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FreeBSD list of projects and ideas for volunteers

Introduction

The FreeBSD project has hundreds of active developers spread all over the world, and many of them have their own parts of the source-tree that they work on. However, there are always a lot of new interesting projects and ideas that needs to be investigated and evaluated, and this is where the FreeBSD project relies on heroic efforts from volunteers. The following list of possible projects is in no way complete, but it should serve as a nice starting point for volunteers who would like to become committers in the future.

Please note that we cannot guarantee that your work will be included in the FreeBSD source tree. This is because people tend to disagree about specifics in the implementation of new features or functionality. However, if you can find a developer who is interested in your work, and you can get him or her to review it, then you are pretty far on your way to get your code into the FreeBSD source tree.

If you have any non-technical questions about this list, please contact Alexander Leidinger and Joel Dahl. Technical questions should be directed to the Technical contact for each project, or to the hackers mailinglist.

File System

Kernel

Networking

Ports

Security

Userland / Installation Tools

Additional Information

FAT (msdosfs) infrastructure work

Technical Contact: Robert Watson

The FreeBSD FAT implementation, msdosfs, offers scope for a number of projects:

  • General cleanup.
  • Introduce appropriate locking to make the file system operate without the Giant lock (MPSAFE).
  • Make msdosfs robust in the presence of unexpected disk removal, since it is frequently used with removable devices.

It is unclear to what extent the last of these items, arguably the most useful, will require modifying surrounding infrastructure such as BIO, GEOM, and VM.

Requirements:

  • Strong C programming skills.
  • Familiarity with concurrent programming techniques.
  • Familiarity with FAT file system layout.
  • Familiarity with virtual file system and virtual memory.

Improve the performance of dump/restore

A performance evaluation of the split cache (as is) and an unified cache (like e.g. NetBSD) would be interesting. More details in this mail to the hackers mailing list. Additional improvements are welcome too.

Requirements:

  • Knowledge of C programming.
  • Basic understanding of backup/restore procedures.

MDFS lockups

Fix MDFS lockups when using async operation modes. Revision 1.115 of md.c has a discussion of the problem.

Requirements:

  • Ability to read and understand foreign C code.
  • Ability to write C code.
  • Knowledge of the VFS and VMA subsystems.

TMPFS

Technical contact: Alexander Leidinger

At the moment FreeBSD includes a memory-based file system called mfs. mfs is just an implementation of the regular ffs - designed for persistent storage - on top of the (volatile) virtual memory system. This means that it uses the same data structures as the on-disk implementation, rendering less than optimal performance and memory usage. With tmpfs, FreeBSD would gain a memory file system which uses less memory and is faster.

Goals:

  • Port the tmpfs file system.
  • Adopt the documentation (including the file system how-to)

Rohit Jalan has begun porting the NetBSD tmpfs to FreeBSD. The source and some benchmarks can be found here. Before it can enter the tree locking has to be added. There are also some bugs to take care of. Rohit has no time to work on it in the next months, any volunteer is welcome to continue his work.

Requirements:

  • Ability to read and understand foreign C code.
  • Ability to write C code.
  • A little bit of knowledge of the VFS subsystem.

CPU usage display in top

The current kernel statistics do not know how to calculate the CPU usage of threaded processes. A volunteer has to understand the current statistics model, design a new statistics model and implement it. This problem only occurs with M:N threading on libpthread.

Requirements:

  • Ability to read and understand foreign C code.
  • Ability to write C code.
  • A good understanding of the FreeBSD SMP system.

Document all sysctls

Technical contacts: Mathieu Arnold, Brad Davis

The sysctl(8) utility retrieves kernel states and allows processes with appropriate privilege to change kernel states. On request it is able to display description lines which document the kernel state. Unfortunately not every sysctl is documented. This task is possible to share with other volunteers. Mathieu Arnold has done some development in Perforce, in the mat_sysctl_cleanup branch.

  • Find every undocumented sysctl in the kernel.
  • Try to determine what this sysctl is for and document it.

Requirements:

  • Ability to read and understand foreign C code.

