FreeBSD Foundation Announces Ed Maste is New Director of Project Development

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce Ed Maste's new role as the
Foundation's part-time Director of Project Development.  Ed has served
on the Foundation's board for two years, and has stepped down in order to
accept this new position.

In this position Ed will manage the Foundation's sponsored work,
including projects funded under specific grants, operational support and
project development undertaken by the Foundation's permanent technical
staff.

Working with the Foundation's Board of Directors, Ed will identify
and document specific areas of future project work interest.  This
roadmap planning will include coordination with FreeBSD consumers and
the FreeBSD community.

"2012 represented an inflection point in the Foundation's history,''
said Justin T. Gibbs, President of the FreeBSD Foundation.  "The
Foundation has a stated goal of investing in permanent staff through
2013.  With Ed taking on this new position I'm excited by the
Foundation's increased capacity to manage our project development and
operational support.''

Ed has over ten years of experience in companies building products
on FreeBSD, in both technical and managerial roles.  He resides in
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.

FreeBSD Foundation announces second technical staff member and iSCSI project

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Edward Tomasz Napierała has joined as its second member of technical staff. This is a continuation of the Foundation's plan to invest in staff in 2013.

A FreeBSD committer since 2007, Edward previously completed a number of projects under Foundation grants, including safe device removal with mounted filesystems, growing mounted filesystems, and resource containers.

Edward is currently implementing a native in-kernel iSCSI stack (both target and initiator) for this increasingly popular block storage protocol. "Although there are a number of iSCSI target implementations that support FreeBSD, the project lacks a high performance and reliable in-kernel target. As iSCSI gains favor, this stack will be a key element in maintaining FreeBSD's competitive position in enterprise and open-source deployments" said Justin T. Gibbs, president of the FreeBSD Foundation. The project is expected to be completed in October 2013.

Another part of Edward's responsibilities will be assisting the FreeBSD Security Team in preparing security advisories and patches.

Edward lives in Warsaw, Poland.

Raise a Million - Spend a Million!

FreeBSD is internationally recognized as an innovative leader in providing a high-performance, secure, and stable operating system. Our mission is to continue and increase our support and funding to keep FreeBSD at the forefront of operating system technology. But, we can’t do this without your help!

Last year with your generosity, we raised over $770,000. This allowed us to not only achieve our goal, but to exceed it by over $250,000.

This year, with your help, we will do more.

This year we will double the amount we spend.

This year we will invest $1,000,000 to support and promote FreeBSD.

What will the Foundation accomplish with your donation in 2013?
• Spend almost $600,000 on software development projects for FreeBSD.
• Support the Release Engineering and Security teams with paid staff time.
• Grow to five technical staff members by year-end.
• Support BSD conferences around the globe, in Europe, Japan, Canada, and the USA.
• Spend over $130,000 on hardware to maintain and improve FreeBSD project infrastructure.
• Grow the FreeBSD community through marketing and outreach to users and businesses.
• Protect the FreeBSD trademarks and provide the project with access to legal counsel.

We have kicked off the new year with 3 newly funded projects, and are actively soliciting additional project proposals now. We've added one new technical staff member and are in the process of adding more.

Please support the Foundation during our Spring Fundraising Drive, and help us raise $100,000 from 1000 donors between April 16th and May 30th.

We can’t do this without you!  Just go to http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate to make your donation.  Then talk to your employer to either match your gift or to make their own donation.

Thank you for your support!

The FreeBSD Foundation

New Funded Project: Capsicum Framework

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Pawel Jakub Dawidek has been awarded a development grant to further improve the Capsicum framework. The grant is jointly funded by Google's Open Source Programs Office.

The project includes the integration of previous work, implementation of new programmer-friendly capability system calls, improvements to the Casper Capsicum service daemon, and sandboxing various security-sensitive applications.

"My previous Capsicum work focused on improving the framework itself to make it a better fit for real world applications. This new project will make use of the improved Capsicum to secure sensitive programs and libraries found in FreeBSD.  The project will also produce many examples for others to follow, allowing them to take advantage of Capsicum to improve the security of their programs," said Pawel.

Ben Laurie, of Google's security team, added that "traditional operating system security is based on Access Control Lists (ACLs).  Decades of experience has made it quite clear this is the wrong model - but how can we move to a better way without having to rebuild everything?  Capsicum shows that it is possible to migrate gradually from the broken ACL world to a more robust capability based world.  We are pleased to be involved in the next step of its evolution."

The project is expected to be completed by June 2013.

Foundation Interview on BSDTalk

FreeBSD Foundation Directors Marshall Kirk McKusick and George Neville-Neil were recently interviewed by BSDTalk. This 34 minute podcast discusses the work of the FreeBSD Foundation. It is available in mp3 and ogg formats.

FreeBSD Foundation is Soliciting the Submission of Project Proposals

The FreeBSD Foundation is soliciting the submission of project
proposals for funded development grants.  Proposals may be related to
any of the major subsystems or infrastructure within the FreeBSD
operating system, and will be evaluated based on desirability,
technical merit, and cost-effectiveness.

Key dates for this proposal solicitation:

Call for proposals:                  27th March 2013
Deadline for submissions:            26th April 2013
Notifcation of accepted proposals:   17th May 2013

Proposals must include the following:

* A detailed description of what is being proposed, how it will
  benefit the FreeBSD Project, and why the work is needed.
* A timeline and costing for the project.
* One or more people that will act as technical reviewers for the work.

Proposals are open to all developers, including non-FreeBSD
committers, but developers without access to commit to the source tree
must provide details about how the completion guidelines will be
achieved.

For details on the proposal submission process see
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/documents/Project%20Proposal%20Procedures%202013.shtml

FreeBSD and Xorg on ARM

As part of the port of FreeBSD to the Efika Platform Project Xorg is now running on FreeBSD on ARM. Here's an update from the developer, Aleksandr Rybalko:

You've already seen or at least heard about ARM systems running FreeBSD. In most cases its routers, firewalls, network storage, etc. Why doesn't anyone use FreeBSD on an ARM based desktop or laptop It is because no one had implemented Xorg support for boards supported by FreeBSD. Now you have away to do just that!

I'm glad to introduce an Xorg driver for ARM, and not only ARM but for syscons framebuffer devices.It's called xf86-video-scfb.  The driver is very simple, and has been tested and works on the Efika MX and Raspberry Pi devices.  I hope it will work with other devices, including those not based on ARM.

Here are the instructions so you can get this running on your own system:  Building Xorg for FreeBSD ARM.