FreeBSD Status Report July-December 2004
From: Scott Long (scottl_at_freebsd.org)
Date: 01/17/05
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Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 01:40:49 -0700 To: hackers@freebsd.org, current@freebsd.org, stable@freebsd.org
July-December 2004 Status Report
Introduction
The FreeBSD status report is back again after another small break. The
second half of 2004 was incredibly busy; FreeBSD 5.3 was released, the
6-CURRENT development branch started, and EuroBSDCon 2004 was a huge
success, just to name a few events. This report is packed with an
impressive 44 submissions, the most of any report ever!
It's also my pleasure to welcome Max Laier and Tom Rhodes to the
status report team. They kindly volunteered to help keep the reports
on time and help improve their quality. Max in particular is
responsible for the reports being divided up into topics for easier
browsing. Many thanks to both for their help!
_________________________________________________________________
Projects
* Common Address Redundancy Protocol - CARP
* Dingo Monthly Report
* FreeBSD profile.sh
* FreeBSD Release Engineering
* FreeSBIE Status Report
* Funded FreeBSD kernel development
* Improved Multibyte/Wide Character Support
* Project Frenzy (FreeBSD-based Live-CD)
* Secure Updating
Documentation
* Hardware Notes
* The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Team
Kernel
* ATA Driver Status Report
* CPU Cache Prefetching
* i386 Interrupt Code & PCI Interrupt Routing
* kgi4BSD
* Layer 2 PFIL_HOOKS
* Low-overhead performance monitoring for FreeBSD
* Move ARP out of routing table
* Network Stack Locking
* New Modular Input Device Layer
* SMPng Status Report
* Sync Protocols (SPPP and NETGRAPH)
* TCP Cleanup and Optimizations
* TCP Reassembly Rewrite and Optimization
* TTCPv2: Transactional TCP version 2
Architectures
* FreeBSD on Xen
* FreeBSD/arm status report
* PowerPC Port
Ports
* FreeBSD GNOME Project Status Report
* OpenOffice.org port status
* Ports Collection
* Update of the Linux userland infrastructure
Vendor / 3rd Party Software
* ALTQ
* Cronyx Adapters Drivers
* OpenBSD packet filter - pf
Miscellaneous
* EuroBSDCon 2004 submitted papers are online
* EuroBSDCon 2005 - Basel / Switzerland
* FreeBSD Security Officer and Security Team
* FreeBSD Source Repository Mirror for svn/svk
* Wiki with new software
* Atheros Wireless Support
* ifconfig Overhaul
* New DHCP Client
* Wireless Networking Support
_________________________________________________________________
ALTQ
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~mlaier/ALTQ_driver/
URL:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=altq&manpath=FreeBSD+6.0-curr
ent&format=html
Contact: Max Laier <mlaier@FreeBSD.org>
ALTQ is part of FreeBSD 5.3 release and can be used to do traffic
shaping and classification with PF. In CURRENT IPFW gained the ability
to do ALTQ classification as well. A steadily increasing number of NIC
drivers has been converted to support ALTQ. For details see the
ALTQ(4) man-page.
Open tasks:
1. Convert/test more NIC drivers.
2. Write documentation.
_________________________________________________________________
ATA Driver Status Report
Contact: Søren Schmidt <sos@FreeBSD.org>
The ATA driver is undergoing quite a few important changes, mainly it
is being converted into modules so it can be loaded/unloaded at will,
and just the pieces for wanted functionality need be present.
This calls for ata-raid to finally be rewritten. This is almost done
for reading metadata so arrays defined in the BIOS can be used, and
its grown quite a few new metadata formats. This also paves the way
for ataraid to finally be able to take advantage of some of the newer
controllers "RAID" abilities. However this needs more work to
materialize but now its finally possible
There is also support coming for a few new chipsets as usual.
The work is just about finished enough that it can be released as
patches to sort out eventual problems before hitting current. The
changes are pretty massive as this touches all over the driver
infrastructure, so lots of old bugs and has also been spotted and
fixed during this journey
_________________________________________________________________
Atheros Wireless Support
Contact: Sam Leffler <sam@FreeBSD.org>
The ath driver was updated to support all the new features added to
the net80211 layer. As part of this work a new version of the Hardware
Access Layer (HAL) module was brought in; this version supports all
available Atheros parts found in PCI and Cardbus products. Otherwise,
adhoc mode should now be usable, antenna management has been
significantly improved, and soft LED support now identifies traffic
patterns.
The transmit rate control algorithm was split out of the driver into
an independent module. Two different algorithms are available with
other algorithms (hopefully) to be added.
Work is actively going on to add Atheros' SuperG capabilities.
_________________________________________________________________
Common Address Redundancy Protocol - CARP
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~mlaier/CARP/
Contact: Max Laier <mlaier@FreeBSD.org>
CARP is an alternative to VRRP. In contrast to VRRP it has full
support for IPv6 and uses crypto to protect the advertisements. It was
developed by OpenBSD due to concerns that the HSRP patent might cover
VRRP and CISCO might defend its patent. CARP has, since then, improved
a lot over VRRP.
CARP is implemented as an in-kernel multicast protocol and displays
itself as a pseudo interface to the user. This makes configuration and
administration very simple. CARP also incorporates MAC based
load-balancing.
Patches for RELENG_5 and recent HEAD are available from the URL above.
I plan to import these patches in the course of the next two to four
month. RELENG_5 has all necessary ABI to support CARP and I might MFC
it for release 5.4 or 5.5 - depending how well the HEAD import goes.
Open tasks:
1. Please test and send feedback!
2. Write documentation.
3. Import newest OpenBSD changes.
_________________________________________________________________
CPU Cache Prefetching
URL: http://www.nrg4u.com/freebsd/tcp_reass+prefetch-20041216.patch
Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre@FreeBSD.org>
Modern CPU's can only perform to their maximum if their working code
is in fast L1-3 cache memory instead of the bulk main memory. All of
today's CPU's support certain L1-3 cache prefetching instructions
which cause data to be retrieved from main memory to the cache ahead
of the time that it is already in place when it is eventually accessed
by the CPU.
CPU Cache Prefetching however is not a golden bullet and has to be
used with extreme care and only in very specific places to be
beneficial. Incorrect usage can lead to massive cache pollution and a
drop in effective performance. Correct and very carefully usage on the
other can lead to drastic performance increases in common operations.
In the linked patch CPU cache prefetching has been used to prefetch
the packet header (OSI layer 2 to 4) into the CPU caches right after
entering into the network stack. This avoids a complete CPU stall on
the first access to the packet header because packets get DMA'd into
main memory and thus never are already pre-cache in the CPU caches. A
second use in the patch is in the TCP input code to prefetch the
entire struct tcpcb which is very large and used with a very high
probability. Use in both of these places show a very significant
performance gain but not yet fully quantified.
