FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - First Quarter 2020
Lorenzo Salvadore
salvadore at freebsd.org
Sun Apr 12 22:05:48 UTC 2020
FreeBSD Project Quarterly Status Report - First Quarter 2020
Introduction
Welcome, to the quarterly reports, of the future! Well, at least the
first quarterly report from 2020. The new timeline, mentioned in the
last few reports, still holds, which brings us to this report, which
covers the period of January 2020 - March 2020.
As you will see from this report, we've had quite an active quarter
with big changes to both kernel, userland, documentation, ports, and
third-party projects in the form of everything from bug and security
fixes over new features to speed improvements and optimizations.
As this report also covers the start of the epidemic, it's also
interesting to note that a quick glance at the svn logs reveal that
there has been no overall drop in number of source commits, that docs
commits have also stayed constant, and that ports have seen an upwards
trend.
We hope that all of you are and yours are as safe as can be managed,
and that we get through this together by working together.
-- Daniel Ebdrup Jensen, debdrup at freebsd.org
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Team Reports
* FreeBSD Foundation
* FreeBSD Core Team
* FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
* Cluster Administration Team
* Continuous Integration
* Ports Collection
* FreeBSD Graphics Team status report
Projects
* NFS over TLS implementation
* Import of the Kyua test framework
* Linux compatibility layer update
* syzkaller on FreeBSD
Kernel
* if_bridge
* sigfastblock(2)
* arm64 LSE atomic instructions
* FreeBSD on Microsoft HyperV and Azure
* FreeBSD on the ARM Morello platform
* NXP ARM64 SoC support
* ENA FreeBSD Driver Update
Architectures
* FreeBSD/powerpc Project
* FreeBSD/RISC-V Project
Userland Programs
* GCC 4.2.1 Retirement
* elfctl utility
* ELF Tool Chain
Ports
* KDE on FreeBSD
* XFCE
* Wine on FreeBSD
* Go on freebsd/arm64
* sysctlmibinfo2 API
Documentation
* FreeBSD Translations on Weblate
* FreeBSD Manpages overhaul
Third-Party Projects
* pot and the nomad pot driver
* NomadBSD
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Team Reports
Entries from the various official and semi-official teams, as found in
the Administration Page.
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:
General
We moved! Our new address is: The FreeBSD Foundation 3980 Broadway St.
STE #103-107 Boulder, CO 80304 USA
In February, the board of directors had an all-day board meeting in
Berkely, CA, where FreeBSD began! We put together our strategic plans
for the next 2 years, which includes software developments projects we
want to support and some educational initiatives.
COVID-19 impacts the Foundation. We put policies in place for all of
our staff members to work from home. We also put a temporary ban on
travel for staff members. We are continuing our work supporting the
community and Project, but some of our work and responses are delayed
because of changes in some of our priorities and the impact of limited
childcare for a few of our staff members.
Partnerships and Commercial User Support
We help facilitate collaboration between commercial users and FreeBSD
developers. We also meet with companies to discuss their needs and
bring that information back to the Project. In Q1, Deb Goodkin met with
commercial users at LinuxConfAu in Australia, FOSDEM in Belgium, and
SCALE18x in the US. These venues provide an excellent opportunity to
meet with commercial and individual users and contributors to FreeBSD.
It's not only beneficial for the above, but it also helps us understand
some of the applications where FreeBSD is used. In addition to meeting
with commercial users at conferences, we continued discussions over
email or on calls over the quarter.
Fundraising Efforts
Last quarter we raised $57,000! Thank you to everyone who came through,
especially in this economic crisis we have found ourselves in. It
heartens us deeply that individuals and organizations have supported
our efforts, when there are so many people, animals, and businesses in
need right now. We also want to extend a big thank you to Tarsnap,
VMWare, and Stormshield for leading the way with Silver level
donations. We hope other organizations will follow their lead and give
back to help us continue supporting FreeBSD.
We are 100% funded by donations, and those funds go towards software
development work to improve FreeBSD, FreeBSD advocacy around the world,
keeping FreeBSD secure, continuous integration improvements, sponsoring
BSD-related and computing conferences, legal support for the Project,
and many other areas.
Please consider making a donation to help us continue and increase our
support for FreeBSD: https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/donate/.
We also have the Partnership Program, to provide more benefits for our
larger commercial donors. Find out more information at
https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/FreeBSD-foundation-partnership-program/
and share with your companies!
OS Improvements
The Foundation supports software development projects to improve the
FreeBSD operating system through our full time technical staff,
contractors, and project grant recipients. They maintain and improve
critical kernel subsystems, add new features and functionality, and fix
problems.
Over the last quarter there were 273 commits to the FreeBSD base system
source repository tagged with FreeBSD Foundation sponsorship, about 12%
of base system commits over the quarter. Many of these are part of
sponsored or staff projects that have their own entries in this FreeBSD
Quarterly Report, but Foundation staff and contractors (Ed Maste,
Konstantin Belousov, Mark Johnston, Li-Wen Hsu) also support the
project with an ongoing series of bug fixes, build fixes, and
miscellaneous improvements that don't warrant a separate entry.
Ed committed miscellaneous improvements to various parts of FreeBSD's
build infrastructure, largely prompted by the work to retire the
obsolete GCC 4.2.1. This included removal of the LLVM_LIBUNWIND option
(now always set), and the removal of unused gperf, gcov, and the GPL
devicetree compiler (dtc). Ed committed sendfile support for the
Linuxulator, submitted by previous intern Bora Özarslan, and tested and
committed a number of submitted bug fixes for the Microchip
USB-Ethernet controller if_muge driver. Ed also updated the copy of
OpenSSH in the base system to 7.9p1, with additional updates in
progress, and worked on a number of security advisories released during
the quarter.
Konstantin Belousov and Mark Johnston both performed a large number of
code reviews during the quarter under Foundation sponsorship. This work
helps developers in the FreeBSD community and those working at
companies using FreeBSD to integrate their work into FreeBSD.
In addition to work described elsewhere in this report Konstantin also
continued his usual series of bug fixes and improvements. This quarter
this included low-level x86 support, fixing sendfile bugs, file system
and vfs bug fixes, and dozens of other miscellaneous improvements.
Additional work included a variety of commits to support Hygon x86 CPUs
and improvements to the runtime linker (rtld)'s direct execution mode.
Mark Johnston continued his work on the Syzkaller system-call fuzzer,
and committed fixes for many issues reported by Syzkaller. Mark triaged
a large number of submitted bug reports and in many cases committed
attached patches or developed fixes. Mark also addressed dozens of
Coverity Scan reports.
