FreeBSD Status Report July-September, 2011

Daniel Gerzo danger at freebsd.org
Tue Nov 8 09:55:09 UTC 2011


FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Q3/2011

Introduction

   This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between July and September
   2011. It is the third of the four reports planned for 2011. This
   quarter was mainly devoted to polishing the bits for the next major
   version of FreeBSD, 9.0, which is to be released by then end of this
   year.

   Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! This report
   contains 28 entries and we hope you enjoy reading it.

   Please note that the deadline for submissions covering the period
   between October and December 2011 is January 15th, 2012.
     __________________________________________________________________

Projects

     * GELI status update
     * HAST (Highly Available Storage) status update
     * pfSense
     * Tool for providing FreeBSD VM Images
     * ZFSguru
     * ZRouter.org project -- a FreeBSD-based firmware for embedded
       devices

FreeBSD Team Reports

     * Ports Collection
     * The FreeBSD Foundation
     * The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team

Network Infrastructure

     * 802.11n / atheros
     * DIstributed Firewall and Flow-shaper Using Statistical Evidence
       (DIFFUSE)
     * Ethernet Switch Framework

Kernel

     * The new CARP
     * VM layer for allocations larger than a page

Documentation

     * Doc sprint on IRC, September 5, 2011
     * The FreeBSD German Documentation Project Status Report
     * The FreeBSD Greek Documentation Project
     * The FreeBSD Japanese Documentation Project

Architectures

     * FreeBSD/arm on Marvell Armada XP
     * FreeBSD/powerpc on AppliedMicro APM86290

Ports

     * FreeBSD Haskell Ports
     * KDE-FreeBSD
     * OpenAFS port
     * Portmaster

Miscellaneous

     * bsd_day(2011)
     * EuroBSDcon 2011
     * FreeBSD Developer Summit, Maarssen

Google Summer of Code

     * Multibyte Encoding Support in Nvi
     __________________________________________________________________

802.11n / atheros

   URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/AdrianChadd/AtherosTxAgg

   Contact: Adrian Chadd <adrian at FreeBSD.org>

   AR5416, AR9160, and AR9280 functions in both station and hostap mode.
   Performance is good.

   Software retry of frames is implemented. Aggregation is implemented.

   BAR TX is not yet handled. HT protection is not implemented; neither is
   MIMO powersave.

Open tasks:

    1. BAR TX
    2. MIMO powersave
    3. Correct handling of flushing TX queues during interface
       reset/reconfigure
    4. Correct handling of 20<->20/40mhz transitions (without dropping
       frames)
    5. More intelligent rate control
     __________________________________________________________________

bsd_day(2011)

   URL: http://bsdday.eu/2011

   Contact: Martin Matuska <mm at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Gabor Pali <pgj at FreeBSD.org>

   The purpose of this one-day event was to gather Central European
   developers of today's open-source BSD systems to popularize their work
   and their organizations, and to meet each other in the real life. We
   wanted to motivate potential future developers and users, especially
   undergraduate university students, to work with BSD systems.

   This year's BSD-Day was be held in Bratislava, Slovakia at Slovak
   University of Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and
   Information Technology on November 5, 2011.
     __________________________________________________________________

DIstributed Firewall and Flow-shaper Using Statistical Evidence (DIFFUSE)

   URL: http://caia.swin.edu.au/freebsd/diffused/
   URL:
   http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/project%20announcements.shtml#diffuse
   URL: http://caia.swin.edu.au/urp/diffuse/
   URL: http://caia.swin.edu.au/urp/diffuse/downloads.html

   Contact: Sebastian Zander <szander at swin.edu.au>
   Contact: Lawrence Stewart <szander at swin.edu.au>
   Contact: Grenville Armitage <garmitage at swin.edu.au>

   DIFFUSE enables FreeBSD's IPFW firewall subsystem to classify IP
   traffic based on statistical traffic properties.

