FreeSoftNews

“Hurrah! 2.0 has been released!” said Matthew Dillon, announcing the eighth major release of DragonFly BSD. This release is the first to include HAMMER, a new clustering filesystem that already boasts an impressive list of features, including: “crash recovery on-mount, no fsck; fine-grained snapshots, snapshot management, snapshot-support for filesystem-wide data integrity checks; historically accessible by default; mirroring: queueless incremental mirroring, master to multi-slave; undo and rollback; reblocking; multi-volume, maximum storage capacity of 1-Exabyte.” Other highlighted changes in this release include, “native fairq-queue implementation using ALTQ, for PF”, and “native connection state recovery to PF, so router reboots do not drop active TCP connections.”

Read more at Kernel Trap

The FreeBSD Project is pleased to announce the conclusion of our
fourth consecutive democratic election of project leadership. The
FreeBSD Core Team constitutes the project’s “Board of Directors” and
is responsible for vetting new src committers, arbitrating technical
disagreements, weighing in on policy and administrative issues, and
appointing sub-committees for handling specific duties (security
officer, release engineers, port managers, webmasters, etc..). The
core team has been democratically elected every 2 years by active
FreeBSD committers since 2000.

Peter Wemm is rejoining the team after a 2 year hiatus, and Kris
Kennaway is joining the team for the first time. The remaining 7
slots were filled with incumbents Wilko Bulte, Brooks Davis, Giorgos
Keramidas, George V. Neville-Neil, Hiroki Sato, Murray Stokely, and
Robert Watson.

The new core team would like to especially thank outgoing members Wes
Peters and Warner Losh for their many years of service to FreeBSD, our
electioneer Dr. Josef Karthauser for running another election for us,
and our returning core secretary Philip Paeps.

Murray Stokely
On behalf of the (new) Core Team

Dear FreeBSD Community,

I am pleased to announce the publication of the FreeBSD Foundation’s
Semi-Annual July Newsletter.

Go to http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2008Jul-newsletter.shtml
to find out what we’ve been doing to help the FreeBSD project and community.

Thank You,

Deb Goodkin
The FreeBSD Foundation

iXsystems announced today the launch of its Professional Services Division for FreeBSD and PC-BSD. The new Professional Services Division will provide Professional Enterprise Grade support, consulting, and development for FreeBSD and PC-BSD.

Service offerings include desktop support such as installation and basic customization of the operating system. Software application support is also offered and includes assistance configuring and installing third-party applications, either through the FreeBSD ports and packages system or via Push-Button Installers (PBIs), graphical utilities to remove and install PC-BSD software in a simple to use, self-contained format.

Also included are more customized support offerings across a wide range of server-related issues such as kernel tuning and system optimization, device driver creation, kernel, userland, and embedded systems development, and a host of other services. iXsystems offers 8×5 PC-BSD and FreeBSD OS support and has a devoted Service Support Office and US-based Call Center to assist with technical support issues.

Read more at PRWeb

What does Linus Torvalds think about BSD? It’s not too pleasant.

Linus Torvalds - the creator of the Linux kernel and its current maintainer - is by all accounts a brilliant human being. He can also be incredibly crass and rude. Case in point is a post he made to the Linux Kernel mailing list (LKML) yesterday, where he offered his opinion on security research and specifically the OpenBSD operating system (which is security centric).

Read more at internetnews.com

A NetBSD developer’s summit is currently being planned for Friday, October
10th, 2008. The event is sponsored by and leads up to this year’s
NYCBSDCon and will take place at Columbia University on the island of
Manhattan in New York City, NY, USA.

While the program for this full-day event is not yet finalized, it will be
open to the public and may include formal presentations as well as
informal discussions of both technical and administrative nature. A
public hackathon is anticipated to run in parallel throughout the weekend.

The common social activities such as PGP signing and consumation of
refreshing beverages or communal ingestion of nutrition are likely to
follow.