Mark's other changes included arm64 Large System Extensions (LSE)
atomic operations, low-level arm64 and x86 work, virtual memory (VM)
work, and bug fixes or other improvements to syslog, the lagg(4) link
aggregation driver, and build reproducibility.
Li-Wen Hsu committed many changes to tests in the base system, such as
turning off known failing tests tracked by PRs, test-related pkgbase
fixes, and other improvements.
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 first quarter of 2020, Foundation staff continued to improve
the Project's CI infrastructure, worked with contributors to fix the
failing build and test cases. The building of a CI staging environment
is in progress on the new machine purchased by the Foundation. We are
also working with other teams in the Project for their testing needs.
For example, we added a new job for running LTP (Linux Testing Project)
on the Linuxulator, to validate improvements in the Foundation's
sponsored Linux emulation work. We are also working with many external
projects and companies to improve their support of FreeBSD.
See the FreeBSD CI section of this report for completed work items and
detailed 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. We purchased one server for a mirror in
Malaysia, and signed the MOU for the new NYI colocation facility in
Illinois. NYI generously provides this as an in-kind donation to the
Project.
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.
Check out some of the advocacy and education work we did last quarter:
* Organized and presented at the first ever FreeBSD Mini-Conf
LinuxConfAu 2020, in Gold Coast, Australia in addition to
sponsoring the conference itself. The recap can be found here.
* Presented BSD Dev Room at FOSDEM '20, in Brussels, Belgium and
represented FreeBSD at a stand along with other members of the
community. Find out more here:
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/fosdem-2020-conference-recap/
* Represented FreeBSD at Apricot 2020 in Melbourne, Australia and
sponsored the event.
* Industry Partner Sponsor for USENIX FAST '20 in Santa Clara, CA
* Sponsored FOSSASIA 2020, in Singapore
* Committed to hold FreeBSD Day at SCALE 18x, in Pasadena, CA
* Held a "Getting Started with FreeBSD Workshop" at SCALE 18x in
addition to giving a talk, representing FreeBSD at the Expo and
holding a "Why FreeBSD is Me" BoF. Check out the conference recap.
We continued producing FreeBSD advocacy material to help people promote
FreeBSD.
Learn more about our efforts in 2019 to advocate for FreeBSD.
In addition to the information found in the Development Projects update
section of this report, take a minute to check out the latest update
blogs:
* POWER to the People: Making FreeBSD a First Class Citizen on POWER.
* Development Project Update: Toolchain Modernization.
Read more about our conference adventures in the conference recaps and
trip
reports in our monthly newsletters.
We help educate the world about FreeBSD by publishing the
professionally produced FreeBSD Journal. As we mentioned previously,
the FreeBSD Journal is now a free publication. Find out more and access
the latest issues.
You can find out more about events we attended and upcoming events
here. As is the case for most of us in this industry, SCALE was the
last event we will be attending for a few months. However, we're
already working on how we can make more on-line tutorials and how-to
guides available to facilitate getting more folks to try out FreeBSD.
In the meantime, please check out the how-to guides we already have
available!
We have continued our work with a new website developer to help us
improve our website. Work has begun to make it easier for community
members to find information more easily and to make the site more
efficient.
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.
Go to http://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/ to find out how we support
FreeBSD and how we can help you!
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Core Team
Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <core at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Core Team is the governing body of FreeBSD.
* Core approved a source commit bit for Alfredo Dal'Ava Júnior.
Alfredo has been working on powerpc64 support. Justin Hibbits
(jhibbits) will mentor Alfredo.
* Core approved a source commit bit for Ryan Moeller. Ryan has been
working on porting ZoL to FreeBSD. Alexander Motin (mav) and Matt
Macy (mmacy) will mentor Ryan.
* Core approved a source commit bit for Nick O'Brien. Nick has been
working on RISC-V at Axiado. Kristof Provost (kp) and Philip Paeps
(philip) will mentor Nick.
* Core approved a source commit bit for Richard Scheffenegger.
Richard has been contributing TCP work. Michael Tuexen (tuexen)
will mentor Richard and Rodney Grimes (rgrimes) will act as
co-mentor.
* Core approved a source commit bit for Aleksandr Fedorov. Aleksandr
has been testing and reviewing bhyve networking code. Vincenzo
Maffione (vmaffione) will mentor Aleksandr and John Baldwin (jhb)
will act as co-mentor.
* Core requested that the freebsd-mobile@ list be retired as it was
almost exclusively receiving spam. postmaster@ completed core's
request.
* Core approved third party authentication for some project services
with certain conditions. For example, for authentication with
Google, users must be using a FreeBSD.org account with two-factor
authentication enabled. For GitHub, we will enable and force
multi-factor authentication for our organization.
* The Core-initiated Git Transition Working Group continued to meet
over the first quarter of 2020. Their report is still forthcoming.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
Links
FreeBSD 11.4-RELEASE schedule
URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.4R/schedule.html
FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE schedule
URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.2R/schedule.html
FreeBSD development snapshots
URL: https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/
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.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team published the schedules for the
upcoming 11.4-RELEASE and 12.2-RELEASE cycles.
Much time was spent by Glen Barber working on updates to the various
build tools adding support for builds from both Subversion and Git.
This is very much a work in progress, as there are a number of
inter-connected moving parts.
Additionally throughout the quarter, several development snapshots
builds were released for the head, stable/12, and stable/11 branches.
Much of this work was sponsored by Rubicon Communications, LLC
(netgate.com) and the FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
Cluster Administration Team
Links
Cluster Administration Team members
URL: https://www.freebsd.org/administration.html#t-clusteradm
Contact: Cluster Administration Team <clusteradm at FreeBSD.org>
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. In this
quarter, the team has worked on the following:
* Upgrade all ref- and universe- machines
* South Africa mirror (JINX) is online
* Package service of Seattle, USA mirror (TUK) is online
* Ongoing systems administration work:
+ Creating accounts for new committers.
+ Backups of critical infrastructure.
+ Keeping up with security updates in 3rd party software.
Work in progress:
* Setup Malaysia (KUL) mirror
* Setup Brazil (BRA) mirror
* Setup Amsterdam (PKT) mirror
* Review the service jails and service administrators operation.
* Infrastructure of building aarch64 and powerpc64 packages
+ NVME issues on PowerPC64 Power9 blocking dual socket machine
from being used as pkg builder.
+ Drive upgrade test for pkg builders (SSDs) courtesy of the
FreeBSD Foundation.
