FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Fourth Quarter 2018

Edward Tomasz Napierała trasz at freebsd.org
Sat Mar 23 13:31:35 UTC 2019


FreeBSD Project Quarterly Status Report - 4th Quarter 2018

   Since we are still on this island among many in this vast ocean of the
   Internet, we write this message in a bottle to inform you of the work
   we have finished and what lies ahead of us. These deeds that we have
   wrought with our minds and hands, they are for all to partake of - in
   the hopes that anyone of their free will, will join us in making
   improvements. In todays message the following by no means complete or
   ordered set of improvements and additions will be covered:

   i386 PAE Pagetables for up to 24GB memory support, Continuous
   Integration efforts, driver updates to ENA and graphics, ARM
   enhancements such as RochChip, Marvell 8K, and Broadcom support as well
   as more DTS files, more Capsicum possibilities, as well as pfsync
   improvements, and many more things that you can read about for
   yourselves.

   Additionally, we bring news from some islands further down stream,
   namely the nosh project, HardenedBSD, ClonOS, and the Polish BSD
   User-Group.

   We would, selfishly, encourage those of you who give us the good word
   to please send in your submissions sooner than just before the
   deadline, and also encourage anyone willing to share the good word to
   please read the section on which submissions we're also interested in
   having.

   Yours hopefully,
   Daniel Ebdrup, on behalf of the status report team.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Team Reports

     * Continuous Integration
     * FreeBSD Core Team
     * FreeBSD Foundation
     * FreeBSD Graphics Team status report
     * FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
     * Ports Collection

Projects

     * amd64 Usermode Protection Keys
     * bhyve - Live Migration
     * bhyve - Save/Restore
     * Capsicum
     * Collection of vt(4) color schemes
     * i386 PAE Pagetables
     * Improving FreeBSD boot security
     * pfsync performance improvement
     * PWM Kernel API and userland utility

Architectures

     * Broadcom ARM64 SoC support
     * DTS Update
     * ENA FreeBSD Driver Update
     * FreeBSD on Power9 (ppc64) Parity
     * FreeBSD/RISC-V update
     * libvdsk - QCOW2 implementation
     * Marvell 8K SoC support
     * Pinebook SDCard Image
     * RockChip Support

Ports

     * FreeBSD KDE status report

Miscellaneous

     * BSD PL

Third-Party Projects

     * ClonOS: virtualization platform on top of FreeBSD Operating System
     * HardenedBSD 2018Q4 Update
     * The nosh project
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Team Reports

   Entries from the various official and semi-official teams, as found in
   the Administration Page.

Continuous Integration

   Links
   FreeBSD Jenkins Instance URL: https://ci.FreeBSD.org
   FreeBSD CI artifact archive URL: https://artifact.ci.FreeBSD.org/
   FreeBSD Jenkins wiki URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Jenkins
   freebsd-testing Mailing List URL:
   https://lists.FreeBSD.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-testing
   freebsd-ci Repository URL: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ci
   Tickets related to freebsd-testing@ URL:
   https://preview.tinyurl.com/y9maauwg
   Hosted CI wiki URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/HostedCI

   Contact: Jenkins Admin <jenkins-admin at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu at FreeBSD.org>

   The FreeBSD CI team maintains continuous integration system and related
   tasks for the FreeBSD project. The CI system regularly checks the
   changes committed to the project's Subversion repository can be
   successfully built, and performs various tests and analysis over the
   results. The results from build jobs are archived in artifact server,
   for the further testing and debugging needs.

   The members on the CI team examine the failing builds and unstable
   tests, and work with the experts in that area to fix the code or build
   and test infrastructure, to improve the software quality of the FreeBSD
   base system. The CI team member and the FreeBSD foundation staff Li-Wen
   is the maintainer of Jenkins and Jenkins related ports.

   In this quarter, we worked on extending test executing environment to
   improve the coverage, temporarily disabling flakey test cases (and
   opening tickets to work with domain experts). Please see
   freebsd-testing@ related tickets for more information.

   In addition to that, starting from this quarter, we also work on
   collaboration with external projects to extend their CI to cover
   FreeBSD. See "HostedCI" wiki page for more information.

   Work in progress:
     * Fixing the failing test cases and builds
     * Adding drm ports building test against -CURRENT
     * Adding tests for selected project branches, e.g.: clang800-import
     * Implementing automatic tests on bare metal hardware
     * Planning the embedded testbed
     * Planning running ztest and network stack tests
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Core Team

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

   Noteworthy events since the last quarterly report:
     * Yuri Pankov (yuripv@) was awarded a source commit bit under the
       mentorship of Konstantin Belousov (kib@).
     * Core agrees that portmgr@ may enforce a 12-month commit bit
       expiration for ports committers.
     * Thomas Munro (tmunro@) was awarded a source commit bit under the
       mentorship of Mateusz Guzik (mgj@) and co-mentorship of Allan Jude
       (allanjude@).
     * With the approval of FCP-0101, 10/100 Ethernet drivers will be
       deprecated.
     * Core approved the promotion of Remko Lodder (remko@) to Deputy
       Security Officer.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Foundation

   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 software development projects, conferences and
   developer summits, and provide travel grants to FreeBSD contributors.
   The Foundation purchases and supports hardware to improve and maintain
   FreeBSD infrastructure and provides resources to improve security,
   quality assurance, and release engineering efforts; publishes marketing
   material to promote, educate, and advocate for the FreeBSD Project;
   facilitates collaboration between commercial vendors and FreeBSD
   developers; and finally, 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:

   Partnerships and Commercial User Support

   As a 501(c)(3) non-profit, we don't directly support commercial users,
   but we do work with them to understand their needs and help facilitate
   collaboration with the community. Last quarter, we were able to meet
   with a number of FreeBSD users and supporters at the October FreeBSD
   Developer Summit and MeetBSD conference in addition to our regular
   company meetings. These in-person meetings provide the opportunity to
   discuss pain points, identify how they can contribute back to FreeBSD,
   talk about what technologies they would like to see supported, and what
   can be done to support FreeBSD over more of their technologies and
   products.

