Introduction

Now available: the 2016Q2 model of the FreeBSD Project Status Report!

This quarter brings several exciting improvements over previous models. We have enhancements from different teams, new features like robust mutexes and support for full disk encryption with GELI. You'll find expanded graphics support, both at the chipset and window manager levels, and ongoing development in many pending features.

Perhaps most exciting, under the hood you'll find a brand-new Core Team.

Don't wait. Take FreeBSD for a spin today.

—Michael W. Lucas

Please submit status reports for the third quarter of 2016 by October 7.

Contact: IRC Admin Team <irc@FreeBSD.org>

Contact: Kubilay Kocak <koobs@FreeBSD.org>

Contact: Eitan Adler <eadler@FreeBSD.org>

The FreeBSD IRC Admin team manages the FreeBSD Project's IRC presence on the freenode IRC network, looking after:

Registrations and ongoing management of channels within the official namespace ( #freebsd* ).

). Liaising with freenode staff.

Allocating freebsd hostmask cloaks for users.

General user support.

In order to facilitate a constructive and positive environment for all members of the FreeBSD community, IRC Admin over the past 3-9 months has established and consolidated a consistent baseline with respect to the management of its channels on freenode. This report is a summary of what has happened so far and things to come.

These activities were completed over the last few quarters:

Registered FreeBSD Group Contacts (GC) with freenode staff. For information on what this means, see the group registration page.

Created a FreeBSD NickServ account to assign as primary owner/founder of the #freebsd* namespace channels.

namespace channels. The primary channels are owned/founded by a generic FreeBSD account that is owned and managed by the FreeBSD Project.

Created the Services::IRC component in Bugzilla for change requests and issue reports.

component in Bugzilla for change requests and issue reports. Obtained a report of all registered freenode channels matching the #freebsd* namespace and assessed the list for current ownership and activity status.

namespace and assessed the list for current ownership and activity status. Assigned freebsd/ user cloaks to users requesting them. For more information, see IRC Cloaks.

user cloaks to users requesting them. For more information, see IRC Cloaks. Obtained a report on all nicknames and accounts with existing freebsd/* user cloaks.

user cloaks. Liaised with freenode staff on upcoming changes to freebsd channels.

The goals for the next few quarters are to:

Complete the transfer of founder ownership for all #freebsd* channels. Existing channel creators, some of whom are project members and others who are not, will be contacted using known contact information or contact information set in their registered NickServ account, in order to initiate the transfer of the channel to the FreeBSD Project. If the contact information of the existing channel owner cannot be obtained, or if no response is received after a suitable period of time has elapsed, IRC Admin will complete the ownership transfer with freenode staff.

channels. Existing channel creators, some of whom are project members and others who are not, will be contacted using known contact information or contact information set in their registered NickServ account, in order to initiate the transfer of the channel to the FreeBSD Project. If the contact information of the existing channel owner cannot be obtained, or if no response is received after a suitable period of time has elapsed, IRC Admin will complete the ownership transfer with freenode staff. Deregister defunct and inactive #freebsd* channels. Channels which have no visible signs of activity based on last active time or registered owner last seen, have been deprecated by alternative channels, or have no other way of having ownership transferred will be deregistered. For channels where a sunset period may be suitable, a channel topic will be set, and optionally a forwarding channel, informing users of the changes, including support and contact information.

channels. Channels which have no visible signs of activity based on last active time or registered owner last seen, have been deprecated by alternative channels, or have no other way of having ownership transferred will be deregistered. For channels where a sunset period may be suitable, a channel topic will be set, and optionally a forwarding channel, informing users of the changes, including support and contact information. Create and document baseline procedures and guidelines. These include: Community and User Guidelines, a Code of Conduct, Operator and Moderator Guidelines and Expectations, Abuse Reporting and Dispute Resolution Guidelines, and procedures for delegation of channel management.

Standardize and re-create channel access lists. Existing access lists and user permissions for all #freebsd* channels remain in their states prior to FreeBSD Group Registration. Consolidation and reassignment to the FreeBSD Project is needed. In order to ensure a consistent user and community experience in official FreeBSD channels going forward, access lists for all channels will be created from the ground up. Users with existing access to channels may, at the IRC Admin team's discretion, be provided with the opportunity to re-apply for access subject to any conditions, terms, or guidelines that may be appropriate.

channels remain in their states prior to FreeBSD Group Registration. Consolidation and reassignment to the FreeBSD Project is needed. In order to ensure a consistent user and community experience in official FreeBSD channels going forward, access lists for all channels will be created from the ground up. Users with existing access to channels may, at the IRC Admin team's discretion, be provided with the opportunity to re-apply for access subject to any conditions, terms, or guidelines that may be appropriate. Determine the methods for informing project members and the community of future changes to IRC services, procedures, and policies.

Determine methods to designate existing channel founders as channel managers or similar.

Update the channels list on the Wiki to distinguish official and unofficial channels.

Establish consistent modes, entry messages, and topics for all channels.

Users are invited to /join #freebsd-irc on the freenode IRC network. The IRC Admin team welcomes ideas, contructive criticism, and feedback on how the FreeBSD Project can improve the service and experience it provides to the community.

While the vast majority of the broader community interacts on the freenode IRC network, the FreeBSD developer presence there needs to be significantly improved.

There are many opportunities to be had by increasing the amount and quality of interaction between FreeBSD users and developers, both in terms of developers keeping their finger on the pulse of the community and in encouraging and cultivating greater contributions to the Project over the long term.

It is critical to have a strong developer presence amongst users, and IRC Admin would like to call on all developers to join the FreeBSD freenode channels to help support that presence. We are the FreeBSD giants on whose shoulders the future contributors stand. It is important to be there, in force.

Contact: Vladimir Krstulja <vlad-fbsd@acheronmedia.com>

Contact: Kubilay Kocak <koobs@FreeBSD.org>

Contact: Bugmeister <bugmeister@FreeBSD.org>

Since the Triage Team was introduced in the October–December 2015 report, it has been working on the following three major aspects of issue triage:

Recruiting and educating more users to assist in issue triage.

Identifying problem areas, especially from the fresh eyes perspective, revealing issues not immediately obvious to contributors with experience.

Proposing changes to improve the issue triage process.

Our efforts have almost exclusively focused on issues in the "Ports & Packages" component as that is the easiest starting point. Other categories like "Base System" require more knowledge and experience with problem content and workflow.