+ Boot issues with Aarch64 reference machines.
* New NYI.net sponsored colocation space in Chicago-land area.
* Prepare resource for git working group
* Searching for more mirror providers
+ https://wiki.freebsd.org/Teams/clusteradm/generic-mirror-layout
+ https://wiki.freebsd.org/Teams/clusteradm/tiny-mirror
__________________________________________________________________
Continuous Integration
Links
FreeBSD Jenkins Instance
URL: https://ci.FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD Hardware Testing Lab
URL: https://ci.FreeBSD.org/hwlab
FreeBSD CI artifact archive
URL: https://artifact.ci.FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD CI weekly report
URL: https://hackmd.io/@FreeBSD-CI
FreeBSD Jenkins wiki
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Jenkins
Hosted CI wiki
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/HostedCI
3rd Party Software CI
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/3rdPartySoftwareCI
Tickets related to freebsd-testing@
URL: https://preview.tinyurl.com/y9maauwg
FreeBSD CI Repository
URL: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ci
Contact: Jenkins Admin <jenkins-admin at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: freebsd-testing Mailing List Contact: IRC #freebsd-ci channel
on EFNet
The FreeBSD CI team maintains the continuous integration system and
related tasks for the FreeBSD project. The CI system regularly checks
the committed changes can be successfully built, then performs various
tests and analysis of the results. The artifacts from the build jobs
are archived in the artifact server for further testing and debugging
needs. The CI team members examine the failing builds and unstable
tests and work with the experts in that area to fix the codes or adjust
test infrastructure. The details of these efforts are available in the
weekly CI reports.
During the first quarter of 2020, we continue working with the
contributors and developers in the project for their testing needs and
also keep working with external projects and companies to improve their
support of FreeBSD.
Important changes:
* All the -head jobs are using clang/lld toolchain
* All the -head test are using kyua in the base
* RISC-V jobs now generate full disk image and run tests in QEMU with
OpenSBI
* freebsd-doc job also checks building of www.freebsd.org
New jobs added:
* https://ci.freebsd.org/job/FreeBSD-head-amd64-test_ltp/
* https://ci.freebsd.org/job/FreeBSD-head-powerpc64-images/
* https://ci.freebsd.org/job/FreeBSD-head-powerpc64-testvm/
Work in progress:
* Collecting and sorting CI tasks and ideas here
* Setup the CI stage environment and put the experimental jobs on it
* Implementing automatic tests on bare metal hardware
* Adding drm ports building test against -CURRENT
* Testing and merging pull requests in the FreeBSD-ci repo
* Planning for running ztest and network stack tests
* Helping more 3rd software get CI on FreeBSD through a hosted CI
solution
* Adding non-x86 test jobs.
* Adding external toolchain related jobs.
* Adding more hardware to the hardware lab
Please see freebsd-testing@ related tickets for more WIP information,
and join the efforts
Sponsor: 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
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 Ports Management Team is responsible for overseeing the overall
direction of the Ports Tree, building packages, and personnel matters.
Below is what happened in the last quarter.
During the last quarter the number of ports settled in at 39,000. There
are currently just over 2,400 open PRs of which 640 are unassigned. The
last quarter saw 8146 commits by 173 committers to the HEAD branch and
357 commits by 52 committers to the 2020Q1 branch. This means the
number of PRs grew although the committer activity remained more or
less constant.
As always, people come and go. This time we welcomed Loïc Bartoletti
(lbartoletti@), Mikael Urankar (mikael@), Kyle Evans (kevans@, who is
already a src committer), and Lorenzo Salvadore (salvadore@, who we
already know for compiling these reports you are reading right now). We
said goodbye to dbn@ and theraven@, who we hope to see back in the
future.
On the infrastructure side, USES=qca was added and USES=zope was
removed. The latter was also due to it was incompatible with Python 3,
and portmgr is in the process of removing Python 2.7 from the Ports
Tree. This means that all ports that currently rely on Python 2.7 need
to be updated to work with Python 3 or be removed.
After a long period of work by multiple people, Xorg got updated from
the 1.18 to the 1.20 release series. Also, the web browsers were
updated: Firefox to version 75.0, Firefox ESR to 68.7.0, and Chromium
to 80.0.3987.149. The package manager itself got updated to version
1.13.2.
antoine@ ran 29 exp-runs during the last quarter for various updates to
KDE, poppler, pkg and build tools; and test compatibility with src
changes: removing procfs-based debugging, fixing TLS alignment, and
only including libssp_nonshared.a in libc for the i386 and Power
architectures.
__________________________________________________________________
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.
The biggest highlight by far during the previous quarter was the long
awaited update of xorg-server to version 1.20. After years of work by
many people, this update finally landed in the form of xorg-server
1.20.7. With this update came a couple of new things, most notably,
FreeBSD 12 and later was switched to use the udev/evdev backend by
default for handling input devices, such as mice and keyboards.
Together with this release, the OpenGL library implementation mesa was
switched to use DRI3 by default, instead of the older DRI2.
These updates caused some fallout when they first were comitted, most
notably issues with keyboards. But with help from Michael Gmelin and
others on the mailing lists, most issues were sorted fast.
Unfortunately version 304 of the nVidia graphics driver is no longer
supported as of this release.
Since this update, xorg-server has also been bumped to 1.20.8, which is
the latest upstream release.
Apart from this update, there has also been ongoing work to keep the
various drm-kmod ports and packages up to date, mostly in response to
changes in FreeBSD CURRENT and to security issues found in the Intel
i915 driver.
We have also done updates as needed to keep the graphics and input
stack up to date and working, and deprecated and removed several old
and no longer used drivers, applications and libraries.
We have also continued our regularly scheduled bi-weekly meetings.
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
__________________________________________________________________
Projects
Projects that span multiple categories, from the kernel and userspace
to the Ports Collection or external projects.
NFS over TLS implementation
Contact: Rick Macklem <rmacklem at freebsd.org>
In an effort to improve NFS security, an internet draft which I expect
will become and RFC soon specifies the use of TLS 1.3 to encrypt all
data traffic on a Sun RPC connection used for NFS.
Although NFS has been able to use sec=krb5p to encrypt data on the
wire, this requires a Kerberos environment and, as such, has not been
widely adopted. It also required that encryption/decryption be done in
software, since only the RPC message NFS arguments are encrypted. Since
Kernel TLS is capable of using hardware assist to improve performance
and does not require Kerberos, NFS over TLS may be more widely adopted,
once implementations are available.