   Fundraising Efforts

   By end of last year, we raised over $1.3M and were able to add Juniper,
   Netflix and Facebook and Handshake.org to our list of Foundation
   Partners. You can view the entire list here
   https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donors/. We are still finalizing
   total donations, and will report the final numbers in early February.
   Thank you to everyone who supported our efforts in 2018.

   OS Improvements

   In the fourth quarter of 2018 six authors made a total of 315 commits
   to the FreeBSD development tree that were identified as being sponsored
   by the FreeBSD Foundation. These included staff members Konstantin
   Belousov, Glen Barber, Li-Wen Hsu and Ed Maste, and grant recipients
   Mateusz Guzik and Mark Johnston.

   Mateusz' work over the quarter consisted of identifying and fixing
   bottlenecks in the FreeBSD kernel and system libraries. The FreeBSD
   base system build, and ports built via Poudriere, were used as
   motivating cases.

   Mark added an in-kernel Intel CPU microcode loader. This simplifies and
   increases the robustness of microcode updates, which is increasingly
   important as mitigations for speculative execution vulnerabilities are
   delivered in microcode.

   Mark also fixed a number of issues relating to capsicum support in base
   system utilities, implemented a number of NUMA enhancements and bug
   fixes, and fixed a number of high profile kernel bugs.

   Ed committed a large number of tool chain fixes to LLVM's lld linker
   and ELF Tool Chain components.

   Along with several FreeBSD developers Ed worked on the OpenSSL 1.1.1
   import in preparation for FreeBSD 12.0, including incorporating OpenSSH
   and ntp changes for compatibility. Ed also added build-time knobs for
   to enable userland retpoline and to enable BIND_NOW which can be used
   as part of a vulnerability mitigation strategy.

   Continuous Integration and Quality Assurance

   The Foundation provides a full-time staff member who is working on
   improving our automated testing, continuous integration, and overall
   quality assurance efforts.

   During the fourth quarter of 2018, Foundation employee Li-Wen Hsu
   continuously worked on improving the project's CI infrastructure,
   examining the failing build and test cases, and work with other teams
   in the project for their testing needs. In this period, we also worked
   on collaboration with external projects to improve their CI on FreeBSD.

   See the FreeBSD CI section of this report for more information.

   Release Engineering

   The Foundation provides a full-time staff member to lead the release
   engineering efforts. This has provided timely and reliable releases
   over the last five years. During the fourth quarter of 2018, Glen
   Barber led the the FreeBSD Release Engineering team in continuing
   working on the 12.0-RELEASE with the official announcement sent
   December 11.

   See the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team section of this report for
   more information.

   Supporting FreeBSD Infrastructure

   The Foundation provides hardware and support to improve the FreeBSD
   infrastructure. Last quarter, we continued supporting FreeBSD hardware
   located around the world.

   FreeBSD Advocacy and Education

   A large part of our efforts are dedicated to advocating for the
   Project. This includes promoting work being done by others with
   FreeBSD; producing advocacy literature to teach people about FreeBSD
   and help make the path to starting using FreeBSD or contributing to the
   Project easier; and attending and getting other FreeBSD contributors to
   volunteer to run FreeBSD events, staff FreeBSD tables, and give FreeBSD
   presentations.

   The FreeBSD Foundation sponsors many conferences, events, and summits
   around the globe. These events can be BSD-related, open source, or
   technology events geared towards underrepresented groups. We support
   the FreeBSD-focused events to help provide a venue for sharing
   knowledge, to work together on projects, and to facilitate
   collaboration between developers and commercial users. This all helps
   provide a healthy ecosystem. We support the non-FreeBSD events to
   promote and raise awareness of FreeBSD, to increase the use of FreeBSD
   in different applications, and to recruit more contributors to the
   Project.

   Some of the advocacy and education work we did last quarter includes:
     * Organized, sponsored, and presented at the October 2018 FreeBSD
       Developers Summit in Santa Clara, CA
     * Sponsored and exhibited at MeetBSD 2018 in Santa Clara, CA
     * Exhibited for the first time at All Things Open in Raleigh, NC
     * Exhibited and sponsored as an Industry Partner at LISA' 18 in
       Nashville, TN
     * Sponsored USENIX OSDI `18 in Carlsbad, CA as an Industry Partner
     * Held an Intro to FreeBSD workshop and a "Why You Should Contribute
       to FreeBSD" talk at the Rocky Mountain Celebration of Women in
       Computing in Lakewood, Colorado

   We continued producing FreeBSD advocacy material to help people promote
   FreeBSD around the world.

   Read more about our conference adventures in the conference recaps and
   trip reports in our monthly newsletters:
   https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/newsletter/

   We help educate the world about FreeBSD by publishing the
   professionally produced FreeBSD Journal. We recently announced that the
   FreeBSD Journal will become a Free publication with the
   January/February 2019 issue.
   https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/journal/.

   You can find out more about events we attended and upcoming events at
   https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/news-and-events/.

   For a look back at all of efforts in 2018, please see the year-end
   video at
   https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/thank-you-for-supporting-freebsd/.

   Legal/FreeBSD IP

   The Foundation owns the FreeBSD trademarks, and it is our
   responsibility to protect them. We also provide legal support for the
   core team to investigate questions that arise. Last quarter, we
   approved 6 requests to use the Trademark. Go to
   http://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org to find out how we support FreeBSD and
   how we can help you!
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Graphics Team status report

   Links
   Project GitHub page URL: https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop

   Contact: FreeBSD Graphics Team <x11 at freebsd.org>
   Contact: Niclas Zeising <zeising at freebsd.org>

   The FreeBSD X11/Graphics team maintains the lower levels of the FreeBSD
   graphics stack. This includes graphics drivers, graphics libraries such
   as the MESA OpenGL implementation, the X.org xserver with related
   libraries and applications, and Wayland with related libraries and
   applications.

   In the forth quarter, the team focused on stablizing the graphics
   drivers and ports for the FreeBSD 12.0 release. The graphics drivers
   have been updated with new versions for both FreeBSD 11.2 and FreeBSD
   12.0. The ports have been renamed in order to make it clearer which
   version of a port runs on which version on FreeBSD. We also created a
   new meta port, graphics/drm-kmod, which will install the correct driver
   based on FreeBSD version and architecture. Moving forward this is the
   recommended way to install the FreeBSD graphics drivers.

