FreeBSD Status Report Third Quarter 2024

Here is the third 2024 status report, with 32 entries.

Unfortunately we are late this quarter, just like last quarter. As our readers know, many FreeBSD contributors are volunteers, so it is natural that less important deadlines like the status reports ones are not always met. Indeed, if you are not a FreeBSD contributor yet, please consider joining us: you could help lighten someone’s burden while learning new skills, working side by side with developers all over the world.

Have a nice read.

Lorenzo Salvadore, on behalf of the Status Team.

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A rendered version of this report is available here: https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2024-07-2024-09/

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Table of Contents

• FreeBSD Team Reports
□ FreeBSD Core Team
□ FreeBSD Foundation
□ FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
□ Continuous Integration
□ Ports Collection
□ Bugmeister Team
□ FreeBSD Samba Team
• Projects
□ Audio Stack Improvements
□ A bhyve management GUI written in Freepascal/Lazarus
□ Changes to dhclient to speed up the FreeBSD boot process
□ Capsicum and Bhyve Code Audit
□ Endpoint-Independent NAT
□ Kyua Jail Support
□ Linux Source Compatibility Wiki page
• Userland
□ Service jails — Automatic jailing of rc.d services
□ Userspace UFS Driver (fuse-ufs)
• Kernel
□ FreeBSD V4L2 & kernel USB Video Class driver
□ mac_do(4), setcred(2), mdo(1)
□ Scheduling Priorities: 256-queue Runqueues Sub-Project
□ Wireless Update
□ VirtIO Sockets and AF_VSOCK support
• Architectures
□ Pinephone Pro Support
□ SIMD enhancements for aarch64
• Cloud
□ FreeBSD on Microsoft HyperV and Azure
□ FreeBSD on EC2
□ OpenStack on FreeBSD
• Documentation
□ Documentation Engineering Team
□ FreeBSD Wiki
□ The FreeBSD Russian Documentation Project
• Ports
□ GCC on FreeBSD
□ Freepascal and Lazarus on FreeBSD aarch64
• Third Party Projects
□ Containers and FreeBSD: Pot, Potluck and Potman

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FreeBSD Team Reports

Entries from the various official and semi-official teams, as found in the Administration Page.

FreeBSD Core Team

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

The FreeBSD Core Team is the governing body of FreeBSD.

Core welcomes René Ladan (rene@) as their new secretary.

Liaisons

Core selected new liaisons for the various teams among themselves:

• bugmeister: glebius

• ci: olivier

• clusteradm: mat

• doceng: lwhsu

• foundation: hrs

• portmgr: tcberner

• re: dch

• secteam: allanjude

• srcmgr: glebius

DevSummit 202409

• The Core Team was almost fully present at EuroBSDCon 2024 in Dublin. The
following people were present: allanjude, dch, glebius, hrs, lwhsu, mat,
olivier, rene

• Slides are available at https://wiki.freebsd.org/DevSummit/202409

• Core met with the FreeBSD Foundation to have their periodic meeting and
take the change to do it in face-to-face. Topics included improving
alignment and communications between the two groups and the community.

New support timeline for FreeBSD releases

• Core approves the proposal by re@ to reduce the support timeline for
FreeBSD releases from five to four years, after which the release is
supported on a best-effort basis. This proposal is also backed by portmgr
and secteam.

srcmgr

• Core helped in forming a new srcmgr team. Their charter is not fully set in
stone yet, it can be adjusted if needed in 6-12 months from now.

• Nominations for new src commit bits should from now on be sent to srcmgr@
instead of core@

• A lurker program is suggested to keep an influx of new members.

• Core announced srcmgr during DevSummit 202409 and sent a follow-up to
developers@ on September 29.

Commit bits

• Core welcomes Igor Ostapenko (igoro) as a new src committer.

• Core extended the text that the grim reaper script sends to include ways on
how to get commit bits of developers re-activated.

