FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Q3/2011
Introduction
This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between July and September
2011. It is the third of the four reports planned for 2011. This
quarter was mainly devoted to polishing the bits for the next major
version of FreeBSD, 9.0, which is to be released by then end of this
year.
Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! This report
contains 28 entries and we hope you enjoy reading it.
Please note that the deadline for submissions covering the period
between October and December 2011 is January 15th, 2012.
__________________________________________________________________
Projects
* GELI status update
* HAST (Highly Available Storage) status update
* pfSense
* Tool for providing FreeBSD VM Images
* ZFSguru
* ZRouter.org project -- a FreeBSD-based firmware for embedded
devices
FreeBSD Team Reports
* Ports Collection
* The FreeBSD Foundation
* The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
Network Infrastructure
* 802.11n / atheros
* DIstributed Firewall and Flow-shaper Using Statistical Evidence
(DIFFUSE)
* Ethernet Switch Framework
Kernel
* The new CARP
* VM layer for allocations larger than a page
Documentation
* Doc sprint on IRC, September 5, 2011
* The FreeBSD German Documentation Project Status Report
* The FreeBSD Greek Documentation Project
* The FreeBSD Japanese Documentation Project
Architectures
* FreeBSD/arm on Marvell Armada XP
* FreeBSD/powerpc on AppliedMicro APM86290
Ports
* FreeBSD Haskell Ports
* KDE-FreeBSD
* OpenAFS port
* Portmaster
Miscellaneous
* bsd_day(2011)
* EuroBSDcon 2011
* FreeBSD Developer Summit, Maarssen
Google Summer of Code
* Multibyte Encoding Support in Nvi
__________________________________________________________________
802.11n / atheros
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/AdrianChadd/AtherosTxAgg
Contact: Adrian Chadd
AR5416, AR9160, and AR9280 functions in both station and hostap mode.
Performance is good.
Software retry of frames is implemented. Aggregation is implemented.
BAR TX is not yet handled. HT protection is not implemented; neither is
MIMO powersave.
Open tasks:
1. BAR TX
2. MIMO powersave
3. Correct handling of flushing TX queues during interface
reset/reconfigure
4. Correct handling of 20<->20/40mhz transitions (without dropping
frames)
5. More intelligent rate control
__________________________________________________________________
bsd_day(2011)
URL: http://bsdday.eu/2011
Contact: Martin Matuska
Contact: Gabor Pali
The purpose of this one-day event was to gather Central European
developers of today's open-source BSD systems to popularize their work
and their organizations, and to meet each other in the real life. We
wanted to motivate potential future developers and users, especially
undergraduate university students, to work with BSD systems.
This year's BSD-Day was be held in Bratislava, Slovakia at Slovak
University of Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and
Information Technology on November 5, 2011.
__________________________________________________________________
DIstributed Firewall and Flow-shaper Using Statistical Evidence (DIFFUSE)
URL: http://caia.swin.edu.au/freebsd/diffused/
URL:
http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/project%20announcements.shtml#diffuse
URL: http://caia.swin.edu.au/urp/diffuse/
URL: http://caia.swin.edu.au/urp/diffuse/downloads.html
Contact: Sebastian Zander <szander@swin.edu.au>
Contact: Lawrence Stewart <szander@swin.edu.au>
Contact: Grenville Armitage <garmitage@swin.edu.au>
DIFFUSE enables FreeBSD's IPFW firewall subsystem to classify IP
traffic based on statistical traffic properties.
With DIFFUSE, IPFW computes statistics (such as packet lengths or
inter-packet time intervals) for observed flows, and uses ML (machine
learning) to classify flows into classes. In addition to traditional
packet inspection rules, IPFW rules may now also be expressed in terms
of traffic statistics or classes identified by ML classification. This
can be helpful when direct packet inspection is problematic (perhaps
for administrative reasons, or because port numbers do not reliably
identify applications).
DIFFUSE also enables one instance of IPFW to send flow information and
classes to other IPFW instances, which then can act on such traffic
(e.g. prioritise, accept, deny, etc.) according to its class. This
allows for distributed architectures, where classification at one
location in your network is used to control fire-walling or
rate-shaping actions at other locations.
