The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Pawel Jakub Dawidek has been awarded a development grant to further improve the Capsicum framework. The grant is jointly funded by Google's Open Source Programs Office.
The project includes the integration of previous work, implementation of new programmer-friendly capability system calls, improvements to the Casper Capsicum service daemon, and sandboxing various security-sensitive applications.
"My previous Capsicum work focused on improving the framework itself to make it a better fit for real world applications. This new project will make use of the improved Capsicum to secure sensitive programs and libraries found in FreeBSD. The project will also produce many examples for others to follow, allowing them to take advantage of Capsicum to improve the security of their programs," said Pawel.
Ben Laurie, of Google's security team, added that "traditional operating system security is based on Access Control Lists (ACLs). Decades of experience has made it quite clear this is the wrong model - but how can we move to a better way without having to rebuild everything? Capsicum shows that it is possible to migrate gradually from the broken ACL world to a more robust capability based world. We are pleased to be involved in the next step of its evolution."
The project is expected to be completed by June 2013.
Author Archives: Dru Lavigne
Foundation Interview on BSDTalk
Accepting Travel Grant Applications for BSDCan 2013
Calling all FreeBSD developers needing assistance with travel expenses to BSDCan 2013.
The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please fill out and submit the Travel Grant Request Application by April 17, 2013 to apply for this grant.
This program is open to FreeBSD developers of all sorts (kernel hackers, documentation authors, bugbusters, system administrators, etc). In some cases we are also able to fund non-developers, such as active community members and FreeBSD advocates.
The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please fill out and submit the Travel Grant Request Application by April 17, 2013 to apply for this grant.
This program is open to FreeBSD developers of all sorts (kernel hackers, documentation authors, bugbusters, system administrators, etc). In some cases we are also able to fund non-developers, such as active community members and FreeBSD advocates.
- You request funding based on a realistic and economical estimate of travel costs (economy airfare, trainfare, ...), accommodations (conference hotel and sharing a room), and registration or tutorial fees. If there are other sponsors willing to cover costs, such as your employer or the conference, we prefer you talk to them first, as our budget is limited. We are happy to split costs with you or another sponsor, such as just covering airfare or board. If you are a speaker at the conference, we expect the conference to cover your travel costs, and will most likely not approve your direct request to us.
- We review your application and if approved, authorize you to seek reimbursement up to a limit. We consider several factors, including our overall and per-event budgets, and (quite importantly) the benefit to the community by funding your travel. Most rejected applications are rejected because of an over-all limit on travel budget for the event or year, due to unrealistic or uneconomical costing, or because there is an unclear or unconvincing argument that funding the applicant will directly benefit the FreeBSD Project. Please take these points into consideration when writing your application.
- We reimburse costs based on actuals (receipts), and by check or bank transfer. And, we do not cover your costs if you end up having to cancel your trip. We also do not cover meal/food/alcohol expenses. We require you to submit a report on your trip, which we may show to current or potential sponsors, and may include in our semi-annual newsletter and our blog.
Foundation Announces New Technical Staff Member
The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Konstantin Belousov has been hired as its first full-time member of technical staff, a key milestone of the Foundation's investment in staff for 2013.
Konstantin has been a FreeBSD committer since 2006, and he recently implemented support for current-generation Intel graphics controllers under contract to the FreeBSD Foundation. This new position will allow him to spend his full working time on supporting and improving FreeBSD.
Konstantin's first project brings support for unmapped I/O to FreeBSD. The unmapped I/O project improves performance by avoiding mapping buffers in the buffer cache, significantly reducing overhead on multi-processor systems. The project builds on foundational work to unify machine-dependent parts of the busdma interface, recently contributed by Jeff Robertson at EMC's Isilon Storage Division. EMC became a FreeBSD foundation donor in 2012.
Netflix, another new Foundation donor for 2012, is already making use of this project. "Netflix partnered closely with Konstantin to provide design input and testing resources for the unmapped I/O project. The work helped us realize an immediate 25% increase in system performance on production workloads. It underscores the immense value of collaborating and investing in the open source community and FreeBSD in particular," said Scott Long, Senior Software Engineer at Netflix.
Konstantin has also been working with the release engineering team since 2008 and his new role with the Foundation will allow him to focus more time on the tools and process used to make FreeBSD releases.
Konstantin lives in Kiev, Ukraine.
Konstantin has been a FreeBSD committer since 2006, and he recently implemented support for current-generation Intel graphics controllers under contract to the FreeBSD Foundation. This new position will allow him to spend his full working time on supporting and improving FreeBSD.
Konstantin's first project brings support for unmapped I/O to FreeBSD. The unmapped I/O project improves performance by avoiding mapping buffers in the buffer cache, significantly reducing overhead on multi-processor systems. The project builds on foundational work to unify machine-dependent parts of the busdma interface, recently contributed by Jeff Robertson at EMC's Isilon Storage Division. EMC became a FreeBSD foundation donor in 2012.
Netflix, another new Foundation donor for 2012, is already making use of this project. "Netflix partnered closely with Konstantin to provide design input and testing resources for the unmapped I/O project. The work helped us realize an immediate 25% increase in system performance on production workloads. It underscores the immense value of collaborating and investing in the open source community and FreeBSD in particular," said Scott Long, Senior Software Engineer at Netflix.
Konstantin has also been working with the release engineering team since 2008 and his new role with the Foundation will allow him to focus more time on the tools and process used to make FreeBSD releases.
Konstantin lives in Kiev, Ukraine.
Foundation at AsiaBSDCon and NorthEast LinuxFest
Foundation representatives will be at two events this weekend (March 16-17). Drop by and say hi if you're near either event. Donations to the Foundation can be made at either event.
AsiaBSDCon is being held at the Tokyo University of Science in Japan.
NorthEast LinuxFest is being held at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.
AsiaBSDCon is being held at the Tokyo University of Science in Japan.
NorthEast LinuxFest is being held at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.
New Funded Project: UEFI Support
The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Benno Rice has been awarded a grant to implement the ability to boot FreeBSD in the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot environment.
The work to be done includes a new version of the loader, kernel modifications to support starting from a UEFI environment and the ability to create install media for pure UEFI systems.
"UEFI support is critical for FreeBSD's future on the amd64 platform and I'm really pleased to be able to ensure that FreeBSD gains support for it," said Benno.
This project is expected to be completed in March 2013.
The work to be done includes a new version of the loader, kernel modifications to support starting from a UEFI environment and the ability to create install media for pure UEFI systems.
"UEFI support is critical for FreeBSD's future on the amd64 platform and I'm really pleased to be able to ensure that FreeBSD gains support for it," said Benno.
This project is expected to be completed in March 2013.
New Funded Project: FreeBSD/ARM Architecture Superpages Support
The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Semihalf, an embedded solutions company, has been awarded a grant to develop transparent superpages support for the FreeBSD/ARM architecture. Semihalf is co-sponsoring the project with the Foundation.
The ARM architecture is already common in the mobile and embedded markets, and is becoming more prevalent in the server market. Among the more interesting industry trends emerging recently is the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture, which is an "ARM server" concept. Many top tier companies have started developing systems or are announcing products with this architecture.
One of the features needed for FreeBSD to be successful in this area is transparent super pages. This provides improved performance and scalability by allowing TLB translations to dynamically cover large physical memory regions.
The project is expected to complete in mid July 2013.
The ARM architecture is already common in the mobile and embedded markets, and is becoming more prevalent in the server market. Among the more interesting industry trends emerging recently is the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture, which is an "ARM server" concept. Many top tier companies have started developing systems or are announcing products with this architecture.
One of the features needed for FreeBSD to be successful in this area is transparent super pages. This provides improved performance and scalability by allowing TLB translations to dynamically cover large physical memory regions.
The project is expected to complete in mid July 2013.
Foundation at SCALE
There will be a FreeBSD booth in the exhibition area of SCALE, to be held at the Hilton LAX in Los Angeles, CA. Exhibition hours are Saturday, February 23 from 10:00–17:30 p.m and Sunday, February 24 from 10:00–16:00. Registration is required for this event, with a nominal fee for the expo area and a slightly higher fee for the entire conference.
We'll be giving out copies of PC-BSD and FreeNAS as well as some cool swag at the FreeBSD booth. We can also accept donations for the FreeBSD Foundation. If you are in the Los Angeles area, drop by and say hi!
We'll be giving out copies of PC-BSD and FreeNAS as well as some cool swag at the FreeBSD booth. We can also accept donations for the FreeBSD Foundation. If you are in the Los Angeles area, drop by and say hi!
Foundation at Ottawa User Group Connect
User Group Connect is a relaxed one day unconference for meeting and interacting with the many technical User Groups in Ottawa. The event runs on Saturday, February 9 from 10:00-17:00 at Shopify in the Byward Market.
The Foundation will be represented at a FreeBSD booth and will be accepting donations. If you're in the Ottawa area, drop by and visit at this free event.
The Foundation will be represented at a FreeBSD booth and will be accepting donations. If you're in the Ottawa area, drop by and visit at this free event.
FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter
The December issue of the FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter has been published:
FreeBSD has a flourishing community. Innovative technology is packed into every release. Thousands of products and services the world relies upon are built on FreeBSD, and the adoption rate of FreeBSD accelerates year after year. By all of these measures, FreeBSD is an amazingly successful open source project. But at the FreeBSD Foundation, we know today's success is just a step on a long path. We constantly ask, "How can we make FreeBSD even better?" "How can we take FreeBSD up that 'extra notch'?" Or as Nigel from 'This is Spinal Tap' would put it, "If we're playing maxed out at ten, how do we take it to eleven?"
Our answer for the 2013 year is to redefine the way the FreeBSD Foundation supports FreeBSD. Every year since I started the FreeBSD Foundation, we have grown our budget and activities by 10 to 25%, all managed by a single part-time employee. This next year we are investing in staff. Staff to bolster FreeBSD's amazing community of volunteers. Staff to scale the FreeBSD Foundation's funded development initiatives. Staff to double our capabilities in a single year.
This plan will increase the number and size of the development projects we fund. However, it is the FreeBSD Foundation's investment in "human infrastructure" that I believe will yield the largest dividends. As a volunteer myself, I know that no matter how deep my love for FreeBSD is, family and my "day job" must come first. Even with these other priorities, the volunteers that maintain the project's computer clusters, handle security incidents, tend our revision control and bug tracking systems, and generate our releases, show amazing skill and awe inspiring dedication. But our pool of volunteers for these areas hasn't grown as quickly as the rest of the project. By adding paid staff to support these roles, we will help reduce burn-out, provide continuity, and increase the effectiveness of FreeBSD's volunteers.
