FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report 1st Quarter 2021

Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb@FreeBSDFoundation.org>

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:

Links:
FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE schedule URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/schedule.html
FreeBSD development snapshots URL: https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/

Contact: FreeBSD Release Engineering Team, <re@FreeBSD.org>

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

Contact: Cluster Administration Team <clusteradm@FreeBSD.org>

Links:
Cluster Administration Team members URL: https://www.freebsd.org/administration/#t-clusteradm

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:

Work in progress:

Links:
FreeBSD Jenkins Instance URL: https://ci.FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD Hardware Testing Lab URL: https://ci.FreeBSD.org/hwlab
FreeBSD CI artifact archive URL: https://artifact.ci.FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD CI weekly report URL: https://hackmd.io/@FreeBSD-CI
FreeBSD Jenkins wiki URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Jenkins
Hosted CI wiki URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/HostedCI
3rd Party Software CI URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/3rdPartySoftwareCI
Tickets related to freebsd-testing@ URL: https://preview.tinyurl.com/y9maauwg
FreeBSD CI Repository URL: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ci

Contact: Jenkins Admin <jenkins-admin@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu@FreeBSD.org>
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:

New jobs added:

Work in progress and open tasks:

Please see freebsd-testing@ related tickets for more WIP information, and don’t hesitate to join the effort!

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Links:
About FreeBSD Ports URL: https://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
Contributing to Ports URL: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/contributing/ports-contributing/
FreeBSD Ports Monitoring URL: http://portsmon.freebsd.org/
Ports Management Team URL: https://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/
Ports Tarball URL: http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/ports/

Contact: René Ladan <portmgr-secretary@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: FreeBSD Ports Management Team <portmgr@FreeBSD.org>

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

Links:
Git transition wiki URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/git
doc git repo URL: https://cgit.FreeBSD.org/doc
ports git repo URL: https://cgit.FreeBSD.org/ports
src (base system) git repo URL: https://cgit.FreeBSD.org/src
Committers guide Git primer URL: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/committers-guide/#git-primer
Handbook Using Git appendix URL: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/mirrors/#git
Game of Trees URL: http://gameoftrees.org/
gitup URL: https://github.com/johnmehr/gitup

Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Warner Losh <imp@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ed Maste <emaste@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Ulrich Spörlein <uqs@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: FreeBSD-git mailing list
Contact IRC #gitcvt channel on EFnet

The doc and src trees were migrated from Subversion to Git at the end of 2020, with some additional work extending into the first quarter of 2021. The Git Working Group implemented or updated commit hooks, and prepared for FreeBSD 13 to be built from Git. We converted draft documentation from Markdown to AsciiDoc and merged it into the committer’s guide and handbook.

The ports repository migration to Git started at the end of the quarter, beginning with a final Subversion commit on March 31st to indicate that the conversion started. We are working on portsnap and other ports infrastructure and they will be finished before or soon after the migration.

The Git Working Group continues to track progress on two permissively-licensed git compatible tools: Gitup and Game of Trees. Gitup is a small, dependency-free tool to clone and update git repositories. It is used only to keep a local tree up-to-date, and has no support for local commits.

Game of Trees is a version control client that is compatible with Git repositories. It provides a user interface and workflow that is distinct from that of Git. It is in no way intended to be a drop-in replacement for git, but can be used to develop software maintained in a Git repository.

Gitup and Game of Trees are currently available as ports and packages. Future work will evaluate them as candidates for the base system.