The FreeBSD Foundation has funded the Centre for Advanced Internet
Architectures at Swinburne University of Technology to undertake the
DIFFUSED (DIFFUSE for freebsD) project, which aims to refine our
publicly released DIFFUSE prototype and integrate all components of the
architecture into FreeBSD.
The project is progressing well in the diffused_head project branch of
the FreeBSD Subversion repository, and is due to be completed by the
end of October 2011. Once the project is completed, the code will be
merged from the project branch into the head branch. An MFC of the code
to 8.x and 9.x should be possible after an appropriate amount of soak
time has elapsed.
__________________________________________________________________
Doc sprint on IRC, September 5, 2011
URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~bcr/doc/sprints/20110905-final.html
Contact: Benedict Reuschling
Contact: Dru Lavigne
On September 5, we held another documentation sprint on IRC channel
#bsddocs to discuss various issues that are important for the whole
FreeBSD documentation community. We talked about the status of the
planned documentation repository conversion to SVN and the status of
the XML docbook conversion. At that point in time, we did not have any
documentation regarding the new bsdinstaller in the upcoming release,
which would have been very bad for users that were trying to install
the release. Luckily, a small team formed quickly to start working on a
new bsdinstall chapter from scratch using a separate google code
repository that gjb@ had set up.
Some of the topics we discussed were moved forward and their status was
revisited at EuroBSDcon's devsummit documentation session. Before the
end of the conference, we had a new bsdinstall chapter committed into
the official documentation tree, thanks to the efforts put into the new
chapter by Gavin Atkinson, Warren Block, and Glen Barber. Garrett
Cooper provided valuable instructions on the various installation
methods that are possible with the new bsdinstaller. Thanks to all who
helped make this a reality.
It is nice to see that the things we talked about at the documentation
sprint developed further, which is why we are trying to do these
sprints in regular intervalls.
Open tasks:
1. Plan the next documentation sprint
2. Continue working on the issues that are still open like the
conversion of the repository to SVN
__________________________________________________________________
Ethernet Switch Framework
URL:
http://zrouter.org/hg/FreeBSD/head/file/default/head/sys/dev/switch
Contact: Aleksandr Rybalko
Many embedded devices have an Ethernet switch on board; such switches
are even embedded on some multiport NICs. This embedded switch
framework is designed to give users the ability to easily control basic
features present in managed switches, such as VLANs, QoS, port
mirroring, etc. Currently we are able to control only VLANs on:
* Atheros AR8216/AR8316 (standalone and embedded in AR724X)
* Broadcom BCM5325 switch family (also embedded in BCM5354 SoC)
* Ralink RT3050F/RT3052F internal switch
* Realtek RTL8309
* IP175X
* IP178X
Open tasks:
1. Fix AR8216/AR8316 driver
2. Fix BCM5325 driver, not all ports pass data
3. Add tick handler for RTL8309 to automatically unisolate ports
4. Unify MIB statistic counters access
5. Add mii read/write bus methods
6. Implement pseudo interfaces for switch PHYs
__________________________________________________________________
EuroBSDcon 2011
URL: http://2011.eurobsdcon.org/
Contact: EuroBSDcon Organizers <oc-2011@eurobsdcon.org>
Contact: Gabor Pali
The 10th anniversary European BSD Conference was organized in Maarssen,
The Netherlands with more than 250 registered visitors. There were many
interesting tutorials, including introductions to DTrace and working
with Netgraph. It featured 26 high-quality talks and 2 keynote speakers
on various topics related to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or even MINIX:
OpenBSD PF, NetBSD NPF, IPv6 support in FreeBSD, virtualization in the
BSD domain, recent developments in OpenSSH, exploration of the recent
FreeNAS, system management with ZFS, practical capabilities for UNIX
known as Capsicum.
It also had a dedicated track for the attendees of the FreeBSD
developer summit, where one could learn more about what is happening
currently in the Project. We had presentations on the new package
management solution, Google Summer of Code 2011, a stacked
cryptographic file system, conversion of documents of different
formats, and status reports on the sparc64 port and the NAND flash
support.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Developer Summit, Maarssen
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/201110DevSummit
Contact: Gabor Pali
We had 60 FreeBSD developers and invited guests attending the FreeBSD
Developer Summit organized as part of EuroBSDcon 2011 in Maarssen, The
Netherlands. This year EuroBSDcon organizers offered us their generous
support in handling the details, like registrations, renting the venue,
and providing food for keeping attendees happy.