The final patch will include documentation and a guide to evaluate and
assess the use of CPU cache prefetch instructions in the kernel.
_________________________________________________________________
Cronyx Adapters Drivers
URL: http://www.cronyx.ru/software
Contact: Roman Kurakin <rik@FreeBSD.org>
Currently FreeBSD supports three family of Cronyx sync adapters:
Tau-PCI - cp(4), Tau-ISA - ctau(4) and Sigma - cx(4). All these
drivers were updated (in 6.current) and now they are Giant free.
However, this is true only for sppp(4). If you are using Netgraph or
async mode (for Sigma) you may need to turn mpsafenet off for that
driver with appropriate kernel variable.
Open tasks:
1. Now all these drivers and sppp(4) are using recursive lock. So the
first task is to make these locks non recursive.
2. Second task is to check/make drivers workable in netgraph/async
mode.
3. I think about ability to switch between sppp/netgraph mode at
runtime. For now you should recompile module/kernel to change
mode.
_________________________________________________________________
Dingo Monthly Report
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/projects/dingo/index.html
Contact: George Neville-Neil <gnn@FreeBSD.org>
In the last month we set up the project page noted above and also
created a p4 branch for those of us who use p4 to do work outside of
CVS.
_________________________________________________________________
EuroBSDCon 2004 submitted papers are online
URL: http://www.eurobsdcon2004.de/papers.html
Contact: Patrick M. Hausen <hausen@punkt.de>
Finally all of the papers and presentations are online for download
from our conference website. Thanks again to all who helped make
EuroBSDCon 2004 a success.
_________________________________________________________________
EuroBSDCon 2005 - Basel / Switzerland
URL: http://www.eurobsdcon.org/
Contact: Max Laier <mlaier@FreeBSD.org>
This year's EuroBSDCon will be held at the University of Basel,
Switzerland from 25th through 27th November. The call for papers
should happen shortly. Please consider attending or even presenting.
Check the conference homepage for more information.
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD GNOME Project Status Report
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome/
Contact: Joe Marcus <marcus@FreeBSD.org>
We haven't produced a status report in a while, but that's just
because we've been busy. Since our last report in March 2004, we have
added three new team members: Koop Mast (kwm), Jeremy Messenger
(mezz), and Michael Johnson (ahze). Jeremy has been quite helpful in
GNOME development porting while Michael and Koop have been focusing on
improving GNOME multimedia, especially GStreamer. The stable release
of GNOME is now up to 2.8.2, and we are actively working on the GNOME
2.9 development branch with is slated to become 2.10 on March 9 of
this year.
The GNOME Tinderbox is still cranking away, and producing packages for
both the stable and development releases of GNOME for all supported
i386 versions of FreeBSD.
Thanks to Michael Johnson, the FreeBSD GNOME team has recently been
given permission to use the Firefox and Thunderbird names , official
icons, and to produce officially branded builds. Mozilla has also been
very interested in merging our local patches back into the official
source tree. This should greatly improve the quality of Firefox and
Thunderbird on FreeBSD moving forward.
Finally, Adam Weinberger (adamw) has been pestering the team for
photos so that we can finally show the community who we are. It is
still unclear as to whether or not this will attract more FreeBSD
GNOME users, or land us on the Homeland Security no-fly list.
Open tasks:
1. Need help porting HAL to FreeBSD (contact marcus@FreeBSD.org )
2. Need help porting libburn to FreeBSD (contact bland@FreeBSD.org )
3. Anyone interested in reviving Gnome Meeting should contact
kwm@FreeBSD.org
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD on Xen
URL: http://www.fsmware.com/xenofreebsd/
URL: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/
Contact: Kip Macy <kmacy@fsmware.com>
FreeBSD 5.2.1 is stable on the stable branch of Xen as a guest.
FreeBSD 5.3 runs on the stable branch of Xen as a guest, but a couple
of bugs need to be tracked down.
Open tasks:
1. FreeBSD support for running in Domain 0 (host)
2. FreeBSD support for VM checkpoint and migration
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD profile.sh
URL: https://projects.fsck.ch/profile
Contact: Tobias Roth <ports@fsck.ch>
FreeBSD profile.sh is targeted at laptops. It allows to define
multiple network environments (eg, home, work), and will then detect
in which environment the laptop is started and configure it
accordingly. Almost everything from under /etc can be configured per
environment, and only the overrides to the default /etc have to be
defined. Suspending in one environment and resuming in a different one
is also supported.
Proper integration into the acpi/apm and several small improvements
are underway. More testing with different system configurations is
needed.
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Release Engineering
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng
Contact: Scott Long <re@FreeBSD.org>
At long last, FreeBSD 5.3 was released in November of 2004. This
marked the start of the RELENG_5/5-STABLE branch and the beginning of
the 6-CURRENT development branch. Many thanks to the tireless efforts
of the FreeBSD developer and user community for making this release a
success.
FreeBSD 4.11 release engineering is also now in progress. This will be
the final release from the 4.x series and is mainly incremental bug
fixes and a handful of feature additions. Of note is that the IBM
ServeRAID 'IPS' driver is now supported on 4.x and will be included in
this release, and the Linux emulation layer has been updated to
support a RedHat 8.0 userland. The release is expected to be available
on January 24.
Looking forward, there will be several FreeBSD 5.x releases in the
coming year. FreeBSD 5.4 release engineering will start in March, and
FreeBSD 5.5 release engineering will likely start in June. These
releases are expected to be more conservative than previous 5.x
releases and will follow the same philosophy as previous -STABLE
branches of fixing bugs and adding incremental improvements while
maintaining API stability.
For the 6-CURRENT development branch as well as all future development
and stable branches, we are planning to move to a schedule with fixed
timelines that move away from the uncertainty and wild schedule
fluctuations of the previous 5.x releases. This means that major
branches will happen at 18 month intervals, and releases from those
branches will happen at 4 month intervals. There will also be a
dedicated period of testing and bug fixing at the beginning of each
branch before the first release is cut from that branch. With the
shorter and more defined release schedules, we hope to lessen the
problem of needed features not reaching users in a reasonable time, as
happened too often with 5.x. This is a significant change in our
strategy, and we look forward to realizing the benefits of it. This
will kick off with the RELENG_6 branch happing in June of 2005,
followed by the 6.0 release in August of 2005.
