The FreeBSD Project | Introduction
source link: https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2021-01-2021-03/
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Entries from the various official and semi-official teams, as found in the Administration Page.
FreeBSD Foundation
Contact: Deb Goodkin <[email protected]>
The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide. Funding comes from individual and corporate donations and is used to fund and manage software development projects, conferences and developer summits, and provide travel grants to FreeBSD contributors. The Foundation purchases and supports hardware to improve and maintain FreeBSD infrastructure and provides resources to improve security, quality assurance, and release engineering efforts; publishes marketing material to promote, educate, and advocate for the FreeBSD Project; facilitates collaboration between commercial vendors and FreeBSD developers; and finally, represents the FreeBSD Project in executing contracts, license agreements, and other legal arrangements that require a recognized legal entity.
Here are some highlights of what we did to help FreeBSD last quarter:
COVID-19 Impact to the Foundation
Like most organizations, our team continued to work from home. Our temporary ban on travel for staff members remains in effect, but continues to not affect our output too much, since most conferences are still virtual. We continued supporting the community and Project, even though some of our work and responses may have been delayed because of changes in some of our priorities and the impact of limited childcare for a few of our staff members.
Partnerships and Commercial User Support
We help facilitate collaboration between commercial users and FreeBSD developers. We also meet with companies to discuss their needs and bring that information back to the Project. Not surprisingly, the stay at home orders, combined with our company ban on travel during Q1 made in-person meetings non-existent. However, the team was able to continue meeting with our partners and commercial users virtually. These meetings help us understand some of the applications where FreeBSD is used.
We were thrilled for the opportunity to work with AMD early on to ensure FreeBSD worked on their recently released third generation EPYC series. You can read more about that here: https://freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/latest-news/freebsd-well-prepared-for-amd-epyc-7003-series-processors/.
Fundraising Efforts
First, we’d like to say thank you to everyone who has given us a financial contribution this year! Last quarter we raised $88,237, which includes donations from organizations like Facebook and Tarsnap, as well as many individuals. We also have a few donation commitments for this quarter.
Going forward this quarter, we will be reaching out to FreeBSD commercial users to help support our growing efforts. At the beginning of 2021, we opened two job positions in our software development team, to increase the amount of support we are able to provide in this area. That includes increasing the amount of code reviews and bug fixes we do and adding some major features to FreeBSD, to help keep FreeBSD the innovative, secure, and reliable operating system you rely on.
You’ll find out how we used your donations for Q1 in our report, as well as individual reports throughout this status report.
We are excited about our plans for 2021, which include more FreeBSD online advocacy and training, operating system course content, and the software development work mentioned above. While we are still in this pandemic, we’re working hard to help connect folks within the community with more virtual opportunities.
Please consider making a donation to help us continue and increase our support for FreeBSD in 2021: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/.
We also have the Partnership Program, to provide more benefits for our larger commercial donors. Find out more information and share with your companies! https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/FreeBSD-foundation-partnership-program/
OS Improvements
Over the quarter a total of 264 base system commits, 63 ports commits, and 10 doc tree commits were tagged as sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation. The Foundation also sponsored work that was committed to third-party repositories, including 26 commits to LLDB (the LLVM project debugger). This includes work from staff members, interns, and grant recipients. In other quarterly report entries you can read more about some of these sponsored projects, such as LLDB and other kernel debugging improvements, and kernel sanitizers.
As usual, staff members committed numerous bug fixes, minor improvements, and security patches. Focus areas in the kernel included virtual memory, x86 pmap, uma, tmpfs, nullfs, ffs and ufs, and job control improvements.
User space work included changes to the libc, libcasper, and libthr libraries, the run-time linker, as well as the ldd, cmp, diff, makefs, elfctl, growfs, and bhyve utilities.
Foundation staff also participated in many Phabricator code reviews, supported bug triage, integrated a number of submissions from third parties, and supported the Git transition working group.
Foundation staff also supported the promotion of the AArch64 (arm64) architecture to Tier-1 status. Work included additions to freebsd-update, integration of various bug fixes, and test run issue triage.
Continuous Integration and Quality Assurance
The Foundation provides a full-time staff member and funds projects on improving continuous integration, automated testing, and overall quality assurance efforts for the FreeBSD Project.
During the first quarter of 2021, the work was focused on pre-commit tests and building release artifacts in the CI staging environment.
The other main working item is following the VCS migration to change the src source from Subversion to Git and doc changed to AsciiDoc format.
See the FreeBSD CI section of this report for completed work items and detailed information.
Supporting FreeBSD Infrastructure
The Foundation provides hardware and support to improve the FreeBSD infrastructure. Last quarter, we continued supporting FreeBSD hardware located around the world. We coordinated efforts between the new NYI Chicago facility and clusteradm to start working on getting the facility prepared for some of the new FreeBSD hardware we are planning on purchasing. NYI generously provides this for free to the Project. We also worked on connecting with the new owners of the NYI Bridgewater site, where most of the FreeBSD infrastructure is located.