The Maarssen developer summit spanned over 3 days. It is generally a
workshop-style event that has now adopted the layout of the developer
summit organized successfully in Canada earlier in May. On the first
day, there were working groups on various topics, e.g. Capsicum,
toolchain issues, ports, and documentation. On the second day, there
were various plenary discussions, like how FreeBSD relates to
virtualization or how vendors relate to FreeBSD. Finally, on the third
day, there were many interesting work-in-progress reports given in a
dedicated developer summit track at the main conference.
Photos and slides for the most of the talks are available on the home
page of the summit.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Haskell Ports
Contact: Gabor Janos PaLI
Contact: Ashish SHUKLA
We updated existing ports to their latest versions and hunted down a
bug in the 9-CURRENT rtld which was causing GHC to crash
intermittently. We also started work on Haskell Platform 2011.3.0.0
(development version) in a separate git branch in our development
repository.
Open tasks:
1. Test GHC to work with clang/LLVM.
2. Add an option to the GHC port to be able to build it with already
installed GHC instead of requiring a separate GHC boostrap tarball.
3. Update Haskell Platform (along with GHC) to 2011.4.0.0 as soon as
it gets out.
4. Add more ports to the Ports collection.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/arm on Marvell Armada XP
Contact: Grzegorz Bernacki <gjb@semihalf.com>
Contact: Rafal Jaworowski <raj@semihalf.com>
Marvell Armada XP is a complete system-on-chip solution based on the
Sheeva embedded CPUs. These devices integrate up to four ARMv6/v7
compliant Sheeva CPU cores with shared L2 cache.
This work is extending FreeBSD/arm infrastructure towards support for
recent ARM architecture variations along with a basic set of device
drivers for integrated peripherals.
The following code has been implemented since the last status report:
* PCI-Express support
* SMP support
*
+ Created framework for ARM platform dependent code.
+ Initialization and starting of Application Processor.
+ Implementation of sending/handling IPI
Next steps:
* Finalize SMP support (TLB/cache operation broadcast, etc.)
* L2 cache support
* SATA driver
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/powerpc on AppliedMicro APM86290
Contact: Grzegorz Bernacki <gjb@semihalf.com>
Contact: Rafal Jaworowski <raj@semihalf.com>
The APM86290 system-on-chip device is a member of AppliedMicro's
PACKETpro family of embedded processors.
The chip includes two Power Architecture PPC465 processor cores, which
are compliant with the Book-E specification of the architecture, and a
number of integrated peripherals.
This work is extending current Book-E support in FreeBSD towards PPC4xx
processor variants along with device drivers for integrated
peripherials.
The following drivers have been created since the last report:
* Interrupt controller
* EHCI USB driver attachment
* Queue Manager/Traffic Manager support
* Initial support of Ethernet controller
* GPIO, I2C
Next steps:
* Finalize Ethernet controller driver
* L2 cache support
__________________________________________________________________
GELI status update
Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek
Selected GELI (disk encryption GEOM class) changes since 2010/Q3
report:
* Implementation of suspend/resume functionality.
* New version subcommand to check GELI providers version.
* New -V option for init subcommand, which allows to create GELI
providers for older FreeBSD versions.
* Significant aesni(4) performance improvements for AES-XTS
algorithm.
__________________________________________________________________
HAST (Highly Available Storage) status update
Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek
Contact: Mikolaj Golub
HAST is under active development. Some changes since Q1 report:
* Async replication mode. Unfortunately it will not make it into
9.0-RELEASE (pjd@).
* IPv6 support (pjd@).
* Activemap fix that significantly reduces number of metadata updates
(trociny@).
* Provider's write cache flush after metadata updates (pjd@).
* Possibility to specify pidfile in configuration file (pjd@).
* Many bug fixes and other improvments.