In the second quarter of 2021 we expect to complete some minor remaining migration tasks. This will complete the initial phase of the Git migration, and the working group will wind down. The core team will then begin a new effort to investigate and evaluate new workflow changes.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation (in part)

Links:
Moritz Systems Project Description URL: https://www.moritz.systems/blog/lldb-freebsd-cpu-target-support-and-userland-debugging-improvements/
Progress Report 1 URL: https://www.moritz.systems/blog/freebsd-remote-process-plugin-on-non-x86-architectures/
Progress Report 2 URL: https://www.moritz.systems/blog/freebsd-legacy-process-plugin-removed/
Progress Report 3 URL: https://www.moritz.systems/blog/lldb-support-for-fork-and-vfork/
Git Repository URL: https://github.com/moritz-systems/llvm-project

Contact: Kamil Rytarowski <kamil@moritz.systems>
Contact: Michał Górny <mgorny@moritz.systems>

The LLDB project builds on libraries provided by LLVM and Clang to provide a great modern debugger. It uses the Clang ASTs and the expression parser, LLVM JIT, LLVM disassembler, etc so that it provides an experience that “just works”. It is also blazingly fast and more permissively licensed than GDB, the GNU Debugger.

FreeBSD includes LLDB in the base system. At present, it has some limitations in comparison with the GNU GDB debugger, and does not yet provide a complete replacement. This project aimed to finish porting the FreeBSD platform support in LLDB to the modern client-server model on all architectures originally supported by LLDB on FreeBSD and removing the obsolete plugin.

After switching to the new process model, the project focused on implementing support for tracing fork(2) and vfork(2) syscalls. The proposed model is compatible with the follow-fork-mode setting from GDB. On fork, the debugger can either continuing tracing the parent and detach the child, or switch to tracing the child and detach the parent. The new code makes it possible to debug child processes. It also prevents software breakpoints from leaking to child processes and causing them to crash.

The introduced changes are expected to be shipped with LLDB 13.0.

The overall experience of FreeBSD/LLDB developers and advanced users on this rock solid Operating System reached the state known from other environments. Furthermore, the FreeBSD-focused work also resulted in generic improvements, enhancing the LLDB support for Linux and NetBSD.

TODO: we are currently working on adding a ptrace(2) request to create a core dump of the stopped program without crashing it. Afterwards, we are planning to improve LLDB test coverage for core dump support and work on any issues we might hit.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Contact: Edward Tomasz Napierala, <trasz@FreeBSD.org>

Linuxulator improvements have been ongoing for the last two years, with support from the FreeBSD Foundation over a few distinct project grants as well as contributions from the community. The goal of this project is to improve FreeBSD’s ability to execute unmodified Linux binaries. Current support status of specific Linux applications is being tracked at the Linux app status Wiki page.

The work this quarter focused on making sure the 13.0-RELEASE ships with Linuxulator in a good shape, and fixing problems reported by users. There are some new directories provided by linsysfs(5), the lack of which, through a curious chain of events, broke installation of make(1) in Ubuntu Focal. The getcwd(2) syscall was fixed to no longer return the wrong error value for certain conditions, which was breaking Mono. The getsockopt(2) syscall now supports SO_PEERSEC and SO_PEERGROUPS, which are being used by su(8) and sudo(8). Other fixes include flag handling for 32-bit send(2) syscall, and several ptrace(2) problems, which were affecting Steam games. The kernel version was bumped to 3.17.0 to unbreak Qt applications from Focal. The sysutils/debootstrap port, and its corresponding debootstrap package, now correctly handle Ubuntu’s GPG keys. The debootstrap utility now installs the mremap(2) workaround for apt(8). This reduces the number of steps required to set up Linux chroot or jail. Finally there have been some improvements to the startup scripts.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Contact: Ed Maste <emaste@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Marcin Wojtas <mw@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Dawid Górecki <dgr@semihalf.com>

We added support for enforcing a write XOR execute mapping policy. It is enabled by setting the kern.elf64.allow_wx and/or kern.elf32.allow_wx sysctls to 0 (for 64-bit and 32-bit binaries, respectively). Binaries can indicate that they requre writeable and executable mappings by setting the NT_FREEBSD_FCTL_WXNEEDED ELF feature bit, set via elfctl.

In addition, elfctl received a few usability improvements to support use by ports, targeting different FreeBSD base system versions. We added a -i flag to ignore unknown flags (so that the same elfctl invocation could be used on older FreeBSD versions) as well as the ability to specify features by value.