If things go as expected, by the end of 2013, the FreeBSD Foundation will have five employees, and an annual budget approaching $750,000. It will be a challenging transition, but a necessary step on the path of FreeBSD's continued success. Please consider giving us your support while we work to take FreeBSD all the way to eleven!
Justin T. Gibbs
President and Founder
The FreeBSD Foundation
Fundraising Update
Wow. I’ve been thoroughly overwhelmed by the outpouring of donations over the last few weeks! As of this publication we have raised $460,000 towards our goal of $500,000.
I want to thank you for everything you do to make this the best operating system around. There wouldn’t be a FreeBSD if we didn’t have you writing code, writing documentation, working on ports and releases, and educating current and future FreeBSD users.
We haven’t met our target yet, but we are getting close. Historically, each year, we have been half way to our fundraising goal at the start of December. Going forward, this is something that we plan on changing.
We unintentionally received some interesting press that disturbed a lot of FreeBSD users. This encouraged over 950 donations to come in, this past week. All I can say, is that it was incredible to see this support. One donor commented, “I don't use FreeBSD yet, but I've heard good things about the project, so that's why I wanted to support you.� How cool is that?
Your donations help us fund projects to improve FreeBSD, sponsor conferences and summits, purchase equipment to build infrastructure, promote FreeBSD, and provide legal counsel for the Project. In short, it helps us to provide the funding to make this the best OS available.
We’ve received some great lessons during this campaign. One thing we learned is that we need to advertise our fundraising needs outside of our FaceBook page, blog, and the FreeBSD Announce mailing list.
I hope that as you read through some of our accomplishments this year, you will consider making a donation to the Foundation. We can’t do it without you!
Efika SmartBook/SmartTop FreeBSD ARM Port
Tired of burning yourself with your laptop? If so, maybe it’s time for a change, such as switching to a platform that doesn’t require a large heat sink or loud cooling fans.
It is now possible to run FreeBSD on a low power, ARM-based, laptop: the Genesi Efika MX Smartbook. It has an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU inside, and, just like a cell phone, is energy efficient, consumes minimal power and uses passive cooling.
Our main project goal is to implement the missing pieces for the Freescale ARM SoC, including graphics, and to provide a great example of FreeBSD running on a low power device that developers can both use, and show off.
With the Efika MX code in the tree, we will have support for ARM-based laptops and even nettops (such as the Efika MX Smartop model) and we can continue pushing FreeBSD into ARM tablets and other ARM-based devices.
Capsicum Component Framework
Capsicum is a novel hybrid capability model that first appeared in FreeBSD 9.0, targeted at application compartmentalization: the mitigation of security vulnerabilities through decomposition of complex and risky applications into isolated components.
In the big picture, Capsicum provides a tight sandboxing mechanism where access to all global name spaces is restricted, and also allows actions that can be performed on file descriptors to be limited (file descriptors represent capabilities).
The purpose of my project was to make Capsicum more mature as well as easier to use by application developers.
The main part of the project was to create the Casper daemon, which is used by sandboxed processes to gain access to functionality that is not directly permitted within a sandbox. As an example, Casper provides a DNS service which can be use by sandboxed processes for host name resolution without the need to read /etc/resolv.conf or send any network packets to DNS servers.
Another part of the project was to remove capability wrapping descriptors - a special kind of file descriptors with a limited set of rights (e.g. a file descriptor which can be used only for reading, but not writing, fchmod, etc.). The capability wrapping descriptors were replaced with the ability to limit rights on any regular descriptor. This simplifies much of Capsicum's kernel support code and makes sandboxing more robust.
Initially the ioctl(2) system call was denied in capability mode (i.e. for sandboxed processes), because of its huge scope. Now, it is possible to limit the ioctl commands that can be performed within a sandbox, on a given descriptor. I also added the ability to control fcntl operations in a similar fashion.
Many bugs were fixed, many smaller improvements were made, and a lot of new regression tests were created along the way.
Capsicum is still on-going work, but thanks to funding from the FreeBSD Foundation and Google, it is maturing quickly and is starting to be used in real world applications (I personally use it in my other, FreeBSD Foundation sponsored, projects: HAST and auditdistd).
iSCSI Target
The goal of this project is to create a native, high performance, iSCSI target facility for FreeBSD. While configuration and connection setup and teardown are handled by a userland daemon, unlike previous target frameworks, all data-movement is performed in the kernel. The iSCSI target is fully integrated with the CAM Target Layer meaning that volumes can be backed by files or any block device. The hardware offload capabilities of modern network adapters will also be supported.
Much of the protocol and data movement logic can be shared between iSCSI target and initiator implementations. Once target support is robust, FreeBSD's existing iSCSI initiator will be updated to use many of the components developed for the target. This will improve initiator performance and add modern features such as InitialR2T.
The project is quickly progressing from a working prototype to a fully functional state; testing phase is expected to start in early January. After that the development will focus on implementing the hardware offload and performance tuning.
EuroBSDCon 2012
In October 2012, the 11th EuroBSDcon was held in the beautiful city of Warsaw in Poland. Four days of talking, learning about BSD, and of course exploring Polish culture (don't forget the Polish Hussars). The conference featured 2 tutorial days followed by two conference days on Saturday and Sunday. The conference consisted of a 2 track program, paralleled by a devsummit track on Saturday.
Traditionally, EuroBSDcon has a strong FreeBSD presence, but there is also enough room for the other BSD's. One of the reasons for the strong FreeBSD presence is the FreeBSD devsummit, which is held concurrently with the EuroBSDcon tutorial days.
The FreeBSD Foundation has been one of the regular sponsors over the years. This support plays an important role in making this an outstanding conference.
Besides sponsoring the conference, The FreeBSD Foundation also provides travel grants for visitors and developers who can not afford to go the conference on their own. This gives them the opportunity to visit the conference and exchange knowledge and ideas with other conference attendees, which greatly improves the value of having such conferences.
We are excited to announce that EuroBSDcon 2013 will be held September 28th-29th, 2013 (tutorials will be September 26th-27th) on Malta (St. Julian's area).
Cambridge Developer Summit 2012
Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of co-organizing the Cambridge DevSummit. Robert Watson, in contrast, had most of the stress, and others had the fun of running around and actually doing the work. This was a three-day event, with a documentation summit scheduled for the day before, organized primarily by Gavin Atkinson and Isabell Long.
This was the second such event hosted in Cambridge; the first in which no one fell in the river—possibly because the weather wasn't quite nice enough to encourage punting that week.
The three days of the main event were split into three sessions, with two tracks in each. I invited some visitors from ARM (who, conveniently, are just down the road) to attend one afternoon session. This was productive, and led to further engagement between the FreeBSD community and ARM. ARM is a customer-focused company, and those who may be interested in FreeBSD/ARM are potential customers of ARM's customers.
We finalized the schedule on the first day, filling an entire whiteboard with items that two or more people wanted to discuss and then splitting into groups. While a bit more advanced planning may have been helpful, our strategy worked relatively well this year. A short summary from each of the groups was presented in the final session and then published on the FreeBSD wiki.
The toolchain session, a big session, was of particular interest to me. We arrived at a tentative plan for throwing the switch to make clang the default compiler on FreeBSD-CURRENT. This was further discussed on the mailing list, and has now happened, bringing us one big step closer to a GPL-free FreeBSD 10.
An afternoon of short talks from researchers in the Cambridge Computer Lab involved either operating systems work in general or FreeBSD in particular. Robert Watson showed off a tablet running FreeBSD on a MIPS-compatible soft-core processor running on an Altera FPGA.
Cambridge, an old university town, predates the invention of hills and so is very amenable to cycling. We hired bikes for all non-local developers so they could get around easily.
The DevSummit dinner was hosted by St. John's College and cosponsored by Google and the FreeBSD Foundation. This enjoyable event, in the historic surroundings of a 500-year old college, provided a unique (and possibly never-to-be-repeated) opportunity of seeing a group of FreeBSD developers smartly dressed.
The day after the conference, Ollivier Robert organized a trip to Bletchley Park, which this year was celebrating Turing's centenary. Although it was an informative outing, I don't believe that it resulted in any concrete plans for a FreeBSD/Collossus port.
Bay Area Vendor Summit 2012
On November 8th The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored the FreeBSD Silicon Valley Vendor Summit. The summit was hosted by Yahoo at their Sunnyvale campus. We had over 50 participants from more than 20 different companies participate in the summit, which is a great turnout.
After a round of introductions we discussed the work that had been completed since the last summit, in May of 2012, including:
Altera IP core drivers
Amazon EC2 work
Comprehensive test framework (ATF)
DTrace on non-x86 (MIPS)
Intel graphics
Ivy Bridge hwpmc
clang/llvm MIPS
ZFS improvements
growfs on live fs
After going over the completed and still to be done items, we had a brief set of comments from Tom Hanrahan of Microsoft on HyperV support for FreeBSD. Microsoft's intention is to have full hypervisor support for FreeBSD and they are actively engaging with the community to get the proper drivers in the right places in our tree so that FreeBSD is a first class citizen in their system.
The first major presentation of the day was Jim Harris talking about VTune. VTune is a system to help developers understand the performance of their code. A small number of us have been working with Intel to get this software available on FreeBSD, as, at the moment, it is only available on Windows and Linux.
VTune includes two major components, a data collector and a visualization program. The collector has been ported to FreeBSD and is available as a pre-beta to interested developers. The visualization program continues to only be available on Windows and Linux, but since the collector and the visualizer are separate it is easy to collect information about programs, including the kernel, running on a FreeBSD host and display the results on another system. One feature that VTune continues to lack, but which Intel is working on, is support for call graphs. Right now the system can show you which line of code is causing a performance problem, which is quite useful, but it does not show the call graph, basically how your program happened to get to that point. This is a feature that Intel knows it needs on FreeBSD for the system to be completely accepted by vendors and other folks building high performance systems with FreeBSD. That being said, it's still an impressive piece of software and will definitely help people who care about performance tuning.
Jim says that those who are interested in using VTune in its current form should contact him directly to get ahold of the beta driver: Jim Harris . I've put up a "VTune How To" page on our Wiki and will be populating it over the next week.
