Announcements

Accepting Travel Grant Applications for AsiaBSDCon 2012!

Calling all FreeBSD developers needing assistance with travel expenses to AsiaBSDCon 2012.

The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please fill out and submit the Travel Grant Request Application at http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/documents/TravelRequestForm.pdf by February 20, 2012 to apply for this grant.

How it works:

This program is open to FreeBSD developers of all sorts (kernel hackers, documentation authors, bugbusters, system administrators, etc). In some cases we are also able to fund non-developers, such as active community members and FreeBSD advocates.

(1) You request funding based on a realistic and economical estimate of travel costs (economy airfare, trainfare, ...), accommodations (conference hotel and sharing a room), and registration or tutorial fees. If there are other sponsors willing to cover costs, such as your employer or the conference, we prefer you talk to them first, as our budget is limited. We are happy to split costs with you or another sponsor, such as just covering airfare or board.

If you are a speaker at the conference, we expect the conference to cover your travel costs, and will most likely not approve your direct request to us.

(2) We review your application and if approved, authorize you to seek reimbursement up to a limit. We consider several factors, including our overall and per-event budgets, and (quite importantly) the benefit to the community by funding your travel.

Most rejected applications are rejected because of an over-all limit on travel budget for the event or year, due to unrealistic or uneconomical costing, or because there is an unclear or unconvincing argument that funding the applicant will directly benefit the FreeBSD Project. Please take these points into consideration when writing your application.

(3) We reimburse costs based on actuals (receipts), and by check or bank transfer. And, we do not cover your costs if you end up having to cancel your trip. We require you to submit a report on your trip, which we may show to current or potential sponsors, and may include in our semi-annual newsletter.

There's some flexibility in the mechanism, so talk to us if something about the model doesn't quite work for you or if you have any questions. The travel grant program is one of the most effective ways we can spend money to help support the FreeBSD Project, as it helps developers get together in the same place at the same time, and helps advertise and advocate FreeBSD in the larger community.

FreeBSD Foundation's End-of-Year Fundraising Campaign!

Dear FreeBSD Community,

The FreeBSD Foundation has been proudly supporting the FreeBSD Project and community for 11 years now. Every year we sponsor BSD conferences and events around the globe, help developers with their travel expenses to attend these conferences, work to protect the intellectual property of the FreeBSD project, visit institutions and corporations to promote the use of FreeBSD, purchase equipment to grow the FreeBSD infrastructure, and fund research and development projects that enhance the FreeBSD OS.

We are deeply grateful for all the support we receive from so many individuals and organizations who value FreeBSD. We currently are at the half way point towards our goal of raising $400,000 this year. We are hoping that you, the FreeBSD community, will help us meet our goal by making a donation this month. By donating to the foundation, you are donating to the FreeBSD Project and community as a whole.

I have had the privilege of meeting many FreeBSD enthusiasts in person, through email, and on the phone. I am always impressed with the passion that these people have for FreeBSD. Most volunteer their precious time after work and some are more fortunate where they actually get paid by their companies to work with FreeBSD. When there is a BSD related conference we usually get quite a few travel grant applications requesting help with developers' travel expenses. Thanks to your support, we have been able to sponsor the travel expenses of developers from Mexico, Lithuania, New Zealand, Germany, Japan, Denmark, and many other countries.

Some of these developers recently wrote personal stories about how receiving help with their travel expenses to attend conferences helped them with their FreeBSD work. These stories will be published in our upcoming newsletter. One developer from Japan, whose attendance we've sponsored more than once, is a technical writer. He told me that the Japanese development community is comprised of earnest and skillful people. They are sharp programmers who know many programming languages, but learning and understanding English is difficult for many of them. He attends the conferences so he can keep up with the latest FreeBSD information and provide this information to the Japanese FreeBSD community in their native spoken language.

Another recent travel grant recipient runs a FreeBSD mirror server in Sweden, a country that apparently does not have many BSD users. He had a chance to meet many FreeBSD developers for the first time by attending EuroBSDCon. He has recently started submitting patches to our FreeBSD documentation set, and will hopefully become a committer, literally doubling the number of committers in Sweden!

Lastly, a Canadian developer that we've sponsored told us, "By attending these conferences I have gained valuable experience, connected with fascinating people that use FreeBSD, learned from presenters and most importantly, forged some friendships that will last a lifetime."

These grant recipients have given far more back to the FreeBSD community than what they have received from the foundation. And, this is only one area where your donations provide a significant, tangible, measurable benefit for the entire FreeBSD community.