During this time, Rodrigo was inactive due to lack of available time, and Vladimir was unable to commit enough time during the first quarter of the year, but provided active contribution during the second. It became obvious that the Issue Triage Team must concentrate on additional recruitment in the coming quarter.

In the last two quarters, several problems were identified and the formulated solutions will be published on our upcoming Wiki page. A summary of those issues is given here:

Issue triage, defined as "ensure that an issue is summarized, classified, and assigned to appropriate people", is too time consuming. Bugzilla automation through auto-assign helps, but is insufficient. If the triage process is extended to include "track the issue through its entire life to resolution", the time and effort required grows exponentially. Fortunately, there are many things the community can do, with minimum effort, that help greatly. Part of the recruitment and education process is educating users on how to properly treat their own issues and issues they interact with, in order to maximize the efficiency of issue tracking and problem resolution. Various timeouts are inadequate. For example, the maintainer timeout is too long and does not differentiate between classes of issues, such as a non-security and a security timeout. Other timeouts are not covered, such as assignee timeouts, when an issue has been assigned with no follow-up activity. Another example is a timeout where additional information was requested but never provided. We will be recommending several changes and documenting these in our Wiki. Partially as a consequence of inadequate timeouts and inadequate ability to efficiently track issues through their entire lifecycle, a great number of issues are open for too long. We have identified several classes of those issues and will document the solutions to each in the near future. Bugzilla is not perfect and at times it can hinder the ability to properly track issues clearly and accurately, in order to resolve them quickly. However, changing bug tracking software is a tremendous effort, so we will instead recommend technical and workflow improvements in order to improve the user experience as much as possible. For example, we identified additional saved searches to help track and quickly find issue categories and, more importantly, their states. Another example is ensuring that various flags and keywords are unambiguous and well understood. For instance, "patch" and "patch-ready" can often be misunderstood or misapplied. Issue statistics are lacking, and for the next quarter we intend to change that. Statistics help to provide insight into potential bottlenecks and inform the prioritization of improvements to the issue tracker and workflows.

Open tasks:

Recruit more suitable triagers into the team, both committers and community members. Gather and present some interesting statistics for the next report. Set up the Wiki page with identified problems and recommended guidelines and policies. Find common use patterns and add more saved searches to Bugzilla.

Contact: FreeBSD Release Engineering Team <re@FreeBSD.org>

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is responsible for setting and publishing release schedules for official project releases of FreeBSD, announcing code freezes and maintaining the respective branches, among other things.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team completed the 10.3-RELEASE cycle late April, led by Marius Strobl. The release was one week behind the original schedule, to accommodate for a few last-minute critical issues that were essential to fix in the final release.

The FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE cycle started late May, one month behind the original schedule. The schedule slip was primarily to accommodate efforts for packaging the FreeBSD base system with the pkg(8) utility. However, as work on this progressed, it became apparent that there were too many outstanding issues. As a result, packaged base will be a "beta" feature for 11.0-RELEASE, with the goal of promoting it to a first-class feature in 11.1-RELEASE. It is expected that provisions will be made to ensure a seamless transition from older supported releases.

Despite the fact that packaged base is not going to be a prime feature for FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE, the Release Engineering Team would like to thank everyone who tested, provided patches, provided ideas and feedback, and in some cases, shot themselves in the foot due to bugs.

This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.

Contact: René Ladan <portmgr-secretary@FreeBSD.org>

Contact: FreeBSD Ports Management Team <portmgr@FreeBSD.org>

The 2016Q3 branch of the Ports Tree currently contains over 26,100 ports, with the PR count around 2,000. Of those, around 425 are unassigned. The activity dropped somewhat, with 5,300 commits made by 125 active committers. Almost 1,760 PRs were closed in the last quarter.

In the last quarter, we added two new committers: Ben Woods ( woodsb02 ) and Torsten Zühlsdorff ( tz ). No commit bits were taken in for safe keeping.

On the management side, mat took over the role of cluster admin liaison from erwin , who decided to step down from portmgr. rene took over the role of port manager secretary from culot . No other changes were made.

A lot of work was done on modernizing the infrastructure of the Ports Tree, by introducing 6 new USES knobs, one new keyword, and splitting out the larger targets of bsd.port.mk into separate scripts. There were a total of 42 exp-runs to validate these and other infrastructure changes and package updates. Furthermore, checks were added to the quality assurance phase of Poudriere to check for missing indirect dependencies, and advancements were made for reproducable package builds.

Some noticeable package updates are: Firefox 47.0.1, Firefox ESR 45.2.0, Thunderbird 45.1.1, Chromium 51.0.2704.106, Ruby 2.2.5, Ruby Gems 2.6.2, pkg 1.8.6, gmake 4.2.1, KDE 4.14.10, Python 2.7.12, libc++ 3.8.0, and binutils 2.26.

Behind the scenes, antoine made sure that the exp-run- and package builders were kept up-to-date. bdrewery worked on further automating and hardening the package building infrastructure.

During BSDCan, mat worked on various items, including updating the Porter's Handbook, and portmgr held a meeting to discuss various items.

Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <core@FreeBSD.org>

The highlight of Core's second quarter has been the regular biennial election of a new Core team. Core would like to thank Dag-Erling Smørgrav and Glen Barber for running the vote. Despite an initially slow uptake on nominations, fourteen candidates eventually stood, including four incumbent members of core. The ninth FreeBSD Core team will be:

John Baldwin

Baptiste Daroussin

Allan Jude

Ed Maste

Kris Moore

George V. Neville-Neil

Benedict Reuschling

Benno Rice

Hiroki Sato

The new Core Team would like to thank the departing members for their many years of service. Members stepping down are:

Gavin Atkinson

Gleb Smirnoff

David Chisnall

Robert Watson

Peter Wemm

The second most notable achievement this quarter was the successful conclusion of an issue that had been on Core's agenda for many years. With the creation of planet.FreeBSD.org, the FreeBSD Project finally has an official blog aggregation service.

Core spent a significant amount of time reviewing licensing and ensuring that the FreeBSD source remains unencumbered by onerous license terms. This quarter involved approving Adrian Chadd's plan to import GPLv2 licensed code, allowing bwn(4) to be built as a loadable module with support for 802.11n networking. This required confirmation that the license terms on the latest dummynet AQM patches were acceptable and that its variant on the BSD 2-clause license is suitable for use in the FreeBSD base system.