Also on the roadmap is a plan to combine the live-iso disk2 and the
install distributions of disk1 into a single disk which can be used
for both installation and for recovery. 3rd party packages that
currently reside on disc1 will be moved to a disk2 that will be
dedicated to these packages. This move will allow us to deal with the
ever growing size of packages and also provide more flexibility to
vendors that wish to add their own packages to the releases. It also
opens the door to more advanced installers being put in place of
sysinstall. Anyone interested in helping with this is encouraged to
contact us.
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Security Officer and Security Team
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/security/
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/security/charter.html
URL:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/staff
-listing.html#STAFF-SECTEAM
URL: http://vuxml.freebsd.org/
URL: http://cvsweb.freebsd.org/ports/security/portaudit/
Contact: Jacques Vidrine <nectar@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Security Officer <security-officer@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Security Team <security-team@FreeBSD.org>
During 2004, there were several notable changes and events related to
the FreeBSD Security Officer role and Security Team.
The charter for the Security Officer (SO) as approved by Core in 2002
was finally published on the web site. This document describes the
mission, responsibilities, and authorities of the SO. (The current SO
is Jacques Vidrine.)
The SO is supported by a Deputy SO and the Security Team. In April,
Chris Faulhaber resigned as Deputy SO and Dag-Erling Smorgrav was
appointed in his place. Also during the year, the following team
members resigned: Julian Elischer, Bill Fumerola, Daniel Harris,
Trevor Johnson, Kris Kennaway, Mark Murray, Wes Peters, Bruce Simpson,
and Bill Swingle; while the following became new members: Josef
El-Rayes, Simon L. Nielsen, Colin Percival, and Tom Rhodes. A huge
thanks is due to all past and current members! The current Security
Team membership is published on the web site.
With the release of FreeBSD 4.8, the SO began extended support for
some FreeBSD releases and their corresponding security branches.
"Early adopter" branches, such as FreeBSD 5.0 (RELENG_5_0), are
supported for at least six months. "Normal" branches are supported for
at least one year. "Extended" branches, such as FreeBSD 5.3
(RELENG_5_3), are supported for at least two years. The currently
supported branches and their estimated "end of life" (EoL) dates are
published on the FreeBSD Security Information web page. In 2004, four
releases "expired": 4.7, 4.9, 5.1, and 5.2.
With the releases of FreeBSD 4.10 and 5.3, the SO and the Release
Engineering team extended the scope of security branches to
incorporate critical bug fixes unrelated to security issues.
Currently, separate Errata Notices are published for such fixes. In
the future, Security Advisories and Errata Notices will be merged and
handled uniformly.
17 Security Advisories were published in 2004, covering 8 issues
specific to FreeBSD and 9 general issues.
2004 also saw the introduction of the Vulnerabilities and Exposures
Markup Language (VuXML). VuXML is a markup language designed for the
documentation of security issues within a single package collection.
Over 325 security issues in the Ports Collection have been documented
already in the FreeBSD Project's VuXML document by the Security Team
and other committers. This document is currently maintained in the
ports repository, path ports/security/vuxml/vuln.xml. The contents of
the document are made available in a human-readable form at the
FreeBSD VuXML web site. The "portaudit" tool can be used to audit your
local system against the listed issues. Starting in November, the
popular FreshPorts.org web site also tracks issues documented in
VuXML.
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Source Repository Mirror for svn/svk
URL: http://svn.clkao.org/svnweb/freebsd/
URL:
http://svn.clkao.org/svnweb/freebsd/rss/fromcvs/branches/RELENG_5/
URL: http://svn.clkao.org/svnweb/freebsd/rss/fromcvs/trunk/
URL: http://svk.elixus.org/
Contact: Kao Chia-liang <clkao@FreeBSD.org>
A public Subversion mirror of the FreeBSD repository is provided at
svn://svn.clkao.org/freebsd/. This is intended for people who would
like to try the svk distributed version control system.
svk allows you to mirror the whole repository and commit when offline.
It also provides history-sensitive branching, merging, and patches.
Non-committers can easily maintain their own branch and track upstream
changes while their patches are being reviewed.
_________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD/arm status report
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/arm
Contact: Olivier Houchard <cognet@FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD/arm made some huge progress. It can boot multiuser, and run
things like "make world" and perl on the IQ31244 board. It also now
has support for various things, including DDB, KTR, ptrace and kernel
modules. A patch is available for early gdb support, and the
libpthread almost works.
_________________________________________________________________
FreeSBIE Status Report
URL: http://www.FreeSBIE.org
URL: http://liste.gufi.org/mailman/listinfo/freesbie
Contact: FreeSBIE Staff <staff@FreeSBIE.org>
FreeSBIE is a Live-CD based on the FreeBSD Operating system, or even
easier, a FreeBSD-based operating system that works directly from a
CD, without touching your hard drive.
On December, 6th, 2004, FreeSBIE Staff released FreeSBIE 1.1, based on
FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE. Some of the innovations are: a renewed series of
scripts to support power users in the use of FreeSBIE 1.1, an
installer to let users install FreeSBIE 1.1 on their hard drives, thus
having a powerful operating system such as FreeBSD, but with all the
personalizations FreeSBIE 1.1 carries, the presence of the best open
source software, chosen and personalized, such as X.Org 6.7, XFCE
4.2RC1, Firefox 1.0 and Thunderbird 0.9.2.
For a complete list of the included software, please consult:
http://www.freesbie.org/doc/1.1/FreeSBIE-1.1-i386.pkg_info.txt
At EuroBSDCon 2004 in Karlsruhe, Germany, people from the FreeSBIE
staff gave a talk, deeping into FreeSBIE scripts implementation and
use.
Open tasks:
1. Translating website and documentation
_________________________________________________________________
Funded FreeBSD kernel development
URL:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2004-December/0009
71.html
Contact: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@FreeBSD.org>
A longish status report for the 6 months of funded development was
posted on announce, rather than repeat it here, you can find it at the
link provided.
_________________________________________________________________
Hardware Notes
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.3R/hardware-i386.html
URL:
http://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/CURRENT/hardware/i386/article.html
Contact: Simon L. Nielsen <simon@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Christian Brueffer <brueffer@FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Hardware Notes have been (mostly) converted to being
directly generated from the driver manual pages. This makes it much
simpler to maintain the Hardware Notes, so they should be more
accurate. The Hardware Notes for FreeBSD 5.3 use this new system.
_________________________________________________________________
i386 Interrupt Code & PCI Interrupt Routing
Contact: John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
The ACPI PCI link support code was reworked to work around some
limitations in the previous implementation. The new version more
closely matches the current non-ACPI $PIR link support. Enhancements
include disabling unused link devices during boot and using a simpler
and more reliable algorithm for choosing ISA IRQs for unrouted link
devices.
