brueffer’s blog

Today marks my five year anniversary with the FreeBSD project. All I can say is, it’s been a pleasure (most of the time). Although sometimes it’s very hard to find the motivation to do some work, seeing the cool stuff everyone else within the project is working on gets one going again pretty quickly.

Thanks to everyone I had the opportunity to work with so far, especially my doc mentor Ceri Davies and my src mentor Robert Watson. It was the operating system that brought me to FreeBSD, but it’s my fellow developers and the community that keep me here (that said, there will be a strong FreeBSD presence at <a href=”http://www.fosdem.org/2008/” mce_href=”http://www.fosdem.org/2008/”>FOSDEM</a> this year, hope to see lots of people in the joined BSD+PostgreSQL developer room).

Well then, off to another five years!

During the last couple of weeks I have converted two more drivers (vge(4) and axe(4)) to support ALTQ. Additionaly, Max Laier has converted aue(4).

Although ALTQ has been a part of FreeBSD for almost 3 years now, there are still lots of drivers that do not support it yet. “Why is that?” you may ask. Actually the driver modifications necessary are minimal, so no problem there. What is missing are people with the hardware to test the changes to make sure that

1. they actually work


2. they do not break driver operation without ALTQ

Testing ALTQ patches does not take a lot of time, the procedure is outlined at http://people.freebsd.org/~mlaier/ALTQ_driver . The following is a (non-exhaustive) list of drivers that have not yet been converted to support ALTQ. If you own any hardware that is supported by one of these drivers, please consider contacting me for a patch to test, or to donate said hardware if you can spare it.

• arl(4) (probably obsolete)


• cdce(4)


• cnw(4) (probably obsolete)


• cue(4)


• cue(4)


• cs(4) (probably obsolete)


• cxgb(4)


• ex(4) (probably obsolete)


• fe(4) (probably obsolete)


• gem(4)


• ie(4) (probably obsolete)


• ixgb(4)


• kue(4)


• lge(4)


• pcn(4)


• nge(4)


• rue(4)


• sn(4)


• snc(4)


• ti(4)


• tl(4)


• tx(4)


• txp(4)


• wb(4)


• xe(4)

Last weekend the Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) took place at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin, Germany. It was the first time this conference took place and all I can say is that it was great. It was a low cost event (5 euro admission fee) and the organizers did an awesome job. Everything ran smoothly, WLAN worked(!), and the overall atmosphere was great.

My talk on Saturday, “FreeBSD im Ãœberblick” (FreeBSD Overview), seemed to have been well received. There were about 25 people in the audience. All in all, there was great service for speakers. Free food and beverages, a quiet room to prepare for the talks and of course lots of beer at the social event

The BSD booth was populated by FreeBSD, NetBSD and even DragonFly BSD people. OpenBSD had a separate booth with the usual merchandising. For FreeBSD, we distributed flyers and CDs. In addition to that, there was a demo PC running FreeBSD 6.1 and KDE that people could play with. As usual, the other BSD folks were great company and I met some people I only knew by name till then.

Unfortunately, relatively few people attended the conference (around 350 I heard somewhere). This was probably due to the great weather and the soccer world cup. I hope FrOSCon will attract some more people next year.

Nothing left to say other than looking forward to FrOSCon 2007!

Links to pictures and other reviews can be found in the FrOSCon Wiki.

My slides can be found at
http://people.freebsd.org/~brueffer/slides/FreeBSD_im_Ueberblick_FrOSCon06.pdf

If you are confused that the aac(4) driver says you have a SCSI controller even though you have a SATA controller (or vice versa), update to the latest CURRENT, or RELENG_6 in a couple of days. Several device names have been corrected.

Moreover, the aac(4) manpage now actually lists all supported controllers. If you are shopping for SCSI/SATA/SAS controllers, this may be worth a look.

So apparently one needs a blog these days to be cool, so I followed the lemmings and registered one as well, courtesy of Erwin Lansing (erwin) and Florent Thoumie (flz).

In other news, I just committed modifications to the my(4) driver to make it usable with the ALTQ packet queuing system. In the past, these modifications led to lock order reversals. Thanks to the work of John Baldwin (jhb) on network driver locking, this is no longer a problem and everything works as expected.

I wonder how many people actually use my(4)...