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FreeBSD Foundation Announces Capsicum Framework Project

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The FreeBSD Foundation has announced that Pawel Jakub Dawidek has been awarded a development grant to further improve the Capsicum framework. The grant is jointly funded by Google’s Open Source Programs Office.

The project includes the integration of previous work, implementation of new programmer-friendly capability system calls, improvements to the Casper Capsicum service daemon, and sandboxing various security-sensitive applications.

“My previous Capsicum work focused on improving the framework itself to make it a better fit for real world applications. This new project will make use of the improved Capsicum to secure sensitive programs and libraries found in FreeBSD. The project will also produce many examples for others to follow, allowing them to take advantage of Capsicum to improve the security of their programs,”

said Pawel.

Ben Laurie, of Google’s security team, added that

“traditional operating system security is based on Access Control Lists (ACLs). Decades of experience has made it quite clear this is the wrong model – but how can we move to a better way without having to rebuild everything? Capsicum shows that it is possible to migrate gradually from the broken ACL world to a more robust capability based world. We are pleased to be involved in the next step of its evolution.”

The project is expected to be completed by June 2013.

Source: FreeBSD Announce Mailinglist

FreeBSD upcoming events updates (MeetBSD, EuroBSDCon, GSoC)

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MeetBSD California 2012

meetBSD 2012 will be held on Yahoo!’s campus in Sunnyvale, California, from 3 – 4 November 2012 and will be co-hosted by Yahoo! and iXsystems.

MeetBSD California is no normal conference – it’s a meeting of the minds from all over the BSD community. MeetBSD California 2012 will feature community-scheduled break-out sessions, discussions groups, and 5-10 minute “lightning talks,” as well as longer talks from seasoned BSD experts. 

MeetBSD California 2012 aims to engage the best of both worlds between traditional planned-speaker-centered conferences and the community-planned unConference model. Day one will be devoted primarily to planned talks, while day two will be scheduled entirely by the attendees, allowing anything from impromptu tutorials to hacking sessions. This is your conference, and we can’t wait to see you there!

EuroBSDCon 2012

BSDTalk has uploaded a 14 minutes interview with Paul Schenkeveld about the upcoming EuroBSDCon 2012 (Warsaw, Poland, 18-21 October): bsdtalk213 – EuroBSDCon with Paul Schenkeveld

GSoC 2012

Not strictly upcoming, but ongoing: Google’s annual Summer of  Code (2012) has kicked off. FreeBSD is represented by 15 projects.

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects. We have worked with open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund projects over a three month period.

GSoC 2012 FreeBSD projects announced

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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

(Free)BSD quick news ‘n links (week 17)

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Below some links to some FreeBSD resourses that you guys may be interested in, and other BSD related items I’ve come across.

FreeBSD

  • Chromium 10, Google’s blazingly fast internet browser, is now available in the FreeBSD Ports directory (www/chromium).
  • New FreeBSD Installer test and walkthrough. Michael W. Lucas tests the new FreeBSD installer (bsd install) and gives his feedback (incl screenshots). He likes most of the changes and improvements, but is not altogether happy yet.
  • FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE Custom XFCE builds available. Download from freebsd-custom.wikidot.com/

DragonFlyBSD

  • DragonFlyBSD 2.10 Released. DFBSD devs have released version 2.10 with better hardware and multiple processor support. The HAMMER file system now supports deduplication.
  • DragonFlyBSD devs are looking for testers to try out the internet browser on DragonFlyBSD (Chromium for DragonFly)

OpenBSD

  • A Puffy in the corporate aquarium. There’s an interesting article on the Undeadly OpenBSD blog of m:tier, a London consultancy that works with Fortune 500 companies to equip them with OpenBSD firewalls, servers and desktops. OpenBSD has a reputation for high security and being a difficult operating system to use for new user, but m:tier helps companies to use for everything:

As a company we are very dedicated to what we do because we are “forced” to use our operating system of choice and we want our customers to be as happy as we are at using it :-)

So our paid job is hacking on and deploying, maintaining, supporting… OpenBSD installations. We are also required to hack on things that can be merged back into OpenBSD itself and when it’s not possible, then we change what we did so that it can be. Of course some developments are very specific to what we do and have no place in the project’s CVS tree.

So, amongst other services, we set up and maintain several 100% OpenBSD-based infrastructures (going from the entry site firewall to the secretary’s workstation) and this is what I’m going to talk about here.  Continues

  • MarBSD-X is a OpenBSD based Live CD with support for X (via)

BSD Certification

The BSD Certification Group (BSDCG) announced today that it has partnered with Schroeder Measurement Technologies (SMT) to increase the geographic availability of BSD certification exams. Through its sister company, Iso-Quality Testing (IQT), SMT maintains a testing center network of carefully selected partners, including college/university testing centers and computer-related businesses to provide testing services in a secure, proctored environment. Testing centers are available in over 300 cities in 19 countries. (full press release)

 

Google SoC 2011 FreeBSD Accepted Projects

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FreeBSD Google summer of codeGoogle 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.