Support for using the local APIC timer to drive the kernel clocks
instead of the ISA timer and i8254 clock is currently being worked on
in the jhb_clock perforce branch. It is mostly complete and will
probably hit the tree in the near future. By letting each CPU use its
own private timer to drive the kernel clocks, the kernel no longer has
to IPI all the other CPUs in the system every time a clock interrupt
occurs.
_________________________________________________________________
ifconfig Overhaul
Contact: Sam Leffler <sam@FreeBSD.org>
The ifconfig program used to configure network interfaces was
overhauled. Over the years ifconfig has grown into a complex and often
contorted piece of software that is hard to understand and difficult
to maintain. The primary motivation for this work was to enable
minimal configurations (for embedded use) without changing the code
and to support future additions in a modular way. Functionality is now
broken out into separate files and operations are registered with the
central ifconfig code base. Features are configured simply by
specifying which code is to be included when building the program.
In the future the plan is for ifconfig to auto-load functionality
through dynamic libraries. This mechanism will allow, for example,
third party software packages to provide kernel services and ifconfig
add-on code without changing the base system.
_________________________________________________________________
Improved Multibyte/Wide Character Support
Contact: Tim Robbins <tjr@FreeBSD.org>
Support for multibyte characters has been added to many more base
system utilities, including basename, col, colcrt, colrm, column, fmt,
look, nl, od, rev, sed, tr, and ul. As a result of changes to the C
library (see below), most utilities that perform regular expression
matching or pathname globbing now support multibyte characters in
these aspects.
The regular expression matching and pathname globbing routines in the
C library have been improved and now recognize multibyte characters.
Various performance improvements have been made to the wide character
I/O functions. The obsolete 4.4BSD "rune" interface and UTF2 encoding
have been removed from the 6-CURRENT branch.
Work is progressing on implementations of the POSIX iconv and
localedef interfaces for potential inclusion into the FreeBSD 6.0
release.
_________________________________________________________________
kgi4BSD
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/~nsouch/kgi4BSD
URL: http://wiki.daemon.li/moin.cgi/KGI
Contact: Nicholas Souchu <nsouch@FreeBSD.org>
The project was very quiet (but still alive!) and mostly dedicated to
testing by volunteers. New documentation at
http://wiki.daemon.li/moin.cgi/KGI .
Open tasks:
1. Help improving the documentation
_________________________________________________________________
Layer 2 PFIL_HOOKS
URL:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-all/2004-August/079811.html
Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre@FreeBSD.org>
IPFW2 has been converted to use PFIL_HOOKS for the IP[46] in/output
path. (See link.) Not converted yet is the Layer 2 Etherfilter
functionality of IPFW2. It is still directly called from the
ether_input/output and bridging code.
Layer 2 PFIL_HOOKS provide a general abstraction for packet filters to
hook into the Layer 2 packet path and filter or manipulate such
packets. This makes it possible to use not only IPFW2 but also PF and
others for Layer 2 filtering.
_________________________________________________________________
Low-overhead performance monitoring for FreeBSD
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~jkoshy/projects/perf-measurement/
Contact: Joseph Koshy <jkoshy@FreeBSD.org>
System-wide and process-virtual counting-mode performance monitoring
counters are now supported for the AMD Athlon and Intel P4 CPUs. SMP
works, but is prone to freezes. Immediate next steps include: (1)
implementing the system-wide and process-virtual sampling modes, (2)
debugging, (3) writing a test suite and (4) improving the project's
documentation.
_________________________________________________________________
Move ARP out of routing table
URL:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2004-April/026380.h
tml
Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Qing Li <qingli@speackeasy.net>
The ARP IP address to MAC address mapping does not belong into the
routing table (FIB) as it is currently done. This will move it to its
own hash based structure which will be instantiated per each 802.1
broadcast domain. With this change it is possible to have more than
one interface in the same IP subnet and layer 2 broadcast domain. The
ARP handling and the routing table will be quite a bit simplified
afterwards. As an additional benefit full MAC address based accounting
will be provided.
Qing Li has become the driver and implementor of this project and is
expected to post a first patch for comments shortly in February 2005.
_________________________________________________________________
Network Stack Locking
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/projects/netperf/
URL: http://www.watson.org/~robert/freebsd/netperf/
Contact: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
The netperf project is working to enhance the performance of the
FreeBSD network stack. This work grew out of the SMPng Project, which
moved the FreeBSD kernel from a "Giant Lock" to more fine-grained
locking and multi-threading. SMPng offered both performance
improvement and degradation for the network stack, improving
parallelism and preemption, but substantially increasing per-packet
processing costs. The netperf project is primarily focused on further
improving parallelism in network processing while reducing the SMP
synchronization overhead. This in turn will lead to higher processing
throughput and lower processing latency. Tasks include completing the
locking work, optimizing locking strategies, amortizing locking costs,
introducing new synchronization primitives, adopting non-locking
synchronization strategies, and improving opportunities for
parallelism through additional threading.
Between July, 2004, and December, 2004, the Netperf project did a
great deal of work, for which there is room only to include limited
information. Much more information is available by visiting the URLS
above, including information on a variety of on-going activities.
Accomplishments include:
July, 2004: A variety of improvements to PCB locking in the IPv6
implementation; locking for the if_xl driver; socket locking for the
NFS client; cleanup of the soreceive() code path including structural
improvements, assertions, and locking fixes; cleanup of the IPX/SPX
code in preparation for locking; additional locking and locking
assertions for the TCP implementation; bug fixes for locking and
memory allocation in raw IP; netatalk cleanup and locking merged to
FreeBSD CVS ; locking for many netgraph nodes merged to FreeBSD CVS ;
SLIP structural improvements; experimental locking for netatalk
ifaddrs; BPF locking optimizations (merged); Giant assertions for VFS
to check VFS/network stack boundaries; UNIX domain socket locking
optimizations; expansion of lock order documentation in WITNESS,
additional NFS server code running MPSAFE; pipe locking optimizations
to improve pipe allocation performance; Giant no longer required for
fstat on sockets and pipes (merged); Giant no longer required for
socket and pipe file descriptor closes (merged); IFF_NEEDSGIANT
interface flag added to support compatibility operation for unlocked
device drivers (merged) ; merged accept filter locking to FreeBSD CVS;
documented uidinfo locking strategy (merged); Giant use reduced in
fcntl().