Since FreeBSD's kernel TLS requires that data be in ext_pgs mbufs for
transmission, most of the work so far has been modifying the NFS code
that builds the protocol arguments to optionally use ext_pgs mbufs.
Coding changes to handle received ext_pgs mbufs has also been done,
although this may not be required by the receive kernel TLS.
The kernel RPC has also been modified to do the STARTTLS Null RPC and
to do upcalls to userland daemons that perform the
SSL_connect()/SSL_accept(), since the kernel TLS does not do this
initial handshake. So far only a self signed certificate on the server,
with no requirement for the client to have a certificate has been
implemented.
Work is still needed to be done for the case where the NFS client is
expected to have a signed certificate. In particular, it is not obvious
to me what the correct solution is for clients that do not have a fixed
IP address/DNS name. The code now is about ready for testing, but
requires that the kernel TLS be able to support receive as well as
transmit. Patches to the kernel TLS for receive are being worked on by
jhb at freebsd.org.
Once receive side kernel TLS becomes available, the code in subversion
under base/projects/nfs-over-tls will need third party testing and a
security evaluation by someone familiar with TLS.
__________________________________________________________________
Import of the Kyua test framework
Links
The FreeBSD Test Suite
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/TestSuite
Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD test suite uses the Kyua test framework to run tests.
Historically Kyua has been installed from the ports collection
(devel/kyua). While this is fine for mainstream architectures, it can
pose bootstrapping issues on new architectures and package installation
is quite slow under emulation or on FPGA based systems. By including it
in the FreeBSD base system we can avoid these issues.
We hope that this inclusion will spur testing of embedded platforms and
simplify the process of testing within continuous integration systems.
We currently plan to retain the devel/kyua port to serve FreeBSD
versions without and to serve as a development version.
Sponsor: DARPA
__________________________________________________________________
Linux compatibility layer update
Contact: Edward Tomasz Napierala <trasz at FreeBSD.org>
Work during this quarter focused on source code cleanup and making it
easier to debug missing functionality. There were, however, some
user-visible changes: added support for TCP_CORK as required by Nginx,
added support MAP_32BIT flag, which fixes Mono binaries from Ubuntu
Bionic, and a fix for DNS resolution with glibc newer than 2.30, which
affected CentOS 8.
The Linux Test Project tests that are being run as part of the the
FreeBSD Continuous Integration infrastructure now include the Open
POSIX test suite.
There's still a lot to do:
* There are pending reviews for patches that add extended attributes
support, and fexecve(2) syscall, and they require wrapping up and
committing
* There are over 400 failing LTP tests. Some of them are false
positives, some are easy to fix bugs, and some require adding new
system calls. Any help is welcome.
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
__________________________________________________________________
syzkaller on FreeBSD
Contact: Mark Johnston <markj at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Michael Tuexen <tuexen at FreeBSD.org>
See the syzkaller entry in the 2019q1 quarterly report for an
introduction to syzkaller.
A number of kernel bugs have been found by syzkaller and fixed this
quarter, mostly in the network stack and file descriptor table code.
Bug investigations have led to improvements in debugging facilities and
assertions, for example in the SCTP stack. Syzkaller reproducers have
been added to Peter Holm's stress2 suite, helping ensure that
regressions are found quickly.
The syzkaller instance hosted by backtrace.io (see the 2019q3 report)
has been very useful in testing syzkaller improvements and finding
bugs. Though Google runs a dedicated syzkaller instance targeting
FreeBSD, it has proved fruitful to run multiple instances since they
end up building different corpuses and thus discover different, though
overlapping, sets of bugs.
Support for fuzzing a number of new system calls has been added,
including the new copy_file_range() and __realpathat() system calls,
and the Capsicum system calls. Some work was also done to audit
existing system call definitions to ensure that FreeBSD-specific
extensions of POSIX system calls are covered. Work is ongoing to target
the Linux emulation layer, and to collect kernel dumps so that one-off
crashes with no reproducer have a chance at being diagnosed and fixed.
Sponsor: backtrace.io Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
__________________________________________________________________
Kernel
Updates to kernel subsystems/features, driver support, filesystems, and
more.
if_bridge
Contact: Kristof Provost <kp at FreeBSD.org>
The current implementation of if_bridge uses a single mutex to protect
its internal data structures. As a result it's nowhere near as fast as
it could be. This is relevant for users who want to run many vnet jails
or virtual machines bridged together, for example.
As part of this project several new tests have already been added for
if_bridge. These are generally very useful for validating any locking
changes, and will also help to prevent regressions for other future
changes. These tests live in /usr/tests/sys/net/if_bridge_test.
The current work is concentrating on investigating if it's possible to
leverage the ConcurrencyKit epoch code for the datapath (i.e.
bridge_input(), bridge_output(), bridge_forward(), ...).
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
__________________________________________________________________
sigfastblock(2)
Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib at FreeBSD.org>
Rtld services need to be async signal safe. This is needed, for
instance, to provide working symbol bindings in signal handlers.
For threaded processes, libthr interposes all user-installed signal
handlers and saves the signals and related context if signal is
delivered while rtld or libthr are in protected section of code.
In non-threaded processes, the async safety is provided by changing
signal mask for the thread. It is actually better than the interposing
done by libthr, since signals are delivered in the right context,
instead of libthr attempt of recreate it later. But the unfortunate
side-effect is that each rtld entry requires two syscalls, one to set
mask, and one to restore it. Typically this adds around 40 or more
syscalls on each process startup. Worse, rtld services used by typical
language runtime exception handling systems also have the cost of
signal mask manipulation.
The new sigfastblock(2) syscall was added that allows thread to
designate a memory location as fast signal block. If this word contains
non-zero value, kernel interprets the thread state same as if all
blockable signals are blocked. The facility drastically improves
exception handling speed on FreeBSD.
Since signals might abort interruptible sleeps, initial implementation
read the blocking word on each syscall entry. This is needed to ensure
that userspace does not see spurious EINTR/ERESTART if the signals are
blocked by the word. Since if kernel cached outdated value for the
block word, it would abort sleep, but then ast sees the correct mask
and does not deliver the pending signal.
There were concerns that this read of the word causes slowdown in
syscalls microbenchmarks, esp. on machines with SMAP. The reason is
that SMAP requires all userspace access bracketed by STAC/CLAC pair of
instructions, which are de-facto serializing (this is not
architectural, but all current microarchitectures do it). The decision
was made to eliminate the word read, at the cost of possibly returning
spurious EINTR. The impact should be minimal, since sigfastblock(2) is
not supposed to be the service available to users, it is only assumed
for rtld and libthr implementations.
