Greetings from the BSD Super BOF

by Chuck Toporek
06/29/2001

Thursday evening at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference in Boston brought what seemed like a lightning round of BSD-related Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions. There were presentations by all of the BSD's, including NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, BSD/OS, and from an Apple representative talking about Mac OS X. The presentations were short but packed with lots of information, with most ending in a brief Q & A session.

Here are some of the bullet-by-bullet highlights:

The NetBSD Project BOF

Presenters: Christos Zoulas, NetBSD Core (Christos); and Luke Mewburn, NetBSD Core (Luke).
Goal: Highly portable
Subsystems are designed with a high level of abstraction
Available on 16 CPU families and 44 architectures (ports)
Binary compatible
State-of-the-art security
Approximately 250 developers
Management via Board and Core
Project Reorganization:

In the process of clarifying the structure, role and assignment of Board and Core
New bylaws have been accepted by the Core; to be released to and ratified by the NetBSD developer community
U.S. nonprofit organization status 501(c)3; waiting on bylaws to be ratified

9,923K lines of code in release 1.5 (4751K for the kernel) with 212 developers
Currently 15,362K lines of code, 5,052K LOC for the kernel with 252 developers
Ran through a list of supported platforms and improved machine support for the various platforms
Performance enhancements include multiplatform symmetric multiprocessing, high-performance user threads via scheduler activation support in the kernel (on branch), and virtual memory improvements
Lots of new drivers, with sound and RAID support for SCSI and IDE
Networking, Universal serial bus (USB)
Miscellaneous Kernel stuff
Supports ISDN, 802.1Q (VLANs), 802.11 wireless, etc.
Userland:

native port of the Sun JVM in progress
internationalization
X11

Packages: bzip2 support, sonsolidate package build information to save time and space; better xpkgwedge support
Release schedule:

1.5.1 available now
1.6 (end of year)

SMP on alpha, i386, sparc, sparc64, vax
Scheduler activations
kernel queues
faster pipe
improved installation tools
package-ized base system
gcc 2.95 integration
ELF integration

Future directions:

more crypto /security work
performance enhancements
multilingual improvements
kernel linker for enhanced LKM support
"Doors" for faster localhost RPC
Dynamic support in switch

Ran through 40 slides in less than 20 minutes. Presentation will be available online at some point.

The OpenBSD Group BOF

Also titled "The TiredBSD BOF"
30 developers in Boston since last Thursday
Used space at the PDOS group in LCS at MIT:

Gratefully appreciate assistance from Kevin Fu
Thanks to Nate Binkert who helped with local hardware
Very productive
Tired, tired, tired, tired, tired, tired...

DARPA:

OpenBSD received a DARPA grant to continue the security work its been doing
Thanks to Jonathan M. Smith and Angelos Keromytis for negotiating this
This is a great opportunity for OpenBSD

Licenses:

ssh
ipf
multicast toolsets:

Xerox, USC, Stanford

tcpdump, ppp, pppd
Many others
We are attempting to clear up the remaining issues now.

OpenSSH:

Received a legal threat from SSH.com, demanding that they change the OpenBSD name, which they refused (good for you!)
IETF SecSH working group rejected a name change
SSH.com have not followed up on its legal threats
SSH deployment on the Net is increasing:

of protocol 2 (greater than 50 percent)
of OpenSSH (greather than 30 percent)

Smart card support (using code developed by CITI Umich); showed chart of SSH protocols and SSH versions

login.conf and BSD Auth support
KerberosV support has been added
Still work in progress

Packet Filtering:

We respected Darren Reed's wishes and removed ipf from our source tree:

first OS to integrate a packet filter (pf)
first OS to remove ipf

Daniel Hartmeier wrote a NAT + stateful filter in about three weeks:

short and simple
integrated into the source tree on Friday
over 100 commits to improve it further, since then
over 20 people have helped improve it since

Work happening on packet normalization:

Described in upcoming USENIX Security paper by Mark Handly, Vern Paxton, and Christian Kreibich
Complete IP reassembly before filtering and forwarding
Remove ambiguities in interpretation

Code remains short; less than 3,000 lines total

Crypto hardware:

Work progressing on supporting more:

Hi/FN 7751, 7951, 6500
Broadcom 58xx
Ises

Preliminary userland crypto support via /dev/crypto working
OpenSSL components for automatic use "working"
2.5 MB/sec scp performance 3DES; one percent CPU utilization
Starting work on PKI crypto support

Networking changes:

IPSEC stability has improved significantly
working on support for $62USD 3cr990 Ipsec + 100Mbit ethernet card
PMTU over IPSec
hardware checksumming
we received diffs for IPComp chnages early this morning
ALTQ