Flags that request opt-out of a mitigation now have a no prefix to make the sense clearer. For example, the flag to indicate that the binary is not compatible with ASLR is now named noaslr. Unprefixed flag names are still supported, for backwards compatibility, but will emit a warning and will be removed in a later version.

The next step is to introduce ports infrastructure to support tagging binaries in ports that require special flags. Details can be found in PR252629.

Another update is that the base system binaries are now built as position-independent executable (PIE) by default, for 64-bit architectures. PIE executables are used in conjunction with address randomization (ASLR) as a mitigation for certain types of security vulnerabilities. The ASLR feature still remains opt-in, however the described change allows enabling it using only sysctl knobs, without a need to rebuild the image. Enabling PIE results in no material performance impact for most workloads.

It is also worth mentioning that a certain number of ports inherit the base systems /usr/share/mk infrastructure, and some initially failed to build after toggling the PIE setting. All issues detected by executing the exp-run were addressed. The details can be found in PR253275.

The next step is to try enabling ASLR by default for 64-bit architectures. The patch is under discussion.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation Sponsor: Stormshield

Links:
TrustedBSD / OpenBSM URL: http://www.trustedbsd.org/openbsm.html
OpenBSM Github Sources URL: https://github.com/openbsm/openbsm
Synchronisation with macOS Catalina URL: https://github.com/openbsm/openbsm/commit/54a0c07cf8bac71554130e8f6760ca68e5f36c7f
Apple OpenSource URL: https://opensource.apple.com

Contact: Gordon Bergling <gbe@FreeBSD.org>

OpenBSM is a crucial part of FreeBSD, which provides auditing features for the operating system. OpenBSM is incorporated into FreeBSD and macOS. Both Apple and FreeBSD have currently made changes to the OpenBSM framework, which weren’t upstreamed. This small project aims to consolidate these changes and upstream them to the OpenBSM github repository, so that both development efforts can be merged to FreeBSD later on.

There is currently a pull request pending that synchronizes the FreeBSD sources with OpenBSM. A comparison was made to incorporate Apple’s Catalina changes. A few weeks ago Apple has also made the source code of Big Sur available. In the latest comparison against OpenBSM Apple has made overlapping ID changes, which are making a simple import of the changes impossible. I am currently trying to work around that issue by making OpenBSM a little vendor specific.

Links:
ENA README URL: https://github.com/amzn/amzn-drivers/blob/master/kernel/fbsd/ena/README

Contact: Michal Krawczyk <mk@semihalf.com>
Contact: Artur Rojek <ar@semihalf.com>
Contact: Marcin Wojtas <mw@semihalf.com>

ENA (Elastic Network Adapter) is the smart NIC available in the virtualized environment of Amazon Web Services (AWS). The ENA driver supports multiple transmit and receive queues and can handle up to 100 Gb/s of network traffic, depending on the instance type on which it is used.

Completed since the last update:

Work in progress:

Sponsor: Amazon.com Inc

Links:
The freebsd-wireless mailing list URL: https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-wireless

Contact: Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz@FreeBSD.org>

Contact: Mark Johnston <markj@FreeBSD.org>

Work has been ongoing to port a pair of kernel sanitizers from NetBSD to FreeBSD. Sanitizers are debugging tools which make use of compiler instrumentation to validate memory accesses. They can automatically detect many classes of C programming bugs, such as use-after-frees and loads of uninitialized variables. When combined with syzkaller or other testing tools, they are effective at detecting kernel bugs that may otherwise require a great deal of manual effort to identify.

Two sanitizers are being ported, KASAN (AddressSanitizer) and KMSAN (MemorySanitizer). KASAN checks the validity of all memory accesses within the kernel map and triggers a panic upon an out-of-bounds access or a use-after-free. Various kernel memory allocators annotate regions of memory to denote whether corresponding accesses are valid. The initial port of KASAN is complete and is planned to appear in the FreeBSD development branch in mid-April. KMSAN detects uses of uninitialized memory and can detect bugs that result in the contents of kernel memory being leaked to userspace. Both sanitizers incur considerable memory and CPU overhead. They are intended to be used mainly in conjunction with test frameworks, though it is certainly possible to boot and run sanitizer-enabled kernels in a desktop or laptop environment. Currently this work is amd64-only. It should be possible to port it to arm64 and riscv with relatively little effort.