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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 supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and worldwide community, and helping to advance the state of FreeBSD. We do this in both technical and non-technical ways. We are 100% supported by donations from individuals and corporations and those investments help us fund the:

• Software development projects to implement features and functionality in
FreeBSD

• Sponsor and organize conferences and developer summits to provide
collaborative opportunities and promote FreeBSD

• Purchase and support of hardware to improve and maintain FreeBSD
infrastructure

• Resources to improve security, quality assurance, and continuous
integration efforts

• Materials and staff needed to promote, educate, and advocate for FreeBSD

• Collaboration between commercial vendors and FreeBSD developers

• Representation of the FreeBSD Project in executing contracts, license
agreements, and other legal arrangements that require a recognized legal
entity

Even though the summer months tend to be slower, we accomplished a lot of work and you will see that in our Q3 report! Some highlights include raising over $135,000 from individual donors, and kicking off two major projects. First, thanks to a large investment from the Sovereign Tech Fund, we will be doing even more to improve our infrastructure. Second, thanks to a large investment by Quantum Leap Research and the Foundation, we will be working to accelerate a FreeBSD on Modern Laptops project. We also continued work on the Alpha-Omega funded project, hired a userland software developer, and opened a job position for a solutions specialist.

As you will see below, spreading the word about FreeBSD through advocacy and community is still an important part of our mission. Over the summer, we sponsored EuroBSDCon, and the upcoming FreeBSD and OpenZFS Summits, and provided travel grants to around eight FreeBSD contributors to attend EuroBSDCon. Our advocacy team was busy producing content that promotes the benefits and strengths of FreeBSD, why companies are using FreeBSD, and why you should use FreeBSD if you care about security. We also promoted work within the Project and Foundation on social media.

During EuroBSDCon, Foundation and Core Team members met to discuss Core’s questions as they navigate what they want to accomplish during their term. We identified 2 key areas to work on in the near term:

1. Financial reporting transparency - Break out operating system improvements
spending in our quarterly reports. We are working with our accountant so
that starting in 2025, we can report how much we are spending on certain
projects and key areas, like laptop, enterprise, security…​ In the
meantime, we will add notes to our financial reports that document which
projects are included in the OS Improvement expense category. We are aware
that we have not posted financials this year. Our accounting team is
introducing us to improved reporting, while integrating our books into a
new accounting system.

2. The projects we are funding are not mentioned on the Project’s website. We
document these on our website, because we want to show our donors where
their financial contributions are being spent. We recognize that we need to
also add documentation about these projects on FreeBSD.org, so we will
investigate how to better connect our software development work with the
Project.

We are funding a lot of software development work to advance, improve, and keep FreeBSD secure. We received funding for some of this work, but most of it is being funded by your donations and our investments. Our purpose is to focus on the long-term sustainability of FreeBSD. To do this, we need more companies stepping in to help fund our efforts. Our investments will only carry on this work for a year or two at most. If your company relies on 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/.

OS Improvements

During the third quarter of 2024, 263 src, 37 ports, and 11 doc tree commits identified The FreeBSD Foundation as a sponsor.

Several members of the FreeBSD Foundation’s development team attended the FreeBSD Developer Summit in Dublin, Ireland prior to EuroBSDCon 2024. You can watch a video of the Hello From the Foundation talk to open the Summit, when:

• Deb Goodkin introduced the FreeBSD Foundation

• Joe Mingrone introduced members of the development team and said a few
words about FreeBSD’s 2024 Google Summer Code campaign

• Ed Maste described some of the current or recently completed Foundation
development projects.

Alice Sowerby, who recently began supporting the Foundation in Technical Program Management role, gave a talk to introduce the CHAOSS (Community Health Analytics for Open Source Software) project and how to start collecting and working with community health metrics.

The Foundation, along with new funding and investment partners, is currently supporting four major projects.

• The first, partially funded by Alpha-Omega, is to improve FreeBSD security.
As part of this effort, the Foundation enlisted Synacktiv to run a code
audit on two significant subsystems: bhyve and Capsicum. For details, refer
to the dedicated Capsicum and Bhyve Code Audit report entry.

• The second project, jointly funded by AMD and the Foundation, is to develop
an AMD IOMMU driver for FreeBSD. The impetus for the project was to better
support large core AMD systems. However, the driver will be useful in
different scenarios when interrupt remapping is required. The work is
nearing completion, and developer Konstantin Belousov is testing the driver
on some of AMD’s large-core-count systems before committing.

• The third project, backed by an investment from the Sovereign Tech Fund, is
to improve FreeBSD through five key sub-projects:

□ Zero Trust Builds: Enhance tooling and processes

□ CI/CD Automation: Streamline software delivery and operations

□ Reduce Technical Debt: Implement tools and processes to keep technical
debt low

□ Security Controls: Modernize and extend security artifacts, including
the FreeBSD Ports and Package Collection, to assist with regulatory
compliance

□ SBOM Improvements: Enhance and implement new tooling and processes for
FreeBSD SBOM

To reduce technical debt, we have partnered with Bitergia to analyze and
assess our open Bugzilla bugs. By implementing improved issue management
processes and establishing open-source tooling for the long term, our goal
is to achieve and sustain a manageable bug backlog. The remaining four
sub-projects will begin in 2025.

