[FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Third Quarter 2015

Benjamin Kaduk bjk at FreeBSD.org
Mon Oct 26 03:07:20 UTC 2015


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FreeBSD Project Quarterly Status Report: July - September 2015

   The third quarter of 2015, from July to September, was again a period
   of busy activity for FreeBSD: for the second quarter in a row we have
   the largest report yet published.

   The Foundation continues to play a strong role, bringing both a
   developer and evangelist presence to conferences, funding much of the
   hardware that the cluster administration team uses to keep things
   running, and sponsoring many development projects for FreeBSD. This
   quarter we also hear from some of the student projects funded by Google
   Summer of Code 2015, ranging a wide gamut from the bootloader to
   additional ARM support, but also at a range of completion status. Some
   of the GSoC output is in the tree already, but others could benefit
   from additional attention to help out our budding new contributors as
   their schedules fill with the return to classes.

   ZFS and the network stack continue to be strong areas for FreeBSD, with
   both receiving active maintenance and feature improvements during this
   quarter. Substantial work continues on arm64, potentially putting it on
   the path toward a promotion to Tier-1 status, and a new port to the
   RISC-V architecture has made great headway in a short period of time.
   But it is not just our strengths and exciting new areas that have seen
   attention this cycle; there are also some parts of the system that are
   frequently perceived as unchanging infrastructure that have received
   attention and improvements, with truss and (k)gdb receiving significant
   overhauls, new implementations for the man page tools being brought in,
   the website receiving a new skin, and a brand new system for
   translating documentation that greatly lowers the barrier to entry.

   Nonetheless, despite its record length, this report does not and cannot
   cover all of the work being done on FreeBSD throughout the reporting
   period -- there are many bug fixes too minor to mention here, and
   developers too busy working on the next project to write up an entry
   for the previous project. It is not just the developers committing to
   Subversion that comprise the ongoing activities of FreeBSD, but also
   the users testing unreleased code or reporting bugs in released code,
   and participants on the mailing lists and forums helping each other
   solve their problems. Even the chats on IRC that wander far from the
   stated topic of a channel contribute to the community around FreeBSD;
   it is that community whose effectiveness and helpfulness is a key
   component of the effectiveness and usefulness of FreeBSD itself. Not
   just to the developers listed in this report, but to everyone in the
   community, thank you for making FreeBSD a great operating system.

   --Ben Kaduk
     __________________________________________________________________

   Please submit status reports for the fourth quarter of 2015 (from
   October to December) by January 7, 2016.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Team Reports

     * FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team
     * FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
     * The FreeBSD Core Team

Projects

     * automtud: Better Jumbo Frame Support
     * bhyve
     * Clang, llvm, lldb, compiler-rt and libc++ Updated to 3.7.0
     * DTrace and TCP
     * FreeBSD on the Acer C720 Chromebook
     * High Availability Clustering in CTL
     * Multipath TCP for FreeBSD
     * Porting bhyve to ARM-based Platforms
     * Root Remount
     * The Graphics Stack on FreeBSD
     * The nosh Project
     * UEFI Boot and Framebuffer Support
     * ZFS Code Sync with Latest Illumos
     * ZFS Support for UEFI Boot/Loader

Kernel

     * Adding PCIe Hot-plug Support
     * Cavium LiquidIO Smart NIC Driver
     * CloudABI: Pure Capabilities Runtime Environment
     * FreeBSD Xen
     * ioat(4) Driver Import
     * IPsec Upgrades

Architectures

     * Atomics
     * FreeBSD on Cavium ThunderX (arm64)
     * FreeBSD on the HiKey ARMv8 Board
     * FreeBSD/arm64
     * FreeBSD/RISC-V Port

Userland Programs

     * mandoc and roff Toolchain
     * pkg 1.6
     * sesutil(8)
     * truss(1)
     * Updates to GDB

Ports

     * Bringing GitLab into the Ports Collection
     * GNOME on FreeBSD
     * KDE on FreeBSD
     * Node.js Modules
     * Ports Collection
     * Ports on PowerPC
     * Xfce on FreeBSD

Documentation

     * PO Translation Project
     * Website CSS Update

Google Summer of Code

     * Allwinner A10/A20 Support
     * mtree Parsing and Manipulation Library
     * Multiqueue Testing
     * Update Ficl in Bootloader

Miscellaneous

     * The FreeBSD Foundation
     * ZFSguru
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team

   Contact: FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team <clusteradm@>

   The FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team consists of the people
   responsible for administering the machines that the project relies on
   for its distributed work and communications to be synchronised.

   Our primary cluster has been hosted as a guest in California for many
   years. Our ongoing project is relocating the core functionality to a
   location in New Jersey with a formal hosting arrangement. This is an
   equipment refresh, consolidation for better use of resources, and for
   better continuity of service.

   There is a significant amount of behind-the-scenes work to make this
   happen. The original cluster was implemented with a common, shared,
   assumed-to-be secure network with ubiquitous NFS everywhere. This
   structure does not lend itself well to being distributed across
   geographically diverse locations, particularly when Internet transit is
   required. The bulk of the work is rebuilding services to be portable,
   stand-alone components that do not depend on shared-network access and
   are safe enough to use across the insecure Internet.

   Highlights this quarter:
     * Many internal distribution systems switched from rsync to a
       distribution mesh using "syncthing".
     * We have implemented more code/data signing infrastructure with
       out-of-band verification.
     * New 32-core reference build hosts are online.
     * Internal admbugs switched from bugzilla 4.4 to 5.0 and packages
       were made available for the bugmeister team.
     * Finally switched from varnish3 to varnish4.
     * We exorcised hub.FreeBSD.org, the last survivor of the 2012
       security incident.
     * vuxml and the legacy portaudit build system were converted to
       components and integrated.
     * https://download.FreeBSD.org/ is nearing completion (please do not
       use until officially announced).
     * A Taiwan node was brought into service for pkg, ftp, svn, and vuxml
       mirroring.
     * One of the freebsd-update mirrors was converted from lighttpd to
       nginx due to a data corruption bug.
     * We completed detachment of the svn repository from the old cluster
       and moved it to its new location.

   Ongoing:
     * The cluster runs a mixture of 11-current and 10-stable as part of
       our "eat our own dogfood" project. For this to be useful, we do
       monthly cluster refreshes to keep up with current code.
     * We build internal base system snapshots every few days and packages
       every day.
     * We also provide support for non-clusteradm-operated services
       including jenkins, reviews, portsnap, freebsd-update, bugzilla,
       package builders, git, and mercurial. This varies from as little as
       maintaining SSL front-ends through operating servers, distributing
       data or building packages/binaries to run.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team

   Links
   FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE announcement
    URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.2R/announce.html
   FreeBSD development snapshots
    URL: http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/
   FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE schedule
    URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.3R/schedule.html
   FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE schedule
    URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/schedule.html

   Contact: FreeBSD Release Engineering Team <re at FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is responsible for setting and
   publishing release schedules for official project releases of FreeBSD,
   announcing code freezes, and maintaining the respective branches, among
   other things.

   In mid-August, the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team released
   FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE, two weeks earlier than the original schedule
   anticipated.

   The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team would like to thank all that have
   tested the BETA and RC builds and reported issues during the release
   cycle.

   The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team, with approval from the
   FreeBSD Core Team, appointed Marius Strobl as the Deputy Lead.

   This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Core Team

   Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <core at FreeBSD.org>

   The biggest task handled by the Core Team during this quarter was
   developing and publishing the new Code of Conduct. The Code of Conduct
   describes how people are expected to behave on all FreeBSD official
   communication channels, as well as how developers and other people
   involved with the project are to behave when representing the project
   in public.

   The Code of Conduct was generally well received and elicited numerous
   comments and suggestions for improvements from the community, many of
   which have been integrated.

   The next task handled by Core was the restoration of Babak Farrokhi's
   ports commit bit. Babak resides in Iran. A few years ago, legal advice
   suggested that allowing contributions from Iranian residents might
   violate US trade sanctions. After several years, Core was asked to
   revisit the issue. On the advice of counsel, Core decided that it could
   restore commit privileges to commmitters residing in Iran.

   The CTM service came under security review. Given that the lack of use
   of routine authenticity checking made the injection of trivial exploit
   code relatively easy, the service was held to be too risky to continue
   as an official part of the FreeBSD base system. CTM has very few
   remaining users but they should be able to install CTM from the Ports
   Collection in order to continue doing so.

   Core learned that ISC was ceasing its hosting service, which has
   entailed a rapid rework of plans on the movement of significant
   portions of the FreeBSD cluster to that data center. Cluster
   administration has taken ownership of the situation and is making
   progress.

   Core fielded an enquiry about NextBSD and whether this should be the
   future direction for the whole FreeBSD project. Core's position is that
   NextBSD is an interesting project, and we regard it, like the other BSD
   projects, as a potential source of good ideas. However, we currently
   have no plans to adopt NextBSD as the official FreeBSD distribution.

   Beyond these issues, Core also spent time in various routine
   activities. During this quarter we issued three new src commit bits,
   and took none in for safekeeping. Welcome to Allan Jude, Marcelo
   Araujo, and Andriy Voskoboinyk.
     __________________________________________________________________

automtud: Better Jumbo Frame Support

   Links
   jmgurney/automtud on github
    URL: https://github.com/jmgurney/automtud

   Contact: John-Mark Gurney <jmg at FreeBSD.org>

   The automtud script will allow a FreeBSD machine to send jumbo frames
   to machines that support them, while using normal-sized frames for
   other machines.

   There are various advantages to using jumbo frames, such as reduced
   protocol overhead. It also means that TCP streams will not be segmented
   as much, although TSO helps mitigate the disadvantages of such
   segmentation. In cases where LRO does not work well, fewer packets will
   be received.

   The script currently does not restore the system to its original state
   when it exits. This means that you must manually change the interface
   MTU and delete host routes after stopping the script.