After the morning break Adrian Chadd brought people up to date on what's going on with embedded systems and FreeBSD. There has been a good deal of progress here, in particular the work done recently on ARM processor support, with FreeBSD now running on several systems, including the BeagelBone, ShivaPlug, and the now ubiquitous Raspberry Pi. MIPS support continues to improve, with a significant chunk of work coming from the folks in Cambridge, as well as companies that are integrating FreeBSD on MIPS into their products. PowerPC is also moving along, although there remains a dearth of hardware on which to work. A good deal of discussion accompanied this section, in particular about what we need to do to get the rest of the system, i.e. ports and packages, up on these architectures. Here the story is also improving with a set of packages existing for ARM processors as well. People interested in this area should check out recent mail threads on arm@ and embedded@ as well as others.
After talking about embedded systems, Daichi Goto updated us on efforts with vendors in Japan. He and Hiroki Sato have been busy working with companies in Japan and have set up a BSD Consulting company which is working with large Japanese companies to build business services on top of FreeBSD, with a great deal of success. Other work they're doing includes getting a good deal of FreeBSD documentation and information translated into Japanese, so that it is more easily accessible to developers in Japan.
After a lunch break a new, at least to me, FreeBSD Vendor, CacheIQ gave a presentation about their product and their use of FreeBSD. CacheIQ builds an SSD based NFS caching system on top of FreeBSD and are interested in following the project's development tree more closely. What followed was a discussion of the project's release policies and best practices relating to developing a product with FreeBSD.
From CacheIQ we moved on to testing and ATF. Garrett Cooper presented the work he's been doing, in collaboration with Simon Gerraty and Marcel Moolenaar, to get ATF integrated into FreeBSD. ATF was originally written for NetBSD and has been in use there for a couple of years now. The goal is to have a good framework for automated testing in FreeBSD and to improve the quality of our testing. As anyone who has worked with test frameworks knows, there are many bike sheds to be avoided here, and Garrett, Simon and Marcel have worked quite hard to keep away from picking colors, and have instead gotten the system into shape and working on FreeBSD. [As of the writing of this newsletter ATF is now in HEAD under contrib/atf.]
Our last session of the day was creating a new have/need list for vendors with the twist this time that we added a "co sponsor" list. The FreeBSD Foundation is going to put up funds to co-sponsor development projects with companies working on FreeBSD. This has already been successfully done in the past with projects such as the NAND Flash project (co-sponsored with Juniper Networks) and others. The Foundation can't sponsor all these projects, but where there is an ability to get cooperation on funding the development it makes sense to get a few interested parties together to get the work done. The list of possible co-development projects includes:
NetConf Agent
EFI Boot on amd64
NDMP
MIPS Super Pages
SID Base Credentials and ACLs
Xen Dom 0
Upcoming summits are in March at AsiaBSDCon and May at BSDCan. Mark your calendars.
2012 Grant and Travel Grant Recipients
Every year we sponsor FreeBSD related conferences and travel to these events for FreeBSD contributors. We believe that BSD-centered and FreeBSD-specific conferences play the dual roles of expanding the FreeBSD user community and supporting collaborative development. The FreeBSD Foundation's travel grant program helps to reduce financial roadblocks to participation in these events.
Our grant recipients often send us amazing tales of their experiences, proving the value of this program to the FreeBSD community. You can find these stories and trip reports on our blog.
Here is a list of projects, developers, and conferences we have sponsored for 2012.
2012 Conference Grant Recipients:
AsiaBSDCon 2012 Conference
BSDCan 2012 Conference
Ottawa 2012 Developer Summit
Ottawa 2012 Vendor Summit
BSDDay 2012
EuroBSDCon 2012 Conference
Cambridge 2012 Developer Summit
Bay Area 2012 Vendor Summit
2012 Project Grant Recipients:
Edward Napierala - iSCSI Target project
Pawel Jakub Dawidek - Capsicum Component Framework
Edward Napierala - Growing Filesystmes Online
Björn Zeeb - IPv6 Performance Analysis
Pawel Jakub Dawidek - Implementing auditdistd
Semihalf - NAND Flash Support
Aleksandr Rybalko - Porting FreeBSD to Efika ARM platform
2012 Travel Grant Recipients:
BSDCan - Hiren Panchasara, Adrian Chadd, Florian Smeets, Ben Haga, Marius Strobl, Brooks Davis, Julien Laffaye, Warren Block, Daichi Goto, Giovanni Trematerra, Davide Italiano, Thomas Abthorpe
EuroBSDCon - Gabor Pali, Alberto Mijares, Gabor Kovesdan, Alexander Pronin
Open Help - Warren Block
MeetBSD - Mark Linimon
Faces of FreeBSD Series
Who are these people that receive money from the Foundation? How are your donations making a difference in the FreeBSD community? We've asked our grant recipients to share their stories with you in what we call the "Faces of FreeBSD" campaign. Tune in weekly to the FreeBSD Foundations's blog to hear how Foundation funding is used to run conferences, work on development projects, help with travel expenses to conferences, and to advocate for FreeBSD.
Looking for a recap of past stories? Here are our first two "Faces of FreeBSD":
Faces of FreeBSD - Dan Langille
Faces of FreeBSD - Alberto Mijares
Netflix
More than 30 million Netflix streaming members around the globe watch more than a billion hours of movies and TV shows each month. In the US, Netflix video streaming accounts for a third of peak downstream Internet traffic. Netflix created Open Connect, a single-purpose content delivery network, to help deliver these petabytes of data.
The main component of Open Connect is the Open Connect Appliance, a small-footprint network streaming device. The Open Connect Appliance is a 4U Intel-based server that is designed to economically maximize storage density in a space and power footprint that is ideal for both ISP data centers and metro-area network interchanges.
The Open Connect Appliance runs on FreeBSD 9. Netflix picked FreeBSD 9 because it is a high performing, low-maintenance and reliable operating system that is supported by major hardware vendors. FreeBSD 9 provides a foundation of reliability, performance, and hands-free manageability. Combined with NGINX, a light-weight and high performance Web server, FreeBSD 9 provides a simple but powerful solution that is capable of serving tens of thousands of simultaneous video streams across multiple 10Gbit fiber optic links.
Beyond its technical strengths, FreeBSD comes with an outstanding ecosystem of developers, vendors, and users who openly share expertise, talent, and technical improvements. Netflix has embraced this community and is committed to giving back its bug fixes and enhancements, thus completing the circle of community collaboration.
- David Fullagar, Director of Content Delivery Architecture, Netflix
FreeBSD has a flourishing community. Innovative technology is packed into every release. Thousands of products and services the world relies upon are built on FreeBSD, and the adoption rate of FreeBSD accelerates year after year. By all of these measures, FreeBSD is an amazingly successful open source project. But at the FreeBSD Foundation, we know today's success is just a step on a long path. We constantly ask, "How can we make FreeBSD even better?" "How can we take FreeBSD up that 'extra notch'?" Or as Nigel from 'This is Spinal Tap' would put it, "If we're playing maxed out at ten, how do we take it to eleven?"
Our answer for the 2013 year is to redefine the way the FreeBSD Foundation supports FreeBSD. Every year since I started the FreeBSD Foundation, we have grown our budget and activities by 10 to 25%, all managed by a single part-time employee. This next year we are investing in staff. Staff to bolster FreeBSD's amazing community of volunteers. Staff to scale the FreeBSD Foundation's funded development initiatives. Staff to double our capabilities in a single year.
This plan will increase the number and size of the development projects we fund. However, it is the FreeBSD Foundation's investment in "human infrastructure" that I believe will yield the largest dividends. As a volunteer myself, I know that no matter how deep my love for FreeBSD is, family and my "day job" must come first. Even with these other priorities, the volunteers that maintain the project's computer clusters, handle security incidents, tend our revision control and bug tracking systems, and generate our releases, show amazing skill and awe inspiring dedication. But our pool of volunteers for these areas hasn't grown as quickly as the rest of the project. By adding paid staff to support these roles, we will help reduce burn-out, provide continuity, and increase the effectiveness of FreeBSD's volunteers.
If things go as expected, by the end of 2013, the FreeBSD Foundation will have five employees, and an annual budget approaching $750,000. It will be a challenging transition, but a necessary step on the path of FreeBSD's continued success. Please consider giving us your support while we work to take FreeBSD all the way to eleven!
Justin T. Gibbs
President and Founder
The FreeBSD Foundation
Fundraising Update
Wow. I’ve been thoroughly overwhelmed by the outpouring of donations over the last few weeks! As of this publication we have raised $460,000 towards our goal of $500,000.
I want to thank you for everything you do to make this the best operating system around. There wouldn’t be a FreeBSD if we didn’t have you writing code, writing documentation, working on ports and releases, and educating current and future FreeBSD users.
We haven’t met our target yet, but we are getting close. Historically, each year, we have been half way to our fundraising goal at the start of December. Going forward, this is something that we plan on changing.
We unintentionally received some interesting press that disturbed a lot of FreeBSD users. This encouraged over 950 donations to come in, this past week. All I can say, is that it was incredible to see this support. One donor commented, “I don't use FreeBSD yet, but I've heard good things about the project, so that's why I wanted to support you.� How cool is that?
Your donations help us fund projects to improve FreeBSD, sponsor conferences and summits, purchase equipment to build infrastructure, promote FreeBSD, and provide legal counsel for the Project. In short, it helps us to provide the funding to make this the best OS available.
We’ve received some great lessons during this campaign. One thing we learned is that we need to advertise our fundraising needs outside of our FaceBook page, blog, and the FreeBSD Announce mailing list.
I hope that as you read through some of our accomplishments this year, you will consider making a donation to the Foundation. We can’t do it without you!
Efika SmartBook/SmartTop FreeBSD ARM Port
Tired of burning yourself with your laptop? If so, maybe it’s time for a change, such as switching to a platform that doesn’t require a large heat sink or loud cooling fans.
It is now possible to run FreeBSD on a low power, ARM-based, laptop: the Genesi Efika MX Smartbook. It has an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU inside, and, just like a cell phone, is energy efficient, consumes minimal power and uses passive cooling.
Our main project goal is to implement the missing pieces for the Freescale ARM SoC, including graphics, and to provide a great example of FreeBSD running on a low power device that developers can both use, and show off.
With the Efika MX code in the tree, we will have support for ARM-based laptops and even nettops (such as the Efika MX Smartop model) and we can continue pushing FreeBSD into ARM tablets and other ARM-based devices.
Capsicum Component Framework
Capsicum is a novel hybrid capability model that first appeared in FreeBSD 9.0, targeted at application compartmentalization: the mitigation of security vulnerabilities through decomposition of complex and risky applications into isolated components.
