Welcome to the September issue of the FreeBSD Foundation Update. We’re calling this the Student Issue, but it’s dedicated to anyone interested in getting involved with the FreeBSD Project. In this issue, you’ll read about the experiences of this year’s FreeBSD Google Summer of Code students, Foundation Interns, and a University of Waterloo Co-Op Student. We also provided a list of resources to help folks get started with the Project, including how-to guides, videos, handbooks and more! Finally, I’m excited to announce a new pilot program dedicated to introducing university students to FreeBSD. Even if you’re not new to the Project, please take a moment to read through this issue, and be sure to share with anyone who might be interested in giving FreeBSD a go. It’s not an exhaustive list of resources, but it will help folks get started on the right path. Also, be sure to reach out if you’d like to tell your Getting Started with FreeBSD story. We’d love to hear from you!
Enjoy!
Deb
Foundation Highlights
Meet the 2023 FreeBSD Google Summer of Code Students:
The FreeBSD Project is proud to have participated in the Google Summer of Code program since its inception in 2005. As we near the completion of the 2023 season, the Foundation asked a few of our GSoC students to share more about themselves and their experience working with the Project.
Meet The Summer 2023 University of Waterloo Co-Op Student: Naman Sood
The Foundation has continued our successful partnership with the University of Waterloo Co-Op Program. Since 2017 we’ve had 15 interns, some having returned for more than one internship. We’ve also had two interns become full-fledged committers, and many continue to contribute. We sat down with this year’s Summer Co-Op Student to learn more about them and why they chose to work with FreeBSD.
Q: What are you currently working on?
I’m currently trying to port parts of the VPS subsystem for FreeBSD from FreeBSD 10 to 14 – specifically, I’m looking to port TCP checkpointing and failover across processes. This would be useful in case, for example, if you had a multi-process web server and one process died, it could hand off its TCP connection to another process. From the client’s perspective, things could continue to work unimpeded even in the face of this failure.
New to FreeBSD? Here’s Where to Connect with the Community:
The FreeBSD Project is always excited for new users and contributors! The easiest way to get involved is through the community itself: mailing lists, social media, and local meetups. These spaces are filled with FreeBSD users, developers, and enthusiasts who are excited to help new users. They’re great places to discuss FreeBSD, meet community members, and ask questions about the operating system.
Looking to give back to the community? New contributors can help proofread existing documentation, provide entirely new detailed documentation, recommend bug fixes, and port new software to FreeBSD. No matter what your expertise, there’s a place for everyone!
Register Today for the November 2023 FreeBSD Vendor Summit
Registration is now open for the November 2023 FreeBSD Vendor Summit. Taking place November 2-3, 2023, in San Jose, CA, the Summit provides commercial FreeBSD users with the unique opportunity to meet face-to-face with developers and contributors to get features requested, problems solved, and needs met. It also opens up discussion on improving and enhancing the operating system. Don’t miss talks by NetApp, Metify, Netflix, ARM, and more! Thank you to our Venue Sponsor, NetApp and our Gold Sponsor, The FreeBSD Foundation. The full schedule will be available later this month. Register today, space is limited!
Get Started With FreeBSD With Some How-To Guides!
The Foundation has been working to create easy-to-follow introductory how-to guides on various FreeBSD features. The goal is to introduce new users to parts of the operating system that they may be unfamiliar with.
One of the Foundation’s goals for 2023-2024 is to increase the adoption and visibility of FreeBSD. This is a pretty broad and lofty goal, so we’ve broken this down into a few key markets/audiences we plan to target. One group we’ve identified is college students. Introducing FreeBSD to people early on in their education paths will help prepare them for jobs in systems programming, and provide marketable skills for many opportunities going forward. Plus, the Project benefits by having more people contributing to FreeBSD.
Here’s a short overview of the FreeBSD University program that we are developing, though it’s currently in the planning stages. However, we have a recent intern willing to work with us and introduce FreeBSD at his university this semester.
Meet FreeBSD Foundation 2023 Summer Intern: Jake Freeland
Introducing students to FreeBSD continues to be a high priority for the Foundation. This year, in addition to our participation in Google Summer of Code and the University of Waterloo Co-Op program, the Foundation hired Jake Freeland, a previous GSoC student, to intern with us for the summer. We sat down with Jake to learn more about him and the work he has been doing to support FreeBSD.
Q: What are you currently working on?
I started the internship by extending capability violation tracing in FreeBSD’s ktrace facility. With my changes, developers can trace and collect verbose capability violation diagnostics when a program is not in capability mode.
Next, I isolated FreeBSD’s system logging utility, syslogd, in a Capsicum security sandbox. The syslogd daemon runs with root privileges, so it is a high profile target for security attacks. Putting syslogd into a sandboxed environment should prevent detrimental effects in the case of a syslogd security vulnerability. With this experience, I created a how-to guide on sandboxing programs using Capsicum
The July/August 2023 issue of the FreeBSD Journal is here! Always free, this issue is all about Containers and Cloud! Covering ports, jails, virtualization and more! Read the Journal
Why Choose FreeBSD
Stormshield leverages off FreeBSD to deliver high performance UTM (Unified Threat Management) and Next-Generation Firewall technology since 1998. We continuously show our support for FreeBSD via technical contributions and sponsorship; as a company we are totally committed to the on-going success of this great community.