Future work in this area consists of finishing the KMSAN port, fixing bugs found by the combination of KASAN and syzkaller, and making sure that sanitizers can validate accesses to the direct map. This may consist of an option to disable usage of the direct map, or introducing a shadow for the direct map.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Contact: Zyta Szpak <zr@semihalf.com>
Contact: Kornel Dulęba <mindal@semihalf.com>
Contact: Marcin Wojtas <mw@semihalf.com>

The Semihalf team is working on improving the FreeBSD support for the Marvell Octeon TX2 CN913x and Armada 7k/8k SoC families.

Marvell Armada 7k8k and Octeon TX2 CN913x SoC families are quad-core 64-bit ARMv8 Cortex-A72 processors with high speed peripherals including 10 Gb Ethernet, PCIe 3.0, SATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 for a wide range of networking, storage, security and industrial applications.

Although the mentioned SoCs are mostly supported in FreeBSD HEAD, some pieces required improvements.

Applied changes:

TODO:

Sponsor: Marvell

Links:
D26884 Implement sndstat nvlist-based enumeration ioctls. URL: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D26884
commit c96151d33509655efb7fb26768cb56a041c176f1 URL: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=c96151d33509655efb7fb26768cb56a041c176f1

Contact: Ka Ho Ng <khng@FreeBSD.org>

This work presents a number of ioctl commands on /dev/sndstat using nv(9) to expose all available audio device nodes. nv(9) is used to generate a serialized binary stream representation of the information of audio device nodes presented in the running system. The documented nvlist structure in sndstat(4) manual page is stable for programming use.

For a long time, enumerating the audio device node interface required parsing content of /dev/sndstat. It is tedious to write such a parser and handle different hw.snd.verbose levels correctly. Using nv(9) eliminates the need to write a text parser to do audio device nodes enumeration.

This work has been committed and is available in FreeBSD 14-CURRENT.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Links:
KDE FreeBSD URL: https://freebsd.kde.org/
KDE Community FreeBSD URL: https://community.kde.org/FreeBSD

Contact: Adriaan de Groot <kde@FreeBSD.org>

The KDE on FreeBSD project aims to package all of the software produced by the KDE Community for the FreeBSD ports tree. The software includes a full desktop environment called KDE Plasma, graphics applications, instant-messengers, a video-editing suite, as well as a tea timer and hundreds of other applications that can be used on any FreeBSD machine.

The KDE team (kde@) is part of desktop@ and x11@ as well, building the software stack to make FreeBSD beautiful and usable as a daily-driver graphics-based desktop machine.

The KDE Frameworks have a monthly release cycle; KDE Plasma and the rest of KDE software run on a quarterly cycle plus monthly bugfixes. All of those releases landed in ports in a timely manner. Around KDE there are several hundred other applications with their own releases, of which notable or new ones are:

Infrastructure work improved the way Qt5 ports install- and un-install changes to the global header qconfig-modules.h. CMake releases landed with distressing regularity, and various low-level things like devel/libphonenumber and graphics/poppler were updated as needed.

The big issue in the Qt stack on FreeBSD is Qt5-WebEngine, which is based on Chromium. Like Chromium itself (upstream), it has a tangled mess of a build system based on Python 2.7. The scheduled removal of Python 2.7 and ports that depend on it is a sword looming over a large chunk of the Qt and KDE stack. Some resolution may be forthcoming in the form of WebEngine-less ports, but the real effort is in trying to get WebEngine to build with Python3.

More detailed descriptions of the updates in this quarter are available here (part 1) and here (part 2).

Links:
The FreeBSD Office project URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Office

Contact: FreeBSD Office team ML <office@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Dima Panov <fluffy@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu@FreeBSD.org>

The FreeBSD Office team works on a number of office-related software suites and tools such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice.

