FreeBSD is pleased to announce that once again we have been selected to participate in the Google Summer of Code program. This gives University students the opportunity to earn a $5000 USD stipend in exchange for working on Open Source software over their Summer break. Students have around 12 weeks to work on their project, and will be mentored by existing FreeBSD committers. Participating organisations will earn $500 USD per student mentored.

FreeBSD’s organisation page may be found at http://www.google-melange.com and a list of possible project ideas may be found at https://wiki.freebsd.org/IdeasPage . Please note that projects do not have to come from the ideas list, and indeed students are encouraged to produce their own project ideas – the majority of past projects have been thought up by the participants themselves.

Students are also encouraged to visit http://www.google-melange.com/ to view more details of the program, including eligibility requirements, and a list of other participating organisations. (via)

It’s that time of the year again. Holiday season is approaching in a few months time, so it’s time to get ready for the annual Google Summer of Code, GSoC 2012.

Each year Google pays quite a number of mainly students to contribute to an open source project. The applications have been gone through and 15 FreeBSD related projects have been approved.

I’m quite excited about the BHyVe, TrueCrypt and parallization projects.

Port FreeBSD/arm to BeagleBoard-xM
Aleksander Dutkowski
The purpose of this project is to run FreeBSD on BeagleBoard-xM device – OMAP3 based multifunctional board. The main work will be to implement OMAP3 support and peripherals like ethernet, usb host, audio and DVI video devices included in BeagleBoard-xM

Parallelization in the ports collection
Alexander Pronin
The main idea of the project is to give a user an opportunity to make install of several ports at the same time. Another part of the project is to be able to build port’s dependencies in parallel. The main aim of this project is to make system update process faster and easier.

Re-enginer the wheel: a rejuvenation of BSD callout(9) and timer facilities
Davide Italiano
In all the BSD kernels, timers are provided using the callout(9) facility, which allows a function to be registered in order to be called at a future time. Right now, FreeBSD can’t handle timeouts less then 2/HZ and precision less then 1/HZ. According to some recent tests, other OSes can do it much better. Some consumers may need better resolution, and this is important in lots of applications, e.g. allow faster TCP recovery in case of error or package loss, or real-time applications.

Kernel level file integrity checker
Efstratios Karatzas
This project will focus on providing file integrity checking capabilities to pefs. The file integrity checker will compare cryptographic checksums of files against a static signed checksum list at access time. The files are thought to be immutable and use of securelevel will guarantee that lower filesystems will protect those files. Securelevel will be extended to only permit execution of files with immutable flag set.

EFI Boot Support for amd64/i386
Eric McCorkle
Complete the implementation of EFI boot support on the amd64 and possibly i386 platforms (including Intel Macs). The end result should allow the FreeBSD kernel to boot on an EFI system.

Userland Lock Profiling and Verification
Greg Miller
This project will provide userland lock profiling and lock order verification functionality, based on the LOCK_PROFILING and WITNESS kernel options. Application developers will be able to build an instrumented application and query statistics via additional library API calls or a gperf-style external data file.

FreeBSD/arm and FDT cleanup
Jakub Klama
This project aims to clean up and refactor FreeBSD/arm and Flattened Device Tree implementation code.

Improve BSD-licensed text processing tools.
Jesse H.
This project aims to improve, complete, and optimize the BSD-licensed text processing tools grep, sort, diff, diff3, sdiff, and mdocml. This will include adding features to diff/diff3/sdiff and mdocml and improving the efficiency of grep and sort.

IPV6 Improvement [Userland]
Jonathan Calmels
Improve the IPv6 support in userland according to the TODO list provided by the FreeBSD network team.

Port TrueCrypt as a geom_gate userland disk device implementation (GSoC)
Monty Chaney-Geib
This project aims to port TrueCrypt as a geom_gate userland disk device implementation. Basically what this will be doing is encrypting a virtual disk in real time.

Port NetBSD’s UDF implementation
Oleksandr
FreeBSD has an implementation of the UDF filesystem but it is not the latest version and doesn’t support many features from newer UDF revisions (>=2.01), such as Metadata Partition or Pseudo OverWrite method. Support UDF is also readonly. NetBSD implementation by Reinoud Zandijk supports most of new UDF features and has write support too. First of all I will support new revisions only for reading and subsequently write support.

CPU percentage limits
Rudolf Tomori
The goal of the project is to add the CPU percentage usage accounting to the existing racct/rctl infrastructure. I want to make it possible for the system administrator to limit either a particular process, a particular user or a particular jail to for example 30% CPU.

BHyVe BIOS emulation to boot legacy systems
Takuya ASADA
Implement BIOS emulation on BHyVe hypervisor, to make BHyVe able to support more guest OSes.

Automated Kernel Crash Reporting System
Tzanetos Balitsaris
This project aims to develop a system for automated kernel crash reports for the FreeBSD Operating System. This includes the creation of a crash reporter program specifically for the FreeBSD kernel, and a service that receive those data, store them in a database according to some rules, and present them via two different web pages. One for the community, and one for the developers of the FreeBSD Project.

NTFS for FreeBSD

Google has announced today that the following FreeBSD related projects have been accepted for the annual Google Summer of Code (2011).

With 17 approved projects, FreeBSD is one of the Top 10 supported projects.

1. Path-based file system MAC policy (Alan Alvarez)
2. Implement TCP UTO (Catalin Nicutar)
3. Replacing the old regex implementation (Gábor Kövesdán)
4. Capsicum application adaptation and core libraries (Ilya Bakulin)
5. Finish porting FUSE to FreeBSD (Ilya Putsikau)
6. FreeBSD/arm port to NXP LPC32x0 (Jakub Klama)
7. pkgng: Implementation of sub-commands to convert .rpm and .deb to pkgng package format (Joffrey Lassignardie)
8. Implement the RPS/RFS in FreeBSD (Kazuya GODA)
9. FreeBSD port of NetworkManager (Kulakov Anton)
10. Testing temporal properties of FreeBSD with Temporally Enhanced Security Logic Assertions (Mateusz Kocielski)
11. Extending Capsicum for Common System Services (Nathan Dautenhahn)
12. Disk device error counters (Oleksandr)
13. Multiqueue BPF support and other BPF features (Takuya ASADA)
14. SMB (smbfs) infrastructure work (Walter Artica)
15. Multibyte Encoding Support in Nvi (Zhihao Yuan)
16. (Re)implement the BFS scheduler in FreeBSD (rudot)
17. Adding DWARF2 Call Frame Information (xxp)

Well done, to everyone who got in.

Shortly after Google Chrome was released, I was  excited to find out that Ben Laurie was porting Google Chrome/Chromium to FreeBSD. This is in my opinion the best web browser available (I know, it’s subjective). It’s light-weight, secure and extendible.

The only thing that has cast a bit of a shadow on the Chromium porting project was thehybrid licensing model, where paying subscribers have access to the latest builds, and non-paying individuals can download an older/out-of-date version.

In itself there’s nothing wrong with this licensing model, but you’d expect that more with closed source and proprietary software. Chrome/Chromium is free and therefore any ported versions should be free too, IMO, as long as Google’s EULA is adhered to.

Due to some issues a new port (www/ports/chromium) maintainer has been appointed, i.e. Rene Ladan.

“However complete and obstinate disregard to the security vulnerabilities of the version in the ports tree, including refusal to even document them contradicts the idea of maintainership as the community understands it and as it is documented.” (source)

We wish Rene the best and we hope to see Chromium 8 that was released last week ported to FreeBSD (current version in ports is version 6).