FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - Second Quarter 2016
28 July, 2016 by bjk@FreeBSD.org | freebsd
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FreeBSD Project Quarterly Status Report - Second Quarter 2016
Now available: the 2016Q2 model of the FreeBSD Project Status Report!
This quarter brings several exciting improvements over previous models.
We have enhancements from different teams, new features like robust
mutexes and support for full disk encryption with GELI. You'll find
expanded graphics support, both at the chipset and window manager
levels, and ongoing development in many pending features.
Perhaps most exciting, under the hood you'll find a brand-new Core
Team.
Don't wait. Take FreeBSD for a spin today.
--Michael W. Lucas
__________________________________________________________________
Please submit status reports for the third quarter of 2016 by October 7.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Team Reports
* FreeBSD IRC Admin Team
* FreeBSD Issue Triage Team
* FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
* Ports Collection
* The FreeBSD Core Team
* The FreeBSD Foundation
Projects
* ASLR Interim State
* Ceph on FreeBSD
* EFI Refactoring and GELI Support
* Robust Mutexes
* The Graphics Stack on FreeBSD
Kernel
* ARM Allwinner SoC Support
* FreeBSD on Hyper-V and Azure
* VIMAGE Virtualized Network Stack Update
Architectures
* FreeBSD/arm64
Userland Programs
* Reproducible Builds in FreeBSD
* Updates to GDB
* Using lld, the LLVM Linker, to Link FreeBSD
Ports
* Bringing GitLab into the Ports Collection
* GNOME on FreeBSD
* Intel Networking Tools
* IPv6 Promotion Campaign
* KDE on FreeBSD
* Obsoleting Rails 3
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Team Reports
FreeBSD IRC Admin Team
Links
FreeBSD IRC Wiki
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/IRC/
Contact: IRC Admin Team <irc@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Kubilay Kocak <koobs@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Eitan Adler <eadler@FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD IRC Admin team manages the FreeBSD Project's IRC presence
on the freenode IRC network, looking after:
* Registrations and ongoing management of channels within the
official namespace (#freebsd*).
* Liaising with freenode staff.
* Allocating freebsd hostmask cloaks for users.
* General user support.
In order to facilitate a constructive and positive environment for all
members of the FreeBSD community, IRC Admin over the past 3-9 months
has established and consolidated a consistent baseline with respect to
the management of its channels on freenode. This report is a summary of
what has happened so far and things to come.
These activities were completed over the last few quarters:
* Registered FreeBSD Group Contacts (GC) with freenode staff. For
information on what this means, see the group registration page.
* Created a FreeBSD NickServ account to assign as primary
owner/founder of the #freebsd* namespace channels.
* The primary channels are owned/founded by a generic FreeBSD account
that is owned and managed by the FreeBSD Project.
* Created the Services::IRC component in Bugzilla for change requests
and issue reports.
* Obtained a report of all registered freenode channels matching the
#freebsd* namespace and assessed the list for current ownership and
activity status.
* Assigned freebsd/ user cloaks to users requesting them. For more
information, see IRC Cloaks.
* Obtained a report on all nicknames and accounts with existing
freebsd/* user cloaks.
* Liaised with freenode staff on upcoming changes to freebsd
channels.
The goals for the next few quarters are to:
* Complete the transfer of founder ownership for all #freebsd*
channels. Existing channel creators, some of whom are project
members and others who are not, will be contacted using known
contact information or contact information set in their registered
NickServ account, in order to initiate the transfer of the channel
to the FreeBSD Project. If the contact information of the existing
channel owner cannot be obtained, or if no response is received
after a suitable period of time has elapsed, IRC Admin will
complete the ownership transfer with freenode staff.
* Deregister defunct and inactive #freebsd* channels. Channels which
have no visible signs of activity based on last active time or
registered owner last seen, have been deprecated by alternative
channels, or have no other way of having ownership transferred will
be deregistered. For channels where a sunset period may be
suitable, a channel topic will be set, and optionally a forwarding
channel, informing users of the changes, including support and
contact information.
* Create and document baseline procedures and guidelines. These
include: Community and User Guidelines, a Code of Conduct, Operator
and Moderator Guidelines and Expectations, Abuse Reporting and
Dispute Resolution Guidelines, and procedures for delegation of
channel management.
* Standardize and re-create channel access lists. Existing access
lists and user permissions for all #freebsd* channels remain in
their states prior to FreeBSD Group Registration. Consolidation and
reassignment to the FreeBSD Project is needed. In order to ensure a
consistent user and community experience in official FreeBSD
channels going forward, access lists for all channels will be
created from the ground up. Users with existing access to channels
may, at the IRC Admin team's discretion, be provided with the
opportunity to re-apply for access subject to any conditions,
terms, or guidelines that may be appropriate.
* Determine the methods for informing project members and the
community of future changes to IRC services, procedures, and
policies.
* Determine methods to designate existing channel founders as channel
managers or similar.
* Update the channels list on the Wiki to distinguish official and
unofficial channels.
* Establish consistent modes, entry messages, and topics for all
channels.
Users are invited to /join #freebsd-irc on the freenode IRC network.
The IRC Admin team welcomes ideas, contructive criticism, and feedback
on how the FreeBSD Project can improve the service and experience it
provides to the community.
While the vast majority of the broader community interacts on the
freenode IRC network, the FreeBSD developer presence there needs to be
significantly improved.
There are many opportunities to be had by increasing the amount and
quality of interaction between FreeBSD users and developers, both in
terms of developers keeping their finger on the pulse of the community
and in encouraging and cultivating greater contributions to the Project
over the long term.
It is critical to have a strong developer presence amongst users, and
IRC Admin would like to call on all developers to join the FreeBSD
freenode channels to help support that presence. We are the FreeBSD
giants on whose shoulders the future contributors stand. It is
important to be there, in force.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Issue Triage Team
Contact: Vladimir Krstulja <vlad-fbsd@acheronmedia.com>
Contact: Kubilay Kocak <koobs@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Bugmeister <bugmeister@FreeBSD.org>
Since the Triage Team was introduced in the October-December 2015
report, it has been working on the following three major aspects of
issue triage:
* Recruiting and educating more users to assist in issue triage.
* Identifying problem areas, especially from the fresh eyes
perspective, revealing issues not immediately obvious to
contributors with experience.
* Proposing changes to improve the issue triage process.
Our efforts have almost exclusively focused on issues in the "Ports &
Packages" component as that is the easiest starting point. Other
categories like "Base System" require more knowledge and experience
with problem content and workflow.
During this time, Rodrigo was inactive due to lack of available time,
and Vladimir was unable to commit enough time during the first quarter
of the year, but provided active contribution during the second. It
became obvious that the Issue Triage Team must concentrate on
additional recruitment in the coming quarter.
In the last two quarters, several problems were identified and the
formulated solutions will be published on our upcoming Wiki page. A
summary of those issues is given here:
1. Issue triage, defined as "ensure that an issue is summarized,
classified, and assigned to appropriate people", is too time
consuming. Bugzilla automation through auto-assign helps, but is
insufficient. If the triage process is extended to include "track
the issue through its entire life to resolution", the time and
effort required grows exponentially. Fortunately, there are many
things the community can do, with minimum effort, that help
greatly. Part of the recruitment and education process is educating
users on how to properly treat their own issues and issues they
interact with, in order to maximize the efficiency of issue
tracking and problem resolution.
