The C standard library (libc) is one of the most important parts of a UNIX system as most programs interact with the kernel through interfaces written in C.  Porting code between platforms with similar libc implementations is trivial and if something is supported by libc, higher-level languages can use it without being reimplemented.

Over time, the C language has slowly evolved to modern multicore systems, but there are still some places that are problematic. One of these is localization as  C began originally had no localization support. FreeBSD libc and Darwin libc (used by Mac OS X) are similar, making it much easier to port code from OS X to FreeBSD than from OS X to Linux. The libc used by OS X supports a set of extended locale functions (xlocale) that allow locale to be set on a per-thread basis.

Additionally, libc++, from the LLVM project, was originally developed on Darwin, so it uses xlocale for most of the C++ locale support.  The lack of this support is the primary obstacle to porting it to FreeBSD.

Once xlocale is supported in FreeBSD libc, we can port libc++ to FreeBSD, giving us an MIT-licensed C++11 standard library implementation.  This, in conjunction with Clang and libcxxrt, means that the entire C++ stack in FreeBSD will be free of any GNU code.  This leaves the linker as the only significant obstacle to a GPL-free FreeBSD 10.

The project will conclude the end of September 2011.

The FreeBSD Foundation

DIFFUSE (Distributed Firewall and Flow-shaper Using Statistical
Evidence) is an extension to the FreeBSD IPFW firewall subsystem
developed by CAIA <http://www.caia.swin.edu.au>. It allows IPFW to classify traffic based on
statistical properties of flows being observed in realtime, and
instantiate network actions across a distributed set of “action nodes”
for particular flows if required.

This project will tidy up and integrate the existing DIFFUSE prototype <http://www.caia.swin.edu.au/urp/diffuse>
into FreeBSD, and incorporate a number of important new
features. Integration of DIFFUSE into FreeBSD will increase FreeBSD’s
utility to designers and implementers of FreeBSD-based networking
infrastructure.

Network architects frequently require the ability to classify different
traffic types flowing across a network, typically using packet
inspection capabilities of base system tools such as ipfw and pf.
Traffic classification then enables the provision of customized service
levels to different traffic types (such as priority packet queuing and
forwarding, or allocation of specific bandwidth guarantees).

DIFFUSE uses machine learning techniques to enable robust and efficient
classification of IP traffic flows based on their unique statistical
properties in addition to traditional inspection of packet header or
payload contents. DIFFUSE also allows traffic classification to occur in
one place (e.g. in the core of a network) and trigger traffic shaping
and differentiation elsewhere (e.g. at the edges of a network). DIFFUSE
has applications in ISP, residential broadband and large corporate
network scenarios to name a few.

The project will conclude the end of October 2011.

The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please fill out and submit the Travel Grant Request Application at
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/documents/TravelRequestForm.pdf by
September 5, 2011 to apply for this grant.

How it works:

This program is open to FreeBSD developers of all sorts (kernel hackers,  documentation authors, bugbusters, system administrators, etc). In some  cases we are also able to fund non-developers, such as active community members and FreeBSD advocates.

(1) You request funding based on a realistic and economical estimate of travel costs (economy airfare, trainfare, …), accommodations (conference hotel and sharing a room), and registration or tutorial
fees.  If there are other sponsors willing to cover costs, such as your employer or the conference, we prefer you talk to them first, as our budget is limited.  We are happy to split costs with you or another
sponsor, such as just covering airfare or board.

*If you are a speaker at the conference, we expect the conference to cover your travel costs, and will most likely not approve your direct request to us. *

(2) We review your application and if approved, authorize you to seek reimbursement up to a limit.  We consider several factors, including our overall and per-event budgets, and (quite importantly) the benefit to the community by funding your travel.

Most rejected applications are rejected because of an over-all limit on travel budget for the event or year, due to unrealistic or uneconomical costing, or because there is an unclear or unconvincing argument that
funding the applicant will directly benefit the FreeBSD Project. Please take these points into consideration when writing your application.

(3) We reimburse costs based on actuals (receipts), and by check or bank transfer. And, we do not cover your costs if you end up having to cancel your trip. We require you to submit a report on your trip, which we may show to current or potential sponsors, and may include in our semi-annual newsletter.

There’s some flexibility in the mechanism, so talk to us if something about the model doesn’t quite work for you or if you have any questions. The travel grant program is one of the most effective ways we can
spend money to help support the FreeBSD Project, as it helps developers get together in the same place at the same time, and helps advertise and advocate FreeBSD in the larger community.

