FreeBSD Status Report Fourth Quarter 2005
Max Laier
max at love2party.net
Thu Jan 26 04:37:31 PST 2006
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October-December 2005 Status Report
Introduction
This report is about the rather quite last quarter of 2005, with the
release of FreeBSD 6.0 and the holiday season things evolved in the
background. Nontheless, most exciting projects hit the tree (or are
going to very soon).
Upcoming events, such as the release of FreeBSD 6.1/5.5 and the third
BSDCan conference with a big developer summit promise to provide a
busier start in 2006. The foundation for upcoming development,
however, are the projects that are described herein.
We hope that you find interesting projects to look at or work on. The
next status report collection will be April 7 2006. We are looking
forward to your report then.
Thanks again to everyone who submitted reports, and thanks to Brad
Davis who stepped up for an extensive spelling and grammar review.
Enjoy reading!
_________________________________________________________________
Projects
* FreeSBIE
* jemalloc
* variant symlinks
Documentation
* FreeBSD list of projects and ideas for volunteers (TODO list for
volunteers)
* Problem Report Database
* The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project
FreeBSD team reports
* FreeBSD Security Officer and Security Team
* Ports Collection
* Release Engineering Status Report
Kernel
* Bt878 Audio Driver (aka FusionHDTV 5 Lite)
* E1000 driver improvements
* LSI MegaRAID improvements
* Sound subsystem improvements
Network infrastructure
* Early Binding Updates and Credit-Based Authorization for the
Kame-Shisa Mobile IPv6 Software
* FAST_IPSEC Upgrade
* KAME Project Status Report
* New Networking Features in FreeBSD 6.0
* Optimizing the FreeBSD IP and TCP Stack
Userland programs
* OpenBSD dhclient
Architectures
* FreeBSD on Xen 3.0
* FreeBSD/xbox
Ports
* FreshPorts
Vendor / 3rd Party Software
* SysKonnect/Marvell Yukon device driver
Miscellaneous
* A Comprehensive Delay Analysis for Reactive and Proactive Handoffs
with Mobile IPv6 Route Optimization
* BSDCan 2006
* TCP/IP Optimization Fundraiser Status
_________________________________________________________________
A Comprehensive Delay Analysis for Reactive and Proactive Handoffs with
Mobile IPv6 Route Optimization
URL:
http://doc.tm.uka.de/2006/vogt-2006-delay-analysis-for-reactive-and-pr
oactive-handoffs.pdf
Contact: Christian Vogt <chvogt at tm.uka.de>
Optimizations to reduce handoff delays inherent in Mobile IPv6 Route
Optimization as well as IPv6 router discovery, address configuration,
and movement detection have so far been mostly considered on an
individual basis. This document evaluates three integrated solutions
for improved handoff experience in surroundings with different
preconditions: reactive handoffs with unmodified routers, reactive
handoffs with router support, and movement anticipation and proactive
handoff management.
_________________________________________________________________
BSDCan 2006
URL: http://www.bsdcan.org/
Contact: Dan Langille <dan at langille.org>
We are well into the process of selecting the talks for BSDCan 2006.
Our new program committee has a hard selection task over the new few
weeks. The deadline for the Call For Papers has passed, but it's not
too late to submit a talk. Please see the above URL for details. After
the success of the Work in Progress last year , we are going to do it
again this year. If you are working on something you'd like to tell
the world about, considering giving a 5 minute talk at BSDCan. The
registration prices for BSDCan 2006 will be the same as they were for
2005 . We will be again in the SITE building at University of Ottawa
and you'll have lots of opportunity to meet with people from all over
the world. Be sure to make your travel plans now and don't miss out on
the biggest BSD event this year: BSDCan 2006.
Open tasks:
1. We're looking for volunteers to help out just before and during
the conference. Contact Dan at the above address.
2. If you have a talk you'd like to present, contact Dan at the above
address.
_________________________________________________________________
Bt878 Audio Driver (aka FusionHDTV 5 Lite)
URL:
http://perforce.freebsd.org/fileSearch.cgi?FSPC=%2F%2Fdepot%2Fuser%2Fj
mg%2Fbktrau%2F...&ignore=GO%21
Contact: John-Mark Gurney <jmg at FreeBSD.org>
Basic audio capture is working. All of the parameters are set by
userland, while the RISC program generation is by kernel. No real
audio has been captured as there are no drivers for the tuner yet.
Someone with a real Bt878 NTSC card that is supported by bktr(4) could
use this to capture audio w/o using the sound card.
