FreeBSD Archive

Joel Dahl, FreeBSD developer: "FreeBSD development is fast these days and reading CVS commit mails is a time consuming task, but almost always both fun and interesting. However, somewhat secret, the really interesting stuff can be found in the Perforce repository. This is where all the cool projects are maintained, and the daily activity is quite high." It's a summary of all the 'secret' development they have in their perforce repository. It mentions DTrace, Xen, FreeBSD/ARM, FreeBSD/MIPS, a new USB system, and sun4v development, for example.

In a mail to the FreeBSD hackers mailing-list, a very detailed request is made from Christian Zander at Nvidia, concerning several missing features in the FreeBSD kernel. In order for Nvidia to provide improved OpenGL performance and SLI support in the future for FreeBSD/i386 and FreeBSD/amd64, several important tasks needs to be completed.

FlightAware uses FreeBSD/amd64 systems to track the locations of up to 70000 flights per day. Will Backman speaks with Karl Lehenbauer about how FlightAware is successfully using FreeBSD with other open source technologies to drive their product.

Jeremie Le Hen has created some ProPolice patches for FreeBSD 6.x and 7-CURRENT. ProPolice is a gcc extension written by Hiroaki Etoh for IBM that tries to prevent stack-smashing attacks. You can find the announcement of the patches here, more info about ProPolice on the IBM ProPolice page, and you can download the FreeBSD patches from here.

Sun dtrace developer Bryan Cantrill reports on the progress being made by John Birrel on porting dtrace to FreeBSD. "While John has quite a bit further to go before one could call it a complete port, what he has now is indisputably useful. If you run FreeBSD in production, you're going to want John's port as it stands today - and if you develop for the FreeBSD kernel (drivers or otherwise), you're going to need it (once you've done kernel development with DTrace, there's no going back)."

"It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.5-RELEASE. Work done between the 5.4-RELEASE and this release has mostly been bugfixes. Some 'vendor supplied' software has also been updated, mostly due to security concerns (specifically BIND and sendmail). This is the last planned release on the 5-STABLE branch."

FreeBSD now both boots and survives a complete 'make buildworld' on the Sun Niagara UltraSPARC T1 CPU. "I'm proud to announce that FreeBSD on the T1 is now stable enough that it can 'make buildworld' natively. The source is currently available in perforce under the view //depot/projects/kmacy_sun4v/... I probably won't roll it back into CVS until the logical domaining support is done. I'm looking forward to receiving input from individuals who plan to deploy it to find out what workloads to target in performance tuning."

"FreeBSD 5.5-RC1 is now available for testing. Things had been going well with the 5.5 BETAs up to the point we suspended making them so we could focus on the balance of the 6.1 release so we think 5.5 is pretty much ready to go. Unless big problems are reported with this RC we will start the 5.5 release builds this coming weekend and do the release early next week."

Linux may soon have a stronger open-source competitor on the desktop if FreeBSD's plans come to fruition. FreeBSD developer Scott Long told ZDNet UK on Thursday that the operating system, descended from the Unix derivative BSD, is "quickly approaching" feature parity with Linux. "Lots of work is going on to make FreeBSD more friendly on the desktop," Long said. "Within the year, we expect to have, or be near, parity with Linux."

"It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE. This release is the next step in the development of the 6.X branch, delivering several performance improvements, many bugfixes, and a few new features. These include: Addition of a keyboard multiplexer. This allows USB and PS/2 keyboards to coexist without any special options at boot. Many fixes for filesystem stability. High load stress tests are now run successfully on a regular basis as part of the normal FreeBSD QA process. Automatic configuration for man Bluetooth devices, as well as automatic support for running WiFi access points. Addition of drivers for new ethernet and SAS and SATA RAID controllers."

"One of the main reasons that I'm so involved with open source is that I've always been fascinated by figuring out how things work. In this interview, John Baldwin of the FreeBSD project gives some insight on what it is like to be a FreeBSD developer and some of the things that happen behind the scenes of a large open source project."

The latest FreeBSD status report has been released. "The highlights of this quarters report certainly include the availability of native Java binaries thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation, as well as progress has been made with Xen support and Sun's Ultrasparc T1. Futhermore we are looking forward to FreeBSD 6.1 and TrustedBSD audit support has been imported into FreeBSD 7-CURRENT. All in all, a very exiting start to 2006." And on a related note, FreeBSD now boots on the Intel Macs.

"The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of the official Java Runtime Environment and Java Development Kit for FreeBSD. The Foundation negotiated a license with Sun Microsystems to distribute these FreeBSD binaries. The binaries are based on JDK 1.5 and work with the official FreeBSD 5.4 and FreeBSD 6.0 releases on the i386 platform."

FreeBSD's Security officer Colin Percival seeks sponsorship. This has happened before with other FreeBSD contributors. "I'm hoping to raise $15000 Canadian (about US$13000) to pay me to work full-time on FreeBSD for 16 weeks over the summer. This will allow me to devote more time to my role as FreeBSD Security Officer, perform a complete overhaul of FreeBSD Update, and make some significant improvements to Portsnap."