August, 2004: UMA KTR tracing (merged); UDP broadcast receive locking
optimizations (merged); TCP locking cleanup and documentation; IPv6
inpcb locking, cleanup, and structural improvements; IPv6 inpcb
locking merged to FreeBSD CVS ; KTR for systems calls added to i386;
substantial optimizations of entropy harvesting synchronization
(merged) ; callout(9) sampling converted to KTR (merged); inpcb socket
option locking (merged); GIANT_REQUIRED removed from netatalk in
FreeBSD CVS; merged ADAPTIVE_GIANT to FreeBSD CVS, resulting in
substantial performance improvements in many kernel IPC-intensive
benchmarks ; prepend room for link layer headers to the UDP header
mbuf to avoid one allocation per UDP send (merged); a variety of UDP
bug fixes (merged); additional network interfaces marked MPSAFE; UNIX
domain socket locking reformulated to protect so_pcb pointers;
MP_WATCHDOG, a facility to dedicate additional HTT logical CPUs as
watchdog CPUs developed (merged) ; annotation of UNIX domain socket
locking merged to FreeBSD CVS; kqueue locking developed and merged by
John-Mark Gurney ; task list for netinet6 locking created; conditional
locking relating to kqueues and socket buffers eliminated (merged);
NFS server locking bugfixes (merged); in6_prefix code removed from
netinet6 by George Neville-Neil, lowering the work load for netinet6
(merged); unused random tick code in netinet6 removed (merged);
ng_tty, IPX, KAME IPSEC now declare dependence on Giant using
compile-time declaration NET_NEEDS_GIANT("component") permitting the
kernel to detect unsafe components and automatically acquire the Giant
lock over network stack operation if needed (merged) ; additional
locking optimizations for entropy code (merged); Giant disabled by
default in the netperf development branch (merged).
September, 2004: bugs fixed relating to Netgraph's use of the kernel
linker while not holding Giant (merged); merged removal of Giant over
the network stack by default to FreeBSD CVS ; races relating to
netinet6 and if_afdata corrected (merged); annotation of possible
races in the BPF code; BPF code converted to queue(3) (merged); race
in sopoll() corrected (merged).
October, 2004: IPv6 netisr marked as MPSAFE; TCP timers locked,
annotated, and asserted (merged); IP socket option locking and cleanup
(merged); Netgraph ISR marked MPSAFE; netatalk ISR marked MPSAFE
(merged); some interface list locking cleanup (merged); use after free
bug relating to entropy harvesting and ethernet fixed (merged);
soclose()/sofree() race fixed (merged); IFF_LOCKGIANT() and
IFF_UNLOCKGIANT() added to acquire Giant as needed when entering the
ioctls of non-MPSAFE network interfaces.
November, 2004: cleanup of UDPv6 static global variables (merged);
FreeBSD 5.3 released! First release of FreeBSD with an MPSAFE and
Giant-free network stack as the default configuration! ; additional
TCP locking documentation and cleanup (merged); optimization to use
file descriptor reference counts instead of socket reference counts
for frequent operations results in substantial performance
optimizations for high-volume send/receive (merged) ; an accept bug is
fixed (merged) experimental network polling locking introduced;
substantial measurement and optimization of mutex and locking
primitives (merged) ; experimental modifications to UMA to use
critical sections to protect per-CPU caches instead of mutexes yield
substantial micro-benchmark benefits when combined with experimental
critical section optimizations ; FreeBSD Project Netperf page
launched; performance micro-benchmarks benchmarks reveal IP forwarding
latency in 5.x is measurably better than 4.x on UP when combined with
optional network stack direct dispatch; several NFS server locking
bugfixes (merged); development of new mbufqueue primitives and
substantial experimentation with them permits development of amortized
cost locking APIs for handoff between the network stack and network
device drivers (work in collaboration with Sandvine, Inc) ; Linux
TCP_INFO API added to allow user-space monitoring of TCP state
(merged); SMPng task list updated; UDP static/global fixes merged to
RELENG_5.
December, 2004: UDP static/global fixes developed for multi-threaded
in-bound UDP processing (merged); socket buffer locking fixes for
urgent TCP input processing (merged); lockless read optimizations for
IF_DEQUEUE() and IF_DRAIN(); Giant-free close for sockets/pipes/...
merged to FreeBSD CVS; optimize mass-dequeues of mbuf chains in netisr
processing; netrate tool merged to RELENG_5; TCP locking fixes merged
to RELENG_5; "show alllocks" added to DDB (merged); IPX locking
bugfixes (merged); IPX/SPX __packed fixes (merged); IPX/SPX moved to
queue(9) (merged); TCP locking fixes and annotations merged to FreeBSD
CVS; IPX/SPX globals and pcb locking (merged); IPX/SPX marked MPSAFE
(merged) ; IP socket options locking merged to FreeBSD; SPPP locked by
Roman Kurakin (merged); UNIX domain socket locking fixes by Alan Cox
(merged).
On-going work continues with regard to locking down network stack
components, including additional netinet6 locking, mbuf queue
facilities and operations; benchmarking; moving to critical sections
or per-CPU mutexes for UMA per-CPU caches; moving to critical sections
or per-CPU mutexes for malloc(9) statistics; elimination of separate
mbuf allocator statistics; additional interface locking; a broad
variety of cleanups and documentation of locking; a broad range of
optimizations.
_________________________________________________________________
New DHCP Client
Contact: Sam Leffler <sam@FreeBSD.org>
The OpenBSD dhcp client program has been ported and enhanced to listen
for 802.11-related events from the kernel. This enables immediate IP
address acquisition when roaming (as opposed to the polling done by
the old code). The main change from the previous client is that there
is one dhclient process per interface as opposed to one for the entire
system. This necessitates changes to the system startup scripts.
Incorporation into the base system is waiting on a volunteer who will
shepherd the changes into the tree and deal with bugs.
_________________________________________________________________
New Modular Input Device Layer
URL:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-src/2004-November/035462.html
Contact: Philip Paeps <philip@FreeBSD.org>
Following a number of mailing lists discussions on the topic, work has
been progressing on the development of a new modular input device
layer for FreeBSD. The purpose of this is twofold:
* Easier development of new input device drivers.
* Support for concurrent use of multiple input devices, particularly
the hot-pluggable kind.
Currently, implementing support for new input devices is a painful
process and there is great potential for code-duplication. The new
input device layer will provide a simple API for developers to send
events from their hardware on to the higher regions of the kernel in a
consistent way, much like the 'input-core' driver in the Linux kernel.
Using multiple input devices at the moment is painful at best. With
the new input device layer, events from different devices will be
properly serialized before they are sent to other parts of the kernel.
This will allow one to easily use, for instance, multiple USB
keyboards in a virtual terminal.