FreeBSD Advocacy and Education
A large part of our efforts are dedicated to advocating for the Project. This includes promoting work being done by others with FreeBSD; producing advocacy literature to teach people about FreeBSD and help make the path to starting using FreeBSD or contributing to the Project easier; and attending and getting other FreeBSD contributors to volunteer to run FreeBSD events, staff FreeBSD tables, and give FreeBSD presentations.
The FreeBSD Foundation sponsors many conferences, events, and summits around the globe. These events can be BSD-related, open source, or technology events geared towards underrepresented groups. We support the FreeBSD-focused events to help provide a venue for sharing knowledge, to work together on projects, and to facilitate collaboration between developers and commercial users. This all helps provide a healthy ecosystem. We support the non-FreeBSD events to promote and raise awareness of FreeBSD, to increase the use of FreeBSD in different applications, and to recruit more contributors to the Project. While we were still unable to attend in-person meetings due to covid-19, we were able to attend virtual events and began planning for the online Spring FreeBSD Developer Summit. In addition to attending and planning virtual events, we are continually working on new training initiatives and updating our selection of how-to guides to facilitate getting more folks to try out FreeBSD. https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/freebsd/how-to-guides/
Check out some of the advocacy and education work we did last quarter:
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Presented a workshop at Apricot 2021
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Staffed a virtual stand at FOSDEM 2021 and created a what’s new in 13.0 video to accompany the stand
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Staffed a virtual booth and was a community sponsor for FOSSASIA 2021
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Participated as an Industry Partner for USENIX FAST ‘21
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Committed to be an Industry Partner for USENIX Annual Tech, USENIX OSDI, USENIX Security and USENIX LISA
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Continued to promote the FreeBSD Office Hours series Videos from the one hour sessions can be found on the Project’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/FreeBSDProject. See the Office Hours section of this report for more information.
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Worked with the organizing committee to begin planning the Spring FreeBSD Developers Summit.
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Continued recruiting for the FreeBSD Fridays series. The series will return in May.
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Participated in an interview with The Register about FreeBSD 13.0 highlights. https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/10/the_state_of_freebsd/
Keep up to date with our latest work in our newsletters: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/latest-updates/?filter=newsletter
We help educate the world about FreeBSD by publishing the professionally produced FreeBSD Journal. As we mentioned previously, the FreeBSD Journal is now a free publication. Find out more and access the latest issues at https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/journal/.
You can find out more about events we attended and upcoming events at https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/.
Legal/FreeBSD IP
The Foundation owns the FreeBSD trademarks, and it is our responsibility to protect them. We also provide legal support for the core team to investigate questions that arise.
Go to http://www.freebsdfoundation.org to find out how we support FreeBSD and how we can help you!
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
Contact: FreeBSD Release Engineering Team, <[email protected]>
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is responsible for setting and publishing release schedules for official project releases of FreeBSD, announcing code freezes and maintaining the respective branches, among other things.
During the first quarter of 2021, the Release Engineering Team started work on the 13.0-RELEASE cycle, the first release from the stable/13 branch. As of this writing, the release is progressing smoothly, with one additional BETA build and two additional RC builds added to the schedule. The schedule has been updated on the FreeBSD Project website to reflect the updates.
Additionally throughout the quarter, several development snapshots builds were released for the head, stable/12, and stable/11 branches. Development snapshot builds for stable/13 will be available after the 13.0 release.
Thank you to all that have helped test the 13.0 builds up until this point and have reported issues. As always, we strive for quality over quantity.
Sponsor: Rubicon Communications, LLC ("Netgate") Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
Cluster Administration Team
Contact: Cluster Administration Team <[email protected]>
The FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team consists of the people responsible for administering the machines that the Project relies on for its distributed work and communications to be synchronised. In this quarter, the team has worked on the following:
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Installed a new package builder
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Added Git support to cluster management scripts
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Put local Git mirrors on the universe machines
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Replaced disks in the UK mirror
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Replaced a disk in pointyhat (https://pkg-status.freebsd.org)
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Recycled some old dead-weight servers eating up rackspace and power at our primary cluster site
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Upgraded developer reference platforms
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ref{11,12,13,14}-{amd64,i386}
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universe*
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Installed two new aarch64 machines
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ref12-aarch64, ref13-aarch64, ref14-aarch64
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security-officer aarch64 freebsd-update builder
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Worked with asciidoc project to update https://www.freebsd.org and https://docs.freebsd.org
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Installed a new mirror server in Brazil, sponsored by nic.br
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gdns points everyone from South America to this mirror
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complete {download,ftp,pkg}.freebsd.org mirror
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Helped rmacklem@ participate in this year’s NFS Bakeathon interoperability testing event by providing a cluster machine to the testing VPN
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Ongoing day to day cluster management activity
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Putting out fires
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Babysitting pkgsync
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Work in progress:
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Move pkg-master.nyi to new hardware
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Fix git fallouts
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Upgrade cluster hardware
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Upgrade developer-facing machines to 14-CURRENT
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Install ref14* machines
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Improve to the package building infrastructure
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Research and test migration away from mailman2
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Work with Git migration working group for ports tree migration
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Review the service jails and service administrators operation
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Improve the web service architecture
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Improve the cluster backup plan
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Setup powerpc pkgbuilder/ref/universal machines
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Prepare for a new mirror site in Australia, to be hosted by IX Australia
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Search for more providers that can fit the requirements for a generic mirrored layout or a tiny mirror
Continuous Integration
Contact: Jenkins Admin <[email protected]>
Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <[email protected]>
Contact: freebsd-testing
Mailing List
Contact: IRC #freebsd-ci channel on EFNet
The FreeBSD CI team maintains the continuous integration system of the FreeBSD project. The CI system firstly checks the committed changes can be successfully built, then performs various tests and analysis over the newly built results. The artifacts from those builds are archived in the artifact server for further testing and debugging needs. The CI team members examine the failing builds and unstable tests and work with the experts in that area to fix the code or adjust test infrastructure. The details of these efforts are available in the weekly CI reports.
