FreeBSD Status Report First Quarter 2025

Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <core@FreeBSD.org>

The FreeBSD Core Team is the governing body of FreeBSD.

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 Q1

Deb Goodkin here. Is it Q2 already? Last quarter was a whirlwind of activity supporting the FreeBSD Project and community. In our report, we will highlight the work we are currently doing to ensure that FreeBSD stays viable and secure for the long term.

As you know, the Foundation is here to support the project in many ways, including software development, security, legal, conferences, and infrastructure. I want to keep this section short, because we have reports throughout this status report to get more details on the work we are doing.

Here is a snapshot of what we worked on last quarter, by the numbers:

Exciting News: Mark Phillips joined the Foundation as our Technical Marketing Manager. Get prepared for some information and helpful technical content coming your way! We also brought on another part-time developer who stepped into our Solutions Specialist role. We will announce that person soon.

Links:
FreeBSD 13.5-RELEASE announcement URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.5/announce/
FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE schedule URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.3R/schedule/
FreeBSD releases URL: https://download.freebsd.org/releases/ISO-IMAGES/
FreeBSD development snapshots URL: https://download.freebsd.org/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/

Contact: FreeBSD Release Engineering Team, <re@FreeBSD.org>

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is responsible for setting and publishing release schedules for official project releases of FreeBSD, announcing code freezes and maintaining the respective branches, among other things.

The Team managed 13.5-RELEASE, leading to the official RELEASE build and announcement in March; this was the final release from the legacy stable/13 branch. Planning has started for the upcoming 14.3-RELEASE cycle.

The Release Engineering Team continued providing weekly development snapshot builds for the main, stable/14, and stable/13 branches.

Links:
Cluster Administration Team members URL: https://www.freebsd.org/administration/#t-clusteradm

Contact: Cluster Administration Team <clusteradm@FreeBSD.org>

FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team members are responsible for managing the machines the Project relies on to synchronize its distributed work and communications.

In this quarter, the team has worked on the following:

Links:
FreeBSD Jenkins Instance URL: https://ci.FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD CI Tinderbox view URL: https://tinderbox.freebsd.org
FreeBSD CI artifact archive URL: https://artifact.ci.FreeBSD.org
Hosted CI wiki URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/HostedCI
3rd Party Software CI URL: https://wiki.FreeBSD.org/3rdPartySoftwareCI
Tickets related to freebsd-testing@ URL: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=__open__&email1=testing%40FreeBSD.org&emailassigned_to1=1&emailcc1=1&emailtype1=equals
FreeBSD CI Repository URL: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ci
dev-ci Mailing List URL: https://lists.FreeBSD.org/subscription/dev-ci

Contact: Jenkins Admin <jenkins-admin@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: freebsd-testing Mailing List
Contact: IRC #freebsd-ci channel on EFNet

In the first quarter of 2025, we worked with the project contributors and developers to address their testing requirements. Concurrently, we collaborated with external projects and companies to enhance their products by testing more on FreeBSD.

Important completed tasks:

Work in progress tasks:

Open or queued tasks:

Please see freebsd-testing@ related tickets for more WIP information, and do not hesitate to join the effort!

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Links:
About FreeBSD Ports URL:https://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
Contributing to Ports URL: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/contributing/#ports-contributing
Ports Management Team URL: https://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/
Ports Tarball URL: http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/ports/

Contact: Tobias C. Berner <portmgr-secretary@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: FreeBSD Ports Management Team <portmgr@FreeBSD.org>

The Ports Management Team is responsible for overseeing the overall direction of the Ports Tree, building packages, and personnel matters. Below is what happened in the last quarter.

In the last quarter, we welcomed Austin Shafer (ashafer@) as a new ports committer, and welcomed back Eygene Ryabinkin (rea@) and Mark Linimon (linimon@).

According to INDEX, there are currently 36,450 (up from 36,332) ports in the Ports Collection. There are currently about 3,333 (down from 3,368) open ports PRs, of which 887 are unassigned. The last quarter saw 10,733 (up from 10,640) commits by 158 (up from 155) committers on the main branch and 707 (down from 733) commits by 54 (down from 61) committers on the 2025Q1 branch.

The most active committers to main were:

A lot has happened in the ports tree in the last three months, an excerpt of the major software upgrades are:

One USES was removed: qca

During the last quarter, pkgmgr@ ran 20 exp-runs to test infrastructure changes and various ports upgrades.

Links:
FreeBSD Bugzilla URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Bugzilla

Contact: Bugmeister <bugmeister@FreeBSD.org>

In this quarter we made major progress on Base System PRs, closing over 1,000 old ones that no longer apply. Many of these were detected by carefully going over all entries in ObsoleteFiles.inc.

Also in this quarter we came even closer to steady-state for ports/doc; we are dealing with incoming PRs more quickly these days. For reference: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/page.cgi?id=dashboard.html&days=90.

The overall number of PRs came down from slightly over 11,000 to just under 10,000. This was due to work from several people to go over entire groups of PRs.

Mark Linimon attended several video calls with various src committers. They are doing some experimentation to learn what kind of effort is sustainable. The most recent effort was to evaluate the latest incoming src PRs; you will note that many of them from the past few weeks have been marked as requesting feedback.