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
__________________________________________________________________
arm64 LSE atomic instructions
Contact: Mark Johnston <markj at FreeBSD.org>
An investigation of some performance oddities on EC2 Graviton 2
instances resulted in support for the use of Large System Extension
(LSE) atomic instructions in the FreeBSD kernel.
LSE is an mandatory ISA extension specified in ARMv8.1. It consists of
a number of new atomic instructions, superseding the
Load-Linked/Store-Conditional (LL/SC) instruction pairs use when LSE is
not implemented. The extension is present in a number of ARMv8 server
platforms, including the Cavium ThunderX2 and AWS Graviton 2. The new
instructions provide significantly better scalability.
A recent set of patches modified the FreeBSD kernel to detect support
for LSE and dynamically select an atomic(9) implementation based on the
new instructions when all CPUs implement the extension. The initial
atomic(9) implementations were provided by Ali Saidi. Some benchmarking
on a 64-vCPU Graviton 2 instance shows a ~4% reduction in wall clock
time for a kernel build, and a ~15% reduction in system CPU time.
Some ARMv8 multi-processor systems implement a heterogenous CPU
architecture, referred to as big.LITTLE, in which multiple processor
types are used. Surprisingly, such systems may implement the LSE on
only a subset of its CPUs, in which case LSE instructions cannot be
used by the kernel. As a result, FreeBSD currently waits until all
processors are online before selecting the atomic(9) implementation,
which precludes the use of ifuncs to provide dynamic selection.
Currently atomic(9)'s use of LSE is limited to the kernel. A future
project would extend this to userspace, so that FreeBSD system
libraries can leverage the LSE instructions when they are available.
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation Sponsor: Amazon
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on Microsoft HyperV and Azure
Links
FreeBSD on MicrosoftAzure wiki
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/MicrosoftAzure
FreeBSD on Microsoft HyperV
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/HyperV
Contact: FreeBSD Integration Services Team <bsdic at microsoft.com>
Contact: Wei Hu <whu at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu at FreeBSD.org>
Wei is working on HyperV Socket support for FreeBSD. HyperV Socket
provides a way for the HyperV host and guest to communicate using a
common socket interface without networking required. Some features in
Azure require HyperV Socket support in the guest.
Details of HyperV Socket is available here.
The work-in-progress is available here
This project is sponsored by Microsoft.
Li-Wen is working on the FreeBSD release code related to Azure for the
-CURRENT and 12-STABLE branches. The release of 12.1-RELEASE on Azure
is also in progress.
The work-in-progress is available here
This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on the ARM Morello platform
Links
The Arm Morello Board
URL: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/cheri-morello.html
The CHERI Project
URL: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/
Contact: Andrew Turner <andrew at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ruslan Bukin <br at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson at FreeBSD.org>
CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions) extends
conventional hardware Instruction-Set Architectures (ISAs) with new
architectural features to enable fine-grained memory protection and
highly scalable software compartmentalization. The CHERI
memory-protection features allow historically memory-unsafe programming
languages such as C and C++ to be adapted to provide strong,
compatible, and efficient protection against many currently widely
exploited vulnerabilities. The CHERI scalable compartmentalization
features enable the fine-grained decomposition of operating-system (OS)
and application code, to limit the effects of security vulnerabilities
in ways that are not supported by current architectures. CHERI is a
hybrid capability architecture in that it is able to blend
architectural capabilities with conventional MMU-based architectures
and microarchitectures, and with conventional software stacks based on
virtual memory and C/C++. This approach allows incremental deployment
within existing ecosystems, which we have demonstrated through hardware
and software prototyping.
On 18 October 2019, Arm announced Morello, an experimental
CHERI-extended, multicore, superscalar ARMv8-A processor,
System-on-Chip (SoC), and prototype board to be available from late
2021. Morello is a part of the UKRI £187M Digital Security by Design
Challenge (DSbD) supported by the UK Industrial Strategy Challenge
Fund, including a commitment of over £50M commitment by Arm. The aim is
to test and validate CHERI extensions to the Arm ISA at scale with the
idea that "successful concepts are expected to be carried forward into
the architecture." The Morello board is scheduled to ship in the third
quarter of 2021.
Over the past decade we have developed CheriBSD, a version of FreeBSD
supporting CHERI. Our public facing work has been performed on MIPS64
and more recently on RISC-V. Andrew has also developed a port to an
earlier version of the Morello ISA which we will be merging into our
public repository as simulators and compilers become available.
The Morello board is based on the Arm Neoverse N1 platform and derived
from the N1SDP development platform. (The AWS Graviton2 systems are
also based on the N1 core.) Ruslan and Andrew are currently working to
enable all relevant features of the N1 and the N1SDP to give us a solid
baseline for work on Morello. These features include the PCI root
complex, system memory management unit (SMMU), and CoreSight. To the
extent practical we are upstreaming these features to FreeBSD.
Sponsor: DARPA, UKRI
__________________________________________________________________
NXP ARM64 SoC support
Contact: Marcin Wojtas <mw at semihalf.com>
Contact: Artur Rojek <ar at semihalf.com>
Contact: Dawid Gorecki <dgr at semihalf.com>
The Semihalf team initiated working on FreeBSD support for the NXP
LS1046A SoC
LS1046A are quad-core 64-bit ARMv8 Cortex-A72 processors with
integrated packet processing acceleration and high speed peripherals
including 10 Gb Ethernet, PCIe 3.0, SATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 for a wide
range of networking, storage, security and industrial applications.
Completed since the last update:
* Clean-up and rebase support on top of FreeBSD-HEAD. Prepare
features for the upstream submission:
+ QorIQ platform clockgen driver
+ LS1046A clockgen driver
+ GPIO support for QorIQ boards
+ QorIQ LS10xx AHCI driver
+ VF610 I2C controller support
+ TCA6416 GPIO expander
+ Epson RX-8803 RTC
+ QorIQ LS10xx SDHCI driver
Todo:
* Upstreaming of developed features. This work is expected to be
submitted/merged to HEAD in the Q2 of 2020.
Sponsor: Alstom Group
__________________________________________________________________
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>
Contact: Maciej Bielski <mba at semihalf.com>
Contact: Marcin Wojtas <mw at semihalf.com>
ENA (Elastic Network Adapter) is the smart NIC available in the
virtualized environment of Amazon Web Services (AWS). The ENA driver
supports multiple transmit and receive queues and can handle up to 100
Gb/s of network traffic, depending on the instance type on which it is
used.
