The FreeBSD Foundation has uploaded a 3 fold flyer featuring the points where FreeBSD excels
You can download the flyer here. Fee free to share online and spread offline.
The FreeBSD Foundation has announced their end of year fundraising campaign.
So far, the Foundation has raised $256,532 of their $500,000 goal for 2012. Raised funds are used to sponsor projects which add features to the operating system, fund developers to attend DevSummits and conferences, and keep the FreeBSD hardware and web infrastructure going.
If you appreciate the work FreeBSD developers and the FreeBSD Foundation are doing, why not consider making a donation?
The FreeBSD Foundation has announced that Aleksandr Rybalko has been awarded a grant to port FreeBSD to the Genesi Efika MX SmartBook laptop and SmartTop nettop devices.
Both use the Freescale i.MX515, an ARM Cortex-A8 System-on-Chip (SoC). These low power devices will provide convenient reference platforms for FreeBSD on ARM, as they are low-cost complete systems. The Smartbook includes a 10″ display, 3G connectivity and a battery life of 6 to 8 hours for $199.
When this project is completed, it will be possible to run X11 applications on FreeBSD on the Efika, with full support for sound and networking. It will also make it much easier to support other devices, such as some Android tablets, that ship with the i.MX515 SoC.
This project will be completed by the end of 2012.
Efika is a line of power efficient ARM architecture and Power Architecture based computers manufactured by Genesi. In Esperanto efika means “efficacious, effective, or efficient” (wikipedia).
The FreeBSD Foundation has published its Semi-Annual Newsletter: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2012Jul-newsletter.shtml
The FreeBSD Foundation has announced that Pawel Jakub Dawidek has been awarded a grant to develop a comprehensive userspace framework for writing Capsicum-based applications, building on the kernel features originally developed by the University of Cambridge and Google Research. Pawel was rewarded grants previously for the HAST and auditdistd projects.
This framework will include a Capsicum runtime linker and component library providing sandboxed versions of key higher-level system libraries. Components will both be sandboxed, improving resistance to vulnerabilities, and also easily available for delegation to sandboxed applications, such as the Chromium web browser. The prototype libcapsicum developed by Cambridge will be analyzed and updated based on lessons learned in implementing Capsicumised software packages, such as hastd and auditdistd. Funding for this project will be provided by the FreeBSD Foundation matched 100% by the Google Open Source Program Office, in support of open source technology transition of Capsicum.
“A continuing challenge in security is to find solutions that not only fix the problems but also can be applied to existing technologies: attractive though the notion is, we are not going to persuade the world to rewrite everything! This is why we at Google are pleased and excited to support the continuing development of Capsicum, which radically improves the security of UNIX based systems whilst allowing a continuous migration path from today’s mechanisms to tomorrow’s,”
said Ben Laurie, Google Senior Staff Software Engineer.
“I’m very excited to be able to work on Capsicum. Some of my software is already using Capsicum, so I’m fully aware of the great potential of this framework. This technology is so much superior than the current attempts to provide sandboxing using tools like chroot(2) or unprivileged user credentials. No matter how corny it sounds, I strongly believe Capsicum can make the Internet a safer place.”
said Pawel.
This project will conclude in August, 2012
Martin Cracauer, a FreeBSD developer, went to BSDCan 2012 and wrote up his experience on the Open Source at Google blog: BSDCan 2012 – “The technical BSD conference”. I’m sure this will have been read by many with an open source interst (26716 RSS followers). Good marketing!
The FreeBSD Foundation funded some FreeBSD developers’ and contributors’ travel expenses. In return they have sumarised what the did at BSDCan, how they got involved and what it means to them.
Read the feedback from:
Some of the BSDCan presentations can be viewed here, in case you missed them.
auditdistd
The auditdistd project is complete. Pawel Jakub Dawidek provides the following report regarding the project: auditdist project completed.
Xorg 7.5.2
The Xorg Team has announced the next round of Xorg updates. Phoronix’ analysis here.
Linuxulator and Linux Base
‘This weekend I made some progress in the linuxulator‘.
OpenSSH
OpenSSH 6.0 has just been released.
The FreeBSD Foundation is soliciting the submission of proposals for work relating to any of the major subsystems or infrastructure within the FreeBSD operating system. Proposals will be evaluated based on desirability, technical merit, and cost-effectiveness.
Details regarding the proposal process are contained in the Proposals Call for Submission PDF (PDF)
If interested, important dates to mark are:
The FreeBSD Foundation has announced it is funding two new projects:
Grow Mounted Filesystems
This project will focus on growing filesystems whilst mounted and add GEOM and filesystem changes that are necessary to increase the size of both UFS and ZFS filesystems while a filesystem is mounted read-write.
Check the announcement for more details: Grow Mounted Filesystems
NAND Flash Support
It was announced that Semihalf, an embedded solutions company, has been awarded a grant to bring their comprehensive NAND Flash file system and storage stack to FreeBSD. This technology enables FreeBSD to natively manage NAND Flash devices, satisfying a crucial requirement for many applications needing access to fast, reliable, non-volatile storage.
Check the announcement for more details: NAND Flash Support