Implementation of OCI containers on Jails/Bhyve with support for podman and buildah. 

The Open Container Initiative (OCI) develops open industry standards for cloud native container formats and runtimes, ensuring platform consistency. An OCI working group is defining these standards for FreeBSD, with implementations using jails and potentially lightweight VMs with FreeBSD’s bhyve hypervisor (which would allow support for other operating systems besides FreeBSD in a container on a FreeBSD host).

The UnionFS project aims to stabilize and enhance its utility on FreeBSD.

The project will focus on enabling apparent modifications to read-only filesystems, supporting multiple jails sharing the same base and simplifying their upgrades, and facilitating container scenarios with layered, pre-packaged images. The UnionFS project on FreeBSD, led by Olivier Certner, is focused on enhancing and stabilizing UnionFS's capabilities, especially for scenarios involving layered filesystems, jails, containers, and storage optimization. 

The project aims to control the number of read/write operations and the read/write bandwidth by introducing hierarchical rate limits configurable similarly to quotas. This will improve system performance and resource management.

The OpenZFS Hierarchical Rate Limits project for FreeBSD aims to significantly enhance the OpenZFS file system by introducing hierarchical rate limits. Configurable similarly to quotas, these rate limits will control the number of read/write operations and the read/write bandwidth, resulting in improved system performance and better resource management.

Initiative to develop a comprehensive FreeBSD AMD IOMMU (Input-Output Memory Management Unit) driver. 

A new collaborative project between Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and The FreeBSD Foundation has commenced to develop a comprehensive FreeBSD AMD IOMMU (Input-Output Memory Management Unit) driver. This initiative aims to enable FreeBSD to fully support systems with over 256 cores, incorporating advanced features such as CPU mapping and bhyve integration.

Initiative to develop a graphical installation interface for FreeBSD

The first challenge for users trying out a new operating system is the installation process, which shapes their initial impression. Nowadays, OS installers usually have a graphical interface, as seen in popular systems such as RedHat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, and Debian GNU/Linux. This graphical method is also common in UNIX systems like FreeBSD. Regardless of the user's technical skills, the installation process plays a crucial role in how the platform is perceived by the public.

Initiative to provide support for the 64-bit RISC-V architecture

The FreeBSD/RISC-V project is providing support for running FreeBSD on the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture.

Initiative to provide a subsystem for blind, low-vision, and color blind users

This project will provide a starting point for a “Vision Accessibility Subsystem” for blind, low-vision, and color blind users.  New features will include a Braille refreshable display framework, a communication channel for the virtual terminal console, a speech synthesizer, high-contrast TUI utilities, and an accessibility book to document assistive technologies available on FreeBSD.

Enhancing FreeBSD's audio stack to improve the support for modern audio hardware and software applications.

While known for its high quality, the FreeBSD audio stack has been undermaintained. A new project aims to enhance the stack comprehensively, addressing frameworks, utilities, and kernel driver bugs to improve overall functionality.

Several significant improvements have been made in recent developments. Asynchronous audio device detach is now supported in FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE and 14-STABLE, providing more flexibility in audio device management. The outdated “snd_clone” framework has been replaced with DEVFS_CDEVPRIV(9), which also ships with FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE and 14-STABLE, modernizing the device management framework.

Improving the Continuous Integration (CI) infrastructure to ensure more reliable and efficient software development and testing processes.

Key achievements include upgrading disk and memory for test VMs using parts from decommissioned machines, updating the build environment for stable/13 jobs to 13.3-RELEASE, and transitioning the i386 build on the main branch to use cross-build on amd64.

Ongoing efforts involve merging critical reviews, adding new hardware to the CI cluster, and designing a pre-commit CI system and pull/merge-request system. The team is also working on utilizing the CI cluster for building release artifacts, simplifying CI/test environment setup, and redesigning the hardware test lab.

Enhancing support for cloud-init, making FreeBSD a Tier I platform to improve its integration and usability in cloud environments.

Cloud-init is now the standard for setting up servers in the cloud. Over the past year and a half, FreeBSD has significantly improved its support for cloud-init. Working closely with the cloud-init developers and the FreeBSD Foundation, this year's focus has been on enhancing FreeBSD to enable the cloud-init team to directly test future changes to FreeBSD code paths. 