Core applied for, and received, a project-wide license for the use of the JetBrains static analysis tool suite, at the behest of Mathieu Previot.

Another of Core's important functions is to ensure good relations amongst developers. To that end, members of Core provided oversight over the backing-out of disputed blacklistd -related patches to OpenSSH, and acted to smooth over ruffled tempers.

This quarter saw the usual quota of gentle reminders to avoid intemperate language and other counter-productive behavior. Core had to take immediate action about death threats appearing on some of the mailing lists. The culprit was immediately banned from the mailing lists and reported to their email service provider. That person will be similarly removed should they be identified as having rejoined under a different alias.

Other activities included:

Working with university authorities in an attempt to get documentation certifying that a prospective GSoC student was legally allowed to work on FreeBSD code as a foreigner enrolled at a USA university. This issue was eventually solved by the student returning home for the summer and working from there.

Issuing guidance on policy around forced commits, or trivial changes used as a means of correcting a commit message. In these cases, the correct approach is to revert the commit and re-commit with the correct message. This ensures the continuing usefulness of svn blame .

. Approving a delay to the planned introduction of packaged base and confirming that this did not require any change to the new support policies to be introduced with 11.0-RELEASE.

During this quarter, four new commit bits were awarded and none were taken in. Please welcome Emmanuel Vadot, Landon Fuller, Mike Karels, and Eric Badger as new src committers. Yes, that is the same Mike Karels who was once a member of the CSRG at Berkeley and co-author of The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System.

Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb@FreeBSDFoundation.org>

The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide. Funding comes from individual and corporate donations and is used to fund and manage development projects, conferences and developer summits, and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers. The Foundation purchases hardware to improve and maintain FreeBSD infrastructure and publishes FreeBSD white papers and marketing material to promote, educate, and advocate for the FreeBSD Project. The Foundation also represents the FreeBSD Project in executing contracts, license agreements, and other legal arrangements that require a recognized legal entity.

Here are some highlights of what we did to help FreeBSD last quarter:

Fundraising Efforts

Our work is 100% funded by your donations. Our spending budget for 2016 is $1,250,000 and we've raised $265,000 so far. Our Q1-Q2 financial reports will be posted by August 1. As you can see, we need your donations to continue supporting FreeBSD at our current level. Please consider making a donation here: freebsdfoundation.org/donate.

OS Improvements

The Foundation improves FreeBSD by funding software development projects approved through our proposal submission process, and our internal software developer staff members. Two Foundation-funded projects continued last quarter; one project is to improve the stability of the vnet network stack virtualization infrastructure, and the second is phase two of the FreeBSD/arm64 port project.

Foundation staff members were responsible for many changes over the quarter. Kostik Belousov accomplished the following work last quarter: implemented robust mutexes support, as part of ongoing efforts to bring our threading library into POSIX compliance and feature completeness; documented kernel interfaces used by the threading library and produced almost 30 pages of technical text; completed and committed the elimination of the pvh_global_lock from the amd64 pmap, which removed a hot contested lock; and fixed bugs that help keep FreeBSD stable and reliable.

Edward Napierala accomplished the following work last quarter: added filesystem thoughput limits to RCTL; committed iSER initiator support; added support for rerooting into NFS; and added iscsictl -e , which makes it possible to enable and disable iSCSI sessions.

Ed Maste, our Project Development Director, accomplished the following work last quarter: investigated the state of reproducible builds in the ports tree, with some work in progress to address issues; updated the ELF Tool Chain tools with bug fixes and improved handling of malformed input; investigated using lld , the linker from the LLVM family, to link the FreeBSD base system; and reported on and tested patches for issues found. He also managed the arm64 development project and investigated and fixed a number of bugs. Lastly, he imported LLVM's libunwind and prepared it for use in FreeBSD 11, and investigated and reviewed the blacklistd proposal and patches.

George Neville-Neil continued hosting the bi-weekly Transport conference call (notes at https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/TransportProtocols) and the bi-weekly DTrace conference call (notes at https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/DTrace.

Ed continued facilitating the bi-weekly graphics call to coordinate efforts on the i915 driver and other graphics stack work.

Several of these projects are described elsewhere in this quarterly report.

Release Engineering

Foundation employee and release engineer Glen Barber worked closely with Marius Strobl on the 10.3-RELEASE, which was completed in April. Glen also merged the release-pkg branch to 11-CURRENT, though this will be a beta feature for 11.0-RELEASE. Lastly, with the Release Engineering Team, he started the 11.0-RELEASE cycle. Find out more in the Release Engineering Team status entry in this report.

"Getting Started with FreeBSD" Project

We hired a summer intern, with no FreeBSD, Linux, or any command line operating system experience, to figure out on his own how to install and use FreeBSD. He is writing easy-to-follow how-to guides to help make the new user experience straightforward and positive. He's also been submitting bug reports and problems through the appropriate channels. You can check out his first how-to guide at https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/freebsd/how-to-guides/.

FreeBSD Advocacy and Education

A large part of our efforts are dedicated to advocating for the Project. This includes promoting work being done by others with FreeBSD; producing advocacy literature to teach people about FreeBSD and help make the path to starting using FreeBSD or contributing to the Project easier; and attending and getting other FreeBSD contributors to volunteer to run FreeBSD events, staff FreeBSD tables, and give FreeBSD presentations.

Some of the work we did last quarter to support FreeBSD advocacy included: Creating a FreeBSD page on our website to promote FreeBSD derivative projects and showcase FreeBSD users (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/freebsd/), and promoting FreeBSD research by creating a Research page on our site and conference handout (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/what-we-do/research/).

We created guidelines and a repository for using the Project and Foundation logos (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/about/brand-assets/).

To help showcase FreeBSD contributors, we published two new Faces of FreeBSD stories, about Michael Lucas (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/faces-of-freebsd-2016-michael-lucas/) and Kris Moore https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/faces-of-freebsd-2016-kris-moore/).

We published the March/April and May/June issues of the FreeBSD Journal and participated in editorial board work. Kirk McKusick wrote a feature article on the Fast Filesystem for the March/April issue, and other team members helped review and edit Journal articles.

We also published monthly newsletters to highlight work being done to support FreeBSD, tell you about upcoming events, and provide other information to keep you in the loop on what we're doing to support the FreeBSD Project and community.

George Neville-Neil and Robert Watson continued teaching and developing open source FreeBSD teaching materials at teachbsd.org.