In the big picture, Capsicum provides a tight sandboxing mechanism where access to all global name spaces is restricted, and also allows actions that can be performed on file descriptors to be limited (file descriptors represent capabilities).
The purpose of my project was to make Capsicum more mature as well as easier to use by application developers.
The main part of the project was to create the Casper daemon, which is used by sandboxed processes to gain access to functionality that is not directly permitted within a sandbox. As an example, Casper provides a DNS service which can be use by sandboxed processes for host name resolution without the need to read /etc/resolv.conf or send any network packets to DNS servers.
Another part of the project was to remove capability wrapping descriptors - a special kind of file descriptors with a limited set of rights (e.g. a file descriptor which can be used only for reading, but not writing, fchmod, etc.). The capability wrapping descriptors were replaced with the ability to limit rights on any regular descriptor. This simplifies much of Capsicum's kernel support code and makes sandboxing more robust.
Initially the ioctl(2) system call was denied in capability mode (i.e. for sandboxed processes), because of its huge scope. Now, it is possible to limit the ioctl commands that can be performed within a sandbox, on a given descriptor. I also added the ability to control fcntl operations in a similar fashion.
Many bugs were fixed, many smaller improvements were made, and a lot of new regression tests were created along the way.
Capsicum is still on-going work, but thanks to funding from the FreeBSD Foundation and Google, it is maturing quickly and is starting to be used in real world applications (I personally use it in my other, FreeBSD Foundation sponsored, projects: HAST and auditdistd).
iSCSI Target
The goal of this project is to create a native, high performance, iSCSI target facility for FreeBSD. While configuration and connection setup and teardown are handled by a userland daemon, unlike previous target frameworks, all data-movement is performed in the kernel. The iSCSI target is fully integrated with the CAM Target Layer meaning that volumes can be backed by files or any block device. The hardware offload capabilities of modern network adapters will also be supported.
Much of the protocol and data movement logic can be shared between iSCSI target and initiator implementations. Once target support is robust, FreeBSD's existing iSCSI initiator will be updated to use many of the components developed for the target. This will improve initiator performance and add modern features such as InitialR2T.
The project is quickly progressing from a working prototype to a fully functional state; testing phase is expected to start in early January. After that the development will focus on implementing the hardware offload and performance tuning.
EuroBSDCon 2012
In October 2012, the 11th EuroBSDcon was held in the beautiful city of Warsaw in Poland. Four days of talking, learning about BSD, and of course exploring Polish culture (don't forget the Polish Hussars). The conference featured 2 tutorial days followed by two conference days on Saturday and Sunday. The conference consisted of a 2 track program, paralleled by a devsummit track on Saturday.
Traditionally, EuroBSDcon has a strong FreeBSD presence, but there is also enough room for the other BSD's. One of the reasons for the strong FreeBSD presence is the FreeBSD devsummit, which is held concurrently with the EuroBSDcon tutorial days.
The FreeBSD Foundation has been one of the regular sponsors over the years. This support plays an important role in making this an outstanding conference.
Besides sponsoring the conference, The FreeBSD Foundation also provides travel grants for visitors and developers who can not afford to go the conference on their own. This gives them the opportunity to visit the conference and exchange knowledge and ideas with other conference attendees, which greatly improves the value of having such conferences.
We are excited to announce that EuroBSDcon 2013 will be held September 28th-29th, 2013 (tutorials will be September 26th-27th) on Malta (St. Julian's area).
Cambridge Developer Summit 2012
Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of co-organizing the Cambridge DevSummit. Robert Watson, in contrast, had most of the stress, and others had the fun of running around and actually doing the work. This was a three-day event, with a documentation summit scheduled for the day before, organized primarily by Gavin Atkinson and Isabell Long.
This was the second such event hosted in Cambridge; the first in which no one fell in the river—possibly because the weather wasn't quite nice enough to encourage punting that week.
The three days of the main event were split into three sessions, with two tracks in each. I invited some visitors from ARM (who, conveniently, are just down the road) to attend one afternoon session. This was productive, and led to further engagement between the FreeBSD community and ARM. ARM is a customer-focused company, and those who may be interested in FreeBSD/ARM are potential customers of ARM's customers.
We finalized the schedule on the first day, filling an entire whiteboard with items that two or more people wanted to discuss and then splitting into groups. While a bit more advanced planning may have been helpful, our strategy worked relatively well this year. A short summary from each of the groups was presented in the final session and then published on the FreeBSD wiki.
The toolchain session, a big session, was of particular interest to me. We arrived at a tentative plan for throwing the switch to make clang the default compiler on FreeBSD-CURRENT. This was further discussed on the mailing list, and has now happened, bringing us one big step closer to a GPL-free FreeBSD 10.
An afternoon of short talks from researchers in the Cambridge Computer Lab involved either operating systems work in general or FreeBSD in particular. Robert Watson showed off a tablet running FreeBSD on a MIPS-compatible soft-core processor running on an Altera FPGA.
Cambridge, an old university town, predates the invention of hills and so is very amenable to cycling. We hired bikes for all non-local developers so they could get around easily.
The DevSummit dinner was hosted by St. John's College and cosponsored by Google and the FreeBSD Foundation. This enjoyable event, in the historic surroundings of a 500-year old college, provided a unique (and possibly never-to-be-repeated) opportunity of seeing a group of FreeBSD developers smartly dressed.
The day after the conference, Ollivier Robert organized a trip to Bletchley Park, which this year was celebrating Turing's centenary. Although it was an informative outing, I don't believe that it resulted in any concrete plans for a FreeBSD/Collossus port.
Bay Area Vendor Summit 2012
On November 8th The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored the FreeBSD Silicon Valley Vendor Summit. The summit was hosted by Yahoo at their Sunnyvale campus. We had over 50 participants from more than 20 different companies participate in the summit, which is a great turnout.
After a round of introductions we discussed the work that had been completed since the last summit, in May of 2012, including:
Altera IP core drivers
Amazon EC2 work
Comprehensive test framework (ATF)
DTrace on non-x86 (MIPS)
Intel graphics
Ivy Bridge hwpmc
clang/llvm MIPS
ZFS improvements
growfs on live fs
After going over the completed and still to be done items, we had a brief set of comments from Tom Hanrahan of Microsoft on HyperV support for FreeBSD. Microsoft's intention is to have full hypervisor support for FreeBSD and they are actively engaging with the community to get the proper drivers in the right places in our tree so that FreeBSD is a first class citizen in their system.
The first major presentation of the day was Jim Harris talking about VTune. VTune is a system to help developers understand the performance of their code. A small number of us have been working with Intel to get this software available on FreeBSD, as, at the moment, it is only available on Windows and Linux.
VTune includes two major components, a data collector and a visualization program. The collector has been ported to FreeBSD and is available as a pre-beta to interested developers. The visualization program continues to only be available on Windows and Linux, but since the collector and the visualizer are separate it is easy to collect information about programs, including the kernel, running on a FreeBSD host and display the results on another system. One feature that VTune continues to lack, but which Intel is working on, is support for call graphs. Right now the system can show you which line of code is causing a performance problem, which is quite useful, but it does not show the call graph, basically how your program happened to get to that point. This is a feature that Intel knows it needs on FreeBSD for the system to be completely accepted by vendors and other folks building high performance systems with FreeBSD. That being said, it's still an impressive piece of software and will definitely help people who care about performance tuning.
Jim says that those who are interested in using VTune in its current form should contact him directly to get ahold of the beta driver: Jim Harris . I've put up a "VTune How To" page on our Wiki and will be populating it over the next week.
After the morning break Adrian Chadd brought people up to date on what's going on with embedded systems and FreeBSD. There has been a good deal of progress here, in particular the work done recently on ARM processor support, with FreeBSD now running on several systems, including the BeagelBone, ShivaPlug, and the now ubiquitous Raspberry Pi. MIPS support continues to improve, with a significant chunk of work coming from the folks in Cambridge, as well as companies that are integrating FreeBSD on MIPS into their products. PowerPC is also moving along, although there remains a dearth of hardware on which to work. A good deal of discussion accompanied this section, in particular about what we need to do to get the rest of the system, i.e. ports and packages, up on these architectures. Here the story is also improving with a set of packages existing for ARM processors as well. People interested in this area should check out recent mail threads on arm@ and embedded@ as well as others.
After talking about embedded systems, Daichi Goto updated us on efforts with vendors in Japan. He and Hiroki Sato have been busy working with companies in Japan and have set up a BSD Consulting company which is working with large Japanese companies to build business services on top of FreeBSD, with a great deal of success. Other work they're doing includes getting a good deal of FreeBSD documentation and information translated into Japanese, so that it is more easily accessible to developers in Japan.
After a lunch break a new, at least to me, FreeBSD Vendor, CacheIQ gave a presentation about their product and their use of FreeBSD. CacheIQ builds an SSD based NFS caching system on top of FreeBSD and are interested in following the project's development tree more closely. What followed was a discussion of the project's release policies and best practices relating to developing a product with FreeBSD.
From CacheIQ we moved on to testing and ATF. Garrett Cooper presented the work he's been doing, in collaboration with Simon Gerraty and Marcel Moolenaar, to get ATF integrated into FreeBSD. ATF was originally written for NetBSD and has been in use there for a couple of years now. The goal is to have a good framework for automated testing in FreeBSD and to improve the quality of our testing. As anyone who has worked with test frameworks knows, there are many bike sheds to be avoided here, and Garrett, Simon and Marcel have worked quite hard to keep away from picking colors, and have instead gotten the system into shape and working on FreeBSD. [As of the writing of this newsletter ATF is now in HEAD under contrib/atf.]
Our last session of the day was creating a new have/need list for vendors with the twist this time that we added a "co sponsor" list. The FreeBSD Foundation is going to put up funds to co-sponsor development projects with companies working on FreeBSD. This has already been successfully done in the past with projects such as the NAND Flash project (co-sponsored with Juniper Networks) and others. The Foundation can't sponsor all these projects, but where there is an ability to get cooperation on funding the development it makes sense to get a few interested parties together to get the work done. The list of possible co-development projects includes:
NetConf Agent
EFI Boot on amd64
NDMP
MIPS Super Pages
SID Base Credentials and ACLs
Xen Dom 0
Upcoming summits are in March at AsiaBSDCon and May at BSDCan. Mark your calendars.
2012 Grant and Travel Grant Recipients
Every year we sponsor FreeBSD related conferences and travel to these events for FreeBSD contributors. We believe that BSD-centered and FreeBSD-specific conferences play the dual roles of expanding the FreeBSD user community and supporting collaborative development. The FreeBSD Foundation's travel grant program helps to reduce financial roadblocks to participation in these events.