   The DRM drivers themselves are named graphics/drm-current-kmod and
   graphics/drm-fbsd12.0-kmod for CURRENT and 12.0 respectively, both of
   which have been updated to use the 4.16 Linux Kernel source. For
   FreeBSD 11.2 we have graphics/drm-fbsd11.2-kmod which uses the 4.11
   Linux Kernel source. Finally, we created graphics/drm-legacy-kmod,
   which works on FreeBSD 12.0 and CURRENT. This is a copy of the legacy
   drivers from the FreeBSD base system. This work will make it possible
   for us to remove the drm2 code from CURRENT, something we are planning
   to do in early February. A remnant of the drm2 code will remain in the
   base after this due to an unresolved dependency for the NVIDIA Tegra
   ARM chip. Plans for its migration are expected to be finalized in first
   quarter in 2019.

   Support for i386 and PowerPC 64 has been added to the drm kernel
   drivers. This is currently in an alpha state.

   Wayland has been enabled by default in the ports tree, meaning that all
   packages are build with Wayland support enabled. This makes it much
   easier to use and test Wayland.

   Support for VMware graphics pass through has been added to the kernel
   driver. Support for this is still missing in graphcs/mesa-dri though,
   so it currently does not work out of the box.

   The input stack has been updated and is now for the most part current
   with upstream. Evdev headers were split off from multimedia/v4l_compat
   into their own port, devel/evdev-proto. This makes it easier to update
   those headers and keep them current with upstream, as needed. The input
   stack is still an area where more work needs to be done to make it
   easier to use various input devices with X and Wayland on FreeBSD.

   Several meetings has been held over the course of the period. Meeting
   notes have been sent out to the public x11 at FreeBSD.org mailing list.

   People who are interested in helping out can find us on the
   x11 at FreeBSD.org mailing list, or on our gitter chat:
   https://gitter.im/FreeBSDDesktop/Lobby. We are also available in
   #freebsd-xorg on EFNet.

   We also have a team area on GitHub where our work repositories can be
   found: https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team

   Category: team

   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.

   During the fourth quarter of 2018, the FreeBSD Release Engineering team
   continued working on the 12.0-RELEASE. The stable/12 branch was created
   on October 19, with the first BETA build being started shortly after.
   The release cycle slipped slightly with the addition of 12.0-BETA4,
   after which the releng/12.0 branch was created on November 16.

   The remainder of the release cycle continued relatively smoothly for
   the duration of the release candidate (RC) phase, with the final
   release builds starting December 7, and the official announcement sent
   December 11.

   Throughout the quarter, several development snapshots builds were
   released for the head and stable/11 branches.

   Much of this work was sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation.
     __________________________________________________________________

Ports Collection

   Links
   About FreeBSD Ports URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
   Contributing to Ports URL:
   https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing/ports-contributing.html
   FreeBSD Ports Monitoring URL: http://portsmon.freebsd.org/index.html
   Ports Management Team">Ports Management Team URL:
   https://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/index.html

   Contact: René Ladan <portmgr-secretary at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: FreeBSD Ports Management Team <portmgr at FreeBSD.org>

   The number of ports in the last quarter shrunk a bit to 32,900. At the
   end of the quarter there were 2365 open port PRs of which a small 500
   were unassigned. The last quarter saw 7333 commits from 174 committers.
   This means that more port PRs were resolved than last quarter and the
   number of commits remained approximately the same.

   During the last quarter, we welcomed Alexandre C. Guimarães
   (rigoletto@) and Vinícius Zavam (egypcio@). The port commit bits of
   Alberto Villa (avilla@), Lars Thegler (lth@), Dryice Dong Liu
   (dryice@), Ion-Mihai Tetcu (itetcu@), Gabor Pali (pgj@), Tom Judge
   (tj@), Ollivier Robert (roberto@), and Maxim Sobolev (sobomax@) were
   taken in for safekeeping.

   The number of commit bits safekept is higher than usual because for
   port commit bits the idle timeout changed from 18 months to 12 months.

   Some default versions were changed:
     * PHP from 7.1 to 7.2
     * Perl5 from 5.26 to 5.28
     * Ruby from 2.4 to 2.5
     * For LLVM, version 7.0 is now supported as a default version.

   Other big changes are:
     * info files are stored in the share/info directory just as other
       operating systems do.
     * PyQt ports can now be installed concurrently.
     * As FreeBSD 10 reached its end of life, support for this branch has
       been removed from the Ports Collection. People still requiring
       FreeBSD 10 support can use the RELEASE\_10\_EOL tag.
     * USES=cmake now defaults to outsource
     * KDE 4 has reached its end-of-life and has been removed from the
       Ports Collection.

   Eager as ever, antoine@ ran 36 exp-runs this quarter to ensure major
   port upgrades were correct.
     __________________________________________________________________

Projects

   Projects that span multiple categories, from the kernel and userspace
   to the Ports Collection or external projects.

amd64 Usermode Protection Keys

   Links
   The patch URL: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18893

   Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib at freebsd.org>

   Skylake Xeons have a new feature in 4-level paging implementation
   called Usermode Protection Keys. It is a complementary page access
   permission management mechanism, which provides very low-overhead
   disabling of all accesses or only modifications, on per-page basis.

   Each thread of execution gets 16 slots, called protection keys, while
   each userspace page mapping is tagged with one key. Processor provides
   a new 32bit register PKRU, which holds access and modification disable
   bits per key, the PKRU register is automatically context-switched, and
   managed by userspace using RDPKRU and WRPKRU instructions. See Intel
   SDM rev. 68 Vol 3 4.6.2 Protection Keys for further details.

   Since a key index must be always specified, this makes the key zero a
   default key, which permissions are tricky to modify without breaking
   the process environment. The rest 15 keys are usable, for instance
   process might put some sensitive data like decoded private key into the
   key protected area, and only enable access on as needed basis, without
   issuing costly mprotect(2) syscall. Note that permissions are enforced
   even for kernel access, so sneaky read(2) from other thread is subject
   to the same permission checks.