Thank You,

The FreeBSD Foundation

FreeBSD’s KAME-based reference implementation of IPv6 first appeared in FreeBSD 4.0, and can be found in a broad range of FreeBSD-derived commercial products. To date, IPv6 has been an optionally configured feature present in the default FreeBSD kernel; however, IPv6 configuration has implied configuration of IPv4. With much “IPv6-ready” application software relying on dual-stack behavior, broken IPv6 applications go unnoticed. Adding support for an IPv6 kernel without IPv4 will make FreeBSD and PC-BSD an ideal test and development platform for both open source and proprietary IPv6-aware application software.

“Narrowing down the code base to not rely on legacy IP will help us to identify OS and application components requiring improvement to work well in an IPv6 environment. This project will help to ensure a bright IPv6 future, as FreeBSD is used throughout the Internet: root name servers, storage appliances, routers, firewalls, TVs, desktop and mobile systems, and many of the world’s busiest web sites,” said Mr. Zeeb. FreeBSD Foundation director and FreeBSD core team member Robert Watson described the project as critical to the future of FreeBSD, “Bjoern’s work will not only improve the maturity of our IPv6 implementation, but also motivate improvement of applications used in million of deployed FreeBSD and FreeBSD-derived systems.” The project will also improve the quality and performance of FreeBSD’s IPv6 stack.

Bjoern Zeeb is a consultant based in Germany and has been an active FreeBSD committer since 2004. He is currently also a member of the FreeBSD Security and Release Engineering teams, and was recently awarded the Itojun Service Award for his work on IPv6 in FreeBSD.

The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD Project and community. The Foundation gratefully accepts donations from individuals and businesses, using them to fund and manage projects, sponsor FreeBSD events, Developer Summits and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers. In addition, the Foundation represents the FreeBSD Project in executing contracts, license agreements, and other legal arrangements that require a recognized legal entity. The FreeBSD Foundation is entirely supported by donations. More information about The FreeBSD Foundation is available on the web at http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org.

FreeBSD Foundation Turns to NYI for East Coast US Mirror

Deployment Adds Enterprise-Grade Redundancy for Improved Reliability,
Reduced Latency, High-Speed Backups and Other Efficiencies

BOULDER, CO, August 10, 2010—The FreeBSD Foundation, a 501(c)(3)
non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD Project and
community, today announced that NYI (www.nyi.net), a New York City-based,
mission-critical data services provider, will be mirroring key West coast
infrastructure at NYI’s 999 Frontier Road data center in Bridgewater, New
Jersey, a recently opened 40,000 square foot facility.

In addition to providing enterprise-grade redundancy and reliability for
the Project’s
infrastructure, the East coast mirror will reduce latency during heavy
download times, distribute load between the two coasts, and allow for
up-to-date backups of all Project data that can be synchronized via
high-speed Internet connections.

“Having a well-connected, secondary site with NYI’s amenities to host
FreeBSD project infrastructure means that we can move services between
sites when doing scheduled maintenance to improve reliability for FreeBSD
developers and users,” said Simon L. Nielsen, FreeBSD.org administrative
team. He added, “The new site also enables us to expand significantly the
available hardware for FreeBSD package building, allowing the FreeBSD ports
team to perform QA test builds and quickly produce binary FreeBSD packages
for end-users.”

“We are long-time open-source advocates,” said Phillip Koblence, VP
Operations, NYI. “The FreeBSD Foundation in particular represents
everything that got us into technology in the first place. With this
deployment, we take our commitment to a new level in the hope that what we
are doing lays the foundation for next-generation data centers built around
FreeBSD. As many people in the community know, NYI’s 999 Frontier Road
facility features many of the Project’s efforts, as everything from PDUs to
the servers run FreeBSD.”

The East coast mirror at 999 Frontier is also notable because it replaces
aging and inadequate hardware; provides dual-configuration so that
experimental vs. production runs can be separated out, allowing changes to
the ports system to be evaluated continuously rather the interrupting
production flow; deploys to multiple sites, providing resiliency in the
event of a failure; provides build capacity required to support the ports
ABI changes required to improve the foundations for binary package support
while maintaining ports-stable regression testing.