Open tasks:

    1. Fix up various Ethernet drivers to better support jumbo frames.
       Most Ethernet drivers, though they support scatter/gather, use a
       physically contiguous zone to do so, which can cause resource
       shortages.
    2. More testing is needed to ensure that things behave as expected.
       This means that when running the script, communication to all
       machines functions normally, without slowdown or connectivity
       issues. Check vmstat -z | grep mbuf to ensure that such issues are
       not due to running out of jumbo_9k or jumbo_16k buffers due to
       Ethernet driver issues.
     __________________________________________________________________

bhyve

   Links
   bhyve FAQ and talks
    URL: http://www.bhyve.org
   NE2000 device emulation GSoC project
    URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2015/NE2000EmulationForBhyve
   Porting bhyve to ARM GSoC project
    URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2015/PortingBhyveToArm
   ptnetmap support in bhyve GSoC project
    URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2015/ptnetmapOnBhyve
   Windows support
    URL: http://docs.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?561187FB.8040506
   Illumos support
    URL: http://docs.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?56118B2B.2040101

   Contact: Peter Grehan <grehan at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Neel Natu <neel at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Tycho Nightingale <tychon at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Allan Jude <freebsd at allanjude.com>
   Contact: Michael Dexter <editor at callfortesting.org>

   bhyve is a hypervisor that runs on the FreeBSD/amd64 platform. At
   present, it runs FreeBSD (8.x or later), Linux i386/x64, OpenBSD
   i386/amd64, NetBSD/amd64, Illumos, and Windows
   Vista/7/8/10/2008r2/2012r2/2016 x64 guests. Current development is
   focused on enabling additional guest operating systems and implementing
   features found in other hypervisors.

   A combined bhyve and ZFS BoF was held during vBSDCon 2015, hosted by
   Michael Dexter and Allan Jude. Questions asked about bhyve included
   live migration and suspend/resume support, and configurations using
   ZFS.

   Three bhyve-related projects were selected for GSoC 2015: NE2000 device
   emulation, porting bhyve to ARM, and ptnetmap support.

   The major enhancement for bhyve this quarter was support for external
   firmware, along with a port of the Intel edk2 UEFI firmware. This
   allows bhyve to run Windows in headless mode, and also Illumos.

Open tasks:

    1. Improve the documentation.
    2. bhyveucl is a work-in-progress script for starting bhyve instances
       based on a libUCL config file. More information at
       https://github.com/allanjude/bhyveucl.
    3. Add support for virtio-scsi.
    4. Flexible networking backends: wanproxy, vhost-net.
    5. Support running bhyve as non-root.
    6. Add filters for popular VM file formats (VMDK, VHD, QCOW2).
    7. Implement an abstraction layer for video (no X11 or SDL in base
       system).
    8. Suspend/resume support.
    9. Live migration.
   10. Nested VT-x support (bhyve in bhyve).
   11. Support for other architectures (ARM, MIPS, PPC).
     __________________________________________________________________

Clang, llvm, lldb, compiler-rt and libc++ Updated to 3.7.0

   Links
   LLVM 3.7.0 Release Notes
    URL: http://llvm.org/releases/3.7.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
   Clang 3.7.0 Release Notes
    URL: http://llvm.org/releases/3.7.0/tools/clang/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
   PR 201377 Ports exp-run
    URL: https://bugs.freebsd.org/201377

   Contact: Dimitry Andric <dim at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Roman Divacky <rdivacky at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Davide Italiano <davide at FreeBSD.org>

   We have updated clang, llvm, lldb, compiler-rt, and libc++ in base to
   the 3.7.0 release. These all contain numerous improvements. Please see
   the linked release notes for more detailed information. This brings us
   completely up-to-date with the latest upstream versions of these
   projects. Meanwhile, Ed Maste is working on importing the llvm.org
   version of libunwind.

   Like the 3.5.x and 3.6.x releases, these components require C++11
   support to build. At this point, FreeBSD 10.0 and later provide that
   support, at least on x86. Currently, there are no solid plans to MFC
   these versions to any stable branches, due to the difficulties this
   would introduce for the usual upgrade scenarios.

   Thanks to Ed Maste and Andrew Turner for their help with this import,
   and thanks to Antoine Brodin for several ports exp-runs.

   During the first ports exp-run, some major problems were found, one
   introduced by a clang bug which caused pow() to generate floating point
   exceptions in some cases. This in turn caused libpng to fail to build,
   and one bug in libjpeg-turbo, which was caused by undefined behavior.
   These two problems took some time to fix, after which another exp-run
   was done, and this resulted in about a dozen newly failed ports. For
   almost all of these new failures, fixes were submitted and linked to
   the original PR 201377 for the exp-run.

Open tasks:

    1. Commit ports fixes for dependencies of PR 201377.
    2. Test and report issues with the new tool chain.
     __________________________________________________________________

DTrace and TCP

   Links
   Commit adding trace points replacing TCPDEBUG
    URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/287759

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

   With the advent of DTrace we are able to replace many of the internal
   kernel debugging options, such as TCPDEBUG, with statically defined
   tracepoints (SDTs). Tracepoints have now been added to the system that
   replicate the functionality of the TCPDEBUG kernel option. No new
   kernel options need to be added -- they are standard with any kernel
   that has DTrace, which is included in the default GENERIC kernels in
   10.X and HEAD.

   This project is sponsored by Limelight Networks.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD on the Acer C720 Chromebook

   Links
   Blog post on how to get things working
    URL: http://blog.grem.de/pages/c720.html
   Blog post with links to commits in HEAD
    URL: http://blog.grem.de/sysadmin/FreeBSD-On-AcerC720-Merged-2015-07-25-23-30.html
   Backported patch for 10.2-RELEASE
    URL: http://blog.grem.de/sysadmin/FreeBSD-10.2-On-AcerC720-2015-09-19-17-00. html

   Contact: Michael Gmelin <freebsd at grem.de>

   The Acer C720 Chromebook is an affordable (under $200) and powerful
   little laptop that provides a battery life of up to six hours running
   FreeBSD. It is a great machine for travelling and coding in general.
   The machine is fully functional, meaning that all essential devices
   work: keyboard, trackpad, light sensor, backlight control, display in
   VESA mode (fast), external Display on HDMI (only VESA mirror mode),
   sound, USB ports, SD card slot, camera, and Atheros wireless.

   This quarter, this project extended previous work on the boot process
   and keyboard driver as well as the smbus(4) driver. It added three new
   drivers: ig4(4) for the I2C bus, cyapa(4) for the trackpad, and isl(4),
   for the ambient light sensor.

   Much of the development was originally done in late 2014. Since then,
   the patches have been massively improved and merged into HEAD, so that
   all relevant devices work without manual patching.

   For those who are unable to run HEAD, there is a backported patch to
   10.2-RELEASE.

   Thanks to everyone who helped in the process. I couldn't have done it
   without you (you know who you are).
     __________________________________________________________________

High Availability Clustering in CTL

   Contact: Alexander Motin <mav at FreeBSD.org>

   CAM Target Layer (CTL), when originally developed by Copan/SGI, had
   support for High Availability clustering. Unfortunately, significant
   portions of the HA code were never published with the main body of the
   source code. Now, the missing part has been reimplemented from scratch,
   fixed, and improved.

   This code supports dual-node HA with Asynchronous LUN Unit Access
   (ALUA) in four modes:
     * Active/Unavailable without interlink between nodes, where the
       secondary node can report nothing except its presence.
     * Active/Standby with the secondary node handling only basic LUN
       discovery and reservation, synchronizing state and command
       execution with the primary node through the interlink.
     * Active/Active with both nodes processing commands and accessing the
       backing storage, synchronizing state and command execution with the
       primary node through the interlink.
     * Active/Active with the secondary node having no backing storage
       access, but instead working as a proxy, transferring all commands
       to the first node for execution through the interlink.

   In the case of lost interlink connectivity to primary node, the
   secondary node falls into the Transitioning state, which is like
   Unavailable and cannot answer most requests, but makes the initiator
   wait for recovery or cluster failover.

   CTL also got a large number of other improvements, including support
   for emulation of CD/DVD drives and removable disks, live LUN
   reconfiguration, and so on.

   The code is committed to FreeBSD head and was recently merged to the
   stable/10 branch.

   This project is sponsored by iXsystems, Inc..
     __________________________________________________________________

Multipath TCP for FreeBSD

   Links
   MPTCP for FreeBSD Project Website
    URL: http://caia.swin.edu.au/urp/newtcp/mptcp/
   MPTCP for FreeBSD Source Repository
    URL: https://bitbucket.org/nw-swin/caia-mptcp-freebsd/

   Contact: Nigel Williams <njwilliams at swin.edu.au>

   Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is an extension to TCP that allows for the use of
   multiple network interfaces on a standard TCP session. The addition of
   new addresses and scheduling of data across them occurs transparently
   from the perspective of the TCP application.

   The goal of this project is to deliver an MPTCP kernel patch that
   interoperates with the reference MPTCP implementation, along with
   additional enhancements to aid network research.

   The v0.5 patch was released, which is the first patch of the re-written
   implementation. We are in the process of documenting the new design and
   addressing some feedback as provided from the community.

   Work has commenced on improved input handling, as the current method of
   receiving and reassembling segments has been the cause of some
   instability and stalls during connection shutdown. This will involve
   re-using the subflow receive buffers and an upcall to enqueue a
   MP-layer reassembly task without the need to take a lock on the MP
   control block. The improvements should also allow bypassing
   mptcp_usrreq for standard TCP connections.

   The MPTCP commit history was synchronized with hg-beta.FreeBSD.org, and
   we have made the repository available on BitBucket (see links). Future
   patch releases will be tagged there. The tree is now merged with
   FreeBSD head weekly. An updated v0.51 patch is ready for release.

   This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.

Open tasks:

    1. Release the v0.51 patch.
    2. Populate documentation and the issue tracker on the BitBucket
       repository.
    3. Improvements to receive-side code before further testing.
    4. Prepare a technical report detailing the design of the current
       patch.
     __________________________________________________________________

Porting bhyve to ARM-based Platforms

   Links
   Project Wiki page
    URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2015/PortingBhyveToArm

   Contact: Mihai Carabas <mihai at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Peter Grehan <grehan at FreeBSD.org>

   This summer we have started porting bhyve onto ARMv7 platforms. The
   low-level routines for ARM processors were rewritten while trying to
   preserve the hypervisor API originally created for the x86
   architectures. We managed to bring up a FreeBSD guest up to the point
   of initializing interrupts. There is still work to be done in order to
   virtualize the interrupts and the timer. Our short-term plan after
   finishing the interrupts and the timer is porting to a real hardware
   platform (Cubie2).