   I implemented the support for the amd64 pmap and provided convenient
   wrappers in libc both for 64bit and 32bit processes. Prototypes for the
   API are presented below and their use should be obvious from the
   explanation.

   int x86_pkru_get_perm(unsigned int keyidx, int access, int modify); int
   x86_pkru_set_perm(unsigned int keyidx, int access, int modify); int
   x86_pkru_protect_range(void *addr, unsigned long len, unsigned int
   keyidx, int flag); int x86_pkru_unprotect_range(void *addr, unsigned
   long len);

   This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
     __________________________________________________________________

bhyve - Live Migration

   Links
   Github wiki - How to Warm Migrate a bhyve guest URL:
   https://github.com/FreeBSD-UPB/freebsd/wiki/Virtual-Machine-Migration-using-bhyve
   Github - Warm Migration branch URL:
   https://github.com/FreeBSD-UPB/freebsd/tree/projects/bhyve_migration
   Github - Live Migration branch URL:
   https://github.com/FreeBSD-UPB/freebsd/tree/projects/bhyve_migration_dev

   Contact: Elena Mihailescu <elenamihailescu22 at gmail.com>
   Contact: Darius Mihai <dariusmihaim at gmail.com>
   Contact: Sergiu Weisz <sergiu121 at gmail.com>
   Contact: Mihai Carabas <mihai at freebsd.org>

   The Migration feature uses the Save/Restore feature to migrate a bhyve
   guest from a FreeBSD host to another FreeBSD host. To migrate a bhyve
   guest, one needs to start an empty guest on the destination host from a
   shared guest image using the bhyve tool with the -R option followed by
   the source host IP and the port to listen to migration request. On the
   source host, the migration is started by executing the bhyvectl command
   with the --migrate or --migrate-live option, followed by the
   destination host IP and the port to send to the messages.

   New features added:
     * Prove that live migration cannot be implemented using the FreeBSD's
       Copy-on-Write mechanism;
     * Add --migrate-live option to bhyvectl;
     * Add additional message exchange between source and destination host
       to establish the migration type and the number of rounds;
     * Implement a dirty-bit approach for live migrating the guest's wired
       memory;

   Future tasks:
     * Clear the dirty bit after each migration round;
     * Extend live migration to highmem segment;
     * Extend live migration to unwired memory;

   This project was sponsored by Matthew Grooms.
     __________________________________________________________________

bhyve - Save/Restore

   Links
   Github repository for the save/restore and migration features URL:
   https://github.com/FreeBSD-UPB/freebsd/tree/projects/bhyve_migration
   Github wiki - How to Save and Restore a bhyve guest URL:
   https://github.com/FreeBSD-UPB/freebsd/wiki/Save-and-Restore-a-virtual-machine-using-bhyve
   Github wiki - Suspend/resume test matrix URL:
   https://github.com/FreeBSD-UPB/freebsd/wiki/Suspend-Resume-test-matrix

   Contact: Elena Mihailescu <elenamihailescu22 at gmail.com>
   Contact: Darius Mihai <dariusmihaim at gmail.com>
   Contact: Sergiu Weisz <sergiu121 at gmail.com>
   Contact: Mihai Carabas <mihai at freebsd.org>

   The Save/Restore for bhyve feature is a suspend and resume facility
   added to the FreeBSD/amd64's hypervisor, bhyve. The bhyvectl tool is
   used to save the guest state in three files (a file for the guest
   memory, a file for devices' and CPU's state and another one for some
   metadata that are used in the restore process). To suspend a bhyve
   guest, the bhyvectl tool must be run with the --suspend
   <state_file_name> option followed by the guest name.

   To restore a bhyve guest from a checkpoint, one simply has to add the
   -r option followed by the main state file (the same file that was given
   to the --suspend option for bhyvectl) when starting the VM.

   New features added:
     * Improve timers' save and restore state feature;
     * Fix synchronization issues related to the ahci device save and
       restore state feature;
     * Add suspend/resume support for Windows guests;
     * Refactor save and restore code - save component's state field by
       field

   Future tasks:
     * Open ticket on Phabricator;
     * Add suspend/resume support for nvme;
     * Add suspend/resume support for virtio-console;
     * Add suspend/resume support for virtio-scsi;
     * Add TSC offseting for restore for AMD CPUs;

   This project was sponsored by Matthew Grooms; iXsystems;.
     __________________________________________________________________

Capsicum

   Links
   Capsicum Wiki Page URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Capsicum

   Contact: Mark Johnston <markj at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Mariusz Zaborski <oshogbo at FreeBSD.org>

   The major improvement in Capsicum is introducing a Casper service
   fileargs, which is an easy way helps to sandbox the utils which need
   access to the filesystem. There are several examples of usage fileargs
   in applications like brandelf(1), wc(1), savecore(1), head(1) and
   strings(1). The fileargs service also helps to bring new features to
   the bhyve like audio device which is secured using Capsicum.

   Another big step was introducing a private Casper service and
   sandboxing the rtsold(8) and rtsol(8).

   Next major improvement, which is still under the review, is rewriting
   the sysctl service. The new sysctl service will allow in an easy way to
   use cap_sysctl() and cap_sysctlnametomib().
     __________________________________________________________________

Collection of vt(4) color schemes

   Links
   iTerm2-Color-Schemes repository with previews URL:
   https://github.com/mbadolato/iTerm2-Color-Schemes
   iTerm2-Color-Schemes vt color schemes URL:
   https://github.com/mbadolato/iTerm2-Color-Schemes/tree/master/freebsd_vt

   Contact: Tobias Kortkamp <tobik at FreeSD.org>

   Since 11.2-RELEASE vt(4) supports setting custom color schemes via the
   kern.vt.color.X.rgb tunables. This is nice but what was missing were
   some ready to use themes.

   iTerm2-Color-Schemes is a collection of around 200 color schemes for
   various terminals. It has recently gained support for vt(4).
   Customizing your console is now as easy as copy and pasting your
   favorite theme to /boot/loader.conf or /boot/loader.conf.local.
     __________________________________________________________________

i386 PAE Pagetables

   Links
   https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18894 URL: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18894

   Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib at freebsd.org>

   The i386 architecture (in modern terms, x86 architecture in 32bit
   protected mode), has supported hardware execute-disable since early
   200x. The only problem preventing the i386 FreeBSD kernel from using it
   was that default page table format used by the kernel is 2-level
   paging, while nx bit is only available for PAE (2.5 levels) page table
   structures. PAE option is too intrusive, it changes both vm_paddr_t and
   bus_addr_t to 64bit, which is not too friendly to many drivers.