Bugmeister folks also did some passes through the database to clean up metadata:

The "automate harvesting PRs and evaluating whether they still apply" task has resulted in the release of patchQA.py as beta. The program can take either a number (as a single PR number), or, with some work, a full REST query.

The main current problem is that the py-patch algorithm does not correctly handle fuzz. Until this is fixed, it will stay in beta.

Almost all of the PRs with patches have been processed by patchQA.py and several hundreds of them have been rebased (e.g. Base System patches to be relative to the top of the src tree). We now have a sense of how many Ports patches are not actually patches to the FreeBSD port itself, but instead need to be manually applied to an extracted work/ directory. A script to try to automate this is in alpha.

The other problem known with patchQA.py is that it does not know the origins of files that are installed into /etc by installworld.

However, it does know enough to internally rebase Ports patches to the ports tree base if necessary.

We also created 120+ new Bugzilla accounts by user request. (We no longer create them automatically because of the spammers.)

Clusteradm@ helped us fend off yet more crawler sites. OTOH, we seem to be losing the war against AI bots.

See also: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Bugzilla/SearchQueries

Contact: srcmgr <srcmgr@FreeBSD.org>

srcmgr@ is focused on finding ways to make src developers more productive, and to try and manage the large numbers of bug reports and pull requests that we receive. The team meets every two weeks to discuss src-related issues and spend time triaging bug reports and pull requests. The current members are Ed Maste, Mark Johnston, John Baldwin, and Warner Losh. Meeting minutes are available on GitHub.

In January and February, srcmgr@ ran two online bug-busting sessions, each attended by roughly 12 developers. The sessions ran for three hours and focused on triaging new src bug reports. The team plans to resume hosting these sessions in the next month.

The srcmgr@ team plans to lead a session at the FreeBSD Developer Summit in June. Topics will include deprecation of 32-bit platforms, and pkgbase support for the upcoming FreeBSD 15.0 release.

Contact: Ed Maste <emaste@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Alice Sowerby <alice@freebsdfoundation.org>

The project started in Q3 of 2024 and was commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency with a budget of $745,000, to be spent over about one year. The main goals are to improve security tools for the base system, ports, and packages, update the project’s infrastructure to speed up development, enhance build security, and make it easier for new developers to get started.

Links:
link:pkgbasify URL: https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/pkgbasify
pkgbase URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase

Contact: Isaac Freund <ifreund@freebsdfoundation.org>

The new pkgbasify tool automatically converts an existing FreeBSD 14+ system to use pkgbase.

I’ve done my best to make pkgbasify as robust as possible and currently believe it to be as reliable as manual conversion if not better.

That said, pkgbasify could use testing on more diverse systems! See the README for usage instructions and details on pkgbasify’s behavior.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Links:
Framework Laptop page on FreeBSD Wiki URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops/Framework_Laptop/
Guide on installing and using FreeBSD on Framework systems URL: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/freebsd-on-framework
Tracking ticket: Framework Laptop: Feature support, bugs and improvements URL: https://bugs.freebsd.org/262152

Contact: Daniel Schaefer <dhs@frame.work>
Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Sheng-Yi Hong <aokblast@FreeBSD.org>

For a long time, Framework Computer Inc. has been very supportive of the FreeBSD project in many ways, including providing engineering samples to the Foundation for testing and working on compatibility.

The Foundation continues to work on improving overall laptop support, and Framework laptops are one of the target platforms for the Laptop Support and Usability Project.

In March, some FreeBSD developers visited Framework’s Taipei office again to test FreeBSD on pre-release Framework products, the Framework Desktop and Framework Laptop 12. The results of these tests will be used to help shape FreeBSD’s development plans, and the FreeBSD support status will be updated in document after further verification.

Sheng-Yi is using the laptop provided by Framework Computer to add more device support, e.g. hwpstate: add CPPC support for pstate driver on AMD.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation for Li-Wen and Sheng-Yi’s work
Sponsor: Framework Computer Inc for Daniel’s work, hardware and space support

Links:
Hackathon/202503 Wiki Page URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Hackathon/202503 FreeBSD Hackathon Wiki Page URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Hackathon

Before the AsiaBSDCon-Lite 2025 event, some members of the community gathered and held a hackathon in Tokyo.

Thanks to Christoff Visser and Internet Initiative Japan Inc. who sponsored the venue.

Links:
GitHub URL: https://github.com/AlchemillaHQ/Sylve
CI URL: https://sylve-ci.alchemilla.io
Discord URL: https://discord.gg/bJB826JvXK

Contact: Hayzam Sherif <hayzam@alchemilla.io>

Sylve is a modern, unified system management platform for FreeBSD, inspired by Proxmox. It intends to provide an integrated web interface for managing virtual machines (via Bhyve), Jails, ZFS storage, networking, and firewalling. The backend is implemented in Go, while the frontend uses SvelteKit with Tailwind CSS and ShadCN UI components.

The project emphasizes a minimal system footprint, currently requiring only sysutils/smartmontools and sysutils/tmux as runtime dependencies.

