FreeBSD Foundation Funded Projects
The projects listed on this page are funded by donations given to The FreeBSD Foundation. There are many on-going projects being worked on by volunteers, companies, etc. for the FreeBSD Project. To find out more about these projects please visit the Project's website at:
To help fund future projects please consider making a donation to the foundation. You can do this by visiting:
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/
DAHDI FreeBSD driver port
Project Status: In Progress
FreeBSD Developer: Max Khon
Max Khon has been awarded a grant to finish the DAHDI FreeBSD driver port.
The purpose of DAHDI/FreeBSD project is to make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions.
DAHDI (Digium/Asterisk Hardware Device Interface) is an open-source device driver framework and a set of HW drivers for E1/T1, ISDN digital and FXO/FXS analog cards (http://www.asterisk.org/dahdi/). Asterisk is one of the most popular open-source software PBX solutions (http://www.asterisk.org/).
The project includes porting DAHDI framework and HW drivers for E1/T1, FXO/FXS analog and ISDN digital cards to FreeBSD. This also includes TDMoE support, software and HW echo cancellation (Octasic, VPMADT032) and HW transcoding support (TC400B). The work is ongoing in the official DAHDI SVN repository with the close collaboration with DAHDI folks at Digium.
The project is nearing its completion: DAHDI framework and HW drivers telephony cards has been ported and tested. There are a number of success stories from early adopters who use E1/T1 and FXO/FXS cards on FreeBSD for several months.
This project will be completed in September 2010.
Resource Containers Project
Project Status: In Progress
FreeBSD Developer: Edward Tomasz Napierala
Edward Tomasz Napierala has been awarded a grant to implement resource containers and a simple per-jail resource limits mechanism.
Unlike Solaris zones, the current implementation of FreeBSD Jails does not provide per-jail resource limits. As a result, users are often forced to replace jails with other virtualization mechanisms. The goal of this project is to create a single, unified framework for controlling resource utilisation, and to use that framework to implement per-jail resource limits. In the future, the same framework might be used to implement more sophisticated resource controls, such as Hierarchical Resource Limits, or to implement mechanisms similar to AIX WLM. It could also be used to provide precise resource usage accounting for administrative or billing purposes.
"It's great that the Foundation decided to fund this project", Edward noted. "It will make jail-based virtualization a much better choice in many scenarios, for example for Virtual Private Server providers."
This project will be completed in December 2010.
DTrace Userland Project
Project Status: In Progress
FreeBSD Developer: Rui Paulo
Rui Paulo has been awarded a grant to add DTrace userland support to FreeBSD.
DTrace is a general purpose and lightweight tracing framework that allows administrators, developers and users to investigate causes of system failure or performance bottlenecks. The FreeBSD operating system has had support for kernel-only DTrace since FreeBSD 8.0, but DTrace userland support was missing. Having userland support in DTrace allows inspection of userland software itself and its correlation with the kernel, thus allowing a much better picture of what exactly is going on behind the scenes.
This project will first concentrate on adding libproc support for symbol to address mapping, address to symbol mapping, breakpoint setup and the rtld interactions with DTrace. Next it will focus on DTrace process control, importing the pid provider and adapting it to FreeBSD and porting the userland statically defined probe provider (usdt). Finally it will bring in the plockstat provider.
"By having userland DTrace support, companies can make their products perform much better on FreeBSD due to the fact that they now have access to this amazing tool," said FreeBSD developer Rui Paulo. He also said, "When we mix the userland support with the kernel side DTrace support, we can also make FreeBSD a better operating system because we can investigate performance bottlenecks much easier."
The project will be completed by September 2010.
BSNMP Improvements Project
Project Status: In Progress
FreeBSD Developer: Shteryana Shopova
The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Shteryana Shopova has been awarded a grant to make improvements to BSNMP.