   I tried to provide PAE_PAGETABLES kernel option which only changed page
   table format, without affecting vm_paddr_t or bus_addr_t, thus keeping
   kernel/driver interfaces intact. But I was not able to make i386
   releases carry two kernels, one to support relic hardware which cannot
   use PAE pagetables, and another for newer machines.

   So I finally did a merge which makes single i386 kernel carry two pmap
   modules, one for PAE and one for old two-level paging structures. Also
   I did not find a reason to not expand vm_paddr_t, while I have to keep
   bus_addr_t at 32bit.

   With a single boot-time knob, i386 kernel can now also utilize up to
   24G or memory, if drivers correctly use busdma(9). I tried to fix
   iflib(4) and ahci(4) so that the most common hardware work, but I
   cannot do the pass over the whole tree.

   Hopefully, together with earlier 4/4G split work, this gives enough
   life for i386 kernel.

   This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
     __________________________________________________________________

Improving FreeBSD boot security

   Links
   TPM 2.0 driver URL:
   https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/dev/tpm/tpm20.c?revision=342084&nview=markup
   Loader Secure Boot support URL: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18798
   Secure Boot library URL: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18797
   binsign utility URL: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18799

   Contact: Michal Stanek <mst at semihalf.com>
   Contact: Marcin Wojtas <mw at semihalf.com>
   Contact: Kornel Duleba <mindal at semihalf.com>

   FreeBSD now supports TPM 2.0 devices. TPM (Trusted Platform Module) is
   a discrete chip which provides secure computation and secure NVRAM
   storage. It is most commonly associated with Measured Boot i.e.
   providing hash measurements of boot elements such as firmware images
   and boot configuration to the OS. In FreeBSD, the TPM can be used to
   strengthen security of services such as Strongswan IPsec, SSH or TLS by
   performing cryptographic operations in the TPM chip itself using
   embedded keys inaccessible to software. TPM facilities such as secure
   NVRAM storage, data sealing, random number generation and others are
   also available to any software via the IBM TSS library.

   UEFI Secure Boot is a technology which provides authentication of
   images that are executed on the host during boot. This prevents
   persistence of unauthorized malicious boot code such as rootkits. UEFI
   stores a list of allowed and blacklisted certificates and verifies
   signatures of all boot images and UEFI applications before they are
   executed on the CPU. Semihalf has developed support for X509
   certificates and signature verification code in EFI loader with the
   help of the minimal BearSSL library. Lists of allowed and forbidden
   certificates are retrieved from UEFI environmental variables. This
   allows users to sign kernel binaries with a self-signed certificate,
   append the signature and let the loader verify its authenticity.

   UEFI Secure Boot support code will most likely be integrated with sjg's
   Veriexec support which is currently being reviewed on Phabricator.

   Semihalf is also working on improving security of Veriexec by moving
   manifest signature verification to the kernel.

   This project was sponsored by Stormshield.
     __________________________________________________________________

pfsync performance improvement

   Contact: Kristof Provost <kp at freebsd.org>

   While pf itself can operate on multiple states simultaneously (on
   different cores), pfsync could not. It used a single PFSYNC_LOCK. This
   greatly reduced throughput on multicore systems as soon as pfsync was
   loaded.

   This was improved by splitting the pfsync queues into buckets, based on
   the state ID. This ensures that updates for a given connection always
   end up in the same bucket, allowing pfsync to still collapse multiple
   updates into one, while allowing multiple cores to proceed at the same
   time. The buckets are independently locked, allowing multiple cores to
   proceed at once.

   The number of buckets is tunable, but defaults to twice the number of
   cpus. Benchmarking has shown improvement of 30 to 100% depending on
   hardware and setup.

   During this effort several vnet-related issues were fixed as well, and
   a basic pfsync test case was added.

   This was committed into head in r341646, and later merged into
   stable/12 and stable/11.

   This project was sponsored by Orange Business Services.
     __________________________________________________________________

PWM Kernel API and userland utility

   Contact: Emmanuel Vadot <manu at FreeBSD.org>

   A new subsystem was added to the kernel for PWM drivers to register
   themselves. In pair with the kernel subsystem, a pwm(8) utility is also
   available so users can configure PWM on their embedded boards. For now
   the only PWM driver compatible with this subsystem is for ARM Allwinner
   SoCs.
     __________________________________________________________________

Architectures

   Updating platform-specific features and bringing in support for new
   hardware platforms.

Broadcom ARM64 SoC support

   Contact: Michal Stanek <mst at semihalf.com>
   Contact: Marcin Wojtas <mw at semihalf.com>

   Semihalf has recently started work on FreeBSD support for BCM5871X SoC
   series.

   These are quad-core 64-bit ARMv8 Cortex-A57 communication processors
   targeted for networking applications such as 10G routers, gateways,
   control plane processing and NAS. Initial support will include iProc
   PCIe, internal BNXT Ethernet controller, OTP (One Time Programmable
   memory) and crypto engine acceleration for IPsec offloading. This work
   is expected to be ready for FreeBSD-HEAD before Q3 2019.

   This project was sponsored by Juniper.
     __________________________________________________________________

DTS Update

   Contact: Emmanuel Vadot <manu at FreeBSD.org>

   DTS files (Device Tree Sources) were updated to be on par with Linux
   4.20 for head and 4.19 for the 12-STABLE branch.

   The DTS are now compiled for some arm64 boards, as the one present in
   U-Boot are not always up-to-date.
     __________________________________________________________________

ENA FreeBSD Driver Update

   Links
   ENA README URL:
   https://github.com/amzn/amzn-drivers/blob/master/kernel/fbsd/ena/README

   Contact: Michal Krawczyk <mk at semihalf.com>

   ENA (Elastic Network Adapter) is the smart NIC which is used in the
   virtualized environment of Amazon Web Services (AWS). It supports
   multiple queues and can handle up to 25 Gb/s, depending on the instance
   type on which it is used.