   With DIFFUSE, IPFW computes statistics (such as packet lengths or
   inter-packet time intervals) for observed flows, and uses ML (machine
   learning) to classify flows into classes. In addition to traditional
   packet inspection rules, IPFW rules may now also be expressed in terms
   of traffic statistics or classes identified by ML classification. This
   can be helpful when direct packet inspection is problematic (perhaps
   for administrative reasons, or because port numbers do not reliably
   identify applications).

   DIFFUSE also enables one instance of IPFW to send flow information and
   classes to other IPFW instances, which then can act on such traffic
   (e.g. prioritise, accept, deny, etc.) according to its class. This
   allows for distributed architectures, where classification at one
   location in your network is used to control fire-walling or
   rate-shaping actions at other locations.

   The FreeBSD Foundation has funded the Centre for Advanced Internet
   Architectures at Swinburne University of Technology to undertake the
   DIFFUSED (DIFFUSE for freebsD) project, which aims to refine our
   publicly released DIFFUSE prototype and integrate all components of the
   architecture into FreeBSD.

   The project is progressing well in the diffused_head project branch of
   the FreeBSD Subversion repository, and is due to be completed by the
   end of October 2011. Once the project is completed, the code will be
   merged from the project branch into the head branch. An MFC of the code
   to 8.x and 9.x should be possible after an appropriate amount of soak
   time has elapsed.
     __________________________________________________________________

Doc sprint on IRC, September 5, 2011

   URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~bcr/doc/sprints/20110905-final.html

   Contact: Benedict Reuschling <bcr at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Dru Lavigne <dru at FreeBSD.org>

   On September 5, we held another documentation sprint on IRC channel
   #bsddocs to discuss various issues that are important for the whole
   FreeBSD documentation community. We talked about the status of the
   planned documentation repository conversion to SVN and the status of
   the XML docbook conversion. At that point in time, we did not have any
   documentation regarding the new bsdinstaller in the upcoming release,
   which would have been very bad for users that were trying to install
   the release. Luckily, a small team formed quickly to start working on a
   new bsdinstall chapter from scratch using a separate google code
   repository that gjb@ had set up.

   Some of the topics we discussed were moved forward and their status was
   revisited at EuroBSDcon's devsummit documentation session. Before the
   end of the conference, we had a new bsdinstall chapter committed into
   the official documentation tree, thanks to the efforts put into the new
   chapter by Gavin Atkinson, Warren Block, and Glen Barber. Garrett
   Cooper provided valuable instructions on the various installation
   methods that are possible with the new bsdinstaller. Thanks to all who
   helped make this a reality.

   It is nice to see that the things we talked about at the documentation
   sprint developed further, which is why we are trying to do these
   sprints in regular intervalls.

Open tasks:

    1. Plan the next documentation sprint
    2. Continue working on the issues that are still open like the
       conversion of the repository to SVN
     __________________________________________________________________

Ethernet Switch Framework

   URL:
   http://zrouter.org/hg/FreeBSD/head/file/default/head/sys/dev/switch

   Contact: Aleksandr Rybalko <ray at FreeBSD.org>

   Many embedded devices have an Ethernet switch on board; such switches
   are even embedded on some multiport NICs. This embedded switch
   framework is designed to give users the ability to easily control basic
   features present in managed switches, such as VLANs, QoS, port
   mirroring, etc. Currently we are able to control only VLANs on:
     * Atheros AR8216/AR8316 (standalone and embedded in AR724X)
     * Broadcom BCM5325 switch family (also embedded in BCM5354 SoC)
     * Ralink RT3050F/RT3052F internal switch
     * Realtek RTL8309
     * IP175X
     * IP178X

Open tasks:

    1. Fix AR8216/AR8316 driver
    2. Fix BCM5325 driver, not all ports pass data
    3. Add tick handler for RTL8309 to automatically unisolate ports
    4. Unify MIB statistic counters access
    5. Add mii read/write bus methods
    6. Implement pseudo interfaces for switch PHYs
     __________________________________________________________________