The OpenStack on FreeBSD project aims to seamlessly integrate OpenStack cloud infrastructure with the FreeBSD operating system, leveraging FreeBSD’s unique features while maintaining compatibility with OpenStack standards.

In the first quarter of 2024, the project made significant strides. A proposal was submitted for BSDCan 2024, and the team attended AsiaBSDCon 2024 to share porting experiences and gather valuable feedback, which helped refine the project’s direction. Phase 1 tasks were reviewed, necessary adjustments were made, and plans for phases 2 and 3 were aligned with long-term goals. A key technical achievement was verifying the bhyve serial console's functionality over TCP. A demo video was also created to showcase the project’s progress and features.

This update supports current-generation Intel WiFi devices and the 802.11ac standard to improve wireless connectivity. 

In November 2023, the FreeBSD Foundation embarked on a significant initiative to improve the iwlwifi driver, which is crucial for supporting Intel Wi-Fi chipsets on FreeBSD. This project, led by FreeBSD developer Cheng Cui in collaboration with Björn Zeeb, aimed to enhance FreeBSD’s wireless capabilities through several key milestones.

Various Improvements to the FreeBSD hypervisor 

This project consists of:

• I/O Performance Measurements
• Virtual Machine Tooling
• Documentation Updates
• Flattened Device Tree for arm64 Guests

Automate the building process for FreeBSD images in the Azure Marketplace

The team is currently focused on several key tasks:

• Automating the Image Building and Publishing Process: Efforts are underway to automate the image building and publishing process to merge these improvements into the FreeBSD src/release/ repository.
• Building and Publishing Snapshot Builds: Snapshot builds are being developed and published to the Azure community gallery, providing users with the latest developments and updates.

Native port of “dotnet” to FreeBSD, Initial port at version 8, with successive version ports ongoing

The support for .NET on FreeBSD (dotnet) enables developers to choose their preferred platform without constraints. This compatibility allows them to take advantage of FreeBSD's unique benefits while maintaining a consistent development environment with .NET. The new native port of .NET, currently available for the amd64 architecture (with aarch64 support in progress), brings .NET runtime version 8 to FreeBSD. This ensures full compatibility while leveraging FreeBSD’s performance and security features, allowing developers to fully utilize FreeBSD's capabilities.

Initiative to strengthen the infrastructure of the FreeBSD Project, improve its capabilities, and provide better services to its users

The FreeBSD Foundation invested over $100,000 to install a server cluster in Chicago. This investment aims to strengthen the FreeBSD Project's infrastructure, improve its capabilities, and provide better services to its users. To support this expansion, the Foundation has partnered with NYI, which generously contributed four racks in their Chicago facility.

Miscellaneous updates in various parts of the FreeBSD source tree.

In Q2 of 2024, Long-term contractor Olivier Certner was active in a few different parts of the tree:

• rtprio(2)
• Vnode recycling/ZFS ARC reclaim
• ULE scheduler
• Miscellaneous: Many (26) reviews, ports updates, and investigated DRM problems
• Published a EuroBSDCon 2023 conference report in the FreeBSD Journal

A comprehensive hardening guide designed to help configure FreeBSD systems securely and efficiently.

This new CIS Benchmark covers critical areas, including:

• User and Group Management: Secure user accounts and groups with best-practice guidelines.
• Service Configurations: Recommendations for securely configuring essential services.
• File System and Permissions: Best practices for managing file system security and permissions.
• Network Configuration: Tips for securing network settings to protect against unauthorized access and attacks.
• Audit and Logging: Instructions on setting up robust logging and auditing to monitor system activity.

Porting the Vector Packet Processing (VPP) framework to FreeBSD to enhance network performance capabilities.

The Vector Packet Processing (VPP) project on FreeBSD aimed to port VPP, an open-source, high-performance user space networking stack, to FreeBSD. VPP optimizes packet processing through vectorized operations and parallelism, ideal for software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) applications. Initiated in November 2023, this effort was led by Tom Jones, a FreeBSD developer specializing in network performance, under a contract with the FreeBSD Foundation.

Naman Sood is a FreeBSD Foundation summer intern who has been working on networking-related tasks. Naman began the internship by submitting improvements to one of the firewalls included with FreeBSD, pf. For example, they completed work started by Luiz Amaral to allow traffic for pfsync, pf's state table synchronization interface, to be carried over IPv6. They also submitted work to implement RFC 4787 REQs 1 and 3 for pf full cone NAT.  Full cone NAT means all requests from an internal IP/port are mapped to the same external IP/port, which allows certain devices like the Nintendo Switch to work behind pf running on FreeBSD. Naman also took on miscellaneous tasks such as exploring extracting tcp checkpoint and failover work from a project called VPS for FreeBSD started by Klaus P. Ohrhallinger and submitting bug fixes for pw(8) and du(1).