Document the sound subsystem

Technical contacts: Alexander Leidinger, Ariff Abdullah

  • Add sound subsystem related section 9 manual pages, so far no sound subsystem related manual pages exists.
  • Add an example driver in share/examples which allows to write a new driver. For this purpose the example driver should contain enough documentation as comments and/or pointers to documentation in man-section 9. This work can be based upon this template.
  • Rewrite the sound subsystem chapter in the FreeBSD Architecture Handbook. The rewrite should contain an overview of the available parts in the sound subsystem and how they interact (data flow, dependencies, ...) and fit together. Additionally it should contain links to already available documentation (official standards, section 9 manual pages, ...).
  • A wiki page documenting everything related to the sound subsystem in FreeBSD has been created.

Requirements:

  • Ability to read and understand foreign C code.
  • Documentation writing skills.

DTrace

Technical contact: John Birrell

URL: Perforce repository, DTrace for FreeBSD

DTrace is a dynamic tracing facility designed by Sun Microsystems and released in Solaris 10. They have since released the major part of Solaris under the banner of OpenSolaris and the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) 1.0. John Birrell has created an initial port and should be contacted for information on what tasks remain to be done.

Requirements:

  • Ability to read and understand foreign C code.
  • Ability to write C code.
  • A good understanding of the FreeBSD kernel.

DWARF2 call frame information

A debug kernel is not able to show stack traces with cross exceptions anymore. This is because we do not emit any dwarf2 call frame information for any assembler code, since gdb switched to the dwarf2 format. A volunteer should annotate every assembler file [*.[sS]] with dwarf2 call frame information.

Requirements:

  • Knowledge of assembly code.
  • Knowledge of ".cfi_*" pseudo-ops to insert dwarf2 frame descriptors.

Dynamic module references

Technical contact: Sam Leffler

Kernel modules may have dynamic references created during operation. For example net80211 key entries reference functions in the crypto module that implements the key's cipher. Presently there is no standard mechanism for expressing this dependency so that module unloading is disallowed; instead modules must track references and implement their own semantics. This task is to define and implement a general mechanism for tracking these references and use them in handling module unload requests.

Requirements:

  • Good knowledge of C.
  • Kernel awareness.

Extend ktrace/kdump output

Technical contact: Alexander Leidinger

The ktrace(1) facility allows to monitor what running processes do. It allows to determine if a process is stuck or if it still does useful work. The goal of this item is to look at the kernel interfaces, add missing "pieces" (e.g. syscall's) to the ktrace output and to extend the output with "decoded" (translating hex/dec values into human readable information, e.g. O_RDONLY in the case of open(2)) information. Some work has been completed and committed, but a few parts still remains. More information is available here.

Also, a related project would be to modify ktrace to write to pipes. Currently the ktrace infrastructure requires the dump output go to a file. It would be useful to be able to instead have it write to pipe, or in fact any type of file descriptor.

Requirements:

  • Knowledge of C.
  • Good knowledge of POSIX interfaces or how to use man(1).
  • No fear to look into the kernel sources.

Fast syscall support for FreeBSD/i386

Technical contact: Attilio Rao

The instruction pair sysenter and sysexit can contribute to certain performance improvements when a syscall is made on IA32. There is however no implementation of this available for FreeBSD, so a volunteer would have to add sysenter/sysexit support to the kernel. This needs to be properly evaluated and benchmarked though, so a complete implementation should therefore also contain informative benchmarks which shows a clear improvement in performance. It is also important to stress the fact that this project is of research quality and measures should be taken to ensure that no regressions are introduced. Another interesting extension to this project would be to investigate and evaluate the possibility to use mmx/xmm registers to gather syscalls arguments. David Xu has some work in progress in his sysenter branch in the perforce repository.

Requirements:

  • Ability to read and understand foreign C code.
  • Ability to write C code.
  • Ability to write and understand x86 assembly.

Generic input device layer

Technical contact: Philip Paeps

The kernel is lacking a generic input device layer analogous to the Linux 'input core' layer. Having such a layer would make it easy to write e.g. touchscreen support (Philip Paeps has some work-in-progress regarding pointer devices and touchscreen support, but not enough time to also cover keyboard support or other generic features).