__________________________________________________________________
KDE-FreeBSD
URL: FreeBSD.kde.org
URL:
http://dot.kde.org/2011/06/29/platform-frameworks-kde-hackers-meet-swit
zerland
URL:
http://blogs.FreeBSDish.org/avilla/2011/06/14/call-for-tests-kde-pim-4-
6-0
URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org/area51.php
Contact: KDE FreeBSD <kde-freebsd@kde.org>
Alberto Villa and Raphael Kubo da Costa went to Randa, Switzerland, to
attend, respectively, the KDE Multimedia/Kdenlive sprint and the
Platform 11 sprint. The sprints afforded them the opportunity to form
closer bonds with the upstream KDE community, to learn about the future
of Qt and KDE and make sure FreeBSD's needs are taken into account. For
more information see the article "From Platform to Frameworks -- KDE
hackers meet in Switzerland" at dot.kde.org.
The KDE on FreeBSD team have continued to improve the experience of KDE
and Qt under FreeBSD. The latest round of improvements include:
* Qt supports Clang as a compiler
The team has also made many releases and upstreamed many fixes and
patches. The latest round of releases include:
* Qt: 4.7.3
* KDE: 4.6.3; 4.6.4; 4.6.5
* Amarok: 2.4.1
* Digikam (and KIPI-plugins): 1.9.0
Further testing is requested for KDE PIM 4.6.0 and Calligra 2.3.72
before the ports are committed. To test the ports please visit Alberto
Villa's call for test and area51.
The team is always looking for more testers and porters so please visit
us at kde-freebsd@kde.org and our homepage.
Open tasks:
1. Testing KDE PIM 4.6.0
__________________________________________________________________
Multibyte Encoding Support in Nvi
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/ZhihaoSoC2011
URL: https://github.com/lichray/nvi2
Contact: Zhihao Yuan <lichray@gmail.com>
nvi-iconv keeps the behaviors and the license of nvi-1.79 in the base
system and adopts the multibyte encoding support from nvi-1.8x.
Status:
* Known memory leaks, bugs are fixed. make buildworld clear, under
WARNS=1 (the old one was WARNS=0).
* UTF-16 is supported with less hacks.
* The 'windowname' option now restores the xterm title through xprop.
* The file encoding detection modified from file(1) is finished and
considered stable. The detection is always on since nvi-iconv never
change the actual encoding, and the detection failbacks to locale.
* Pavel Timofeev provided a full Russian translation of the catalog.
Thanks to him.
* Now nvi-iconv is able to be compiled with widechar only and without
iconv (inspired by a user on FreeBSDChina.org). In that case, it
only supports your locale.
Open tasks:
1. The wide character support in nvi's message (feedback over the last
line) system.
2. Collect more testing results and get code review.
__________________________________________________________________
OpenAFS port
URL: http://openafs.org
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/afs
Contact: Benjamin Kaduk <kaduk@mit.edu>
Contact: Derrick Brashear <shadow@gmail.com>
AFS is a distributed network filesystem that originated from the Andrew
Project at Carnegie-Mellon University. OpenAFS 1.6.0 has released, and
is available in the FreeBSD Ports Collection; it is usable under light
load, but heavy usage reveals some issues that remain unresolved. The
OpenAFS kernel module is now built using the bsd.kmod.mk infrastructure
on the git master branch; unfortunately this change required a minor
change in the OS-independent Makefiles and could not be merged in time
for 1.6.0. Some attention has been given to memory leaks, but only one
small leak has been patched so far.
There are several known outstanding issues that are being worked on,
but detailed bug reports are welcome at port-freebsd@openafs.org.
Open tasks:
1. Update VFS locking to allow the use of disk-based client caches as
well as memory-based caches.
2. Track down races and deadlocks that may appear under load.
3. Eliminate a moderate memory leak from the kernel module.
4. PAG (Process Authentication Group) support is not functional.
__________________________________________________________________
pfSense
URL: http://www.pfsense.org/
Contact: Scott Ullrich <sullrich@gmail.com>
Contact: Chris Buechler <cbuechler@gmail.com>
pfSense 2.0 has been released to the world. This brings the past three
years of new feature additions, with significant enhancements to almost
every portion of the system. The changes and new features are
summarized here. This is by far the most widely deployed release we
have put out, thanks to the efforts of thousands of members of the
community.