The work on this is still in very rudimentary state. It is expected
that the first visible changes will be committed to -CURRENT around
late February or early March.
_________________________________________________________________
OpenBSD packet filter - pf
URL: http://pf4freebsd.love2party.net/
Contact: Max Laier <mlaier@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Daniel Hartmeier <dhartmei@FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD 5.3 is the first release to include PF. It went out okay, but
some bugs were discovered too late to make it on the CD. It is
recommend to update `src/sys/contrib/pf' to RELENG_5. The specific
issues addressed are:
* Possible NULL-deref with user/group rules.
* Crash with binat on dynamic interfaces.
* Silent dropping of IPv6 packets with option headers.
* Endless loops with `static-port' rules.
Most of these issues were discovered by FreeBSD users and got fed back
to OpenBSD. This is a prime example of open source at work.
The Handbook's Firewall section was modified to mention PF as an
alternative to IPFW and IPF.
Open tasks:
1. Write more documentation/articles.
2. Write an IPFilter to PF migration guide/tool.
_________________________________________________________________
OpenOffice.org port status
URL: http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/
URL:
http://ooomisc.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/ooomisc/Free
BSD/
URL: http://sourceforge.jp/projects/waooo/files/
Contact: Maho Nakata <maho@FreeBSD.org>
OpenOffice.org 2.0 status
* OpenOffice.org 2.0 is planned to be released in March 2005.
Currently developer snapshot versions are available. Now one of
the developer version has been ported, and committed to ports tree
(/usr/ports/editors/openoffice-2.0-devel).
* Packages for 5.3-RELEASE are available at
http://sourceforge.jp/projects/waooo/files/asOOo_1.9m71_FreeBSD53I
ntel_install_en-US.tbz etc., and soon it will also available at :
http://ooomisc.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/ooomisc/
FreeBSD/ with the language pack.
* Almost all of the patches required to build will be integrated to
master. http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=40187
* Now we have three external ports : lang/gcc-ooo, devel/bison-devel
and devel/epm. To avoid regressions and bugs of gcc, we use the
exactly same gcc as Hamburg team (former StarDivision) uses. We
need bison later than 1.785a. Note this port CONFLICTS with
devel/bison. Epm is a package manager which now OpenOffice.org
uses.
OpenOffice.org 1.1 status
* 1.1.4 has been ported and committed to ports tree.
* Packages are available at
http://ooomisc.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/ooomisc/
FreeBSD/ .
* Now recognizes Linux version of Java JDKs.
General
* Invoking OpenOffice.org from command line has been changed. Now
`.org' is mandatory. e.g. openoffice-1.1.4 ->
openoffice.org-1.1.4. Since the name of the software is
OpenOffice.org, not OpenOffice. We are also considering the name
of the ports (/usr/ports/editors/openoffice-2.0-devel ->
openoffice.org2-devel etc)
* Now marked as BROKEN OOo ports for prior than 5.3-RELEASE and
4.11-RELEASE. These ports have been suffering from a minor
implementation difference of rtld.c between FreeBSD and Linux,
Solaris, NetBSD. We have been applying a patch adding _end in
mapfile. We need this since rtld depend on existence of _end
symbol in obj_from_addr_end, unfortunately this seem to induce
hard-to-solve errors. A great progress has been made kan, rtld now
do not depend on _end. A fix was committed 2004/02/25 17:06:16,
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/libexec/rtld-elf/rtld.c.
diff?r1=1.91&r2=1.92&f=h .
* Benchmark test! Building OOo requires huge resources. We just
would like to know the build timings, so that how your machine is
well tuned for demanding jobs.
http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/benchmark.html . Currently,
GOTO daichi (daichi)'s Pentium 4 3.0GHz machine build fastest.
Just 1h25m22.42s for second build of OOo 1.1.4, using ccache.
* SDK tutorial is available at
http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/sdk.html
* Still implementation test and quality assurance have not yet been
done. Even systematic documentations are not yet available for
FreeBSD. http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/testing.html and
http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/QA.html for details.
Acknowledgments Two persons contributed in many aspects. Pavel Janik
(reviewing and giving me much advice) and Kris Kennaway (extremely
patient builder). and (then, alphabetical order by first name).
daichi, Eric Bachard, kan, lofi, Martin Hollmichel, nork, obrien,
Sander Vesik, sem, Stefan Taxhet, and volunteers of OpenOffice.org
developers (esp. SUN Microsystems, Inc.) for cooperation and warm
encouragements.
_________________________________________________________________
Ports Collection
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
URL: http://portsmon.firepipe.net/index.html
Contact: Mark Linimon <linimon_at_FreeBSD_dot_org>
Contact: Erwin Lansing <erwin@FreeBSD.org>
Since the last report on the Ports Collection, much has changed.
Organizationally, the portmgr team saw the departure of some of the
long-term members, and the addition of some newer members, Oliver
Eikemeier, Kirill Ponomarew and Mark Linimon. Later on, portmgr also
had to say goodbye to Will Andrews. In addition, we have gained quite
a few new ports committers during this time period, and their
contributions are quite welcome!
Most effort was devoted to two releases. The 5.3 release saw an
especially long freeze period, but due to the good shape of the ports
tree, the freeze for the 4.11 could be kept to a minimum. Several
iterations of new infrastructure changes were tested on the cluster
and committed. Also, the cluster now builds packages for 6-CURRENT,
increasing the total number of different build environment to 10.
Additionally, several sweeps through the ports tree were made to bring
more uniformity in variables used in the different ports and their
values, e.g. BROKEN , IGNORE , DEPRECATED , USE_GCC , and and others.
In technical terms, the largest change was moving to the X.org
codebase as our default X11 implementation. At the same time, code was
committed to be able to select either the X.org code or the XFree86
code, which also saw an update during that time. Due to some hard work
by Eric Anholt, new committer Dejan Lesjak, and Joe Marcus Clarke, all
of this happened more smoothly than could have reasonably been
expected.
As well, GNOME and KDE saw updates during this time, as did Perl and
the Java framework. Further, there were some updates to the Porter's
Handbook, but more sections are still in need of updates to include
recent changes in practices. Also, during this time, Bill Fenner was
able to fix a bug in his distfile survey .
Shortly before the release for 4.11 our existing linux_base was marked
forbidden due to security issues. A lot of effort was spent to upgrade
the default version to 8 from 7 to ship 4.11 with a working
linuxolator.
Due to stability problems in the April-May timeframe, the package
builds for the Alpha were dropped. After Ken Smith and others put some
work into the Alphas in the build cluster, package builds for 4.X were
reenabled late in 2004.
