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Infrastructure Modernization

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.

Q4 update

• Work Package A: Technical Debt reduction. The Foundation collaborated with
the Source Management team to commission and deploy a number of dashboards
that characterize the bug backlog for the FreeBSD Project. These were
created to the team’s specifications by our project partner, Bitergia, who
used an open source tool called GrimoireLab to create the dashboards.
Foundation staff have hosted the dashboards on a FreeBSD deployment and
they can be seen at https://grimoire.freebsd.org/. More information about
the dashboards can be found at https://github.com/freebsd/grimoire.

The Source Management team has also used these dashboards to support their
new, evolving approach to bug triage and it has been included as a key tool
for collaborative bug-squashing events.

• Work Package B: Zero Trust Builds, and Work Package C: CI/CD Automation.
The Foundation collaborated with various key management and administration
teams within the FreeBSD Project to co-create the details of the scope for
these two projects. They are scheduled to start in January and will
conclude in Q2/3.

• Work Package D: Security Controls in Ports and Packages, and Work Package
E: Improve Software Bill of Materials (SBOM). These have not started yet as
they are scheduled for February and March starts respectively.

Commissioning body: Sovereign Tech Agency

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Laptop Support and Usability Improvements Project

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

The project began in Q4 of 2024 and is funded by the FreeBSD Foundation and Quantum Leap Research. It has a budget of $750,000, which will be used over one to two years. The goal is to improve key features like WiFi, audio usability, suspend and resume functions, graphics, and Bluetooth. The team will also create clear documentation and step-by-step guides to help people use the new features.

Q4 Update

• The Foundation initiated the project, created a public roadmap, and
allocated contractors to relevant workstreams. December was the first
monthly iteration of development, covering:

□ Implement S0ix low power states

□ Put a VM into hibernation

□ Create a list of supported laptops

□ Create a translation layer for Linux drivers on FreeBSD

□ Create a list of supported window environments

□ wireless_update,POC driver for Intel WiFi interfaces (based on OpenBSD/
Haiku)

□ Resolve tech debt in pkg to enable PkgBase development

□ Document how to update graphic drivers

□ Implement s2idle low power state

□ Bring in camera code donation from Dell

• The FreeBSD project started a community group called the "Laptop and
Desktop Working Group" (LDWG) to help people working on Laptop- and
Desktop-related projects to connect and collaborate with others in the
community working on similar efforts. The group held its first monthly
meeting in December 2024. To stay updated on LDWG activities, you can join
the Desktop mailing list.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
Sponsor: Quantum Leap Research

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Security engineering at the FreeBSD Foundation

Links:
FreeBSD Foundation Releases Bhyve and Capsicum Security Audit Funded by Alpha-Omega Project URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/latest-news/
freebsd-foundation-releases-bhyve-and-capsicum-security-audit-funded-by-alpha-omega-project
/
How FreeBSD security audits have improved our security culture URL: https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6152-how-freebsd-security-audits-have-improved-our-security-culture
/
Home of the ORC WG URL: https://github.com/orcwg/orcwg
FreeBSD Foundation: Contact Us URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/contact-us/
Open Source Vulnerability schema (OSV Schema) URL: https://openssf.org/projects/osv-schema/
ossf/osv-schema tools: import a conversion tool to and from VuXML (#237) URL: https://github.com/ossf/osv-schema/pull/237

Contact: Pierre Pronchery <pierre@freebsdfoundation.org>

My tasks at the FreeBSD Foundation continue to revolve around Security Engineering for the FreeBSD Project.

First, we keep working on the outcome of the source code audit on bhyve and Capsicum, documenting and researching how to prevent and mitigate similar issues from occurring again in the future. This includes the processes relevant for contributions to the FreeBSD Project, as well as the preparation of a joint presentation with Alpha-Omega at the BSD Devroom during the coming FOSDEM conference in 2025.

At the same time, I am liaising with the Open Regulatory Compliance Working Group (ORC WG), where an FAQ is being elaborated jointly by a number of stakeholders on the European Union’s newly introduced Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). This is all related to our ongoing collaboration with OpenSSF, notably the self-assessment initiative; note that the FreeBSD Foundation can provide assistance in this regard for projects deploying FreeBSD.