EuroBSDcon 2011

   URL: http://2011.eurobsdcon.org/

   Contact: EuroBSDcon Organizers <oc-2011 at eurobsdcon.org>
   Contact: Gabor Pali <pgj at FreeBSD.org>

   The 10th anniversary European BSD Conference was organized in Maarssen,
   The Netherlands with more than 250 registered visitors. There were many
   interesting tutorials, including introductions to DTrace and working
   with Netgraph. It featured 26 high-quality talks and 2 keynote speakers
   on various topics related to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or even MINIX:
   OpenBSD PF, NetBSD NPF, IPv6 support in FreeBSD, virtualization in the
   BSD domain, recent developments in OpenSSH, exploration of the recent
   FreeNAS, system management with ZFS, practical capabilities for UNIX
   known as Capsicum.

   It also had a dedicated track for the attendees of the FreeBSD
   developer summit, where one could learn more about what is happening
   currently in the Project. We had presentations on the new package
   management solution, Google Summer of Code 2011, a stacked
   cryptographic file system, conversion of documents of different
   formats, and status reports on the sparc64 port and the NAND flash
   support.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Developer Summit, Maarssen

   URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/201110DevSummit

   Contact: Gabor Pali <pgj at FreeBSD.org>

   We had 60 FreeBSD developers and invited guests attending the FreeBSD
   Developer Summit organized as part of EuroBSDcon 2011 in Maarssen, The
   Netherlands. This year EuroBSDcon organizers offered us their generous
   support in handling the details, like registrations, renting the venue,
   and providing food for keeping attendees happy.

   The Maarssen developer summit spanned over 3 days. It is generally a
   workshop-style event that has now adopted the layout of the developer
   summit organized successfully in Canada earlier in May. On the first
   day, there were working groups on various topics, e.g. Capsicum,
   toolchain issues, ports, and documentation. On the second day, there
   were various plenary discussions, like how FreeBSD relates to
   virtualization or how vendors relate to FreeBSD. Finally, on the third
   day, there were many interesting work-in-progress reports given in a
   dedicated developer summit track at the main conference.

   Photos and slides for the most of the talks are available on the home
   page of the summit.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Haskell Ports

   Contact: Gabor Janos PaLI <pgj at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Ashish SHUKLA <ashish at FreeBSD.org>

   We updated existing ports to their latest versions and hunted down a
   bug in the 9-CURRENT rtld which was causing GHC to crash
   intermittently. We also started work on Haskell Platform 2011.3.0.0
   (development version) in a separate git branch in our development
   repository.

Open tasks:

    1. Test GHC to work with clang/LLVM.
    2. Add an option to the GHC port to be able to build it with already
       installed GHC instead of requiring a separate GHC boostrap tarball.
    3. Update Haskell Platform (along with GHC) to 2011.4.0.0 as soon as
       it gets out.
    4. Add more ports to the Ports collection.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD/arm on Marvell Armada XP

   Contact: Grzegorz Bernacki <gjb at semihalf.com>
   Contact: Rafal Jaworowski <raj at semihalf.com>

   Marvell Armada XP is a complete system-on-chip solution based on the
   Sheeva embedded CPUs. These devices integrate up to four ARMv6/v7
   compliant Sheeva CPU cores with shared L2 cache.

   This work is extending FreeBSD/arm infrastructure towards support for
   recent ARM architecture variations along with a basic set of device
   drivers for integrated peripherals.

   The following code has been implemented since the last status report:
     * PCI-Express support
     * SMP support
     *
          + Created framework for ARM platform dependent code.
          + Initialization and starting of Application Processor.
          + Implementation of sending/handling IPI

   Next steps:
     * Finalize SMP support (TLB/cache operation broadcast, etc.)
     * L2 cache support
     * SATA driver
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD/powerpc on AppliedMicro APM86290

   Contact: Grzegorz Bernacki <gjb at semihalf.com>
   Contact: Rafal Jaworowski <raj at semihalf.com>

   The APM86290 system-on-chip device is a member of AppliedMicro's
   PACKETpro family of embedded processors.