Ports QA reminders -- portmgr team members are now sending out
periodic email about problems in the Ports Collection. The current set
includes:
* a public list of all ports to be removed due to security problems,
build failures, or general obsolescence, unless they are fixed
first
* private email to all maintainers of the affected ports (including
ports dependent on the above)
* private email to all maintainers of ports that are marked BROKEN
and/or FORBIDDEN
* private email to maintainers who aren't committers, who have PRs
filed against their ports (to flag PRs that might never have been
Cc:ed to them)
* public email about port commits that break building of INDEX
* public email about port commits that send the revision metadata
backwards (and thus confuse tools like portupgrade)
The idea behind each of these reminders is to try to increase the
visibility of problems in the Ports Collection so that problems can be
fixed faster.
Finally, it should be noted that we passed yet another milestone and
the Ports Collection now contains over 12,000 ports.
Open tasks:
1. The majority of our build errors are still due to compilation
problems, primarily from the gcc upgrades. Thanks to the efforts
of many volunteers, these are decreasing, but there is still much
more work to be done.
2. The next highest number of build errors are caused by code that
does not build on our 64-bit architectures due to the assumption
that "all the world's a PC." Here is the entire list ; the
individual bars are clickable. This will become more and more
important now that the amd64 port has been promoted to tier-1
status.
3. A lot of progress has been meed to crack down on ports that
install files outside the approved directories and/or do not
de-install cleanly (see "Extra files not listed in PLIST" on
pointyhat ) and this will remain a focus area.
_________________________________________________________________
PowerPC Port
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/~grehan/miniinst.iso
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/~grehan/miniinst.txt
Contact: Peter Grehan <grehan@FreeBSD.org>
A natively built 6.0-CURRENT miniinst ISO is available at the above
link. It runs best on G4 Powermacs, but may run on other Newworld
machines. See the release notes for full details.
As usual, lots of help is needed. This is a great project for those
who want to delve deeply into FreeBSD kernel internals.
_________________________________________________________________
Project Frenzy (FreeBSD-based Live-CD)
URL: http://frenzy.osdn.org.ua/
URL: http://frenzy.osdn.org.ua/eng/
Contact: Sergei Mozhaisky <technix@ukrpost.com.ua>
Frenzy is a "portable system administrator toolkit," Live-CD based on
FreeBSD. It generally contains software for hardware tests, file
system check, security check and network setup and analysis. Current
version 0.3, based on FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE, contains almost 400
applications in 200MB ISO-image.
Tasks for next release: script for installation to HDD; unified system
configuration tool; updating of software collection.
_________________________________________________________________
Secure Updating
URL: http://www.daemonology.net/portsnap/
URL: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-update/
Contact: Colin Percival <cperciva@FreeBSD.org>
In my continuing quest to secure the mechanisms by which FreeBSD users
keep their systems up to date, I've added a new tool: Portsnap.
Available as sysutils/portsnap in the ports tree, this utility
securely downloads and updates a compressed snapshot of the ports
tree; this can then be used to extract or update an uncompressed ports
tree. In addition to operating in an end-to-end secure manner thanks
to RSA signatures, portsnap operates entirely over HTTP and can use
under one tenth of the bandwidth of cvsup for users who update their
ports tree more than once a week.
FreeBSD Update -- my utility for secure and efficient binary tracking
of the Security/Errata branches -- continues to be widely used, with
over 100 machines downloading security or errata updates daily.
At some point in the future I intend to bring both of these utilities
into the FreeBSD base system, probably starting with portsnap.
_________________________________________________________________
SMPng Status Report
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/smp/
Contact: John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: <smp@FreeBSD.org>
Lots of changes happened inside the network stack that will hopefully
be covered by a separate report. Outside of the network stack, several
changes were made however including changes to proc locking, making
the kernel thread scheduler preemptive, fixing several priority
inversion bugs in the scheduler, and a few performance tweaks in the
mutex implementation.
Locking work on struct proc and its various substructures continued
with locking added where needed for struct uprof, struct rusage, and
struct pstats. This also included reworking how the kernel stores
process time statistics to store the raw struct bintime and tick
counts internally and only compute the more user friendly values when
requested via getrusage() or wait4().
Support for kernel thread preemption was added to the scheduler.
Basically, when a thread makes another thread runnable, it may yield
the current CPU to the new thread if the new thread has a more
important priority. Previously, only interrupt threads preempted other
threads and the implementation would occasionally trigger spurious
context switches. This change exposed bugs in other parts of the
kernel and was turned off by default in RELENG_5. Currently, only the
i386, amd64, and alpha platforms support native preemption.
Several priority inversion bugs present in the scheduler due to
various changes to the kernel from SMPng were also fixed. Most of the
credit for these fixes belongs Stephan Uphoff who has recently been
added as a new committer. Fixes include: closing a race in the
turnstile wakeup code, changing the sleep queue code to store threads
in FIFO order so that the sleep queue wakeup code properly handles
having a thread's priority changes, and abstracting the concept of
priority lending so that the thread scheduler is now able to properly
track priority inheritance and handle priority changes for threads
blocked on a turnstile.
Works in progress include separating critical sections from spin
mutexes some so that bare critical sections become very cheap as well
as continuing to change the various ABI compatibility layers to use
in-kernel versions of system calls to reduce stackgap usage and make
the system call wrappers MPSAFE.
_________________________________________________________________
Sync Protocols (SPPP and NETGRAPH)
URL: http://www.freebsd.org/~rik
Contact: Roman Kurakin <rik@FreeBSD.org>
sppp(4) was updated (in 6.current) to be able to work in mpsafe mode.
For compatibility if an interface is unable to work in mpsafe mode,
sppp will not use mpsafe locks.
Support of FrameRelay AnnexD was added as a historical commit. Many of
Cronyx users were expecting this commit for a long long time, and most
of them still prefer sppp vs netgraph because of simplicity of its
configuration (especially for ppp (vs mpd) and fr (vs a couple of
netgraph modules). After MFCing this I'll finally close a PR 21771,
from 2000/10/05
_________________________________________________________________
TCP Cleanup and Optimizations
URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/tcpcleanup.html
Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre@FreeBSD.org>
The TCP code in FreeBSD has evolved significantly since the fork from
4.4BSD-Lite2 in 1994 primarily due to new features and refinements of
the TCP specifications.
The TCP code now needs a general overhaul, streamlining a cleanup to
make it easily comprehensible, maintainable and extensible again. In
addition there are many little optimizations that can be done during
such an operation propelling FreeBSD back at the top of the best
performing TCP/IP stacks again, a position it has held for the longest
time in the 90's.
