The FreeBSD Foundation has announced 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 Network Time Protocol (NTP) is widely used for synchronization over the network and the ntpd daemon is the current reference synchronization algorithm. The system clock in FreeBSD is currently designed with ntpd in mind, leading to strong feedback coupling between the kernel and the synchronization daemon.

The RADclock is an example of an alternative class of synchronization algorithms based on feed-forward principles. This project will provide the core support for feed-forward algorithms, so that alternatives to ntpd can be developed and tested. The central motivation for this is the strong potential of such approaches for highly robust and accurate synchronization.

Beyond this, virtualization is one of the next major challenges faced by time keeping systems. The current feedback synchronization model is complex and introduces its own dynamics, an approach that is not suited to the requirements of virtualization. Feed-forward based synchronization offers a cleaner and simpler approach, which is capable of providing accurate time keeping over live migration of virtual machines.” (source: FreeBSD Foundation Blog)

If you want to see FreeBSD prosper further in 2011, why not make a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation to help them fund more projects? Currently there are roughly 280 less donors than last year and the Foundation is still $136.000 away from the set $350.000 goal. Any donation, however small will make a difference. (I am not affiliated with the Foundation)

The FreeBSD Foundation has announced it is funding the 5 new TCP Congestion Control Algorithms Project:

“The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Swinburne University’s Technology’s Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures has been awarded a grant to implement five new TCP congestion control algorithms in FreeBSD.

Correctly functioning congestion control (CC) is crucial to the efficient operation of the Internet and IP networks in general. CC dynamically balances a flow’s throughput against the inferred impact on the network, lowering throughput to protect the network as required.

The FreeBSD operating system’s TCP stack currently utilizes the defacto standard NewReno loss-based CC algorithm, which has known problems coping with many aspects of modern data networks like lossy or large bandwidth/delay paths. There is significant and ongoing work both in the research community and industry to address CC related problems, with a particular focus on TCP because of its ubiquitous deployment and use.

Swinburne University of Technology’s ongoing work with FreeBSD’s TCP stack and congestion control implementation has progressively matured. This project aims to refine their prototypes and integrate them into FreeBSD.

The project will conclude in January 2011.” (source: freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com)

The five protocols are:

• H-TCP for high bandwidth-delay product paths
• CUBIC for fast long-distance networks
• Vegas for end to end congestion avoidance
• and 2 new algorithms Hamilton Delay and CAIA-Hamilton Delay

If you’d like to see the Foundation fund more of these sort of projects, why not considering making a (small) donation?

This month I will be donating any affiliate commission I receive from Bordeaux Software (run Windows software on FreeBSD / PC-BSD) to the Foundation. If you’d love to use FreeBSD and/or PC-BSD but need to use Windows software as well, incl Microsoft Office, why not buy a copy of Bordeau ($10)?

Colin Percival will be donating his profits from tarsnap.com this month.

The FreeBSD Foundation has kicked off its annual end-of-year fund-raise drive, and is calling happy (Free)BSD users make a small donation to help the FreeBSD Project fund new initiatives, sponsor FreeBSD Conferences, grant travel grants etc.

The Foundation has received some large (corporate) donations already, but the number of last year’s individual donations hasn’t been matched yet. More than half of the £350k goal has been given. If you want and can help, you can donate here (I am not affiliated with the FreeBSD Foundation).

FreeBSD Foundation president Justin Gibbs writes:

As the year is winding down I’m writing this note to remind you of the motivation behind the FreeBSD Foundation’s work, its benefits to you, and to ask for your financial assistance in making our work possible.

Ten years ago, I created the FreeBSD Foundation to repay a debt I owe to the FreeBSD project. While working on FreeBSD I learned the fundamentals of sound software design, how to successfully manage a large code base, and experienced the challenges of release engineering. Beyond the benefits of this education, FreeBSD has provided a robust platform that has allowed me to build several successful commercial products while being well paid to work on an operating system I love.

Today, through my volunteer work with the FreeBSD Foundation, I’m still paying down this debt.

This year, despite the slow pace of the economic recovery, the FreeBSD Foundation has an impressive list of accomplishments:

Provided $100,000 in grants for projects that improve FreeBSD in the areas of:

• DTrace support
• High availability storage
• Enhanced SNMP reporting
• Virtualization and resource partitioning
• Embedded device support
• Networking stack improvements

Allocated $50,000 for equipment to enhance FreeBSD project infrastructure.

Sponsored 8 FreeBSD related conferences.

Funded 16 travel grants giving increased community and developer access to conferences.

Provided legal support to the FreeBSD project.