Our grant recipients often send us amazing tales of their experiences, proving the value of this program to the FreeBSD community. You can find these stories and trip reports on our blog.
Here is a list of projects, developers, and conferences we have sponsored for 2012.
2012 Conference Grant Recipients:
AsiaBSDCon 2012 Conference
BSDCan 2012 Conference
Ottawa 2012 Developer Summit
Ottawa 2012 Vendor Summit
BSDDay 2012
EuroBSDCon 2012 Conference
Cambridge 2012 Developer Summit
Bay Area 2012 Vendor Summit
2012 Project Grant Recipients:
Edward Napierala - iSCSI Target project
Pawel Jakub Dawidek - Capsicum Component Framework
Edward Napierala - Growing Filesystmes Online
Björn Zeeb - IPv6 Performance Analysis
Pawel Jakub Dawidek - Implementing auditdistd
Semihalf - NAND Flash Support
Aleksandr Rybalko - Porting FreeBSD to Efika ARM platform
2012 Travel Grant Recipients:
BSDCan - Hiren Panchasara, Adrian Chadd, Florian Smeets, Ben Haga, Marius Strobl, Brooks Davis, Julien Laffaye, Warren Block, Daichi Goto, Giovanni Trematerra, Davide Italiano, Thomas Abthorpe
EuroBSDCon - Gabor Pali, Alberto Mijares, Gabor Kovesdan, Alexander Pronin
Open Help - Warren Block
MeetBSD - Mark Linimon
Faces of FreeBSD Series
Who are these people that receive money from the Foundation? How are your donations making a difference in the FreeBSD community? We've asked our grant recipients to share their stories with you in what we call the "Faces of FreeBSD" campaign. Tune in weekly to the FreeBSD Foundations's blog to hear how Foundation funding is used to run conferences, work on development projects, help with travel expenses to conferences, and to advocate for FreeBSD.
Looking for a recap of past stories? Here are our first two "Faces of FreeBSD":
Faces of FreeBSD - Dan Langille
Faces of FreeBSD - Alberto Mijares
Netflix
More than 30 million Netflix streaming members around the globe watch more than a billion hours of movies and TV shows each month. In the US, Netflix video streaming accounts for a third of peak downstream Internet traffic. Netflix created Open Connect, a single-purpose content delivery network, to help deliver these petabytes of data.
The main component of Open Connect is the Open Connect Appliance, a small-footprint network streaming device. The Open Connect Appliance is a 4U Intel-based server that is designed to economically maximize storage density in a space and power footprint that is ideal for both ISP data centers and metro-area network interchanges.
The Open Connect Appliance runs on FreeBSD 9. Netflix picked FreeBSD 9 because it is a high performing, low-maintenance and reliable operating system that is supported by major hardware vendors. FreeBSD 9 provides a foundation of reliability, performance, and hands-free manageability. Combined with NGINX, a light-weight and high performance Web server, FreeBSD 9 provides a simple but powerful solution that is capable of serving tens of thousands of simultaneous video streams across multiple 10Gbit fiber optic links.
Beyond its technical strengths, FreeBSD comes with an outstanding ecosystem of developers, vendors, and users who openly share expertise, talent, and technical improvements. Netflix has embraced this community and is committed to giving back its bug fixes and enhancements, thus completing the circle of community collaboration.
- David Fullagar, Director of Content Delivery Architecture, Netflix
MeetBSD Trip Report: Mark Linimon
The Foundation sponsored Mark Linimon's travel to California from October 28th to November 9th, 2012, to attend MeetBSD, the preceding Developer's Summit, the postceding Vendor Summit, and to perform work on the FreeBSD systems at ISC. Here is his trip report:
Developer Summit:
I gave a brief overview of the state of the Ports Collection, and invited those interested in more details to attend my talk at MeetBSD proper.
In addition, I answered a number of question in informal sessions from various developers and contributors, some of whom I had met before, and some whom I had not.
Among the issues brought up were ports on various architectures, cross-building ports or perhaps building ports under emulation, and plans for Content Distribution Networks.
Of particular note, I was able to interact in person with the Yahoo team (Peter Wemm, Sean Bruno, and Ben Haga) to talk about issues affecting our machines in the cluster.
MeetBSD:
I presented a session about the state of the Ports Collection on FreeBSD, and future directions. You may view my slides online.
In particular, I focused on the progress in our new packaging system pkgng; our reworked options system optionsng; the state of ports vs. clang; and the Redports distributed build testing system. It should be noted that hardware for both production package building and also Redports was purchased via Foundation funds.
I also attended other sessions that I found useful, especially Sean Bruno's explanation of qemu. I hope that we will be able to use this for cross-building ports in the future.
Vendor Summit:
At the Vendor Summit mostly I was an observer. However, I did present a brief explanation of the status of the ports tree, and how that might affect the vendors. As well, I chatted informally with Tom Hanrahan of Microsoft's Hyper-V effort about how best to interact with the FreeBSD community. In addition, I was able to interact with a number of other representatives from vendors who had questions about the Ports Collection, particularly about building for non-x86 architectures.
ISC:
The ISC systems needed some major work.
For one day overlapping my trip, Simon Nielsen was also on-site and did the preliminary install of 7 new Atom servers. These were purchased by the Foundation to be administration servers for a future fallover facility for the main Yahoo systems. I continued this work and did other work as follows:
Developer Summit:
I gave a brief overview of the state of the Ports Collection, and invited those interested in more details to attend my talk at MeetBSD proper.
In addition, I answered a number of question in informal sessions from various developers and contributors, some of whom I had met before, and some whom I had not.
Among the issues brought up were ports on various architectures, cross-building ports or perhaps building ports under emulation, and plans for Content Distribution Networks.
Of particular note, I was able to interact in person with the Yahoo team (Peter Wemm, Sean Bruno, and Ben Haga) to talk about issues affecting our machines in the cluster.
MeetBSD:
I presented a session about the state of the Ports Collection on FreeBSD, and future directions. You may view my slides online.
In particular, I focused on the progress in our new packaging system pkgng; our reworked options system optionsng; the state of ports vs. clang; and the Redports distributed build testing system. It should be noted that hardware for both production package building and also Redports was purchased via Foundation funds.
I also attended other sessions that I found useful, especially Sean Bruno's explanation of qemu. I hope that we will be able to use this for cross-building ports in the future.
Vendor Summit:
At the Vendor Summit mostly I was an observer. However, I did present a brief explanation of the status of the ports tree, and how that might affect the vendors. As well, I chatted informally with Tom Hanrahan of Microsoft's Hyper-V effort about how best to interact with the FreeBSD community. In addition, I was able to interact with a number of other representatives from vendors who had questions about the Ports Collection, particularly about building for non-x86 architectures.
ISC:
The ISC systems needed some major work.
For one day overlapping my trip, Simon Nielsen was also on-site and did the preliminary install of 7 new Atom servers. These were purchased by the Foundation to be administration servers for a future fallover facility for the main Yahoo systems. I continued this work and did other work as follows:
- I moved most of the Ethernet cables from the old, unmanaged, switches to the Juniper EX3300 managed switch that Simon had also installed.
- I wired serial cables to the new Atom servers and verified that they worked properly.
- I returned one of the Atom servers to iXsystems for an RMA. It turned out that the CPU had suffered early failure. I reinstalled the system once they were finished.
- We still had several systems in rack B2, which ISC wishes us to vacate. Since the portmgr-owened systems there were offline due to other reasons, I relocated them. Two systems still remain.
- I deinstalled a power controller that had failed.
- The cable situation had become sub-optimal. In many cases, the only cables that had been on hand were 25' or more. It was barely possible to get to the back of the systems, and airflow was a problem. I installed various shorter lengths of cable, and correctly color-coded them while doing so.
- I verified all the connections to the console server and the PDUs.
- I attempted to install a new hard drive on our PowerPC server there. However, without a CDROM drive, that system is hard to work with. Instead, I carried the hard drive back to Austin, where I will format it up on my similar system here and send it back to ISC.
- I purchased a second power supply for the Coverity machine.
- I removed rack slides from the systems on which those slides do not fit into the shallow racks there.
- I purchased some rack shelves that will stand in for these slides to help us manage our physical space. They still need to be installed.
- I physically labeled all the systems.
- I annotated all the above in our administration database.
Foundation at LISA
There will be a FreeBSD booth in the exhibition area of LISA, to be held at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina in San Diego, CA. Exhibition hours are Wednesday, December 12 from 12:00–19:00 p.m and Thursday, December 13 from 9:30–14:00. Registration is required for this event, but is free for the exhibition area.
In addition to accepting donations for the Foundation, we'll be giving out copies of PC-BSD and FreeNAS as well as some cool swag. If you are in the San Diego area, drop by and say hi!
In addition to accepting donations for the Foundation, we'll be giving out copies of PC-BSD and FreeNAS as well as some cool swag. If you are in the San Diego area, drop by and say hi!
Year-End Fundraising Campaign
Dear FreeBSD Community,
Your donations have helped make FreeBSD the best OS available! By investing in The FreeBSD Foundation you have helped us keep FreeBSD a high-performance, secure, and stable operating system.
Thanks to people like you, the FreeBSD Foundation has been proudly supporting the FreeBSD Project and community for 12 years now. We are incredibly grateful for all the support we receive from you and so many individuals and organizations that value FreeBSD. As of this writing we have raised $250,000 towards our goal of raising $500,000. Would you consider making a gift to support our work in 2013?
Donations can easily be made here.
This year your donations helped FreeBSD by:
The FreeBSD Foundation is well known for its successful development projects. Our 2013 plans are even more ambitious and we have recently hired two full-time technical staff members to help achieve these goals.
But are you aware of the tangible benefits derived from our support of the FreeBSD community? The words from one of our travel grant recipients, Alberto Mijares, help tell that story:
“Attending EuroBSDCon motivated me so much that I organized a meeting with my peers just to share my experiences. I gave a talk about IPv6 and FreeBSD at a local student event. I also want to take the BSD certification exam at BSDCan and I’m planning a big BSD event in my country in 2013 or early 2014.�
Alberto also recently submitted a PR with a new port for the Ports Collection and he’s joining the effort to translate the updated FreeBSD handbook into Spanish. He also wants to become a BSD Certification exam facilitator.