Completed since the last update:
* Upstream of the driver to v2.1.1, introducing:
+ Bug fix for LLQ mode which was causing race when multiple IO
queues were used
Work in progress:
* Last touches for ENA v2.2.0 release, introducing:
+ Add driver support for the upcoming HW features (like Rx
offsets, reporting Tx drops)
+ Add sysctl tuneables for IO queue number
+ Create IO queues with optional size backoff
+ Rework the way of configration of drbr and Rx ring size to be
more robust and stable
+ New HAL version
+ Other minor fixes and improvements
Sponsor: Amazon.com Inc
__________________________________________________________________
Architectures
Updating platform-specific features and bringing in support for new
hardware platforms.
FreeBSD/powerpc Project
Contact: Mark Linimon <linimon at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Justin Hibbits <jhibbits at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Piotr Kubaj <pkubaj at FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD/powerpc project continues to mature.
In addition to the above listed people, we want to acknowledge
contributions from adalava, bdragon, luporl, and mikael, among others.
Key points:
* On -CURRENT, all platforms have been switched to the LLVM 10.0
compiler and lld10. Thus, ld.bfd has been removed from base.
* On powerpc64, -CURRENT has been switched to the ELFv2 ABI. Older
versions of -CURRENT that either used GCC, or LLVM with the ELFv1
ABI, are no longer supported.
* On powerpc64 FreeBSD-STABLE (11 and 12), the platforms still remain
on the antique gcc4.2.1 in base. Note: that version of GCC has been
removed from the -CURRENT src tree. Support for this configuration
is now a "best-effort" status.
* On powerpc (32-bit), the ABI did not change as with powerpc64, so
upgrading should be easier than with powerpc64.
Hardware status:
* The aacraid(4) driver has been been fixed for big-endian, thanks to
luporl. This means that Talos customers who got the SAS option can
now use the onboard SAS.
* The ixl(4) driver has also been fixed for big-endian, also thanks
to luporl.
Software status:
* As a result of -CURRENT switching to LLVM/ELFv2, ifuncs became
available, meaning that we now have optimized memcpy/bcopy and
strncpy functions when running on processors that supports VSX
instructions.
* powerpc64 is now able to run on QEMU without the need of Huge Pages
support.
* The virtio drivers have been fixed.
* kernel minidump has been fixed.
Package status:
* A FreeBSD.org package set is available for powerpc64/12
(quarterly). The -quarterly build has just been rebased from 12.0
to 12.1, per the desupport of the older 12.0. The first rebased
build has been completed, with 29776 packages being available.
* We are currently working on the upgrade of the package builder to a
recent -CURRENT. Therefore, the available packages for -CURRENT are
still ELFv1, which are not useful. Please contact Mark Linimon for
more information.
* mesa has been switched to llvm90, which fixes certain problems.
* Work continues on firefox and related ports.
* More ports fixes are being committed every day.
The team would like to thank IBM for the loan of two POWER8 and one
POWER9 machines, and Oregon State University (OSU) for providing the
hosting. As well, we would like to thank the clusteradm team for
keeping the Tyan POWER8 machines online that are hosted at NYI.
Also, Piotr would like to thank the FreeBSD Foundation for funding his
personal Talos, and Raptor (via its IntegriCloud subsidiary) for
loaning a server on which talos.anongoth.pl runs.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/RISC-V Project
Links
Wiki
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/riscv
Contact: Ruslan Bukin <br at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Mitchell Horne <mhorne at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Kristof Provost <kp at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Philip Paeps <philip at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: freebsd-riscv Mailing List Contact: IRC #freebsd-riscv channel
on freenode
It has been a year since the RISC-V project's last status report. In
that time, the RISC-V port has benefited from increased attention, and
received improvements of all kinds.
The RISC-V project has brought in two new src committers. We'd like to
welcome Jessica Clarke (jrtc27@), who is a member of CheriBSD, and Nick
O'Brien (nick@) of Axiado to the team.
Some highlights from last year:
* Bring-up on SiFive's Hifive Unleashed board
* Support for the OpenSBI firmware and version 0.2 of the SBI
specification
* Addition of the UART, SPI, and PRCI device drivers for the HiFive
Unleashed
Last quarter, the default compiler and linker was switched to
clang/lld. This
required a small number of integration changes on our side, but was
mainly enabled by the upstream improvements to the RISC-V LLVM
back-end. LLVM's RISC-V support became "official" with LLVM 9, and LLVM
10 has brought further improvements. The LLVM back-end is expected to
continue to mature, as there are now many parties actively involved in
its development. GCC remains supported as an external toolchain for
RISC-V.
The CI job for HEAD has been updated to use the clang/lld toolchain,
and a GCC job will be added in the future. The RISC-V disk image built
in the CI system now contains the full base system and is available on
the CI artifact server for further testing. The CI test job was updated
to use OpenSBI in qemu. Work on running the FreeBSD test suite for
RISC-V in the CI system is in progress.
Some progress has been made on supporting the ports framework on
RISC-V, which was mostly untested until recently. First,
emulators/qemu-user-static-devel received an update adding support for
the RISC-V 64-bit ABI, allowing ports to be cross-compiled via
poudiere(8). Second, improvements were made to the detection of the
soft-float ABI, riscv64sf. Systems running either of the hard-float or
soft-float ABIs can now compile and run ports natively. At the moment a
small subset of ports can be built successfully, and in the coming
months we will look to improve that to include a base set of crucial
ports (e.g. python or perl).
The CheriBSD project saw an initial port to RISC-V this quarter.
Preliminary support for the CHERI ISA has been added to the Spike and
QEMU emulators, as well as the necessary changes on the CheriBSD side.
Currently, the CheriBSD RISC-V kernel boots, and most statically
compiled CHERI binaries run without issue.
Although real RISC-V hardware is still scarce, any users with an
interest trying out or contributing to the RISC-V port are encouraged
to do so. Please visit the recently updated wiki page for information
on getting set up, or check out "Getting Started with FreeBSD/RISC-V"
in the January/February edition of The FreeBSD Journal.
Sponsor: DARPA, AFRL, Axiado, the FreeBSD Foundation
__________________________________________________________________
Userland Programs
Changes affecting the base system and programs in it.
GCC 4.2.1 Retirement
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at freebsd.org>
Contact: Warner Losh <imp at freebsd.org>
In 2007 the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) migrated to GPLv3, which
prompted discussions about the future of the FreeBSD tool chain. We
held a Tool Chain Summit at BSDCan 2010. Roman Divacky gave an update
on the ClangBSD project, building FreeBSD using the new and rapidly
improving Clang compiler.
