FreeBSD Foundation
Links:
FreeBSD Foundation
URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/
Technology
Roadmap URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/technology-roadmap/
Donate URL:
https://freebsdfoundation.org/donate/
Foundation Partnership Program URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/freebsd-foundation-partnership-program/
FreeBSD
Journal URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/journal/
Foundation
Events URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/events/
Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb@FreeBSDFoundation.org>
The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to advancing FreeBSD through technical and non-technical support. Funded entirely by donations, the Foundation supports software development, infrastructure, security, and collaboration efforts; organizes events and developer summits; provides educational resources; and represents the FreeBSD Project in legal matters. The following report covers just some of the ways we supported FreeBSD in Q4.
Deb Goodkin here. On behalf of the Foundation, I want to start out by saying thank you to this amazing community! Your financial contributions have allowed us to step up and take on some significant projects, including large, multi-phase software development work, greater security improvements, and important infrastructure improvements that will continue through 2025. We also increased our FreeBSD advocacy efforts over many different technical and social media platforms, including creating more content to promote and advocate for FreeBSD. You’ll find more information about all of this work below. For a more in-depth look at our efforts in 2024, be sure to check out the year-end blog posts and my year-end reflections in the advocacy section below.
We are hiring! Check out our jobs page here for our Solutions Specialist and Technical Marketing Manager job postings. Plus, we are looking for part-time technical writers and will be opening up another position soon, so keep an eye on this page https://freebsdfoundation.org/open-positions/.
We are still finalizing our 2024 fundraising numbers, but at this writing, we have raised around $1,324,000. You might be thinking, why do not we have a final tally now that it is 2025? First, we have not yet received all the checks postmarked 2024 . We are also waiting on a few payments from invoices issued last year. We will have a final report in the next quarterly status report.
Thank you to the individuals and organizations that made a financial contribution in Q4! We received 325 donations from individuals totaling $120,841 and six financial contributions from organizations totaling $326,000. We also received a grant from the Silicon Valley Community Fund.
I would also like to send a shoutout to the anonymous donor who wanted us to help get Framework laptops into developers' hands. Pietro Cerutti has been coordinating that effort, and we are close to finalizing the process with Framework so developers can place their orders directly with them.
We also funded almost $5,000 worth of AV equipment for the BSDCon AV team to minimize the amount of equipment needed to rent at each of the two main BSD conferences.
Now, back to our financials. We will be publishing 2024 financial documents and reports in Q1. Our updated Q1-Q3 2024 Financial reports will be published by the end of January and will better match the budget format. The Final 2024 financial reports will be published in early Q2. Going forward, our budget and financial reports will provide more details on how funding is allocated to the major software development projects. For example, we will include how much was spent on the laptop project each quarter. We are working with our accountant to improve our accounting systems to be more transparent on how we spend our money.
We are excited about the opportunities for FreeBSD in 2025 and beyond, and are growing our team to help support the work needed to take advantage of these opportunities. However, we need your help to sustain this. Our investments will only carry on this work for a year or two at most. If your company is invested in the long-term sustainability of FreeBSD, please consider giving a financial contribution so we can ensure it stays the secure, reliable, and innovative platform you depend on. Not sure how to go about asking? Please reach out. We can help you navigate the process.
Please go here to make a donation: https://freebsdfoundation.org/donate/. To find out more about our Partnership Program, go here: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/freebsd-foundation-partnership-program/.
Advocacy
During the 4th quarter of 2024, we continued to raise awareness, advocate for the project, showcase users, while also providing educational content to the FreeBSD community. Here are some highlights of those efforts.
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Sponsored and helped to organize the Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit which took place November 7-8, 2024 in San Jose, CA. Check out the event recap. Videos are available on the FreeBSD YouTube channel.
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Updated the community on two of the new releases:
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Shared the FreeBSD Foundation 2024 Report on the Security Audit of the Capsicum and bhyve subsystems. Learn more in the Security Audit.