If you have any suggestions, would like to offer your help, plan on
attending or have any other comments, please contact
.

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce we are soliciting the
submission of proposals for work relating to any of the major subsystems
or infrastructure within the FreeBSD operating system.  A budget of
$80,000 was allocated for 2008 to fund multiple development projects.
Proposals will be evaluated based on desirability, technical merit and
cost-effectiveness.

To find out more about the proposal process please read the attached
document. You can also find the document on our website at
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/documents/FreeBSD%20Foundation%20Proposals.pdf.

We look forward to reading all the interesting project proposals!

Sincerely,

The FreeBSD Foundation

If you ever plan on writing an open source program, then you must make an important decision, selecting a program license. Generally for open source programs, there are two main licenses that most developers take into consideration. These licenses are the Gnu General Public License, and the BSD license. This article will explain the fundamentals of each license, and will help you in choosing the right license for your open source project.

The first software license that comes to mind for an open source program is the Gnu General Public License(GPL). Created by Richard Stallman in 1989, the GPL is currently at version 3. The GPL is a restrictive license, which actively enforces copyleft”

Read more at DevelopersVoice

The NetBSD Foundation Moves to a Two Clause BSD License
=======================================================

Following on from a vote amongst the membership of the NetBSD
Foundation, and in recognition of the changing face of software
licensing, the Foundation has changed its recommended license to be a
2 clause BSD license. A template version of this new license is
included at the bottom of this email. This recommended license is the
one that the Foundation strongly encourages its contributors to use
when assigning copyright to the Foundation.

• Read more: The NetBSD Foundation Moves to a Two Clause BSD License

Majors changes:
- - Upgrade to FreeBSD 6.3. Because of this there are some changes:
~ - WOL kernel patch has to be removed because there is currently no
patch available for this version.
~ - Add msk (Marvell/SysKonnect Yukon II Gigabit Ethernet) network driver.
~ - Add pcn (AMD Am79C97x PCI 10/100 (with precedence over ‘lnc’))
network driver.
- - Remove ‘kern.hz=”500″‘ from /boot/loader.conf. With FreeBSD 6.3 it
is set to 100 by default.
- - Add ‘lagg’ link aggregation and link failover interface support
(kernel).

• Read more: FreeNAS 0.69b1 (Fedaykin) released

I’ve used Josh Grosse’s jggimi live CD version of OpenBSD to test hardware compatibility recently, but now there’s a new live CD project based on OpenBSD called BSDanywhere.

From the BSDanywhere site:

What is BSDanywhere?

BSDanywhere is a bootable Live-CD image based on OpenBSD. It consists of the entire OpenBSD base system (without compiler) plus graphical desktop, an unrepresentative collection of software, automatic hardware detection and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices as well as other peripherals.

Read more at Click

Hi!

As announced earlier, EuroBSDCon 2008 will be held on 18 and 19 October 2008,
in Strasbourg, France. We are still looking for proposals for presentations
and tutorials. The submission deadline has been extended to 1 July 2008.

Important dates to remember:

1 July 2008
Abstracts for papers and tutorials due

• Read more: EuroBSDCon 2008 - extension of submission deadline

The FreeBSD Project has begun the switch of its source code management
system from CVS to Subversion. At this point in time, FreeBSD’s
developers are making changes to the base system in the Subversion
repository. There is a replication system in place that exports our
work to the legacy CVS tree on a continuous basis.

• Read more: FreeBSD.org begins switch to Subversion

Hello Everyone,

The branches supported by the FreeBSD Security Officer have been updated
to reflect recent EoL (end-of-life) events. The new list is below and
at <URL: http://security.freebsd.org/ >. FreeBSD 5.5, FreeBSD 6.1, and
FreeBSD 6.2 have `expired’ and are no longer supported effective June 1,
2008. Users of these releases are advised to upgrade promptly to FreeBSD
6.3 or FreeBSD 7.0, either by downloading an updated source tree and
building updates manually, or (for i386 and amd64 systems) using the
FreeBSD Update utility as described in the FreeBSD 6.3 and FreeBSD 7.0
release announcements.