2. Various timeouts are inadequate. For example, the maintainer
timeout is too long and does not differentiate between classes of
issues, such as a non-security and a security timeout. Other
timeouts are not covered, such as assignee timeouts, when an issue
has been assigned with no follow-up activity. Another example is a
timeout where additional information was requested but never
provided. We will be recommending several changes and documenting
these in our Wiki.
3. Partially as a consequence of inadequate timeouts and inadequate
ability to efficiently track issues through their entire lifecycle,
a great number of issues are open for too long. We have identified
several classes of those issues and will document the solutions to
each in the near future.
4. Bugzilla is not perfect and at times it can hinder the ability to
properly track issues clearly and accurately, in order to resolve
them quickly. However, changing bug tracking software is a
tremendous effort, so we will instead recommend technical and
workflow improvements in order to improve the user experience as
much as possible. For example, we identified additional saved
searches to help track and quickly find issue categories and, more
importantly, their states. Another example is ensuring that various
flags and keywords are unambiguous and well understood. For
instance, "patch" and "patch-ready" can often be misunderstood or
misapplied.
5. Issue statistics are lacking, and for the next quarter we intend to
change that. Statistics help to provide insight into potential
bottlenecks and inform the prioritization of improvements to the
issue tracker and workflows.
Open tasks:
1. Recruit more suitable triagers into the team, both committers and
community members.
2. Gather and present some interesting statistics for the next report.
3. Set up the Wiki page with identified problems and recommended
guidelines and policies.
4. Find common use patterns and add more saved searches to Bugzilla.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
Links
FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE schedule
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/10.3R/schedule.html
FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE schedule
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/11.0R/schedule.html
FreeBSD Development Snapshots
URL: http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/
Contact: FreeBSD Release Engineering Team <re@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 completed the 10.3-RELEASE cycle
late April, led by Marius Strobl. The release was one week behind the
original schedule, to accommodate for a few last-minute critical issues
that were essential to fix in the final release.
The FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE cycle started late May, one month behind the
original schedule. The schedule slip was primarily to accommodate
efforts for packaging the FreeBSD base system with the pkg(8) utility.
However, as work on this progressed, it became apparent that there were
too many outstanding issues. As a result, packaged base will be a
"beta" feature for 11.0-RELEASE, with the goal of promoting it to a
first-class feature in 11.1-RELEASE. It is expected that provisions
will be made to ensure a seamless transition from older supported
releases.
Despite the fact that packaged base is not going to be a prime feature
for FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE, the Release Engineering Team would like to
thank everyone who tested, provided patches, provided ideas and
feedback, and in some cases, shot themselves in the foot due to bugs.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
Ports Collection
Links
FreeBSD Ports Website
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
How to Contribute
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing/ports-contributing.html
Ports Monitoring Website
URL: http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/index.html
Ports Management Team Website
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/portmgr/index.html
Ports Management Teamon Twitter
URL: https://twitter.com/freebsd_portmgr/
Ports Management Team on Facebook
URL: https://www.facebook.com/portmgr
Ports Management Team on Google+
URL: https://plus.google.com/communities/108335846196454338383
Contact: René Ladan <portmgr-secretary@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: FreeBSD Ports Management Team <portmgr@FreeBSD.org>
The 2016Q3 branch of the Ports Tree currently contains over 26,100
ports, with the PR count around 2,000. Of those, around 425 are
unassigned. The activity dropped somewhat, with 5,300 commits made by
125 active committers. Almost 1,760 PRs were closed in the last
quarter.
In the last quarter, we added two new committers: Ben Woods (woodsb02)
and Torsten Zühlsdorff (tz). No commit bits were taken in for safe
keeping.
On the management side, mat took over the role of cluster admin liaison
from erwin, who decided to step down from portmgr. rene took over the
role of port manager secretary from culot. No other changes were made.
A lot of work was done on modernizing the infrastructure of the Ports
Tree, by introducing 6 new USES knobs, one new keyword, and splitting
out the larger targets of bsd.port.mk into separate scripts. There were
a total of 42 exp-runs to validate these and other infrastructure
changes and package updates. Furthermore, checks were added to the
quality assurance phase of Poudriere to check for missing indirect
dependencies, and advancements were made for reproducable package
builds.
Some noticeable package updates are: Firefox 47.0.1, Firefox ESR
45.2.0, Thunderbird 45.1.1, Chromium 51.0.2704.106, Ruby 2.2.5, Ruby
Gems 2.6.2, pkg 1.8.6, gmake 4.2.1, KDE 4.14.10, Python 2.7.12, libc++
3.8.0, and binutils 2.26.
Behind the scenes, antoine made sure that the exp-run- and package
builders were kept up-to-date. bdrewery worked on further automating
and hardening the package building infrastructure.
During BSDCan, mat worked on various items, including updating the
Porter's Handbook, and portmgr held a meeting to discuss various items.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Core Team
Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <core@FreeBSD.org>
The highlight of Core's second quarter has been the regular biennial
election of a new Core team. Core would like to thank Dag-Erling
Smøgrav and Glen Barber for running the vote. Despite an initially slow
uptake on nominations, fourteen candidates eventually stood, including
four incumbent members of core. The ninth FreeBSD Core team will be:
* John Baldwin
* Baptiste Daroussin
* Allan Jude
* Ed Maste
* Kris Moore
* George V. Neville-Neil
* Benedict Reuschling
* Benno Rice
* Hiroki Sato
The new Core Team would like to thank the departing members for their
many years of service. Members stepping down are:
* Gavin Atkinson
* Gleb Smirnoff
* David Chisnall
* Robert Watson
* Peter Wemm
The second most notable achievement this quarter was the successful
conclusion of an issue that had been on Core's agenda for many years.
With the creation of planet.FreeBSD.org, the FreeBSD Project finally
has an official blog aggregation service.
Core spent a significant amount of time reviewing licensing and
ensuring that the FreeBSD source remains unencumbered by onerous
license terms. This quarter involved approving Adrian Chadd's plan to
import GPLv2 licensed code, allowing bwn(4) to be built as a loadable
module with support for 802.11n networking. This required confirmation
that the license terms on the latest dummynet AQM patches were
acceptable and that its variant on the BSD 2-clause license is suitable
for use in the FreeBSD base system.
Core applied for, and received, a project-wide license for the use of
the JetBrains static analysis tool suite, at the behest of Mathieu
Previot.
Another of Core's important functions is to ensure good relations
amongst developers. To that end, members of Core provided oversight
over the backing-out of disputed blacklistd-related patches to OpenSSH,
and acted to smooth over ruffled tempers.
This quarter saw the usual quota of gentle reminders to avoid
intemperate language and other counter-productive behavior. Core had to
take immediate action about death threats appearing on some of the
mailing lists. The culprit was immediately banned from the mailing
lists and reported to their email service provider. That person will be
similarly removed should they be identified as having rejoined under a
different alias.