   The chip includes two Power Architecture PPC465 processor cores, which
   are compliant with the Book-E specification of the architecture, and a
   number of integrated peripherals.

   This work is extending current Book-E support in FreeBSD towards PPC4xx
   processor variants along with device drivers for integrated
   peripherials.

   The following drivers have been created since the last report:
     * Interrupt controller
     * EHCI USB driver attachment
     * Queue Manager/Traffic Manager support
     * Initial support of Ethernet controller
     * GPIO, I2C

   Next steps:
     * Finalize Ethernet controller driver
     * L2 cache support
     __________________________________________________________________

GELI status update

   Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at FreeBSD.org>

   Selected GELI (disk encryption GEOM class) changes since 2010/Q3
   report:
     * Implementation of suspend/resume functionality.
     * New version subcommand to check GELI providers version.
     * New -V option for init subcommand, which allows to create GELI
       providers for older FreeBSD versions.
     * Significant aesni(4) performance improvements for AES-XTS
       algorithm.
     __________________________________________________________________

HAST (Highly Available Storage) status update

   Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at FreeBSD.org>

   Contact: Mikolaj Golub <trociny at FreeBSD.org>

   HAST is under active development. Some changes since Q1 report:
     * Async replication mode. Unfortunately it will not make it into
       9.0-RELEASE (pjd@).
     * IPv6 support (pjd@).
     * Activemap fix that significantly reduces number of metadata updates
       (trociny@).
     * Provider's write cache flush after metadata updates (pjd@).
     * Possibility to specify pidfile in configuration file (pjd@).
     * Many bug fixes and other improvments.
     __________________________________________________________________

KDE-FreeBSD

   URL: FreeBSD.kde.org
   URL:
   http://dot.kde.org/2011/06/29/platform-frameworks-kde-hackers-meet-swit
   zerland
   URL:
   http://blogs.FreeBSDish.org/avilla/2011/06/14/call-for-tests-kde-pim-4-
   6-0
   URL: http://FreeBSD.kde.org/area51.php

   Contact: KDE FreeBSD <kde-freebsd at kde.org>

   Alberto Villa and Raphael Kubo da Costa went to Randa, Switzerland, to
   attend, respectively, the KDE Multimedia/Kdenlive sprint and the
   Platform 11 sprint. The sprints afforded them the opportunity to form
   closer bonds with the upstream KDE community, to learn about the future
   of Qt and KDE and make sure FreeBSD's needs are taken into account. For
   more information see the article "From Platform to Frameworks -- KDE
   hackers meet in Switzerland" at dot.kde.org.

   The KDE on FreeBSD team have continued to improve the experience of KDE
   and Qt under FreeBSD. The latest round of improvements include:
     * Qt supports Clang as a compiler

   The team has also made many releases and upstreamed many fixes and
   patches. The latest round of releases include:
     * Qt: 4.7.3
     * KDE: 4.6.3; 4.6.4; 4.6.5
     * Amarok: 2.4.1
     * Digikam (and KIPI-plugins): 1.9.0

   Further testing is requested for KDE PIM 4.6.0 and Calligra 2.3.72
   before the ports are committed. To test the ports please visit Alberto
   Villa's call for test and area51.

   The team is always looking for more testers and porters so please visit
   us at kde-freebsd at kde.org and our homepage.

Open tasks:

    1. Testing KDE PIM 4.6.0
     __________________________________________________________________

Multibyte Encoding Support in Nvi

   URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/ZhihaoSoC2011
   URL: https://github.com/lichray/nvi2

   Contact: Zhihao Yuan <lichray at gmail.com>

   nvi-iconv keeps the behaviors and the license of nvi-1.79 in the base
   system and adopts the multibyte encoding support from nvi-1.8x.