Open tasks:

    1. Virtualize interrupts and timer.
    2. Port to a real hardware platform.
    3. Create SMP support for bhyve-on-arm.
    4. Port to ARMv8.
     __________________________________________________________________

Root Remount

   Links
   Userland code review
    URL: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D3693

   Contact: Edward Tomasz Napierala <trasz at FreeBSD.org>

   A feature long missing from FreeBSD was the ability to boot up with a
   temporary rootfs, configure the kernel to be able to access the real
   rootfs, and then replace the temporary root with the real one. In
   Linux, this functionality is known as pivot_root. The reroot project
   aims to provide similar functionality in a different, slightly more
   user-friendly, way. Simply put, from the user's point of view it is as
   simple as running reboot -r. The system performs a partial shutdown,
   killing all processes and unmounting the rootfs, and then partial
   bringup, mounting the new rootfs, running init, and running the startup
   scripts as usual.

   The kernel part of the project has been committed to 11-CURRENT. The
   userland part is at the "finishing touches" stage, and is expected to
   be committed soon. A merge to stable/10 is planned and reroot support
   is planned be included in FreeBSD 10.3.

   This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Graphics Stack on FreeBSD

   Links
   Graphics stack roadmap and supported hardware matrix
    URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Graphics
   Graphics stack team blog
    URL: http://blogs.freebsdish.org/graphics/
   Ports development tree on GitHub
    URL: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports-graphics

   Contact: FreeBSD Graphics team <freebsd-x11 at FreeBSD.org>

   The Mesa ports were updated to 10.6.8. At the same time, the ports
   received a major overhaul to make sure all ports are correctly
   configured. Dual version support was removed. There is only one Mesa
   version for all supported FreeBSD versions. The libosmesa port, which
   provided the off-screen version of Mesa, was merged into the Mesa
   framework.

   Another big item that was included in the Mesa port is OpenCL. There
   are two GPU-based OpenCL implementations: lang/clover for supported
   Radeon cards, and lang/beignet for supported Intel cards (currently
   only Ivybridge). Thanks go to Johannes Dieterich, O. Hartmann, and Koop
   Mast for making this happen.

   Now that Mesa is up-to-date, we can apply the same update procedure to
   the X.Org server. It is currently at 1.14, and an update to 1.17 is
   ready. It will be committed shortly.

   On the kernel side, progress has been made with the i915 update. The
   driver is able to attach. There are some reports that the X.Org server
   starts but Mesa is unhappy, so acceleration does not work yet. If you
   want to test, instructions will be posted on the wiki in the i915
   update article (see links). At this stage, we can only accept patches,
   though -- we will not be able to provide support.

   We attended two conferences: XDC 2015 in Toronto and EuroBSDcon 2015 in
   Stockholm. Reports will be posted on the blog.

Open tasks:

    1. See the Graphics wiki page for up-to-date information.
     __________________________________________________________________

The nosh Project

   Links
   Introduction and blurb
    URL: http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh.html
   FreeBSD binary packages
    URL: http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh/freebsd-binary-packages.html
   Installation How-To
    URL: http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh/timorous-admin-installation-how-to.html
   Roadmap
    URL: http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh/roadmap.html
   Commands
    URL: http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh/commands.html
   A slightly outdated nosh Guide
    URL: http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh/guide/index.html

   Contact: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard
   <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups at NTLWorld.COM>

   The nosh project is a suite of system-level utilities for initializing,
   running, and shutting down BSD systems, and for managing daemons,
   terminals, and logging. It supersedes BSD init and the NetBSD rc.d
   system, drawing inspiration from Solaris SMF for named milestones,
   daemontools-encore for service control/status mechanisms, UCSPI, and
   IBM AIX for separated service and system management. It comprises a
   range of compatibility mechanisms, including shims for familiar
   commands from other systems, and an automatic import mechanism that
   takes existing configuration data from /etc/fstab,
   /etc/rc.conf{,.local}, /etc/ttys, and elsewhere, applying them to its
   native service definitions and creating additional native services. It
   is portable (including to Linux) and composable, it provides a
   migration path from the world of systemd Linux, and it does not require
   new kernel APIs. It provides clean service environments, orderings and
   dependencies between services, parallelized startup and shutdown
   (including fsck), strictly size-capped and autorotated logging, the
   service manager as a "subreaper", and uses kevent(2) for event-driven
   parallelism.

   The past few months have seen a growth in the import mechanism, with
   full import of /etc/fstab and /etc/ttys available in version 1.18 in
   July, and importing PC-BSD Warden and FreeBSD 9 jails, and full import
   of gbde and geli mount/unmount mechanisms in version 1.21 in October.
   It has also gained the ability to automatically re-generate host.conf
   and sysctl.conf whenever their source files change.

   Other developments in the past few months include fully independent
   shutdown support, no longer relying upon an externally provided
   shutdown command from another toolset, and a full suite of binary
   packages. As of version 1.20, it became possible to have a
   fully-nosh-managed system, on both FreeBSD and Linux, using just
   precompiled binary packages.

   The biggest task remaining is one that was set a while ago: the
   creation of enough native service bundles and ancillary utilities to
   entirely supplant the rc.d system. A lot of this has been achieved,
   with the original target list of 157 items now down to just 39
   remaining. These are the tricky ones, of course, where help is most
   needed.

Open tasks:

    1. There are still a few rc scripts left that should be easy to
       convert, such as /etc/rc.d/gptboot and /etc/rc.d/growfs as oneshot
       services, /etc/rc.d/routing, and /etc/rc.d/kldxref.
    2. FreeBSD's /etc/rc.d/bluetooth is over 360 lines long. In 2011, Iain
       Hibbert wrote a "simpler" bluetooth for NetBSD. This can perhaps be
       used as a simpler basis for a nosh translation.
    3. Add kernel support for passing a -b option to pid 1, and support
       for a boot_bare variable in the loader, to allow "emergency" (where
       even no shell dotfiles are loaded) and "rescue" mode bootstraps,
       akin to Linux. (History: The -b mechanism and idea date back to
       version 2.57d of Miquel van Smoorenburg's System 5 init clone,
       dated 1995-12-03, and was already known as "emergency boot" by
       1997.)
    4. Add support to FreeBSD's fsck(8) for outputting machine-readable
       progress reports to a designated file descriptor, so that nosh can
       provide progress bars for multiple fscks running in parallel. nosh
       already provides this functionality on Linux, where fsck(8) does
       provide machine-readable output.
    5. Identify when the configuration import system needs to be
       triggered, such as when bsdconfig alters configuration files, and
       create the necessary hooks to import external configuration changes
       into nosh.
    6. Investigate how FreeBSD/PC-BSD could be improved by taking
       advantage of some available nosh package mechanisms.
     __________________________________________________________________

UEFI Boot and Framebuffer Support

   Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at freebsd.org>
   Contact: Marcel Moolenaar <marcel at freebsd.org>

   A number of UEFI bug fixes were committed over the last quarter,
   improving compatibility with different UEFI implementations. This
   includes improvements to EFI's vt(4) framebuffer driver, efifb, to
   handle systems with high resolution displays and unusual framebuffer
   stride values. In particular, this improves compatibility with a large
   number of recent Apple MacBook Pros and other Macs.

Open tasks:

    1. Test FreeBSD head and FreeBSD-STABLE snapshots on a variety of UEFI
       implementations.
     __________________________________________________________________

ZFS Code Sync with Latest Illumos

   Contact: Alexander Motin <mav at FreeBSD.org>

   The ZFS codebase received a significant batch of merges, and is now in
   sync with the latest Illumos. Among other things, this update includes:
     * LZ4 is now the default compression algorithm.
     * Improved prefetch for faster send/receive.
     * Reduced RAM usage by almost 50% for L2ARC.
     * Improved I/O aggregation.
     * Fine-grained checksumming in send/receive stream.
     * Reduced import time for pools with many datasets.
     * Reworked and simplified predictive prefetcher.

   The code is committed to FreeBSD head and was recently merged to the
   stable/10 branch.
     __________________________________________________________________

ZFS Support for UEFI Boot/Loader

   Contact: Eric McCorkle <eric at metricspace.net>

   UEFI-enabled boot1.efi and loader.efi have been modified to support
   loading and booting from a ZFS filesystem, as described in the previous
   report. The ZFS-enabled loader.efi can be treated as a chainloader when
   using ZFS-enabled GRUB.

   During this quarter, several successful tests have been reported on
   simple ZFS setups, using both boot1.efi with loader.efi as well as GRUB
   and loader.efi.

   Successful tests have been reported for UFS with the patched boot1.efi
   and loader.efi as well.

Open tasks:

    1. Test reports are needed for more complex ZFS setups, such as with
       log/l2arc vdevs, mirroring, striping, and raidz.
    2. Pending successful reports, the patch needs to be reviewed and
       committed.
     __________________________________________________________________

Adding PCIe Hot-plug Support

   Links
   PCIe Hot-plug Perforce Branch
    URL: http://p4db.FreeBSD.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/pciehotplug
   Commit adding bridge save/restore
    URL: https://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/changeset/base/r281874
   Github branch with patches
    URL: https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/freebsd/tree/pciehp

   Contact: John-Mark Gurney <jmg at FreeBSD.org>

   PCI Express (PCIe) hot-plug is used on both laptops and servers to
   allow peripheral devices to be added or removed while the system is
   running. Laptops commonly include hot-pluggable PCIe as either an
   ExpressCard slot or a Thunderbolt interface. ExpressCard has built-in
   USB support that is already supported by FreeBSD, but ExpressCard PCIe
   devices like Gigabit Ethernet adapters and eSATA cards are only
   supported when they are present at boot, and their removal may cause
   FreeBSD to crash.