The real goal of this driver is to make HD capture possible with the
DViCO FusionHDTV5 Lite card that I have. I have some of the
documentation that I need, but I'm still missing two key docs. The
docs for the LGDT3303 ATSC/8VSB/QAM demodulator chip and a block
diagram of the board showing which GPIO lines go where and how the
chips are interconnected. DViCO has been responsive in acknowledging
my emails, but they have yet to produced any data besides pointing me
to the Linux driver (which is difficult to figure out stuff by).
Open tasks:
1. Complete basic capture driver.
2. Make the bktr(4) drive cleanly attach to the card, and possibly
add support for analog capture.
_________________________________________________________________
E1000 driver improvements
Contact: Scott Long <scottl at freebsd.org>
Contact: Andre Opperman <andre at freebsd.org>
In an effort to solve the 'interrupt aliasing' problem that plagues
many motherboards under FreeBSD, I modified the Intel e1000 network
driver (if_em) to use a combination of fast interrupts and taskqueues.
This technique avoids interrupt threads entirely, which in turn avoids
triggering the aliasing problem in the Intel APIC. The result is that
the driver now handles and masks interrupts immediately, and a private
taskqueue is then scheduled to run to process the link events and
rx/tx events. A side effect of this asynchronous processing is that it
acts much as traditional polling does, in that the amount of work done
in the taskqueue can be controlled, and the taskqueue rescheduled to
process work at a later time. This leads to the driver having the
low-latency benefits of interrupts and the workload segmentation of
polling, all without complicated heuristics. Several users have
reported that the driver can handle higher loads than traditional
polling without deadlocks.
Along with this work, I modified the SMPng locking in the driver so
that no lock is required for the RX path. Since this path is already
implicitly serialized by the interrupt and/or taskqueue and/or polling
handler (all of which are exclusive to each other), there was no need
for extra synchronization. This has two benefits. The first is
reduction in processing overhead to unlock and lock the driver for
every RX packet, and significant reduction in contention of the driver
lock when transmitting and receiving packets at the same time. I
believe that it is further possible to run the TX-complete path
without a lock, further reducing overhead and contention for high
transmit loads. The reduced contention also greatly benefitted the
fast-forward bridging code in FreeBSD, with up to 25% performance
improvement seen, as well as lower CPU utilization.
The work can be found in FreeBSD 7-CURRENT for now. There are still
some rough edges relating to falling back to traditional ithread and
polling behavior, and I do not intend to merge the changes back to
FreeBSD 6.x until these are resolved. I also hope to extend the
INTR_FAST+taskqueue model into a general framework for doing Mac OSX
style filter interrupts. The work in the if_em driver can also be
extended to other high-performance network drivers such as if_bge and
if_ti. Any help with investigating these topics is welcomed.
_________________________________________________________________
Early Binding Updates and Credit-Based Authorization for the Kame-Shisa
Mobile IPv6 Software
URL: http://www.tm.uka.de/~chvogt/ebucba/
URL:
http://doc.tm.uka.de/2005/draft-vogt-mobopts-early-binding-updates-00.
txt
URL:
http://doc.tm.uka.de/2005/draft-vogt-mobopts-credit-based-authorizatio
n-00.txt
Contact: Christian Vogt <chvogt at tm.uka.de>
Based on the Kame-Shisa Mobile IPv6 Software for FreeBSD 5.4, we
implemented the performance optimization "Early Binding Updates" and
"Credit-Based Authorization". The combined optimizations facilitate
significant reductions in handoff delay without compromising protocol
security [1][2].
_________________________________________________________________
FAST_IPSEC Upgrade
Contact: George Neville-Neil <gnn at freebsd.org>
Contact: Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz at freebsd.org>
Currently splitting out the rest of the PF_KEY data-structures from
the key database. This will mean the user level applications and the
kernel will not share datastructures and that they can, hopefully,
advance on their own without being in lockstep.
Open tasks:
1. Calculate diffs between Kame IPv4 version of IPSec and FAST_IPSEC
and upgrade FAST to the latest standards.
2. Add IPv6 support to FAST_IPSEC.
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD list of projects and ideas for volunteers (TODO list for volunteers)
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/ideas/
Contact: Joel Dahl <joel at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Alexander Leidinger <netchild at FreeBSD.org>
The "TODO list for volunteers" is now committed as the "FreeBSD list
of projects and ideas for volunteers". So far the interest in the list
is high and some volunteers already took the opportunity to start
tackling some of the entries.