This project includes several enhancements to the existing FreeBSD SNMP framework, including SNMPv3-compliant user authentication, packet encryption and view-based access control. In addition, the project also includes a new module that will allow full SNMP management and monitoring of the FreeBSD wireless networking stack. When the project is completed, FreeBSD should be the OS of choice when building open source-based embedded wireless appliances due to the advanced capabilities of its wireless network stack, and the light-weight, secure and complete management solution that bsnmpd(1) will provide out of the box. Existing FreeBSD installations that use bsnmpd(1) for monitoring will also benefit from the added security and finer-grained access-control to SNMP data.
"SNMP is the defacto standard for network monitoring," said Shteryana Shopova, FreeBSD developer. She also added, "SNMP is used everywhere - in network servers, switches, routers, firewalls, workstations, ip phones, printers, UPSs, all sorts of embedded appliances. I am happy to have the opportunity to work on several additions to bsnmpd(1) that have been requested by the FreeBSD community."
This project will be completed in October 2010.
FreeBSD Jail Based Virtualization Project
Project Status: In Progress
FreeBSD Developer: Bjoern Zeeb
Bjoern A. Zeeb has been awarded a grant to improve FreeBSD's jail based virtualization infrastructure and to continue to work on the virtual network stack. His employer, CK Software GmbH is matching the Foundation's funding with hours.
FreeBSD has been well known for its jail based virtualization during the last decade. With the import of the virtual network stack, FreeBSD's operating system level virtualization has reached a new level.
This project includes cleanup of two years of import work and development and, more notably, brings the infrastructure for a network stack teardown. Cleanly shutting down a network stack in FreeBSD will be the major challenge in the virtualization area to get the new feature to production ready quality for the 9.x release lifecycle.
Further, the project includes generalization of the virtual network stack framework, factoring out common code. This will provide an infrastructure and will ease virtualization of further subsystems like SYSV/Posix IPC with minimal overhead. All further virtualized subsystems will immediately benefit from shared debugging facilities, an essential feature for early adopters of the new technology.
"Improved jail based virtualization support, that continues to be very lightweight and as easily manageable as classic jails, will be a killer feature for the next few years," said Bjoern A. Zeeb, FreeBSD developer. He also added, "It will allow people to partition their FreeBSD server, run simulations without racks of hardware, or provide thousands of virtual instances in hosting environments fairly easy and efficiently. While this follows the trend of green computing, it also adds to FreeBSD's virtualization portfolio with Xen or other more heavyweight hypervisor support, which can be mixed with jails as needed."
While work in this area will have to continue, the funding for this project will end mid-July 2010.
High Available Storage Project
Project Status: Completed
FreeBSD Developer: Pawel Jakub Dawidek
Pawel Jakub Dawidek has been awarded a grant to implement storage replication software that will enable users to use the FreeBSD operating system for highly available configurations where data has to be shared across the cluster nodes. The project is partly being funded by OMCnet Internet Service GmbH and TransIP BV.
The software will allow for synchronous block-level replication of any storage media (GEOM providers, using FreeBSD nomenclature) over the TCP/IP network and for fast failure recovery. HAST will provide storage using GEOM infrastructure, which means it will be file system and application independent and could be combined with any existing GEOM class. In case of a master node failure, the cluster will be able to switch to the slave node, check and mount UFS file system or import ZFS pool and continue to work without missing a single bit of data.
Flattened Device Tree Project
Project Status: Completed
FreeBSD Developer: Rafal Jaworowski
Rafal Jaworowski and Semihalf has been awarded a grant to provide FreeBSD with support for the flattened device tree (FDT) technology. This project allows for describing hardware resources of a computer system and their dependencies in a platform-neutral and portable way.
The main consumers of this functionality are embedded systems whose hardware resources assignment cannot be probed or self-discovered. The FDT idea is inherited from Open Firmware IEEE 1275 device-tree notion (part of the regular Open Firmware implementation), and among other deployments is used as a basis for Power.org's embedded platform reference specification (ePAPR).
You can find out more about the project at http://wiki.freebsd.org/FlattenedDeviceTree.