Other activities included:
* Working with university authorities in an attempt to get
documentation certifying that a prospective GSoC student was
legally allowed to work on FreeBSD code as a foreigner enrolled at
a USA university. This issue was eventually solved by the student
returning home for the summer and working from there.
* Issuing guidance on policy around forced commits, or trivial
changes used as a means of correcting a commit message. In these
cases, the correct approach is to revert the commit and re-commit
with the correct message. This ensures the continuing usefulness of
svn blame.
* Approving a delay to the planned introduction of packaged base and
confirming that this did not require any change to the new support
policies to be introduced with 11.0-RELEASE.
During this quarter, four new commit bits were awarded and none were
taken in. Please welcome Emmanuel Vadot, Landon Fuller, Mike Karels,
and Eric Badger as new src committers. Yes, that is the same Mike
Karels who was once a member of the CSRG at Berkeley and co-author of
The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System.
__________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Foundation
Links
FreeBSD Foundation Website
URL: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/
Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb@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 development projects, conferences and developer
summits, and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers. The
Foundation purchases hardware to improve and maintain FreeBSD
infrastructure and publishes FreeBSD white papers and marketing
material to promote, educate, and advocate for the FreeBSD Project. The
Foundation also 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:
Fundraising Efforts
Our work is 100% funded by your donations. Our spending budget for 2016
is $1,250,000 and we've raised $265,000 so far. Our Q1-Q2 financial
reports will be posted by August 1. As you can see, we need your
donations to continue supporting FreeBSD at our current level. Please
consider making a donation here: freebsdfoundation.org/donate.
OS Improvements
The Foundation improves FreeBSD by funding software development
projects approved through our proposal submission process, and our
internal software developer staff members. Two Foundation-funded
projects continued last quarter; one project is to improve the
stability of the vnet network stack virtualization infrastructure, and
the second is phase two of the FreeBSD/arm64 port project.
Foundation staff members were responsible for many changes over the
quarter. Kostik Belousov accomplished the following work last quarter:
implemented robust mutexes support, as part of ongoing efforts to bring
our threading library into POSIX compliance and feature completeness;
documented kernel interfaces used by the threading library and produced
almost 30 pages of technical text; completed and committed the
elimination of the pvh_global_lock from the amd64 pmap, which removed a
hot contested lock; and fixed bugs that help keep FreeBSD stable and
reliable.
Edward Napierala accomplished the following work last quarter: added
filesystem thoughput limits to RCTL; committed iSER initiator support;
added support for rerooting into NFS; and added iscsictl -e, which
makes it possible to enable and disable iSCSI sessions.
Ed Maste, our Project Development Director, accomplished the following
work last quarter: investigated the state of reproducible builds in the
ports tree, with some work in progress to address issues; updated the
ELF Tool Chain tools with bug fixes and improved handling of malformed
input; investigated using lld, the linker from the LLVM family, to link
the FreeBSD base system; and reported on and tested patches for issues
found. He also managed the arm64 development project and investigated
and fixed a number of bugs. Lastly, he imported LLVM's libunwind and
prepared it for use in FreeBSD 11, and investigated and reviewed the
blacklistd proposal and patches.
George Neville-Neil continued hosting the bi-weekly Transport
conference call (notes at https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/TransportProtocols)
and the bi-weekly DTrace conference call (notes at
https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/DTrace.
Ed continued facilitating the bi-weekly graphics call to coordinate
efforts on the i915 driver and other graphics stack work.
Several of these projects are described elsewhere in this quarterly
report.
Release Engineering
Foundation employee and release engineer Glen Barber worked closely
with Marius Strobl on the 10.3-RELEASE, which was completed in April.
Glen also merged the release-pkg branch to 11-CURRENT, though this will
be a beta feature for 11.0-RELEASE. Lastly, with the Release
Engineering Team, he started the 11.0-RELEASE cycle. Find out more in
the Release Engineering Team status entry in this report.
"Getting Started with FreeBSD" Project
We hired a summer intern, with no FreeBSD, Linux, or any command line
operating system experience, to figure out on his own how to install
and use FreeBSD. He is writing easy-to-follow how-to guides to help
make the new user experience straightforward and positive. He's also
been submitting bug reports and problems through the appropriate
channels. You can check out his first how-to guide at
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/freebsd/how-to-guides/.
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.
Some of the work we did last quarter to support FreeBSD advocacy
included: Creating a FreeBSD page on our website to promote FreeBSD
derivative projects and showcase FreeBSD users
(https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/freebsd/), and promoting FreeBSD
research by creating a Research page on our site and conference handout
(https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/what-we-do/research/).
We created guidelines and a repository for using the Project and
Foundation logos
(https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/about/brand-assets/).
To help showcase FreeBSD contributors, we published two new Faces of
FreeBSD stories, about Michael Lucas
(https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/faces-of-freebsd-2016-michael-lucas/) and Kris Moore
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/faces-of-freebsd-2016-kris-moore/).
We published the March/April and May/June issues of the FreeBSD Journal
and participated in editorial board work. Kirk McKusick wrote a feature
article on the Fast Filesystem for the March/April issue, and other
team members helped review and edit Journal articles.
We also published monthly newsletters to highlight work being done to
support FreeBSD, tell you about upcoming events, and provide other
information to keep you in the loop on what we're doing to support the
FreeBSD Project and community.
George Neville-Neil and Robert Watson continued teaching and developing
open source FreeBSD teaching materials at teachbsd.org.
We launched the first Hosting Partner Spotlight to showcase the
Project's partnership with NYI
(https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/hosting-partner-spotlight-nyi-at-the-heart-of-freebsd/)
We worked with Microsoft to get FreeBSD onto Azure
(https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/more-from-the-freebsd-foundation-on-the-projects-partnership-with-microsoft/).
The Foundation was quoted in Cavium's Thunder X2 press release
(http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cavium-announces-thunderx2-300276536.html
George worked with ARM to coordinate the upcoming ARM Partner Meeting
in Cambridge.
Conferences and Events
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 about FreeBSD, to increase the use of
FreeBSD in different applications, and to recruit more contributors to
the Project.
In April, Benedict Reuschling helped organize and run a hackathon in
Essen April 22-24. He then attended the Open Source Datacenter
conference in Berlin, with Allan Jude, to give a talk about
"Interesting things you can do with ZFS," which highlighted OpenZFS
features and how well they work on FreeBSD
(https://www.netways.de/index.php?id445#c44065).
We promoted FreeBSD at:
* Flourish -- April 1-2 in Chicago (http://flourishconf.com/2016/)
* LFNW -- April 23-24 in Bellingham WA
(https://www.linuxfestnorthwest.org/2016).
* OSCON -- May 18-19 in Austin, TX
(http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon/open-source-us
Deb Goodkin and Dru Lavigne attended the Community Leadership Summit in
Austin: May 14, 15 (http://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/schedule/)
Deb promoted FreeBSD at USENIX ATC June 22-23 in Denver, CO.