   ENAv2 has been under development for FreeBSD, similar to Linux OS and
   DPDK. New changes are including:
     * Upgrade of the HAL to the version supporting ENAv2
     * Optimization of the logging on the Tx path
     * LLQ (Low Latency Queue) feature, which is reducing latency on
       instances supporting ENAv2
     * Optimization of the locks on hot paths by adding Tx queue
       management and lockless Rx queue cleanup
     * Fixes on the error handling paths
     * Use bitfield for tracking device states
     * Add additional doorbells on Tx path
     * Add queue depth setup in the runtime and allows Rx queue depth to
       be configured independently
     * And more minor bug fixes and code reorganization

   Todo:
     * Internal review and validation
     * Upstream of the patches

   This project was sponsored by Amazon.com Inc.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD on Power9 (ppc64) Parity

     * NMI semantics: NMIs need to be emulated by only soft disabling
       interrupts, disabling interrupts blocks all interrupts except
       machine check exceptions and system resets.
     * Superpage support is stable and on by default in the POWER9BSD
       staging branch
     * NUMA support: Parse OFW and set up appropriate structures for
       memory to be allocated from the correct domain and interrupts to be
       bound to the correct socket.
     * LKPI support for POWER9, Drm-next supports radeonkms. Some
       additional big endian changes required for amdgpu.
     * Interrupt handling improvements resulting in up to a 10% reduction
       in buildkernel time.
     * Cached XICS IPI vector
     * Added XIVE exploitation mode driver
     * Rust support in review.
     * Successfully booted an LLVM compiled kernel.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD/RISC-V update

   Contact: Ruslan Bukin <br at freebsd.org>
   Contact: Mark Johnston <markj at freebsd.org>

   FreeBSD/RISC-V is getting more mature during last quarter.

   We have optimised RISC-V copyin(9)/copyout(9) routines. They now
   support word-sized copies where possible to dramatically increase speed
   of copying data between kernel and userspace.

   We made a series of improvements and bug fixes to pmap support
   (machine-dependent portion of virtual memory subsystem). This part was
   not touched during the last years, and is now getting attention.

   RISC-V GENERIC kernel gets support for witness(4) (The FreeBSD lock
   validation facility).

   The British company Embecosm has reported that they were able to boot
   FreeBSD on real hardware -- a SiFive Unleashed board. The support is
   limited to a single core only. We are expecting patches from them.
     __________________________________________________________________

libvdsk - QCOW2 implementation

   Links
   Github - Libvdsk QCOW2 branch URL:
   https://github.com/FreeBSD-UPB/freebsd/tree/projects/bhyve_libvdsk

   Contact: Sergiu Weisz <sergiu121 at gmail.com>
   Contact: Marcelo Araujo <araujo at freebsd.org>
   Contact: Mihai Carabas <mihai at freebsd.org>

   New features added:
     * Extend libvdsk to make it easier to implement new formats;
     * Implement read/write/probe functionalities in order to parse QCOW2
       image files;

   Future tasks:
     * Add support for Copy-On-Write;
     * Add support for multiple snapshots;
     * Integrate libvdsk in bhyve

   This project was sponsored by Matthew Grooms.
     __________________________________________________________________

Marvell 8K SoC support

   Contact: Emmanuel Vadot <manu at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Luis Octavio O Souza <loos at FreeBSD.org>

   Support for booting FreeBSD on Marvell 8K SoC (present on the
   MacchiatoBin for example) has been commited. As of today, clocks, gpio,
   thermal, sdcard/eMMC drivers has been commited. SATA and USB were
   already working.

   This project was sponsored by Rubicon Communications, LLC ("Netgate").
     __________________________________________________________________

Pinebook SDCard Image

   Contact: Emmanuel Vadot <manu at FreeBSD.org>

   SDCard image is now produced for the Pinebook. By default the console
   is directed in the EFI Framebuffer and the serial console.
     __________________________________________________________________

RockChip Support

   Contact: Emmanuel Vadot <manu at FreeBSD.org>

   Early support for the RockChip RK3399 has been commited. For now it's
   only possible to netboot boards (Like the RockPro64). Original patch
   was submitted by Greg V <greg at unrelenting.technology>.

   Support for the RK805 and RK808 PMIC (Power Management IC) has been
   added. This allow changing some regulators voltage such as the cores
   one so cpufreq support works. You can change core frequencies with
   sysctl or powerd(8).
     __________________________________________________________________

Ports

   Changes affecting the Ports Collection, whether sweeping changes that
   touch most of the tree, or individual ports themselves.

FreeBSD KDE status report

   Links
   KDE FreeBSD URL: https://freebsd.kde.org/

   Contact: Adriaan de Groot <adridg at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Tobias C. Berner <tcberner at FreeBSD.org>

   First of all, we removed KDE 4 from the ports tree this quarter. Qt4
   will follow it by the end of march.

   Thanks to the update of libinput in ports we could finally update
   Plasma Desktop past 5.12, and are now again in sync with the upstream
   releases.

   KDE Frameworks and Applications were also kept in sync with upstream.

   We've also updated Qt5 to 5.12 -- with QtWebEngine still hanging on on
   5.9.5 for now, but thanks to a new contributor we should have 5.12 by
   the end of Q1.

   In the background we changed the default behavior of cmake in the ports
   tree to default to outsource builds.

   People who are willing to contribute can find us on #kde-freebsd on
   freenode, and the kde at FreeBSD.org mailing list. Further we accept
   pull-requests and contributions on
   github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports-kde.
     __________________________________________________________________

Miscellaneous

   Objects that defy categorization.