We launched the first Hosting Partner Spotlight to showcase the Project's partnership with NYI (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/hosting-partner-spotlight-nyi-at-the-heart-of-freebsd/)

We worked with Microsoft to get FreeBSD onto Azure (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/more-from-the-freebsd-foundation-on-the-projects-partnership-with-microsoft/).

The Foundation was quoted in Cavium's Thunder X2 press release (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cavium-announces-thunderx2-300276536.html

George worked with ARM to coordinate the upcoming ARM Partner Meeting in Cambridge.

Conferences and Events

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, to work together on projects, and to facilitate collaboration between developers and commercial users. This all helps provide a healthy ecosystem. We support the non-FreeBSD events to promote and raise awareness about FreeBSD, to increase the use of FreeBSD in different applications, and to recruit more contributors to the Project.

In April, Benedict Reuschling helped organize and run a hackathon in Essen April 22-24. He then attended the Open Source Datacenter conference in Berlin, with Allan Jude, to give a talk about "Interesting things you can do with ZFS," which highlighted OpenZFS features and how well they work on FreeBSD (https://www.netways.de/index.php?id=3445#c44065).

We promoted FreeBSD at:

Flourish — April 1-2 in Chicago (http://flourishconf.com/2016/)

LFNW — April 23-24 in Bellingham WA (https://www.linuxfestnorthwest.org/2016).

OSCON — May 18-19 in Austin, TX (http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon/open-source-us

Deb Goodkin and Dru Lavigne attended the Community Leadership Summit in Austin: May 14, 15 (http://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/schedule/)

Deb promoted FreeBSD at USENIX ATC June 22-23 in Denver, CO.

Our team attended BSDCan and the Ottawa Developer Summit. We held our annual board meeting to vote on officers, board members, and work on our strategic planning. Most of us attended the developer/vendor summits. Kirk McKusick presented "A Brief History of the BSD Fast Filesystem" (http://www.bsdcan.org/2016/schedule/events/654.en.html). Ed Maste gave a presentation on "Reproducible Builds in FreeBSD". George helped run the vendor summit.

We sponsored five FreeBSD contributors to attend BSDCan.

Legal/FreeBSD IP

The Foundation owns the FreeBSD trademarks, and it is our responsibility to protect them. We continued to review requests and grant permission to use the trademarks.

FreeBSD Community Engagement

We launched our first Community Survey. The purpose was to get input from the community on why they use FreeBSD, what they'd like to see the Foundation support, and other input to help us determine our direction and how we should support the Project.

Anne Dickison, our Marketing Director, has been overseeing the efforts to rewrite the Project's Code of Conduct to help make this a safe, inclusive, and welcoming community.

Other Stuff We Did

Last quarter we purchased a server to reside at NYI to improve the continuous integration tools within the Project.

We had two face-to-face board meetings last quarter to work on strategic planning and identify areas in the project we should support.

We also held our first ever staff retreat in Boulder, Colorado to give our small team an opportunity to work together in person.

We hired Sabine Percarpio as our Administration Manager. She is helping us manage donations, accounting, travel grant applications, handle questions that come in to the Foundation, and run our organization smoothly.

Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib@FreeBSD.org>

This is an interim report on the technical state of my work towards ASLR support in the FreeBSD base system.

The proccontrol(1) utility was written to manage and query ASLR enforcement on a per-process basis. It is required for analyzing ASLR failures in specific programs. This utility leverages the procctl(2) interface which was added to the previous version of the patch, with some bug fixes.

With r300792, ASLR settings are reset to system-wide defaults whenever a setuid binary is executed.

The command's syntax is:

proccontrol -m (trace|aslr) [-q] [-s (enable|disable)] [-p pid | command]

with possible arguments

-m (specifies the trace mode to control debugger attachments)

-q (queries the state of the specified mode for the process with the PID specified by the -p option)

-s (toggles the feature on or off for the given process or itself)

If a command is specified, it inherits the applied settings from proccontrol . For instance, to start a build of a program with ASLR disabled, use proccontrol -m aslr -s disable make .

A ports exp-run was done with ASLR tuned up to the most aggressive settings. The results can be found in PR 208580.

Case study: Lisp

SBCL is an interesting case which illustrates several points. It is much smaller than JDK, and its build system is easier to work with. The code provides a very non C-like language runtime which utilizes a lot of corner cases and makes non-standard uses of the VM system, at least from the point of view of a typical C programmer.

SBCL compiles Lisp forms into the machine native code and manages its own arena for objects. The precompiled Lisp runtime is mapped from a core file. SBCL relies on the operating system's C runtime for the initial load of Lisp, and needs a functional libc to issue many system calls, including syscalls, as well as the dynamic loader. The end result is that there are unfixed mmap(2) calls during both startup and runtime, interfering with other MAP_FIXED mmaps . The loading of the core file and the private arenas are hard-coded to exist at fixed addresses.

This happens to work on the default address map, which is not changed often, so the SBCL choices of the base addresses evolved to work. But any significant distortion of the standard map results in SBCL mmap(MAP_FIXED) requests attempting to override memory from other allocators.

FreeBSD uses the MAP_EXCL flag to mmap(2) , which must be used in the form MAP_FIXED|MAP_EXCL to cause mmap(2) to fail if the requested range is already used. I tried to force MAP_FIXED requests from SBCL to implicitly set MAP_EXCL , but this did not go well, since SBCL sometimes pre-allocates regions for later use with MAP_FIXED . So, MAP_EXCL mappings failed, dumping the process into ldb .

On Linux, if it is detected that the kernel is in AS-randomization mode, the initial SBCL runtime sets its personality to non-random and re-execs. This might be a solution for FreeBSD as well, after the ASLR patch is committed, so that the procctl(2) knob is officially available.

SBCL still has issues on Linux, even with re-exec, when more aggressive randomization from the PaX patch is applied, as seen in bug 1523213.

Case study: Emacs

The Emacs build procedure involves loading the temacs image with the compiled Emacs Lisp files and then dumping its memory to create an image with the content preloaded, in order to reduce startup time.

Recent Emacs sources seem to generally avoid MAP_FIXED , except in some situations. When Emacs does use the flag, it carefully checks that the selected region is not busy. In fact, Emacs would benefit from using MAP_EXCL .

I tried several runs of building Emacs and running the dumped binary, but was not able to reproduce any issues. It seems that the code improved enough to tolerate ASLR both in Linux and NetBSD without turning it off.