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to have been able to fund the purchase of
the hardware. Brad Davis, Mark Linimon, and Simon Nielsen from the FreeBSD
Project worked on the configuration, along with key members of the NYI
team.

About The FreeBSD Foundation
The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to
supporting the FreeBSD Project and community. The Foundation gratefully
accepts donations from individuals and businesses, using them to fund and
manage projects,
sponsor FreeBSD events, Developer Summits and provide travel grants to
FreeBSD developers. In addition, the Foundation represents the FreeBSD
Project in executing contracts, license agreements, and other legal
arrangements that require a
recognized legal entity. The FreeBSD Foundation is entirely supported by
donations. More information about The FreeBSD Foundation is available on
the web at http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org.

About NYI
Established in 1996, NYI is headquartered in the heart of the Wall Street
area and owns and maintains its own data centers, including 999 Frontier, a
newly opened 40,000 square foot facility in Bridgewater, New Jersey. The
company’s core services include colocation, dedicated servers, web and
email hosting, and managed services, as well as turnkey disaster recovery
and business continuity solutions from its Bridgewater location. With
high-bandwidth connectivity partners AboveNet, Verizon Business, Optimum
Lightpath, and AT&T, NYI specializes in mission-critical data services for
the financial services industry, in addition to customers from a broad
range of industries, including media, law, fashion, architecture, life
sciences and real estate. NYI is SAS 70 Type II-compliant, in addition to
being both PCI and HIPAA compliant. For more information, visit
www.nyi.net.

# # #

Media Contact:

Bill Lessard
Publicist
NYI

This project includes several enhancements to the existing FreeBSD
SNMP framework, including SNMPv3-compliant user authentication, packet
encryption and view-based access control. In addition, the project
also includes a new module that will allow full SNMP management and
monitoring of the FreeBSD wireless networking stack. When the
project is completed, FreeBSD should be the OS of choice when building
open source-based embedded wireless appliances due to the advanced
capabilities of its wireless network stack, and the light-weight,
secure and complete management solution that bsnmpd(1) will provide
out of the box. Existing FreeBSD installations that use bsnmpd(1) for
monitoring will also benefit from the added security and finer-grained
access-control to SNMP data.

“SNMP is the defacto standard for network monitoring,” said Shteryana
Shopova, FreeBSD developer. She also added, “SNMP is used
everywhere – in network servers, switches,  routers, firewalls,
workstations, ip phones, printers, UPSs, all sorts of embedded
appliances. I am happy to have the opportunity to work on several
additions to bsnmpd(1) that have been requested by the FreeBSD
community.”

This project will be completed in October 2010.

Sincerely,

The FreeBSD Foundation

Today is the last day to submit your travel grant application for BSDCan 2010!

The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel
grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please fill out and submit
the Travel Grant Request Application at by April 9, 2010 to apply for this grant.

How it works:

This program is open to FreeBSD developers of all sorts (kernel hackers,
documentation authors, bugbusters, system administrators, etc).  In some
cases we are also able to fund non-developers, such as active community
members and FreeBSD advocates.

(1) You request funding based on a realistic and economical estimate of
travel costs (economy airfare, trainfare, …), accommodations
(conference hotel and sharing a room), and registration or tutorial
fees.  If there are other sponsors willing to cover costs, such as your
employer or the conference, we prefer you talk to them first, as our
budget is limited.  We are happy to split costs with you or another
sponsor, such as just covering airfare or board.

If you are a speaker at the conference, we expect the conference to
cover your travel costs, and will most likely not approve your direct
request to us.

(2) We review your application and if approved, authorize you to seek
reimbursement up to a limit.  We consider several factors, including our
overall and per-event budgets, and (quite importantly) the benefit to
the community by funding your travel.

Most rejected applications are rejected because of an over-all limit on
travel budget for the event or year, due to unrealistic or uneconomical
costing, or because there is an unclear or unconvincing argument that
funding the applicant will directly benefit the FreeBSD Project.
Please take these points into consideration when writing your application.

(3) We reimburse costs based on actuals (receipts), and by check or bank
transfer. And, we do not cover your costs if you end up having to cancel
your trip. We require you to submit a report on your trip, which we may
show to current or potential sponsors, and may include in our
semi-annual newsletter.

There’s some flexibility in the mechanism, so talk to us if something
about the model doesn’t quite work for you or if you have any questions.
The travel grant program is one of the most effective ways we can
spend money to help support the FreeBSD Project, as it helps developers
get together in the same place at the same time, and helps advertise and
advocate FreeBSD in the larger community.