BSD PL

   Links
   https://bsd-pl.org/ URL: https://bsd-pl.org/

   Contact: Official <meetup at bsd-pl.org>
   Contact: Konrad Witaszczyk <def at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Mariusz Zaborski <oshogbo at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Jarosl/aw Zurek <contact at zurek.pro>

   The Polish BSD User group is an initiative promoting systems from the
   BSD family. We organize both meetings and as well as tutorial sessions.
   In general, we have three presentations which last around 15 minutes.
   Afterwards there's an open discussions about topics related to
   operating systems and security. There's something for everybody, and
   the first presentation is about something connected to BSD and it's
   aimed at beginners. The second presentation is for more advanced BSD
   users but the final talk is more general and not connected to BSD.
   Usually it covers an interesting topic related to technology. Everyone
   can suggest a subject for the presentations and discussions. Some
   presentations from the past were about: ZFS checkpoints, GELI, FreeNAS,
   PAM, DTrace, Yubikey, Pytest, ZeroTrust, Jenkins and the iocage
   training session. Hope to see you there!
     __________________________________________________________________

Third-Party Projects

   Many projects build upon FreeBSD or incorporate components of FreeBSD
   into their project. As these projects may be of interest to the broader
   FreeBSD community, we sometimes include brief updates submitted by
   these projects in our quarterly report. The FreeBSD project makes no
   representation as to the accuracy or veracity of any claims in these
   submissions.

ClonOS: virtualization platform on top of FreeBSD Operating System

   Links
   ClonOS Main Site URL: https://clonos.tekroutine.com

   Contact: Oleg Ginzburg <olevole at olevole.ru>

   What is ClonOS?

   ClonOS is a turnkey open-source platform based on FreeBSD and the CBSD
   framework. ClonOS offers a complete web UI for an easy control,
   deployment and management of FreeBSD jails containers and bhyve/Xen
   hypervisor virtual environments.

   ClonOS is currently the only available platform which allows both Xen
   and bhyve hypervisors to coexist on the same host. Since ClonOS is a
   FreeBSD-based platform, it has the ability to create and manage jails
   natively, allowing you to run FreeBSD applications without losing
   performance.

   Features:
     * easy management via web UI interface
     * bhyve management (create, delete VM)
     * Xen management (create, delete VM) [coming soon, roadmap]
     * connection to the "physical" guest console via VNC from the browser
       or directly
     * real time system monitoring
     * access to load statistics through SQLite3 and beanstalkd
     * support for ZFS features (cloning, snapshots)
     * import/export of virtual environments
     * public repository with virtual machine templates
     * puppet-based helpers for configuring popular services

   ClonOS 2018Q4 Status Report

   During this period, work was carried out to:
     * implement real-time graph for jail/bhyve based on RACCT statistics
     * test bhyve live migration, support live migration in CBSD
     * prepare ClonOS 19.01-RELEASE

   Open task:
     * ClonOS roadmap: https://clonos.tekroutine.com/roadmap.html
     * FreeNAS/XigmaNAS or any other NAS integration
     * I would like to see ClonOS in real-world use. In this regard, I am
       interested in finding more people and companies that use FreeBSD
       for vm/jail services.
     __________________________________________________________________

HardenedBSD 2018Q4 Update

   Links
   https://hardenedbsd.org URL: https://hardenedbsd.org

   Contact: Shawn Webb <shawn.webb at hardenedbsd.org>

   Introduction to HardenedBSD

   HardenedBSD is a security-enhanced fork of FreeBSD that aims to provide
   the BSD community with a clean-room reimplementation of the
   publicly-documented parts of the grsecurity patchset for Linux. We
   maintain close compatibility with FreeBSD by syncing every six hours
   with FreeBSD.

   HardenedBSD Foundation Update

   Through a generous donation by DEF CON, the computer security
   conference held each year in Las Vegas, and an anonymous member of the
   community, the HardenedBSD Foundation was able to provide the
   HardenedBSD project with a new Cavium ThunderX2 server. HardenedBSD has
   been working closely with FreeBSD's and Cavium's Jayachandran
   (jchandra at freebsd) to gain working support for the ThunderX2. As soon
   as the ThunderX2 becomes functional, HardenedBSD will be able to
   support both 12-STABLE and 13-CURRENT for arm64.

   We assisted OPNsense's migration from FreeBSD to HardenedBSD as the
   base operating system. OPNsense's January 2019 release (19.1) will
   complete the migration. Further work will be done to enable
   HardenedBSD's PaX NOEXEC implementation in OPNsense. PaX NOEXEC is a
   strong form of W^X, which prevents memory allocations from being both
   writable and executable, and toggling between the two.

   The HardenedBSD Foundation Corp. is a registered 501(c)(3) tax-exempt
   not-for-profit charitable organization in the United States. We look
   forward to a productive 2019, with work to support Cross-DSO CFI still
   ongoing.

   HardenedBSD 12-STABLE Released

   In December 2018, HardenedBSD published is first official release of
   12-STABLE. From the release announcement:

   Improvements in 12-STABLE from 11-STABLE:
     * Non-Cross-DSO Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) for applications on
       amd64 and arm64. At this time, CFI is not applied to the kernel.
       More info on CFI is below.
     * Jailed bhyve (upstreamed to FreeBSD)
     * Per-jail toggles for unprivileged process debugging (the
       security.bsd.unprivileged_process_debug sysctl node. Upstreamed to
       FreeBSD.)
     * Spectre v2 mitigation with retpoline applied to the entirety of
       base and ports (with only a few ports opting out.)
     * Symmetric Multi-Threading (SMT) disabled by default (re-enable by
       setting machdep.hyperthreading_allowed to 1 in loader.conf(5)).
     * Migration of more compiler toolchain components to llvm's
       implementations (llvm-ar, llvm-nm, and llvm-objdump).
     * Compilation of applications with Link-Time Optimization (LTO).

   Non-Cross-DSO CFI

   Non-Cross-DSO CFI is an exploit mitigation technique that helps to
   prevent attackers from modifying the behavior of a program and jumping
   to undefined or arbitrary memory locations. Microsoft has implemented a
   variant of CFI, which they term Control Flow Guard, or CFG. The PaX
   team has spent the last few years perfecting their Reuse Attack
   Protector, RAP. CFI, CFG, and RAP all attempt to accomplish the same
   goal, with RAP being the most complete and effective implementation.
   Clang's CFI is stronger than Microsoft's CFG and PaX Team's RAP is
   stronger than both CFI and CFG. RAP would be a great addition to
   HardenedBSD; however, it requires a GPLv3 toolchain and is patented.