   The goal of this project is to allow these devices to be inserted and
   removed while FreeBSD is running. This work will provide the basic
   infrastructure to support adding and removing devices, though it is
   expected that additional work will be needed to update individual
   drivers to support hot-plug.

   Current testing is focused on getting a simple UART device functional.
   Basic hot swap is currently functional.

   A set of the patches for the work done in this project is now available
   on github.com.

   This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.

Open tasks:

    1. Get suspend/resume functional by saving and restoring the necessary
       registers. This should be addressed by r281874.
    2. Make sure that upon suspend, devices are removed so that we are not
       fooled if they are replaced with different devices while the
       machine is suspended.
    3. Improve how state transitions are handled, possibly by using a
       proper state machine.
     __________________________________________________________________

Cavium LiquidIO Smart NIC Driver

   Links
   LiquidIO product page
    URL: http://www.cavium.com/LiquidIO_Application_Acceleration_Adapters.html

   Contact: Stanislaw Kardach <kda at semihalf.com>
   Contact: Zyta Racia <zr at semihalf.com>

   This project aims to add support for the LiquidIO family of
   high-performance programmable accelerator 10/40-gigabit Ethernet
   network adapters. The currently developed kernel driver supports
   CN6640- and CN6880-based PCIe cards, enabling these features:
     * A CNNIC API for controlling/interacting with the smart NIC from
       user and kernel space including:
          + Handling multiple concurrent applications running on the same
            device
          + A request/reply mechanism for (a)synchronous ordered/unordered
            communication
          + Remote memory operations
          + Device shutdown/reset
     * A basic NIC module utilizing the CNNIC API and a Cavium-provided
       NIC firmware. This module provides:
          + Single/multi-queue TX
          + Hardware TCP/UDP checksum offloading
          + Large Receive Offload
          + Promiscous mode
     * Sysctl-based device statistics and configuration view
     * Custom firmware loading via user-built modules and FreeBSD's
       firmware(9) mechanism.

   The project is currently being developed in house and is being prepared
   for upstream. We plan on making it available in FreeBSD 11.

   This project is sponsored by Cavium, and Semihalf.

Open tasks:

    1. Upstream the code to FreeBSD head.
     __________________________________________________________________

CloudABI: Pure Capabilities Runtime Environment

   Links
   CloudABI project page
    URL: https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudlibc
   CloudABI Ports Collection
    URL: https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudabi-ports
   CloudABI presentation at FrOSCon
    URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTHSZGVvLw4

   Contact: Ed Schouten <ed at FreeBSD.org>

   CloudABI is a POSIX-like runtime environment that uses Capsicum as its
   sole access control mechanism. CloudABI allows you to develop software
   that is better hardened against security vulnerabilities, is easier to
   test, and is easier to migrate across systems.

   As of August, all of the kernel modifications that are needed to run
   CloudABI programs have been integrated into FreeBSD head. After loading
   the cloudabi64 kernel module, you can either run CloudABI programs
   directly from the shell or by using the cloudabi-run tool
   (sysutils/cloudabi-utils). cloudabi-run allows you to inject sockets,
   files, and directories into the launched program in a more structured
   way.

   In the meantime, work has started on developing a Ports Collection that
   contains cross-compiled utilities and libraries for CloudABI. The
   intent is that this framework generates native packages for a number of
   operating systems, making it possible to develop CloudABI applications
   on any operating system, regardless of whether that operating system
   actually supports CloudABI.

   If you are interested in CloudABI, be sure to go to the project page on
   GitHub, watch recordings of talks at conferences, or wait for the
   upcoming edition of the FreeBSD Journal, which will feature an article
   on CloudABI.

   This project is sponsored by Nuxi, the Netherlands.

Open tasks:

    1. CloudABI is currently only available for amd64. It would make sense
       to port CloudABI to additional architectures like aarch64.
    2. Support for CloudABI has only been integrated into FreeBSD. If we
       manage to upstream support for CloudABI into other operating
       systems, it should be possible to run the same binary on multiple
       operating systems without recompilation.
    3. The CloudABI Ports Collection currently has only 60 packages.
       Although these packages already the building blocks of some
       interesting software, we are always interested in expanding.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Xen

   Links
   FreeBSD PVH DomU wiki page
    URL: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/FreeBSD_PVH
   FreeBSD PVH Dom0 wiki page
    URL: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/FreeBSD_Dom0
   Porting FreeBSD as a Xen ARM guest
    URL: http://www.xenproject.org/component/allvideoshare/video/latest/bsdcan-2015-how-to-port-bsd-as-a-xen-on-arm-guest.html

   Contact: Roger Pau Monn?<royger at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Julien Grall <julien.grall at citrix.com>

   Xen is a hypervisor using a microkernel design, providing services that
   allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same
   computer hardware concurrently. Xen support for FreeBSD on x86 as a
   guest was introduced in version 8 and ARM support is currently being
   worked on. Support for running FreeBSD as an amd64 Xen host (Dom0) is
   available in HEAD.

   On the x86 front, most of the work during this quarter focused on the
   implementation of PVH inside Xen. Consequently, most of the activity
   happened inside of the hypervisor. Patches for a clean PVH
   implementation have been posted, with the aim of having them merged in
   the next Xen release (4.7). Once that is done, work will continue
   adding new features to both FreeBSD and Xen to have feature parity with
   traditional PV guests/hosts.

   Apart from this, work is ongoing to import a new netfront from Linux in
   order to support new features, like split event channel and multiple
   queue support.

   On the ARM front, this quarter's work focused on getting FreeBSD/arm64
   booting as a Xen guest. The current activity is to upstream patches
   preparing Xen drivers to support arm64. This includes a rework of the
   console driver.

   This project is sponsored by Citrix Systems R&D.

Open tasks:

    1. Generalize the event channel code so it can be used on ARM.
    2. Improve backend (netback, blkback) performance.
    3. Work with upstream Xen to improve PVH and make it stable.
    4. Improve the generic bounce buffer code for unmapped bios in order
       to support the alignment requirements of the blkfront driver.
     __________________________________________________________________

ioat(4) Driver Import

   Links
   Wikipedia article on IOAT
    URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O_Acceleration_Technology
   Commit importing ioat(4)
    URL: https://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/base?view=revision&revision=r287117

   Contact: Jim Harris <jimharris at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Conrad Meyer <cem at FreeBSD.org>

   A new driver, ioat(4), was added to the tree. ioat(4) supports Intel's
   I/O Acceleration Technology devices which are found on some Intel
   server systems.

   These devices are DMA offload engines, which can accelerate some
   I/O-heavy applications by offloading memory copies from the main CPU to
   the I/OAT unit. This acceleration is not transparent; applications must
   be adapted to take advantage of the hardware.

   Some I/OAT models support more advanced copying modes, such as XOR;
   these modes are not yet supported in the ioat(4) driver.

   This project is sponsored by Intel Corporation, and EMC / Isilon
   Storage Division.

Open tasks:

    1. Further testing, especially on a range of device models other than
       BDXDE (looking for volunteers here).
    2. Support for the more advanced copy modes.
     __________________________________________________________________

IPsec Upgrades

   Contact: George Neville-Neil <gnn at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: John-Mark Gurney <jmg at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Ermal Lu? <eri at FreeBSD.org>

   IPsec is now enabled by default in the GENERIC kernel configuration,
   and work is proceeding to speed things up in various ways. The latest
   changes are the addition, by John-Mark Gurney, Ermal Lu?, and George
   V. Neville-Neil, of AES modes both in hardware and in software. Part of
   this work also includes more benchmarks undertaken using Conductor in
   the netperf project. Results have been reported at BSDCan and vBSDcon
   with more to come at EuroBSDcon and BSDCon Brasil.

   This project is sponsored by Netgate, and The FreeBSD Foundation.

Open tasks:

    1. Performance improvements and other tweaks are ongoing.
     __________________________________________________________________

Atomics

   Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Alan Cox <alc at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Bruce Evans <bde at FreeBSD.org>

   Atomic operations serve two fundamental purposes. First, they are the
   building blocks for expressing synchronization algorithms in a single,
   machine-independent way using high-level languages. In essense, atomics
   abstract the different building blocks supported by the various
   architectures on which FreeBSD runs, making it easier to develop and
   reason about lock-less code by hiding hardware-level details.

   Atomics also provide the barrier operations that allow software to
   control the effects on memory of out-of-order and speculative execution
   in modern processors as well as optimizations by compilers. This
   capability is especially important to multithreaded software, such as
   the FreeBSD kernel, when running on systems where multiple processors
   communicate through a shared main memory.

   Each machine architecture defines a memory model, which specifies the
   possible effects on memory of out-of-order and speculative execution.
   More precisely, it specifies the extent to which the machine may
   visibly reorder memory accesses to optimize performance. Unfortunately,
   there are almost as many models as architectures. Some architectures,
   for example IA32 or Sparcv9 TSO, are relatively strongly ordered. In
   contrast, others, like PowerPC or ARM, are very relaxed. In effect,
   atomics define a very relaxed abstract memory model for FreeBSD's
   machine-independent code that can be efficiently realized on any of
   these architectures.

   Most FreeBSD development and testing still happens on x86 machines,
   which, when combined with x86's strongly ordered memory model, leads to
   errors in the use of atomics, specifically, barriers. In other words,
   the code is not properly written to FreeBSD's abstract memory model,
   but the strong ordering of the x86 architecture hides this fact. The
   architectures impacted by the code that incorrectly uses atomics are
   less popular or have limited availability, and the resulting bugs from
   the misuse of atomics are hard to diagnose.

   The goal of this project is to audit and upgrade the usage of lockless
   facilities, hopefully fixing bugs before they are observed in the wild.

   FreeBSD defines its own set of atomics operations, like many other
   operating systems. But unlike other operating systems, FreeBSD models
   its atomics and barriers on the release consistency model, which is
   also known as acquire/release model. This is the same model which is
   used by the C11 and C++11 language standards as well as the new 64-bit
   ARM architecture. Despite having syntactical differences, C11 and
   FreeBSD atomics share essentially the same semantics. Consequently,
   ample tutorials about the C11 memory model and algorithms expressed
   with C11 atomics can be trivially reused under FreeBSD.