And there are so many others we support who are a part of the FreeBSD movement! Stay tuned as we begin our Faces of FreeBSD Campaign. Starting this month we will be spotlighting different people on our website and FaceBook page who have received funding to work on development projects, run conferences, travel to conferences, and advocate for FreeBSD. The numbers are growing thanks to your support!
Donate today to help us continue and increase our support of the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide! Making a donation is quick and easy.
Your donations have helped make FreeBSD the best OS available! By investing in The FreeBSD Foundation you have helped us keep FreeBSD a high-performance, secure, and stable operating system.
Thanks to people like you, the FreeBSD Foundation has been proudly supporting the FreeBSD Project and community for 12 years now. We are incredibly grateful for all the support we receive from you and so many individuals and organizations that value FreeBSD. As of this writing we have raised $250,000 towards our goal of raising $500,000. Would you consider making a gift to support our work in 2013?
Donations can easily be made here.
This year your donations helped FreeBSD by:
- Funding development projects to improve FreeBSD, including: Capsicum Application Sandboxing, Growing UFS Filesystems Online, the NAND Flash File System, IPv6 Performance Analysis and Improvements, Distributed Security Audit Logging, and porting FreeBSD to the Efika ARM platform.
- Educating the public and promoting FreeBSD. We produced a high-quality FreeBSD 9 brochure and visited companies to help facilitate collaboration efforts with the Project.
- Sponsoring BSD conferences and summits in Europe, Japan, Canada, and the US.
- Protecting FreeBSD IP and providing legal support to the Project.
- Purchasing hardware to build and improve FreeBSD project infrastructure.
The FreeBSD Foundation is well known for its successful development projects. Our 2013 plans are even more ambitious and we have recently hired two full-time technical staff members to help achieve these goals.
But are you aware of the tangible benefits derived from our support of the FreeBSD community? The words from one of our travel grant recipients, Alberto Mijares, help tell that story:
“Attending EuroBSDCon motivated me so much that I organized a meeting with my peers just to share my experiences. I gave a talk about IPv6 and FreeBSD at a local student event. I also want to take the BSD certification exam at BSDCan and I’m planning a big BSD event in my country in 2013 or early 2014.�
Alberto also recently submitted a PR with a new port for the Ports Collection and he’s joining the effort to translate the updated FreeBSD handbook into Spanish. He also wants to become a BSD Certification exam facilitator.
And there are so many others we support who are a part of the FreeBSD movement! Stay tuned as we begin our Faces of FreeBSD Campaign. Starting this month we will be spotlighting different people on our website and FaceBook page who have received funding to work on development projects, run conferences, travel to conferences, and advocate for FreeBSD. The numbers are growing thanks to your support!
Donate today to help us continue and increase our support of the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide! Making a donation is quick and easy.
EuroBSDCon Trip Report: Gabor Pali
The next trip report is from Gabor Pali:
This year the FreeBSD Foundation helped me with travelling to EuroBSDcon organized in Warsaw, Poland, in the beautiful building of the Warsaw University of Technology. It is an excellent opportunity to meet fellow developers in person and discuss some of the on-going issues or just to hang out somewhere in a nice European city while drinking some fine local beer.
Similar to the previous years, I volunteered to organize and lead the ssociated FreeBSD Developer Summit (overlapping with the tutorials) and chair the Developer Summit Track at the main conference. This was my third time as a "remote organizer", and thanks to Pawel Jakub Dawidek and the student volunteers at the Warsaw Univesity of Technology, everything went smooth, resulting in a productive summit. I tried to improve the format learned from the BSDCan developer summit organizers, and offer the visiting developers a way to exploit their time spent together well.
Besides taking care of the usual organization tasks, I also had some time to actively participate in some of the sessions during the summit. For example, I shared my experiences earned in teaching university courses from a practical aspect at the "Teaching FreeBSD as a University Course" group, lead by Benedict Reuschling. I think one could manage to find complete but not-that-complicated real-life examples in the source code that could serve as a demonstration tool to introduce problems and their potential solutions. This motivates students as they can see what causes headaches to the FreeBSD developers and how they try to resolve issues. As a special guest for this session, Pawel brought Andrzej Tobola, a lecturer from the University, who has been using FreeBSD for a long time and he uses it for teaching. He provided us with interesting feedback.
Again, similar to previous years, I managed to put a schedule together for the Developer Summit Track as part of EuroBSDcon 2012. It featured brief summaries of the working group leaders, so the conference visitors could see what is planned in the FreeBSD Project these days. But we also had many interesting talks on many of the work-in-progress projects: the XML transition in the documentation source tree, the plans for the new ports building infrastructure, and the presentations of some of our Google Summer of Code students from this year. I joined as well and gave a presentation on the project I did at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory during the summer. This featured the FreeBSD port of the Mirage network stack, which is written in OCaml.
From the conference, Dan Langille's inspiring talk comes to my mind: he decided to reveal his secrets on how he organizes the premier BSD conference in Canada, BSDCan. I am glad that he did so and finally made it to Europe to see how his competitors are doing. I found his presentation very useful as it perfectly supported the experiences I have earned so far.
I really enjoyed the developer summit and the associated dinners, as well as the conference and the city itself. I think the fellow organizers did their best to bring the spirit of the European BSD Conferences to Warsaw -- and do not forget that this was also made possible with the help of its gold sponsor, the FreeBSD Foundation. Every donation to the Foundation helps us to maintain the tradition of such a great conference.
This year the FreeBSD Foundation helped me with travelling to EuroBSDcon organized in Warsaw, Poland, in the beautiful building of the Warsaw University of Technology. It is an excellent opportunity to meet fellow developers in person and discuss some of the on-going issues or just to hang out somewhere in a nice European city while drinking some fine local beer.
Similar to the previous years, I volunteered to organize and lead the ssociated FreeBSD Developer Summit (overlapping with the tutorials) and chair the Developer Summit Track at the main conference. This was my third time as a "remote organizer", and thanks to Pawel Jakub Dawidek and the student volunteers at the Warsaw Univesity of Technology, everything went smooth, resulting in a productive summit. I tried to improve the format learned from the BSDCan developer summit organizers, and offer the visiting developers a way to exploit their time spent together well.
Besides taking care of the usual organization tasks, I also had some time to actively participate in some of the sessions during the summit. For example, I shared my experiences earned in teaching university courses from a practical aspect at the "Teaching FreeBSD as a University Course" group, lead by Benedict Reuschling. I think one could manage to find complete but not-that-complicated real-life examples in the source code that could serve as a demonstration tool to introduce problems and their potential solutions. This motivates students as they can see what causes headaches to the FreeBSD developers and how they try to resolve issues. As a special guest for this session, Pawel brought Andrzej Tobola, a lecturer from the University, who has been using FreeBSD for a long time and he uses it for teaching. He provided us with interesting feedback.
Again, similar to previous years, I managed to put a schedule together for the Developer Summit Track as part of EuroBSDcon 2012. It featured brief summaries of the working group leaders, so the conference visitors could see what is planned in the FreeBSD Project these days. But we also had many interesting talks on many of the work-in-progress projects: the XML transition in the documentation source tree, the plans for the new ports building infrastructure, and the presentations of some of our Google Summer of Code students from this year. I joined as well and gave a presentation on the project I did at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory during the summer. This featured the FreeBSD port of the Mirage network stack, which is written in OCaml.
From the conference, Dan Langille's inspiring talk comes to my mind: he decided to reveal his secrets on how he organizes the premier BSD conference in Canada, BSDCan. I am glad that he did so and finally made it to Europe to see how his competitors are doing. I found his presentation very useful as it perfectly supported the experiences I have earned so far.
I really enjoyed the developer summit and the associated dinners, as well as the conference and the city itself. I think the fellow organizers did their best to bring the spirit of the European BSD Conferences to Warsaw -- and do not forget that this was also made possible with the help of its gold sponsor, the FreeBSD Foundation. Every donation to the Foundation helps us to maintain the tradition of such a great conference.
EuroBSDCon Trip Report: Gabor Kövesdán
The next trip report is from Gabor Kövesdán:
It was my very first time at a FreeBSD Developer Summit and a EuroBSDCon and I was very excited about it. Recently, I have been actively working on two important projects, which I wanted to discuss and report about. One of them is the XML migration and clean up of the documentation and the second one is the regular expression code.
I arrived on October 17 in Warsaw and I was about to go to the dinner but it was really late when I arrived at the accommodation and got prepared for the dinner. But I met some of the other developers after dinner and we had some interesting conversations, but no one stayed too long at the hacking lounge because next day’s developer summit was scheduled to start at 8 am.
On the next day I arrived on time at the developer summit. There was a bit of delay since the majority of the people had problems finding the place on time. After the short opening talk, I participated in the Toolchain working group. I am not directly involved in the toolchain and compiler work in the source tree but I have been working on important command-line utilities like grep and sort, which are usually used in build processes and I work on some massive changes on the documentation infrastructure, which also has a build system, so I thought it was an interesting session for me. I learned about the ongoing work and bmake’s more advanced features. Someone raised performance questions and utilities so we also talked a bit about grep and similar things. I didn’t stay at the afternoon’s session because I still wanted to polish some stuff I was going to present the next day.
The second day of the developer summit was very productive. We started with the documentation session and we covered lots of important topics. The two most important I want to highlight was the XML and toolchain migration and the printed edition of the Handbook. I summarized the rationale of the changes and I presented rendered output made with the old and the suggested new tools and I also showed some other pdf documentations from open source projects. I highlighted in what sense I think we are behind and what we should do to have a modern and pleasant look. In fact, our HTML documentation is visually quite nice but if we compare it to the printable output, the latter is far behind. We could render fancy and modern output with much more advanced features with Apache FOP but it depends on Java, which raised some concerns. I emphasized that Java would only be required for printable formats, which are not built by default, not even on FreeBSD.org, so the impact of this dependency is not that serious. The second most viable solution would require LaTeX, which is also a heavy dependency and we do not even have good LaTeX support in FreeBSD since the TeXLive ports are not yet ready for production use. As for the Handbook work, we talked about different options to reorganize current content and other items that need to be done before publishing, like updating indexterms, glossary, and adding more conceptual figures to help understanding the textual explanations. We also mentioned some possibilities of an ebook format. We also talked a bit about tooling and the possibility of using UTF-8 as a unique global encoding. For this, we invited Ed Schouten, who gave us a bit of a status report and overview of what is ready and what needs to be done to fully support UTF-8 at the console. After the documentation session, I participated in the vendor summit where we heard useful industry experiences from third-party vendors. I then talked a bit to Ulrich Spörlein about some ideas concerning mdocml.