Sylve addresses a key gap in the FreeBSD ecosystem: a user-friendly, full-featured web interface for system management. By unifying virtualization, storage, and network management, it aims to lower the barrier for users and administrators deploying FreeBSD in complex environments.

We started working on the project since February and have made significant progress across several areas:

The project remains under active development and is not yet production-ready.

Planned tasks for the upcoming quarter include:

Contributions, testing, and feedback are very welcome. If you are interested in contributing, consider helping with:

Sponsor: FreeBSD Foundation and Alchemilla (development and infrastructure support)

Links:
The main commit URL: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=30e6e008bc06385a66756bebb41676f4f9017eca

Contact: Igor Ostapenko <igoro@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Dave Cottlehuber <dch@FreeBSD.org>

The meta and env new parameters of jail(8) have been introduced. Each one is an arbitrary string associated with a jail. It can be set upon jail creation or added/modified later:

The values are not inherited from the parent jail. A parent jail can read both metadata parameters, while a child jail can read only env via the newly added security.jail.env sysctl.

The maximum size of meta or env per jail is controlled by the global security.jail.meta_maxbufsize sysctl. Decreasing it does not alter the existing meta information.

Each metadata buffer can optionally be handled as a set of key=value\n strings:

While meta.k1="" or meta.k1= resets the value to an empty string, the meta.k1 without the equal sign removes the given key. The flua’s libjail has been updated respectively to support the key-based handling.

Sponsor: SkunkWerks GmbH

Contact: Christos Margiolis <christos@FreeBSD.org>

I have been working on the audio stack since 2024Q1. Below is a list of the previous status reports:

Important work since last report:

Future work includes:

You can also follow the development process in freebsd-multimedia@, where I post regular reports.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Links:
Update to Linux 6.7 DRM drivers URL: https://github.com/freebsd/drm-kmod/pull/332
Update to Linux 6.8 DRM drivers URL: https://github.com/freebsd/drm-kmod/pull/344

Contact: Jean-Sébastien Pédron <dumbbell@FreeBSD.org>

DRM drivers are kernel drivers for integrated and discrete GPUs. They are maintained in the Linux kernel and we port them to FreeBSD. As of this report, we take the AMD and Intel DRM drivers only (NVIDIA FreeBSD drivers are proprietary and provided by NVIDIA themselves).

We usually port them one Linux version at a time. This allows us to ship updates more often and it eases porting and debugging because we have a smaller delta compared to a bigger jump skipping several versions.

This quarter, we ported DRM drivers from Linux 6.7 and 6.8. This effort did not hit the Ports tree yet because several patches to the FreeBSD kernel (the linuxkpi compatibility layer specifically) are still being reviewed and improved.

So far, the feedback was good for GPUs that were already supported by previous versions of the drivers. For newer GPUs, especially Intel ones, panics and display corruptions were reported. At this point, it is difficult to say if we just miss fixes from Linux that were published in a later version, or if these issues are actual bugs on FreeBSD.

These updates target the FreeBSD 15-CURRENT development branch for now. Once kernel patches are accepted and the DRM drivers updates merged, we will evaluate if/how we can backport the kernel patches to earlier release branches (namely 14-STABLE).

If you want to try them, you will find instructions to build and install a kernel with the non-committed changes, the drivers and the firmwares, in the pull requests’ descriptions.

The next steps are:

This work is kindly sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation as part of the Laptop and Desktop Project.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Links:
Blog URL: https://obiw.ac/s0ix/
FOSDEM talk on S0ix URL: https://youtu.be/mBxj_EkAzV0
Working Repository URL: https://github.com/obiwac/freebsd-s0ix
Tip of the S0ix + AMD SMU stack URL: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D48721
USB4 suspend stack URL: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D49453

Contact: obiwac <obiwac@FreeBSD.org>

Suspend-to-idle and support for S0ix sleep is in the process of being added to FreeBSD.

This will allow modern Intel and AMD laptops (e.g. AMD and newer Intel Framework laptops), some of which do not support ACPI S3 sleep, to enter low power states to increase battery life.

Suspending and resuming is working on the Framework 13 AMD Ryzen 7040 series, though the deepest S0ix state (S0i3), necessary for significant power savings, cannot yet be entered on AMD systems. The major blocker for this at the moment is being able to suspend all the USB4 routers correctly, without which the power management firmware will refuse to enter S0i3. USB4 suspend support in FreeBSD is necessary as the BIOS wakes them up and runs a pre-OS connection manager for USB4 to work before an OS loads with its own connection manager, so they start off in an awake state.

Work has been picked up from the initial USB4 driver Scott Long started writing, but it is not yet at a stage where the routers are being fully suspended.

An amdsmu driver was written to read last suspend statistics and sleep-state residency counters (which were unavailable in the ACPI _LPI objects). The SMU is a small coprocessor on AMD CPUs which runs the power management firmware and is ultimately what decides to enter S0i3 or not. These statistics can tell us if the system entered S0i3 during the last suspend, how much time it took to enter, and which proportion of suspended time was spent in S0i3.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Links:
google/syzkaller URL: https://github.com/google/syzkaller
work repository URL: https://github.com/estarriol43/syzkaller/tree/freebsd/frame-injection-v2

Contact: Jian-Lin Li <ljianlin99@gmail.com>
Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu@FreeBSD.org>

Syzkaller is an operating system kernel fuzzer that can look for vulnerabilities in the kernel.

