The developers of FreeBSD have released their status report for the 4th Quarter of 2016. Here you will find detailed reports from the Release Engineering Team, Ports Collection, FreeBSD Core Team, and FreeBSD Foundation. Projects highlighted are Ceph on FreeBSD, OpenBSM, Sysctl Exporter for Prometheus, the Graphics Stack, FreeBSD Hyper-V and Azure, and many more.

Another year has passed (and another has gotten well underway, while we worked to assemble this report). Over the past two years that I have been part of the monthly@ team that assembles these reports, it has been enlightening to watch the individual entries pass through my emacs and/or vim. These reports give me a picture of what is going on with FreeBSD that I could not get just from reading commit mail; I hope that is also true for our readers.

This quarter brings the usual mix of continuations of many stalwart projects and entires of new participants, as well as the return of some items after a few quarters’ hiatus. Enjoy and be enlightened!

—Benjamin Kaduk

Original announcement: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2017-February/001781.html

Official status report: https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2016-10-2016-12.html

Work on FreeBSD as they ended out 2016 included finalizing 11.0-RELEASE, expanding the Ports Tree to now more than 27,000 packages, better supporting Azure and Hyper-V for virtualization, improve ARM and ARM64 support, advance their reproducible builds support so that about 80% of the ports tree can now be built reproducibly, made progress on LLVM’s LLD linker as their system linker, continued porting the LXQt desktop to FreeBSD, and more.

Phoronix: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeBSD-Q4-2016-Report

For those who have not seen it yet, the folks at FreeBSD have published their status report for the 3rd Quarter of 2016. Head over to the link below for a detailed report from the Release Engineering, Ports Collection, Core, and Foundation Teams, along with updates on various projects, Kernel, Google Summer of Code, etc.

As focused as we are on the present and what is happening now, it is sometimes useful to take a fresh look at where we have come from, and where we are going. This quarter, we had our newest doc committer working to trace through the tangled history of many utilities, and we also get a glimpse looking forward at what may come in FreeBSD 12.

Though 11.0-RELEASE was not finalized until after the period covered in this report, we can still have some anticipatory excitement for the features that will be coming in 12.0. The possibilities are tantalizing: a base system with no GPL components, arm64 as a Tier-1 architecture, capsicum protection for common utilities, and the CloudABI for custom software are just a few.

The work of the present is no less exciting, with 11.0 making its way out just after the end of Q3, the new core coming into its own, and much more that you’ll have to read and find out.

—Benjamin Kaduk

Full Q3 2016 Status Report: https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2016-07-2016-09.html

The FreeBSD Team has released their full status report for the 2nd Quarter of 2016. Other updates, as noted by Phoronix, are Allwinner SoC support improvements, ARM64 enhancements, LLVM, and GNOME/KDE updates. Follow the link below to see detailed reports from each team project.

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

Official status report: https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2016-04-2016-06.html

Related links:

Hacker News Discussion – FreeBSD Q2 2016 Status Report

Phoronix – FreeBSD Q2’2016: EFI Improvements, Prepping For FreeBSD 11.0, Package Updates

The FreeBSD Project Team members have made available the first quarterly status report for 2016, covering the period between January to the end of March 2016. Notable changes are a new code of conduct, improved support for Cavium ThunderX 64-bit ARM, a new GPLv3 toolchain repository and more. See the full status report at the link below.

The first quarter of 2016 showed that FreeBSD retains a strong sense of ipseity. Improvements were pervasive, lending credence to the concept of meliorism.

Panegyrics are relatively scarce, but not for lack of need. Perhaps this missive might serve that function in some infinitesimal way.

There was propagation, reformation, randomization, accumulation, emulation, transmogrification, debuggenation, and metaphrasal during this quarter.

In the financioartistic arena, pork snout futures narrowly edged out pointilism, while parietal art remained fixed.

In all, a discomfiture of abundance. View the rubrics below, and marvel at their profusion and magnitude! Marvel!

—Warren Block

FreeBSD Q1 Status Report: https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2016-01-2016-03.html

Related:

Phoronix – FreeBSD Working On A GPLv3 Toolchain Repo & Other Advancements In Q1-2016

The FreeBSD Team has released their status report for Quarter 4 of 2015, detailing the tremendous progress in their development projects. As summarized by Phoronix, notable achievements are:

– Support for FreeBSD ARM on the Banana Pi, Cubie Board, and Cubie Board 2.
– Evaluating whether to accept GPLv3 licensed code into their source repository.
– The CAM I/O scheduler continues to advance, hopefully in time for FreeBSD 11.
– The FreeBSD graphics stack was updated to Mesa 11.0.8 and X.Org Server 1.17.4. An updated i915 KMS driver is also expected to soon land.

and much more.

The fourth quarter of 2015 saw a great deal of activity for FreeBSD. This is now the third quarter running for which I can say that this is the largest report yet published! Many thanks to everyone who proactively submitted topics and entries — it is great to have more complete coverage of ongoing development for the community to learn about in these reports.

An experimental new Triage Team was formed this quarter to create a new way for community members to participate, and to improve issue management and productivity in general. Making more effective use of automation and tooling can help to increase developer productivity and the quality of FreeBSD, just as the adoption of Jenkins and continual integration tooling catches regressions quickly and maintains the high standards for the system.

Efforts to bring our BSD high standards to new architectures continue, with impressive work on arm64 leading to its promotion to Tier-2 status and a flurry of work bringing up the new RISC-V hardware architecture. Software architecture is also under active development, including system startup and service management. A handful of potential init system replacements are mentioned in this report: launchd, relaunchd, and nosh. Architectural changes originating both from academic research (multipath TCP) and from the realities of industry (sendfile(2) improvements) are also under way. It is heartening to see how FreeBSD provides a welcoming platform for contributions from both research and industry.

To all the readers, whether from academia or industry, hobbyist or professional: I hope you are as excited as I am to read about all of the progress and projects covered in this report, and the future of FreeBSD!

—Ben Kaduk

Full status report: https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2015-10-2015-12.html

FreeBSD has released their second quarter status report for 2015. Visit the link for a full, comprehensive report of what the developers have been up to so far.

Original: https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2015-04-2015-06.html

The second quarter of 2015, from April to June, was another period of busy activity for FreeBSD. This report is the largest we have published so far.

The cluster and release engineering teams continued to improve the structures that support FreeBSD’s build, maintenance, and installation. Projects ran the gamut from security and speed improvements to virtualization and storage appliances. New kernel drivers and capabilities were added, while work to make FreeBSD run on various ARM architectures continued at a rapid pace. The Ports Collection grew, even while adding capabilities and fixing problems. Outside projects like pkgsrc have become interested in adding support. Documentation was a major focus, one that is often complimented by people new to FreeBSD. BSDCan 2015 was a great success, turning many hours of sleep deprivation into an even greater amount of inspiration.

As always, a great deal of this activity was directly sponsored by the Foundation. The project’s status as a first-class operating system owes a great deal to the Foundation’s past and ongoing work.

The number and detail of these reports really gives only a tiny glimpse of all that is happening. A huge portion of FreeBSD development takes place all the time, including bug fixes, feature improvements, rewrites, and imports of new code. This ongoing work is difficult, time-consuming, and, far too often, unrecognized. We should take a moment to consider and thank not just the contributors listed here, but also the end users, bug submitters, port maintainers, coders, security analysts, infrastructure defenders, tinkerers, scientists, designers, questioners, answerers, rule makers, testers, documenters, sysadmins, dogmatists, iconoclasts, and crazed geniuses who make FreeBSD such an effective and useful operating system. If you are reading this, you are one of these people, too. Thank you.

—Warren Block