Per-Architecture improvements:

PowerPC (Titanium, iBook, Native X11 support, Airport/wavelan)
Alpha (shared libraries, X11 almost working)
Many other device drivers for all architectures continued effort to improve the driver support

Snort folks are looking at their new packet-filtering program to help further its development
Why did DARPA fund the OpenBSD Project?
Answer:
"I was at this DARPA meeting months ago, and my sense is that we're looking at a situation where improving security on the Internet has never been integrated into operating systems. The government is using more open operating systems, so he thinks that if DARPA funds open source security development that they'll ask other OS creators to build security into their systems as well. The OpenBSD project was already working on some of this stuff anyway, so getting the DARPA funding worked out to their advantage as a means of furthering development by putting it on a fast track."

The FreeBSD Project BOF

Presentation by Jordan Hubbard, now of Apple Computer, Inc.
Showed off his new Titanium PowerBook, stating it was one of the benefits of his new job. (Mentioned he was working on speeding up the boot process...hey, that'd be nice!)
Launched into Mac OS X ("Hey, isn't this a talk on FreeBSD?!")
Jordan's presentation was titled, "State of the Union 2001"
274 committers as of this morning
between 2 and 3 million users
still running the internet's top sites
"BSD is dying" posts on Slashdot up 75%
Ports collection passes 5000 mark
AMD and Intel step up FreeBSD efforts
WindRiver acquires BSDi
BSDCon becomes USENIX event
OS X goes mainstream
Microsoft renounces evil, switches to FreeBSD ;^)
Apple has been good about mentioning FreeBSD in their press info and on their site
Microsoft is rumored to be porting C# to FreeBSD
4.3 released in April 2001:

4.4 on Aug. 20, 2001
5.0 on Nov. 11 (EARLY ACCESS)
4.5 on Dec. 15, 2001
5.1 on March 15, 2002
4.6 on April 20, 2002
5.2 on Jul. 15, 2002 (when they will encourage mainstream users to adopt the 5.x release)

Coming in 5.x:

SMPng first implementation
SMP for Alpha
Background fsck / snapshots
DEVFS
"NEWCARD" supports Cardbus; supports newbus architecture
PowerPC / Ultra SPARC 64 pports
IA64/x86-64 Hammer

Also have stuff from Wasabi to look at
IA64 is up as single user
Questions/responses:

No plans to support IRDA in FreeBSD any time soon; there is code out there to support it, but more needs to be done to build in support
It is Jordan's job at Apple to integrate BSD into OS X, so there will not be a code fork
OS X will be based on Darwin, so there will be no code fork
MS port of C# might force Sun to do a native port of Java to FreeBSD
5.x will fork in November, but won't really be available to users for a year afterward

BSD/OS Report

WindRiver Systems now owns BSD/OS:

Embedded systems:

Virtuoso (DSP)
VxWorks, VxWorks AE
BSD/OS

Server OS
Developer tools:

Tornado visual suite of debuggers, etc.

BSDi Acquisition:

What went to WindRiver:

BSD OS and related software
FreeBSD-related work
BSDi name

Who went to WindRiver:

Software engineering
Software support and sales

Who didn't go:

Management
Marketing
Hardware staff

Transition issues:

Most things work as before
Support: 800-usa-4wrs
Email: Support
new engineering office in Minneapolis
transitioning from Colorado Springs to Alameda and Minnesota
Web sites remain: www.bsdi.com and www.windriver.com

Upcoming Release: BSD/OS 4.3

Hardware support:

Up to 4GB memory
SCPI
Gigabit Ethernet
IDE/ATAPI DMA, larger disk support

Network booting: PXE
Compiler/tool upgrades: binutils, gcc, C++ exceptions
Linux environment: _clone() implemented (sfork)
Upgraded KAME IPv6, IPSec
Upgraded lots of utilities: BIND, sendmail, Apache, XFree86, hylafax, nmh
Fixed-priority scheduling (not documented; uses POSIX scheduling interface)
Trailing slashes "work" on directories
Now entering beta

Expecting new release to ship sometime in the Fall 2001
Technology in Process: SMPng/BSDng:

Medium-grained symmetric multiprocessing
Approach:

Lock data structures as needed
Interrupts as threads
spl calls are gone
Kernel is preemptible

Originally started with BSD/OS 4.0/4.1
Now merging with 4.3 (giant-lock)
Status:

Now on front burner
Running multiuser
Process support, filesystems, network done
Some sections left to do