   Status:
     * Known memory leaks, bugs are fixed. make buildworld clear, under
       WARNS=1 (the old one was WARNS=0).
     * UTF-16 is supported with less hacks.
     * The 'windowname' option now restores the xterm title through xprop.
     * The file encoding detection modified from file(1) is finished and
       considered stable. The detection is always on since nvi-iconv never
       change the actual encoding, and the detection failbacks to locale.
     * Pavel Timofeev provided a full Russian translation of the catalog.
       Thanks to him.
     * Now nvi-iconv is able to be compiled with widechar only and without
       iconv (inspired by a user on FreeBSDChina.org). In that case, it
       only supports your locale.

Open tasks:

    1. The wide character support in nvi's message (feedback over the last
       line) system.
    2. Collect more testing results and get code review.
     __________________________________________________________________

OpenAFS port

   URL: http://openafs.org
   URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/afs

   Contact: Benjamin Kaduk <kaduk at mit.edu>
   Contact: Derrick Brashear <shadow at gmail.com>

   AFS is a distributed network filesystem that originated from the Andrew
   Project at Carnegie-Mellon University. OpenAFS 1.6.0 has released, and
   is available in the FreeBSD Ports Collection; it is usable under light
   load, but heavy usage reveals some issues that remain unresolved. The
   OpenAFS kernel module is now built using the bsd.kmod.mk infrastructure
   on the git master branch; unfortunately this change required a minor
   change in the OS-independent Makefiles and could not be merged in time
   for 1.6.0. Some attention has been given to memory leaks, but only one
   small leak has been patched so far.

   There are several known outstanding issues that are being worked on,
   but detailed bug reports are welcome at port-freebsd at openafs.org.

Open tasks:

    1. Update VFS locking to allow the use of disk-based client caches as
       well as memory-based caches.
    2. Track down races and deadlocks that may appear under load.
    3. Eliminate a moderate memory leak from the kernel module.
    4. PAG (Process Authentication Group) support is not functional.
     __________________________________________________________________

pfSense

   URL: http://www.pfsense.org/

   Contact: Scott Ullrich <sullrich at gmail.com>
   Contact: Chris Buechler <cbuechler at gmail.com>

   pfSense 2.0 has been released to the world. This brings the past three
   years of new feature additions, with significant enhancements to almost
   every portion of the system. The changes and new features are
   summarized here. This is by far the most widely deployed release we
   have put out, thanks to the efforts of thousands of members of the
   community.

Open tasks:

    1. Work on 2.1 is underway with the biggest changes being IPV6 support
       and PBI packaged binaries for the package system.
     __________________________________________________________________

Portmaster

   URL: http://dougbarton.us/portmaster-proposal.html

   Contact: Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org>

   Portmaster offers several new features since the last quarterly update;
   some bug fixes for the package installation code, and various internal
   optimizations. The most exciting new feature is probably the ability to
   specify the -r option more than once for the same portmaster run. This
   greatly increases efficiency when several "branch" and/or "trunk" ports
   need updates at the same time, especially for package-building systems.

Open tasks:

    1. Splitting out the fetch code is still "on the list" of work to be
       done, but it was sidetracked by other priorities in the past
       months. I hope to complete it in the quarter to come.
    2. Another new feature in the works is support for a list of files for
       portmaster to preserve and restore during upgrades of a port.
     __________________________________________________________________

Ports Collection

   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
   URL:
   http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing-ports/
   URL: http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/index.html
   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/portmgr/index.html
   URL: http://blogs.FreeBSDish.org/portmgr/
   URL: http://www.twitter.com/freebsd_portmgr/
   URL: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=135441496471197

   Contact: Thomas Abthorpe <portmgr-secretary at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Port Management Team <portmgr at FreeBSD.org>

   The ports tree slowly moves up closer to the 23,000 mark. The PR count
   still remains at about 1000.

   In Q2 we added 4 new committers, but took in 6 commit bits for safe
   keeping.