In July 2023, Yan-Hao Wang began a summer internship with the Foundation to work a variety of tasks. The planned work includes adding and improving documentation tools, adding tests for userspace tools in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, fixing libxo issues, and surveying a roadmap for developing RPI4 and IPV6 TODOs.  An "expert system" for FreeBSD man pages and documents will be a best-effort, proof-of-concept task that will include importing FreeBSD documents such as man pages and the Handbooks into a vector database so that large language models like ChatGPT can "read" them in order to offer better answers when queried with FreeBSD-related question.

With the update of OpenSSL to version 3 in FreeBSD's main branch, there are many port build errors that must be fixed before FreeBSD 14.0 can be released. Most of the critical issues with OpenSSL 3 and LLVM 15 have already been fixed, but with LLVM 16 there are approximately 800 additional ports that fail to build resulting in an additional 2800 dependent ports that are skipped in a full ports tree build. Muhammad Moinur (Moin) Rahman will complete the time-consuming and tedious work to fix all port issues related to the update to OpenSSL 3 and LLVM 16.

Modern computer architectures provide SIMD (single instruction multiple data) instruction set extensions to operate on multiple data at once. Commonly used for numerical applications such as video codecs, graphics rendering, and scientific computing, use of SIMD techniques also aids in basic data processing tasks such as those implemented by libc functions. The objective of this project by Robert Clausecker is to provide such SIMD-enhanced versions of relevant FreeBDS libc library functions and thus improving the performance of software linked against it.

From June 1 until September 1, 2023, Jake Freeland will intern with the Foundation to work on Capsicum, FreeBSD's sandbox framework.  Capsicum was built to limit the capabilities given to applications and libraries. The Capsicum model is simple and secure, but progress and development surrounding the framework has died down in recent years. Extending the number of tools available to the developer for convenient program Capsicumization will decrease the aforementioned learning curve significantly. If Capsicumization is easy, then more developers will adopt it.

En-Wei Wu, a 2022 Google Summer of Code Contributor, began an internship with the FreeBSD Foundation in early 2023 to work on FreeBSD wireless drivers and tools. The work is divided into three components:

- wtap extensions

- hostapd(8) improvements

- 802.11 driver development

DTrace is a framework that gives administrators and kernel developers the ability to observe kernel behavior in real time.  The project’s main goal is to implement inline function tracing (a much-requested DTrace feature) and also port kinst to riscv and arm64. For inline tracing, kinst will make use of the DWARF debugging standard to be able to detect inline calls and create probes for each one of them. In the future, this functionality could be leveraged to address some of the shortcomings of FBT, such as the tail-call optimization problem (chapter 20.4 of the DTrace manual) and the absence of inline tracing capabilities.

The Foundation began sponsoring Marshall Kirk McKusick to implement the changes required to allow snapshots of UFS/FFS filesystems using journaled soft updates. This work requires extensive changes in the UFS/FFS soft updates and snapshot kernel code and also in the fsck_ffs utility.

WireGuard is a secure tunneling protocol with both userland and kernel implementations. The Foundation is sponsoring John Baldwin to work on wireguard by updating the data path crypto in the upstream WireGuard driver to use the in-kernel OpenCrypto Framework for the data path. 

This multi-stage project aims to provide FreeBSD with a modern debugger and bring LLDB closer to being a fully featured GDB replacement. Part III is focused on improvements for kernel debugging.

This multi-stage project aims to provide FreeBSD with a modern debugger and bring LLDB closer to being a fully featured GDB replacement. Part II of this project involves switching some non-x86 CPU architectures to the new remote process plugin framework and removing the old native-debugging process plugin altogether.

This muliti-stage project aims to provide FreeBSD with a modern debugger and bring LLDB closer to being a fully featured GDB replacement.

The Foundation has awarded a development grant to Edward Tomasz Napierała to investigate running under the Linuxulator a number of popular client-facing and server related Linux applications, and fix or document identified issues.