If you benefit from FreeBSD, please donate. With your donation, we can continue to support FreeBSD activities like:

development projects to support emerging technologies such as IPv6 support in FreeBSD, GEM, KMS, and DRI support for Intel drivers, Five New TCP Congestion Control Algorithms, and much more.
BSD conferences around the globe, including Europe, Japan, Canada, US, and Ukraine.
giving students and contributors the opportunity to attend conferences and developer summits.
maintaining the infrastructure of computers and equipment that support our community.
growing the FreeBSD community through marketing and outreach to users and businesses.
protecting the FreeBSD trademarks and providing the project with access to legal counsel.
helping FreeBSD continue to serve as the foundation for research and enterprise.

Please consider making a donation so we can continue -- and increase our support of the FreeBSD Project and community! Making a donation is easy and quick. Please visit The FreeBSD Foundation website to find out how you can make a difference for FreeBSD today.

Thank you for your support!

Sincerely,

Deb Goodkin
Secretary/Treasurer
The FreeBSD Foundation

Five New TCP Congestion Control Algorithms Project Completes!

We're pleased to announce the completion of another Foundation funded project.

Project Coordinator Professor Grenville Armitage provided the following summary for us:

Background

TCP is a crucial part of any modern operating system. FreeBSD's standard "NewReno" congestion control (CC) is not able to fully utilize the high capacity links available today. A range of newer CC algorithms have emerged (and continue to emerge) from the networking research community over the past 15+ years. These include traditional loss-based algorithms (where packet losses indicate network congestion) and delay-based algorithms (where changes in Round Trip Time, RTT, are used to infer network congestion).

However, to date FreeBSD's TCP stack has not had an easy-to-use mechanism for introducing new CC algorithms. In recent years the Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures (CAIA) at Swinburne University of Technology has (with the support of the Cisco University Research Program Fund at Community Foundation Silicon Valley) been developing a range of extensions to the FreeBSD TCP stack. These included a modular framework for adding new CC algorithms and new modular implementations of the existing NewReno algorithm, four other algorithms from the literature (H-TCP, CUBIC, Vegas and HD) and a novel algorithm developed at CAIA (CHD). In mid-2010 the FreeBSD Foundation funded CAIA to complete, tidy up and commit a number of these key enhancements to the FreeBSD TCP stack.

Delivered

Our project, "Five New TCP Congestion Control Algorithms for FreeBSD", has delivered the following enhancements to FreeBSD's TCP stack:

Modular congestion control framework.
Khelp (Kernel Helper) and Hhook (Helper Hook) frameworks.
Basic Khelp/Hhook (Kernel help/hook) integration with the TCP stack.
ERTT (Enhanced Round Trip Time) Khelp module for delay-based TCP algorithms.
Modularised implementations of NewReno, CUBIC and HTCP loss-based TCP CC algorithms.
Modularised implementations of Vegas, "HD" and "CHD" delay-based TCP CC algorithms.
Technical report comparing the computational overhead associated with TCP before and after integrating the new frameworks and modularised NewReno algorithm.

Benefits

Each congestion control algorithm is implemented as a loadable kernel module. Algorithms can be selected to suit the application/network characteristics and requirements of the host's installation. The modular CC framework also makes it much easier for developers to implement new algorithms, allowing FreeBSD's TCP to be at the forefront of advancements in this area, while still maintaining the stability of its network stack.

CUBIC and HTCP are variants of TCP that provide significant performance improvements (relative to NewReno) over high bandwidth, high latency paths. Vegas, HD, and CHD utilise RTT fluctuations to provide a more timely indication of network congestion -- by not forcing network queues to overflow, delay-based CC algorithms can help to keep queuing delays low along a network path. CHD is also tolerant of packet losses that are unrelated to congestion (such as can occur over wireless links).

In addition, the Khelp/Hhook frameworks provide useful kernel infrastructure which are not specific to the TCP stack and we anticipate they will be used elsewhere in the kernel in the future to provide other unrelated enhancements to FreeBSD.

Participants

Code development, testing, and documentation: David Hayes and Lawrence Stewart

Editorial review of code and documentation: Rui Paulo and Bjoern Zeeb

Project supervision: Grenville Armitage

Project URL: http://caia.swin.edu.au/freebsd/5cc/

End-of-Year Fundraising Campaign

Dear FreeBSD Community,

As the year is winding down I'm writing this note to remind you of the motivation behind the FreeBSD Foundation's work, its benefits to you, and to ask for your financial assistance in making our work possible.