Open tasks:
1. Work on 2.1 is underway with the biggest changes being IPV6 support
and PBI packaged binaries for the package system.
__________________________________________________________________
Portmaster
URL: http://dougbarton.us/portmaster-proposal.html
Contact: Doug Barton
Portmaster offers several new features since the last quarterly update;
some bug fixes for the package installation code, and various internal
optimizations. The most exciting new feature is probably the ability to
specify the -r option more than once for the same portmaster run. This
greatly increases efficiency when several "branch" and/or "trunk" ports
need updates at the same time, especially for package-building systems.
Open tasks:
1. Splitting out the fetch code is still "on the list" of work to be
done, but it was sidetracked by other priorities in the past
months. I hope to complete it in the quarter to come.
2. Another new feature in the works is support for a list of files for
portmaster to preserve and restore during upgrades of a port.
__________________________________________________________________
Ports Collection
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
URL:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing-ports/
URL: http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/index.html
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/portmgr/index.html
URL: http://blogs.FreeBSDish.org/portmgr/
URL: http://www.twitter.com/freebsd_portmgr/
URL: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=135441496471197
Contact: Thomas Abthorpe
Contact: Port Management Team
The ports tree slowly moves up closer to the 23,000 mark. The PR count
still remains at about 1000.
In Q2 we added 4 new committers, but took in 6 commit bits for safe
keeping.
The Ports Management team have been running -exp runs on an ongoing
basis, verifying how base system updates may affect the ports tree, as
well as providing QA runs for major ports updates. Of note, -exp runs
were done for:
* Python update
* Boost updates
* Gtk3 updates
* clang testing
* pkgng testing
* testing ruby19
* setting the default fortran to lang/gcc46
* setting apache22 as default
* setting the default LDFLAGS in CONFIGURE_ENV
Work continues to refine the new build master pointyhat-west. An
upgrade to -current done in September has proven problematic. We have
enlisted ISC and Josh Paetzel to try to determine a fix. In the
meantime, the source will be downgraded to RELENG_9.
The portsmon instance is being re-homed at Yahoo. Users should not see
any changes. The new instance is currently visible at
portsmonj.FreeBSD.org but will soon take on the portsmon.FreeBSD.org
name. The team would like to express its appreciation to TDC A/S for
the loan of the existing machine for several years.
Work is underway to create a new QAT instance at NYI/NJ.
portmgr also assisted in setting up a sparc64 machine for general
develop access at Yahoo.
Thanks to on-site work by Sean Bruno and Ben Haga, we once again have
access to the powerpc build machine at ISC, and powerpc builds have
been restarted. They also helped us get one more i386 machine back
online.
linimon is working on a set of scripts to more quickly produce
pre-configured PXEboot images for package build nodes.
The update of __FreeBSD_version in param.h to 1000000 proved very
disruptive to the ports tree, triggering lots of bad assumption in code
that interpreted it as FreeBSD 1. A great deal of work has gone into
identifying the instances of broken code and fixing and upstreaming
them. While this is taking place, one recommended workaround is to set
your version to 999999.
Open tasks:
1. Looking for help getting ports to build with clang.
2. Looking for help fixing ports broken on CURRENT. (List needs
updating, too)
3. Looking for help with Tier-2 architectures. (List needs updating,
too)
4. Most ports PRs are assigned, we now need to focus on testing,
committing and closing.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Foundation
URL: http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/
Contact: Deb Goodkin
The Foundation sponsored KyivBSD 2011 which was held in Kiev, Ukraine
on September 24. We were represented at Ohio LinuxFest in Columbus,
Ohio. And, we approved six travel grants for EuroBSDCon. Stop by and
visit us at the FreeBSD booth during LISA '11, December 7-8, in Boston,
MA.
Three Foundation funded projects were completed during this period:
implementing xlocale APIs to enable porting libc++ by David Chisnall,
implementing DIFFUSE for FreeBSD by Swinburne University, and adding
GEM, KMS, and DRI support for Intel drivers by Konstantin Belousov.
We published our semi-annual newsletter. We purchased servers and other
hardware for the FreeBSD co-location centers at Sentex and NYI.