Work during this quarter was focused on providing the latest stable release of LibreOffice suite and companion apps to all FreeBSD users.

Latest and quarterly ports branches got a new branch (7.1) of the LibreOffice suite and updated to 7.1.1 release.

Meanwhile, our WIP repository got back a working CI instance again, thanks to Li-Wen Hsu.

We are looking for people to help with the open tasks:

Patches, comments and objections are always welcome in the mailing list and bugzilla.

Links:
VirtualBox home page URL: https://www.virtualbox.org/
VirtualBox OSE port on FreshPorts URL: https://www.freshports.org/emulators/virtualbox-ose

Contact: VirtualBox port team <vbox@FreeBSD.org>

The VirtualBox ports have been updated to the upstream 6.1.18 release.

This is a new major release with new features and better support, especially for graphics output. This new release has support only for recent amd64 CPUs providing virtualization support in hardware (VT-x, AMD-V bits).

The previous versions of the VirtualBox ports have been preserved as the -legacy versions to allow people unable to use the new version to have a virtualization solution.

The new additions port at present fails to build on i386 but the old additions do provide basic functionality for that emulation.

Contact: Sergio Carlavilla <carlavilla@FreeBSD.org>

The Doc New Generation project is finished. The switch-over date was Saturday, January 23rd.

But there’s a list of remaining tasks:

If you want to reduce the TODO list, give me a ping :)

Links:
Translate FreeBSD on Weblate wiki URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/DocTranslationOnWeblate
FreeBSD Weblate Instance URL: https://translate-dev.freebsd.org/

Contact: Danilo G. Baio <dbaio@FreeBSD.org>

After the doc migration to Hugo/AsciiDoctor the Weblate tool it’s opened again.

There are three projects on our Weblate:

Language teams that were using Weblate before the migration to Hugo/AsciiDoctor, please see our Translation based on Automatic Suggestions Wiki article for more details.

We’ve just started a project for converting the old method of automatically translating strings, using the Machine Translation feature, to a new system that will work for the new documentation. This will save time for our translators.

There are still pending items: you can check the Status Page; any help is very welcome.

The next step for the new quarter is to prepare and release the Website translations through Weblate as well.

Contact: Sergio Carlavilla <carlavilla@FreeBSD.org>

The purpose of this working group is to redesign the Website and the Documentation Portal.

The work will be divided into 4 phases.

Phase 1:

Phase 2:

Phase 3:

Phase 4:

Links:
Discord Wiki Page URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Discord
Discord Invitation Link URL: https://discord.gg/RHprKbvWJN

Contact: Lewis Cook <lcook@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Vincent Milum Jr <freebsd@darkain.com>
Contact: Kubilay Kocak <koobs@FreeBSD.org>

The FreeBSD project and community continues to grow, and in the last 2 quarters, we established an official FreeBSD server on the popular Discord platform, as a complementary means for out-reach, support, collaboration and social connection for and between members of the FreeBSD community, new and old.

Discord boasts broad accessibility and unique features that the the community can enjoy without the steeper learning curves associated with other support and social mediums, that can often deter or overwhelm newcomers. It also provides an opportunity to broaden FreeBSD’s reach outside traditional spaces and audiences.

We currently have a respectable 480 members, with that number growing daily, and have established baseline community guidelines and moderation processes consistent with and complementary to other support channels and the FreeBSD Code of Conduct.

While it’s early days, events have already been successfully hosted on the platform. In January, Tom Jones (thj@) announced and ran an online Bugathon focusing on issues related to the branching of FreeBSD 13. We’ve also created dedicated text and voice channels to facilitate more of these kinds of events in the future. We hope to see more events like these run as examples of how we can utilize Discord constructively and in ways we haven’t as a community or project before.