This project aims to improve the support of Syzkaller on FreeBSD. Based on the existing WiFi fuzzer designed for Linux, we drafted a WiFi fuzzer for FreeBSD. We planned to use wtap(4), a virtual wifi interface for testing, in order to support WiFi fuzzing.

Some of the design details include:

We have developed a WiFi fuzzer using existing ioctl interface provided by wtap. One can check out the result in this branch.

We hope to introduce Netlink interface, which is adopted by the Syzkaller to inject 802.11 frames into Linux kernel, to FreeBSD to improve the compatibilities between Linux and FreeBSD.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Contact: Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: The FreeBSD wireless mailing list <wireless@FreeBSD.org>

With multiple wireless projects ongoing, this report focuses on the efforts using permissively licensed Linux wireless drivers mostly unmodified on FreeBSD. The currently supported drivers are iwlwifi(4), rtw88(4), and rtw89(4).

The rtw88(4) driver was made to work (associate) again (Bugzilla PR#283142). In addition, thanks to the massive help debugging and testing by the community, the cause for leaking memory got resolved (Bugzilla PR#283903).

Tunables to selectively control HT and VHT support in rtw88(4), and rtw89(4) were added. HW crypto offload was enabled by default for CCMP. It turns out that a lot of users are still using TKIP. Work is in on the way to support this and will hopefully land early in Q2.

HT (11n) and VHT (11ac) support are now also compiled in by default for the LinuxKPI based drivers. The drivers and entire framework changes were merged from main to stable/14 so both branches have the same level of support.

People installing firmware using fwget(8) will get HT and VHT automatically enabled for iwlwifi(4) 2200 (mostly AX200), AX210, and BE200 chipset generations. Older iwlwifi(4) chipset generations, rtw88(4), and rtw89(4) will need extra work in LinuxKPI or the driver to provide working support.

It was announced that iwlwififw(4) will follow rtw88(4), and rtw89(4) firmware and be removed from the base system in April 2025 for both main and stable/14 in favor of the ports based solution and fwget(8) support (Announcement).

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Contact: Tom Jones <thj@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: The FreeBSD wireless mailing list <wireless@FreeBSD.org>

At the end of 2024 Future Crew LLC provided the source for their iwx port from OpenBSD. I opted to merge the two drivers together using the Future Crew driver as a base and importing my modifications.

I worked on this driver, tidying up and removing a lot of development code and expanding support for more devices. iwx in FreeBSD should now attach to any device supported by OpenBSD. Firmware is available thanks to bz@ in the net/wifi-firmware-iwlwifi-kmod package.

iwx landed in FreeBSD on the final day of the quarter. iwx probes with a lower priority than iwlwifi to avoid breaking deployed configurations.

iwx supports legacy, HT and VHT rates and some users have reported significant throughputs in test. There remain many issues around rate selection and development is continuing.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Links:
Repository on Codeberg URL: https://codeberg.org/Honeyguide/freebsd-pinephonepro

Contact: Toby Kurien <toby@tobykurien.com>

The project to port FreeBSD over to the Pinephone Pro is progressing. The aim of this project is to step by step support components of the Pinephone Pro in FreeBSD so that the device one day might be usable as a highly mobile FreeBSD device.   In this quarter, console output to the screen was enabled, using EFI framebuffer support. This requires using a specific version of U-boot that sets up the EFI framebuffer, which FreeBSD’s kernel is then able to use for output while booting up. While this comes with limitations (like no hardware acceleration), it is a big step forward in making FreeBSD usable on the PinePhone Pro. To make it easier to try the current code changes out, a script was added to the repository to create a flashable image for booting from an SD card. This script downloads and patches a FreeBSD CURRENT mini-memstick image with the custom device tree and kernel. The resulting image can then be copied to an SD card using dd and booted up on the phone. See the repo for details.

Work on enabling the USB port was started but has stalled and help is needed, particularly from someone who understands the USB subsystem and can help move this forward. Currently, some USB controllers are detected by FreeBSD but no USB devices are visible, e.g. the internally connected modem. Help is also needed to port the WiFi driver from Linux, which would be the same driver needed for Raspberry Pi 3b+/4/5 (Broadcom 43455 wifi module connected via SDIO). Anyone wanting to assist can contact me by e-mail.

See the post on the FreeBSD Forum for more: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/porting-freebsd-to-pinephone-pro-help-needed.95948/

Sponsor: Honeyguide Group

Links:
Microsoft Azure article on FreeBSD wiki URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/MicrosoftAzure
Microsoft HyperV article on FreeBSD wiki URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/HyperV

Contact: Microsoft FreeBSD Integration Services Team <bsdic@microsoft.com>
Contact: freebsd-cloud Mailing List
Contact: The FreeBSD Azure Release Engineering Team <releng-azure@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Wei Hu <whu@FreeBSD.org>, <weh@microsoft.com>
Contact: Souradeep Chakrabarti <schakrabarti@microsoft.com>
Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <lwhsu@FreeBSD.org>

In this quarter, we have published the 13.5-RELEASE on Azure Marketplace.