Finally, possibilities around the integration of OSV tooling into the FreeBSD ecosystem are under investigation as well.

Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation

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Security Audits

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

The project began in Q2 of 2024 and was funded by Alpha Omega with a budget of $137,500, which was used over about six months and is now complete. The focus was on conducting a code audit for key subsystems, bhyve and Capsicum, as well as performing a security audit of the development process. The funds were used to hire a specialist offensive security firm to perform the code audit, to contract developers to address issues found, and for Foundation staff’s work on
both audits.

Q4 update
The project is complete.

The Code Audit and subsequent reports were released after the related Security Advisories were published.

The Process Audit is complete. It was created by FreeBSD Foundation staff who ran an outreach exercise to gather information about the current FreeBSD development process. The teams consulted were: Security Team, Source Management Team, Cluster Administrators, Release Engineering Team.

Information was gathered through an online long-form survey which was structured around existing frameworks for analysing security in software development. Teams were asked to describe current development processes and appraise the current security practices, as well as to make suggestions for improvements.

The responses were collated and synthesised into the report by Foundation staff. The report was reviewed for accuracy by the original respondents.

The report will now be made available to the Security Team and other teams previously mentioned, as well as to the Foundation executive team. This will be a useful tool in identifying areas for investment and prioritisation going forward as more security projects are planned and funded.

The report is intended primarily for FreeBSD Project and Foundation planning purposes and as such there is no plan to promote it to an external audience. Interested readers should contact the Security Team to request a copy of the report.

To learn about the project, and to see historical monthly updates visit: https://github.com/ossf/alpha-omega/tree/main/alpha/engagements/2024/FreeBSD.

Sponsor: Alpha Omega Project

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Framework Laptop support

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 Laptop Inc is friendly to the FreeBSD project in many aspects, including providing engineering samples to Foundation for testing and working on support.

Since 2024 summer, there are several small hackathons in Framework’s Taipei office on testing FreeBSD on different models of Framework laptop, and the peripheral devices.

Sheng-Yi is using the laptop provided by Framework Computer to add more device support, e.g. d3b05d0ea10a: Add smbus and i2c device IDs for Meteor Lake.

Daniel from Framework Computer Inc started a repository under Framework Computer’s GitHub organization to keep the notes of installation and miscellaneous information. He fixed fingerprint readers (libfprint) not just for Framework, but in general on FreeBSD. And working on the support and fix to many related drivers on FreeBSD.

In November, Foundation people and some FreeBSD developers visited Framework’s
San Francisco office and had a meeting for checking the current FreeBSD support status and discussing the possible future collaboration plans.

Foundation will continue working on improving the general laptop support and using Framework as one of the target platforms for the Laptop Support and Usability Project.

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

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Userland

Changes affecting the base system and programs in it.

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PkgBase-motivated improvements to pkg

Contact: Isaac Freund <ifreund@freebsdfoundation.org>

Some problems blocking progress on the PkgBase project are caused by shortcomings of pkg(8). The primary goal of my work on pkg is to unblock PkgBase progress. However, all users of pkg will benefit even if they do not use PkgBase.

The scheduler for pkg’s install/upgrade/delete jobs has been rewritten, motivated by solving PR259785. The new scheduler models the scheduling problem as a directed graph and splits upgrade jobs into delete/install halves only when necessary to break a cycle in the graph. This formal model gives strong guarantees about ordering that the old scheduler was not able to provide and prevents unnecessary splitting of upgrade jobs. It also fixes longstanding bugs where the old scheduler would bail out and cause the entire upgrade to fail. The new scheduler is included in pkg version 1.21.99.3 (pkg-devel).

The rest of my work this quarter has been related to pkg’s automatic tracking of shared library dependencies, which PkgBase heavily relies on. The initial motivating problem was PR265061 but it was necessary to make more fundamental changes to how pkg tracks shlibs before cleanly solving that problem became possible.