Unfortunately the FreeBSD project does not have enough human resources
to provide a technical contact for every entry. Interested volunteers
should not be afraid to try to come up with a solution for an entry
without a technical contact. The people on the hackers and current
mailing list are typically very helpful regarding answering specific
questions (as long as they know the answer...).
We are looking forward to hear about new ideas, people willing to be
technical contacts for generic topics (e.g. USB) or specific entries
(already existing or newly created), suggestions for existing entries
or completion reports for (parts of) an entry.
Open tasks:
1. Add more ideas.
2. Find more technical contacts.
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on Xen 3.0
URL: http://www.fsmware.com/xenofreebsd/7.0/STATUS
Contact: Kip Macy <kip.macy at gmail.com>
Full domU support in p4 branch of -CURRENT, except suspend / restore.
Dom0 work is in progress. Scott Long is working on xenbus integration
with newbus. After newbus integration it will go into CVS. I hope to
see it MFCed to RELENG_6 so it will be available for 6.1.
Open tasks:
1. Port the backend drivers from Linux.
2. Port the domain management tools from Linux.
3. Add multiboot support to loader(8) to support it booting xen.
4. SMP, x86_64, and PAE support.
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Security Officer and Security Team
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/security/
URL:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/staff
-listing.html#STAFF-SECTEAM
URL: http://vuxml.freebsd.org/
Contact: Security Officer <security-officer at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Security Team <security-team at FreeBSD.org>
This report covers the period July 2005 - January 2006, since the
FreeBSD Security Team did not submit a status report for July -
October 2005.
In August 2005, the long-time Security Officer, Jacques Vidrine,
stepped down and was replaced by Colin Percival. Jacques remains with
the team as Security Officer Emeritus, and the team thanks him for all
his work over the past four years.
Also in August 2005, Dag-Erling C. Smørgrav was replaced by Simon L.
Nielsen as Deputy Security Officer. In addition, Tom Rhodes and Guido
van Rooij retired from the team in September 2005 and January 2006
respectively in order to devote their time to other parts of the
FreeBSD project. The current Security Team membership is published on
the web site.
In the time since the last status report, ten security advisories have
been issued (five in 2005, five in 2006) concerning problems in the
base system of FreeBSD; of these, four problems were in "contributed"
code, while six were in code maintained within FreeBSD. The
Vulnerabilities and Exposures Markup Language (VuXML) document has
continued to be updated by the Security Team and the Ports Committers
documenting new vulnerabilities in the FreeBSD Ports Collection; since
the last status report, 117 new entries have been added, bringing the
total up to 636.
The following FreeBSD releases are supported by the FreeBSD Security
Team: FreeBSD 4.10, FreeBSD 4.11, FreeBSD 5.3, FreeBSD 5.4, and
FreeBSD 6.0. Their respective End of Life dates are listed on the web
site.
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/xbox
URL: http://xbox-bsd.nl
Contact: Rink Springer <rink at FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD/xbox support is nearing completion. Patches are available for
nve(4) ethernet support, as well as a syscons(4)-capable console. I am
working to integrate these in CURRENT, a backport to 6.x is planned
too.
Work is under way to support X.Org as well; people with more detailed
knowledge of X.Org are welcome to assist.
Open tasks:
1. Enable framebuffer support in X.Org
2. Figure out a way to use mfsroots without using loader(8)
_________________________________________________________________
FreeSBIE
URL: http://www.freesbie.org
URL: http://torrent.freesbie.org
URL: freesbie at gufi.org
Contact: FreeSBIE staff <staff at freesbie.org>
Development is going on after the complete rewrite of the toolkit.
There are many plugins available and we're testing a new
implementation of unionfs for 6.x. Since it's a bit unstable, it won't
be included in the release anyway. Developers hope to enter the BETA
state on February 1st, to release an -RC image around February 15th
and the RELEASE around March 1st. We need more people to test the
images we provide. Torrents for them are available at
torrent.freesbie.org .
Open tasks:
1. A new BETA Release, based on 6-STABLE, is available for testing.
_________________________________________________________________
FreshPorts
URL: http://www.freshports.org/
Contact: Dan Langille <dan at langille.org>
FreshPorts recently moved to a new webserver. This should speed things
up considerably.
You can read all about the new hardware on the recently introduced
FreshPorts Blog . This blog will include technical discussions about
ports and the problems they present with respect to FreshPorts. Site
announcements will be posted there. As bugs are found, they will be
listed, as well as their fixes.
Supporting multiple platforms and architectures is still in the
development stage. Lack of time is affecting progress.