How do our activities benefit you? If you are a company using FreeBSD, our work to strengthen the FreeBSD community ensures the continued viability of FreeBSD and a large pool of developers to tap into. If you are an end user, our work brings you new features and access to conferences. And if you are a FreeBSD developer, the FreeBSD Foundation is providing the resources needed to make your next innovation possible.

The FreeBSD project thrives through the hard work of our community, but it also requires financial backing. This year we set a fund-raising goal of $350,000. We are pleased to report that we are half way there, but we need your help to reach our goal. Every donation, no matter its size, helps to make our work possible. As a non-profit with very low overhead, your donation is the best way to invest in FreeBSD. Please make that investment today.

Source: FreeBSD Foundation blog

The following is a press release issued by the FreeBSD Foundation and New York Internet; Bill Lessard from nyi.net forwarded this to me.
If you have any FreeBSD related products or services you want to generate interest in, why not contact me too?

FreeBSD Foundation turns to NYI.net for East Coast US Mirror

Deployment Adds Enterprise-Grade Redundancy for Improved Reliability, Reduced Latency, High-Speed Backups and Other Efficiencies

The FreeBSD Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD Project and community, today announced that NYI, a New York City-based, mission-critical data services provider, will be mirroring key West coast infrastructure at NYI’s 999 Frontier Road data center in Bridgewater, New Jersey, a recently opened 40,000 square foot facility.

In addition to providing enterprise-grade redundancy and reliability for the Project’s infrastructure, the East coast mirror will reduce latency during heavy download times, distribute load between the two coasts, and allow for up-to-date backups of all Project data that can be synchronized via high-speed Internet connections.

“Having a well-connected, secondary site with NYI’s amenities to host FreeBSD project infrastructure means that we can move services between sites when doing scheduled maintenance to improve reliability for FreeBSD developers and users,”

said Simon L. Nielsen, FreeBSD.org administrative team. He added,

“The new site also enables us to expand significantly the available hardware for FreeBSD package building, allowing the FreeBSD ports team to perform QA test builds and quickly produce binary FreeBSD packages for end-users.”

“We are long-time open-source advocates. The FreeBSD Foundation in particular represents everything that got us into technology in the first place. With this deployment, we take our commitment to a new level in the hope that what we are doing lays the foundation for next-generation data centers built around FreeBSD. As many people in the community know, NYI’s 999 Frontier Road facility features many of the Project’s efforts, as everything from PDUs to the servers run FreeBSD.”

said Phillip Koblence, VP Operations, NYI.

The East coast mirror at 999 Frontier is also notable because it replaces aging and inadequate hardware; provides dual-configuration so that experimental vs. production runs can be separated out, allowing changes to the ports system to be evaluated continuously rather the interrupting production flow; deploys to multiple sites, providing resiliency in the event of a failure; provides build capacity required to support the ports ABI changes required to improve the foundations for binary package support while maintaining ports-stable regression testing.

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to have been able to fund the purchase of the hardware. Brad Davis, Mark Linimon, and Simon Nielsen from the FreeBSD Project worked on the configuration, along with key members of the NYI team.

About The FreeBSD Foundation
The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD Project and community. The Foundation gratefully accepts donations from individuals and businesses, using them to fund and manage projects, sponsor FreeBSD events, Developer Summits and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers. In addition, the Foundation represents the FreeBSD Project in executing contracts, license agreements, and other legal arrangements that require a recognized legal entity. The FreeBSD Foundation is entirely supported by donations. More information about The FreeBSD Foundation is available on the web.

About NYI
Established in 1996, NYI is headquartered in the heart of the Wall Street area and owns and maintains its own data centers, including 999 Frontier, a newly opened 40,000 square foot facility in Bridgewater, New Jersey. The company’s core services include colocation, dedicated servers, web and email hosting, and managed services, as well as turnkey disaster recovery and business continuity solutions from its Bridgewater location. With high-bandwidth connectivity partners AboveNet, Verizon Business, Optimum Lightpath, and AT&T, NYI specializes in mission-critical data services for the financial services industry, in addition to customers from a broad range of industries, including media, law, fashion, architecture, life sciences and real estate. NYI is SAS 70 Type II-compliant, in additon to being both PCI and HIPAA compliant.

The FreeBSD Foundation has published their semi-anual newsletter with updates on projects receiving support and funding, their donation goal for 2010 and how FreeBSD and commercial vendors can co-operate.

