FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Second Quarter 2019
Ed Maste
emaste at freebsd.org
Mon Aug 26 16:56:30 UTC 2019
On Sun, 25 Aug 2019 at 08:24, Edward Tomasz Napierała <trasz at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> FreeBSD Project Quarterly Status Report - 2nd Quarter 2019
Due to an oversight the FreeBSD Foundation's quartery status entry was
omitted from this report.
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:
We held our annual board meeting in Ottawa on May 14. Board Director
and Officer elections take place each year at this meeting. Justin
Gibbs was elected as the new President of the Board of Directors. The
new FreeBSD Foundation Board of Directors includes President and
Founder Justin T. Gibbs, Vice President Benedict Reuschling, Secretary
Philip Paeps, Treasurer Marshall Kirk McKusick, and Directors Hiroki
Sato, George Neville-Neil and Robert N. M. Watson. You can read more
about the elections at:
<https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/latest-news/freebsd-foundation-names-justin-gibbs-as-new-board-president/>.
After the elections, our management team gave updates to the board on
their respective areas. We then discussed the key areas of the Project
that need help, and where we can step in to fill those holes. We
reviewed and updated our 12 month goals, and identified projects we
should support. We then discussed conferences we are likely to attend,
and went over the latest on our fundraising efforts. We followed that
up with a discussion on how to get more users to contribute back to
the Project. While discussing how to increase the number of users and
contributors, we talked about methods for making for more training
material available.
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 Q2, Ed Maste and Deb
Goodkin met with a few commercial users in Germany. It’s not only
beneficial for the above, but it also helps us understand some of the
applications where FreeBSD is used. Because BSDCan brings in a high
number of commercial users, we have an excellent opportunity to have
similar discussions about their needs during the four-day FreeBSD
Summit and BSDCan.
Fundraising Efforts
Our work is 100% funded by your donations. We are grateful for the
generous donations from Intel, NetApp, VMware and Stormshield last
quarter. We are working hard to get more commercial users to give back
to help us continue our work supporting FreeBSD. More importantly,
we’d like to thank our individual donors, for making $10-$1,000
donations last quarter, for a total of $16,000!
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 improves the FreeBSD operating system by employing our
technical staff to maintain and improve critical kernel subsystems,
add features and functionality, and fix problems. The Foundation also
provides grants to fund individual projects.
There were 243 commits to the FreeBSD base system repository sponsored
by the Foundation during the quarter. These include improvements to
the tmpfs in-memory, MSDOS, and UFS filesystems, device driver and
hardware compatibility fixes, virtual memory (VM), tool chain,
documentation, and testing and continuous integration improvements.
We fixed a number of race conditions and security issues found by
Syzkaller, Google’s code-coverage-guided system call fuzzer.
Alan Somers’ work on updating FreeBSD’s support for FUSE (userspace
filesystems) continued during the quarter; the full details are
elsewhere in this quarterly report. At this point most of the work has
been committed to the project branch but some bug fixes and
improvements have been committed directly to the FreeBSD development
branch.
Edward Napierala’s Linuxulator project continued through the quarter,
resulting in a number of improvements to the Linuxulator and
linux-specific functionality such as linsysfs. This work is part of
the path to supporting the Linux strace debugging tool in order to
facilitate debugging failures of other Linux binaries under the
Linuxulator. Mateusz Guzik continued with scalability and performance
improvements during the quarter, and Bjoern Zeeb integrated the SDIO
stack (with details elsewhere in the quarterly report).
Progress was made on the online RAID-Z expansion project over the
quarter. Matt Ahrens posted an alpha preview of the feature for
further experimentation and review, and the FreeBSD Foundation will
make an alpha release image available for testing in the near future.
Foundation staff contributed to nine FreeBSD security advisories and
errata updates over the quarter, including CPU vulnerability
workarounds. Related work included improving Intel microcode update
loading.
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 second quarter of 2019, Foundation staff continued to
improve the project's CI infrastructure, worked with contributors to
fix the failing build and test cases, and worked with other teams in
the Project for their testing needs. We hosted a CI-focused working
group at BSDcan and continue to publish the CI weekly report at
freebsd-testing@ mailing list.
See the FreeBSD CI section of this report for more information.
Supporting FreeBSD Infrastructure
The Foundation provides hardware and support to improve the FreeBSD
infrastructure. Last quarter, we continued supporting FreeBSD hardware
located around the world.
FreeBSD Advocacy and Education
A large part of our efforts are dedicated to advocating for the
Project. This includes promoting work being done by others with
FreeBSD; producing advocacy literature to teach people about FreeBSD
and help make the path to starting using FreeBSD or contributing to
the Project easier; and attending and getting other FreeBSD
contributors to volunteer to run FreeBSD events, staff FreeBSD tables,
and give FreeBSD presentations.
The FreeBSD Foundation sponsors many conferences, events, and summits
around the globe. These events can be BSD-related, open source, or
technology events geared towards underrepresented groups. We support
the FreeBSD-focused events to help provide a venue for sharing
knowledge, to work together on projects, and to facilitate
collaboration between developers and commercial users. This all helps
provide a healthy ecosystem. We support the non-FreeBSD events to
promote and raise awareness of FreeBSD, to increase the use of FreeBSD
in different applications, and to recruit more contributors to the
Project.
Check out some of the advocacy and education work we did last quarter:
- Represented FreeBSD at LinuxFest Northwest In Bellingham, Washington
- Sponsored and helped organize the FreeBSD Developers Summit at
BSDCan, in Ottawa, Canada
- Sponsored and attended BSDCan 2019
- Set up registration and attended the Vienna FreeBSD Security
Hackathon in Vienna, Austria
- Represented FreeBSD at HKOSCON
- Attended the Berlin FreeBSD Developers Summit
- Presented at 2019 Comcast Labs Connect Open Source Conference
Sponsored, presented and represented FreeBSD at RootConf 2019 in
Bangalore, India
- Committed to attend OSCON, and All Things Open
- Committed to sponsor and help organize a Bay Area Developers Summit
- Provided FreeBSD advocacy material
- Provided travel grants to FreeBSD contributors to attend many of the
above events
We continued producing FreeBSD advocacy material to help people
promote FreeBSD around the world.
Read more about our conference adventures in the conference recaps and
trip reports in our monthly newsletters:
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/newsletter/
We help educate the world about FreeBSD by publishing the
professionally produced FreeBSD Journal. As we mentioned previously,
the FreeBSD Journal is now a free publication. Find out more and
access the latest issues at
https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/journal/.
You can find out more about events we attended and upcoming events at
https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/news-and-events/.
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!
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