In my opinion, it is not reasonable to fight the issues in the kernel as most of it is not fixable from the kernel side. The procctl(2) interface and proccontrol(1) utilities provide an override when needed, but are not automated.

Conclusions

The set of ports which cannot be built with ASLR turned on should be limited but fluid. However, exp-runs may not reliably uncover all problems due to randomization, as seen in the Emacs example. In the route to enable ASLR by default (with non-aggressive settings), the ports framework should provide an option like ASLR_UNSAFE=yes which spawns proccontrol -m aslr -s disable make for the build stages of the unsafe port. Users would still need to be aware of proccontrol(1) in order to run the resulting binary or wrapper scripts provided to do so.

A recommended approach is a flag in the ELF binary to mark it as not compatible with non-standard AS layouts. This frees users from having to use proccontrol(1) , but still requires patching the application's build process and upstreaming the changes. This approach is also useful outside the context of ASLR. However, that mechanism is not yet ready, and developing it is a larger work than ASLR itself.

This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.

Contact: Willem Jan Withagen <wjw@digiware.nl>

Ceph is a distributed object store and filesystem designed to provide excellent performance, reliability, and scalability. It provides the following features:

Object Storage: Ceph provides seamless access to objects using native language bindings or radosgw , a REST interface that is compatible with applications written for S3 and Swift. Block Storage: Ceph’s RADOS Block Device (RBD) provides access to block device images that are striped and replicated across the entire storage cluster. File System: Ceph provides a POSIX-compliant network filesystem that aims for high performance, large data storage, and maximum compatibility with legacy applications.

I started looking into Ceph because using HAST with CARP and ggate did not meet my requirements. My primary goal with Ceph is to run a storage cluster of ZFS storage nodes where the clients run bhyve on RBD disks stored in Ceph.

The FreeBSD build process can build most of the tools in Ceph. However, the RBD-dependent items do not work, since FreeBSD does not yet provide RBD support.

Since the last quarterly report, the following progress was made:

Switching to using CMake from Automake results in a much cleaner development environment and better test output. The changes can be found in the wip-wjw-freebsd-cmake branch. The throttling code has been overhauled to prevent live locks. These mainly occur on FreeBSD but also manifest on Linux. A few more tests were fixed. On one occasion, I was able to complete the full test suite without errors.

11-CURRENT is used to compile and build-test Ceph. The Clang toolset needs to be at least version 3.7, as the Clang 3.4 available on stable/10 does not have all of the capabilities required to compile everything.

This setup will get things running for FreeBSD:

Install bash and link to it in /bin (requires root privileges): sudo pkg install bash sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/bash /bin/bash

Build Ceph: git clone https://github.com/wjwithagen/ceph.git cd ceph git checkout wip-wjw-freebsd-tests ./do_freebsd-cmake.sh --deps

The --deps argument is only needed for the initial installation, to pull in the necessary dependencies; it should be omitted for subsequent builds.

CMake is now used to build Ceph on FreeBSD; the old method using automake is no longer used.

Parts Not Yet Included:

RBD: Rados Block Devices are currently implemented in the Linux kernel, but there used to be a userspace implementation. It is possible that ggated could be used as a template, since it provides some of the same functionality and it has a userspace counterpart.

could be used as a template, since it provides some of the same functionality and it has a userspace counterpart. BlueStore: FreeBSD and Linux have a different AIO API which needs to be bridged. There has been some discussion about aio_cancel not working for all device types in FreeBSD.

not working for all device types in FreeBSD. CephFS: Cython tries to access an internal field in struct dirent , which fails to compile.

, which fails to compile. Tests that verify the correct functionality of these features are also excluded from the test suite.

Tests Not Yet Included:

ceph-detect-init/run-tox.sh : the current implementation does not know anything about FreeBSD's rc system.

: the current implementation does not know anything about FreeBSD's system. Tests that make use of nosetests do not really work since nosetests is not in /usr/bin , and calling /usr/bin/env nosetests does not work on FreeBSD.

do not really work since is not in , and calling does not work on FreeBSD. test/pybind/test_ceph_argparse.py

test/pybind/test_ceph_daemon.py

Open tasks:

The current and foremost task is to get the test suite to complete without errors. Build an automated test platform that will build ceph/master on FreeBSD and report the results back to the Ceph developers. This will increase the maintainability of the FreeBSD side of things, as developers are signaled that they are using Linux-isms that will not compile or run on FreeBSD. Ceph has several projects that support this: Jenkins, teuthology, and palpito. But even a while { compile } loop that reports the build data on a static webpage is a good start. Run integration tests to see if the FreeBSD daemons will work with a Linux Ceph platform. Get the currently excluded Python tests to work. Compile and test the userspace RBD (Rados Block Device). Investigate if an in-kernel RBD device could be developed akin to ggate . Investigate the keystore which currently prevents the building of Cephfs and some other parts. Integrate the FreeBSD /etc/rc.d init scripts in the Ceph stack for testing and for running Ceph on production machines.

Contact: Eric McCorkle <eric@metricspace.net>

The EFI bootloader has undergone considerable refactoring to make more use of the EFI API. The filesystem code in boot1 has been eliminated, and a single codebase for filesystems now serves both boot1 and loader . This codebase is organized around the EFI driver model and it should be possible to export any filesystem implementation as a standalone EFI driver without too much effort.

Both boot1 and loader have been refactored to utilize the EFI_SIMPLE_FILE_SYSTEM interface. In the loader, this is accomplished with a dummy filesystem driver that is just a translation layer between the loader filesystem interface and EFI_SIMPLE_FILE_SYSTEM . A reverse translation layer allows the existing filesystem drivers to function as EFI drivers.

The EFI refactoring by itself exists in a branch on github.

Additionally, GELI support has been added using the EFI refactoring. This allows booting from a GELI-encrypted filesystem. Note that the EFI system partition, which contains boot1 , must be a plaintext msdosfs partition. This patch adds an intake buffer to the crypto framework, which allows injection of keys directly into a loaded kernel, without the need to pass them through arguments or environment variables. This patch only uses the intake buffer for EFI GELI support, as legacy BIOS GELI support still uses environment variables.

EFI GELI support depends on the efize branch.

These patches have been tested and used and should be able to handle use by early adopters. Note that the LOADER_PATH variable has been changed to /boot/loader.tst , to facilitate safe testing.