Thank You,

The FreeBSD Foundation

The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please fill out and submit the Travel Grant Request Application by April 9, 2010 to apply for this grant.

How it works:

This program is open to FreeBSD developers of all sorts (kernel hackers, documentation authors, bugbusters, system administrators, etc).  In some cases we are also able to fund non-developers, such as active community members and FreeBSD advocates.

(1) You request funding based on a realistic and economical estimate of travel costs (economy airfare, trainfare, …), accommodations (conference hotel and sharing a room), and registration or tutorial
fees.  If there are other sponsors willing to cover costs, such as your employer or the conference, we prefer you talk to them first, as our budget is limited.  We are happy to split costs with you or another
sponsor, such as just covering airfare or board.

If you are a speaker at the conference, we expect the conference to cover your travel costs, and will most likely not approve your direct request to us.

(2) We review your application and if approved, authorize you to seek reimbursement up to a limit.  We consider several factors, including our overall and per-event budgets, and (quite importantly) the benefit to the community by funding your travel.

Most rejected applications are rejected because of an over-all limit on travel budget for the event or year, due to unrealistic or uneconomical costing, or because there is an unclear or unconvincing argument that funding the applicant will directly benefit the FreeBSD Project. Please take these points into consideration when writing your application.

(3) We reimburse costs based on actuals (receipts), and by check or bank transfer. And, we do not cover your costs if you end up having to cancel your trip. We require you to submit a report on your trip, which we may show to current or potential sponsors, and may include in our semi-annual newsletter.

There’s some flexibility in the mechanism, so talk to us if something about the model doesn’t quite work for you or if you have any questions. The travel grant program is one of the most effective ways we can spend money to help support the FreeBSD Project, as it helps developers get together in the same place at the same time, and helps advertise and advocate FreeBSD in the larger community.

Thank You,

The FreeBSD Foundation

The commit notice from Paweł Jakub Dawidek briefly describes the project. A detailed discussion of the project is available form the FreeBSD Wiki.

This is a great example of the cyclical support of the FreeBSD community. It demonstrate the value that the FreeBSD Foundation brings to our community and all should be encourage to support the foundation so that they can in turn support the community by sponsoring more great projects.

We’ve extended the deadline for accepting AsiaBSDCon travel grant applications. Please submit your application by Feb. 10, 2010. If you have already submitted an application, you will be hearing from us soon.

Please fill out and submit the Travel Grant Request Application at
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/documents/TravelRequestForm.pdf.

How it works:

This program is open to FreeBSD developers of all sorts (kernel hackers,
documentation authors, bugbusters, system administrators, etc).  In some
cases we are also able to fund non-developers, such as active community
members and FreeBSD advocates.

(1) You request funding based on a realistic and economical estimate of
travel costs (economy airfare, trainfare, …), accommodations
(conference hotel and sharing a room), and registration or tutorial
fees.  If there are other sponsors willing to cover costs, such as your
employer or the conference, we prefer you talk to them first, as our
budget is limited.  We are happy to split costs with you or another
sponsor, such as just covering airfare or board.

If you are a speaker at the conference, we expect the conference to
cover your travel costs, and will most likely not approve your direct
request to us.

(2) We review your application and if approved, authorize you to seek
reimbursement up to a limit.  We consider several factors, including our
overall and per-event budgets, and (quite importantly) the benefit to
the community by funding your travel.

Most rejected applications are rejected because of an over-all limit on
travel budget for the event or year, due to unrealistic or uneconomical
costing, or because there is an unclear or unconvincing argument that
funding the applicant will directly benefit the FreeBSD Project.
Please take these points into consideration when writing your application.

(3) We reimburse costs based on actuals (receipts), and by check or bank
transfer. And, we do not cover your costs if you end up having to cancel
your trip. We require you to submit a report on your trip, which we may
show to current or potential sponsors, and may include in our
semi-annual newsletter.

There’s some flexibility in the mechanism, so talk to us if something
about the model doesn’t quite work for you or if you have any questions.
The travel grant program is one of the most effective ways we can
spend money to help support the FreeBSD Project, as it helps developers
get together in the same place at the same time, and helps advertise and
advocate FreeBSD in the larger community.

Thank You,

The FreeBSD Foundation