Upcoming FreeBSD Events: BSDCan, GSoC 2011

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As most of you will be aware, BSDCan is one of the major annual BSD conferences, and Google sponsors development of the 5 big BSD’s each year in the Summer of Code. More info with regards to these events below.

BSDCan 2011

BSD Talk has a 15 minutes interview with Dan Langille, the organiser of BSDCan 2011, wherein they chat about the upcoming BSDCan conference: BSDTalk 203 – BSDCan and PGCon with Dan Langille

The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please fill out and submit the (PDF) Travel Grant Request Application by April 15, 2011 to apply for this grant.

This program is open to FreeBSD developers of all sorts (kernel hackers, documentation authors, bugbusters, system administrators, etc). In some cases we are also able to fund non-developers, such as active community members and FreeBSD advocates. Read further

Google Summer of Code 2011

Google Announces Summer of Code Accepted Projects
Google has announced the accepted projects list for its 2011 Google Summer of Code (GSOC) Program. Accepted Projects can be viewed on this page. FreeBSD is among them. If you want to take part, check out the FreeBSD GSoC ideas page.

Grazer Linuxtag 2011

FH Joanneum Graz, Graz, Austria  –

The Grazer Linuxtag is a one day event (09 April 2011, FH Joanneum Graz, Graz, Austria) on Linux and free software in general. Besides a FreeBSD booth and the possibility to take the BSDA certification exam there will also be a BSD Bootcamp with live workshops covering different FreeBSD topics. More information can be found here.

 

Chromium for FreeBSD – change of port maintainer

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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).

Of EoL, GSoC, paid development and why I love UNIX

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FreeBSD 6.4 and 8.0 EoLs coming soon

On November 30th, FreeBSD 6.4 and FreeBSD 8.0 will have reached their End of Life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Since FreeBSD 6.4 is the last remaining supported release from the FreeBSD 6.x stable branch, support for the FreeBSD 6.x stable branch will also cease at the same point. Users of either of these FreeBSD releases are strongly encouraged to upgrade to either FreeBSD 7.3 or FreeBSD 8.1 before that date.

The FreeBSD Ports Management Team wishes to remind users that November 30 is also the end of support for the Ports Collection for both FreeBSD 6.4 RELEASE and the FreeBSD 6.x STABLE branch. Neither the infrastructure nor individual ports are guaranteed to work on these FreeBSD versions after that date. A CVS tag will be created for users who cannot upgrade for some reason, at which time these users are advised to stop tracking the latest ports CVS repository and use the RELEASE_6_EOL tag instead. (source)

FreeBSD at GSoC Mentor Summit

As in previous years, Google held a “Mentor Summit” to bring together representatives from the open source organizations that participated in the Google Summer of Code to share experiences of what worked, what didn’t, and generally learn from each other about shepherding students through the program. The mentor summit is always run Unconference-style and it is a great opportunity to meet, learn, and socialize with the many other open source organization… continues (Murray’s FreeBSD Notes)

FreeBSD Will Pay for Some KMS, GEM Love

“The good news, however, is that the FreeBSD Foundation is willing to finance a developer to work on bringing kernel mode-setting and Graphics Execution Manager support over to the FreeBSD kernel.”

Source & full story: FreeBSD Will Pay for Some KMS, GEM Love (phoronix.com)

Why I Love Unix

I love Unix because of all the wonderful things that I can do on the command line. When I first used Unix in 1983, it was love on first sight. With a list of the most basic commands by my side, I quickly discovered how much I could accomplish with several command strings strung together. Unix was nothing like what I’d been using up to that point in my brief data processing career. It was clever, modular and logical. With tools like grep and languages like awk, it was quite a bit of fun to discover how easily I could make the system do my bid. My ability to capture sequences of commands easily into scripts made it possible for me to encapsulate my clever commands, even share them with coworkers. The Unix culture seemed innovative, inviting my participation in creating an environment that really worked for me.

Full blog post: Why I love UNIX (itworld.com)

Other BSD related news

Chromium 7.0 FreeBSD builds available (1 week only)

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Ruben from the FreeBSD Chromium porting team emailed me to say that for this week only the latest Chromium 7.0 for FreeBSD subscriber builds will be available for free (excluding HTML 5 video).

The subscriber builds are largely open source and funded by a hybrid model. If you like what you see, you may consider subscribing to the weekly builds and fund further development on this port.

Download Chromium 7 for FreeBSD 8 (i386 – amd64) or FreeBSD 9 (amd64)

Chromium is an open-source browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all users to experience the web. This site contains design documents, architecture overviews, testing information, and more to help you learn to build and work with the Chromium source code.