Our team attended BSDCan and the Ottawa Developer Summit. We held our
annual board meeting to vote on officers, board members, and work on
our strategic planning. Most of us attended the developer/vendor
summits. Kirk McKusick presented "A Brief History of the BSD Fast
Filesystem" (http://www.bsdcan.org/2016/schedule/events/654.en.html).
Ed Maste gave a presentation on "Reproducible Builds in FreeBSD".
George helped run the vendor summit.
We sponsored five FreeBSD contributors to attend BSDCan.
Legal/FreeBSD IP
The Foundation owns the FreeBSD trademarks, and it is our
responsibility to protect them. We continued to review requests and
grant permission to use the trademarks.
FreeBSD Community Engagement
We launched our first Community Survey. The purpose was to get input
from the community on why they use FreeBSD, what they'd like to see the
Foundation support, and other input to help us determine our direction
and how we should support the Project.
Anne Dickison, our Marketing Director, has been overseeing the efforts
to rewrite the Project's Code of Conduct to help make this a safe,
inclusive, and welcoming community.
Other Stuff We Did
Last quarter we purchased a server to reside at NYI to improve the
continuous integration tools within the Project.
We had two face-to-face board meetings last quarter to work on
strategic planning and identify areas in the project we should support.
We also held our first ever staff retreat in Boulder, Colorado to give
our small team an opportunity to work together in person.
We hired Sabine Percarpio as our Administration Manager. She is helping
us manage donations, accounting, travel grant applications, handle
questions that come in to the Foundation, and run our organization
smoothly.
__________________________________________________________________
Projects
ASLR Interim State
Links
Patch Home
URL: http://kib.kiev.ua/kib/aslr
Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib@FreeBSD.org>
This is an interim report on the technical state of my work towards
ASLR support in the FreeBSD base system.
The proccontrol(1) utility was written to manage and query ASLR
enforcement on a per-process basis. It is required for analyzing ASLR
failures in specific programs. This utility leverages the procctl(2)
interface which was added to the previous version of the patch, with
some bug fixes.
With r300792, ASLR settings are reset to system-wide defaults whenever
a setuid binary is executed.
The command's syntax is:
proccontrol -m (trace|aslr) [-q] [-s (enable|disable)] [-p pid |
command]
with possible arguments
-m (specifies the trace mode to control debugger attachments)
-q (queries the state of the specified mode for the process with the
PID specified by the -p option)
-s (toggles the feature on or off for the given process or itself)
If a command is specified, it inherits the applied settings from
proccontrol. For instance, to start a build of a program with ASLR
disabled, use proccontrol -m aslr -s disable make.
A ports exp-run was done with ASLR tuned up to the most aggressive
settings. The results can be found in PR 208580.
Case study: Lisp
SBCL is an interesting case which illustrates several points. It is
much smaller than JDK, and its build system is easier to work with. The
code provides a very non C-like language runtime which utilizes a lot
of corner cases and makes non-standard uses of the VM system, at least
from the point of view of a typical C programmer.
SBCL compiles Lisp forms into the machine native code and manages its
own arena for objects. The precompiled Lisp runtime is mapped from a
core file. SBCL relies on the operating system's C runtime for the
initial load of Lisp, and needs a functional libc to issue many system
calls, including syscalls, as well as the dynamic loader. The end
result is that there are unfixed mmap(2) calls during both startup and
runtime, interfering with other MAP_FIXED mmaps. The loading of the
core file and the private arenas are hard-coded to exist at fixed
addresses.
This happens to work on the default address map, which is not changed
often, so the SBCL choices of the base addresses evolved to work. But
any significant distortion of the standard map results in SBCL
mmap(MAP_FIXED) requests attempting to override memory from other
allocators.
FreeBSD uses the MAP_EXCL flag to mmap(2), which must be used in the
form MAP_FIXED|MAP_EXCL to cause mmap(2) to fail if the requested range
is already used. I tried to force MAP_FIXED requests from SBCL to
implicitly set MAP_EXCL, but this did not go well, since SBCL sometimes
pre-allocates regions for later use with MAP_FIXED. So, MAP_EXCL
mappings failed, dumping the process into ldb.
On Linux, if it is detected that the kernel is in AS-randomization
mode, the initial SBCL runtime sets its personality to non-random and
re-execs. This might be a solution for FreeBSD as well, after the ASLR
patch is committed, so that the procctl(2) knob is officially
available.
SBCL still has issues on Linux, even with re-exec, when more aggressive
randomization from the PaX patch is applied, as seen in bug 1523213.
Case study: Emacs
The Emacs build procedure involves loading the temacs image with the
compiled Emacs Lisp files and then dumping its memory to create an
image with the content preloaded, in order to reduce startup time.
Recent Emacs sources seem to generally avoid MAP_FIXED, except in some
situations. When Emacs does use the flag, it carefully checks that the
selected region is not busy. In fact, Emacs would benefit from using
MAP_EXCL.
I tried several runs of building Emacs and running the dumped binary,
but was not able to reproduce any issues. It seems that the code
improved enough to tolerate ASLR both in Linux and NetBSD without
turning it off.
In my opinion, it is not reasonable to fight the issues in the kernel
as most of it is not fixable from the kernel side. The procctl(2)
interface and proccontrol(1) utilities provide an override when needed,
but are not automated.
Conclusions
The set of ports which cannot be built with ASLR turned on should be
limited but fluid. However, exp-runs may not reliably uncover all
problems due to randomization, as seen in the Emacs example. In the
route to enable ASLR by default (with non-aggressive settings), the
ports framework should provide an option like ASLR_UNSAFE=yes which
spawns proccontrol -m aslr -s disable make for the build stages of the
unsafe port. Users would still need to be aware of proccontrol(1) in
order to run the resulting binary or wrapper scripts provided to do so.
A recommended approach is a flag in the ELF binary to mark it as not
compatible with non-standard AS layouts. This frees users from having
to use proccontrol(1), but still requires patching the application's
build process and upstreaming the changes. This approach is also useful
outside the context of ASLR. However, that mechanism is not yet ready,
and developing it is a larger work than ASLR itself.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
Ceph on FreeBSD
Links
Ceph Main Site
URL: http://ceph.com
Main Repository
URL: https://github.com/ceph/ceph
My Fork
URL: https://github.com/wjwithagen/ceph
Pull Request With FreeBSD-Specific Changes to Ceph
URL: https://github.com/ceph/ceph/pull/7573
Contact: Willem Jan Withagen <wjw@digiware.nl>
Ceph is a distributed object store and filesystem designed to provide
excellent performance, reliability, and scalability. It provides the
following features:
1. Object Storage: Ceph provides seamless access to objects using
native language bindings or radosgw, a REST interface that is
compatible with applications written for S3 and Swift.
2. Block Storage: Ceph's RADOS Block Device (RBD) provides access to
block device images that are striped and replicated across the
entire storage cluster.
3. File System: Ceph provides a POSIX-compliant network filesystem
that aims for high performance, large data storage, and maximum
compatibility with legacy applications.
I started looking into Ceph because using HAST with CARP and ggate did
not meet my requirements. My primary goal with Ceph is to run a storage
cluster of ZFS storage nodes where the clients run bhyve on RBD disks
stored in Ceph.