When a package is created with pkg-create(8), pkg scans the included files and generates shlibs_provided/shlibs_required lists based on the executables/shared libraries found. Before my changes, pkg would use the elf hints file of the host system as an input to pkg-create in order to filter out shlibs provided by the base system from the generated shlibs_required list. An ALLOW_BASE_SHLIBS option disabled this filtering for the purpose of building PkgBase packages.

After my changes, pkg-create no longer reads the elf hints file of the host system and base system shlibs are included in the generated shlibs_required list. When pkg-install(8)/pkg-upgrade(8)/etc. invoke the solver on an non-PkgBase system, pkg generates a list of shlibs provided by the base system as an input to the solver by scanning /lib and /usr/lib. On a PkgBase system, the PkgBase packages provide all base system shlibs.

This allows the ALLOW_BASE_SHLIBS option to be eliminated. It also gives better integration between the ports packages and PkgBase packages as shlib dependencies of ports packages on PkgBase packages are now tracked rather than ignored. Finally, this change significantly simplifies the pkg codebase and improves portability. This change was implemented in https://github.com/freebsd/pkg/pull/2386 and is not yet included in a pkg release.

With that change and other internal improvements I was able to add support for tracking lib32 and Linuxulator shlibs, which should resolve the problem that originally motivated my work on pkg’s shlib handling (PR265061). This support is implemented in https://github.com/freebsd/pkg/pull/2387 and is not yet included in a pkg release.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

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Progress on the FreeBSD installer

Links:
Improving Repair Ability of the FreeBSD Installer URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2024Projects/ImprovingRepairAbilityOfTheFreeBSDInstaller
GSoC 2024 - Improving Installer with Repair and Upgrade Ability (#1395) URL: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/pull/1395
bsdinstall: Add pkg install support in live env (#1424) URL: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/pull/1424
bsdinstall: Add repair scripts to installer menu (#1427) URL: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/pull/1427
Laptop and Desktop Working Group URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/LaptopDesktopWorkingGroup

Contact: Pierre Pronchery <pierre@freebsdfoundation.org>

As part of 2024’s GSoC Project on the FreeBSD installer, I had the pleasure to
mentor Chun Cheng Yeh (aka "Leaf") with his implementation of additional capabilities. The aim was to add support for repairing or updating an existing installation of FreeBSD, as well as allowing packages to be installed in the Live environment. This work has been consolidated into three distinct pull-requests, available on GitHub. While some aspects probably still require additional polishing before a possible merge, the possibility to significantly extend the installer images into a potentially life-saving tool is within reach.

This is particularly relevant given the ongoing efforts to improve support for laptop and desktop use of FreeBSD. In this context, I am currently resuming work on the graphical version of the installer. The most immediate challenge includes shaping it suitably for integration into the next major release.

Combining the two initiatives above should help FreeBSD close some gaps with its competition amongst other modern Operating Systems, for the enterprise as well as for laptop and desktop use.

Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation

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Kernel

Updates to kernel subsystems/features, driver support, filesystems, and more.

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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:

• sound(4) and driver bug fixes, including panics and races. Several cleanup
and refactor patches.

• Committed mididump(1). Ships with 14.2-RELEASE and 14-STABLE.

• Implementing AFMT_FLOAT support. This fixes ports, such as emulators/wine,
that require AFMT_FLOAT support from OSS. Related bug reports: PR 184380,
PR 281390, PR 264973, PR 157050.

Future work includes:

• More bug fixes, optimizations and general improvements.

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

• Implement a bluetooth device management utility.

• virtual_oss patches and improvements.

• Attempt to automate snd_hda(4) pin-patching.

• Investigate SOF/DMIC support.

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

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

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mac_do(4), setcred(2), mdo(1)

Contact: Olivier Certner <olce.freebsd.statusreports@certner.fr>
Contact: Baptiste Daroussin <bapt@FreeBSD.org>

This project aims at allowing controlled process credentials transitions without using setuid executables but instead leveraging our MAC framework. For an overall presentation, we refer the reader to the previous quarter’s report.
As this is a progress report, we only recall the outline here.

In a nutshell, this project comprises two components:

• mac_do(4) is the kernel module that checks credentials transition requests
and authorizes those that match rules configured by the administrator.