As this is an encrypted filesystem patch, an error can potentially leave data inaccessible. It is strongly recommended to use the following procedure for testing:

Back up your data! Do not forget to back up your data! Install an EFI shell on the EFI System Partition (ESP). Install the patched boot1 on the ESP to something like /boot/efi/BOOTX64.TST . Install the patched loader to /boot/loader.tst on your machine. Create a GELI partition outside of the normal boot partition. First, try booting /boot/efi/BOOTX64.TST and make sure it properly handles the encrypted partition. Copy a boot environment, including the patched loader, to the encrypted partition. Use the loader prompt to load a kernel from the encrypted partition. Try switching over to an encrypted main partition once everything else is working.

Open tasks:

Testing is needed. The code will need review, and some style(9) normalization must occur before it goes into FreeBSD.

Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib@FreeBSD.org>

Contact: Ed Maste <emaste@FreeBSD.org>

Now that process-shared locks are implemented for our POSIX threads implementation, libthr , the only major feature lacking for POSIX compliance is robust mutexes. Robust mutexes allow applications to detect, and theoretically recover from, crashes which occur while modifying the shared state. The supported model is to protect shared state by a pthread_mutex , and the crash is detected as thread termination while owning the mutex. A thread might terminate alone, or it could be killed due to the termination of the containing process. As such, the robust attribute is applicable to both process-private and -shared mutexes.

An application must be specifically modified to handle and recover from failures. The pthread_mutex_lock() function may return a new error EOWNERDEAD , which indicates that the previous owner of the lock terminated while still owning the lock. Despite returning this non-zero value, the lock is granted to the caller. In the simplest form, an application may detect the error and refuse to operate until the persistent shared data is recovered, such as by manual reinitialization. More sophisticated applications could try to automatically recover from the condition, in which case pthread_mutex_consistent(3) must be called on the lock before unlocking it. However, such recovery can be considered to be very hard. Still, even the detection of inconsistent shared state is useful, since it avoids further corruption and random faults of the affected application.

It is curious but not unexpected that this interface is not used widely. The only real-life application which utilizes it is Samba. Using Samba with an updated FreeBSD base uncovered minor bugs both in the FreeBSD robust mutex implementation, and in Samba itself.

It is believed that libthr in FreeBSD 11 is POSIX-compliant for major features. Further work is planned to look at inlining the lock structures to remove overhead and improve the performance of the library.

Most of the implementation of the robustness feature consisted of making small changes in the lock and unlock paths, both in libthr and in kern_umtx.c . This literally required reading all of the code dealing with mutexes and condition variables, which was something I wanted to help future developers with. In the end, with the help of Ed Maste, man pages for umtx(2) and all thr*(2) syscalls were written and added to the base system's documentation set.

This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.

Open tasks:

Use the implementation in real-word applications and report issues.

Contact: FreeBSD Graphics team <freebsd-x11@FreeBSD.org>

Contact: Matthew Macy <mmacy@nextbsd.org>

In the Ports tree, Mesa was updated to 11.2.2. The next major release, 12.0.0 release candidate 4, is ready for testing in our development tree.

The GSoC project about being able to connect a /dev entry to sysctl nodes is making progress. After some fruitful discussons on the freebsd-arch@ mailing-list, Kiloreux finished the design and is now implementing the solution. The GSoC project on libdevq was abandoned.

All Intel GPUs up to and including the unreleased Kaby Lake are supported. The xf86-video-intel driver will be updated soon. Updating this driver requires updating Xorg , which in turn is blocked on Nvidia updates.

Several problems remain to be solved:

There are instances of visual artifacts that appear with varying frequency, depending on workload. Of particular note is the lack of redraw when a Qt5 window is partially covered by a menu and then uncovered.

WebGL demos will sometimes fail due to a recoverable render ring hang.

There are still some known stability issues with processors prior to Sandy Bridge (pre-2010).

Matt Macy is hoping to be able to diagnose the first two issues, along with others, by updating Linux support to the point where the Intel GPU Tools work on FreeBSD.

The Radeon AMD/ATI driver has been updated to GCN 1.0. This has only been tested on an R7 240. 2D-accelerated X works. Due to apparent issues with user library support, X does not recognize the KMS driver as being 3D-capable and reports it as "not DRI2 capable". The OpenCL benchmark clpeak fails in drm/ttm , so there may in fact be issues in the underlying 3D support.

The Amdgpu AMD/ATI driver has been updated to GCN 1.1 and higher. The KMS driver loads and attaches on discrete GPUs, though problems still exist on the Carizzo APU. X will not start due to unimplemented functions in libdrm . Koop Mast is actively working on this and should have it fixed soon.

None of the required patches to src/sys were committed in time for FreeBSD 11. Although the plan is to ultimately make linuxkpi , drm , i915 , radeon , and amdgpu updates available as ports, this will likely not happen until development has slowed to the point where it is economical to backport them to FreeBSD in svn. Until that time, modern GPU support will be available in PC-BSD snapshots and in the drm-next-4.6 branch on GitHub.

Contact: Jared McNeill <jmcneill@FreeBSD.org>

Contact: Emmanuel Vadot <manu@FreeBSD.org>

Allwinner SoCs are used in multiple hobbyist devboards and single-board computers. Recently, support for these SoCs received many updates.

Theses tasks were completed during the second quarter of 2016:

Switch to upstream DTS

A83T SoC support

H3 SoC support

Switch to the new clock framework

Convert the A10 interrupt controller to INTRNG

OHCI support

A generic ALLWINNER kernel config file

kernel config file A20/A31 NMI support

AXP209 PMU interrupts, GPIO, and sensors support

A83T thermal sensor support

RSB (Reduced Serial Bus) support

AXP813/AXP818 PMU support

A83T Security ID support

Support for the Allwinner Gigabit Ethernet controller found in H3/A83T/A64

USB OTG (in review)

A10/A20 Security ID support (in review)

A13 SoC Support (in review)

Ongoing work:

A64 support

Use U-Boot EFI implementation for ARM32/ARM64

Open tasks:

SPI driver LCD Support Any unsupported hardware device that might be of interest.

