July 8, 2014
Welcome to our inaugural monthly update. As we head full steam into summer, we wanted to remind you of some of the great things happening at the Foundation. First, be on lookout for the latest edition of the semi-annual newsletter. It should be arriving in your inbox near the end of month. Until then, please take a few minutes to check out the highlights from the past few weeks.
Deb
Development Projects Update
Welcome to the initial project update for the Foundation’s monthly email newsletter. Each month we’ll provide highlights on Foundation staff projects, funded development contracts, or upcoming investigations.
First up, the replacement system console vt(4) (commonly called Newcons) is now available in the standard (GENERIC) kernel in FreeBSD-HEAD, and can be chosen by a boot-time tunable setting. We expect to have this support merged for the FreeBSD 10.1 release. A few final integration tasks remain, but it is working well in early testing, and supports the migration to the updated Xorg graphics stack. Integration with UEFI boot is also expected in the 10.1 release.
Next, the new autofs-based automounter is progressing well and a call for wider testing should follow in the near future. The new automounter is intended to address limitations in the current amd(8) automounter, and provides a similar user experience as found on Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris.
Finally, Foundation staff member Konstantin Belousov investigated reports of poor performance and scalability with PostgreSQL 9.3 on FreeBSD. The benchmarks exposed a number of real opportunities to improve scalability in the FreeBSD kernel, even if they do not directly relate to the performance expected in a production deployment. In fact, the prototype patches developed during this investigation improve performance in certain cases by up to 30 times. The report and patches can be found on the FreeBSD-current and FreeBSD-performance mailing lists.
Thank you for your interest, and look for details on new and upcoming projects in our soon to be released semi-annual newsletter.
contributed by Ed Maste
BSDCan 2014 – Getting Inspired, Empowered, and Enlightened
BSDCan is one of the largest BSD-related conferences in the world, and is held in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, every year. The location allows for many FreeBSD advocates from around the world to conveniently attend. When you attend this conference, you meet the most amazing people. Some are like celebrities, having worked on FreeBSD since the beginning. Then there are the newbies, who have so much energy and passion to get involved in this project; they are chomping at the bit to jump in and make a difference. Young and old, experienced and new, working together into the wee hours, to learn, exchange information, and to grow. This is what this conference and others like this are all about.
We are proud to sponsor conferences like this, and this year we were a Gold+ Sponsor. We also sponsored 7 developers to attend the conference. We know this face-to-face collaboration, excels the growth of FreeBSD exponentially. Taking advantage of developers attending the conference, we sponsor the developer and vendor summits, that are held the two days prior to the conference.
The vendor summit allows developers from companies that use FreeBSD to talk about how they are using FreeBSD and what they would like to see supported. It gives other FreeBSD developers an opportunity to see how companies are using FreeBSD and to prioritize features and improvements to FreeBSD, as well as build relationships between companies and the Project members, to collaborate on work.
The developer summit gives developers an opportunity to work together on areas that interest them, to highlight and educate people on what they are working on, as well as collaborate in more depth on areas of the operating system that they are working on.
Lastly, we held our annual board meeting the two days prior to the developer summit. We elected our directors and officers, worked on long-term strategic planning, project roadmapping, and near-term goals. We also met with the core team to discuss roles and responsibilities, project roadmapping, and what we can do to help the Project more.
All together, BSDCan was a very productive conference for us, being able to sponsor the conference, the summits, and travel grant recipients, as well as spend some quality time working face-to-face to develop plans on how we are going to help the FreeBSD Project and community.
contributed by Deb Goodkin
We Need Your Support
We are a quarter of the way of reaching our 2014 fundraising goal! We couldn’t do it without you. Thank you to everyone who has made a donation this year.
Did you know we are 100% funded by your donations?
If you’ve ever attended BSD-related conference; received a Foundation travel or project grant; or even benefited from features or improvements added with the help from Foundation, you’ve seen first hand the importance of the work we’re doing. We need your help to keep the Project growing. Please consider making a donation to the Foundation to help us continue our support of FreeBSD.
You can also help by spreading the word. Does your company know they can get their logo on our website with a donation of $10,000 or more? For an even bigger incentive, these logos will soon rotate on our homepage. Our goal is to add 10 new corporate logos on our website by end of next quarter.
From the new online journal to funding projects that make your job easier, your generosity is what fuels FreeBSD community success. Please consider helping us by donating today!