Requirements:

  • Ability to read and understand foreign C code.
  • Ability to write C code.

Implement and profile algorithms for powerd

Technical contacts: Nate Lawson, Bruno Ducrot

Implement a range of predictive algorithms (and perhaps design your own) and profile them for power usage and performance loss. The best algorithm will save the most power while losing the least performance. This has been discussed on the ACPI mailing list and Bruno Ducrot has some early patches.

Requirements:

  • Basic C knowledge.
  • Laptop supported by cpufreq(4).

iSCSI

Technical contact: Danny Braniss

Danny Braniss has been working on an iSCSI stack for FreeBSD for some time now. His work is in Perforce, and he has posted several patch sets and had numerous discussions on the mailing lists.

Requirements:

  • Ability to read and understand foreign C code.
  • Ability to write C code.
  • Knowledge about (i)SCSI/CAM.

New bus_alloc_resources() API

Technical contact: Warner Losh

Recently, bus_alloc_resources has been added to the kernel. This, coupled with the bus_space_{read,write} family of functions can significantly reduce the setup needed for driver resource allocation. Unfortunately, most of the drivers in the tree have not yet been converted, thus ensuring that the old, bad way continues. What is needed is for someone to go through the drivers in the tree and convert them. After conversion, they need to ensure that they still work on at least some hardware and work with someone to get them committed. Warner Losh is available for review and coordination of committing.

Requirements:

  • Ability to read, write and understand C code.
  • Knowledge about device drivers.
  • Access to hardware to test on.

PCI-Hotplug support

Technical contact: Bruce M. Simpson

Requirements:

  • Ability to read and understand foreign C code.
  • Ability to write C code.
  • A good understanding of low-level access of the hardware.
  • A good understanding of FreeBSD device drivers.

Pluggable Disk Scheduler

Technical contact: Emiliano Mennucci

References: The Pluggable Disk Schedulers SoC project, Patches

Our "Pluggable Disk Schedulers" SoC 2005 project resulted in code which solved the problem where large sequential I/O requests, or certain access patterns from one or a few processes, might almost completely starve other processes. It is available as a patch for RELENG_4 and RELENG_5. Unfortunately the code in FreeBSD-current (and RELENG_6) changed too much, so that the patches can not be committed. The goal of this project is to port the pluggable disk schedulers to the GEOM framework.

Requirements:

  • Ability to read and understand foreign C code.
  • Ability to write C code.
  • Knowledge of GEOM (or interest in getting familiar with it).

Port OpenBSD's sensors framework

References: Overview, http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.sbin/sensorsd/, http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sbin/bioctl/, http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/scsi/safte.c

The OpenBSD sensors framework is an unified way of handling any kind of hardware sensor one can image. A sensor driver collects data from system sensors, SAS devices, harddisks, ... and allows an administrator to query the data with the unified management interface.

Requirements:

  • Ability to read and understand foreign C code.
  • Ability to write C code.

Remove procfs dependencies

Technical contact: Maxime Henrion

Someone needs to finish the support for PT_SYSCALL in the ptrace() subsystem, and add support for another ptrace() command that will replace the PIOCWAIT and PIOCSTATUS ioctls of procfs (should probably be named PT_WAIT), in order for truss(1) to be able to work without procfs(5). Removing the procfs(5) dependency from ps -e is also desirable.

Requirements:

  • C knowledge.
  • Understanding of kernel debugging interfaces.

Rewrite the in-kernel file system syncer

References: mail #1, mail #2

Goals:

  • Change the syncer so it can sync out to multiple physical devices simultaneously.
  • Only write out up to X megabytes of data, remember where it left off, and then proceed to the next dirty file (OpenBSD and NetBSD already do this).
  • Replace the write_behind code with something (detect the existence of a large amount of sequential dirty data and kick another thread to flush it out synchronously, instead of doing it itself asynchronously) integrated into the syncer (the data set size could perhaps be increased from 64KB to 1MB).