• mdo(1) is the userland program playing the role of a mediator between
processes wanting to launch other processes with changed credentials and
mac_do(4), whose function is to authorize only specific such changes.
setcred(2) is the new system call at the interface between them. It enables
userland to request various credentials changes atomically, allowing mac_do
(4) to base its decision on the transition between the initial and desired
final credentials.

Both prerequisite commits and changes in MAC/do proper have been reviewed and all commits have finally been pushed to FreeBSD’s main branch, including documentation in the form of a new manual page for setcred(2) and changes to the mac_do(4) one to match the new sysctl(8) knobs and rules syntax.

Rules can now express finely which groups are allowed in the resulting credentials for a given UID or GID, notably making it possible to specify which target primary and supplementary groups the final credentials can, or must, or must not include. Please consult mac_do(4) for a description of the new syntax and examples.

Future work, in no particular order and timeframe, may include:

• For the mac_do(4) component:

□ Currently, it can only grant credentials transitions for processes
spawned from the /usr/bin/mdo executable. The possibility to tweak this
path may be interesting for custom thin jail layouts. The ability to
have several such paths is one of the missing pieces to be able to use
mac_do(4) in conjunction with other credentials-granting programs such
as sudo(1) and doas(1).

□ mac_do(4) currently can only grant new credentials if they are
requested via the new setcred(2), as it needs to see the current and
desired final credentials to make a decision. However, each call to
traditional and standard credentials-changing functions, such as setuid
(2), seteuid(2), etc., can be considered as a (limited) full transition
on its own, which mac_do(4) could decide upon. This functionality could
allow to more finely control transitions to root and, combined with
that of the previous point, to install and use credentials-granting
programs without the "setuid" bit. However, the full power of this new
mac_do(4) module version cannot be harnessed without modifying these
programs to use setcred(2).

• For the mdo(1) component:

□ The credentials transitions that can be requested are fairly limited
compared to what mac_do(4)'s rules can allow. It would be useful to
make it possible to:

☆ Specify any list of target groups (primary or supplementary),
possibly based on user names (with the implicit list coming from
the contents of /etc/passwd and /etc/group) but allowing some
tweaks (such as excluding a particular group in the final
credentials).

☆ Allow changes of groups only.

☆ Request a password before calling setcred(2) in certain cases. This
weakens the security paradigm of the mac_do(4)/mdo(1) combination,
as it would now rely on userland for part of the gating process,
but seems acceptable in many cases.

☆ Grow a mode producing the target part of rules corresponding to the
contents of the password and group databases for some users.

We welcome any feedback on this new version and the future-work list above.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
Sponsor: Kumacom SARL

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Suspend/Resume Improvements

Links:
Blog URL: https://obiw.ac/s0ix/
Working Branch URL: https://github.com/obiwac/freebsd-s0ix

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.

Ben Widawsky from Intel started working on this in 2018 but his work was never finished and is now outdated. His work has now been picked up and the first goal is to get suspend/resume working on the Framework 13 AMD Ryzen 7040 series by end of January. There are plans for presenting initial results at a talk at FOSDEM.

Currently, all device power constraints on AMD can already be parsed to enter a system’s low power states.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

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umb(4) driver for MBIM USB 4G/5G modems

Links:
UMB(4) - OpenBSD Device Drivers Manual URL: https://man.openbsd.org/umb
UMB(4) - NetBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual URL: https://man.netbsd.org/umb.4
Bug 263783 - USB MBIM: Support for LTE/4G USB modems URL: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=263783
Introduce the USB umb(4) network driver URL: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D48167

Contact: Pierre Pronchery <pierre@freebsdfoundation.org>

The Mobile Broadband Interface Model (MBIM) is a protocol for communication with network USB devices, transmitting packet data over mobile broadband networks. Implementing this protocol adds support for a whole range of USB devices providing connectivity to mobile networks, such as 4G, 5G, and their subsequent technological evolutions.

A first implementation for this protocol was performed for OpenBSD in 2016, under the name umb(4). I have ported it myself to NetBSD under the same name, back in 2019. I was then contracted to make it work with OPNSense, and authorized to publish it as Open Source in 2022. Unfortunately, by this time, some changes in FreeBSD effectively broke the driver, and it could not be merged until fixed.