• The fourth project, which will be funded by both the Foundation and Quantum
Leap Research, is to improve FreeBSD laptop usability. We have begun (or
will soon start) supporting developers working in the following areas:

□ Enhanced wireless chipset support: Expanding chipset compatibility to
ensure reliable wireless connectivity and support for newer wireless
standards.

□ Power management: Implementing modern power-saving states (such as
s2idle and s0ix) to improve battery life and energy efficiency.

□ Graphics enhancements: Improving support for Intel and AMD graphics by
integrating the latest DRM drivers.

□ Audio improvements: Enhancing audio routing, headphone switching, and
digital microphone (DMIC) functionality for a more user-friendly
multimedia experience.

□ Laptop-specific hardware features: Addressing specialty buttons,
touchpad gestures, and other unique hardware components found in modern
laptops.

FreeBSD completed our 20th consecutive year participating in Google Summer of Code. The 11 projects for this summer are now complete; nine passed.

The Foundation has been providing project management support for the FreeBSD Open Container Initiative (OCI) Working Group, with Alice Sowerby hosting the bi-weekly meeting, and running the recent Podman on FreeBSD testing project. The OCI develops open industry standards for cloud native container formats and runtimes, ensuring platform consistency. The FreeBSD OCI Working Group is defining these standards for FreeBSD, with implementations using jails and potentially lightweight VMs with bhyve. Refer to the Foundation’s OCI Container
Support Project page for details.

In other Foundation news:

• Isaac Freund joined the Foundation’s development team as a Userland
Developer. As the lead developer of the River Wayland Compositor and a
member of the Core Zig Team, we are excited about the experience Isaac will
be bringing to FreeBSD.

• Alfonso Sabato Siciliano is working on a Vision Accessibility Subsystem for
blind, low-vision, and color blind users. New features will include a
Braille refreshable display framework, a communication channel for the
virtual terminal console, a speech synthesizer, high-contrast TUI
utilities, and an accessibility book to document assistive technologies
available on FreeBSD.

• Tom Jones, completed his work with RGNets to port the Vector Packet
Processor (VPP), a layer 2-4 multi-platform network stack in userspace, to
FreeBSD. You can read about Tom’s next project to support full-cone NAT for
FreeBSD firewalls in his Endpoint-Independent NAT report entry.

• Christos Margiolis continued to improve FreeBSD’s audio stack and provide
audio developers with useful tools and frameworks to facilitate sound
development on FreeBSD. Refer to the Audio Stack Improvements entry for the
latest news.

• Olivier Certner has two entries in this report. You can read about his
latest work in the Scheduling Priorities: 256-queue Runqueues Sub-Project
and mac_do(4), setcred(2), mdo(1) report entries.

• Bjoern Zeeb continued to improve wireless networking on FreeBSD. You can
read the latest news in Bjoern’s Wireless Update entry.

• Philip Paeps continued work on a contract to modernize the FreeBSD cluster.

• Chih-Hsin Chang has continued work to port OpenStack components so that the
cloud computing platform can be run on FreeBSD hosts. Refer to the
OpenStack on FreeBSD entry for the latest information.

• Other members of the Foundation’s technology team contributed to FreeBSD
development efforts. For example:

□ Mitchell Horne committed work for RISC-V, including adding support for
the Supervisor-mode: Page-Based Memory Types (Svpbmt) extension

□ Ed Maste removed the deprecated mergemaster tool in favor of etcupdate
(8) for updating files not managed by install world

□ Joe Mingrone updated our base libpcap and tcpdump(1)

□ Li-Wen Hsu kept our Jenkins port tracking the latest upstream versions
with a number of port updates.

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.

Advocacy

During the third quarter of 2024, we continued growing our efforts to drive awareness, advocate for the project, highlight users, and bring educational content to the FreeBSD community. Below are some of those efforts.

• Presented at the EuroBSDcon 2024 FreeBSD Developer Summit. Slides and the
Live stream are now available.

• Attended and exhibited at EuroBSDCon 2024. The Foundation was again a
Silver Sponsor.

• Finalized our Bronze Sponsorship of the OpenZFS User and Developer Summit

• Began planning the Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit taking place November 7-8, 2024
in San Jose, CA. The program is now available and registration is open.