   The Ports Management team have been running -exp runs on an ongoing
   basis, verifying how base system updates may affect the ports tree, as
   well as providing QA runs for major ports updates. Of note, -exp runs
   were done for:
     * Python update
     * Boost updates
     * Gtk3 updates
     * clang testing
     * pkgng testing
     * testing ruby19
     * setting the default fortran to lang/gcc46
     * setting apache22 as default
     * setting the default LDFLAGS in CONFIGURE_ENV

   Work continues to refine the new build master pointyhat-west. An
   upgrade to -current done in September has proven problematic. We have
   enlisted ISC and Josh Paetzel to try to determine a fix. In the
   meantime, the source will be downgraded to RELENG_9.

   The portsmon instance is being re-homed at Yahoo. Users should not see
   any changes. The new instance is currently visible at
   portsmonj.FreeBSD.org but will soon take on the portsmon.FreeBSD.org
   name. The team would like to express its appreciation to TDC A/S for
   the loan of the existing machine for several years.

   Work is underway to create a new QAT instance at NYI/NJ.

   portmgr also assisted in setting up a sparc64 machine for general
   develop access at Yahoo.

   Thanks to on-site work by Sean Bruno and Ben Haga, we once again have
   access to the powerpc build machine at ISC, and powerpc builds have
   been restarted. They also helped us get one more i386 machine back
   online.

   linimon is working on a set of scripts to more quickly produce
   pre-configured PXEboot images for package build nodes.

   The update of __FreeBSD_version in param.h to 1000000 proved very
   disruptive to the ports tree, triggering lots of bad assumption in code
   that interpreted it as FreeBSD 1. A great deal of work has gone into
   identifying the instances of broken code and fixing and upstreaming
   them. While this is taking place, one recommended workaround is to set
   your version to 999999.

Open tasks:

    1. Looking for help getting ports to build with clang.
    2. Looking for help fixing ports broken on CURRENT. (List needs
       updating, too)
    3. Looking for help with Tier-2 architectures. (List needs updating,
       too)
    4. Most ports PRs are assigned, we now need to focus on testing,
       committing and closing.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Foundation

   URL: http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/

   Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb at FreeBSDFoundation.org>

   The Foundation sponsored KyivBSD 2011 which was held in Kiev, Ukraine
   on September 24. We were represented at Ohio LinuxFest in Columbus,
   Ohio. And, we approved six travel grants for EuroBSDCon. Stop by and
   visit us at the FreeBSD booth during LISA '11, December 7-8, in Boston,
   MA.

   Three Foundation funded projects were completed during this period:
   implementing xlocale APIs to enable porting libc++ by David Chisnall,
   implementing DIFFUSE for FreeBSD by Swinburne University, and adding
   GEM, KMS, and DRI support for Intel drivers by Konstantin Belousov.

   We published our semi-annual newsletter. We purchased servers and other
   hardware for the FreeBSD co-location centers at Sentex and NYI.

   The work above, as well as many other tasks which we do for the FreeBSD
   Project, could not be done without donations. Please help us by making
   a donation or asking your company to make a donation. We would be happy
   to send marketing literature to you or your company. Find out how to
   make a donation at our donate page.

   Find out more up-to-date Foundation news by reading our blog and
   Facebook page.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD German Documentation Project Status Report

   URL: https://doc.bsdgroup.de

   Contact: Johann Kois <jkois at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Benedict Reuschling <bcr at FreeBSD.org>

   We managed to update the German version of the documentation just in
   time to get it included in the upcoming 9.0-RELEASE. The website
   translations were also kept in sync with the ones on FreeBSD.org.

   We tried to re-activate committers who did not contribute for some time
   but most of them are currently unable to free up enough time. We hope
   to gain fresh contributor blood as we are getting occasional reports
   about bugs and grammar in the German translation.