A fix for virtual ports is in the works. I'm also going to implement
more caching to speed things up. If interested in discussing the
options there, please get involved in the blog.
_________________________________________________________________
jemalloc
Contact: Jason Evans <jasone at FreeBSD.org>
libc's malloc implementation has been replaced with an implementation
that is designed to scale well for multi-threaded applications running
on multi-processor systems. This is accomplished by creating multiple
allocation arenas that are independent of each other, and permanently
assigning threads to these arenas. In the common case, threads do not
access the same allocator arena at the same time, which reduces
contention and cache sloshing.
Single-threaded application performance is approximately equivalent to
what it was with phkmalloc, but for multi-threaded applications that
make heavy use of malloc, the performance difference can be huge
(orders of magnitude).
As with phkmalloc, the new malloc implementation supports runtime
configuration via the MALLOC_OPTIONS environment variable. See the
malloc(3) manpage for details on supported options, as well as more
information about the allocator's architecture.
_________________________________________________________________
KAME Project Status Report
URL: http://www.kame.net/
URL: http://www.kame.net/newsletter/20051107/
URL: http://www.wide.ad.jp/news/press/20051107-KAME-e.html
URL: http://ipv6style.jp/en/special/kame/20051205/index.shtml
Contact: SUZUKI Shinsuke <suz at FreeBSD.org>
Most of the latest KAME code has been merged to 7-current and
6-stable, to prepare for the project conclusion in March 2006. For the
same reason, we moved some ports applications (security/racoon,
net/pim6sd, net/pim6dd, net/dhcp6) from KAME to sourceforge.net.
Some of the items (e.g. IGMPv3/MLDv2, Mobile-IPv6/NEMO, SCTP, DCCP,
ISATAP) are not merged yet from the latest KAME code for several
reasons. Other projects will continue to merge their work.
Open tasks:
1. remove __P() macros
2. set net.inet6.ip6.kame_version to a more appropriate date :-)
3. update src/sys/netinet6/README
_________________________________________________________________
LSI MegaRAID improvements
Contact: Scott Long <scottl at freebsd.org>
Contact: Doug Ambrisko <douga at freebsd.org>
Major work has gone into improving both the performance of the LSI
MegaRAID (amr) driver, and in adding Linux compatiblity support. SMGng
locking was added in Oct 2005 as well as a number of performance
improvements. The result is 138% performance improvement in some local
transaction tests.
Throughout 2005 a lot of work has gone into adding Linux compatibility
to the driver. It is now possible to run many of the LSI-provided
management apps for Linux under FreeBSD. Both this feature and the
performance improvements are in the 7-CURRENT development branch of
FreeBSD and are scheduled to be backported in time for the FreeBSD 6.1
release.
_________________________________________________________________
New Networking Features in FreeBSD 6.0
URL:
http://people.freebsd.org/New%20Networking%20Features%20in%20FreeBSD%2
06%20-%20Presentation.pdf
URL:
http://people.freebsd.org/New%20Networking%20Features%20in%20FreeBSD%2
06%20-%20Paper.pdf
URL: http://www.eurobsdcon.org
Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre at freebsd.org>
FreeBSD 6 has evolved drastically in the development branch since
FreeBSD 5.3 and especially so in the network area. The presentation
and paper give an in-depth overview of all network stack related
enhancements, changes and new code with a narrative on their
rationale.
_________________________________________________________________
OpenBSD dhclient
Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Sam Leffler <sam at FreeBSD.org>
The OpenBSD rewrite of dhclient has been imported, replacing the ISC
dhclient. The OpenBSD client provides better support for roaming on
wireless networks and a simpler model of operation. Instead of a
single dhclient process per system, there is one per network
interface. This instance automatically goes away in the even of link
loss and is restarted via devd when link is reacquired. To support
this change, many aspects of the network interface configuration
process were overhauled.
Support for adding aliases to DHCP configured interfaces has been
committed to CURRENT and will be merged before 6.1-RELEASE. Soon work
will begin to merge changes from OpenBSD that have taken place since
the initial import.
Work on further interface configuration enhancements is underway for
FreeBSD 7.0.