With the future in mind, we have plans to:

We are keen on project and community members to reach out to talk about how we can best leverage Discord. Some ideas we’d love people to get involved with include:

Links:
CBSD API module URL: https://www.bsdstore.ru/en/cbsd_api_ssi.html

Contact: Oleg Ginzburg <olevole@olevole.ru>

Links:
Documentation URL: https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/

Contact: Simon Peter <probono@puredarwin.org>
Contact: #helloSystem on irc.freenode.net, mirrored to #helloSystem:matrix.org on Matrix

Links:
Website URL: https://alpha.pkgbase.live/

Contact: Mina Galić <me@igalic.co>

PkgBase.live is an unofficial repository for the FreeBSD PkgBase project. PkgBase packages the FreeBSD base system as ca 330 packages.

The PkgBase project gives users the choice of which parts of the system to install. Users can choose which parts of the base system to install, without building their system from source and optionally choose to install -dbg packages when they need them. PkgBase is built with default options. There’s no need to build WITHOUT_SENDMAIL, when users can just chose not to install it! In addition, PkgBase.live builds every usable kernel! This is especially important for architectures like armv7.

As a service, PkgBase.live was inspired by up.bsd.live, which provides freebsd-update(8) for STABLE and CURRENT branches. Despite this inspiration, freebsd-update has been a constant point of frustrations for me, so I was looking for alternatives.

PkgBase is not ready for prime time yet, or else the FreeBSD project would be providing this service. With the call for testing open since 2016, I thought it was time to offer a public service, so a broader part of the community can take part in testing, without having to do all the work for themselves.

A lot of things already work fine, but more work needs to be done, as can be seen from the TODO list, as well as the "Pending Changes" on the website. Perhaps the most important thing would be to provide ISOs which lets people setup a fresh system with PkgBase from the get-go.

Hardware for PkgBase is kindly sponsored by a member of the FreeBSD community.

Links:
Potluck Repository & Project URL: https://potluck.honeyguide.net/
Potluck on github URL: https://github.com/hny-gd/potluck
Potman on github URL: https://github.com/grembo/potman
Pot Project URL https://pot.pizzamig.dev

Contact: Stephan Lichtenauer (Potluck) <sl@honeyguide.eu>
Contact: Michael Gmelin (Potman) <grembo@FreeBSD.org>

Pot is a jail management tool that also supports orchestration through Nomad.

Potluck aims to be to FreeBSD and Pot what Dockerhub is to Linux and Docker: A repository of Pot flavours and complete images for usage with Pot and in many cases Nomad.

The new Potman project aims to simplify building Pot images with Vagrant and VirtualBox based on the Potluck approach, e.g. as part of a DevOps workflow for software development and testing. That way, Pot images can more easily be created as part of a Jenkins workflow to be deployed with Nomad and Consul.

In the last two quarters, FreeBSD 12.2 Potluck images have been built and the 11.4 images have been upgraded with the new packages. Furthermore, new images like Wordpress and an improved flavour script (which squashes a nasty network problem) have been created.

Future plans include further Potman workflow features, new and improved Potluck images and publishing FreeBSD 13-based images.

As always, feedback and patches are welcome.

Links:
sysctlinfo URL: https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctlinfo
sysctlbyname-improved URL: https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctlbyname-improved
BSDCan 2020 - sysctlinfo questions URL: https://git.io/Jm9x7
sysctl-libnv URL:https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctl-libnv[https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctl-libnv]
sysctlmibinfo2 URL:https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctlmibinfo2[https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctlmibinfo2]
sysctlview URL: https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctlview
nsysctl URL: https://gitlab.com/alfix/nsysctl

Contact: Alfonso Sabato Siciliano <alfonso.siciliano@email.com>

The sysctl system call and the wrapper sysctl utility can get and set the system state at runtime; the kernel exposes the available parameters as objects of a Management Information Base. After a recent system update with a CURRENT-GENERIC configuration, the MIB has exceeded ten thousand objects (both internal nodes and leaves, most in the vm.uma subtree) on my laptop with a Desktop environment without ZFS. Furthermore I received tips, ideas, PRs and issues about sysctl so some improvement has been fulfilled; finally the suggestions received during BSDCan 2020 have been accomplished.