   One facility of C11 that was missing from FreeBSD atomics was fences.
   Fences are bidirectional barrier operations which could not be
   expressed by the existing atomic+barrier accesses. They were added in
   r285283.

   Due to the strong memory model implemented by x86 processors,
   atomic_load_acq() and atomic_store_rel() can be implemented by plain
   load and store instructions with only a compiler barrier. No additional
   ordering constraints are required. This simplification of
   atomic_store_rel() was done some time ago in r236456. The
   atomic_load_acq() change was done in r285934, after careful review of
   all its uses in the kernel and user-space to ensure that no hidden
   dependency on a stronger implementation was left.

   The only reordering in memory accesses which is allowed on x86 is that
   loads may be reordered with older stores to different locations. This
   results from the use of store buffers at the micro-architecural level.
   So, to ensure sequentially consistent behavior on x86, a store/load
   barrier needs to be issued, which can be done with an MFENCE
   instruction or by any locked read-modify-write operation. The latter
   approach is recommended by the optimization guides from Intel and AMD.
   It was noted that careful selection of the scratch memory location,
   which is modified by the locked RMW operation, can reduce the cost of
   the barrier by avoiding false data dependencies. The corresponding
   optimization was committed in r284901.

   The atomic(9) man page was often a cause of confusion due to both
   erroneous and ambiguous statements. The most significant of these
   issues were addressed in changes r286513 and r286784.

   Some examples of our preemptive fixes to the misuse of atomics that
   would only become evident on weakly ordered machines are:
     * A very important lockless algorithm, used in both the kernel and
       libc, is the timekeeping functionality implemented in
       kern/kern_tc.c and the userspace __vdso_gettimeofday. This
       algorithm relied on x86 total store order (TSO) behavior. It was
       fixed in r284178 and r285286.
     * The kern/kern_intr.c lockless updates to the it_need indicator were
       corrected in r285607.
     * An issue with kern/subr_smp.c:smp_rendezvous_cpus() not
       guaranteeing the visibility of updates done on other CPUs to the
       caller was fixed in r285771.
     * The pthread_once() implementation was fixed to include missed
       barriers in r287556.

   This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation (Konstantin
   Belousov's work).
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD on Cavium ThunderX (arm64)

   Contact: Dominik Ermel <der at semihalf.com>
   Contact: Wojciech Macek <wma at semihalf.com>
   Contact: Zbigniew Bodek <zbb at semihalf.com>

   Cavium's ThunderX is a high-performance 64-bit ARMv8 CPU, available in
   configurations with up to 48 cores per package. ThunderX is the initial
   reference platform for the FreeBSD/arm64 porting effort.

   Additional Semihalf-sponsored work on ThunderX support brought brand
   new features such as:
     * Multi-socket operation: FreeBSD now runs on a two-node ThunderX
       server board with a total of 96 CPU cores!
     * Virtual Networking Interface Card driver: The VNIC driver consists
       of 4 elements (BGX, MDIO, and Physical and Virtual Functions) and
       is the second driver in FreeBSD to utilize SR-IOV capabilities.
       ThunderX is now able to use built-in networking interfaces at 1-40
       Gbps.

   Moreover, previously introduced functionalities have been improved and
   committed to HEAD. This includes:
     * PCIe drivers for both internal and external controllers
     * ITS (Interrupt Translation Services) fixes
     * Platform-specific changes for ThunderX
     * Various other fixes to the kernel (PCI, UMA, etc.)

   The remaining features are being reviewed and will be integrated into
   HEAD soon. However, the GENERIC kernel already supports and runs on
   ThunderX.

   This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation, ARM Ltd., Cavium,
   and Semihalf.

Open tasks:

    1. Upstream the remaining features: 2-socket support, VNIC driver, and
       PCIe fixes
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD on the HiKey ARMv8 Board

   Links
   HiKey wiki entry
    URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/arm64/HiKey
   Hardware description
    URL: https://www.96boards.org/products/ce/hikey/

   Contact: Andrew Turner <andrew at FreeBSD.org>

   The HiKey is a low-cost ARMv8 development board from the Linaro
   96boards initiative. It contains a HiSilicon Kirin 6220 with eight
   ARMv8 cores and 1GB of ram.

   FreeBSD has been ported to run on the HiKey with a minimal set of
   drivers. As of this report, FreeBSD supports the micro-SD slot and USB
   host, and will boot off the SD card to multi-user mode using a recent
   arm64 snapshot.

   The kernel is missing a number of device drivers. However, it is at a
   usable state for people interested in testing FreeBSD on ARMv8
   hardware.

   This project is sponsored by ABT Systems Ltd, and ARM Ltd.

Open tasks:

    1. A driver for SDIO and the onboard WiFi.
    2. Fix the MMC driver to access the eMMC.
    3. Support the USB in OTG mode.
    4. Support a display via HDMI.
    5. Add thermal management.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD/arm64

   Links
   FreeBSD arm64 wiki page
    URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/arm64

   Contact: Andrew Turner <andrew at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at FreeBSD.org>

   Numerous cleanups and fixes have been applied to the arm64 kernel. This
   includes fixes to exception handling, asynchronous signals, ddb, and
   pmap. ddb has been updated to better handle accessing memory that may
   be unmapped. The pmap code was made more complete by implementing more
   functions as needed.

   Further work on SMP means that FreeBSD now boots on all 48 cores on the
   Cavium ThunderX platform. This includes adding support for the ARM
   GICv3 interrupt controllers and fixing the memory mapping to be
   shareable between CPUs.

   The test suite has been run on both qemu and hardware. Most of the test
   cases are passing, with around 30 tests either broken or failing. Work
   on diagnosing the issues with the remaining test cases is ongoing.

   This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation, and ABT Systems
   Ltd.

Open tasks:

    1. Port to more SoCs.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD/RISC-V Port

   Links
   FreeBSD wiki RISC-V
    URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/riscv
   Single user boot log
    URL: https://people.freebsd.org/~br/riscv-singleuser.txt

   Contact: Ruslan Bukin <br at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Arun Thomas <arun.thomas at baesystems.com>
   Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at FreeBSD.org>

   RISC-V is an open source Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) designed at
   UC Berkeley. It is freely available for all uses without requiring fees
   or license agreements. The RISC-V team intends to provide freely
   available BSD licensed CPU designs.

   Ruslan Bukin (University of Cambridge) now has FreeBSD booting to a
   single user shell on a RISC-V simulator. The porting effort started
   only two months ago and is very much a work in progress, requiring
   significant refactoring and clean up before it reaches a committable
   state. Nonetheless, this is exceptional progress in a short time. The
   porting effort also identified a number of proposed ISA improvements.

   The port currently uses the GNU tool chain (GCC and binutils), and runs
   on the Spike simulator. Improved RISC-V support in Clang/LLVM and
   related tools is highly desired.

   This project is sponsored by DARPA, AFRL.
     __________________________________________________________________

mandoc and roff Toolchain

   Links
   Heirloom doctools
    URL: https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-doctools
   mandoc
    URL: http://mdocml.bsd.lv/

   Contact: Baptiste Daroussin <bapt at FreeBSD.org>

   mandoc is a suite of tools for compiling mdoc, the roff macro language
   of choice for BSD manual pages.

   mandoc is the default renderer for manpages on FreeBSD head. This
   quarter, the apropos(1) utility was switched to use mandoc's version,
   which offers a new database format (in SQLite) bringing more powerful,
   fine-grained ways to search man pages.

   While mandoc is very good for man pages, we also provide lots of other
   documentation in plain roff format. The Heirloom toolchain is being
   studied to replace groff in base. The Heirloom nroff toolchain has
   multiple benefits: it has very good unicode support and very good
   compatibility with groff.

   A great deal of work as been done testing the Heirloom nroff toolchain
   with all the roff documents in the base system (including man pages),
   and upstream has been very proactive in fixing reported bugs.

   The soelim(1) utility has been replaced with a BSD-licensed version
   which is good enough to work with all available roff toolchains to ease
   the transition. This version of the soelim(1) utility, originally
   written solely for FreeBSD, is now part of the mandoc tool suite.

   In coordination with Ingo Schwarze from OpenBSD, the col(1) utility has
   been cleaned up and updated to recognize both SUSv2-style escape-digit
   and BSD-style escape-control-char sequences in the input stream.

   The checknr(1) utility has been cleaned up and extended to support
   modern roff(7) macros, including synchronizing code from NetBSD and the
   Heirloom doctools version.

   Many roff fixes were made to documentation and man pages, having been
   discovered while testing the new toolchain.
     __________________________________________________________________

pkg 1.6

   Contact: FreeBSD pkg Team <pkg at FreeBSD.org>

   pkg 1.6.0 has been released. Many changes have been made since pkg 1.5:
     * The dependency solver is greatly improved
     * Lots of fixes in the three-way merge code
     * pkg add can now work without a version specified in the dependency
       line
     * pkg check -d now also checks the required libraries
     * Improved support for partial upgrades
     * Improved zsh completion support
     * Improved Linux support: all regression tests now pass on Linux
     * Messages can now be context-aware, showing a given message always,
       or only during installation, upgrade (conditional on the previous
       version), or removal
     * @keywords now accept new entries to add context-aware messages
     * Added the ability to generate graphiz's dot format representation
       of the solver's problem
     * pkg search now defaults to showing the pkg-comments of the matched
       packages
     * Lots of bug fixes and code cleanup
     * Improvements in cross-installation support

Open tasks:

    1. Add a notion of priority to the list of files to ensure that
       certain files are the first to be replaced. This was a blocker for
       packaging base.
    2. Investigate replacing openssl by mbedtls.
     __________________________________________________________________

sesutil(8)

   Links
   Wikipedia: SCSI Enclosure Services (SES)
    URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_Enclosure_Services

   Contact: Baptiste Daroussin <bapt at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Allan Jude <allanjude at FreeBSD.org>

   sesutil(8) was originally created as a more universal way to blink the
   "locate" LEDs on most hot-swappable drive enclosures.