"Not a product announcement...no schedule"

"spl calls are available as macros, so they're not all out"
need to get things like ppp finished
not on a real schedule, but that'll happen down the road
Ports/Platforms:

Intel/IA32
SPARC:

PCI-based systems almost done (but haven't figured out how it fits into the strategy)
On hold

PowerPC:

"These chips are all over the place in the embedded world"
IBM system controller (CPC700)
Galileo system controller in progress
Each board is different!
release strategy not determined

Unix Goes Transluscent: BSD and Mac OS X

"Mac OS X has the power and openness of Unix, with the simplicity and friendliness of a Mac"
"Unix is very friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are"
Mac OS X Goals:

Open Source Unix Core
Standads-based Graphics APIs
Rapid application development
scalable internet services
consistent user interface
Developer Tools are bundled with every copy of Mac OS X and can be freely downloaded from Apple's site.

Mac OS X is based on:

Darwin:

full preemptive multitasking
complete memory protection
advanced virtual mmeory
modern networking
Mach 3, BSD Unix 4.4
Open Source

Darwin APIs:

User Environments: XFree86 4.1, XTools; command line interface; network services
Kernel Environment: filesystem, networking, AppleTalk, IP, BSD Kernel; Mach Kernel; I/O Kit; Drivers

Support for X11, but not recommended for writing new applications

Key Darwin Features:

loadable kernel extensions:

Filesystems (VFS)
Networking (NKE)
Drivers (IOKit; allows for subclassing to work in real-time and SMP)

Power management
Dynamic Network Configuration

The goal of the Darwin project is not to replace Unix, but to support OS X:
Darwin is Open Source:

Darwin 1.3 basis of Mac OS X
Source code available live via CVS
Binary download available now:

Easy-to-use installer
Runs on PowerPC and x86

CDs available from third parties
NO PLANS TO PORT OS X TO x86 HARDWARE!

Darwin Community:

Over 80,000 registered developers:

Students
Governent and corporations

Darwin Developers:

Apple Engineering

Entire Core OS Team (Brett Halle)
Largest GCC Group (Stan Shebs)
New BSD Group (Jordan Hubbard)

External Committers "Darwin Developers"

Around a dozen (and growing)
Key university partners
You?

Killer Graphics APIs

Quartz: 2-D system based on PDF; rendering, compositing, and anti-aliasing
OpenGL: Industry standard 3D graphics technology
QuickTime: The standard for Internet multimedia

Carbon:

The easiest way to bring existing Mac applciations to OS X

Modernize Mac OS 9 APIs
Most apps are 90-percent compliant

CarbonLib allows those same apps to run on Mac OS 9
Used by leading software developers to support Mac OS X

Cocoa:

Next-generation object-oriented app frameworks
accessible from Objective-C or Java
Proven developer benefits (productivity, consistency, reliability, maintainability)

Java 2:

Only desktop OS to bundle Java 2 Standard Edition with Hotspot VM
Fully integrated JDK 1.3
Java apps can deliver Aqua GUIs
Great development tools:

Project Builder from Apple
JBuilder from Borland

Diverse Languages:

Programming:

ANSI C
C++, Embedded C++
Objective-C, Objective-C++
Java

Scripting:

Shells (tcsh is the default, but korn wasn't on their list)
Perl
AppleScript

Mac OS X is the Future Desktop Unix

Largest distributor of Unix systems (shipping with every Mac)
Key productivity applications (MS Office, Quake III Arena -- yeah, you can be really productive with Quake ;^)
Rapid graphical development (Cocoa and Java front-ends

Links:

And so the night ended for me as both batteries for my laptop gave up the ghost and there were no power outlets in sight. You'd think someone from the conference planning group would see all these folks walking around with laptops, searching for a power outlet, and get a clue. Yes, how about powerbars in conference rooms so people can plug in?

So, I left the room and the BSD free-for-all before the tomatoes started flying and headed off to catch the Green line to make my way home. And thanks to a Red Sox loss to the <cough>Devil Rays</cough>, I didn't make it home until around midnight.

And that's all for sports, thankyou!

Chuck Toporek is an editor in O'Reilly's Open Source and XML editorial group. He has recently edited CVS Pocket Reference, GIMP Pocket Reference, and the recently released Beyond Contact: A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien Civilizations. Chuck and his wife, Kellie Robinson, coauthored Hydrocephalus: A Guide for Patients, Families, and Friends, as part of O'Reilly's Patient-Centered Guides series. When not working, he can be found playing Marathon, doing laundry, or playing elephant games with his cat, Max. Write to him at Chuck Toporek.