March 2024 Software Development Update

The FreeBSD Foundation is proud to present an impressive range of software development projects for 2024 aimed at enriching the FreeBSD ecosystem. These projects cover multiple areas, from wireless network improvements to cloud and file system advancements, demonstrating our commitment to innovation and infrastructure growth. 

The FreeBSD Foundation is making significant strides in wireless development, led by Cheng Cui and Bjoern Zeeb. Their primary goals are to fix bugs, stabilize the system, and improve iwlwifi for 802.11ac transfer speeds. Zeeb’s recent contributions have brought stability fixes to native and LinuxKPI-based wireless drivers in FreeBSD 13.3. They will soon focus on enhancing iwlwifi performance to achieve faster and more reliable wireless connections on FreeBSD systems.

The FreeBSD Foundation has taken a significant step towards integrating Vector Packet Processing (VPP) into FreeBSD by contracting Tom Jones in November 2023. VPP is highly regarded for its superior packet processing capabilities and is being customized to fit FreeBSD’s infrastructure. The project will start with fixing the VPP build on FreeBSD, progressing to verifying fundamental functionality, and culminating in the creation of a VPP port. This initiative will leverage VPP’s vectorized operations and parallelism, making FreeBSD an ideal choice for software-defined networking and network function virtualization applications. Performance improvements will be recommended, and FreeBSD-specific APIs will be documented to achieve the project’s objectives.

The OpenStack on FreeBSD project, sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation and led by Chih-Hsin Chang and Li-Wen Hsu, has achieved significant milestones. The project successfully migrated OpenStack to physical machines running FreeBSD 14.0-STABLE, incorporating components like Keystone, Glance, Placement, and Neutron, with a port in progress of the Ironic baremetal provisioning system. This advancement includes updating installation documentation and dependencies. Future efforts will focus on streamlining the installation process through FreeBSD ports and integrating improvements based on community feedback. For detailed information and to contribute, visit their GitHub page.

Muhammad Moinur Rahman is working on improving FreeBSD’s CI infrastructure. The goal is to make the development process smoother by integrating CI scripts into the build system for pre-commit testing. The focus is on making individual CI jobs more debuggable, which will help to quickly resolve any problems that arise. The project also aims to support private FreeBSD runners for CI on popular git hosting services, making it easier for developers working on private branches. This flexibility will make integrating FreeBSD builds and scripts easier with other CI tools like Cirrus CI, improving the overall developer experience and workflow efficiency.

The FreeBSD Foundation is thrilled to announce its ongoing involvement in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). This demonstrates our unwavering dedication to fostering new talent and innovative projects within the FreeBSD community. Through GSoC, FreeBSD has introduced fresh ideas and contributions while providing a platform for aspiring developers to engage deeply with FreeBSD’s ecosystem. This engagement has resulted in numerous noteworthy projects over the years, enriching the FreeBSD project and its community.

In late 2023, the FreeBSD Foundation initiated a significant cluster refresh by allocating over $100,000 for purchasing and shipping 15 new servers to four racks at NYI’s new Chicago facility. This upgrade, led by the Cluster Administration team, aims to enhance FreeBSD’s infrastructure into the new year with a setup that includes package builders, web servers, package mirrors, CI servers, firewall/routers, and an admin bastion. This move is part of the Foundation’s ongoing effort to support and enhance FreeBSD’s infrastructure. More details about the 2023 infrastructure support can be found in their 2023 review.