• Updated the community on the new release schedule: Navigating FreeBSD’s New
Quarterly and Biennial Release Schedule

• Announced: New CIS® FreeBSD 14 Benchmark: Secure Your Systems with
Expert-Guided Best Practices

• Shared more information about the Sovereign Tech Fund’s investment in the
Foundation: Sovereign Tech Fund to Invest €686,400 in FreeBSD
Infrastructure Modernization

• Announced the joint investment by Quantum Leap Research and FreeBSD
Foundation to Improve Laptop Support and Usability and more on why we are
making this investment.

• Published additional blogs including:

□ FreeBSD Ports and Packages: What you need to know

□ Why You Should Use FreeBSD

□ Enhancing Memory Safety in Programming: Insights from the FreeBSD
Vendor Summit

□ FreeBSD as a Platform for Your Future Technology

□ Celebrating FreeBSD: Insights from Deb Goodkin

• Participated in the following contributed articles, interviews and
podcasts:

□ Get to Know: Deb Goodkin, Executive Director, FreeBSD Foundation

□ All Things Open Blog: Unlocking the Potential of FreeBSD

□ Why Open Source Can Be the Perfect Place for New Developers – and How
to Get Started, with Deb Goodkin from the FreeBSD Foundation

□ Steady in a shifting Open Source world: FreeBSD’s enduring stability

□ Apple’s Open Source Roots: The BSD Heritage Behind macOS and iOS

• Published the July 2024, August 2024, and September 2024 FreeBSD Foundation
Updates.

• Released the May/June 2024 and July/August 2024 issues of the FreeBSD
Journal with HTML versions of the articles.

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!

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FreeBSD Release Engineering Team

Links:
FreeBSD 13.4-RELEASE announcement URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.4R/announce/
FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE schedule URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.2R/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 13.4-RELEASE, leading to the final RELEASE build and announcement in September. Planning has started for the upcoming 14.2-RELEASE cycle.

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

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Continuous Integration

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 fourth quarter of 2024, 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:

• Update main and stable/14 build environment to 14.1-RELEASE

Work in progress tasks:

• Improving the src/tests/ci work to support running test suites

• Merging Pre-commit CI with CIRRUS-CI

• Designing and implementing pre-commit CI building and testing and pull/
merge-request based system (to support the workflow working group)

• Proof of concept system is in progress.

• Designing and implementing use of CI cluster to build release artifacts as
release engineering does, starting with snapshot builds

• Simplifying CI/test environment setting up for contributors and developers

• Setting up the CI stage environment and putting the experimental jobs on it

• Redesigning the hardware test lab and adding more hardware for testing

Open or queued tasks:

• Collecting and sorting CI tasks and ideas

• Setting up public network access for the VM guest running tests

• Implementing use of bare-metal hardware to run test suites

• Adding drm ports building tests against -CURRENT

• Helping more software get FreeBSD support in its CI pipeline (Wiki pages:
3rdPartySoftwareCI, HostedCI)

• Working with hosted CI providers to have better FreeBSD support

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

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

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Ports Collection

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.

According to INDEX, there are currently 36,504 ports in the Ports Collection. There are currently ~3,379 open ports PRs. The last quarter saw 11,594 commits by 154 committers on the main branch and 832 commits by 78 committers on the 2024Q3 branch. Compared to last quarter, this means a slight increase in the number of commits on the main branch (from 10,525) and about half of the backports to the quarterly branch (compared to 1,771). The number of ports also increased (up from 32,471).

The most active committers to main were:

• 5133 sunpoet@FreeBSD.org

• 1262 yuri@FreeBSD.org

• 375 jbeich@FreeBSD.org

• 357 vvd@FreeBSD.org

• 331 bofh@FreeBSD.org

• 192 uzsolt@FreeBSD.org

• 185 eduardo@FreeBSD.org

• 172 diizzy@FreeBSD.org

• 148 mfechner@FreeBSD.org

• 131 arrowd@FreeBSD.org

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

• Default version of PostgreSQL switched to 16

• chromium updated from 126.0.6478.126 to 129.0.6668.100

• firefox updated from 127.0.2 to 131.0-rc1

• firefox-esr updated from 115.9.1 to 128.3.0-rc1

• rust updated from 1.79.0 to 1.81.0

• sdl2 updated from 2.30.3 to 2.30.7

• wlroots updated from 0.17.4 to 0.18.1

• wine-devel updated from 9.4 to 9.16

• qt5 updated from 5.15.14 to 5.15.15

• qt6 updated from 6.7.2 to 6.7.3

• plasma6 updated from 6.1.1 to 6.1.2

During the last quarter, pkgmgr@ ran 24 exp-runs to test various ports upgrades, updates to default versions of ports, and base system changes.