Open tasks:

    1. Submit grammar, spelling or other errors you find in the German
       documents and the website
    2. Translate more articles and other open handbook sections
       (especially the new chapter about the new FreeBSD installer).
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Greek Documentation Project

   URL: http://www.FreeBSDgr.org
   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/el/books/handbook

   Contact: Manolis Kiagias <manolis at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida at FreeBSD.org>

   After a few rather quiet months, the FreeBSD Greek Documentation
   Project is back on track, translating and improving the Handbook, FAQ
   and FreeBSD articles. The new bsdinstall chapter has been translated
   and is now present in the Handbook. Our experimental Handbook builds
   are also available at the project's hub. Three new status pages have
   been added:
     * Merge Status for the en_US tree shows whether the local en_US repo
       is in sync with the official CVS
     * Merge Status for the el_GR tree - as above but for the Greek tree
     * Pending Commits shows newer yet to be committed versions of the
       Greek docs

   For more information, please visit http://www.freebsdgr.org. Patches,
   fixes and contributions are always welcome.

Open tasks:

    1. Translate the remaining chapters of the Handbook to Greek.
    2. Complete the translation of the FreeBSD FAQ.
    3. Keep the currently translated docs in sync with the English
       versions.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Japanese Documentation Project

   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ja/
   URL: http://www.jp.FreeBSD.org/doc-jp/

   Contact: Hiroki Sato <hrs at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Ryusuke Suzuki <ryusuke at FreeBSD.org>

   The www/ja and doc/ja_JP.eucJP/books/handbook subtrees have constantly
   been updated since the last report.

   www/ja: During this period, many areas of outdated content in the
   www/ja subtree were updated to the latest versions in the English
   counterparts. The Japanese version of 8.2R release announcement was
   added and the upcoming 9.0R announcement will be translated in a timely
   manner.

   Handbook: The Japanese "kernelconfig" section finally caught up with
   the original English version. The next targets are "cutting-edge" and
   new installer section.

Open tasks:

    1. Further translation work for outdated documents in both
       doc/ja_JP.eucJP and www/ja.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team

   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/

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

   The Release Engineering Team has been coordinating the upcoming FreeBSD
   9.0-RELEASE. Thanks to work done by many of the developers. The
   release, though delayed, is taking the shape nicely. We have reached
   the stage of doing the second Release Candidate. At this time we expect
   to have one more Release Candidate, to be followed by the final release
   itself.
     __________________________________________________________________

The new CARP

   URL: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~glebius/newcarp/

   Contact: Gleb Smirnoff <glebius at FreeBSD.org>

   I am now working on significant rewrite of CARP in FreeBSD.

   The reason for this work is that the CARP protocol actually does not
   bring a new interface, but is a property of interface address.
   Rewriting it in this way helps to remove several hacks from incoming
   packet processing, simplifies some code, makes CARP addresses more sane
   from the viewpoint of routing daemons such as quagga/zebra and closes
   many CARP-related PRs in GNATS. It also brings support for a single
   redundant address on the subnet, the thing that is called "carpdev
   feature" in OpenBSD, long awaited in FreeBSD.

   For this moment I have a patch against head/ that compiles and works in
   my test environment that I am going to deploy soon on some of servers
   under my control.

   The patch has been reviewed by Bjoern Zeeb (bz@).

Open tasks:

    1. More testing requested!
    2. Implement arpbalance and ipbalance features. This requires a next
       step of rewriting, probably borrowing some ideas from OpenBSD.
    3. Update documentation.
     __________________________________________________________________

Tool for providing FreeBSD VM Images

   URL: https://github.com/yerenkow/freebsd-vm-image

   Contact: Alexander Yerenkow <yerenkow at gmail.com>

   A set of scripts to make building FreeBSD VM images easy.

   Providing a way to make regular build images of the latest version from
   SVN. Images currently can be copied with `dd` to USB flash (for testing
   on real hardware) and VirtualBox (.vdi).