   This work is based on the original SES tools created by Matthew Jacob
   in 2000, which have been available in the share/examples section of the
   source tree, but were not built by default.

   The new utility extends the original code with a number of very useful
   features:
     * Print a map of all objects connected to the SES controller
     * Map device names (/dev/da5) to SES slot number
     * Blink the Locate and/or Fault LED of a drive by its SES slot number
       or device name
     * Check the status of the entire SES controller

   This project is sponsored by Gandi, and ScaleEngine Inc..

Open tasks:

    1. Test sesutil(8) against more hardware.
    2. Diagnose an issue where the locate command sometimes needs to be
       sent twice to activate the LED.
    3. Add support for libxo output types.
     __________________________________________________________________

truss(1)

   Contact: John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Bryan Drewery <bdrewery at FreeBSD.org>

   The interface between the ABI-specific backends and the truss core was
   refactored, reducing duplicated code. This prompted additional
   follow-on work to add support for more ABIs, including aarch64 and
   CloudABI.

   ptrace(2) was extended to return more information about the currently
   executing system call. This restored behavior that had been present in
   a previous version of truss: knowing the correct number of arguments
   for all system calls.

   The fork-following support in truss was reworked to use native fork
   following in ptrace(2) rather than forking a new truss process for each
   child of a traced process.

   Support for decoding more arguments has been added in the last quarter
   as well.

Open tasks:

    1. Create a new libsysdecode library to hold shared code between
       truss(1) and kdump(1).
    2. Decode more system call arguments.
    3. Add appropriate system call decoding specifications for freebsd32
       system calls.
    4. Implement an ABI for 64-bit Linux binaries under FreeBSD/amd64.
     __________________________________________________________________

Updates to GDB

   Links
   Extend libkvm to support cross-debugging of vmcores
    URL: https://reviews.FreeBSD.org/D3341

   Contact: John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>

   Support for following children after forks for FreeBSD was implemented
   and merged upstream to GDB's master branch, and was included in GDB
   7.10.

   Work has continued on porting kgdb to newer gdb. The amd64, i386,
   powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 backends have all been ported and are
   now available via a new KGDB option in the devel/gdb port.

   The MD backends for libkvm have been rewritten to support
   cross-debugging crashdumps, and the kgdb targets for amd64 and i386
   have been reworked to support cross-debugging. Both i386 and amd64 kgdb
   binaries have been able to cross-debug the other architecture's vmcores
   with these changes. This changeset for libkvm is not yet in the tree,
   but is awaiting more testing.

Open tasks:

    1. Test the libkvm changes on platforms other than amd64, i386, and
       powerpc64.
    2. Figure out why the powerpc kgdb targets are not able to unwind the
       stack past the initial frame.
    3. Add support for more platforms (arm, mips, aarch64) to upstream gdb
       for both userland and kgdb.
    4. Write a new 1:1-only thread target for FreeBSD that can be sent
       upstream.
    5. Add support for debugging powerpc vector registers.
     __________________________________________________________________

Bringing GitLab into the Ports Collection

   Links
   PR for the new port
    URL: https://bugs.FreeBSD.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=202468
   Installation guide
    URL: https://github.com/t-zuehlsdorff/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/install/installation-freebsd.md
   GitLab Source Tree
    URL: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/
   Contact: Torsten Z?lsdorff <ports at toco-domains.de>
   Contact: Michael Fausten <ports at michael-fausten.de>

   GitLab is a web-based Git repository manager with many features, used
   by more than 100.000 organizations, including NASA and Alibaba. It also
   is a very long-standing entry on the "Wanted Ports" list on the FreeBSD
   Wiki.

   In the last month there was steady progress, finally resulting in the
   PR for adding the new port. In addition to the many dependencies Philip
   M. Gollucci is working on, there was already a large amount of work
   done. Along with many new or updated rubygems, Rails 4.1 was
   resurrected. A large group of committers were involved in the process
   and guided us through the various problems and pitfalls.

   Because of the number of dependencies -- we nearly hit 100 -- making
   progress takes some time. In the meantime, a new major version of
   GitLab has already been released, requiring even more dependencies and
   updates. Work on this version is in progress, but the first goal is to
   get the latest stable version from the 7.14 branch into the ports tree.

   This project is sponsored by anyMOTION GRAPHICS GmbH, D?seldorf,
   Germany.

Open tasks:

    1. Closing all the PRs of the dependencies
    2. Committing the GitLab port itself
    3. Updating the port to the latest version of the 8.x branch
     __________________________________________________________________

GNOME on FreeBSD

   Links
   FreeBSD Gnome website
    URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome
   Devel repository
    URL: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports-gnome
   Upstream build bot
    URL: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Jhbuild/FreeBSD
   USE_GNOME Porter's Handbook chapter
    URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/using-gnome.html

   Contact: FreeBSD GNOME Team <freebsd-gnome at FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD GNOME Team maintains the GNOME, MATE, and CINNAMON desktop
   environments and graphical user interfaces for FreeBSD. GNOME 3 is part
   of the GNU Project. MATE is a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop. CINNAMON is
   a desktop environment using GNOME 3 technologies but with a GNOME 2
   look and feel.

   This quarter, GNOME 3.16 and MATE 1.10 were committed to the ports
   tree, followed up by some incremental improvements. A chapter covering
   the use of USE_GNOME within individual ports' Makefiles was written and
   committed to the Porter's Handbook.

   GNOME 3.18 has been ported. There are, however, some issues that need
   to be resolved before it can be committed to the ports tree.

Open tasks:

    1. The FreeBSD GNOME website is stale. Work is under way to improve
       it.
    2. Please give feedback on and suggest improvements to the chapter in
       the Porter's Handbook on the USE_GNOME functionality.
    3. Continue working on investigating the issues blocking GNOME 3.18.
     __________________________________________________________________

KDE on FreeBSD

   Links
   KDE on FreeBSD website
    URL: https://freebsd.kde.org/
   KDE ports staging area
    URL: https://freebsd.kde.org/area51.php
   KDE on FreeBSD wiki
    URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/KDE
   KDE/FreeBSD mailing list
    URL: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-freebsd
   Development repository for integrating KDE 5
    URL: http://src.mouf.net/area51/log/branches/plasma5

   Contact: KDE on FreeBSD team <kde at FreeBSD.org>

   Overall, we have updated the following ports this quarter:
     * CMake 3.3.1 (r396266)
     * Qt 4.8.7 (r397043)
     * QtCreator 3.5.0 (r395935)
     * Fixed some dependencies, typos and plists in Qt5-ports
       (r396044-r396047), spotted by Ralf Nolden

   In our development repository, we have done the following work:
     * Updated PyQt-bindings for qt4 to 4.11.4 and added qt5 bindings 5.5,
       contributed by Guido Falsi, and modified by Tobias Berner (area51)
     * Updated qt5 to 5.5.0. Ralf Nolden has contributed a handful of
       useful new ports, for example lang/qt5-l10n (area51/qt-5.5)
     * The plasma5 branch has been kept up to date with KDE's upstream and
       contains ports for Frameworks 5.14.0, Plasma Desktop 5.4.2 and
       Applications 15.08.1 (area51/plasma5)

Open tasks:

    1. Work on getting the stuff from plasma5 branch into ports. (This is
       a major update to nearly all KDE applications, so testers are very
       welcome.)
    2. Finalize the work on PyQt5.
    3. Port qt5-webengine. Qt-5.5 will probably be the last release
       shipping a www/webkit-qt5 port.
     __________________________________________________________________

Node.js Modules

   Links
   Node.js modules
    URL: https://www.assembla.com/spaces/cozycloud/subversion/source
   Pre-draft documentation
    URL: https://people.FreeBSD.org/~olivierd/porters-handbook/using-nodejs.html

   Contact: Olivier Duchateau <olivierd at FreeBSD.org>

   Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily
   building fast, scalable network applications. It uses an event-driven,
   non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect
   for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed
   devices.

   The goal of this project is to make it easy to install the modules
   available in the npm package registry.

   Currently, the repository contains more than 100 new ports, in
   particular:
     * CoffeeScript (a programming language that transcompiles to
       JavaScript)
     * node-gyp (allows building Node.js addons, often written in C or
       C++)
     * Request (a simplified HTTP client)

   We have also written several helpers for the porting, available in our
   experimental repository.

Open tasks:

    1. Bring in grunt.js (and modules), the JavaScript task runner.
    2. Put more effort into support for node-gyp in the USES framework
     __________________________________________________________________

Ports Collection

   Links
   Ports Collection website
    URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
   Contributing to the Ports Collection
    URL: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/contributing/ports-contributing.html
   Port Monitoring service
    URL: http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/index.html
   Team Website
    URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/portmgr/index.html
   Blog
    URL: http://blogs.freebsdish.org/portmgr/
   Twitter feed
    URL: http://www.twitter.com/freebsd_portmgr/
   Facebook page
    URL: http://www.facebook.com/portmgr
   Google+ page
    URL: http://plus.google.com/communities/108335846196454338383

   Contact: Frederic Culot <portmgr-secretary at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: FreeBSD Ports Management Team <portmgr at FreeBSD.org>

   As of the end of Q3 the ports tree holds just over 25,000 ports, and
   the PR count is above 2,000. The summer period saw less activity on the
   ports tree than during the previous quarter, with fewer than 7,000
   commits performed by 120 active committers. Unfortunately, the number
   of problem reports closed also decreased significantly, with fewer than
   1,500 problem reports fixed during Q3.

   In Q3 several commit bits were taken in for safekeeping, following an
   inactivity period of more than 18 months (fluffy), or on committer's
   request (xmj, stefan, brix). One new developer was granted a ports
   commit bit (Jason Unovitch junovitch at FreeBSD.org), and one returning
   committer (Babak Farrokhi) had his commit bit reinstated.

   On the management side, no changes were made to the portmgr team during
   Q3.

