doc/en/news/status/report-june-2001.xml
Chris Costello c482274a1d Change the title of "Close a PR drive"' to Problem Reports' to avoid
undesirable sorting by the stylesheets.
2001-09-18 17:48:22 +00:00

825 lines
24 KiB
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<report>
<date>
<month>June</month>
<year>2001</year>
</date>
<cvs:keywords xmlns:cvs="http://www.FreeBSD.org/XML/CVS" version="1.0">
<cvs:keyword name="freebsd">
$FreeBSD: www/en/news/status/report-june-2001.xml,v 1.4 2001/09/18 12:22:07 chris Exp $
</cvs:keyword>
</cvs:keywords>
<section>
<title>Introduction</title>
<p>One of the benefits of the FreeBSD development model is a focus
on centralized design and implementation, in which the operating
system is maintained in a central repository, and discussed on
centrally maintained lists. This allows for a high level of
coordination between authors of various components of the system,
and allows policies to be enforced over the entire system, covering
issues ranging from architecture to style. However, as the FreeBSD
developer community has grown, and the rate of both mailing list
traffic and tree modifications has increased, making it difficult
even for the most dedicated developer to remain on top of all the
work going on in the tree.</p>
<p>The FreeBSD Monthly Development Status Report attempts to
address this problem by providing a vehicle that allows developers
to make the broader community aware of their on-going work on
FreeBSD, both in and out of the central source repository. This is
the first issue, and as such is an experiment. For each project and
sub-project, a one paragraph summary is included, indicating
progress since the last summary (in this case, simply recent
progress, as there have been no prior summaries).</p>
<p>This status report may be reproduced in whole or in part, as
long as the source is clearly identified and appropriate credit
given.</p>
</section>
<section>
<title>Future Editions</title>
<p>Assuming there is some positive feedback on this idea, and that
future submissions get made such that there is content for future
issues, the goal is to release a development status report once a
month. As such, the next deadline will be July 31, 2001, with a
scheduled publication date in the first week of August. This will
put the status report on a schedule in line with the calendar, as
well as providing a little over a month until the next deadline,
which will include a number of pertinent events, including the
Annual USENIX Technical Conference in Boston, MA. Submissions
should be e-mailed to:</p>
<blockquote>
<a href="mailto:robert+freebsd.monthly@cyrus.watson.org">
robert+freebsd.monthly@cyrus.watson.org</a>
</blockquote>
<p>Many submitters will want to wait until the last week of July so
as to provide the most up-to-date status report; however,
submissions will be accepted at any time prior to that date.</p>
<p>
<i>-- Robert Watson &lt;
<a href="mailto:rwatson@FreeBSD.org">rwatson@FreeBSD.org</a>
&gt;</i>
</p>
</section>
<project>
<title>Binary Updater Project</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Eric</given>
<common>Melville</common>
</name>
<email>eric@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
<person>
<name>
<given>Murray</given>
<common>Stokely</common>
</name>
<email>murray@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://people.freebsd.org/~murray/updater.html" />
</links>
<body>
<p>The FreeBSD Binary Updater Project aims to provide a secure
mechanism for the distribution of binary updates for FreeBSD.
This project is complementary to the Open Packages and libh
efforts and there should be very little overlap with those
projects. The system uses a client / server mechanism that allows
clients to install any known "profile" or release of FreeBSD over
the network. Where a specific profile might contain a specific
set of FreeBSD software to install, additional packages, and
configuration actions that make it more ideal for a specific
environment (ie FreeBSD 4.3 Secure Web Server Profile)</p>
<p>The system can currently be used to install a FreeBSD system
or perform the most simple of upgrades but many features are
absent. In particular, the client is in its infancy and much work
remains to be done. We need additional developers so please get
in touch with us at
<a href="mailto:updater@osd.bsdi.com">updater@osd.bsdi.com</a>
if you are interested in spending some cycles on this.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>Problem Reports</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Poul-Henning</given>
<common>Kamp</common>
</name>
<email>phk@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://phk.freebsd.dk/Gnats/" />
</links>
<body>
<p>Poul-Henning Kamp kicked off a drive to get our GNATS PR
database cleaned up so the wheat can be sorted from the chaff.