Requirements:

  • Ability to read and understand foreign C code.
  • Ability to write C code.
  • Some understanding of the VM system / buffer cache.

Suspend to disk

Technical contacts: Nate Lawson, Bruno Ducrot

Implement a suspend/resume from disk mechanism. Possibly use the dump functions to dump pages to disk, then use ACPI to put the system in S4 or power-off. Resume would require changes to the loader to load the memory image directly and then begin executing again.

Requirements:

  • Good knowledge of C.
  • Understanding of the hardware/software interface.
  • A laptop that works with ACPI.
  • Kernel awareness.

Sync FreeBSD i386 boot code with DragonFly

Technical contact: John Baldwin

DragonFly invested a lot of time to clean up and document it. Additionally they fixed some bugs. Interesting files in the DragonFly CVS are sys/boot/i386/bootasm.h, sys/boot/i386/bootasmdef.c, sys/boot/boot0/*, sys/boot/boot2/*, sys/boot/i386/btx/*, sys/boot/i386/cdboot/*, sys/boot/i386/libi386/amd64_tramp.S, sys/boot/i386/libi386/biosdisk.c and sys/boot/i386/loader/main.c. An interested volunteer has to compare and evaluate both implementations and port interesting/good parts.

Requirements:

  • Ability to read and understand foreign C code.
  • Ability to write C code.
  • Knowledge of i386 assembly.
  • Knowledge of BIOS interfaces.
  • Knowledge of low-level boot behavior.

Syscons modularization

Separate the syscons code into distinct parts for input, output, console handling (switching, screen savers etc.) and terminal emulation. Introduce fine-grained locking. Also implement vt100 and vt220 emulation to supplement the existing SCO emulation. Add a gettytab(5) capability for specifying the terminal emulation, and add entries to /etc/gettytab for the alternative emulations.

Optionally implement xterm emulation. The top line of the screen should serve as a title bar, displaying the title set with the \e]0; escape sequence as well as the vty number.

Requirements:

  • Ability to read and understand foreign C code.
  • Ability to write C code.
  • A good understanding of text terminals and terminal emulation.

csup improvements

Technical contact: Maxime Henrion

URL's: csup homepage, CVSweb

Maxime Henrion is working on a rewrite of CVSup in C, called csup, and he has imported csup into the FreeBSD base system. It should be ready for use in a stable environment, but there are however still several missing features. The following list should be a good starting point:

  • Add support for authentication.
  • Add support for shell commands sent by the server.
  • Add missing support for various CVSup options: -D, -a (requires authentication support), -e and -E (requires shell commands support) and the destDir parameter.
  • Add support for CVS mode. This is important for developers, since this mode sends the actual RCS files themselves. This is very useful for storing a full copy of the CVS repository on the client machine.

Requirements:

  • Strong knowledge of C.
  • Good knowledge of POSIX standards.
  • Ability to work with multi-threaded applications.

HTTP support for pxeboot

Technical contact: Robert Watson

Implementing HTTP support for pxeboot would allow us to boot a machine using PXE and pull down a kernel from a web server rather than NFS. This will allow us to install from DHCPD + Apache or even just DHCPD + a remote web server. As PXE does not provide an integrated TCP stack, at least a minimal TCP implementation would need to be present in the FreeBSD PXE loader.

Requirements:

  • Good PXE knowledge.
  • Detailed knowledge of TCP/IP.

NFS Lockd (improve semantics)

Technical contact: Alfred Perlstein

  • Improve the semantics of the NFS lockd in FreeBSD. Apple has made certain enhancements that can be leveraged in our code base.
  • Implement state recovery in the lockd.

Requirements:

  • Good knowledge of C.

NFS Lockd (kernel implementation)

Technical contact: Alfred Perlstein

Moving the lockd implementation into the kernel provides several key performance and semantic improvements.

Requirements:

  • Good knowledge of C.
  • Good understanding of NFS.
  • Good understanding of locking.
  • Good understanding of RPC.
  • Good understanding of kernel level networking.

pf and netgraph interaction

Technical contact: Max Laier

Teach pf to talk to the netgraph subsystem. Requires a design on how to express this in pf.conf and implementation. Being able to use divert sockets would be interesting as well and should be largely parallel with regards to the design.