Contact: Sepherosa Ziehau <sepherosa@gmail.com>

Contact: Hongjiang Zhang <honzhan@microsoft.com>

Contact: Dexuan Cui <decui@microsoft.com>

Contact: Kylie Liang <kyliel@microsoft.com>

During BSDCan 2016, Microsoft announced the global availability of FreeBSD 10.3 images in Azure. There are many FreeBSD-based Azure virtual appliances in the Azure Marketplace, including Citrix Systems' NetScaler and Netgate's pfSense. Microsoft also made an in-depth technical presentation to introduce how the performance of the Hyper-V network device driver was optimized to reach full line rate on 10Gb networks and achieved decent performance on 40Gb networks. The slides and video from the presentation are available from the BSDCan website.

Microsoft continues to strive to further optimize the performance of Hyper-V network and storage device drivers. Work is ongoing to replace the internal data structure in the LRO kernel API from a singly-linked list to a double-linked list, to speed up the LRO lookup by hash table, and to evaluate the performance with tcp_lro_queue_mbuf() .

The handling of SCSI inquiry in the Hyper-V storage driver is enhanced to make sure that disk hotplug and smartctl(8) work reliably. Refer to PR 210425 and PR 209443 for details.

BIS test cases are available on GitHub for Hyper-V and for Azure.

This project was sponsored by Microsoft.

Contact: Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz@FreeBSD.org>

VIMAGE is a virtualization framework on top of FreeBSD jails that was introduced to the kernel about eight years ago with the vnet virtualized network stack.

Over the last few years, many people started to use VIMAGE in production, production-like setups, and appliances. This adoption increased the urgency to finish the work to avoid panics on network stack teardown and to avoid memory leaks.

The vnet teardown has been changed to be from top to bottom, trying to tear down layer by layer. This is preferable to removing interfaces first and then cleaning everything up, as no more packets could flow once the interfaces are gone. Along with this work, various paths with potential memory leaks were plugged. Lastly, vnet support was added to formerly unvirtualized components, such as the pf and ipfilter firewalls and some virtual interfaces.

This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.

Open tasks:

Please test FreeBSD 11.0-ALPHA6 or later. When reporting a problem, use the vimage keyword in the FreeBSD bug tracker.

Contact: Andrew Turner <andrew@FreeBSD.org>

The arm64 pmap code has been updated to work with the full 4 pagetable levels. This allows us to increase the user virtual address space to 256TB, with a concomittant increase of the kernel virtual address space. It also allows an increase in the size of the physical memory FreeBSD can handle to up to 2TB.

The interrupt framework has been replaced with intrng on arm64 . This allows both arm and arm64 to share interrupt controller drivers, as is the case with the GICv2 driver. The GICv3 ITS driver has been rewritten to better integrate with intrng .

Busdma was updated to handle the cache. The updated code assumes that devices are non-coherent by default, unless the device driver marks the DMA tag as coherent when creating it. The generic and ThunderX PCIe drivers have been updated to create coherent mappings when the device tree marks the hardware as coherent. This work also fixed issues found with the sync operation where it was missing memory barriers.

A number of issues with hwpmc have been fixed. This improves the stability of hwpmc on arm64 , with no known software issues. There is a single known issue which seems to be hardware-related, however, further testing is required.

NEW_PCIB has been enabled on arm64 . This includes handling the PCI_RES_BUS resource type.

Old interfaces replaced before FreeBSD-11 have been removed from the arm64 kernel and libraries. This includes support for compatibility with libc from releases prior to 11.0. The brk and sbrk functions have also been removed. This allows a workaround for these functions in the arm64 C runtime to be removed.

loader.efi has been updated to use an event timer to implement its internal time function. This is needed, as many UEFI implementations do not handle the GetTime runtime service method. This means that loader.efi will now correctly count down before automatically booting.

Initial support for the ARM Juno reference platform has been added. This hardware is common within ARM, and has been useful for finding assumptions on cpuids. Booting on the Juno required fixing the kernel to remove the assumption that it is booting from CPU zero. This included assigning cpuids and fixing assumptions within the GICv2 driver that the cpuid is the same as the GIC cpuid. FreeBSD can now boot on the 4 Cortex-A53 CPUs of the Juno board. Further investigation is needed to track down why the boot fails when the 2 Cortex-A57 CPUs are enabled.

Initial work has started on booting FreeBSD on the Pine64 and Raspberry Pi 3 boards. Both can boot to multiuser mode with out-of-tree patches. Further work is needed to bring these patches into the tree, but it is expected this will happen soon after the end of the code freeze.

This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation, and ABT Systems Ltd.

Contact: Ed Maste <emaste@FreeBSD.org>

Reproducible builds are a set of software development practices which create a verifiable path from human-readable source code to the binary code used by computers. In brief, the idea is that building the same binary, software package, document, or other binary artifact twice from the same source produces identical output. The reproducible-builds.org website provides background information and documentation on making builds reproducible.

Many folks have contributed to the reproducible build effort in FreeBSD src and ports over the last decade. There are many practical benefits of reproducible builds, such as bandwidth and storage savings. However, there is a growing interest in the broad open source and free software communities, primarily from a software and toolchain integrity perspective. Over the last few years, some members of the Debian Project have led a comprehensive and structured reproducible builds effort.

Baptiste Daroussin and Ed Maste attended the first Reproducible Builds Summit in Athens last year. Since then, Ed investigated the state of build reproducibility in the ports tree, and presented Reproducible Builds in FreeBSD at BSDCan 2016. With some work-in-progress patches, over 80% of the FreeBSD ports tree builds reproducibly.

The Diffoscope tool performs in-depth comparison of files, archives, or directories to understand why a binary artifact does not build reproducibly. Diffoscope results for the nonreproducible builds in Ed's talk are available at one of the links above.

This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.

Open tasks:

Integrate FreeBSD ports builds into the reproducible-builds.org continuous integration infrastructure. Integrate reproducible build patches into the ports tree. Investigate sources of nonreproducibility in individual ports.

Contact: John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>

Contact: Luca Pizzamiglio <luca.pizzamiglio@gmail.com>

The devel/gdb port has been updated to GDB 7.11.1.

Support for system call catchpoints has been committed upstream. Support for examining ELF auxiliary vector data via info auxv has been committed upstream. Both features will be included in GDB 7.12.

Open tasks:

Figure out why the powerpc kgdb targets are not able to unwind the stack past the initial frame. Add support for more platforms, such as arm , mips , and aarch64 , to upstream gdb for both userland and kgdb . Add support for debugging powerpc vector registers. Add support for $_siginfo . Implement info proc commands. Implement info os commands.

