FreeBSD Foundation September Update, tiny C lib for programming Unix daemons, EuroBSDcon trip reports, GhostBSD tested on real hardware, and a BSD auth module for duress.
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FreeBSD Foundation Update, September 2018

MESSAGE FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR


Dear FreeBSD Community Member, It is hard to believe that September is over. The Foundation team had a busy month promoting FreeBSD all over the globe, bug fixing in preparation for 12.0, and setting plans in motion to kick off our 4th quarter fundraising and advocacy efforts. Take a minute to see what we’ve been up to and please consider making a donation to help us continue our efforts supporting FreeBSD!


September 2018 Development Projects Update


In preparation for the release of FreeBSD 12.0, I have been working on investigating and fixing a backlog of kernel bug reports. Of course, this kind of work is never finished, and we will continue to make progress after the release. In the past couple of months I have fixed a combination of long-standing issues and recent regressions. Of note are a pair of UNIX domain socket bugs which had been affecting various applications for years. In particular, Chromium tabs would frequently hang unless a workaround was manually applied to the system, and the bug had started affecting recent versions of Firefox as well. Fixing these issues gave me an opportunity to revisit and extend our regression testing for UNIX sockets, which, in turn, resulted in some related bugs being identified and fixed.
Of late I have also been investigating reports of issues with ZFS, particularly, those reported on FreeBSD 11.2. A number of regressions, including a kernel memory leak and issues with ARC reclamation, have already been fixed for 12.0; investigation of other reports is ongoing. Those who closely follow FreeBSD-CURRENT know that some exciting work to improve memory usage on NUMA systems is now enabled by default. As is usually the case when new code is deployed in a diverse array of systems and workloads, a number of problems since have been identified. We are working on resolving them as soon as possible to ensure the quality of the release.
I’m passionate about maintaining FreeBSD’s stability and dependability as it continues to expand and grow new features, and I’m grateful to the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring this work. We depend on users to report problems to the mailing lists and via the bug tracker, so please try running the 12.0 candidate builds and help us make 12.0 a great release.


Fundraising Update: Supporting the Project


It’s officially Fall here at Foundation headquarters and we’re heading full-steam into our final fundraising campaign of the year. We couldn’t even have begun to reach our funding goal of $1.25 million dollars without the support from the companies who have partnered with us this year. Thank you to Verisign for becoming a Silver Partner. They now join a growing list of companies like Xiplink, NetApp, Microsoft, Tarsnap, VMware, and NeoSmart Technologies that are stepping up and showing their commitment to FreeBSD!
Funding from commercial users like these and individual users like yourself, help us continue our efforts of supporting critical areas of FreeBSD such as:


Operating System Improvements: Providing staff to immediately respond to urgent problems and implement new features and functionality allowing for the innovation and stability you’ve come to rely on.
Security: Providing engineering resources to bolster the capacity and responsiveness of the Security team providing your users with piece of mind when security issues arise.
Release Engineering: Continue providing a full-time release engineer, resulting in timely and reliable releases you can plan around.
Quality Assurance: Improving and increasing test coverage, continuous integration, and automated testing with a full-time software engineer to ensure you receive the highest quality, secure, and reliable operating system.
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