This quarter I have managed to offer an updated version and confirmed it working (thanks Mike and Zhenlei!). This version is now under review in Phabricator as D48167. The submission is still based on code from 2020, and behind progress made by OpenBSD since that time. As such, it is currently restricted to IPv4. However, I believe it makes sense to keep the review simple and focus on the design decisions and integration, before progressively importing the improvements made upstream since then in OpenBSD (notably IPv6 support).

In its current form, the driver was modified from being out of tree and available as a plug-in for OPNSense, into a kernel module and its companion binary, umbconfig(8). This management binary effectively allows the umb(4) driver to be configured beyond the capabilities of ifconfig(8): the PIN or PUK code, APN, username/password, or roaming parameters can be setup, and the connectivity tracked as well (network provider, speed…​).

Should you want to give it a spin yourself and get hardware supported by this driver, the single most important feature to look for is support for the MBIM specification. The manual page for OpenBSD provides a list of devices that should be compliant; note that some of them require preliminary configuration in order to effectively expose the MBIM interface. The exact procedure is vendor-specific, and can also depend on the model and current configuration of the device. You should refer to the documentation offered for your device for any steps necessary.

Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation

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LinuxKPI 802.11 Wireless Update

Links:
Categorised Wireless Problem Reports URL: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/showdependencytree.cgi?id=277512&hide_resolved=0
Overview of drivers URL: https://people.freebsd.org/~bz/wireless/

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.

Drivers previously committed directly to FreeBSD src.git were retroactively imported in vendor branches and merged to main. This makes maintenance and identifying local changes a lot easier. The iwlwifi(4), rtw88(4), and rtw89(4) drivers got updated in main to match Linux 6.11.

The rtw89(4) driver, which had been ported and in the tree for a while, got connected to the build. Thanks for that goes to the efforts of the community finding two bugs preventing it from working before.

Wireless firmware in ports got updated and a release flavor was added. The release building framework got enhanced to install the firmware packages onto the release media. The installer grew support to run fwget(8) on the installed system to install the firmware. This all together ensures that (wireless) drivers with external firmware can be used from the installer and right away on the installed system without the need for alternate connectivity. With the framework in place for iwlwifi(4), rtw88(4), and rtw89(4) support for more drivers can easily be added in the future. These changes shipped the first time with 14.2-RELEASE.

Having a lot of these requested necessities out of the way, time was spent on HT(802.11n) and VHT(802.11ac) improvements to the LinuxKPI framework synching between driver and net80211. Hardware crypto offload got sorted along with A-MPDU RX/BA offload right at the end of the year. Both were needed towards the goal to achieve higher throughput with iwlwifi(4).

A half-year old bug, which stayed unnoticed preventing packets to be sent beyond scanning with rtw88(4) in main and stable/14, received a patch to fix the situation.

Work for the first quarter of 2025 should include:

• finishing basic HT and VHT support, and

• looking at finishing the code for generic LinuxKPI 802.11 suspend/resume
support

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

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Wireless Update

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

With Support from the FreeBSD Foundation this quarter I started working on porting the iwx WiFi driver from OpenBSD (via Haiku). The iwx driver supports many of the chipsets supported by iwlwifi, but rather than make that driver more complex the OpenBSD developers decided to support these devices in a new driver.

iwx on OpenBSD currently supports running as a station in 80211abgn and ac, it does not yet support ax rates. The goals of this project are to import a maintainable driver from OpenBSD and to gradually increase support until we have a native driver in FreeBSD with support for 80211ac (and potentially 80211ax).

Currently the driver supports 80211a and 80211g and is able to saturate the practical limits of the rates these standards offers (roughly 28Mbit down and 25 Mbit up). The driver is under active development and moving quite quickly.

The plan for the next quarter is to add support for high throughput rates, implement monitor mode and stabilise the driver for a public call for testing.

Once the driver is stable enough a call for testing will be posted to the freebsd-current and freebsd-wireless mailing lists.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

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Syzkaller Improvement on FreeBSD

Links:
google/syzkaller URL: https://github.com/google/syzkaller

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.


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