The FreeBSD build process can build most of the tools in Ceph. However,
the RBD-dependent items do not work, since FreeBSD does not yet provide
RBD support.
Since the last quarterly report, the following progress was made:
1. Switching to using CMake from Automake results in a much cleaner
development environment and better test output. The changes can be
found in the wip-wjw-freebsd-cmake branch.
2. The throttling code has been overhauled to prevent live locks.
These mainly occur on FreeBSD but also manifest on Linux.
3. A few more tests were fixed. On one occasion, I was able to
complete the full test suite without errors.
11-CURRENT is used to compile and build-test Ceph. The Clang toolset
needs to be at least version 3.7, as the Clang 3.4 available on
stable/10 does not have all of the capabilities required to compile
everything.
This setup will get things running for FreeBSD:
* Install bash and link to it in /bin (requires root privileges):
sudo pkg install bash
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/bash /bin/bash
* Build Ceph:
git clone https://github.com/wjwithagen/ceph.git
cd ceph
git checkout wip-wjw-freebsd-tests
./do_freebsd-cmake.sh --deps
The --deps argument is only needed for the initial installation, to
pull in the necessary dependencies; it should be omitted for subsequent
builds.
CMake is now used to build Ceph on FreeBSD; the old method using
automake is no longer used.
Parts Not Yet Included:
* RBD: Rados Block Devices are currently implemented in the Linux
kernel, but there used to be a userspace implementation. It is
possible that ggated could be used as a template, since it provides
some of the same functionality and it has a userspace counterpart.
* BlueStore: FreeBSD and Linux have a different AIO API which needs
to be bridged. There has been some discussion about aio_cancel not
working for all device types in FreeBSD.
* CephFS: Cython tries to access an internal field in struct dirent,
which fails to compile.
* Tests that verify the correct functionality of these features are
also excluded from the test suite.
Tests Not Yet Included:
* ceph-detect-init/run-tox.sh: the current implementation does not
know anything about FreeBSD's rc system.
* Tests that make use of nosetests do not really work since nosetests
is not in /usr/bin, and calling /usr/bin/env nosetests does not
work on FreeBSD.
* test/pybind/test_ceph_argparse.py
* test/pybind/test_ceph_daemon.py
Open tasks:
1. The current and foremost task is to get the test suite to complete
without errors.
2. Build an automated test platform that will build ceph/master on
FreeBSD and report the results back to the Ceph developers. This
will increase the maintainability of the FreeBSD side of things, as
developers are signaled that they are using Linux-isms that will
not compile or run on FreeBSD. Ceph has several projects that
support this: Jenkins, teuthology, and palpito. But even a while {
compile } loop that reports the build data on a static webpage is a
good start.
3. Run integration tests to see if the FreeBSD daemons will work with
a Linux Ceph platform.
4. Get the currently excluded Python tests to work.
5. Compile and test the userspace RBD (Rados Block Device).
6. Investigate if an in-kernel RBD device could be developed akin to
ggate.
7. Investigate the keystore which currently prevents the building of
Cephfs and some other parts.
8. Integrate the FreeBSD /etc/rc.d init scripts in the Ceph stack for
testing and for running Ceph on production machines.
__________________________________________________________________
EFI Refactoring and GELI Support
Links
GELI Support Branch
URL: https://github.com/emc2/freebsd/tree/geli_efi
EFI Refactoring Branch
URL: https://github.com/emc2/freebsd/tree/efize
Contact: Eric McCorkle <eric@metricspace.net>
The EFI bootloader has undergone considerable refactoring to make more
use of the EFI API. The filesystem code in boot1 has been eliminated,
and a single codebase for filesystems now serves both boot1 and loader.
This codebase is organized around the EFI driver model and it should be
possible to export any filesystem implementation as a standalone EFI
driver without too much effort.
Both boot1 and loader have been refactored to utilize the
EFI_SIMPLE_FILE_SYSTEM interface. In the loader, this is accomplished
with a dummy filesystem driver that is just a translation layer between
the loader filesystem interface and EFI_SIMPLE_FILE_SYSTEM. A reverse
translation layer allows the existing filesystem drivers to function as
EFI drivers.
The EFI refactoring by itself exists in a branch on github.
Additionally, GELI support has been added using the EFI refactoring.
This allows booting from a GELI-encrypted filesystem. Note that the EFI
system partition, which contains boot1, must be a plaintext msdosfs
partition. This patch adds an intake buffer to the crypto framework,
which allows injection of keys directly into a loaded kernel, without
the need to pass them through arguments or environment variables. This
patch only uses the intake buffer for EFI GELI support, as legacy BIOS
GELI support still uses environment variables.
EFI GELI support depends on the efize branch.
These patches have been tested and used and should be able to handle
use by early adopters. Note that the LOADER_PATH variable has been
changed to /boot/loader.tst, to facilitate safe testing.
IMPORTANT:
As this is an encrypted filesystem patch, an error can potentially
leave data inaccessible. It is strongly recommended to use the
following procedure for testing:
1. Back up your data!
2. Do not forget to back up your data!
3. Install an EFI shell on the EFI System Partition (ESP).
4. Install the patched boot1 on the ESP to something like
/boot/efi/BOOTX64.TST.
5. Install the patched loader to /boot/loader.tst on your machine.
6. Create a GELI partition outside of the normal boot partition.
7. First, try booting /boot/efi/BOOTX64.TST and make sure it properly
handles the encrypted partition.
8. Copy a boot environment, including the patched loader, to the
encrypted partition.
9. Use the loader prompt to load a kernel from the encrypted
partition.
10. Try switching over to an encrypted main partition once everything
else is working.
Open tasks:
1. Testing is needed.
2. The code will need review, and some style(9) normalization must
occur before it goes into FreeBSD.
__________________________________________________________________
Robust Mutexes
Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste@FreeBSD.org>
Now that process-shared locks are implemented for our POSIX threads
implementation, libthr, the only major feature lacking for POSIX
compliance is robust mutexes. Robust mutexes allow applications to
detect, and theoretically recover from, crashes which occur while
modifying the shared state. The supported model is to protect shared
state by a pthread_mutex, and the crash is detected as thread
termination while owning the mutex. A thread might terminate alone, or
it could be killed due to the termination of the containing process. As
such, the robust attribute is applicable to both process-private and
-shared mutexes.
An application must be specifically modified to handle and recover from
failures. The pthread_mutex_lock() function may return a new error
EOWNERDEAD, which indicates that the previous owner of the lock
terminated while still owning the lock. Despite returning this non-zero
value, the lock is granted to the caller. In the simplest form, an
application may detect the error and refuse to operate until the
persistent shared data is recovered, such as by manual
reinitialization. More sophisticated applications could try to
automatically recover from the condition, in which case
pthread_mutex_consistent(3) must be called on the lock before unlocking
it. However, such recovery can be considered to be very hard. Still,
even the detection of inconsistent shared state is useful, since it
avoids further corruption and random faults of the affected
application.
It is curious but not unexpected that this interface is not used
widely. The only real-life application which utilizes it is Samba.