   Clang's CFI requires a linker that supports Link-Time Optimization
   (LTO). HardenedBSD 12-STABLE ships with lld as the default linker. All
   CFI schemes have been enabled for nearly all applications in base.
   Please note that any application that calls function pointers resolved
   via dlopen + dlsym will require the cfi-icall scheme to be disabled.

   HardenedBSD is the first enterprise operating system to apply
   Non-Cross-DSO CFI broadly to userland.
     __________________________________________________________________

The nosh project

   Links
   Introduction and blurb URL: http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/
   Guide URL: http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide.html
   FreeBSD binary packages URL:
   http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/freebsd-binary-packages.html
   Installation how-to URL:
   http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/timorous-admin-installation-how-to.html
   Roadmap URL: http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/roadmap.html

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

   Background

   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, the Mewburn rc system, and OpenRC, drawing
   inspiration from daemontools-encore for service control/status
   mechanisms, UCSPI for networked services, Solaris SMF for named
   milestones, and IBM AIX for separated service and system management. It
   includes 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, has orderings
   and dependencies between services, has parallelized startup and
   shutdown (including fsck), provides strictly size-capped and
   autorotated logging, has the service manager as a "subreaper", provides
   per-user service management as well as system-wide, provides user-space
   virtual terminals, brings TTY login under the general service
   management umbrella, and uses kevent(2) for event-driven parallelism.

   For more, see the aforelinked Introduction and blurb, and the nosh
   Guide.

   News

   The project has seen a lot of development since the last status report
   in 2017. To briefly touch upon just some of the things that have been
   worked on:
     * There are several more packages for things like running Bruce
       Guenter's bcron, shims for OpenRC's rc-update and rc-service tools,
       and shims for portable substitutes for a couple of Linux's
       util-linux tools.

     * There are quite a lot of new tools, including getuidgid,
       userenv-fromenv, setgid-fromenv, envgid, printenv, setlogin,
       console-decode-ecma48, console-control-sequence,
       console-flat-table-viewer, console-input-method, and
       local-stream-socket-connect. To look at just two of these:

     * printenv as a built-in allows more convenient use in conjunction
       with clearenv. It can also generate output in some additional
       formats.

     * console-control-sequence also responds to the name setterm, and can
       do most of what the non-portable util-linux tool by that name does;
       excluding the things that are specific to non-portable Linux
       ioctl()s and control codes (such as display adapter power
       management), but also including _extra_ standard DEC VT and ECMA-48
       things that the util-linux tool does _not_ do (such as turning
       strikethrough, calculator keypad application mode, mouse reports,
       and the alternative screen buffer on and off).

     * There are a lot of new service bundles for more services, too many
       to list here. One can find them listed in the 1.37 and 1.38 + 1.39
       release announcements.

     * There are new chapters in the nosh Guide, on packages and ports, on
       resources for terminals such as keyboard maps, input methods, and
       fonts, and on how the head0 user-space virtual terminal is
       structured. There are also new manual pages - in addition to the
       ones for all of the new commands, of course - on the subjects of
       the http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/TerminalCapabilities.html
       system. There are also some replacements for some Linux manual
       pages that have gone missing over the past decade.

     * The external format configuration import subsystem has seen some
       major improvements in per-user service configuration. The per-user
       service manager itself gained a control FIFO, addressing a
       long-standing bug.

   A particular area of improvement since the last status report is the
   inclusion of input method capabilities in user-space virtual terminals.
   The input method mechanism uses the same CIN files as used by several
   other softwares, similar to how one can use existing SCO/FreeBSD
   keyboard maps and FreeBSD vt fonts. It places a simple textual user
   interface on top of a user-space virtual terminal, can switch amongst
   multiple input methods on the fly, and responds to both the dedicated
   keys on a JIS 106/109-key keyboard or a Korean 103/106-key keyboard and
   the conventional keys used on other keyboards. The blurb includes an
   example of how this works for a Japanese user, and the virtual terminal
   chapters of the nosh Guide now incorporate input methods into the doco.

   Another area of work was eliminating Wide NCurses from almost all of
   the tools, apart from the one tool that by definition uses it
   (console-ncurses-realizer). Wide NCurses has long been a porting
   difficulty for several operating systems, including Gentoo Linux and
   OpenBSD, and does not really model modern real world terminals and
   terminal emulators very well. It has been replaced by a new
   TerminalCapabilities library, in conjunction with a library for
   handling ECMA-48 character sequence decoding and ECMA-48/DEC VT control
   sequence generation. The decoder is the basis for the new
   console-decode-ecma48 tool, for example, as well as being the decoder
   for terminal input in console-termio-realizer and in full-screen TUI
   tools like chkservice and the new console-flat-table-viewer.

   The external formats import subsystem will also now make a replacement
   /etc/system-control/convert/termcap/termcap.db that one can use, which
   includes amongst other things the currently missing teken terminal
   type.

   Roadmap

   In addition to what is on the aforelinked roadmap, several things are
   on the cards for forthcoming versions. Tools that can feed the process
   table into console-flat-table-viewer in the proper vis(3) form. The
   ability to have different keyboard maps for different keyboards if one
   has multiple keyboards. A Linux shim for login.conf. Proper handling of
   CSI sub-parameters in SoftTerm. A manual page for the CIN file format.
   A time-env-next-matching tool.

   How you can help
     * The Z shell completions now have extensive coverage of the toolset,
       but there are no completions for the Bourne Again shell or the
       Friendly Interactive shell. Work on such completions would be
       welcome. The users who use those shells would welcome it
       especially.

     * The system-manager already recognizes a -b option for emergency
       mode. Work to make the FreeBSD loader and kernel send such an
       option to process #1, in response to an additional emergency mode
       boot menu choice, would be very welcome.

     * The monitor-fsck-progress and monitored-fsck tools stand ready to
       work with a -C option to fsck that makes it spit out progress
       information to an open file descriptor. Another way to help is to
       add this capability to fsck.

     * teken needs to be added to base termcap. It was put into NCurses
       terminfo back in 2014.
     __________________________________________________________________
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