

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.

Open tasks:

  1. Translating the Handbook
  2. Checking the grammar of the Dutch Handbook
  3. Translate the rest of the documentation

TTCPv2: Transactional TCP version 2

URL: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-all/2004-November/089939.html

Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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.

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.

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.

Update of the Linux userland infrastructure

Contact: Alexander Leidinger <netchild@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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.

Wiki with new software

URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/

Contact: Josef El-Rayes <josef@FreeBSD.org>

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 http://wiki2.daemon.li

Open tasks:

  1. Move content from old wiki to new one.

Wireless Networking Support

Contact: Sam Leffler <sam@FreeBSD.org>

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.

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.

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.

Work is actively going on to add Atheros' SuperG capabilities, WDS, and for multi-bss support (ssid and/or bssid) on a single device.

Open tasks:

  1. Drivers other than ath need updates to support the new security protocols
  2. hostapd needs work to support the IAPP and 802.11i preauthentication protocols (these are simple conversion of existing Linux code)
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