_________________________________________________________________
Optimizing the FreeBSD IP and TCP Stack
URL:
http://people.freebsd.org/Optimizing%20the%20FreeBSD%20IP%20and%20TCP%
20Stack%20-%20Presentation.pdf
URL:
http://people.freebsd.org/Optimizing%20the%20FreeBSD%20IP%20and%20TCP%
20Stack%20-%20Paper.pdf
URL: http://www.eurobsdcon.org
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/tcpoptimization.html
Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre at freebsd.org>
FreeBSD has gained fine grained locking in the network stack
throughout the 5.x-RELEASE series cumulating in 6.0-RELEASE. Hardware
architecture and performance characteristics have evolved
significantly since various BSD networking subsystems have been
designed and implemented. This paper gives a detailed look into the
implementation and design changes in FreeBSD 7-CURRENT to extract the
maximum network performance from the underlying hardware.
Sponsored by: TCP/IP Optimization Fundraiser 2005
_________________________________________________________________
Ports Collection
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/ports/
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~fenner/portsurvey/
URL: http://edwin.adsl.barnet.com.au/~edwin/ports/
URL: http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/index.html
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/index.html
URL: http://tinderbox.marcuscom.com
Contact: Mark Linimon <linimon at FreeBSD.org>
During this time, the number of ports PRs briefly dipped below 500 --
a number not seen since late 2000, when there were 4000 ports instead
of our new total of over 14,000 ports. This is due to the hard work of
a large number of individuals, including pav, edwin, mnag, garga, and
many others. Congratulations folks! Some of this was due to more
aggressively committing PRs where the maintainer had not responded
within the timeout period. Although controversial, this new policy
seems to be succeeding in its goal of improving the Ports Collection.
A new file, ports/KNOBS, was added by ahze to help bring some order in
the chaos that had been the OPTIONS namespace.
dougb has changed the way that rc.d works in -HEAD to work more like
the base rc.d scripts. We are hoping that this change will make ports
maintenance easier in the future. However, in the meantime a few bugs
have been introduced (which we intend to have fixed by the time 6.1 is
released). While this regression is unfortunate, it was decided that
now was the best time to try to make this change rather than waiting
for 7.0. We hope our users can be patient with us in the interim.
Work continues to improve the marcuscom ports tinderbox, with new
features added by marcus, aDe, and edwin in particular. Several ports
committers are now running their own copies to test ports changes.
The www.FreeBSD.org/ports page, and the portmgr web pages, were
reworked as well.
We have added 4 new committers since the last report.
Open tasks:
1. Progress has been made in cracking down on ports that do not
correctly install when LOCALBASE is not /usr/local, but some ports
remain.
2. portmgr would like to remind committers that PRs for their ports
should be handled (either committed or marked 'suspended' or
'analyzed') within the two week timeout period. In this way other
committers do not have to invoke the maintainer timeout and things
will work more smoothly.
_________________________________________________________________
Problem Report Database
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/support.html#gnats
Contact: Mark Linimon <bugmeister_at_freebsd_dot_org>
The experiment to add 'tags' to many of the kern and related PRs,
including such things as '[nfs]', '[fxp]', and so forth, continues. In
addition, PRs with patches have been more consistently tagged with
'[patch]'. Two new periodic reports based on both functional tags and
PRs with patches have been added, with the goal of making these PRs
more visible.
_________________________________________________________________
Release Engineering Status Report
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/releng
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/releases
Contact: RE Team <re at freebsd.org>
Another very busy year for the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team.
Recognizing the problems, both technical and emotional, surrounding
the FreeBSD 5.x releases, our primary focus was in getting the bugs
out of FreeBSD 6.0 and getting it released. We succeeded at that quite
well, and the 6.0 release on Nov 18 was a huge success for the
project. Many thanks to all of the developers who put in countless
hours fixing bugs and improving performance, and to the users who
helped find, fix, and verify bugs.
Moving forward to 2006, we plan on doing a joint release of FreeBSD
5.5 and 6.1 in late March. The 5.5 release will mark the end of active
FreeBSD 5.x development and releases, and is intended to help users
who have not yet switched to FreeBSD 6. It consists primarily of bug
fixes and minor improvements. FreeBSD 6.1 will be an upgrade to 6.0
and will include new drivers, better performance in certain areas, as
well as bug fixes. We expect to release FreeBSD 6.2 and 6.3 later in
2006.
_________________________________________________________________
Sound subsystem improvements
URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~ariff/
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/ideas/
Contact: Ariff Abdullah <ariff at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Alexander Leidinger <netchild at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Multimedia Mailinglist <multimedia at FreeBSD.org>
A lot of changes have taken place in the sound system since the last
status report. They range from less hickups and distortion by disk
accesses and/or driver bugs to new and improved features (software
volume control implemented for soundcards which do not have hardware
volume control). Additionally a new driver (snd_atiixp) has seen the
light and a lot of problem reports where fixed.