The work above, as well as many other tasks which we do for the FreeBSD
Project, could not be done without donations. Please help us by making
a donation or asking your company to make a donation. We would be happy
to send marketing literature to you or your company. Find out how to
make a donation at our donate page.
Find out more up-to-date Foundation news by reading our blog and
Facebook page.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD German Documentation Project Status Report
URL: https://doc.bsdgroup.de
Contact: Johann Kois
Contact: Benedict Reuschling
We managed to update the German version of the documentation just in
time to get it included in the upcoming 9.0-RELEASE. The website
translations were also kept in sync with the ones on FreeBSD.org.
We tried to re-activate committers who did not contribute for some time
but most of them are currently unable to free up enough time. We hope
to gain fresh contributor blood as we are getting occasional reports
about bugs and grammar in the German translation.
Open tasks:
1. Submit grammar, spelling or other errors you find in the German
documents and the website
2. Translate more articles and other open handbook sections
(especially the new chapter about the new FreeBSD installer).
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Greek Documentation Project
URL: http://www.FreeBSDgr.org
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/el/books/handbook
Contact: Manolis Kiagias
Contact: Giorgos Keramidas
After a few rather quiet months, the FreeBSD Greek Documentation
Project is back on track, translating and improving the Handbook, FAQ
and FreeBSD articles. The new bsdinstall chapter has been translated
and is now present in the Handbook. Our experimental Handbook builds
are also available at the project's hub. Three new status pages have
been added:
* Merge Status for the en_US tree shows whether the local en_US repo
is in sync with the official CVS
* Merge Status for the el_GR tree - as above but for the Greek tree
* Pending Commits shows newer yet to be committed versions of the
Greek docs
For more information, please visit http://www.freebsdgr.org. Patches,
fixes and contributions are always welcome.
Open tasks:
1. Translate the remaining chapters of the Handbook to Greek.
2. Complete the translation of the FreeBSD FAQ.
3. Keep the currently translated docs in sync with the English
versions.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Japanese Documentation Project
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ja/
URL: http://www.jp.FreeBSD.org/doc-jp/
Contact: Hiroki Sato
Contact: Ryusuke Suzuki
The www/ja and doc/ja_JP.eucJP/books/handbook subtrees have constantly
been updated since the last report.
www/ja: During this period, many areas of outdated content in the
www/ja subtree were updated to the latest versions in the English
counterparts. The Japanese version of 8.2R release announcement was
added and the upcoming 9.0R announcement will be translated in a timely
manner.
Handbook: The Japanese "kernelconfig" section finally caught up with
the original English version. The next targets are "cutting-edge" and
new installer section.
Open tasks:
1. Further translation work for outdated documents in both
doc/ja_JP.eucJP and www/ja.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/
Contact: Release Engineering Team
The Release Engineering Team has been coordinating the upcoming FreeBSD
9.0-RELEASE. Thanks to work done by many of the developers. The
release, though delayed, is taking the shape nicely. We have reached
the stage of doing the second Release Candidate. At this time we expect
to have one more Release Candidate, to be followed by the final release
itself.
__________________________________________________________________
The new CARP
URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~glebius/newcarp/
Contact: Gleb Smirnoff
I am now working on significant rewrite of CARP in FreeBSD.
The reason for this work is that the CARP protocol actually does not
bring a new interface, but is a property of interface address.
Rewriting it in this way helps to remove several hacks from incoming
packet processing, simplifies some code, makes CARP addresses more sane
from the viewpoint of routing daemons such as quagga/zebra and closes
many CARP-related PRs in GNATS. It also brings support for a single
redundant address on the subnet, the thing that is called "carpdev
feature" in OpenBSD, long awaited in FreeBSD.
For this moment I have a patch against head/ that compiles and works in
my test environment that I am going to deploy soon on some of servers
under my control.
The patch has been reviewed by Bjoern Zeeb (bz@).
Open tasks:
1. More testing requested!
2. Implement arpbalance and ipbalance features. This requires a next
step of rewriting, probably borrowing some ideas from OpenBSD.
3. Update documentation.
__________________________________________________________________
Tool for providing FreeBSD VM Images
URL: https://github.com/yerenkow/freebsd-vm-image
Contact: Alexander Yerenkow <yerenkow@gmail.com>
A set of scripts to make building FreeBSD VM images easy.