The first day of the conference, I participated in the developer summit track and presented my two projects. After the presentation I got some encouraging words from some participants and now I have a potential tester for this work. I spent the rest of the day at the developer summit track, listening to fellow developers and all of the talks were quite interesting.
The final day I listened to the BHyVe and the ZFS talks and then I was hanging around in the sponsors room thinking about and discussing the Handbook reorganization. I talked about it to other developers and I also interchanged some experiences with a NetBSD doc fellow. I am really glad that I participated at the conference since it was a really good experience both from a technical and a social viewpoint. I am very thankful to the FreeBSD Foundation that made this trip possible!
It was my very first time at a FreeBSD Developer Summit and a EuroBSDCon and I was very excited about it. Recently, I have been actively working on two important projects, which I wanted to discuss and report about. One of them is the XML migration and clean up of the documentation and the second one is the regular expression code.
I arrived on October 17 in Warsaw and I was about to go to the dinner but it was really late when I arrived at the accommodation and got prepared for the dinner. But I met some of the other developers after dinner and we had some interesting conversations, but no one stayed too long at the hacking lounge because next day’s developer summit was scheduled to start at 8 am.
On the next day I arrived on time at the developer summit. There was a bit of delay since the majority of the people had problems finding the place on time. After the short opening talk, I participated in the Toolchain working group. I am not directly involved in the toolchain and compiler work in the source tree but I have been working on important command-line utilities like grep and sort, which are usually used in build processes and I work on some massive changes on the documentation infrastructure, which also has a build system, so I thought it was an interesting session for me. I learned about the ongoing work and bmake’s more advanced features. Someone raised performance questions and utilities so we also talked a bit about grep and similar things. I didn’t stay at the afternoon’s session because I still wanted to polish some stuff I was going to present the next day.
The second day of the developer summit was very productive. We started with the documentation session and we covered lots of important topics. The two most important I want to highlight was the XML and toolchain migration and the printed edition of the Handbook. I summarized the rationale of the changes and I presented rendered output made with the old and the suggested new tools and I also showed some other pdf documentations from open source projects. I highlighted in what sense I think we are behind and what we should do to have a modern and pleasant look. In fact, our HTML documentation is visually quite nice but if we compare it to the printable output, the latter is far behind. We could render fancy and modern output with much more advanced features with Apache FOP but it depends on Java, which raised some concerns. I emphasized that Java would only be required for printable formats, which are not built by default, not even on FreeBSD.org, so the impact of this dependency is not that serious. The second most viable solution would require LaTeX, which is also a heavy dependency and we do not even have good LaTeX support in FreeBSD since the TeXLive ports are not yet ready for production use. As for the Handbook work, we talked about different options to reorganize current content and other items that need to be done before publishing, like updating indexterms, glossary, and adding more conceptual figures to help understanding the textual explanations. We also mentioned some possibilities of an ebook format. We also talked a bit about tooling and the possibility of using UTF-8 as a unique global encoding. For this, we invited Ed Schouten, who gave us a bit of a status report and overview of what is ready and what needs to be done to fully support UTF-8 at the console. After the documentation session, I participated in the vendor summit where we heard useful industry experiences from third-party vendors. I then talked a bit to Ulrich Spörlein about some ideas concerning mdocml.
The first day of the conference, I participated in the developer summit track and presented my two projects. After the presentation I got some encouraging words from some participants and now I have a potential tester for this work. I spent the rest of the day at the developer summit track, listening to fellow developers and all of the talks were quite interesting.
The final day I listened to the BHyVe and the ZFS talks and then I was hanging around in the sponsors room thinking about and discussing the Handbook reorganization. I talked about it to other developers and I also interchanged some experiences with a NetBSD doc fellow. I am really glad that I participated at the conference since it was a really good experience both from a technical and a social viewpoint. I am very thankful to the FreeBSD Foundation that made this trip possible!
EuroBSDCon Trip Report: Alexander Pronin
The Foundation sponsored several developers to attend the EuroBSDCon DevSummit and conference in October. Here is the trip report from Alexander Pronin, a GSoC student who worked on parallelization in the ports collection and pkgng utility.
I arrived in Warsaw on Wednesday. After dropping off my luggage at the hotel Gromada Centrum, I stayed for the rest of the day at the hotel, preparing for the coming devsummit. Unfortunately, I was late to join devsummit participants for dinner and discussion of the coming devsummit.
The next day the devsummit started. The first person I met was Pali Gabor Janos, the devsummit organizer. I also became acquainted with Aleksander Dutkowski, another Google Summer of Code student at The FreeBSD Project. During the briefing part of the devsummit, participants introduced themselves and went to the working group rooms. First, I attended the Ports working group. The working group covered the following topics. Beat described the current state of movement to SVN, and explained problems that he faced and the long period of movement to the SVN repository. Finally, utilities that still work with the CVS repository were covered. Then Baptiste Daroussin discussed the current state and further implementation of the pkgng utility, as well as topics related to build cluster, such as the new portbuild2 script and schedule of building of binary packages sets. Unfortunately, the problem of UNIQUENAME global variable is still open. Finally, the new options framework and default sets of options for various FreeBSD builds were discussed. Kris Moore also took part in this discussion in scope of default options for PC-BSD.
During lunch I met Gavin Atkinson. He kindly offered his help in case of any questions or if I need his help with introduction to somebody in the community. I also get acquainted with Ulrich Spoerlein. We discussed the current state of mirroring FreeBSD source code to GitHub, the importance and benefits of his work, and the importance of maintaining GitHub repositories for GSoC students at The FreeBSD Project. Then I met Aleksandr Rybalko who works on porting FreeBSD to embedded platforms in the Ukraine.
After lunch I attended the OS Course working group, where we discussed different techniques of teaching FreeBSD at Universities, such as a FreeBSD administration course and FreeBSD system programming course. During this discussion, the most important and interesting aspects of FreeBSD where outlined as well as potential student projects and student materials. I met Andrzej Tobola, with whom I discussed academic research in Poland. After the discussion group I met with Benedict Reuschling (leader of the group) and spoke about the possibilities of teaching FreeBSD at his university, and possible relations between FreeBSD and PhD academic research.
During dinner I talked to Hiroki Sato on usage of FreeBSD in students circles. I met with Eric Allman and Kirk McKusick, we talked a bit on my future talk in the scope of the Devsummit Track.
The second day I attended the Quality Assurance Testing group, where Hiroki Sato presented his Documentation testing framework. Necessary testing environments for ports commiters were also covered. Then went the vendor group, where Alistair Crooks gave a very interesting talk on Netflix and FreeBSD. Finally I visited the Desktop working group with Kris Moore as leader. After dinner I get acquainted with Baptiste Daroussin, with whom I discussed my GSoC project, and the state of my changes. He also encouraged me to start setting up a roadmap for commiting my changes to the source tree.
The third day of the conference started. Eric Allman gave a keynote talk on the OpenSource project life cycle in comparison with academic research projects and commercial projects. I stayed at the Devsummit Track, where I gave my talk after lunch. After my presentation, I talked to Kirk McKusick on the state of my project, and he also encouraged me to get up to speed and prepare my changes for the source tree. After the Devsummit Track I attended Marc Espie’s presentation dedicated to the packaging system in OpenBSD.
During the Social event Brooks Davis gave me a short talk regarding the current state and future changes in the ports collection and related utilities, and shared his experience with me regarding contribution to the ports source.
On the last day of conference I attended the following talks:
And finally, Kirk McKusick gave his overview of different types of locking in the FreeBSD kernel, and discussed where each type of locking is appropriate and why.
I arrived in Warsaw on Wednesday. After dropping off my luggage at the hotel Gromada Centrum, I stayed for the rest of the day at the hotel, preparing for the coming devsummit. Unfortunately, I was late to join devsummit participants for dinner and discussion of the coming devsummit.
The next day the devsummit started. The first person I met was Pali Gabor Janos, the devsummit organizer. I also became acquainted with Aleksander Dutkowski, another Google Summer of Code student at The FreeBSD Project. During the briefing part of the devsummit, participants introduced themselves and went to the working group rooms. First, I attended the Ports working group. The working group covered the following topics. Beat described the current state of movement to SVN, and explained problems that he faced and the long period of movement to the SVN repository. Finally, utilities that still work with the CVS repository were covered. Then Baptiste Daroussin discussed the current state and further implementation of the pkgng utility, as well as topics related to build cluster, such as the new portbuild2 script and schedule of building of binary packages sets. Unfortunately, the problem of UNIQUENAME global variable is still open. Finally, the new options framework and default sets of options for various FreeBSD builds were discussed. Kris Moore also took part in this discussion in scope of default options for PC-BSD.
During lunch I met Gavin Atkinson. He kindly offered his help in case of any questions or if I need his help with introduction to somebody in the community. I also get acquainted with Ulrich Spoerlein. We discussed the current state of mirroring FreeBSD source code to GitHub, the importance and benefits of his work, and the importance of maintaining GitHub repositories for GSoC students at The FreeBSD Project. Then I met Aleksandr Rybalko who works on porting FreeBSD to embedded platforms in the Ukraine.
After lunch I attended the OS Course working group, where we discussed different techniques of teaching FreeBSD at Universities, such as a FreeBSD administration course and FreeBSD system programming course. During this discussion, the most important and interesting aspects of FreeBSD where outlined as well as potential student projects and student materials. I met Andrzej Tobola, with whom I discussed academic research in Poland. After the discussion group I met with Benedict Reuschling (leader of the group) and spoke about the possibilities of teaching FreeBSD at his university, and possible relations between FreeBSD and PhD academic research.
During dinner I talked to Hiroki Sato on usage of FreeBSD in students circles. I met with Eric Allman and Kirk McKusick, we talked a bit on my future talk in the scope of the Devsummit Track.
The second day I attended the Quality Assurance Testing group, where Hiroki Sato presented his Documentation testing framework. Necessary testing environments for ports commiters were also covered. Then went the vendor group, where Alistair Crooks gave a very interesting talk on Netflix and FreeBSD. Finally I visited the Desktop working group with Kris Moore as leader. After dinner I get acquainted with Baptiste Daroussin, with whom I discussed my GSoC project, and the state of my changes. He also encouraged me to start setting up a roadmap for commiting my changes to the source tree.