Most of those changes and the changes mentioned in the previous status
report are already merged to RELENG_6 and will be part of 6.1-RELEASE.
Open tasks:
1. Have a look at the sound related entries on the ideas list.
2. Rewrite some parts (e.g. a new mixer subsystem with OSS
compatibility).
3. sndctl(1): tool to control non-mixer parts of the sound system
(e.g. spdif switching, virtual-3D effects) by an user (instead of
the sysctl approach in -current); pcmplay(1), pcmrec(1),
pcmutil(1).
4. Plugable FEEDER infrastructure. For ease of debugging various
feeder stuff and/or as userland library and test suite.
5. Support for new hardware (envy24, Intel HDA).
6. Performance enhancement (via 'slave'-channels).
7. Closer compatibility with OSS, especially for the upcoming OSS v4.
_________________________________________________________________
SysKonnect/Marvell Yukon device driver
URL: http://www.marvell.com
URL: http://www.syskonnect.de
Contact: Karim Jamal <support at syskonnect.de>
This project provides support for SysKonnect's SK-98xx,
SK-95xx,SK-9Exx and SK-9Sxx PCI/PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet adapters
via the yk(4) driver, as well as Marvell's Yukon LOM Gigabit Ethernet
controllers via the myk(4) driver. Driver source has been made
available to selected members of the FreeBSD project.
_________________________________________________________________
TCP/IP Optimization Fundraiser Status
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/tcpoptimization.html
URL:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/em/if_em.c?rev=1.98&
content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup
URL:
http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-july-2005-oct-2005.html#TCP-
&-IP-Routing-Optimization-Fundraise
Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre at freebsd.org>
The fundraise has been very successful and I want to thank everyone
who has pledged their support and tipped the jar. The full amount plus
a little bit more has been raised in a very short timeframe. More
information on the exact amounts and their sponsors can be found at
the first link.
After the delays on this project caused by the FreeBSD 6.0 Release
cycle code freeze work has picked up and a paper was written and a
presentation held on "Optimizing the FreeBSD IP and TCP Stack" for
EuroBSDCon 05 on November 27th. See related status report under that
title.
From December 21st to January 11th I received access to a calibrated
Agilent N2X gigabit tester and traffic generator. Stock FreeBSD
7-current was tested and profiled extensively in this timeframe. A
first proof of concept optimization was developed in cooperation with
Scott Long. It involved converting the Intel Gigabit ethernet em(4)
driver to make use of fast interrupt handlers, taskqueues and lockless
RX ring handling. This improved the performance from 570kpps to
750kpps, a 25% improvement, with IP fastforwarding enabled.
Open tasks:
1. A large number of profiles and measurements was taken and a
detailed report on the performance characteristics and remaining
bottlenecks is under preparation.
2. Further optimizations and new features described on the
Optimization Fundraiser page.
_________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/nl/books/handbook
URL: http://www.freebsd-nl.org/doc/nl
URL: http://www.freebsd-nl.org/www/nl/
Contact: Remko Lodder <remko at FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Siebrand Mazeland <s.mazeland at xs4all.nl>
The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project is an ongoing project,
focussed on translating the English documentation and website to the
Dutch language. Currently we are almost done with the FreeBSD Handbook
and started the initial translation of the FreeBSD Website. We are
always looking for people to help out, if you can help, please contact
Siebrand or me so that we can divide the work amongst us.
Recent publications:
Recently the Printing and the Serial Communications chapters were
added to the FreeBSD Dutch Handbook.
Recently started items:
We started with the translation of the PPP and SLIP chapter and the
translation of the website.
Open tasks:
1. Translate the final parts of the FreeBSD handbook.
2. Translate the FreeBSD Website
_________________________________________________________________
variant symlinks
URL: http://butcher.heavennet.ru/patches/kernel/varsym/
Contact: Andrey Elsukov <bu7cher at yandex.ru>
The port of DragonFly's variant symlinks ( project ideas ) to FreeBSD.
Variant symlinks is a dynamic symbolic link implementation. Source
file of a variant symlink may contain one or more variable names. Each
of these variable names is enclosed in braces and preceded by a dollar
sign in the style of variable references in sh(1). Whenever a variant
symlink is followed, each variable found in source file is replaced by
its associated value. In this manner, a variant symlink may resolve to
different paths based on context.
Open tasks:
1. Document a new system calls.
2. More testing.
3. Write the rc.d script for the variant symlinks initialization.
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