Since that time Clang was imported into the FreeBSD base system and was
used more and more widely - first being installed but not the default
cc, then used by default on i386 and amd64, and later used on more and
more targets. In the years since Dimitry Andric has been keeping our
copy of Clang up-to-date.
GCC 4.2.1 was kept in the tree for a few FreeBSD targets that hadn't
migrated to Clang, such as MIPS and Sparc64. By early this year all
remaning targets had migrated to external toolchain (contemporary GCC
from ports or packages), or had been deprecated.
With no in-tree consumers remaining, GCC 4.2.1 was removed from FreeBSD
in r358454 on February 29, 2020.
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
__________________________________________________________________
elfctl utility
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at freebsd.org>
In r340076 Ed added the NT_FREEBSD_FEATURE_CTL ELF note, used to allow
binaries to opt out of, or in to, vulnerability mitigation and other
features. FreeBSD Foundation intern Bora Özarslan later added a tool to
decode and modify the ELF note, but it had yet to be installed by
default.
In the previous quarter Ed renamed the tool to elfctl, and installed it
in /usr/bin. Ed also committed a number of minor bug fixes, code style
improvements, etc.
Usage examples - list known feature flags:
$ elfctl -l
Known features are:
aslr Disable ASLR
protmax Disable implicit PROT_MAX
stackgap Disable stack gap
wxneeded Requires W+X mappings
List feature tags set on a binary:
$ elfctl /bin/ls
File '/bin/ls' features:
aslr 'Disable ASLR' is unset.
protmax 'Disable implicit PROT_MAX' is unset.
stackgap 'Disable stack gap' is unset.
wxneeded 'Requires W+X mappings' is unset.
Indicate that a binary requests to opt-out of address randomization:
$ elfctl -e +aslr binary
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
__________________________________________________________________
ELF Tool Chain
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste at freebsd.org>
A number of performance and functional improvements were committed to
ELF Tool Chain tools over the last quarter.
FreeBSD Foundation intern Tiger Gao added DWARF Debug Information Entry
(DIE) caching to addr2line which provided a substantial improvement
when translating many entries (even surpassing GNU addr2line with a
large list).
Tiger also rebased and updated an upstream ELF Tool Chain submission to
handle DW_AT_ranges and addressed two elfcopy/objcopy bugs: setting the
OS/ABI field correctly when converting a binary file to ELF, and
correctly adding new sections when there is no .shstrtab section.
Ed committed several readelf improvements, including decoding the
PROTMAX_DISABLE, STKGAP_DISABLE, and WXNEEDED ELF feature control
flags, decoding Xen and GNU Build-ID ELF notes, and improved input
validation.
Mark Johnston addressed many memory and file descriptor leaks and
similar issues reported by Coverity Scan.
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
__________________________________________________________________
Ports
Changes affecting the Ports Collection, whether sweeping changes that
touch most of the tree, or individual ports themselves.
KDE on FreeBSD
Links
KDE FreeBSD
URL: https://freebsd.kde.org/
KDE Community FreeBSD
URL: https://community.kde.org/FreeBSD
Contact: Adriaan de Groot <kde at FreeBSD.org>
The KDE on FreeBSD project packages the software produced by the KDE
Community for FreeBSD. The software includes a full desktop environment
KDE Plasma, the art application Krita, video editor Kdenlive and
hundreds of other applications that can be used on any FreeBSD desktop
machine.
The quarter opened with a new kstars (amateur astronomy application)
release landing in ports, and then had the usual regular updates:
* three KDE Frameworks releases (on a monthly schedule),
* three bugfix releases to the collection of KDE software from the
KDE release service (formerly KDE Applications, but it was always
more that only-applications),
* three bugfix releases to the KDE Plasma desktop.
There were no substantial Qt updates but four bugfix releases for
devel/cmake, and regular work all over the ports tree.
The SDDM login manager was updated to a much newer -- by over a year --
release and patched to support more FreeBSD features.
One update to devel/qca dropped compatibility with FreeBSD 11 because
upstream no longer supports older OpenSSL versions. There is
infrastructure in the ports tree now that adds a USES=qca for Qt
applications needing crypto support.
The open bugs list remains stable around 28 open issues, with some
interesting xkb issues as a highlight. We welcome detailed bug reports
and patches. KDE packaging updates are prepared in a copy of the ports
repository on GitHub and then merged in SVN. We welcome pull requests
there as well.
__________________________________________________________________
XFCE
Contact: Guido Falsi <xfce at FreeBSD.org>
After the XFCE update to 4.14 a regression was observed in the XFCE
window manager xfwm4. It caused window decorations to be drawn wrong or
missing with certain graphic hardware setups. It has been reported that
the recent update to Xorg server in the ports tree fixes this issue.
The updated Xorg server will be available in the next qurterly branch.
__________________________________________________________________
Wine on FreeBSD
Links
Wine homepage
URL: https://www.winehq.org
Contact: Gerald Pfeifer <gerald at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Lorenzo Salvadore <salvadore at FreeBSD.org>
The standard Wine port has moved from Wine 4.0.3 to Wine 5.0 which
represents over 7,400 individual changes including built-in modules in
PE format, multi-monitor support, Vulkan 1.1 support, and an XAudio2
re-implementation.
After our request for help in the last quarterly report the i386 wine
ports have been adopted by salvadore who immediately started resolving
existing bugs and improving the ports. Most of this work is ready and
we began committing first pieces in March. Since it takes more time
than initially expected, we will also update the i386-wine-devel port
during this process so that users needing a more recent version can
easily get it from the ports tree (or binary packages). On the other
hand, we plan on backporting these improvements to i386-wine after
i386-wine-devel is done and only then update that port, so that we
always guarantee a stable version of i386-wine.
__________________________________________________________________
Go on freebsd/arm64
Links
Go 1.14 Release Notes
URL: https://golang.org/doc/go1.14#freebsd
Contact: Mikaël Urankar <mikael at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Dmitri Goutnik <dmgk at FreeBSD.org>
Starting from the recently released version 1.14, Go now officially
supports 64-bit ARM architecture on FreeBSD 12.0 or later. This porting
effort was initially started by Greg V (aka myfreeweb) and resumed by
Shigeru Yamamoto, Dmitri Goutnik and Mikaël Urankar. Dmitry has set up
a CI builder to catch regression on FreeBSD aarch64 (it's required by
the golang policy for adding a new port to the main Go repository)
Work in progress:
* a lot of ports use an old version of golang.org/x/sys or
golang.org/x/net (to name a few) that doesn't contain the FreeBSD
aarch64 bits, work is being done to fix these ports (details are in
the bug tracker entry
__________________________________________________________________
sysctlmibinfo2 API
Links
sysctlmibinfo2
URL: https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctlmibinfo2
Contact: Alfonso Sabato Siciliano <alfonso.siciliano at email.com>
In the previous third and fouth quarterly status reports 2019, the
sysctlinfo interface and an extension to improve the sysctlbyname()
syscall were described, they can access to the sysctl MIB and pass the
properties of an object to the userland, but both are quite low level
and kernel related.
