FreeBSD Foundation Q2 2022 Status Update

Written as part of the FreeBSD Project’s 2nd Quarter 2022 Status Report, check out the highlights of what we did to help FreeBSD last quarter:

First, I’d like to send a big thank you to everyone who gave a financial contribution to our efforts. We are 100% funded by your donations, so every contribution helps us continue to support FreeBSD in many ways, including some of the work funded and published in this status report.

Our goal this year is to raise at a minimum $1,400,000 towards a spending budget of around $2,000,000. As I write this report, we’ve brought in under $200,000 towards that goal. So, we obviously need to step up our effort of fundraising. It’s by far the hardest part of my job. I’d much prefer talking to folks in our community on how we can help you, help create content to recruit more users and contributors to the Project, and understand challenges and painpoints that individuals and organizations have in using FreeBSD, so we can help improve those areas. Asking for money is not on that list.

We support FreeBSD in five main areas. Software development is the largest area we fund with six software developers on staff who step in to implement new features, support tier 1 platforms, review patches, and fix issues. You can find out some of the work we did under OS Improvements in this report. FreeBSD Advocacy is another area that we support to spread the word about FreeBSD at conferences, in presentations online and in-person, tutorials and how-to guides. We purchase and support hardware for the FreeBSD infrastructure that supports the work going on in the Project. Virtual and in-person events are organized by the Foundation to help connect and engage community members to share their knowledge and collaborate on projects. Finally, we provide legal support to the Project when needed and protect the FreeBSD trademarks.

If you haven’t made a donation this year, please consider making one at https://freebsdfoundation.org/donate/.

We also have a Partnership Program for larger commercial donors. You can find out more at https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/freebsd-foundation-partnership-program/

During the second quarter of 2022, 243 src, 62 ports, and 12 doc tree commits were made that identified The FreeBSD Foundation as a sponsor. This represents 10.6, 0.7, and 4.5% of the total number of commits to each repository.

You can read about some of the Foundation-sponsored work in individual quarterly report entries.

Other ongoing sponsored work is described here.

The aim of the Wireguard project is to improve support for the FreeBSD Wirguard kernel module. The work by John Baldwin involved adapting the module to use FreeBSD’s OCF rather than Wireguard’s internal implementations. It also involved adding new ciphers and API support. The latest upstream release incorporates this work.

OpenStack is a cloud system for different types of resources like virtual machines. However, OpenStack only unofficially supports FreeBSD as a guest system. That means users can spawn FreeBSD instances on the open cloud platform, but it is not currently possible run OpenStack on FreeBSD hosts. The goal of this project is port OpenStack components so that FreeBSD can function as an OpenStack host.

The Foundation recently signed a new contract for Byhve support. This contract will allow John Baldwin to dedicate time to Bhyve as issues arise, especially security issues.

Under sponsorship from the Foundation, Pau Amma wrapped up a mini-project to explore how the Handbook can be improved. A survey was sent out and the results will be shared soon.

The Foundation provides a full-time staff member and funds projects to improve continuous integration, automated testing, and overall quality assurance efforts for the FreeBSD project.

The Foundation provides hardware and support for the Project. A new Australian mirror was brought online by the Cluster Administration team. If you are a FreeBSD user in Oceania or southeast Asia, please let us know if download speeds for installer images and packages has improved.

With your donations, the Foundation purchased new hardware to repair two PowerPC package builders, one for little endian packages (powerpc64le) and the second for big endian packages (powerpc64, powerpc). The new hardware just arrived at the data center and will be installed soon. Expect lots of PowerPC packages in the near future.

Much of our effort is dedicated to Project advocacy. This may involve highlighting interesting FreeBSD work, producing literature and video tutorials, attending events, or giving presentations. The goal of the literature we produce is to teach people FreeBSD basics and help make their path to adoption or contribution easier. Other than attending and presenting at events, we encourage and help community members run their own FreeBSD events, give presentations, or staff FreeBSD tables.

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, working together on projects, and facilitating 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. We are continuing to attend virtual events and planning the June 2022 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.

Check out some of the advocacy and education work we did last quarter:

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/.

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 https://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org to find more about how we support FreeBSD and how we can help you!