This project will update the DRM drivers to a more recent version of Linux, initially targetting the Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version 5.4, and where possible will implement BSD licensed kernel compatibility shims. Once this is complete updates to later Linux kernel versions will follow.

This project will update and enhance Allan Jude’s original prototype implementation in collaboration with other OpenZFS developers, to prepare it for merging into OpenZFS proper. Work will also include additional tests, backwards compatibility improvements, documentation, and performance analysis. The project is expected to be complete in early fall, 2020.

The current if_bridge implementation contends heavily on a single BRIDGE_LOCK mutex. As a result it's limited to a little over 1 million packets per second, regardless of the number of cores in the system. This means, for small packets, it can just about saturate a 1Gbps link, but little more than that. The overall idea is to replace the single mutex by two read-mostly locks, one protecting the overall bridge, and a second to protect the forwarding table. The vast majority of packets will only require read locks, allowing multiple cores to pass packets over the bridge simultaneously.

Each year CPUs are made with larger core and thread counts, and running FreeBSD on these new CPUs often demonstrates new scalability bottlenecks. This project will use a number of motivating use cases, such as "poudriere -j 128" package builds and "will-it-scale".

This project will provide solid foundations for debugging failures encountered when running modern Linux binaries, and improving the Linux compatibility at both binary and source-level levels. It will also clean up the existing Linuxulator implementation and make it easier and quicker to port software originally written for, and maintained primarily under, Linux.

FreeBSD's fuse(4) driver is buggy and out-of-date. It's essentially unusable for any networked filesystem like CephFS, MooseFS, or Tahoe-LAFS. This project will fix all of fuse's known bugs, update the kernel API, and add a new test suite.

This project aims to integrate SDIO support as an initial step towards supporting SDIO-conected WiFi modules, as on the Raspberry Pi and others.

This project provides a USB mass storage target, making it possible to have FreeBSD running on an embedded device appear as a USB flash key, providing the user with documentation and drivers necessary to fully use the embedded target. This is invaluable in both teaching and product environments as one part of an excellent "out-of- the-box" experience.

The Foundation sponsored Landon Fuller's work to modernize FreeBSD support for Broadcom Wi-Fi adaptors, laying the groundwork for comprehensive Broadcom Wi-Fi support on FreeBSD, including enabling the adoption of additional softmac PHY and fullmac device support from Broadcom’s ISC-licensed Linux drivers.

This project aimed to add out-of-box USB OTG support, making FreeBSD a much more attractive option for both newbies lacking the equipment to set up headless operation and companies looking for a more user friendly option.

The Zettabyte File System (ZFS) is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed to protect against data corruption and support high storage capacities.

The Foundation is sponsoring Matthew Ahrens to develop a “RAID-Z Expansion” feature. This will allow adding an extra disk to an existing RAID-Z group, allowing the expansion from a 4-wide RAID-Z1 group into a 5-wide RAID-Z1 group.

This provides a lightweight daemon that can notified in realtime of attempted "bad behavior" from various daemons. The daemon stores the data about the attack in a persistent database, and can update a packet filter to block access from the network addresses of the attacker.

This project aims to finalize the work done to make the VIMAGE network stack code production ready. Starting with an update of the previously reviewed work sitting in a perforce repository, incremental patches will be tested, presented to the community, and included in the FreeBSD SVN base system repository head/ branch.

The virtualized network stack will significantly enhance FreeBSD's jail functionality, allowing jails to have their own complete and locally administered network stacks, including firewalls, routing, and IPsec configurations.

TCP Extensions for Multipath Operation with Multiple Addresses (MPTCP) allows a mutli-homed host to utilize multiple network interfaces or paths on a single TCP session. The protocol is currently being standardized by the IETF in RFC 6824.

Officially known as AArch64, the 64-bit ARM architecture is also known as ARMv8 and arm64. The 64-bit ARM architecture is expected to find use in traditional server markets, in contrast to the embedded and mobile markets where 32-bit ARM is widely adopted.

The Newcons project will deliver an updated FreeBSD console driver with Unicode support and improved support for graphics modes. This will improve interoperability with X11 and Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) graphics drivers.

The FreeBSD Foundation, with a generous grant from Google, teamed up to sponsor Joseph Koshy in improving the hardware performance counter support in FreeBSD. The goal of the project was the addition of callgraph support in the hwpmc driver.

The project is to make FreeBSD tolerate the removal of active disk devices, such as when a USB flash device with a mounted filesystems is physically detached by a user. Currently the system may panic in this situation.