The sysctlmibinfo2 library provides an API to explore the sysctl MIB,
to convert an object name in its corresponding Object Identifier and to
find an object to get its properties, therefore it is useful to handle
an object correctly and to build a sysctl-like utility.
Primarily sysctlmibinfo2 wraps the low level interface to provide an
easy API, some example: sysctlmif_desc() retrieves the description of
an object, sysctlmif_kind() gets the type (string, integer, etc) and
sysctlmif_fmt() specifies the format (an integer could represent a
deciKelvin, milliKelvin, etc), then it is possible to print properly an
object value.
Moreover sysctlmibinfo2 provides a high level API: a struct
sysctlmif_object definition and functions to build data structures of
objects. Example, let's say we want to manage the sound system,
sysctlmif_grouplistbyname("hw.snd") returns the list of the Sound
Driver objects and sysctlmif_treebyname("dev.pcm") returns a tree where
"dev.pcm" is the root node and each subtree represents an audio device.
Obviously sysctlmibinfo2 benefits of the features of sysctlinfo:
handles OIDs up to CTL_MAXNAME levels, supports capability mode, can
seek an object by its name (avoiding to explore the MIB just to find
the corresponding OID), gets all info about an object in a time,
manages a name with a NULL level or expanded with an input for the
sysctl handler.
The library can be installed via the devel/libsysctlmibinfo2 port, a
manual page and examples in the Public Domain are available for getting
started your projects.
__________________________________________________________________
Documentation
Noteworthy changes in the documentation tree, in manpages, or in
external books/documents.
FreeBSD Translations on Weblate
Links
Translate FreeBSD on Weblate wiki
URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/DocTranslationOnWeblate
FreeBSD Weblate Instance
URL: https://translate-dev.freebsd.org/
Contact: Danilo G. Baio <dbaio at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Edson Brandi <ebrandi at FreeBSD.org>
As announced on January, The FreeBSD Project is adopting Weblate as its
web-based continuous localization platform.
We are getting new volunteers to the effort and so far these are the
numbers:
Q1 2020 Status
* 10 languages
* 47 registered users
Languages
* Chinese (Simplified) (zh_CN)
* Chinese (Traditional) (zh_TW) - Added
* French (fr_FR) - Added
* German (de_DE) - Added
* Italian (it_IT) - Added
* Norwegian Bokmål - Added - New language on FreeBSD
* Persian (fa_IR) - Added - New language on FreeBSD
* Portuguese (Brazil)
* Spanish
* Turkish (tr-TR) [1] - Added - New language on FreeBSD
1 - Already had an effort in the past.
We want to thank everyone that contributed, translating or reviewing
documents.
And please, help promote this effort on your local user group, we
always need more volunteers.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Manpages overhaul
Contact: Gordon Bergling <gbergling at gmail.com>
I am currently working on an overhaul for the FreeBSD manpages by
updating the HISTORY and STANDARDS sections and while here creating new
manpages for parts of the system that missing documentation. FreeBSD
has already one of the best documentation available for an UNIX-like
operation system, but there are parts that could be improved.
For the parts that have been already improved you can have a look at my
Phabricator account.
If you would like to help on improving the documentation effort, please
contact Benedict Reuschling bcr at freebsd.org or me at
gbergling at gmail.com.
__________________________________________________________________
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.
pot and the nomad pot driver
Links
pot project
URL: https://pot.pizzamig.dev
pot on github
URL: https://github.com/pizzamig/pot
Nomad pot driver
URL: https://github.com/trivago/nomad-pot-driver
minipot
URL: https://github.com/pizzamig/minipot
Contact: Luca Pizzamiglio <pizzamig at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Esteban Barrios <esteban.barrios at trivago.com>
An initial effort to write proper documentation and guides for the pot
project has started. The documentation, even if incomplete, is
available at here. A F.A.Q. page is available and waiting for users to
submit their questions.
During the last quarter, some bugs were reported on pot and on the
nomad-pot-driver. Both projects released a new bug fix version. Many
thanks to 'grembo' and 'Crest' that reported issues, tested and tried
our solutions. Thanks also to Mateusz (0mp) for his Pull Requests!
pot will have a new release soon (0.11.0), focused on network:
* network stack support: ipv4 only, ipv6 only, dual stack.
* flexible network setup for alias: adding the ability to use an
arbitrary network setup for alias network type
Contributions are welcome! Label "good first issue" has been added to
issues to invite newcomers to contribute to the project!
__________________________________________________________________
NomadBSD
Links
NomadBSD Website
URL: https://www.nomadbsd.org/
NomadBSD Github
URL: https://www.github.com/NomadBSD/NomadBSD
NomadBSD Forum
URL: https://forum.NomadBSD.org/
Contact: NomadBSD Team <info at NomadBSD.org>
NomadBSD is a persistent live system for USB flash drives, based on
FreeBSD. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup, it is
configured to be used as a desktop system that works out of the box,
but can also be used for data recovery, for educational purposes, or
testing FreeBSD's hardware compatibility.
In March we released a new minor version 1.3.1 which improves the
configuration of the network interfaces, fixed some bugs and added
nomadbsd-chusr and nomadbsd-sysinfo. Further some new features found
their way into the release.
Some days later the channel explainingcomputers on YouTube released a
review video of NomadBSD. The explainingcomputers has almost 600,000
followers and the review was positive so we saw the highest peak in
downloads ever! Along with it came a lot of people looking for help on
our mailing list and on Twitter so we decided to set up a new support
forum.
We are looking for people to help the project. Help is much appreciated
in all areas:
* Translation of program interfaces
* Design artwork
* Programming new tools, extend existing ones
* Tests and Bug reports / UX and feature suggestions
* Mirrors outside of Europe
Open tasks:
* Support installation on disk partitions and add a partition editor
GUI.
* Complete disk encryption
* Add a user-friendly network manager
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