• Letter From the President
• Fundraising Update
• Flattened Device Tree Project
• Userland DTrace Project
• FreeBSD Jail Based Virtualization Project
• Resource Containers Project
• HA Storage Project
• BSNMP Improvements
• DAHDI FreeBSD driver port
• FreeBSD Lectures Captioning Project
• Upgrades to the Ports Building Cluster
• AsiaBSDCon 2010
• BSDCan 2010
• BSD Toolchain Summit
• MeetBSD Poland 2010
• 2010 Grant and Travel Grant Recipients
• Testimonial – Building a Business on FreeBSD
• Financials

The FreeBSD Foundation funds various projects each year and there are several interesting projects in progress:

• DAHDI (formerly known as Zaptel) FreeBSD driver port–this project will make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions
• resource containers and a simple per-jail resource limits mechanism
• userland dtrace
• BSNMP improvements
• jail-based virtualization

The FreeBSD Foundation is able to fund these projects due to the generosity of user donations. If you haven’t donated yet this year, consider doing so here. No donation amount is too small–in fact, the more individual donations the better, as this helps the Foundation to meet the IRS’ non-profit requirements. Also, your name is added to the website when you donate, allowing you to show your support for FreeBSD.

Source: Dru’s blog (reposted with permission)

The FreeBSD Foundation has announced it will sponsor Max Khon to finish the DAHDI FreeBSD driver port.

DAHDI (Digium/Asterisk Hardware Device Interface) is the open source device interface technology used to control Digium and other legacy telephony interface cards.

“The purpose of DAHDI/FreeBSD project is to make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions.

DAHDI (Digium/Asterisk Hardware Device Interface) is an open-source device driver framework and a set of HW drivers for E1/T1, ISDN digital and FXO/FXS analog cards (http://www.asterisk.org/dahdi/). Asterisk is one of the most popular open-source software PBX solutions.

The project includes porting DAHDI framework and HW drivers for E1/T1, FXO/FXS analog and ISDN digital cards to FreeBSD. This also includes TDMoE support, software and HW echo cancellation (Octasic, VPMADT032) and HW transcoding support (TC400B). The work is ongoing in the official DAHDI SVN repository with the close collaboration with DAHDI folks at Digium.

The project is nearing its completion: DAHDI framework and HW drivers telephony cards has been ported and tested. There are a number of success stories from early adopters who use E1/T1 and FXO/FXS cards on FreeBSD for several months.”

Congratulations, Max, for receiving the grant. It’s great to see FreeBSD branching out into another specialist area. AskoziaPBX used to be based on FreeBSD, but hardware support issues made the team decide to move to a Linux based PBX solution. Hopefully we will soon see another fully FreeBSD based PBX system (Askozia, Michael Iedema?)

One of the ways the FreeBSD Foundation supports FreeBSD, is by funding FreeBSD development (e.g. the Jail based virtualisation project). The Foundation has agreed to fund two more projects:

• Jail Resource Containers Project (announcement)
• Dtrace Userland Project (announcement)

I Resource Containers Project

This project will be undertaken by Edward Tomasz Napierala. “Unlike Solaris zones, the current implementation of FreeBSD Jails does not provide per-jail resource limits. As a result, users are often forced to replace jails with other virtualization mechanisms. The goal of this project is to create a single, unified framework for controlling resource utilisation, and to use that framework to implement per-jail resource limits. In the future, the same framework might be used to implement more sophisticated resource controls, such as Hierarchical Resource Limits, or to implement mechanisms similar to AIX WLM. It could also be used to provide precise resource usage accounting for administrative or billing purposes.”

“It’s great that the Foundation decided to fund this project. It will make jail-based virtualization a much better choice in many scenarios, for example for Virtual Private Server providers.”

Edward noted.

II DTrace Userland Project

Rui Paulo has been awarded a grant to add DTrace userland support to FreeBSD.

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. Having userland support in DTrace allows inspection of userland software itself and its correlation with the kernel, thus allowing a much better picture of what exactly is going on behind the scenes.

This project will first concentrate on adding libproc support for symbol to address mapping, address to symbol mapping, breakpoint setup and the rtld interactions with DTrace. Next it will focus on DTrace process control, importing the pid provider and adapting it to FreeBSD and porting the userland statically defined probe provider (usdt). Finally it will bring in the plockstat provider.

“By having userland DTrace support, companies can make their products perform much better on FreeBSD due to the fact that they now have access to this amazing tool. When we mix the userland support with the kernel side DTrace support, we can also make FreeBSD a better operating system because we can investigate performance bottlenecks much easier.”

said FreeBSD developer Rui Paul

Well done to Rui and Edward. We’re looking forward to testing the results of their work at the end of the year. If you wish to see more of these sort of projects, you can donate to the FreeBSD Foundation.