Wei Hu continues bug fixing for FreeBSD MANA NIC device.

Work in progress tasks:

Open tasks:

Sponsor: Microsoft for people in Microsoft, and for resources for the rest
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation for everything else

Links:
Cloud Native Buildpacks (CNBs) URL: https://buildpacks.io/
GitHub Buildpacks repository URL: https://github.com/buildpacks/pack

Contact: Robert Gogolok <gogolok@gmail.com>

Cloud Native Buildpacks (CNBs) transform application source code into container images. Those images can run on any cloud. With buildpacks, organizations can concentrate the knowledge of container build best practices within a specialized team, instead of having application developers across the organization individually maintain their own Dockerfiles.

My goal for this quarter was to enable building the tool pack on FreeBSD.

With the following changes, it is now possible to compile pack on FreeBSD:

The next steps are:

Links:
EC2 Boot performance over time URL: https://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-ec2-boot-performance/

Contact: Colin Percival <cperciva@FreeBSD.org>

FreeBSD is available on both amd64 (Intel and AMD) and arm64 (Graviton) EC2 instances.

In the past quarter, considerable effort has gone into making "hot unplug" (e.g. detaching EBS volumes) work correctly, with several different fixes required on different instance types. This is expected to be fully functional in the upcoming FreeBSD 14.3.

Sponsor: Amazon
Sponsor: https://www.patreon.com/cperciva

Links:
FreeBSD Documentation Project URL: https://www.freebsd.org/docproj/url
FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer for New Contributors URL: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/fdp-primer/url
Documentation Engineering Team URL: https://www.freebsd.org/administration/#t-docengurl

Contact: FreeBSD Doceng Team <doceng@FreeBSD.org>

The doceng@ team is a body to handle some of the meta-project issues associated with the FreeBSD Documentation Project; for more information, see FreeBSD Doceng Team Charter.

Links:
FreeBSD wiki front page URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/FrontPage

Contact: Mark Linimon <linimon@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Wiki admin <wiki-admin@FreeBSD.org>

The wiki team needs new blood.

Since the last status report (2024Q3) forward progress has stalled. We have given out several dozen new accounts but most of the changes by these new authors have been to individual pages, not to the overall structure.

Mark Linimon still thinks the wiki could be a great resource if people were willing to put time into it. But right now, there are more complaints about stale data than there are new contributors and new ideas.

It is fair to say that right now, the wiki is on autopilot.

Link:
Project Repository URL: https://gitlab.com/alfix/freebsd-accessibility

Contact: FreeBSD Accessibility mailing list <freebsd-accessibility@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Alfonso Sabato Siciliano <asiciliano@FreeBSD.org>

The FreeBSD Foundation is supporting a series of projects to enhance accessibility for users with visual impairments.

FreeBSD offers several assistive technologies, thanks to the dedicated work of contributors and committers. An ongoing effort focuses on listing and documenting these accessibility features in a new handbook. Currently, the project centers on documenting features for blind, low-vision, and colorblind users, covering both PORTS and BASE system functionalities. For example: ports for screen magnification, screen readers (which aid users who cannot see the screen), as well as tools for adjusting colors in desktop environments. Additionally, accessibility features available in the BASE system to enhance visibility are also being documented with examples and tips: such as the ability to modify colors, fonts, and sizes in the system’s virtual console vt(4).

The new handbook will be organized into sections. The first section will serve as an introduction, while the second will delve into assistive technologies for visual accessibility. The repository mentioned above provides access to the handbook’s work-in-progress, including the code (in a fork of the FreeBSD "doc" repository, accessibility-book branch) and an HTML preview. Completion and review for publication are expected soon. Future plans include adding a Section 3 for hearing accessibility, a Section 4 for interaction accessibility, and a "Miscellaneous" chapter in Section 1 to cover general aspects. A discussion on this topic is available on the accessibility mailing list.

Furthermore, during this quarter, the port www/edbrowse has been updated. This is a fully command-line web browser designed for compatibility with screen readers. A solution is also being developed to facilitate easy color customization for TUI utilities in the BASE system, with the potential to set high contrast directly from the system installer bsdinstall(8).

Tips and new ideas are welcome. If possible, send reports to the FreeBSD Accessibility mailing list, to share and to track discussions in a public place.

Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation

Links:
Bhyvemgr URL: https://github.com/alonsobsd/bhyvemgr/

Contact: José Alonso Cárdenas Márquez <acm@FreeBSD.org>

Bhyvemgr is a bhyve management GUI written in Freepascal/Lazarus on FreeBSD. It needs a bunch of tools mostly installed on base system and some installed from ports/packages. The main goal is to be a desktop application focus on desktop user to easily and quickly setup and run virtual machines on FreeBSD hosts.

During this quarter, there were many bugfixes and improvements to Bhyvemgr.

These are some highlights that were added:

Bhyvemgr supports aarch64 only on 15-CURRENT and amd64 from FreeBSD 13.x to 15-CURRENT. Also, bhyvemgr can be compiled or installed from ports or pkg binaries with gtk2, qt5 or qt6 interface support.

A big thank to Entersekt for sponsor my work. Now I can use a RockPro64 (aarch64) for testing bhyvemgr on aarch64.

