FreeBSD Bi-Monthly Status report

Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!sn-xit-02!sn-xit-06!sn-xit-09!supernews.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newspeer1.nwr.nac.net!newsfeed.freenet.de!newsfeed.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp!news2.dg.net.ua!bn.utel.com.ua!carrier.kiev.ua!not-for-mail
From: Scott Long <scott_l...@btc.adaptec.com>
Newsgroups: lucky.freebsd.current
Subject: November-December 2002 FreeBSD Bi-Monthly Status report
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 04:16:26 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: unknown
Lines: 534
Sender: n...@horse.lucky.net
Approved: newsmas...@lucky.net
Message-ID: <3E30BDD8.80806@btc.adaptec.com.lucky.freebsd.current>
NNTP-Posting-Host: horse.carrier.kiev.ua
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
 boundary="------------040609010809000405010004"
NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 04:16:26 +0000 (UTC)
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021125


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_evmen...@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 <m...@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 <i...@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 <donati...@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 <s...@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 <gor...@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 <m...@FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: FreeBSD-Standards Mailing List <standa...@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 <mar...@FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Maxim Sobolev <sobo...@FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Adam Weinberger <ad...@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 <k...@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 <r...@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 <pe...@FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Marcel Moolenaar <mar...@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 <gio...@FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Marc Fonvieille <black...@FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Stéphane Legrand <steph...@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 <s...@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 <horik...@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 <nso...@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 <j...@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 <h...@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 <h...@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 <rwat...@FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: TrustedBSD Discussion List
   <trustedbsd-disc...@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 <rwat...@FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: TrustedBSD Discussion List
   <trustedbsd-disc...@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 <s...@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).

--------------040609010809000405010004--


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message