Ten years ago, I created the FreeBSD Foundation to repay a debt I owe to the FreeBSD project. While working on FreeBSD I learned the fundamentals of sound software design, how to successfully manage a large code base, and experienced the challenges of release engineering. Beyond the benefits of this education, FreeBSD has provided a robust platform that has allowed me to build several successful commercial products while being well paid to work on an operating system I love. Today, through my volunteer work with the FreeBSD Foundation, I'm still paying down this debt.

This year, despite the slow pace of the economic recovery, the FreeBSD Foundation has an impressive list of accomplishments:

Provided $100,000 in grants for projects that improve FreeBSD in the areas of:

DTrace support
High availability storage
Enhanced SNMP reporting
Virtualization and resource partitioning
Embedded device support
Networking stack improvements

Allocated $50,000 for equipment to enhance FreeBSD project infrastrutture.
Sponsored 8 FreeBSD related conferences.
Funded 16 travel grants giving increased community and developer access to conferences.
Provided legal support to the FreeBSD project.

How do our activities benefit you? If you are a company using FreeBSD, our work to strengthen the FreeBSD community ensures the continued viability of FreeBSD and a large pool of developers to tap into. If you are an end user, our work brings you new features and access to conferences. And if you are a FreeBSD developer, the FreeBSD Foundation is providing the resources needed to make your next innovation possible.

The FreeBSD project thrives through the hard work of our community, but it also requires financial backing. This year we set a fund-raising goal of $350,000. We are pleased to report that we are half way there, but we need your help to reach our goal. Every donation, no matter its size, helps to make our work possible. As a non-profit with very low overhead, your donation is the best way to invest in FreeBSD. Please make that investment today.

You can make a donation (including recurring subscriptions) by going to:

http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/

To find out more about The FreeBSD Foundation, please visit:

http://www.freebsdfoundation.org

Thank You,

Justin T. Gibbs
Founder and President
The FreeBSD Foundation

DAHDI/FreeBSD Project Completed

Max Khon has completed the DAHDI Project and provides the following report:

I am pleased to announce the completion of the DAHDI/FreeBSD project.

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.

The main goal of this funded project was to make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions.

Currently, most of the DAHDI bits have been ported, including the DAHDI framework itself, HW drivers, TDMoE drivers, drivers for software and HW echo cancellation (Octasic, VPMADT032) and HW transcoding (TC400B). The project is hosted in the official DAHDI SVN repository.

misc/dahdi in the FreeBSD ports collection now contains the most recent bits of DAHDI/FreeBSD and also some stuff that is not available in DAHDI/FreeBSD SVN due to licensing and copyright restrictions. These include the OSLEC echo canceler and the experimental zaphfc driver.

I will continue periodic merges from DAHDI/Linux SVN on a regular basis and roll out new DAHDI/FreeBSD releases. These will most likely be synchronized with DAHDI/Linux releases.

Userland DTrace Support

Rui Paulo recently committed to FreeBSD HEAD the userland DTrace support, marking the completion of this FreeBSD Foundation sponsored project. Rui summarizes his work as follows:

DTrace, which originated on Solaris 10, is a comprehensive tracing framework that allows the instrumentation of software. FreeBSD has had DTrace support since 7.0, but until now tracing userland programs was not possible. Now that this project is complete, anyone can use DTrace with userland programs.

Tracing and instrumenting userland programs is very important because it allows the understanding of what's going on, especially on highly complex systems such as databases, web servers, and language interpreters. Since DTrace on FreeBSD now has the ability to instrument both the kernel and the userland program, you can get very meaningful data on how your program is behaving and why.

Companies building products on FreeBSD now have the ability to create better products and find about problems faster then before.

This project focused on allowing the creation of DTrace pid probes, userland statically defined probes (aka USDT), importing plockstat (a DTrace utility to measure lock contention in the pthread library), importing dtruss (a system call tracing utility similar to ktrace) and enabling FreeBSD DTrace support on MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Merges to upcoming FreeBSD releases (8.2 and 7.3) are being thought out, but it's likely they will happen.

FreeBSD Jail Based Virtualization Project Completed

We're pleased to announce the completion of the foundation funded FreeBSD Jail Based Virtualization project. Here's a summary of the project by Bjoern Zeeb, the developer on the project.

I am happy to report that the funded parts of the FreeBSD Jail Based Virtualization project are completed. Some of the results have been shipping with 8.1-RELEASE while others are ready to be merged to HEAD.