People interested in helping or supporting the project are welcome.

Current version: 1.5.0

TODO

Sponsor: Entersekt

Links:
AppJail on GitHub URL: https://github.com/DtxdF/AppJail
Director on GitHub URL: https://github.com/DtxdF/Director
Overlord on GitHub URL: https://github.com/DtxdF/Overlord

Contact: Jesús Daniel Colmenares Oviedo <DtxdF@disroot.org>

AppJail is an open-source BSD-3 licensed framework entirely written in POSIX shell and C to create isolated, portable and easy to deploy environments using FreeBSD jails that behaves like an application.

Director is a tool for running multi-jail environments on AppJail using a simple YAML specification. A Director file is used to define how one or more jails that make up your application are configured. Once you have a Director file, you can create and start your application with a single command: appjail-director up.

Overlord is a fast, distributed orchestrator for FreeBSD jails oriented to GitOps. You define a file with the service intended to run on your cluster and deployment takes seconds to minutes. This orchestration tool uses AppJail, Director and can even create VMs with vm-bhyve, but as its philosophy is "deploy using code" you can create a single file once and deploy many times. Through a tree chaining system Overlord deploys jails on connected systems sharing their resources almost infinitely. See the wiki for articles that use Overlord.

Sponsor: https://www.patreon.com/appjail

Links:
GCC Project URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/
GCC 11 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-11/
GCC 12 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-12/
GCC 13 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-13/
GCC 14 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-14/

Contact: Lorenzo Salvadore <salvadore@FreeBSD.org>

The exp-run to update GCC default version from 13 to 14 has been suspended. Indeed it has been noticed that FreeBSD 13.4 lacks symbols that are used by GCC 14 for linking, please see https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=284499#c0 for a more detailed explanation. The symbols are however already present in higher FreeBSD version. Since FreeBSD 13.4 is expected to go out of support soon (on June 30th), it has been decided that it is preferable to suspend the exp-run until then. I plan to put it back on track on July 1st.

In the meantime, work is being done on bugs. Bugs 276070 and 284441 have been fixed. At the time this report is written, some bugs are being discussed addressing special values of the CPUTYPE variable, please see for example 285711.

Links:
Add IPv6 support for address parsing and unparsing in ng_ksocket URL: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D48204

Contact: Seyed Pouria Mousavizadeh Tehrani <info@spmzt.net>

Support for IPv6 has been added to the ng_ksocket(4) module.

The ng_ksocket node type allows users to open a socket inside the kernel and have it appear as a netgraph node. While attempting to export traffic flow using ng_netflow(4), I recognized the need for IPv6 implementation within the ng_ksocket module.

There was a previous attempt to add IPv6 support to the ng_ksocket module (see Phabricator review D23788).

After looking into those changes, I decided to complete the efforts and also add validation to comply with standards.

The result is now available as an updated review on Phabricator.

Now, we can create IPv6 sockets using the ksocket module directly within the netgraph framework. After my changes, I was able to export my traffic flows directly using netgraph without the need to enable IPv4 on my network links.

Links:
KDE/FreeBSD initiative URL: https://freebsd.kde.org/
FreeBSD — KDE Community Wiki URL: https://community.kde.org/FreeBSD

Contact: KDE on FreeBSD Mailing List <kde@FreeBSD.org>

The KDE on FreeBSD project packages CMake, Qt, and software from the KDE Community, for the FreeBSD ports tree. The software includes a full desktop environment called KDE Plasma (for both X11 and Wayland) and hundreds of applications that can be used on any FreeBSD machine. The KDE team is part of desktop@, building the software stack to make FreeBSD beautiful and usable as a daily driver graphical desktop workstation.

Links:
OpenBGPD 8.8 released URL: https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250207192657
Fix crash on interface destroy URL: https://github.com/openbgpd-portable/openbgpd-portable/pull/93

Contact: Seyed Pouria Mousavizadeh Tehrani <info@spmzt.net>

This work fixes FIB handling on FreeBSD when an interface is destroyed.

I encountered this issue on one of our OpenBGPd-enabled FreeBSD servers, where destroying an interface caused all our BGP sessions to drop due to a crash in OpenBGPd.

I decided to debug the issue and fix the problem; the results can be found in this GitHub pull request.

Now, we can safely create or destroy virtual or cloned interfaces alongside OpenBGPd without worrying about our BGP sessions.

Links:
Project description URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/project/improving-openjdk-on-freebsd/
Project repository URL: https://github.com/freebsd/openjdk

Contact:
Harald Eilertsen <haraldei@freebsdfoundation.org>
FreeBSD Java mailing list <freebsd-java@lists.freebsd.org>

The main goal of this project is to improve OpenJDK support on FreeBSD/amd64 and FreeBSD/arm64.

Java is an important runtime environment for many high performance, critical enterprise systems. Making sure Java based applications run correctly and efficiently on FreeBSD is important to ensure that FreeBSD will continue to be a viable and attractive platform for enterprises, as well as businesses and organizations of all sizes.

We released a port for OpenJDK 23 for FreeBSD at the very end of last year, and have since then fixed issues with font management and some other minor improvements. We have also been following the development of OpenJDK 24 closely, and are just finishing a port for it that should be available by the time this status update is published.