Wireless Mesh Support
Project Status: Completed
FreeBSD Developer: Rui Paulo
Rui Paulo will be implementing the forthcoming IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh standard for FreeBSD. Wireless mesh networks are expected to become widespread as routers and network appliances deploy them, allowing wireless networks to be built and extended dynamically. Support for the standard will allow FreeBSD consumers to take advantage of this new technology.
Improvements to the FreeBSD TCP Stack.
Project Status: On going
FreeBSD Developer: Lawrence Stewart and Swinburne University of Technology's Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures (CAIA)
This three-part project will include implementing Appropriate Byte Counting (ABC) RFC3465 support, adapting and merging CAIA's Statistical Information for TCP Research (SIFTR) TCP analysis tool into FreeBSD, and making improvements to the TCP reassembly queue.
The project completed July 2009.
Make removing disk devices with mounted filesystems on them safe.
Project Status: Completed
FreeBSD Developer: Edward Tomasz Napierala
The project is to make FreeBSD tolerate the removal of active disk devices, such as when a USB flash device with a mounted filesystems is physically detached by a user. Currently the system may panic in this situation. The work involves adding proper reference counting to strategic portions of the kernel and modifying filesystems to properly handle "device lost" errors.
Status of the changes is: -CURRENT should no longer panic when you remove a USB drive without unmounting it first. The changes will be merged into 7.x soon.
Network Stack Virtualization Project
Project Status: Completed
FreeBSD Developer: Bjoern Zeeb
The virtualized network stack will significantly enhance FreeBSD's jail functionality, allowing jails to have their own complete and locally administered network stacks, including firewalls, routing, and IPsec configurations. The Foundation will be sponsoring Bjoern Zeeb, a FreeBSD network developer, to enhance the existing prototype, now being merged into FreeBSD 8.x, as well as provide code review.
Improving the Hardware Performance Counter Support
Project Status: Completed August 6, 2007
FreeBSD Developer: Joseph Koshy
The FreeBSD Foundation, with a generous grant from Google, teamed up to sponsor Joseph Koshy in improving the hardware performance counter support in FreeBSD. The goal of the project was the addition of callgraph support in the hwpmc driver. With callgraph support, developers can more clearly visualize performance issues through the exact code paths, rather than a specific function which may only exhibit issues through one path, but not others. In addition to the improvements to this software, Google provided funding for 2 modern CPU machines for development and testing. These new machines were placed in the network performance cluster hosted by Sentex Corp in Ontario, Canada.
Following is a more detailed list of what was added:
- The hwpmc driver now supports callchain capture, for both the kernel and for user processes.
- The machine-dependent and machine-independent parts of the kernel for the i386 and amd64 architectures (the ones that hwpmc is available on) have been so enhanced to support extra functionality needed by hwpmc(4) for callgraph support.
- The libpmc(3) library has been enhanced to process the new information collected by the kernel module.
- The pmcstat(8) tool produces two kinds of reports using captured callchain data, (a) traditional gprof(1) callgraphs and (b) a callchain summary, for two different 'views' into the collected data.
- Manual pages for the driver hwpmc(4), command-line tool pmcstat(8), and interface library pmc(3) now reflect the new features available.
How to access the code
The callchain capture work is in CVS now.
Network Stack Virtualization Project
Project Status: Completed
FreeBSD Developer: Marko Zec
The network stack virtualization project aims at extending the FreeBSD kernel to maintain multiple independent instances of networking state. This will allow for complete networking independence between jails on a system, including giving each jail its own firewall, virtual network interfaces, rate limiting, routing tables, and IPSEC configuration.
The prototype, which is kept in sync with FreeBSD -CURRENT, is now sufficiently stable for testing. It virtualizes the basic INET and INET6 kernel structures and subsystems, including IPFW and PF firewalls, and more. The next step is to have the IPSEC code fully virtualized, and refine and document the management APIs. The short-term goal is to deliver production-grade kernel support for virtualized networking for FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE (as a snap-in kernel replacement), while continuing to keep the code in sync with -CURRENT for possible merging at a later date.