Requirements:

  • Good knowledge of C.
  • Good understanding of kernel level networking.
  • Basic understanding of pf and netgraph as a user at least.

Super tunnel daemon

Technical contact: Poul-Henning Kamp

IP can be tunneled over IP, UDP, TCP, SSH, DNS, HTTP and many other protocols, and this means that it is often possible to get a connection out through a firewall, but each of these encapsulations require prior setup of a specific program for each encapsulation, and the user must experiment to decide which one to use at any one time. The super tunnel daemon should implement pluggable encapsulations and make it automatically select the most efficient encapsulation that works at any one time. The user should not notice transitions from one encapsulation to another, apart from maybe a small delay.

Wanted features (not sorted or prioritized):

  • Autodetection of the environment (DHCP, DNS, routing, ...) in a non-offensive way (no global portscans allowed; asking via DHCP, zeroconf or similar technologies is ok) as far as possible.
  • Plugin architecture for easy addition of further encapsulations.
  • Failover from one encapsulation to another.
  • Distinct configuration files for encapsulations which need to be configured (e.g. proxy, authentication, ...).
  • Possibility to disable installed encapsulations.
  • Print/log hints for protocols which require some configuration, e.g. telling the user to use keys and perhaps the ssh-agent for ssh.
  • Configurable additional plugin directories (for plugins installed via the ports collection).
  • Log how it is able to tunnel the traffic (this also makes it useful for finding unwanted holes in the configuration of a firewall).

Requirements:

  • Good knowledge of C.
  • Good knowledge about networks.

TCP/IP regression test suite

Technical contact: Robert Watson, George V. Neville-Neil

Design and implement a wire level regression test suite to exercise various states in the TCP/IP protocol suite. Ideally with both IPv4 and IPv6 support.

Requirements:

  • Strong TCP/IP knowledge.

Update wi

Many new and useful features (e.g. crypto protocols like WPA) of the WLAN infrastructure in the kernel are not used in wi(4). While wi(4) cards are old and can not compete with recent wireless cards, they are still in use in a lot of places. The goal of this item is to examine the WLAN infrastructure and other WLAN drivers in the tree for nice features and port/use them in the wi(4) driver.

Requirements:

  • Knowledge of C.
  • No fear of undocumented parts of the kernel.
  • One wi(4) card and one other wireless device to test against.

WPA2 preauthentication in hostapd

Technical contact: Sam Leffler

WPA2 is the authentication protocol defined as part of the IEEE 802.11i specification. This protocol is now commonly used to authenticate wireless stations to access points. Part of this protocol is the ability to pre-authenticate a station with one or more access points so that roaming can happen quickly. FreeBSD lacks support for this aspect of the protocol in the hostapd program used to construct a WPA-enabled access point. This task would port the Linux code that exists to support pre-authentication in hostapd. This mostly involves rewriting some user-mode multicast code and testing the result.

Requirements:

  • Good knowledge of C.
  • Wireless networking fundamentals.
  • WPA-capable wireless network setup.

Add hashed .db support to pkg_tools

Technical contact: Kris Kennaway

pkg_create(1) and friends use flat databases (aka ordinary files and directories in /var/db/pkg) to maintain their data. This makes it cumbersome and/or impossible to do efficient lookups of data on installed packages and makes certain operations very slow. portupgrade has the right idea of hashing this into a berkeley db file, but it uses tools that are not in the base system (ruby).

A self-contained project would be to add similar (preferably compatible) code into pkg_tools directly, possibly also extending the data that is stored and allowing for more flexible querying with tools like pkg_info (e.g. replicating the pkg_which utility of portupgrade). Adding mutual exclusion to protect concurrent pkg_add/delete operations from corrupting database state is also important.

Requirements:

  • Knowledge of C.
  • Basic understanding of the use of berkeley db.