In parallel with porting OpenJDK 24 work has been ongoing on moving the BSD port also to the mainline OpenJDK development tree, and the first patches have been accepted upstream. Currently the focus is on reviving the OpenJDK BSD port project, as well as getting a separate project repository set up under it.

A lot of the work of this quarter has gone into cleaning up the patches of the BSD port based on the development in the upstream mainline and jdk24 branches. Also a lot of time has been spent on improving the results of the built in test suites (jtreg and gtest) on FreeBSD. This has involved both changes to the tests themselves, but also various parts of the low level OpenJDK code. More work is needed to get the final few tests passing, especially on Aarch64, but compared to previous OpenJDK releases on FreeBSD the results have been improving.

Finally, a significant amount of time has been spent on communicating and discussing how to approach the goal of integrating the BSD support in the mainline OpenJDK codebase. The OpenJDK project has been very open, welcoming and supportive of the effort, and seems more than willing to help make this happen in a good way.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Links:
Wazuh URL: https://www.wazuh.com/

Contact: José Alonso Cárdenas Márquez <acm@FreeBSD.org>

Wazuh is a free and open source platform used for threat prevention, detection, and response. It is capable of protecting workloads across on-premises, virtualized, containerized, and cloud-based environments.

Wazuh solution consists of an endpoint security agent, deployed to the monitored systems, and a management server, which collects and analyzes data gathered by the agents. Besides, Wazuh has been fully integrated with the Elastic Stack or OpenSearch Stack, providing a search engine and data visualization tool that allows users to navigate through their security alerts.

During this quarter, there were many bugfixes and improvements to wazuh ports.

A quickly Wazuh jail installation to test it can be done using Wazuh AppJail-Makejails.

A big thank to Entersekt for sponsor my work. Now I can use a RockPro64 (aarch64) for Wazuh testing/packaging.

People interested in helping with the project are welcome.

Current version: 4.11.0

TODO

Sponsor: Entersekt

Chinese FreeBSD Community (CFC) URL: https://bsdcn.org/

Community member count: QQ group 249 members, WeChat group 175 members

Links:
Discord Server URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Discord/DiscordServer

Contact: Setesh Strong <setesh.strong@gmail.com>

The FreeBSD Community Discord server has grown to over 5.3K members, with over 3K members active in the last month. To help support our community’s health and pursue growth in project contribution and engagement, the BSDlabs group developed the Helper program, more than two years ago now. After several phases of growth, we have reached the point where the team has thrived enough that it has become necessary to divide it into three distinct functional teams.

Our community health and culture helpers (@moderators) are led by Alexander Vereeken. Our newcomer onboarding and training helpers (@mentors) are led by Alexander Ziaee. Our event organizer and outreach helpers (@organizers) are led by Ahmad Abdulla.

Since the creation of the new teams, all of our helpers have been hard at work, driving growth within the areas of their remit within the program. We are proud to share some of the outcomes of their efforts with you, as well as several of the areas of focus and objectives we will tackle in the upcoming quarter.

Antranig Vartanian led the development of our recurring series of Ask the Greybeards AMAs (Ask Me Anything) with the support of other veteran sysadmins and developers. This recurring event provides an opportunity for users and those still gaining mastery of our platform to meet and learn from the depth of experience our community offers. Special thanks to Michael Dexter and many others for their engagement and support of this event. Your expertise and skills help nurture the future of our ecosystem.

Significant progress into onboarding new contributors has occurred through the efforts of the newcomer helper team under Alexander Ziaee’s leadership. His work has brought newly increased activity to our docs tree.

At the request of Warner Losh, we have created a workspace for #google-summer-of-code on the server. This space provides a location for those engaged with GSoC to ask questions and receive feedback and assistance. In further pursuit of our desire to bridge between silos, we are in the process of establishing a matterbridge bot. This will serve to connect with the #freebsd-gsoc IRC channel, as well as other potential links in the future with FreeBSD’s IRC and Matrix communities.

We are proud to welcome developers working on FreeBSD’s wifi stack to our server. We have created the #wifi-hacking workspace to facilitate their efforts. Special thanks to Adrian Chadd for bringing this opportunity to us, and leading the way in the thriving activity in this workspace.

We are currently in the process of developing our new Co-op Study Club, driven by the leadership of Jesper Schmitz Mouridsen. This will provide members of our community with the opportunity to build their skills in side-by-side study, under the guidance of our newcomer helper team. As a project driven study group, it will develop our members’ passions into strengths, while building comfort and familiarity with contributing to the project via porting, src development, and documentation testing and patching. Experienced mentorship will be on hand to provide learning resources for those who join this study group, answer questions that cannot be answered by peer support, and aiding in overcoming blockers. Our objective is to provide a roadmap and environment for achieving excellence as both developers and FreeBSD contributors.

Thanks to the efforts of community helper Jessica Hawkwell, with the support of events team leader Ahmad Abdulla, we have seen the addition of a #foss-ecosystem channel. This development marks the beginning of the process of bridging between the various silos, both within the FreeBSD community, and in the larger FOSS ecosystem. If you want us to add a link to your segment of the community and it is not already contained in our directory in this channel, please reach out to us.