Open tasks:

    1. Build images with ports-set from main port-tree
    2. Build images with ports-set from main port-tree plus overrides form
       area51 (like experimental images)
    3. Build images with special development branches included (like for
       testing drivers)
     __________________________________________________________________

VM layer for allocations larger than a page

   Contact: Alan Cox <alc at FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Davide Italiano <davide.italiano at gmail.com>

   The aim of this project is to create a new layer that sits between UMA
   and the virtual memory system managing chunks of kernel virtual memory
   on the order of 2 to 4 MB in size. At the end of the work, UMA
   page_alloc() would no longer call directly into the VM system. It would
   instead call into this new layer. Thus, uma_large_malloc() and
   uma_large_free() would no longer be immediately allocating and
   deallocating kernel virtual memory. This results in a gain in terms of
   performances (there is a relatively high cost in the approach adopted
   until now), and also in terms of reduction of fragmentation (the VM
   system uses a first-fit policy of allocation so there is room for
   improvements).
     __________________________________________________________________

ZFSguru

   URL: http://zfsguru.com
   URL: http://zfsguru.com

   Contact: Jason Edwards <guru at ZFSguru.com>

   ZFSguru is a newly designed Network Attached Storage operating system,
   much like FreeNAS. The difference is that ZFSguru focuses heavily on
   ZFS and user friendly operation, and uses a full FreeBSD distribution
   with no elements stripped down. This allows people new to FreeBSD and
   UNIX in general to access the power of ZFS, while still allowing more
   advanced users to tweak their NAS with additional functionality and use
   it as a normal FreeBSD distribution.

   Started a little over a year ago, the ZFSguru project is making good
   progress. It should already be one of the most user friendly
   distributions focused on ZFS, and sports some very unique features. The
   advanced ZFS benchmarking and convenient Root-on-ZFS installation are
   good examples. Priority is given to finishing the missing core
   functionality, and extending the number of available service addons
   which currently are limited to iSCSI-target and VirtualBox extensions.

Open tasks:

    1. Finish ZFS and network related functionality in the web-interface.
    2. Introduce new service addons, adding optional functionality to
       ZFSguru.
    3. Extend the documentation.
     __________________________________________________________________

ZRouter.org project -- a FreeBSD-based firmware for embedded devices

   URL: http://zrouter.org
   URL: http://lists.zrouter.org
   URL: http://zrouter.org/hg/zrouter/
   URL: http://zrouter.org/hg/FreeBSD/head/

   Contact: Aleksandr Rybalko <ray at FreeBSD.org>

   ZRouter.org is a young project that aims to produce FreeBSD-based
   firmware for small boxes such as SOHO router, APs, etc. At the present
   time ZRouter.org is able to build working firmware for:
     * D-Link DAP-1350
     * D-Link DIR-320
     * D-Link DIR-320-NRU
     * D-Link DIR-330
     * D-Link DIR-615-E4
     * D-Link DIR-620
     * D-Link DIR-632
     * D-Link DSA-3110-A1
     * D-Link DSR-1000N
     * NorthQ NQ-900
     * TPLink TL-WR941ND-v3_2
     * Ubiquiti RSPRO

   Currently we are working on most parts of the core system but we are
   also in the planning phase for implementing a simple web-based GUI
   which we hope will have taken form before the next FreeBSD status
   report.

   We still have many items not done, so devices in that list cannot be
   called "Production Ready" yet. But we work on that.

   It is easy to add new devices, because we have separate definition of
   board and SoC(System on Chip), so if you have "Asus WL-500g Premium v2"
   for example, you can copy D-Link/DIR-320 directory and tweak to work
   for your device. We already have basic support for:
     * Broadcom BCM5354
     * Broadcom BCM5836
     * Ralink RT3052F
     * Ralink RT3050F
     * Ralink RT5350F
     * Atheros AR7161
     * Atheros AR7242
     * Atheros AR7241
     * Atheros AR7240
     * Atheros AR9132
     * Intel ixp435
     * Cavium CN5010

   If you have ability and time, please join us at http://zrouter.org
   (Redmine iface and mailing lists)

Open tasks:

    1. Device drivers
    2. Web UI
    3. Control scripts
    4. Watchdog
    5. etc.
     __________________________________________________________________

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