Using Samba with an updated FreeBSD base uncovered minor bugs both in
the FreeBSD robust mutex implementation, and in Samba itself.
It is believed that libthr in FreeBSD 11 is POSIX-compliant for major
features. Further work is planned to look at inlining the lock
structures to remove overhead and improve the performance of the
library.
Most of the implementation of the robustness feature consisted of
making small changes in the lock and unlock paths, both in libthr and
in kern_umtx.c. This literally required reading all of the code dealing
with mutexes and condition variables, which was something I wanted to
help future developers with. In the end, with the help of Ed Maste, man
pages for umtx(2) and all thr*(2) syscalls were written and added to
the base system's documentation set.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Use the implementation in real-word applications and report issues.
__________________________________________________________________
The Graphics Stack on FreeBSD
Links
GitHub Repository
URL: https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics
Graphics Stack Roadmap and Supported Hardware Matrix
URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/Graphics
Ports Development Repository
URL: https://github.com/FreeBSD/freebsd-ports-graphics
DRM 4.6 Development Repository
URL: https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/tree/drm-next-4.6
GSoC 2016: Link /dev Entries to Sysctl Nodes
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas#Devices_management:_link_.2Fdev_entries_to_sysctl_nodes
GSoC 2016: Redesign libdevq
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SummerOfCode2016/RethinkLibdevq
Graphics Team Blog
URL: http://planet.FreeBSD.org/graphics
Contact: FreeBSD Graphics team <freebsd-x11@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Matthew Macy <mmacy@nextbsd.org>
In the Ports tree, Mesa was updated to 11.2.2. The next major release,
12.0.0 release candidate 4, is ready for testing in our development
tree.
The GSoC project about being able to connect a /dev entry to sysctl
nodes is making progress. After some fruitful discussons on the
freebsd-arch@ mailing-list, Kiloreux finished the design and is now
implementing the solution. The GSoC project on libdevq was abandoned.
All Intel GPUs up to and including the unreleased Kaby Lake are
supported. The xf86-video-intel driver will be updated soon. Updating
this driver requires updating Xorg, which in turn is blocked on Nvidia
updates.
Several problems remain to be solved:
* There are instances of visual artifacts that appear with varying
frequency, depending on workload. Of particular note is the lack of
redraw when a Qt5 window is partially covered by a menu and then
uncovered.
* WebGL demos will sometimes fail due to a recoverable render ring
hang.
* There are still some known stability issues with processors prior
to Sandy Bridge (pre-2010).
Matt Macy is hoping to be able to diagnose the first two issues, along
with others, by updating Linux support to the point where the Intel GPU
Tools work on FreeBSD.
The Radeon AMD/ATI driver has been updated to GCN 1.0. This has only
been tested on an R7 240. 2D-accelerated X works. Due to apparent
issues with user library support, X does not recognize the KMS driver
as being 3D-capable and reports it as "not DRI2 capable". The OpenCL
benchmark clpeak fails in drm/ttm, so there may in fact be issues in
the underlying 3D support.
The Amdgpu AMD/ATI driver has been updated to GCN 1.1 and higher. The
KMS driver loads and attaches on discrete GPUs, though problems still
exist on the Carizzo APU. X will not start due to unimplemented
functions in libdrm. Koop Mast is actively working on this and should
have it fixed soon.
None of the required patches to src/sys were committed in time for
FreeBSD 11. Although the plan is to ultimately make linuxkpi, drm,
i915, radeon, and amdgpu updates available as ports, this will likely
not happen until development has slowed to the point where it is
economical to backport them to FreeBSD in svn. Until that time, modern
GPU support will be available in PC-BSD snapshots and in the
drm-next-4.6 branch on GitHub.
__________________________________________________________________
Kernel
ARM Allwinner SoC Support
Links
Allwinner FreeBSD Wiki
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD/arm/Allwinner
Contact: Jared McNeill <jmcneill@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Emmanuel Vadot <manu@FreeBSD.org>
Allwinner SoCs are used in multiple hobbyist devboards and single-board
computers. Recently, support for these SoCs received many updates.
Theses tasks were completed during the second quarter of 2016:
* Switch to upstream DTS
* A83T SoC support
* H3 SoC support
* Switch to the new clock framework
* Convert the A10 interrupt controller to INTRNG
* OHCI support
* A generic ALLWINNER kernel config file
* A20/A31 NMI support
* AXP209 PMU interrupts, GPIO, and sensors support
* A83T thermal sensor support
* RSB (Reduced Serial Bus) support
* AXP813/AXP818 PMU support
* A83T Security ID support
* Support for the Allwinner Gigabit Ethernet controller found in
H3/A83T/A64
* USB OTG (in review)
* A10/A20 Security ID support (in review)
* A13 SoC Support (in review)
Ongoing work:
* A64 support
* Use U-Boot EFI implementation for ARM32/ARM64
Open tasks:
1. SPI driver
2. LCD Support
3. Any unsupported hardware device that might be of interest.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on Hyper-V and Azure
Links
FreeBSD Virtual Machines on Microsoft Hyper-V
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/HyperV
Supported Linux and FreeBSD virtual machines for Hyper-V on Windows
URL: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn531030.aspx
Contact: Sepherosa Ziehau <sepherosa@gmail.com>
Contact: Hongjiang Zhang <honzhan@microsoft.com>
Contact: Dexuan Cui <decui@microsoft.com>
Contact: Kylie Liang <kyliel@microsoft.com>
During BSDCan 2016, Microsoft announced the global availability of
FreeBSD 10.3 images in Azure. There are many FreeBSD-based Azure
virtual appliances in the Azure Marketplace, including Citrix Systems'
NetScaler and Netgate's pfSense. Microsoft also made an in-depth
technical presentation to introduce how the performance of the Hyper-V
network device driver was optimized to reach full line rate on 10Gb
networks and achieved decent performance on 40Gb networks. The slides
and video from the presentation are available from the BSDCan website.
Microsoft continues to strive to further optimize the performance of
Hyper-V network and storage device drivers. Work is ongoing to replace
the internal data structure in the LRO kernel API from a singly-linked
list to a double-linked list, to speed up the LRO lookup by hash table,
and to evaluate the performance with tcp_lro_queue_mbuf().
The handling of SCSI inquiry in the Hyper-V storage driver is enhanced
to make sure that disk hotplug and smartctl(8) work reliably. Refer to
PR 210425 and PR 209443 for details.
BIS test cases are available on GitHub for Hyper-V and for Azure.
This project was sponsored by Microsoft.
__________________________________________________________________
VIMAGE Virtualized Network Stack Update
Links
Project Workspace (Now Merged to Head).
URL: https://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/base/projects/vnet/
Contact: Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz@FreeBSD.org>
VIMAGE is a virtualization framework on top of FreeBSD jails that was
introduced to the kernel about eight years ago with the vnet
virtualized network stack.
Over the last few years, many people started to use VIMAGE in
production, production-like setups, and appliances. This adoption
increased the urgency to finish the work to avoid panics on network
stack teardown and to avoid memory leaks.