Progress is good, but there is still a lot of work to do. Give a
hand if you can. Remember: every unhandled PR is a pissed off
contributor or user.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>CVSROOT script rewrite/tidy</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Josef</given>
<common>Karthauser</common>
</name>
<email>joe@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>I'm in the process of rewriting the CVSROOT/scripts to make
them more clean and configurable. A lot of other projects also
use these and so it makes sense to make them as easy to use in
other environments as possible.</p>
<p>Status: work in progress. There is now a configuration file,
but not all the scripts use it yet.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>DEVFS</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Poul-Henning</given>
<common>Kamp</common>
</name>
<email>phk@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>Work is progressing on implementing true cloning devices in
DEVFS. Brian Somers and Poul-Henning Kamp are working to make
if_tun the first truly cloning driver in the system. Next will be
the pty driver and the bpf driver.</p>
<p>From July 1st DEVFS will be standard in -current.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>digi driver</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Brian</given>
<common>Somers</common>
</name>
<email>brian@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>Added the digi driver. Initial work was done by John Prince
&lt;johnp@knight-trosoft.com&gt;, but all the modular stuff was
done by me and initial work on supporting Xe and Xi cards (ala
dgb) was done by me. I'm now awaiting an Xe card being sent from
joerg@ (almost a donation) so that I can get that side of things
working properly.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>Diskcheckd</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Poul-Henning</given>
<common>Kamp</common>
</name>
<email>phk@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url
href="http://phantom.cris.net/freebsd/projects/viewproj.php?p_id=15" />
</links>
<body>
<p>Ben Smithurst has written a "diskcheckd" daemon which will
read all sectors on the disks over a configured period. With
recent increases in disksizes it is by no means a given that disk
read errors will be discovered before they are fatal. This daemon
will hopefully result in the drive firmware being able to
relocate bad sectors before they become unreadable. This code is
now committed to 5.0-CURRENT.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>if_fxp driver</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Jonathan</given>
<common>Lemon</common>
</name>
<email>jlemon@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>In the last month (May-June), the new fxp driver was brought
into -stable. This new driver uses the common MII code, so
support for new PHYs is easy to add. Support for the new Intel
82562 chips was added. The driver was updated to add VLAN support
and a workaround for a bug affecting Intel 815-based boards.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>Java Project</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Greg</given>
<common>Lewis</common>
</name>
<email>glewis@eyesbeyond.com</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>The FreeBSD Java Project has continued its "behind the scenes"
work over the last month. Progress was made both technically,
with the help of Bill Huey (of Wind River), on a port of JDK
1.3.1 and legally, with Nate Williams continuing negotiations
with Sun on a mutually acceptable license to release a binary
Java 2 SDK under. The JDK 1.2.2 port has also seen some
development, with a new patchset likely to be released soon which
includes JPDA and NetBSD support (the latter courtesy of Scott
Bartram).</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>Kernel Graphics Interface port</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Nicolas</given>
<common>Souchu</common>
</name>
<email>nsouch@fr.alcove.com</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://kgi.sourceforge.net/" />
</links>
<body>
<p>The Kernel Graphics Interface project has worked for several
years to provide a framework for graphic drivers under Linux
receiving input from other groups like the UDI project. Currently
the KGI core implementation is quite settled, as is the driver
coding model as a whole. Work is being done to newbussify KGI and
produce a kld, as part of a future redesign of the graphics
subsystem in FreeBSD. KGI will be an alternative for graphic card
producers that don't accept the XFree86 model of userland graphic
adapters and will also provide accelerated support for any other
graphic alternative.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>libh Project</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Alexander</given>
<common>Langer</common>
</name>
<email>alex@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
<person>
<name>
<given>Nathan</given>
<common>Ahlstrom</common>
</name>
<email>nra@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://people.freebsd.org/~alex/libh/" />
</links>
<body>
<p>The libh project is a next generation sysinstall. It is
written in C++ using QT for its graphical frontend and tvision
for its console support. The menus are scriptable via an embedded
tcl interpreter. It has been growing functionality quite a bit
lately, including a new disklabel editor. Current work is on
installation scripts for CDROM, FTP, ... installs as well as a
fully functional standalone disk-partition and label editor. The