Jails have been the well known operating system level virtualization technique in FreeBSD for over a decade. The import of Marko Zec's network stack virtualization has introduced a new way for abstracting subsystems. As part of this project, the abstraction framework has been generalized. Together with Jamie Gritton's flexible jail configuration syscalls, this will provide the infrastructure for, and will ease the virtualization of, further subsystems without much code duplication. The next subsystems to be virtualized will likely be SYSV/Posix IPC to help, for example, PostgreSQL users. This will probably be followed by the process namespace.

Along with the framework, debugging facilities, such as the interactive kernel debugger, have been enhanced so that every new subsystem will be able to immediately make use of these improvements without modifying a single line of code. Libjail and jls can now work on core dumps and netstat is able to query individual live network stacks attached to jails.

For the virtual network stack, work was focused on network stack teardown, a concept introduced with the network stack virtualization. The primary goal was to prototype a shutdown of the (virtual) network stacks from top to bottom, which means letting interfaces go last rather than first and still being able to cleanly shutdown TCP connections. Good progress was made, but a lot of code over the last two decades was never written in a way to be cleanly stopped. Work on this will have to continue, along with virtualizing the remaining network subsystems to allow long term stability and a leak and panic free shutdown. As a side effect, users of non-virtualized network stacks will also benefit, as other general network stack problems are identified and fixed along the way.

I am happy to see more early adopters, former OpenSolaris users, and people contributing code or reporting problems and would like to encourage people to further support this project.

My special thanks go the FreeBSD Foundation and CK Software GmbH for having sponsored this project, as well as to John Baldwin and Philip Paeps for helping with review and excellent suggestions.

Accepting Travel Grant Applications for EuroBSDCon 2010!

Calling all FreeBSD developers needing assistance with travel expenses to EuroBSDCon 2010.

How it works:

If you are a speaker at the conference, we expect the conference to cover your travel costs, and will most likely not approve your direct request to us.

2009 End-of-Year Fund-raising Campaign!

Since the start of our 'Be Counted!' campaign in August of this year, over 350 new and returning donors have contributed to the FreeBSD Foundation. With your help, we are now 50% of the way to meeting our 2009 fund raising goal. Thank you donors, for your support! Now, in these last few weeks of 2009, the FreeBSD Foundation needs the support of those who have yet to donate to take us the rest of the way.

The recession has hit everyone hard. For many, every possible expense has been cut, and what spending they do is out of strict necessity. Unfortunately the challenges facing FreeBSD are undiminished by recessions and the technological landscape continues to change at a rampant pace. That is why the FreeBSD Foundation nearly doubled its 2008 budget for 2009 and needs your support so we can avoid cutting our investments in 2010.

If you benefit from FreeBSD, please donate so:

development projects are funded to support emerging technologies such as solid state disks, USB 3.0, machine and network virtualization, highly parallel processors, clustering, and data replication.
BSD conferences continue around the globe.
students and contributors have the opportunity to attend conferences and developer summits.
the infrastructure of computers and equipment supporting our community can be maintained.
the FreeBSD community is grown through marketing and outreach to users and businesses.
FreeBSD trademarks are protected and the project has access to legal counsel.
FreeBSD continues to serve as the foundation for research and enterprise.

Every donation, no matter its size, makes this work possible. As a non-profit with very low overhead, your donation is the best way to invest in FreeBSD. Please make that investment today so we can meet our dual goals for 2009 of 1000 donors and $300,000.

You can make a donation (including recurring subscriptions) by going to: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/.

Be Counted Campaign!

Millions of systems run FreeBSD. Hundreds of volunteers contribute to FreeBSD's success. But what is the size of FreeBSD's user base? This simple question is very hard to answer, but its answer is vital to the cause of promoting FreeBSD. It is extremely difficult to convince businesses to invest time and money to add FreeBSD support to their products based solely on vague estimates of the size of our community. We should know - working to make FreeBSD a more widely supported platform is a task the FreeBSD Foundation has worked on since its inception.

Please help us in our fight to promote FreeBSD. A donation to the FreeBSD Foundation helps fund our work, but it also gives us strength in numbers. Our count of unique donors is a vital indication of the size and buying power of our community. However, we have never broken even one thousand donors in any year. We know in our hearts that this is a small fraction of our user base and of those who want to help expand FreeBSD's presence.

So stand up and be counted! Make a donation. Encourage other FreeBSD users to donate as well. No donation amount is too large or too small. Just by becoming a donor you are making a powerful statement about the strength of FreeBSD!

You can make a donation by going to: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/.