Automatic registering of UID and GID

Some sort of mechanism for adding/removing users/groups automatically, rather than using home-brew pkg-install scripts. It would need to be a bit more sophisticated than only registering the UID/GID, to deal with setting the other passwd(5) fields; a port might need more than one user; some ports might want a specific ID, others just the next available one, etc, etc.

Perhaps ports that have UIDs registered in the handbook could also be registered in a file inside /usr/ports, which the framework would use in UID creation requests.

Requirements:

  • Strong knowledge of shell and make code.
  • A basic understanding of the inner workings of the ports tree.

Cleanup of USE and WITH variables

Technical contact: Erwin Lansing

Make these more consistent. WITH_* should be user-settable variables while USE_* only is for internal use in the ports.

Requirement:

  • Strong knowledge of shell and make code.
  • A basic understanding of the inner workings of the ports tree.

COMPAT_43TTY

Technical contact: Gardner Bell

Some ports may break when removing COMPAT_43TTY from the kernel configuration since they assume old ioctl's when they identify FreeBSD. The goal of this entry is to:

  • Identify the ports which behave like this. A tinderbox setup is probably needed. Using grep to find "#include <sgtty.h>" and this list from Kris Kennaway might also be good starting points.
  • Fix breakages and send patches upstream.

Requirements:

  • Knowledge of autotools.
  • Time and patience.

Improvements of OPTIONS

The current OPTIONS infrastructure can be improved in several ways.

  • It should be possible to define OPTIONS after bsd.ports.pre.mk.
  • Add an API to override the current curses based interface with a different GUI, e.g. zenity/gdialog instead of dialog.
  • More room for a description in the OPTIONS dialog - possibly some sort of help dialog could be provided for each option, like in sysinstall.
  • Better handling of cases where OPTIONS are changed/added/removed between upgrades.
  • The ability to depend on, or at least test, OPTIONS set in other ports. Possibly it would be nice to enforce setting variables that are depended upon when the port is being installed as a dependency.
  • Other types of OPTIONS controls - A text box in particular would be useful for entering variables that need real values.
  • The possibility for mutually exclusive OPTIONS.
  • Bugfixes:
    • If you attempt to run make config for a port with ${PKGNAMEPREFIX} defined, the make config process will error out with:
      ===> Using wrong configuration file /path/options/file
      The solution is to define LATEST_LINK to be prefix-${PORTNAME}, but this should be done internally.

Requirements:

  • Strong knowledge of shell and make code.
  • A basic understanding of the inner workings of the ports tree.

Package tools improvements

The pkg_* tools, which deal with the installation of pre-build binary package of ports, could do with a code cleanup or maybe even a rewrite from scratch. Some features of the ports tree are not supported by the pkg_* tools, e.g. versioned dependencies.

Requirements:

  • Strong knowledge of C code.
  • A basic understanding of the inner workings of the ports tree.

Audit kernel event sources

Technical contact: Robert Watson

A number of kernel security subsystems, such as IPFW and pf, generate security log data. This task involves identifying potential sources of security event information in the kernel and modifying kernel subsystems to log that information using the kernel security event auditing system. User and programmer documentation of audit may be found on the TrustedBSD Documentation Page. There are also extensive manual pages relating to audit in FreeBSD. This project will require careful security analysis and kernel programming, and will likely need some re-working of the kernel audit framework (which is currently entirely focused on gathering user and kernel system call audit data).

Requirements:

  • Strong C programming skills.
  • Familiarity with concurrent programming techniques.
  • General understanding of TCP/IP firewalls.
  • Willingness to read the CC/CAPP specification.

Distributed audit daemon

Technical contact: Robert Watson

Create a tool that manages per-machine audit records and submits them to a central site for processing and long-term archiving/management. Ideally with support for SSL (or the like) so they do not travel on the wire in the clear.

Requirements:

  • Strong (portable) C programming skills.
  • Knowledge of the audit subsystem.