Providing a way to make regular build images of the latest version from
SVN. Images currently can be copied with `dd` to USB flash (for testing
on real hardware) and VirtualBox (.vdi).
Open tasks:
1. Build images with ports-set from main port-tree
2. Build images with ports-set from main port-tree plus overrides form
area51 (like experimental images)
3. Build images with special development branches included (like for
testing drivers)
__________________________________________________________________
VM layer for allocations larger than a page
Contact: Alan Cox
Contact: Davide Italiano <davide.italiano@gmail.com>
The aim of this project is to create a new layer that sits between UMA
and the virtual memory system managing chunks of kernel virtual memory
on the order of 2 to 4 MB in size. At the end of the work, UMA
page_alloc() would no longer call directly into the VM system. It would
instead call into this new layer. Thus, uma_large_malloc() and
uma_large_free() would no longer be immediately allocating and
deallocating kernel virtual memory. This results in a gain in terms of
performances (there is a relatively high cost in the approach adopted
until now), and also in terms of reduction of fragmentation (the VM
system uses a first-fit policy of allocation so there is room for
improvements).
__________________________________________________________________
ZFSguru
URL: http://zfsguru.com
URL: http://zfsguru.com
Contact: Jason Edwards
ZFSguru is a newly designed Network Attached Storage operating system,
much like FreeNAS. The difference is that ZFSguru focuses heavily on
ZFS and user friendly operation, and uses a full FreeBSD distribution
with no elements stripped down. This allows people new to FreeBSD and
UNIX in general to access the power of ZFS, while still allowing more
advanced users to tweak their NAS with additional functionality and use
it as a normal FreeBSD distribution.
Started a little over a year ago, the ZFSguru project is making good
progress. It should already be one of the most user friendly
distributions focused on ZFS, and sports some very unique features. The
advanced ZFS benchmarking and convenient Root-on-ZFS installation are
good examples. Priority is given to finishing the missing core
functionality, and extending the number of available service addons
which currently are limited to iSCSI-target and VirtualBox extensions.
Open tasks:
1. Finish ZFS and network related functionality in the web-interface.
2. Introduce new service addons, adding optional functionality to
ZFSguru.
3. Extend the documentation.
__________________________________________________________________
ZRouter.org project -- a FreeBSD-based firmware for embedded devices
URL: http://zrouter.org
URL: http://lists.zrouter.org
URL: http://zrouter.org/hg/zrouter/
URL: http://zrouter.org/hg/FreeBSD/head/
Contact: Aleksandr Rybalko
ZRouter.org is a young project that aims to produce FreeBSD-based
firmware for small boxes such as SOHO router, APs, etc. At the present
time ZRouter.org is able to build working firmware for:
* D-Link DAP-1350
* D-Link DIR-320
* D-Link DIR-320-NRU
* D-Link DIR-330
* D-Link DIR-615-E4
* D-Link DIR-620
* D-Link DIR-632
* D-Link DSA-3110-A1
* D-Link DSR-1000N
* NorthQ NQ-900
* TPLink TL-WR941ND-v3_2
* Ubiquiti RSPRO
Currently we are working on most parts of the core system but we are
also in the planning phase for implementing a simple web-based GUI
which we hope will have taken form before the next FreeBSD status
report.
We still have many items not done, so devices in that list cannot be
called "Production Ready" yet. But we work on that.
It is easy to add new devices, because we have separate definition of
board and SoC(System on Chip), so if you have "Asus WL-500g Premium v2"
for example, you can copy D-Link/DIR-320 directory and tweak to work
for your device. We already have basic support for:
* Broadcom BCM5354
* Broadcom BCM5836
* Ralink RT3052F
* Ralink RT3050F
* Ralink RT5350F
* Atheros AR7161
* Atheros AR7242
* Atheros AR7241
* Atheros AR7240
* Atheros AR9132
* Intel ixp435
* Cavium CN5010
If you have ability and time, please join us at http://zrouter.org
(Redmine iface and mailing lists)
Open tasks:
1. Device drivers
2. Web UI
3. Control scripts
4. Watchdog
5. etc.
__________________________________________________________________
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