During the first quarter of 2021, we continued working with the contributors and developers in the project to fulfil their testing needs and also keep collaborating with external projects and companies to improve their products and FreeBSD.
Important changes:
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All src jobs were changed to use git to follow VCS migration. Thanks Brandon Bergren (bdragon@) again.
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Doc job was updated for following the AsciiDoc migration.
New jobs added:
Work in progress and open tasks:
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Designing and implementing pre-commit CI building and testing
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Designing and implementing use of CI cluster to build release artifacts as release engineering does
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Collecting and sorting CI tasks and ideas here
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Testing and merging pull requests in the FreeBSD-ci repo
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Reducing the procedures of CI/test environment setting up for contributors and developers
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Setting up the CI stage environment and putting the experimental jobs on it
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Setting up public network access for the VM guest running tests
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Implementing automatic tests on bare metal hardware
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Adding drm ports building tests against -CURRENT
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Planning to run ztest and network stack tests
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Adding more external toolchain related jobs
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Improving the hardware lab to be more mature and adding more hardware
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Helping more software get FreeBSD support in their CI pipeline Wiki pages: 3rdPartySoftwareCI, HostedCI
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Working with hosted CI providers to have better FreeBSD support
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The build and test results will be sent to the dev-ci mailing list soon. Feedback and help with analysis is very appreciated!
Please see freebsd-testing@ related tickets for more WIP information, and don’t hesitate to join the effort!
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
Ports Collection
Contact: René Ladan <[email protected]>
Contact: FreeBSD Ports Management Team <[email protected]>
The Ports Management Team is responsible for overseeing the overall direction of the Ports Tree, building packages, and personnel matters. Below is what happened in the last quarter.
As always, first the quarterly dashboard: * we currently have around 43,800 ports (including flavors). * the open PR count for ports is currently 2477, of which 532 are unassigned. * during the last quarter, 9481 commits were made by 168 committers on the main branch, and 620 commits by 64 committers on the 2021Q1 branch. Compared to 2020Q4, the number of ports again grew by five percent, the number of open PRs dropped a bit, and the number of commits on the main branch grew with almost nine percent.
During the last quarter, we welcomed Neel Chauhan (nc@), Lewis Cook (lcook@), and Nuno Teixeira (eduardo@). Adrian Chadd (adrian@) who is already a src committer got a ports commit bit extension. Tobias Berner (tcberner@) asked if he could join the portmgr-lurker program and was shortly added afterwards.
We sent another mail to the ports@ mailing list outlining further plans for removing Python 2.7 from the Ports Tree. Currently all ports recursively depending on Python 2.7 are marked to expire on 2021-06-23, which unfortunately includes a lot of KDE ports due to the qt5-webengine port. We are evaluating various mitigation strategies.
portmgr has been collaborating with the Git Working Group over the last year to prepare the Ports Tree to be converted to Git. Tasks included: * converting various scripts and tools to support Git * attending Git Working Group meetings * updating documentation * updating various internal and public third-party services * evaluating numerous test conversion (git-beta) results
Regarding the Ports Tree itself, two new USES were introduced: *
kodi to ease porting of Kodi add-ons *
mpi for dependencies of MPICH and OpenMPI A new
default version for ImageMagick was added and the default version
for Julia was removed as no Julia port currently exists.
pkg was updated to 1.16.3, Firefox to 87.0, and
Chromium to 89.0.4389.114
The Cluster Administration Team assisted with getting three new package building machines running in the build cluster. Two are for arm64 builds and one is a general builder.
antoine@ was again busy with exp-runs, 28 this time, to: * test various ports updates * update the clang/LLVM version from 6 to 10 in USES=compiler * reduce includes in /usr/include/crypto
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