Mandatory Access Control

Technical contact: Robert Watson

FreeBSD 5.0 was the first FreeBSD release to ship with support for Mandatory Access Control (MAC), an access control technology allowing system administrators to implement multi-level security, integrity protection, and other "mandatory" policies. Policies may be compiled into the kernel, or loaded as loadable kernel modules. Later revisions of FreeBSD and the MAC Framework enhanced MAC support, and additional policy modules were made available, such as a port of the SELinux FLASK/TE framework available as a third party policy module. However, many of the sample MAC modules included with FreeBSD are considered experimental examples of what the technology can be used for, rather than production policies. For example, the Biba integrity policy can be deployed in production, but requires significant tuning to do so effectively.

This task involves a general review of the MAC Framework and Policy modules, with the goal of identifying improvement areas. It also involves specific cleanups, optimizations, and completeness work on specific policy modules -- most importantly, the Biba and MLS sample labeled policy modules. Work there includes improving memory overhead and efficiency; for example, moving from allocating complete labels for every labeled object to referencing common label storage where labels are identical, which occurs a great deal of the time in most systems. Other cleanups include moving towards a canonical/extensible on-disk label storage format, adding regression tests, investigating interactions with user applications, and writing documentation.

Requirements:

  • Strong C programming skills.
  • Familiarity with OS security policies, including discretionary and mandatory access control.
  • Familiarity with concurrent programming techniques.
  • Willingness to read the CC/CAPP specification.

Security regression tests

Technical contact: Robert Watson

FreeBSD is undergoing constant and active improvement to all of its critical subsystems, from file systems to the network stack. With any change, there is a risk of introducing bugs or regressions. The goal of this task is to produce a security regression test suite, which encapsulates requirements regarding system security properties and tests that they (still) hold. Areas to test include file system access control, privilege, authentication, cryptography, process containment, and more. There are some current tests along these lines in the FreeBSD regression test tree, but they are both incomplete and and inadequate. New tests must be created; existing tests must be completed and updated.

Requirements:

  • Strong C programming skills.
  • High tolerance for writing test code.
  • High tolerance for reading API specifications.
  • Rigorous and devious mindset.

BSD-licensed ELF Tools

Technical contact: Joseph Koshy

Create BSD-licensed versions of ELF processing tools (e.g., nm and strip) using the ELF(3) and GELF(3) API set in FreeBSD -CURRENT.

Requirements:

  • Knowledge of C.

Build options improvements

Technical contact: Alexander Leidinger, Gardner Bell

The new "delete-old" and "delete-old-libs" target in /usr/src for 6.1 and -CURRENT should be extended to support the WITHOUT_* knobs, e.g. WITHOUT_RESCUE or WITHOUT_CRYPT, and delete files which are covered by those knobs. Some switches have already been covered. You can view a list of all switches and what effect they have here.

Requirements:

  • Time to build and install the world several times.
  • A way to determine which files were not touched by an installworld.

lint(1) improvements from OpenBSD

OpenBSD has some improvements to lint(1) which may be beneficial to have.

Requirements:

  • Good knowledge of C.

Libprocstat and libnetstat

Technical contact: Robert Watson

Create, similar to libmemstat, wrapper libraries to support monitoring and management applications to avoid direct use of kvm. Three parts to the project: for each of the above, add kernel support to export data in a less ABI-sensitive way using sysctl, write a library to present the information in an extensible way to applications, and update applications to use the library instead of reaching directly into kernel memory / consuming sysctls. The goal is to allow the kernel implementation to change without breaking applications and requiring them to be recompiled, and to allow monitoring functions to be extended without breaking applications. This should also facilitate writing new classes of monitoring and profiling tools.

Requirements:

  • Good knowledge of C.

Multibyte collation support

Currently FreeBSD supports only single byte collation. Multibyte collation support would be nice.

Benefits:

  • Proper national sorting in UTF-8 and other multibyte locales.

Requirements:

  • Knowledge of C.
  • Familiarity with locale subsystem and relevant ISO standards.

NDMP data server

URL: The NDMP Initiative

The NDMP initiative was launched to create an open standard protocol for network-based backup for network-attached storage. Major commercial storage systems come with a compliant service. This allows major commercial backup systems to backup such NAS devices. Including a NDMP disk server into FreeBSD would allow to play nice out of the box (modulo some configuring) regarding backups in a corporate environment.