The vnet teardown has been changed to be from top to bottom, trying to
tear down layer by layer. This is preferable to removing interfaces
first and then cleaning everything up, as no more packets could flow
once the interfaces are gone. Along with this work, various paths with
potential memory leaks were plugged. Lastly, vnet support was added to
formerly unvirtualized components, such as the pf and ipfilter
firewalls and some virtual interfaces.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Please test FreeBSD 11.0-ALPHA6 or later. When reporting a problem,
use the vimage keyword in the FreeBSD bug tracker.
__________________________________________________________________
Architectures
FreeBSD/arm64
Links
FreeBSD/arm64 Wiki Entry
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/arm64
Contact: Andrew Turner <andrew@FreeBSD.org>
The arm64 pmap code has been updated to work with the full 4 pagetable
levels. This allows us to increase the user virtual address space to
256TB, with a concomittant increase of the kernel virtual address
space. It also allows an increase in the size of the physical memory
FreeBSD can handle to up to 2TB.
The interrupt framework has been replaced with intrng on arm64. This
allows both arm and arm64 to share interrupt controller drivers, as is
the case with the GICv2 driver. The GICv3 ITS driver has been rewritten
to better integrate with intrng.
Busdma was updated to handle the cache. The updated code assumes that
devices are non-coherent by default, unless the device driver marks the
DMA tag as coherent when creating it. The generic and ThunderX PCIe
drivers have been updated to create coherent mappings when the device
tree marks the hardware as coherent. This work also fixed issues found
with the sync operation where it was missing memory barriers.
A number of issues with hwpmc have been fixed. This improves the
stability of hwpmc on arm64, with no known software issues. There is a
single known issue which seems to be hardware-related, however, further
testing is required.
NEW_PCIB has been enabled on arm64. This includes handling the
PCI_RES_BUS resource type.
Old interfaces replaced before FreeBSD-11 have been removed from the
arm64 kernel and libraries. This includes support for compatibility
with libc from releases prior to 11.0. The brk and sbrk functions have
also been removed. This allows a workaround for these functions in the
arm64 C runtime to be removed.
loader.efi has been updated to use an event timer to implement its
internal time function. This is needed, as many UEFI implementations do
not handle the GetTime runtime service method. This means that
loader.efi will now correctly count down before automatically booting.
Initial support for the ARM Juno reference platform has been added.
This hardware is common within ARM, and has been useful for finding
assumptions on cpuids. Booting on the Juno required fixing the kernel
to remove the assumption that it is booting from CPU zero. This
included assigning cpuids and fixing assumptions within the GICv2
driver that the cpuid is the same as the GIC cpuid. FreeBSD can now
boot on the 4 Cortex-A53 CPUs of the Juno board. Further investigation
is needed to track down why the boot fails when the 2 Cortex-A57 CPUs
are enabled.
Initial work has started on booting FreeBSD on the Pine64 and Raspberry
Pi 3 boards. Both can boot to multiuser mode with out-of-tree patches.
Further work is needed to bring these patches into the tree, but it is
expected this will happen soon after the end of the code freeze.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation, and ABT Systems
Ltd.
__________________________________________________________________
Userland Programs
Reproducible Builds in FreeBSD
Links
Base System Reproducible Builds Wiki Page
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/ReproducibleBuilds
Ports Reproducible Builds Wiki Page
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/PortsReproducibleBuilds
BSDCan 2016 Reproducible Builds in FreeBSD talk
URL: http://www.bsdcan.org/2016/schedule/events/714.en.html
Reproducible Builds Website
URL: https://reproducible-builds.org/
Diffoscope Home Page
URL: https://diffoscope.org/
Diffoscope Results from the BSDCan Reproducible Builds Talk
URL: https://people.FreeBSD.org/~emaste/reproducible-builds/iteration-1/diffoscope/
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste@FreeBSD.org>
Reproducible builds are a set of software development practices which
create a verifiable path from human-readable source code to the binary
code used by computers. In brief, the idea is that building the same
binary, software package, document, or other binary artifact twice from
the same source produces identical output. The reproducible-builds.org
website provides background information and documentation on making
builds reproducible.
Many folks have contributed to the reproducible build effort in FreeBSD
src and ports over the last decade. There are many practical benefits
of reproducible builds, such as bandwidth and storage savings. However,
there is a growing interest in the broad open source and free software
communities, primarily from a software and toolchain integrity
perspective. Over the last few years, some members of the Debian
Project have led a comprehensive and structured reproducible builds
effort.
Baptiste Daroussin and Ed Maste attended the first Reproducible Builds
Summit in Athens last year. Since then, Ed investigated the state of
build reproducibility in the ports tree, and presented Reproducible
Builds in FreeBSD at BSDCan 2016. With some work-in-progress patches,
over 80% of the FreeBSD ports tree builds reproducibly.
The Diffoscope tool performs in-depth comparison of files, archives, or
directories to understand why a binary artifact does not build
reproducibly. Diffoscope results for the nonreproducible builds in Ed's
talk are available at one of the links above.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Integrate FreeBSD ports builds into the reproducible-builds.org
continuous integration infrastructure.
2. Integrate reproducible build patches into the ports tree.
3. Investigate sources of nonreproducibility in individual ports.
__________________________________________________________________
Updates to GDB
Contact: John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Luca Pizzamiglio <luca.pizzamiglio@gmail.com>
The devel/gdb port has been updated to GDB 7.11.1.
Support for system call catchpoints has been committed upstream.
Support for examining ELF auxiliary vector data via info auxv has been
committed upstream. Both features will be included in GDB 7.12.
Open tasks:
1. Figure out why the powerpc kgdb targets are not able to unwind the
stack past the initial frame.
2. Add support for more platforms, such as arm, mips, and aarch64, to
upstream gdb for both userland and kgdb.
3. Add support for debugging powerpc vector registers.
4. Add support for $_siginfo.
5. Implement info proc commands.
6. Implement info os commands.
__________________________________________________________________
Using lld, the LLVM Linker, to Link FreeBSD
Links
FreeBSD lld Wiki Page
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/LLD
Status Report on Linking FreeBSD/amd64 With lld
URL: http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-March/096449.html
BSDCan 2016 Talk on lld for FreeBSD
URL: http://www.bsdcan.org/2016/schedule/events/656.en.html
Contact: Rafael Espíndola <rafael.espindola@gmail.com>
Contact: Davide Italiano <dccitaliano@gmail.com>
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste@FreeBSD.org>
lld is the linker in the LLVM family of projects. It is intended to be
a high-performance linker and supports the ELF, COFF, and Mach-O object
formats. Where possible, lld maintains command-line and functional
compatibility with the existing GNU BFD ld and gold linkers. However,
the authors of lld are not constrained by strict compatibility where it
would hamper performance or desired functionality.
Over the last quarter, the lld project implemented version script
support sufficient to handle the FreeBSD base system. This is an
important milestone on the path to having lld as a viable system
linker.
lld still lacks comprehensive linker script expression evaluation
support, and therefore cannot yet be used to link the FreeBSD kernel.
This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
Open tasks:
1. Develop linker script expression improvements in the upstream lld
project.
2. Import a newer lld snapshot into the vendor area, add the build
infrastructure, and connect it to the world build, installed as
ld.lld.