   On the QA side, 25 exp-runs were performed to validate sensitive
   updates or cleanups. Amongst those, the noticeable changes are the
   update to pkg 1.6, the automake14 removal, and several important port
   updates such as doxygen to 1.8.10, gnome3 to 3.16, cmake to 3.3.1, and
   the Qt4 ports to 4.8.7. The default jdk was also set to openjdk8. Some
   infrastructure changes included the addition of new options helpers:
   opt_VARS, opt_VARS_OFF, opt_IMPLIES, and opt_PREVENTS. Some macros were
   also removed, such as UNIQUENAME and LATEST_LINK.

Open tasks:

    1. We would like to remind everyone that the ports tree is built and
       run by volunteers, and any help is greatly appreciated. This is
       more important than ever, since the number of problem reports
       cannot seem to stop increasing. So if you use ports or packages,
       please consider jumping in and helping! This is also true for
       existing porters: it would be great if you would consider the next
       step, which is to share your knowledge and mentor someone more
       junior with the ports tree internals. And if you already do these
       tasks, many thanks to you!
     __________________________________________________________________

Ports on PowerPC

   Contact: Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe at FreeBSD.org>

   The Ports Collection typically receives less attention on Tier-2
   architectures than on Tier-1 architectures, although several build-runs
   were performed at various points in the past, and broken ports were
   marked as such at those times.

   Some of the Tier-2 platforms, such as PowerPC and ARM, have improved
   considerably recently, both on FreeBSD's and the compilers' sides, but
   as the tree is not rebuilt on the cluster very often, it was suspected
   that many ports are marked BROKEN while they in fact now build and run
   correctly.

   Over the past several weeks, 26 ports that were indeed broken on at
   least PowerPC had been fixed, 58 ports that were incorrectly marked as
   broken (leftovers from the old times) were marked as working, and fewer
   than 40 ports still have issues requiring further work.

Open tasks:

    1. The Ports Collection could benefit a lot from more frequent sweeps
       targeting Tier-2 systems.
    2. Recent work on QEMU-backed emulators and the much-anticipated
       cross-building of ports are essential pieces to bring FreeBSD
       packages on par with the base system's support, architecture-wise.
     __________________________________________________________________

Xfce on FreeBSD

   Links
   FreeBSD Xfce Project
    URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Xfce
   FreeBSD Xfce Repository
    URL: https://www.assembla.com/spaces/xfce4/subversion/source

   Contact: FreeBSD Xfce Team <xfce at FreeBSD.org>

   Xfce is a free software desktop environment for Unix and Unix-like
   platforms, such as FreeBSD. It aims to be fast and lightweight, while
   still being visually appealing and easy to use.

   During this quarter, the team has kept these applications up-to-date:
     * science/xfce4-equake-plugin 1.3.8
     * sysutils/xfce4-power-manager 1.5.2
     * x11/libexo 0.10.7
     * x11/xfce4-embed-plugin 1.6.0
     * x11/xfce4-verve-plugin 1.1.0
     * x11/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin 1.5.1
     * x11-wm/xfce4-desktop 4.12.3
     * www/midori 0.5.11

   We also follow the unstable releases (available in our experimental
   repository) of:
     * sysutils/xfce4-panel-switch 1.0.2 (utility to backup panel layouts)
     * x11/xfce4-dashboard 0.5.1

   In the trunk branch, x11-wm/xfce4-panel contains a patch to support
   sysutils/xfce4-panel-switch (available through the panel preferences).

Open tasks:

    1. Test the new stable release of GLib 2.46.x with the kqueue/kevent
       backend enabled (it was disabled with revision r393663). Currently
       several features are broken, especially in Thunar, xfce4-panel, and
       Xfdashboard.
     __________________________________________________________________

PO Translation Project

   Links
   PO Translations
    URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/po-translations.html
   German translation of the Leap Seconds article
    URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/de_DE.ISO8859-1/articles/leap-seconds/
   Dutch translation of the Explaining BSD article
    URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/nl_NL.ISO8859-1/articles/explaining-bsd/
   FreeBSD Translators mailing list
    URL: https://lists.FreeBSD.org/pipermail/freebsd-translators/

   Contact: FreeBSD Documentation Team <freebsd-doc at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: FreeBSD Translators <freebsd-translators at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Warren Block <wblock at FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD documentation translation process has been in need of
   modernization for quite some time. The existing process was just too
   difficult for translators to keep translations up to date.

   With help from Benedict Reuschling, Shaun McCance, Ryan Lortie, Hiroki
   Sato, and many others, the availability of a new PO translation system
   was announced in August.

   PO translations handle most of the overhead of the translation process.
   Translators do not have to keep track of commits to the upstream
   English version. The actual work of translating is quicker and easier.
   PO editors show how much of the document has been translated. If a
   translation is already available for a given string, it can be easily
   reused.

   Early testing has been very successful. Most issues involve discovering
   and documenting the new processes rather than fixing bugs. New
   translations of English documents have already been committed.

   There will certainly be additional changes and improvements, but the
   system works. We will continue to discover how to share work between
   translation teams and the project as a whole. This work will be much
   easier now that the initial hurdle of being able to use PO software has
   been passed.

Open tasks:

    1. Continue testing. The system is new to us and there are bound to be
       bugs and situations with unexpected results.
    2. Improve documentation on using the new PO translations. Much of
       this involves things that rarely happened with the old system, like
       adding a completely new language directory.
    3. Add new translations for existing documents. There is much less
       work to create and update a translated document now. Existing and
       new translators are working on adding and updating translations of
       the English documentation.
    4. Figure out how to generate and share translation memory with other
       members of a language team or translators outside the team.
    5. Test new PO editors like Pootle and Virtaal.
    6. Determine a method to allow translators commit access for
       translations.
    7. Develop and test code to translate manual pages.
     __________________________________________________________________

Website CSS Update

   Links
   FreeBSD Main Site
    URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/

   Contact: Warren Block <wblock at FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD website has remained essentially unchanged in appearance
   for many years. Like other legacy systems, it is difficult to change.
   It is heavily used and therefore subject to non-trivial bikeshedding.

   The CSS shrunk the reader's font from the size they had requested. It
   specified hardcoded font and object sizes in pixels. On wide monitors,
   only the middle third of the screen was used. Hardware has changed from
   what existed when this version of the site was created. Screens have
   become larger and wider, and increased in resolution at the same time.

   It was time for a change. Font sizes were set to percentages, with none
   smaller than 100%. The width of the main box was changed to 90%. Other
   small adjustments were added. These limited changes produced a rendered
   site that better respects the reader's settings, is much easier to
   read, and shows more information.

   Although no content changed, the appearance was so different that some
   viewers thought we had redesigned the site. It is gratifying to know
   that so many people are using it. We would also like to thank people
   for the response, which was overwhelmingly positive and hardly
   bikesheddy at all.

Open tasks:

    1. Fix other outdated assumptions in the CSS. Alternately, rework the
       entire site. However, that is a much more complex and ambitious
       project than it might seem.
     __________________________________________________________________

Allwinner A10/A20 Support

   Links
   Wiki page
    URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD/arm/Allwinner

   Contact: Luiz Otavio O Souza <loos at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Pratik Singhal <ps06756 at gmail.com>

   The Allwinner A10 and A20 chips are ARM CPUs found in increasingly
   common development boards and other devices, such as the
   Cubieboard/Cubieboard 2 and the Banana Pi.

   With the end of a GSoC project by Pratik Singhal, our A10 and A20
   support has improved. Pratik helped with the implementation and testing
   of the SD card and SATA support for the Allwinner chips.

   Luiz Otavio O Souza added support for the dwc network interface on the
   A20, which is capable of gigabit speeds.

   Glen Barber kindly added support for official FreeBSD images for
   Cubieboard 2 and the Banana Pi.

   This project is sponsored by Google Summer of Code 2015 (partly).

Open tasks:

    1. Some drivers are still missing: audio, video/HDMI/framebuffer, IR,
       I2C, SPI, PWM.
    2. Fix if_dwc for better performance.
     __________________________________________________________________

mtree Parsing and Manipulation Library

   Links
   Wiki page
    URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2015/mtreeParsingLibrary

   Contact: Michal Ratajsky <michal at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks at FreeBSD.org>

   FreeBSD includes several programs that work with file system hierarchy
   descriptions in the mtree(5) format. These descriptions, also called
   specifications, have a broad range of uses, from automatically creating
   directory structures to security auditing.

   Each of the programs, namely mtree, bsdtar, install, and makefs, has
   its own implementation of the mtree format. This not only adds
   maintenance overhead, but also makes interoperability difficult, as
   each of the implementations only supports a limited subset of the
   format.

   The goal of this project was to create a new libmtree library,
   implementing everything the mtree format has to offer, and wrapping it
   with an expressive API which all the listed programs can use. We also
   wanted libmtree to be portable, as one of the major users of the mtree
   format is libarchive, the library implementing most of bsdtar.

   Currently, the library is functionally complete, ready to be downloaded
   and receive everyone's attention. We have also decided to bundle the
   mtree program along with it. The bundled mtree has also been modified
   for better portability.

   The project included modifying libarchive, install and makefs to use
   libmtree. These modified versions are also available.

   Please see the Wiki page for more information, download locations, and
   an example of using the libmtree API.

   This project is sponsored by Google Summer of Code 2015.

Open tasks:

    1. Test and review the library code and API, and the modifications
       made to the programs.
    2. Fix the known problems that are mentioned on the Wiki page.
     __________________________________________________________________

Multiqueue Testing

   Links
   Project Wiki Page
    URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2015/MultiqueueTestingProject

   Contact: Tiwei Bie <btw at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Hiren Panchasara <hiren at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: George Neville-Neil <gnn at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson at FreeBSD.org>

   The aim of this project is to design and implement infrastructure to
   validate that a number of the network stack's multiqueue behaviours are
   functioning as expected.

   At present, most of this project has been implemented. It mainly
   consists of two parts:
    1. A general mechanism to collect the per-ring per-cpu statistics that
       can be used by all NIC drivers, and extensions to netstat(1) to
       report these statistics.
    2. A suite of network stack behavior testing programs that consists
       of:
          + a virtual multiqueue ethernet interface (vme)
          + a UDP packet generator based on vme
          + a UDP server based on socket(2)
          + a TCP client based on lwip and vme
          + a TCP server based on socket(2)

   However, it still needs further refinements to make it suitable for
   committing to FreeBSD head.

