Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 21:15:20 -0700 From: Scott Long <scott_long@btc.adaptec.com> To: current@freebsd.org Subject: November-December 2002 FreeBSD Bi-Monthly Status report Message-ID: <3E30BDD8.80806@btc.adaptec.com>
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November-December 2002 Status Report
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 are likely to be limited to imporving 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 egineering
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 useable 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/hand
book/
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
Dameon 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, project 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 seperate
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
Millenium 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 commited 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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