In addition to the existing tools afforded by Discord for our server, we are currently in the process of upgrading and expanding our infrastructure. This effort focuses on ensuring the availability of Discord bot infrastructure and tooling, as well as restoring etherpad and dpaste functionality for collaboration. We seek to improve support for all of the dedicated developers within the workspaces of our community.

If you are a member of the FreeBSD ecosystem and have not yet connected to our Discord presence, we invite you to do so via the invite link available on the wiki at the top of this report. If you have experience or passion for any of the areas of our current helper teams, or a passion for Discord bot infrastructure development, we would love to have you on our teams. We invite you to contact us via the above contact email, or by sending a DM on Discord (@setesh.strong).

Links:
GitHub URL: https://github.com/christian-moerz/framework-kmod
Bugzilla URL: https://bugs.freebsd.org/285448

Contact: Chris Moerz <freebsd@ny-central.org>

The development of the framework-kmod kernel module originated from discussions and collaborative efforts within the FreeBSD Laptop and Desktop Workgroup (LDWG). This module addresses a specific need for dynamic screen dimming functionality, particularly suited for environments where full-featured desktop environments are not in use.

The primary feature of the framework-kmod kernel module is to dynamically dim the screen when the computer is not in use and to restore brightness upon detecting user activity. This functionality is designed to enhance power efficiency and user experience, especially in minimalistic setups.

By default, the module dims the screen very aggressively, dimming it after approximately one second of inactivity. This behavior ensures immediate power savings but may need adjustment based on user preferences. The module’s settings can be customized through sysctls, allowing users to tailor the behavior to their needs. Users can set different brightness levels for the dimmed and bright states, adjust the length of time that needs to pass without any input signal before dimming the screen, and apply different settings depending on whether the laptop is running on a power outlet or battery. Brightness levels can also be adjusted through the use of the keyboard’s brightness control keys.

The module tracks input signals through evdev(4). If no input is detected within the set timeout period, the screen brightness is reduced. Upon detecting user input, the brightness is immediately restored to the previous level. The module requires drm-kmod drivers to be loaded in advance, ensuring compatibility with the necessary graphics drivers.

The framework-kmod is not a general-purpose screen dimming driver. It is specifically designed for use with tty consoles or simple window managers like suckless' dwm or i3. Users of full-featured desktop environments like Gnome or KDE are advised to use the built-in screen dimming functions provided by those environments.

The development of this module was driven by the needs identified during LDWG calls, highlighting the collaborative nature of the workgroup. A port of the framework-kmod has been submitted, making it accessible for broader use and further development by the FreeBSD community.

Links:
Desktop mailing list URL: https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-desktop/
Wiki Page URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/LaptopDesktopWorkingGroup
YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9SdSkfqH9U&list=PLugwS7L7NMXwHlYfDKNMXwJrjFrYVA9ca

Contact: Chris Moerz <freebsd@ny-central.org>

The FreeBSD Laptop and Desktop Workgroup (LDWG) has continued its dedicated efforts throughout the first quarter.

LDWG holds monthly meetings to discuss the state of FreeBSD on laptops and desktops and to review progress. These meetings are scheduled every second Monday at 5 PM UTC. The next meeting is set for Wednesday, May 14, at 10 AM PST / 1 PM EDT / 5 PM UTC.

A survey has been initiated to explore alternative calling options that would enable participants from APAC regions to join the calls more conveniently.

All calls are now available on YouTube, allowing broader access for interested parties to stay updated on the group’s activities.

The group’s participants have made notable advancements in several areas:

All activities are meticulously documented on the group’s worksheet. LDWG encourages anyone interested in contributing to add their name to the worksheet. If there is any planned or ongoing work, participants are welcome to include it in the worksheet.

The established LDWG’s call agenda includes:

LDWG is working to improve the call’s agenda in collaboration with the Enterprise Working Group. Both groups face the challenge of having more areas of interest and work streams than available resources. Therefore, a process is being developed to ensure that available time is spent on matters that have the required resources and attention.

The group is open to anyone interested in the matter. We welcome anyone who wants to join the group and/or calls to do so.

Hope to see you there!

Links:
Pot organization on GitHub URL: https://github.com/bsdpot

Contact: Luca Pizzamiglio (Pot) <pizzamig@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Bretton Vine (Potluck) <bv@honeyguide.eu>
Contact: Michael Gmelin (Potman) <grembo@FreeBSD.org>

Pot is a jail management tool that also supports orchestration through Nomad. Potluck aims to be to FreeBSD and Pot what Dockerhub is to Linux and Docker: a repository of Pot flavours and complete container images for usage with Pot and in many cases Nomad.

During this quarter, there was a new Pot release 0.16.1 which includes a number of minor fixes. The FreeBSD port was updated accordingly.

Potluck got a new OnlyOffice Documentserver image that can be used together with the Nextcloud image. Additionally, a large number of images have received improvements and bug fixes again, e.g. Nextcloud Spreed, Grafana, Vault or Consul and all images have been rebuilt for an updated base image.

Last not least, we are in the process of moving the main repository to Codeberg with GitHub acting as a mirror.

As always, feedback and patches are welcome.

Sponsors: Nikulipe UAB, Honeyguide Group