Contact: Rafael Espíndola <rafael.espindola@gmail.com>

Contact: Davide Italiano <dccitaliano@gmail.com>

Contact: Ed Maste <emaste@FreeBSD.org>

lld is the linker in the LLVM family of projects. It is intended to be a high-performance linker and supports the ELF , COFF , and Mach-O object formats. Where possible, lld maintains command-line and functional compatibility with the existing GNU BFD ld and gold linkers. However, the authors of lld are not constrained by strict compatibility where it would hamper performance or desired functionality.

Over the last quarter, the lld project implemented version script support sufficient to handle the FreeBSD base system. This is an important milestone on the path to having lld as a viable system linker.

lld still lacks comprehensive linker script expression evaluation support, and therefore cannot yet be used to link the FreeBSD kernel.

This project was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.

Open tasks:

Develop linker script expression improvements in the upstream lld project. Import a newer lld snapshot into the vendor area, add the build infrastructure, and connect it to the world build, installed as ld.lld . Request a ports exp-run with /usr/bin/ld a symlink to ld.lld . Extensive testing.

Contact: Torsten Zühlsdorff <tz@FreeBSD.org>

After being in the FreeBSD Ports Collection for three months, GitLab continues to mature and gain adoption. Most of its initial problems have been resolved, with one known issue left: it does not start on boot. Any help in solving this issue is welcome.

Staying in sync with upstream is now easy for minor versions. But, some of the monthly major releases create a big workload by introducing a number of new dependencies. This makes testing and updating an expensive process.

The GitLab project itself now mentions native support on FreeBSD, which is quite a commendation.

Current work aims to fix the open problems, get the latest major version into the port, and create documentation for the update progress.

Contact: FreeBSD GNOME Team <freebsd-gnome@FreeBSD.org>

The FreeBSD GNOME Team maintains the GNOME, MATE, and CINNAMON desktop environments and graphical user interfaces for FreeBSD. GNOME 3 is part of the GNU Project. MATE is a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop. CINNAMON is a desktop environment using GNOME 3 technologies, but with a GNOME 2 look and feel.

GNOME 3.20 was ported with help from Ruslan Makhmatkhanov and Gustau Perez. Work is being done on updating GDM from the old 3.16 version to the 3.20 version. For some reason, scrollbars in Firefox are no longer working, though this has not been investigated.

With Gtk+ 3.20, theme support was again changed, and the changes are not backwards compatible. If you have a theme update that requires the new Gtk+ version, feel free to add it as a blocker bug to the GNOME/Gtk+ 3.20 update bug. This bug will be used for the exp-run of GNOME 3.20, when it is ready, and to track the theme-related ports. Also, there is a problem with the open and save dialog content going invisible.

Open tasks:

Finish GDM 3.20 porting. Investigate why the scrollbars in Firefox are missing and why the open/save dialog content is missing.

Contact: Sergey Kozlov <sergey.kozlov@intel.com>

Several tools for Intel(R) Ethernet networking products are now available as ports and packages for FreeBSD:

sysutils/intel-nvmupdate : An application that is used to update non-volatile memory on XL710- and X710-based network devices.

: An application that is used to update non-volatile memory on XL710- and X710-based network devices. sysutils/intel-qcu : An application used to switch QSFP+ ports between 1x40Gbps and 4x10Gbps mode on XL710-based network devices.

: An application used to switch QSFP+ ports between 1x40Gbps and 4x10Gbps mode on XL710-based network devices. net/intel-ixl-kmod : An updated driver which enables the tools support on FreeBSD-10.x.

This project was sponsored by Intel Corporation.

Open tasks:

FreeBSD 11 support is under development and will be included in the next release.

Contact: Torsten Zühlsdorff <tz@FreeBSD.org>

Half a year ago, I started a promotion campaign to improve support for fetching ports via IPv6. Research performed in December 2015 showed that 10,308 of 25,522 ports were not fetchable when using IPv6-only, as these ports ignore the FreeBSD.org pkg mirror.

As a result of the campaign, the following servers now successfully support IPv6:

This enables 711 more ports to be fetched via IPv6.

I would like to thank Wolfgang Zenker, who is very active in supporting the adoption of IPv6. During the latest RIPE meeting, he brought up the topic of non-support of IPv6 being a hindrance to business. I am hopeful that his talk changed some more minds and will help widen the support of IPv6.

Contact: KDE on FreeBSD team <kde@FreeBSD.org>

The KDE on FreeBSD team focuses on packaging and improving the user experience of KDE and Qt on FreeBSD.

Many updates were committed to the ports tree this quarter, and even more were committed to our experimental ports repository. Tobias Berner, Adriaan de Groot, and Ralf Nolden were responsible for most of the work.

The following notable updates landed in the ports tree this quarter:

The CMake ports were updated to 3.5.1 and 3.5.2.

The DigiKam ports were updated to 4.14.0.

The KDevelop ports were updated to 4.7.3.

The devel/qbs port was added for Qt's future build system, QBS.

port was added for Qt's future build system, QBS. Qt Creator was updated to 3.4.0, 3.5.0, 3.5.1, 3.6.0, 4.0.0, 4.0.1, and 4.0.2.

A new port misc/qt5-examples was added for the project examples provided by Qt. This makes Qt Creator more functional.

was added for the project examples provided by Qt. This makes Qt Creator more functional. A new port misc/qt5-doc was added for Qt's API documentation, used by Qt Creator and other programs.

was added for Qt's API documentation, used by Qt Creator and other programs. The base KDE4 ports were updated to 4.14.10.

The following work occurred in our development repository:

Created ports for Qt 5.6.1-1 ( branches/qt-5.6 ).

). Created ports for Qt 5.7.0 ( branches/qt-5.7 ).

). The plasma5 branch is up-to-date with KDE's upstream and contains ports for Frameworks 5.24.0, Plasma Desktop 5.7.0, and Applications 16.04.2 ( branches/plasma5 ).

Contact: Torsten Zühlsdorff <tz@FreeBSD.org>

Ruby on Rails is the base for most of the rubygems in the Ports Collection. Currently, versions 3.2 and 4.2 coexist. Since Rails 3.2 is running out of support, the time has come to switch to 4.2.

While there is ongoing progress to remove Rails 3.2 from the ports tree, there are some ports for which this is a major update that blocks the overall process. The most recent blocker was the outstanding update of www/redmine from 2.6 to 3.2. This has completed successfully, so we can now move on.