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Bugmeister Team

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

Contact: Bugmeister <bugmeister@FreeBSD.org>

Charts and graphs

Ed Maste from the FreeBSD Foundation has expressed an interest in seeing useful charts and graphs added to Bugzilla. The few that we have now are not very informative. Many of the interesting Bugzilla queries for them have been documented, but the information there is really dense.

If you are interested in working on this task, contact Ed directly.

Bugzilla version upgrade

Recently, upstream Bugzilla has released 5.0.4.1, which is a minor bugfix release. Preliminary work suggests that the update will be unobtrusive. Work is continuing.

PR statistics

PRs continue to come in and get triaged. Over the longer term, we are nearly at steady-state.

The number of PRs over the past quarter (and year) has fluctuated. Vladimir Druzenko pointed out that the number dropped by around 200 during 2023Q4. (We have not done the data analysis to find out why that was.) However, slowly, the number has come back to where it was a year ago. But we do seem to be closing incoming PRs more quickly these days. For reference:

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/page.cgi?id=dashboard.html&days=365

The overall number of PRs remains at slightly over 11,600. We do have a lot of technical debt.

Bugmeister is also working towards restarting the Bugathons.

Acknowledgements

Bugmeister would like to thank a number of people who have assisted with bugbusting, including new triagers Alexander Vereeken, Alexander Ziaee, and Frederick Lee.

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FreeBSD Samba Team

Links:
FreeBSD Samba Team Wiki URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Samba
Samba Homepage URL: https://www.samba.org/

Contact: FreeBSD Samba Team <samba@FreeBSD.org>

Samba provides secure, stable and fast file and print services for all clients using the SMB/CIFS protocol. It is an important component to seamlessly integrate FreeBSD/Linux/Unix Servers and Desktops into Active Directory environments. It can function both as a domain controller or as a regular domain member.

The new FreeBSD Samba Team was created to better coordinate maintenance efforts of the Samba ports and its dependencies, in particular:

• databases/ldb22

• databases/ldb25

• databases/ldb28

• databases/tdb

• devel/talloc

• devel/tevent

• net/samba416

• net/samba419

Notable changes in the last quarter include:

• Creation of the FreeBSD Samba Team by Timur Bakeyev, Xavier Beaudouin,
Yasuhiro Kimura, Mateusz Piotrowski, and Mikaël Urankar.

• Added SAMBA_LDB_PORT to Mk/Uses/samba.mk (sponsored by Klara, Inc.)

• Switching net/samba419 to use external dependencies by default instead of
vendoring (sponsored by Klara, Inc.)

• Updating net/samba419 to 4.19.8

Currently, the FreeBSD Samba team is coordinating efforts in the following areas:

• Switching the default version of Samba from 4.16 to 4.19 (Bugzilla PR#
280769).

• Current blockers are:

• Broken fruit:posix_rename = yes (Bugzilla PR#281360)

• Broken replication in Samba 4.19.8_1 (Bugzilla PR#281672)

• Adding Samba 4.20 to the ports tree (Bugzilla PR#280533)

• Adding Samba 4.21 to the ports tree (Bugzilla PR#281262)

Testing and community contributions are welcome, please reach out on Bugzilla or via the team email.

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Projects

Projects that span multiple categories, from the kernel and userspace to the Ports Collection or external projects.

Audio Stack Improvements

Contact: Christos Margiolis <christos@FreeBSD.org>

The FreeBSD audio stack is one of those fields that does not attract the same attention and development as others do, since it has been left largely unmaintained, and, although high in quality, there is still room for improvement — from lack of audio development frameworks, to missing userland
utilities and kernel driver-related bugs. This project is meant to touch on all those areas, and as such, is more of a general improvement project, than an implementation of a specific feature.

Important work since last report:

• Several sound(4) fixes.

• Wrote mixer(8) and sound(4) tests.

• mixer(8): Implement hot-swapping

• audio(8): Initial revision

• sound: Implement dummy driver

• Improved and added sound examples.

• mididump(1): Initial revision

• virtual_oss patches.

• Gave a talk at the 09/2024 DevSummit in Dublin, Ireland.

Future work includes:

• More bug fixes and improvements.

• Finalize and commit of audio(8) and mididump(1).

• Implement a generic MIDI layer, similar to pcm/, and improve/modernize the
MIDI codebase in general.

• Implement a bluetooth device management utility.


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