The third day of the conference started. Eric Allman gave a keynote talk on the OpenSource project life cycle in comparison with academic research projects and commercial projects. I stayed at the Devsummit Track, where I gave my talk after lunch. After my presentation, I talked to Kirk McKusick on the state of my project, and he also encouraged me to get up to speed and prepare my changes for the source tree. After the Devsummit Track I attended Marc Espie’s presentation dedicated to the packaging system in OpenBSD.
During the Social event Brooks Davis gave me a short talk regarding the current state and future changes in the ports collection and related utilities, and shared his experience with me regarding contribution to the ports source.
On the last day of conference I attended the following talks:
- The BHyVe Hypervisor In Depth (Michael Dexter)
- Tips on running a conference for 250 people all by yourself (Dan Langille)
- OpenBSD and ‘real’ threads (Philip Guenther)
- Touch your NetBSD (Pierre Pronchery)
- A Fault Aware Global Server Load Balancer in DNS (Stefan D. Caunter, Allan C. Jude)
And finally, Kirk McKusick gave his overview of different types of locking in the FreeBSD kernel, and discussed where each type of locking is appropriate and why.
New Funded Project: Porting Efika
The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Aleksandr Rybalko has been awarded a grant to port FreeBSD to the Genesi Efika MX SmartBook laptop and SmartTop nettop devices.
Both use the Freescale i.MX515, an ARM Cortex-A8 System-on-Chip (SoC). These low power devices will provide convenient reference platforms for FreeBSD on ARM, as they are low-cost complete systems. The Smartbook includes a 10" display, 3G connectivity and a battery life of 6 to 8 hours for $199.
When this project is completed, it will be possible to run X11 applications on FreeBSD on the Efika, with full support for sound and networking. It will also make it much easier to support other devices, such as some Android tablets, that ship with the i.MX515 SoC.
This project will be completed by the end of 2012.
Both use the Freescale i.MX515, an ARM Cortex-A8 System-on-Chip (SoC). These low power devices will provide convenient reference platforms for FreeBSD on ARM, as they are low-cost complete systems. The Smartbook includes a 10" display, 3G connectivity and a battery life of 6 to 8 hours for $199.
When this project is completed, it will be possible to run X11 applications on FreeBSD on the Efika, with full support for sound and networking. It will also make it much easier to support other devices, such as some Android tablets, that ship with the i.MX515 SoC.
This project will be completed by the end of 2012.
Foundation Gold Sponsor of EuroBSDCon
The Foundation is proud to be a gold sponsor of EuroBSDCon, to be held at the Warsaw Univeristy of Technology in Warsaw, Poland from October 18-21. EuroBSDcon is the European annual technical conference gathering users and developers working on and with BSD based operating systems family and related projects. This year's keynote speakers include Marshall Kirk McKusick and Robert Watson.
Several members of the Foundation will be at the conference. Stop by the FreeBSD booth in the expo area to check out our latest brochures, swag, make a donation, and discuss funded projects.
Several members of the Foundation will be at the conference. Stop by the FreeBSD booth in the expo area to check out our latest brochures, swag, make a donation, and discuss funded projects.
Foundation at OLF
The Foundation will be at Ohio LinuxFest on Saturday, September 29 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center, in the downtown arena-district Columbus, Ohio. As usual, we'll be accepting donations for the Foundation, answering questions about funded projects, and will have some brochures and cool swag. Registration is free for this event, so if you are in the area, drop by the booth in the expo area and say hi!
OpenHelp Trip Report: Warren Block
Warren Block of the documentation team recently submitted his trip report for the OpenHelp Documentation Conference:
The Open Help Conference was held in Newport, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio. Shaun McCance, the GNOME documentation team's "Fearless Leader", organized the conference to bring together open source documentation groups. Dru Lavigne of PC-BSD asked me earlier this year to attend, and the FreeBSD Foundation graciously sponsored the trip. Conference attendance was rather small, but as the conference went on, it turned out that a smaller group allowed for different, more personal discussions which I really enjoyed.
Several of the attendees arrived two days early to work on an open source style guide. Trying to start a project from scratch turns out to be surprisingly difficult. We spent a great deal of time talking about the issues that affect documentation, and particularly open source documentation. Content issues like tense, passive or active voice, weasel words like "should", compound words, and translation all came up. How to organize such a document is a huge question also. Then there were project issues, like what license to use, where to host, what type of markup language to use, even what to call the document. The nice thing about existing projects is that while you may not be particularly happy with the rules or decisions, you are at least freed from making all those decisions to work on actual content. In the end, an archive was created on gitorious with a collection of some of the basic ideas.
The conference itself began with Florian Nadge of SUSE and his talk, Writing for Translation. As an American, I can barely speak English, yet there was a lot of crossover between the concepts of writing to make translation easy, and writing for clarity. Many of the concepts are the same: keeping sentences short, not combining multiple ideas into one sentence, avoiding things that are difficult to translate like humor and jargon. Another interesting point was that translation teams are often the first people in a country to be introduced to software, and the same people can become valued contributors. Several recommendations that we should add to the FreeBSD documentation Primer include active voice, consistent words for the same meaning, and keeping sentences to less than 23 words.
I followed with my presentation on automated documentation proofreading with igor (textproc/igor). The concept of making documentation easier to write by having the computer proofread everything that can be automated is a surprising idea to some people. As usual, people were fascinated with features that seemed simple to me, and vice versa. This is one of the best reasons for these conferences: the cross-pollination of ideas.
Next up were a series of shorter talks on tools. Janet Swisher of Mozilla gave a demonstration of Popcorn Maker, an HTML5 Javascript library from http://popcornjs.org/ that allows integrating video into documentation. The really clever part of this is that it can use existing video without any changes, tying a particular point in a video to a link in documentation, or the other way around.
Anne Gentle of OpenStack talked about Clouddocs Maven, a web-based documentation system. Shaun McCance spoke on ITS Tool, a program that assists in translating XML with PO files. It is in FreeBSD ports as textproc/itstool.
The second day of the conference had more usable information. Jean Weber of the LibreOffice documentation team discussed how they produce documentation with a very small team of diverse contributors. Florian Nadge spoke about Publican, the Red Hat DocBook XML toolchain.
Shaun McCance gave another presentation, this time on making documentation accessible for people with differing physical abilities. As with the other talks, there were surprising crossovers. For instance, help systems that require a mouse are unusable for people with limited movement, but also on a factory floor where there is no place to put a mouse. Audio and video help face similar restrictions.
After the presentations, the group had a series of far-ranging talks covering such subjects as how to encourage users to become contributors, how to encourage under-represented groups to become involved in open source, and how to reward and retain contributors.
Finally, on Monday, Dru and I participated in a doc sprint. We covered use of some of the FreeBSD documentation tools, and took and closed a PR as an example. She documented--and I occasionally helped identify--the packages needed to run Publican on FreeBSD. Since then, Steve Wills created a full port, textproc/publican.
The conference was a great experience. As a side note, Newport and Cincinnati were great towns.
My thanks to Dru Lavigne for inviting me, Shaun McCance for hosting the conference, all the attendees for their participation, and particularly the FreeBSD Foundation for making it possible for me to attend.
The Open Help Conference was held in Newport, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio. Shaun McCance, the GNOME documentation team's "Fearless Leader", organized the conference to bring together open source documentation groups. Dru Lavigne of PC-BSD asked me earlier this year to attend, and the FreeBSD Foundation graciously sponsored the trip. Conference attendance was rather small, but as the conference went on, it turned out that a smaller group allowed for different, more personal discussions which I really enjoyed.
Several of the attendees arrived two days early to work on an open source style guide. Trying to start a project from scratch turns out to be surprisingly difficult. We spent a great deal of time talking about the issues that affect documentation, and particularly open source documentation. Content issues like tense, passive or active voice, weasel words like "should", compound words, and translation all came up. How to organize such a document is a huge question also. Then there were project issues, like what license to use, where to host, what type of markup language to use, even what to call the document. The nice thing about existing projects is that while you may not be particularly happy with the rules or decisions, you are at least freed from making all those decisions to work on actual content. In the end, an archive was created on gitorious with a collection of some of the basic ideas.
The conference itself began with Florian Nadge of SUSE and his talk, Writing for Translation. As an American, I can barely speak English, yet there was a lot of crossover between the concepts of writing to make translation easy, and writing for clarity. Many of the concepts are the same: keeping sentences short, not combining multiple ideas into one sentence, avoiding things that are difficult to translate like humor and jargon. Another interesting point was that translation teams are often the first people in a country to be introduced to software, and the same people can become valued contributors. Several recommendations that we should add to the FreeBSD documentation Primer include active voice, consistent words for the same meaning, and keeping sentences to less than 23 words.
I followed with my presentation on automated documentation proofreading with igor (textproc/igor). The concept of making documentation easier to write by having the computer proofread everything that can be automated is a surprising idea to some people. As usual, people were fascinated with features that seemed simple to me, and vice versa. This is one of the best reasons for these conferences: the cross-pollination of ideas.
Next up were a series of shorter talks on tools. Janet Swisher of Mozilla gave a demonstration of Popcorn Maker, an HTML5 Javascript library from http://popcornjs.org/ that allows integrating video into documentation. The really clever part of this is that it can use existing video without any changes, tying a particular point in a video to a link in documentation, or the other way around.
Anne Gentle of OpenStack talked about Clouddocs Maven, a web-based documentation system. Shaun McCance spoke on ITS Tool, a program that assists in translating XML with PO files. It is in FreeBSD ports as textproc/itstool.
The second day of the conference had more usable information. Jean Weber of the LibreOffice documentation team discussed how they produce documentation with a very small team of diverse contributors. Florian Nadge spoke about Publican, the Red Hat DocBook XML toolchain.
Shaun McCance gave another presentation, this time on making documentation accessible for people with differing physical abilities. As with the other talks, there were surprising crossovers. For instance, help systems that require a mouse are unusable for people with limited movement, but also on a factory floor where there is no place to put a mouse. Audio and video help face similar restrictions.
After the presentations, the group had a series of far-ranging talks covering such subjects as how to encourage users to become contributors, how to encourage under-represented groups to become involved in open source, and how to reward and retain contributors.
Finally, on Monday, Dru and I participated in a doc sprint. We covered use of some of the FreeBSD documentation tools, and took and closed a PR as an example. She documented--and I occasionally helped identify--the packages needed to run Publican on FreeBSD. Since then, Steve Wills created a full port, textproc/publican.
The conference was a great experience. As a side note, Newport and Cincinnati were great towns.
My thanks to Dru Lavigne for inviting me, Shaun McCance for hosting the conference, all the attendees for their participation, and particularly the FreeBSD Foundation for making it possible for me to attend.