3. Request a ports exp-run with /usr/bin/ld a symlink to ld.lld.
4. Extensive testing.
__________________________________________________________________
Ports
Bringing GitLab into the Ports Collection
Links
GitLab Port
URL: http://freshports.org/www/gitlab
PR: Not Starting on Boot
URL: https://bugs.FreeBSD.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id 8793
Contact: Torsten Zühlsdorff <tz@FreeBSD.org>
After being in the FreeBSD Ports Collection for three months, GitLab
continues to mature and gain adoption. Most of its initial problems
have been resolved, with one known issue left: it does not start on
boot. Any help in solving this issue is welcome.
Staying in sync with upstream is now easy for minor versions. But, some
of the monthly major releases create a big workload by introducing a
number of new dependencies. This makes testing and updating an
expensive process.
The GitLab project itself now mentions native support on FreeBSD, which
is quite a commendation.
Current work aims to fix the open problems, get the latest major
version into the port, and create documentation for the update
progress.
__________________________________________________________________
GNOME on FreeBSD
Links
FreeBSD GNOME Website
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome
Development Repository
URL: https://github.com/FreeBSD/freebsd-ports-gnome
Upstream Build Bot
URL: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Jhbuild/FreeBSD
USE_GNOME Porter's Handbook Chapter
URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/using-gnome.html
GNOME/Gtk+ 3.20 Update Bug
URL: https://bugs.FreeBSD.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id!0272
Contact: FreeBSD GNOME Team <freebsd-gnome@FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD GNOME Team maintains the GNOME, MATE, and CINNAMON desktop
environments and graphical user interfaces for FreeBSD. GNOME 3 is part
of the GNU Project. MATE is a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop. CINNAMON is
a desktop environment using GNOME 3 technologies, but with a GNOME 2
look and feel.
GNOME 3.20 was ported with help from Ruslan Makhmatkhanov and Gustau
Perez. Work is being done on updating GDM from the old 3.16 version to
the 3.20 version. For some reason, scrollbars in Firefox are no longer
working, though this has not been investigated.
With Gtk+ 3.20, theme support was again changed, and the changes are
not backwards compatible. If you have a theme update that requires the
new Gtk+ version, feel free to add it as a blocker bug to the
GNOME/Gtk+ 3.20 update bug. This bug will be used for the exp-run of
GNOME 3.20, when it is ready, and to track the theme-related ports.
Also, there is a problem with the open and save dialog content going
invisible.
Open tasks:
1. Finish GDM 3.20 porting.
2. Investigate why the scrollbars in Firefox are missing and why the
open/save dialog content is missing.
__________________________________________________________________
Intel Networking Tools
Contact: Sergey Kozlov <sergey.kozlov@intel.com>
Several tools for Intel(R) Ethernet networking products are now
available as ports and packages for FreeBSD:
* sysutils/intel-nvmupdate: An application that is used to update
non-volatile memory on XL710- and X710-based network devices.
* sysutils/intel-qcu: An application used to switch QSFP+ ports
between 1x40Gbps and 4x10Gbps mode on XL710-based network devices.
* net/intel-ixl-kmod: An updated driver which enables the tools
support on FreeBSD-10.x.
This project was sponsored by Intel Corporation.
Open tasks:
1. FreeBSD 11 support is under development and will be included in the
next release.
__________________________________________________________________
IPv6 Promotion Campaign
Links
Wiki Page
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/IPv6PortsTODO
Contact: Torsten Zühlsdorff <tz@FreeBSD.org>
Half a year ago, I started a promotion campaign to improve support for
fetching ports via IPv6. Research performed in December 2015 showed
that 10,308 of 25,522 ports were not fetchable when using IPv6-only, as
these ports ignore the FreeBSD.org pkg mirror.
As a result of the campaign, the following servers now successfully
support IPv6:
1. mirror.amdmi3.ru
2. vault.centos.org
3. mirror.centos.org
4. gstreamer.freedesktop.org
5. people.FreeBSD.org
This enables 711 more ports to be fetched via IPv6.
I would like to thank Wolfgang Zenker, who is very active in supporting
the adoption of IPv6. During the latest RIPE meeting, he brought up the
topic of non-support of IPv6 being a hindrance to business. I am
hopeful that his talk changed some more minds and will help widen the
support of IPv6.
__________________________________________________________________
KDE on FreeBSD
Links
KDE on FreeBSD Website
URL: https://freebsd.kde.org/
KDE Ports Staging Area
URL: https://freebsd.kde.org/area51.php
KDE on FreeBSD Wiki
URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/KDE
KDE/FreeBSD Mailing List
URL: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-freebsd
Development Repository for Integrating KDE 5
URL: http://src.mouf.net/area51/log/branches/plasma5
Development Repository for Integrating Qt 5.6
URL: http://src.mouf.net/area51/log/branches/qt-5.6
Development Repository for Integrating Qt 5.7
URL: http://src.mouf.net/area51/log/branches/qt-5.7
Contact: KDE on FreeBSD team <kde@FreeBSD.org>
The KDE on FreeBSD team focuses on packaging and improving the user
experience of KDE and Qt on FreeBSD.
Many updates were committed to the ports tree this quarter, and even
more were committed to our experimental ports repository. Tobias
Berner, Adriaan de Groot, and Ralf Nolden were responsible for most of
the work.
The following notable updates landed in the ports tree this quarter:
* The CMake ports were updated to 3.5.1 and 3.5.2.
* The DigiKam ports were updated to 4.14.0.
* The KDevelop ports were updated to 4.7.3.
* The devel/qbs port was added for Qt's future build system, QBS.
* Qt Creator was updated to 3.4.0, 3.5.0, 3.5.1, 3.6.0, 4.0.0, 4.0.1,
and 4.0.2.
* A new port misc/qt5-examples was added for the project examples
provided by Qt. This makes Qt Creator more functional.
* A new port misc/qt5-doc was added for Qt's API documentation, used
by Qt Creator and other programs.
* The base KDE4 ports were updated to 4.14.10.
The following work occurred in our development repository:
* Created ports for Qt 5.6.1-1 (branches/qt-5.6).
* Created ports for Qt 5.7.0 (branches/qt-5.7).
* The plasma5 branch is up-to-date with KDE's upstream and contains
ports for Frameworks 5.24.0, Plasma Desktop 5.7.0, and Applications
16.04.2 (branches/plasma5).
__________________________________________________________________
Obsoleting Rails 3
Contact: Torsten Zühlsdorff <tz@FreeBSD.org>
Ruby on Rails is the base for most of the rubygems in the Ports
Collection. Currently, versions 3.2 and 4.2 coexist. Since Rails 3.2 is
running out of support, the time has come to switch to 4.2.
While there is ongoing progress to remove Rails 3.2 from the ports
tree, there are some ports for which this is a major update that blocks
the overall process. The most recent blocker was the outstanding update
of www/redmine from 2.6 to 3.2. This has completed successfully, so we
can now move on.
To help with porting or testing, feel free to contact me or the
ruby@FreeBSD.org mailing list.
__________________________________________________________________
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