   This project is sponsored by Google Summer of Code 2015.
     __________________________________________________________________

Update Ficl in Bootloader

   Links
   Wiki Page
    URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2015/UpdateFiclInBootloader

   Contact: Colin Lord <clord at FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD bootloader has used Ficl 3 for quite some time. This
   project was intended to update the version of Ficl in use to Ficl 4.
   Ficl 4 is not only faster but also has a smaller memory footprint, both
   being important advantages for a bootloader.

   As part of the Google Summer of Code program, I worked on importing the
   Ficl 4 sources to get a bootloader running Ficl 4. The first half of
   the summer consisted of setting up my test environment, as well as
   arranging the sources in the tree properly and modifying the build
   files to point to the new locations. Once that was complete, the
   sources had to be modified to build correctly and to add back in some
   of the FreeBSD-specific parts from Ficl 3. Unfortunately, after all
   those tasks were completed, a few bugs in the Ficl project were
   discovered that delayed the bootloader update, so it is not finished.
   The Illumos project has faced similar issues with Ficl 4 so I received
   some good tips from them, but since school has started back up I have
   not been able to put much work into fixing the bugs.

   This project is sponsored by Google Summer of Code 2015.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Foundation

   Links
   Foundation website
    URL: http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/
   FreeBSD Journal
    URL: http://freebsdjournal.com/

   Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb at FreeBSDFoundation.org>

   The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated
   to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community
   worldwide. Funding comes from individual and corporate donations and is
   used to fund and manage development projects, conferences and developer
   summits, and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers. The
   Foundation purchases hardware to improve and maintain FreeBSD
   infrastructure and publishes FreeBSD white papers and marketing
   material to promote, educate, and advocate for the FreeBSD Project. The
   Foundation also represents the FreeBSD Project in executing contracts,
   license agreements, and other legal arrangements that require a
   recognized legal entity.

   Here are some highlights of what we did to help FreeBSD last quarter:

   Anne Dickison and Deb Goodkin attended OSCON to promote FreeBSD.

   Robert Watson organized and ran the Cambridge FreeBSD Developer Summit
   2015 ("BSDCam"). We provided travel grants to two FreeBSD developers to
   attend the summit. Three Foundation board/staff members attended too.

   George V. Neville-Neil attended the ARM Partner Meeting where he met
   with 15 silicon and systems vendors to present the unique traits and
   qualities of FreeBSD and work on setting up partnerships with the
   companies building and deploying ARM hardware.

   George and Robert Watson collaborated in Cambridge on developing
   further FreeBSD-based teaching material at undergraduate and masters
   levels. Part of this project was funded by the Foundation.

   George planned and ran the DevSummit at vBSDCon 2015.

   We were proud to be a sponsor of vBSDCon 2015, Sept 11-13 in Washington
   DC. George V. Neville-Neil and Ed Maste presented "Supporting a BSD
   Project" at the conference. Dru Lavigne, Glen Barber, George V.
   Neville-Neil, and Ed Maste attended and represented the Foundation at
   both vBSDCon and the FreeBSD Developer Summit that preceded it. We had
   many people stop by our table to make a donation, and it was another
   great opportunity to talk and work with people face-to-face.

   Cheryl Blain and John Baldwin promoted the Foundation and FreeBSD at
   the SNIA 2015 Storage Developer Conference, in Santa Clara, California,
   Sept 21-24. The Foundation was also a sponsor.

   We sponsored Andy Turner to attend Linaro Connect in San Francisco,
   Sept 21-25.

   Ed Maste, our project development director, attended the X.Org
   Developer's Conference (XDC) in Toronto, Ontario.

   We sponsored the 2015 nginx Conference and sent FreeBSD community
   member John Baldwin.

   George Neville-Neil continued planning the 2015 Silicon Valley Vendor
   Summit, including securing the venue.

   Benedict Reuschling and Erwin Lansing helped plan and organize the
   EuroBSDCon FreeBSD Developer Summit. This included setting up the
   working groups, securing the venue, and getting the T-shirts made.

   Benedict helped organize, and he and Dru Lavigne participated in the
   FreeBSD Hackathon in the Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany. It was a
   successful weekend of fixing bugs and collaborating with others.

   Dru Lavigne taught a FreeBSD class in Berlin, Germany July 29-31.

   We were a sponsor of womENcourage 2015, in Uppsala Sweden, Sept 24-26.
   Dru was the moderator for a panel on Open Source as a Career Path. All
   the panelists were FreeBSD contributors including Dan Langille, Allan
   Jude, Benedict Reuschling, and Deb Goodkin. We also had a table at the
   job fair and talked to a lot of students and professors about the
   benefits of working on FreeBSD as an alternative to an internship,
   teaching about FreeBSD in university classes, and hosting FreeBSD
   events at their schools. Dan taught a workshop on How to Contribute to
   an Open Source project. Deb participated in this workshop and started a
   discussion on offering a similar workshop at BSD and non-BSD
   conferences. The workshop would be titled "How to Contribute to
   FreeBSD", and participants would learn how to contribute documentation
   to the Project.

   We continued to publish our monthly newsletters, keeping the community
   informed on what we are doing, including event recaps, testimonials,
   project updates, and upcoming events. We received testimonials from
   Microsoft, NYCBus, and ScaleEngine. We also continued to approach
   companies to provide us with testimonials to help promote their use of
   FreeBSD.

   Anne Dickison rebooted the Faces of FreeBSD series and is working with
   FreeBSD contributors on writing their stories. She continued to produce
   more FreeBSD Swag and literature to promote FreeBSD, as well as
   advocating for FreeBSD over our social channels and with new
   partnerships.

   We reached our 2015 goal of 10,000 FreeBSD Journal subscribers, and we
   published a new Open Journal article on our website, to help promote
   the Journal. We also started offering a new subscription bundle, where
   you can buy all the 2014 issues. The July/August issue was published.

   Justin T. Gibbs began teaching a semester-long FreeBSD class at a
   middle school in Boulder, Colorado. We are using the BeagleBone Black
   (BBB) to run FreeBSD connected to Macs and PCs. We have received a lot
   of support, both internally, and from the Project, to get the FreeBSD
   images to work on the BBB with the Macs and PCs. It has been a great
   collaborative effort with community members, and this will help future
   classes in being able to support inexpensive platforms for teaching
   FreeBSD.

   Work continued on creating a FreeBSD curriculum for a half day
   workshop. Hopefully this will be available in late Spring.

   We provided legal support for the Project including granting trademark
   permission for some users and companies who requested permission to put
   the FreeBSD logo on their websites and marketing literature.

   We met with commercial users to get their input on what they would like
   to see supported in FreeBSD. We also do this to help connect FreeBSD
   developers with commercial users to help facilitate collaboration.

   FreeBSD Foundation employee and Release Engineer Glen Barber was
   extremely busy during this quarter, working on a number of exciting
   areas of the FreeBSD Project. Some of the highlights include:
     * Code cleanup and bug fixes to several parts of the release build
       code, and finishing adding support for automatically uploading
       cloud provider images, which was merged to the stable/10 branch
       before the code freeze. The 10.2-RELEASE cycle spanned a 9-week
       timeframe overall, starting from the code slush.
     * With the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team, released two BETA builds
       and three RC builds for the 10.2-RELEASE cycle, with the final
       release announced mid-August, two weeks ahead of the original
       schedule.
     * With the FreeBSD Cluster Administrators Team, assisted with a
       number of general updates and enhancements to the FreeBSD
       infrastructure.
     __________________________________________________________________

ZFSguru

   Links
   Home page
    URL: http://zfsguru.com
   Forum post on Gnome 3 debugging
    URL: http://zfsguru.com/forum/zfsgurudevelopment/1038

   Contact: Jason Edwards <jason at zfsguru.com>

   ZFSguru started as a front-end to ZFS but has since grown into a
   multifunctional server appliance with its own unique features. While
   the project is still in early development, it already offers multiple
   unique features not found in other projects. Unlike similar projects,
   nothing is stripped away from the base operating system, meaning
   ZFSguru behaves as a normal FreeBSD installation and thus is very
   versatile. The web-interface is designed to unite both novice and
   advanced users, providing both very easy to use basic functionality as
   well as features to be appreciated by more experienced users. The
   modular nature of the project combats the danger of bloat, whilst still
   allowing extended functionality to be easily deployed.

   On the 15th of August, version 0.3 of ZFSguru was released. Some
   highlights of the new version:
     * New build infrastructure allows for frequent releases of system
       images and services in a semi-automated way.
     * A new GuruDB database allows for a growing number of system images
       and servers, and provides good caching to accelerate pages.
     * The installation procedure was given a major overhaul.
     * In addition to the LiveCD, USB images are now available. The USB
       image supports both legacy MBR bootcode and UEFI boot.
     * Many libraries in the web-interface have been overhauled, in
       addition to many other additions to the web interface.
     * Many improvements were made to optional add-on services, such as
       the new Gnome 3 graphical environment.

   Other progress made in the months July, August, and September:
     * System image builds 001, 002, 003, and 004 have been released for
       all supported branches: 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 (-STABLE), and 11.0
       (-CURRENT).
     * Work on the 0.4 web-interface has started, which focuses on
       improving network support in the web-interface.
     * Work on a new visual theme for the web-interface has started. The
       new interface is likely to be included in the upcoming 0.4 release.
     * A new master server is being prepared, which is likely to be
       operational in December.
     * A new website is being worked on, to be launched the first of
       January, 2016.

Open tasks:

    1. The new Gnome 3 desktop does not work for everyone and still has
       issues. Anyone capable of diagnosing these issues can give the
       Gnome 3 LiveCD a try. Please see the linked forum thread for more
       information.
    2. Several ports fail to compile with our own build infrastructure,
       and require bug reports in order to get them fixed upstream.
    3. A 'State of the Project 2015' is due in Q4, providing an overview
       for future development of the project.
     __________________________________________________________________

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