GUI API was extended a little and many bugs were fixed. There
seems to be some interest in i18n work.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>Mount(2) API</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Poul-Henning</given>
<common>Kamp</common>
</name>
<email>phk@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>Maxime Henrion is working on implementing a new and more
extensible mount(2) systemcall, mainly to overcome the 32 bits
for mountoptions limit, secondary goal to make it possible to
mount filesystems from inside the kernel.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>OLDCARD pccard implementation</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Warner</given>
<common>Losh</common>
</name>
<email>imp@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>In the last two months, the OLDCARD pccard implemenation was
rototilled to within an inch of its life. Many new pci cardbus
bridges were added. Power handling was improved. PCI Card cardbus
bridges are nearly supported and should be committed in early
June to the tree. This will likely be the last major work done on
OLDCARD. After pci cards are supported, work will shift to
improving NEWCARD.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>PowerPC Port</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Benno</given>
<common>Rice</common>
</name>
<email>benno@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>The PowerPC port is proceeding well. All seems to be working
in pmap.c after a number of problems encountered where FreeBSD
passes a vm_page_t to a NetBSD-derived function that expects a
vm_offset_t. Then after debugging the atomic operations code, I'm
now at the point where VM appears to be initialised and it's now
hanging while in sys/kern/kern_malloc.c:kmeminit(). Progress
continues. =)</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>PPP</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Brian</given>
<common>Somers</common>
</name>
<email>brian@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>Developing full MPPE support for Andre Opperman @ Monzoon in
Switzerland. Work is now complete and will eventually be brought
into -current, but no dates are yet known.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>pseudofs</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Dag-Erling</given>
<common>Smorgrav</common>
</name>
<email>des@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>Pseudofs is a framework for pseudo-filesystems, like procfs
and linprocfs. The goal of pseudofs is twofold:</p>
<ul>
<li>eliminate code duplication between (and within) procfs and
linprocfs</li>
<li>isolate procfs and linprocfs from the complexities of the
vfs system to simplify maintenance and further
development.</li>
</ul>
<p>Pseudofs has reached the point where it is sufficiently
functional and stable that linprocfs has been almost fully
reimplemented on top of it; the only bit that's missing is the
proc/&lt;pid&gt;/mem file.</p>
<p>The primary to-do item for pseudofs right now is to add
support for writeable files (which are required for procfs, and
are quite a bit less trivial to handle than read-only files). In
addition, pseudofs needs either generic support for raw
(non-sbuf'ed, possibly mmap'able) files, or failing that,
special-case code to handle proc/&lt;pid&gt;/mem.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>RELNOTESng</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Bruce</given>
<common>A. Mah</common>
</name>
<email>bmah@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://people.freebsd.org/~bmah/relnotes/" />
</links>
<body>
<p>RELNOTESng is the name I've given to the rewrite of the *.TXT
files that typically accompany a FreeBSD release. The information
from these files (which include, among other things, the release
notes and the supported hardware list) have been reorganized and
converted to SGML. This helps us produce the documentation in
various formats, as well as facilitating the maintainence of
documentation for multiple architectures. This work was recently
committed to -CURRENT, and I intend to MFC it to 4-STABLE before
4.4-RELEASE.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>SMPng Project</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>John</given>
<common>Baldwin</common>
</name>
<email>jhb@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
<person>
<name>
<given>Jake</given>
<common>Burkholder</common>
</name>
<email>jake@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
<person>
<name>
<given>SMP</given>
<common>Mailing list</common>
</name>
<email>smp@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://www.freebsd.org/~jasone/smp/" />
</links>
<body>
<p>The SMPng project aims to provide multithreaded support for
the FreeBSD kernel. Currently the kernel still runs almost
exclusively under the Giant kernel lock. Recently, progress has
been made in locking the process group and session structures as
well as file descriptors by Seigo Tanimura-san. Alfred Perlstein
has also added in a giant lock around the entire virtual memory
(VM) subsystem which will eventually be split up into several
smaller locks. The locking of the VM subsystem has proved tricky,
and some of the current effort is focused on finding and fixing a
few remaining bugs in on the alpha architecture.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>SMPng mbuf allocator</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Bosko</given>
<common>Milekic</common>
</name>
<email>bmilekic@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://people.freebsd.org/~bmilekic/code/mb_slab/" />