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Created a series of year end retrospectives on the work we did in 2024.
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Published additional blogs including:
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Why Your Open Source Project Should Prioritize Security: Lessons from FreeBSD’s Proactive Approach
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Why FreeBSD Should Be the Foundation for Your Security Product
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Celebrating FreeBSD Day with Tara Stella: A Journey from Linux to FreeBSD
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Advancing Cloud Native Containers on FreeBSD: Podman Testing Highlights
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Participated in the following contributed articles, interviews and podcasts:
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Published the October 2024, November 2024, and December 2024 FreeBSD Foundation Newsletters.
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Released the September/October 2024 issue of the FreeBSD Journal with HTML versions of the articles.
OS Improvements
During the fourth quarter of 2024, 382 src
, 135
ports
, and 17 doc
tree commits identified
The FreeBSD Foundation as a sponsor.
The Foundation and its investment partners supported four major projects:
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Konstantin Belousov continued work on an AMD IOMMU driver for FreeBSD, a project jointly funded by AMD and the Foundation. This effort aims to enhance support for large-core AMD systems and other scenarios requiring interrupt remapping. The driver was pushed to the src tree in early November and continues to undergo testing and refinement.
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Alpha-Omega and the Foundation have been jointly funding a project to improve FreeBSD security. For the latest updates, refer to the Security Engineering at the FreeBSD Foundation entry for the latest updates.
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A project to improve FreeBSD laptop usability began this quarter. For details, refer to the Laptop Support and Usability Improvements Project report entry.
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Work commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency to modernize FreeBSD’s infrastructure continued this quarter. The goal of this work is to help achieve and sustain a manageable bug backlog. As part of this effort, The Foundation worked with Bitergia to analyze and assess open Bugzilla bugs. Muhammad Moinur Rahman finished porting Grimoirelab and deploying Grimoire in the FreeBSD cluster.
Other projects:
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Alfonso S. Siciliano provided a FreeBSD Accessibility Project update.
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Aymeric Wibo began implementing suspend-to-idle and S0ix sleep support.
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Chih-Hsin Chang continued work to improve OpenStack on FreeBSD.
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Christos Margiolis shared an update on work to improve the FreeBSD audio stack.
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Harald Eilersten began working on a project to improve OpenJDK on FreeBSD.
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Isaac Freund worked on PkgBase-motivated improvements to pkg.
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Jian-Lin Li began a project to improve Syzkaller on FreeBSD.
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Joseph Mingrone spent time on a personal project to improve Common Lisp support in the ports tree.
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Olivier Certner submitted a report entry describing the work he completed with Baptiste Daroussin to allow controlled process credentials transitions using the MAC framework.
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Pierre Pronchery returned to working on a umb(4) driver for MBIM USB 4G/5G modems and he shared an update on work to improve the FreeBSD Installer.
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Tom Jones started porting the iwx WiFi driver from OpenBSD (via Haiku).
Other members of the Foundation’s development team contributed to FreeBSD development efforts. For example:
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Mitchell Horne worked with community contributor Julien Cassette to add a RISC-V Allwinner D1 clock and reset driver.
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Chuck Tuffli, John Baldwin, and Pierre Pronchery fixed a few bhyve issues:
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In the ports tree, Muhammad Moinur Rahman converted
USE_OCAML
andUSE_JAVA
to theUSES
framework. -
Ed Maste squashed a couple of makefs(8) bugs related to creating ISO9660 filesystems via the cd9660(4) driver:
Continuous Integration and Workflow Improvement
As part of our continued support of the FreeBSD Project, the Foundation supports a full-time staff member dedicated to improving the Project’s continuous integration system and test infrastructure.
Legal/FreeBSD IP
The Foundation owns the FreeBSD trademarks, and it is our responsibility to protect them. We also provide legal support for the core team to investigate questions that arise.
Go to https://freebsdfoundation.org to find more about how we support FreeBSD and how we can help you!
Last modified on: February 26, 2025 by Lorenzo Salvadore