• Read more: FreeBSD supported branches update

As of June 1, 2008 00:00:00 UTC, FreeBSD 5.X support in the ports tree
is End Of Life. This means that a ports tree checked out after this
date is not guaranteed to produce usable packages on 5.X. Additionally,
5.X package builds on the cluster will cease. Users are encouraged to
upgrade to 6.3 or 7.0 if they wish to continue to track the latest ports
tree.

A tag, RELEASE_5_EOL, has been laid down to mark the last point in the
ports tree that officially supported FreeBSD 5.X. Port Manager asks
that you not rush to remove 5.X support right away as we’d like a
settling-down period, and we want secteam to have a chance to make their
EOL announcements as well.

Marcus on behalf of portmgr

Bcc: ports, developers, portmgr

FreeNAS 0.686.4 stable has been released today. It is a maintenance
release, so no new features has been included.

The following changes has been done:

Minors changes:
- - Set subnet mask to 24 per default if DHCP is activated, otherwise
WebGUI is not accessible in
~ most networks when changing from DHCP to static.
- - Do not validate sync time values when pressing ‘Now’ on status
report page.

• Read more: FreeNAS 0.686.4 (Gom Jabbar) released

To kick off the pre-5.0-branch feature freeze, there will be a
hackathon this weekend, May 24-25, 2008, with the goal of tackling
bugs on the critical and high priority list for 5.0… and any other
worthy bugs you’d like to see fixed in the next stable branch of
NetBSD.

The wiki page for this hackathon is here:
http://wiki.netbsd.se/Hackathon11

As usual, the hackathon will be “held” on irc, in #netbsd-code on
irc.freenode.net.

This is happening on fairly short notice, so please spread the word.

See you there.

Matthew Dillon sent out a series of updates about his developing HAMMER filesystem, noting that he is currently focusing on the reblocking and pruning code, tracking down a number of bugs resulting in B-Tree corruption. He also noted that previously HAMMER was comprised of three components: B-Tree nodes, records, and data. In his latest cleanups, he has entirely removed the record structure, “this will seriously improve the performance of directory and inode access.” This change did require an on-media format change, “I know I have said this before, but there’s a very good chance that no more on-media changes will be made after this point. The official freeze of the on-media format will not occur until the 2.0 release, however.”

Read more at KernelTrap

1983. The year of the IBM PC XT, the Apple Lisa, Pioneer 10 leaving the solar system, and Hooters opening up shop in Florida. It’s also the birthyear of a 25 year old BSD bug, squashed only a few days ago.

A few days ago, Marc Balmer, OpenBSD developer, received an email from an OpenBSD user. The email claimed that SAMBA would crash when serving files off an MS-DOS filesystem. Balmer got into contact with a few SAMBA developers who claimed that SAMBA uses a special workaround in order to function properly on BSD systems: the code for reading directories in all BSDs was flawed.

Read more at OSNews

FreeNAS 0.69:
- ————-

Majors changes:
- - Upgrade to FreeBSD 6.3. Because of this there are some changes:
- - WOL kernel patch has to be removed because there is currently no
patch available for this version.
- - Add msk (Marvell/SysKonnect Yukon II Gigabit Ethernet) network driver.
- - Add pcn (AMD Am79C97x PCI 10/100 (with precedence over ‘lnc’))
network driver.
- - Remove ‘kern.hz=”500″‘ from /boot/loader.conf. With FreeBSD 6.3 it
is set to 100 by default.
- - Add ‘lagg’ link aggregation and link failover interface support
(kernel).
- - Switch back to SCHED_4BSD scheduler.
- - Add generic webserver service.
- - Complete review and typo fixes in sourcecode. Thanks to Jerome Warnier.
- - Upgrade rsync to 3.0.2.

• Read more: FreeNAS 0.686.4b and 0.69b released