  • Evaluate the existing revisions of the NDMP standard.
  • Choose an appropriate revision (after checking of supported versions in commercial backup systems).
  • Implement at least a NDMP data server.
  • Bonus: implement a NDMP tape server (to allow attached tapes to be used).

Requirements:

  • Access to a commercial backup system with NDMP support (mostly for interoperability testing; since a NDMPcopy application seems to be available, this is not a hard requirement).
  • Good knowledge of a programming language which is included in the base system.
  • Knowledge about UFS snapshots.

Performance tracking

Technical contact: Brooks Davis

The "performance tracking" entry is meant to monitor the performance of FreeBSD itself over the development time, e.g. someone makes a change to the kernel and the tracking system is able to show the performance impact to various subsystems (microbenchmarks) or to real world applications like apache or mysql (macrobenchmarks). The tracking system should be able to do this with multiple machines and multiple configurations (while the goal is not to compare configurations or machines (but different FreeBSD versions) we would not mind if it is also able to do this. This does not need to be implemented from scratch, it is allowed/encouraged to reuse existing free software.

Requirements:

  • Access to multiple machines.

Port libumem to FreeBSD

Solaris 9 and later versions include libumem, a user space slab allocator that includes debugging features we may want to have on FreeBSD too.

Yen-Ming Lee has a port of the Linux port. He is looking for someone who is interested in benchmarking, testing, or evaluating his port.

Jason Evans has a benchmark suite at here. A description of the benchmark can be found in his jemalloc paper

Online references for libumem are (in suggested reading order):

Requirements:

  • Good C knowledge (reading and writing).
  • Experience with debugging allocation problems.

Port prebind from OpenBSD

The OpenBSD prebind is a secure implementation of prelinking that is compatible with address space randomization. Prelinking allows to speed up application startup when a lot of libraries are involved. This should show a noticeable effect with e.g. GNOME/KDE.

Requirements:

  • Good C knowledge (reading and writing).

PXE Installer

It would be great to have a bundled PXE installer. This would allow one to boot an install server from a FreeSBIE live CD-ROM on one box, set the BIOS on subsequent boxes to PXE boot, and then have the rest happen by magic. This would be very helpful for installing cluster nodes, etc.

Markus Boelter is working on a bundled PXE installer as part of his BSDInstaller project withhin the Google Summer of Code 2006. The PXE Installer is working but some non-PXE related issues have to be solved before it can enter the tree.

Requirements:

  • Good PXE knowledge.

Regression testing system

Technical contact: Alexander Leidinger, Nik Clayton

Nik Clayton has written a regression test infrastructure using Perl. More of the regression tests should be made to work with libtap.

  • Many of the existing tests should be moved from using assert() to using ok() and friends from libtap.
  • More regression tests should be written.

Porting LTP might also be a good idea.

Requirements:

  • Good knowledge of scripting languages (Perl preferred).
  • Good knowledge of software testing.

Sysinstall

  • Ask for network configuration before install - so you do not have to configure the net twice.
  • Make a guess of the timezone based upon country & keyboard.

Requirements:

  • Good C knowledge (reading and writing).
  • No fear regarding "naturally grown" code.

Tar output mode for installworld

Technical contact: Robert Watson

Instead of installing using install, mkdir, mtree, etc, directly construct a tarball. This would allow creating install distributions without root access, as setuid etc would never hit the local disk. This would require some retrofitting of our installation mechanisms.

Requirements:

  • No fear regarding our installation system.

Unicode support in vi

Many base system utilities grew multibyte support in 2004. It would be nice to continue this trend by teaching vi(1) to display and edit documents in UTF-8 encoding.

Requirements:

  • Knowledge of C.

Projects at FreeBSD.org

Additional projects may be found by browsing the FreeBSD Development Projects page. The most prominent projects are:

Do not forget to have a look at the other projects too or by viewing some of the recent Developer Status Reports.

Technical contacts

If you are interested in working on a project not explicitly mentioned above, you may want to contact one of the potential technical contacts below:

Additionally, there are a lot of interesting mailing lists that can be used when searching information about specific subjects.