This three-part project will include implementing Appropriate Byte Counting (ABC) RFC3465 support, adapting and merging CAIA's Statistical Information for TCP Research (SIFTR) TCP analysis tool into FreeBSD, and making improvements to the TCP reassembly queue.

Rui Paulo will be implementing the forthcoming IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh standard for FreeBSD. Wireless mesh networks are expected to become widespread as routers and network appliances deploy them, allowing wireless networks to be built and extended dynamically.

Rafal Jaworowski and Semihalf has been awarded a grant to provide FreeBSD with support for the flattened device tree (FDT) technology. This project allows for describing hardware resources of a computer system and their dependencies in a platform-neutral and portable way.

Pawel Jakub Dawidek has been awarded a grant to implement storage replication software that will enable users to use the FreeBSD operating system for highly available configurations where data has to be shared across the cluster nodes.

The network stack virtualization project aims at extending the FreeBSD kernel to maintain multiple independent instances of networking state. This will allow for complete networking independence between jails on a system, including giving each jail its own firewall, virtual network interfaces, rate limiting, routing tables, and IPSEC configuration.

Bjoern A. Zeeb has been awarded a grant to improve FreeBSD's jail based virtualization infrastructure and to continue to work on the virtual network stack. His employer, CK Software GmbH is matching the Foundation's funding with hours.

DTrace is a general purpose and lightweight tracing framework that allows administrators, developers and users to investigate causes of system failure or performance bottlenecks. The FreeBSD operating system has had support for kernel-only DTrace since FreeBSD 8.0, but DTrace userland support was missing.

Max Khon has been awarded a grant to finish the DAHDI FreeBSD driver port. The purpose of DAHDI/FreeBSD project is to make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions.

Edward Tomasz Napierala has been awarded a grant to implement resource containers and a simple per-jail resource limits mechanism.

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Shteryana Shopova has been awarded a grant to make improvements to BSNMP.

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has awarded Bjoern Zeeb a grant to improve the maturity of IPv6 support in FreeBSD and PC-BSD. This project is jointly sponsored with iXsystems.

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Konstantin Belousov has been awarded a grant to implement support of GEM, KMS, and DRI for Intel Drivers. This project is being co-sponsored by iXsystems.

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Swinburne University of Technology's Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures has been awarded a grant to implement Five new TCP Congestion Control Algorithms in FreeBSD.

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Julien Ridoux and Darryl Veitch at the University of Melbourne have been awarded a grant to implement support of feed-forward clock synchronization algorithms.

The C standard library (libc) is one of the most important parts of a UNIX system as most programs interact with the kernel through interfaces written in C. Porting code between platforms with similar libc implementations is trivial and if something is supported by libc, higher-level languages can use it without being reimplemented.

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has awarded Bjoern Zeeb a grant to analyze the performance of FreeBSD's IPv6 stack. This project is jointly sponsored with iXsystems.

The FreeBSD audit facility provides fine-grained, configurable logging of security-relevant events. One of the key purposes of logging security events is postmortem analysis in case of system compromise.

This project makes it possible to grow a UFS or ZFS file system while mounted read-write. This includes changes to both file systems, GEOM infrastructure, and drivers.

The FreeBSD Documentation Project relied on outdated and obsolete tools for producing the FreeBSD Handbook and other documentation.

The ARM architecture is expanding into higher-end server computing markets, and supporting sophisticated features of the platform is key to FreeBSD's success in these new areas.

This project delivered a native in-kernel iSCSI stack (both target and initiator) for the increasingly popular block storage protocol.

This project continued the integration of Capsicum and the Casper daemon into FreeBSD. A new structure for capability rights increased the number of possible capability rights to around 1000, allowing for future development while maintaining API/ABI compatibility.

Limitations of the amd(8) automounter are a recurring problem reported by many FreeBSD users. The new automounter project intends to address these concerns.

The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) provides boot- and run-time services for x86 computers, and is a replacement for the legacy BIOS. This project will adapt the FreeBSD loader and kernel boot process for compatibility with UEFI firmware, found on contemporary servers, desktops, and laptops.

This project adds modern AES modes to FreeBSD's OpenCrypto cryptographic framework, for use by IPsec and other consumers. This project is co-sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation and Netgate, a leading vendor of BSD-based firewalls and networking gear.