This overhaul is a very involved and delicate matter and needs
extensive formal and actual testing to ensure no regressions compared
to the current code. The effort needed for this work is about two
man-month of fully focused and dedicated time. To get it done I need
funding to take time off my day job and to dedicate me to FreeBSD work
much the way PHK did with his buffer cache and vnode rework projects.
In February 2005 I will officially announce the funding request with a
detailed description of the work and how the funding works. In general
I can write invoices for companies wishing to sponsor this work on
expenses. Tax exempt donations can probably be arranged through the
FreeBSD foundation. Solicitations of money are already welcome, please
contact me on the email address above.
Open tasks:
1. Funding for two man-month equivalents of my time.
2. If you want or intend to sponsor US$1k or more please contact me
in advance already now.
_________________________________________________________________
TCP Reassembly Rewrite and Optimization
URL: http://www.nrg4u.com/freebsd/tcp_reass-20041213.patch
URL:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2004-December/005918.ht
ml
Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre@FreeBSD.org>
Currently TCP segment reassembly is implemented as a linked list of
segments. With today's high bandwidth links and large bandwidth*delay
products this doesn't scale and perform well.
The rewrite optimizes a large number of operational aspects of the
segments reassembly process. For example it is very likely that the
just arrived segment attaches to the end of the reassembly queue, so
we check that first. Second we check if it is the missing segment or
alternatively attaches to the start of the reassembly queue. Third
consecutive segments are merged together (logically) and are skipped
over in one jump for linear searches instead of each segment at a
time.
Further optimizations prototyped merge consecutive segments on the
mbuf level instead of only logically. This is expected to give another
significant performance gain. The new reassembly queue is tracking all
holes in the queue and it may be beneficial to integrate this with the
scratch pad of SACK in the future.
Andrew Gallatin was able to get 3.7Gb/sec TCP performance on
dual-2Gbit Myrinet cards with severe packet reordering (due to a
firmware bug) with the new TCP reassembly code. See second link.
_________________________________________________________________
The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Team
URL: http://www.evilcoder.org/content/section/6/39/
URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/nl/books/handbook/
URL: http://www.evilcoder.org/freebsd_html/
Contact: Remko Lodder <Remko@FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project is a ongoing project to
translate the documentation into the Dutch language. Currently we are
mainly focused on the Handbook, which is progressing pretty well.
However, lots need to be translated and checked before we have a
'complete' translation ready. So if you are willing to help out,
please checkout our website and/or contact me.
Open tasks:
1. Translating the Handbook
2. Checking the grammar of the Dutch Handbook
3. Translate the rest of the documentation
_________________________________________________________________
TTCPv2: Transactional TCP version 2
URL:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-all/2004-November/089939.html
Contact: Andre Oppermann <andre@FreeBSD.org>
The old TTCP according to RFC1644 was insecure, intrusive, complicated
and has been removed from FreeBSD >= 5.3. Although the idea and
semantics behind it are still sound and valid.
The rewrite uses a much easier and more secure system with 24bit long
client and server cookies which are transported in the TCP options.
Client cookies protect against various kinds of blind injection
attacks and can be used as well to generally secure TCP sessions (for
BGP for example). Server cookies are only exchanged during the
SYN-SYN/ACK phase and allow a server to ensure that it has
communicated with this particular client before. The first connection
is always performing a 3WHS and assigning a server cookie to a client.
Subsequent connections can send the cookie back to the server and
short-cut the 3WHS to SYN->OPEN on the server.
TTCPv2 is fully configurable per-socket via the setsockopt() system
call. Clients and server not capable of TTCPv2 remain fully compatible
and just continue using the normal 3WHS without any delay or other
complications.
Work on implementing TTCPv2 is done to 90% and expected to be
available by early February 2005. Writing the implementation
specification (RFC Draft) has just started.
_________________________________________________________________
Update of the Linux userland infrastructure
Contact: Alexander Leidinger <netchild@FreeBSD.org>
The default linux_base port port was changed from the RedHat 7 based
emulators/linux_base to the RedHat 8 based emulators/linux_base-8 just
in time for FreeBSD 4.11-Release because of a security problem in
emulators/linux_base. In the conversion process several problems where
fixed in some Linux ports.
Both RedHat 7 and 8 are at their end of life, so expect an update to a
more recent Linux distribution in the future. For QA reasons this
update wasn't scheduled before FreeBSD 4.11-Release.
_________________________________________________________________
Wiki with new software
URL: http://wikitest.freebsd.org/
Contact: Josef El-Rayes <josef@FreeBSD.org>
After experiencing spam attacks on the old wiki-engine caused by
non-existent authentification mechanism, I had to replace it with a
more advanced software. Instead of usemod, we now run moinmoin. As a
consequence it's no longer just a 'browse & edit', but you have to
sign up and let someone who is already in the ACL group 'developers'
add you to the group. So it is a 'developers-only' resource now. The
old wiki is found at http://wiki2.daemon.li
Open tasks:
1. Move content from old wiki to new one.
_________________________________________________________________
Wireless Networking Support
Contact: Sam Leffler <sam@FreeBSD.org>
The wireless networking layer was updated to support the 802.1x, WPA,
and 802.11i security protocols, and the WME/WMM multi-media protocol.
As part of this work extensible frameworks were added for
cryptographic methods, authentication, and access control. Extensions
are implemented as loadable kernel modules that hook into the net80211
layer. This mechanism is used, for example, to implement WEP, TKIP,
and CCMP crypto protocols. The Atheros driver (ath) is currently the
only driver that uses the full set of features. Adding support to
other drivers is simple but waiting on volunteers. Ports of the
wpa_supplicant and hostapd programs enable use of the new security
protocols.
The support for tracking stations in a bss (managed or adhoc) and
stations found when scanning was overhauled. Multiple tables are now
used, each with different management policies, reference counting is
now done consistently, and inactivity processing is done more
intelligently (e.g. associated stations are probed before removal).
This is the first step towards proper roaming support and other
advanced features.
AP power save support was added. Associated stations may now operate
in power save mode; frames sent to them will be buffered while they
are sleeping and multicast traffic will be deferred until after the
next beacon (per the 802.11 protocol). Power save support is required
in a standards-compliant access point. Only the ath driver currently
implements power save support.
Work is actively going on to add Atheros' SuperG capabilities, WDS,
and for multi-bss support (ssid and/or bssid) on a single device.
Open tasks:
1. Drivers other than ath need updates to support the new security
protocols
2. hostapd needs work to support the IAPP and 802.11i
preauthentication protocols (these are simple conversion of
existing Linux code)
_________________________________________________________________
Copyright 1995-2005 the FreeBSD Project. All rights reserved.
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