</links>
<body>
<p>mb_alloc is a new specialized allocator for mbufs and mbuf
clusters. Presently, it offers various important advantages over
the old (status quo) mbuf allocator, particularily for MP
machines. Additionally, it is designed with the possibility of
future enchancements in mind.</p>
<p>Presently in initial review &amp; testing stages, most of the
code is already written.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>Sparc64 Port</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Jake</given>
<common>Burkholder</common>
</name>
<email>jake@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>Work has (re)started on a port of FreeBSD to the UltraSPARC
architecture, specifically targeting PCI based workstations. Jake
Burkholder will be porting the kernel, and Ade Lovett has
expressed an interest in working on userland. Recent work on the
project includes:</p>
<ul>
<li>built a gnu cross toolchain targeting sparc64</li>
<li>obtained remote access to an ultra 5 development machine
(thanks to emmy)</li>
<li>developed a minimal set of headers and source files to
allow the kernel to be compiled and linked</li>
<li>implemented a mini-loader which relocates the kernel, maps
it into the tlbs and calls it</li>
<li>nabbed Benno Rice's openfirmware console driver which
allows printf and panic to work</li>
</ul>
<p>At this point the kernel can be net-booted and prints the
FreeBSD copyright before calling code that is not yet
implemented. I am currently working on a design for the pmap
module and plan to begin implementation in the next few days.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>TrustedBSD</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Robert</given>
<common>Watson</common>
</name>
<email>rwatson@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://www.TrustedBSD.org/" />
</links>
<body>
<p>The TrustedBSD Project seeks to improve the security of the
FreeBSD operating system by adding new security features, many
derived from common trusted operating system requirements. This
includes Access Control Lists (ACLs), Fine-grained Event Logging
(Audit), Fine-grained Privileges (Capabilities), Mandatory Access
Control (MAC), and other architecture features, including file
system extended attributes, and improved object labeling.</p>
<p>Individual feature status reports are documented seperately
below; in general, basic features (such as EAs, ACLs, and kernel
support for Capabilities) will be initially available in
5.0-RELEASE, conditional on specific kernel options. A
performance-enhanced version of EAs is currently being targetted
at 6.0-RELEASE, along with an integrated capability-aware
userland, and MAC support.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>TrustedBSD: ACLs</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Chris</given>
<common>D. Faulhaber</common>
</name>
<email>jedgar@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>Patches are now available to add ACL support to cp(1) and
mv(1) along with preliminary support for install(1). Ilmar's i18n
patches for getfacl(1) and setfacl(1) need to be updated for the
last set of changes and committed. Some other functional
improvements are also in the pipeline.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>TrustedBSD Capabilities</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Thomas</given>
<common>Moestl</common>
</name>
<email>tmm@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<body>
<p>The kernel part of the capability implementation is mostly
finished; all uses of suser() and suser_xxx() and nearly all
comparisons of uid's with 0 have been converted to use the newly
introduced cap_check() call. Some details still need
clarification. More documentation for this needs to be done.</p>
<p>POSIX.2c-compatible getfcap and setfcap programs have been
written. Experimental capability support in su(1), login(1),
install(1) and bsd.prog.mk is being tested.</p>
<p>Support for capabilities, ACL's, capabilities and MAC labels
in tar(1) is being developed; only the capability part is tested
right now. Generic support for extended attributes is planned,
this will require extensions to the current EA interface, which
are written and will probably be committed to -CURRENT in a few
weeks. A port of these features to pax(1) is planned.</p>
</body>
</project>
<project>
<title>TrustedBSD MAC and Object Labeling</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Robert</given>
<common>Watson</common>
</name>
<email>rwatson@FreeBSD.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="http://www.TrustedBSD.org/" />
</links>
<body>
<p>An initial prototype of a Mandatory Access Control
implementation was completed earlier this year, supporting
Multi-Level Security, Biba Integrity protection, and a more
general jail-based access control model. Based on that
implementation, I'm now in the process of improving the FreeBSD
security abstractions to simplify both the implementation and
integration of MAC support, as well as increase the number of
kernel objects protected by both discretionary and mandatory
protection schemes. Generic object labeling introduces a
structure not dissimilar in properties to the kernel ucred
structure, only it is intended to be associated with kernel
objects, rather than kernel subjects, permitting the creation of
generic security protection routines for objects. This would
allow the easy extension of procfs and devfs to support ACLs and
MAC, for example. A prototype is underway, with compiling and
running code and simple protections now associated with
sysctl's.</p>
</body>
</project>
</report>