Slashdot Mirror
The FreeBSD Foundation Is Soliciting Project Proposals
Professor_Quail writes "Following a successful 2012 fundraising campaign, 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. The proposal process is open to all developers (including non-FreeBSD committers), and the deadline for submitting a proposal is April 26th, 2013."
The foundation is currently funding a few other projects, including UEFI booting support.
Include support of LDAP and static leases. A wizard for requesting & configuring IPv6Tov4 tunnels thru current IPv6 providers would be a major boon
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
They should get rid of the insecure and buggy libresolv and replace it with /etc/hosts for all DNS lookups.
Spend it all on marketing, then maybe you'll get more than 5 people to give a crap about FreeBSD. Serious suggestion.
If you like meshes, you'd better look into CAN and distributed caching too - because without that, your mesh is going to be overwhelmed very easily.
The OGL implementation for example.
stable and installer supported ZFS boot support for the / volume.
I would like to see improved Java support. What we have now is all either hacks based on running the Linux JVM as a compatible ABI, or you have to build a JVM from source due to licensing. I would like to see a commercial JVM run natively. Ideally IBM's.
That's not something FreeBSD can do though, I don't expect.
Something to completely restore a machine?
DragonflyBSD is a good solid project, but could you name the aspects in which it is superior to FreeBSD? DragonflyBSD has hammerfs; FreeBSD has ZFS. That's a draw at best. There are some relatively minor improved features which would be nice to port back maybe.
FreeBSD supports far more hardware platforms than most or any linux distros. I have never had any problem whatsoever with FreeBSD on any PC hardware I tried. What specific hardware have you had a problem with? How long ago was it?
Uh, the completely non-locking allocators, scheduler paths, and so on? DragonflyBSD's internals are what separated it from FreeBSD: the original maintainer had some big ideas on how to rewrite the schedulers (process, thread, I/O) and allocators to be a lot faster, lighter, more efficient, and scalable; he got banned from FreeBSD.
HP Moonshot is going to bring 2000+ core servers to the data center one of these years (it's quiet, but there's real progress happening in there and lots of partners in the data center testing out the design and commenting and criticizing and helping to debug and improve it), and everything that isn't concurrent without a performance impact (that means no lock paths and no being any less than 4x as fast to schedule 4 threads at once) is going to shit itself when it hits the hardware and probably die.
Thousands of cores. Bajillions of bytes of memory.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
You seem to be talking about CPUs, but if the subject is supported peripherals or other devices, Linux seems to be way ahead of the BSDs in this area.
You know those guitars that are like, double guitars?
If FreeBSD supported more printers and scanners / MFC devices, I'd be back on it tomorrow.
Foundations for Wayland, KVM, KMS, systemd, Dalvik. Many of these things should just be a compile away with the right few pieces in place. Don't get left behind & don't let Linux's advancements be an island
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
I'm a busy software developer working for a big company, so I don't have much time to contribute for Open Source and open knowledge projects. Supporting the FreeBSD Foundation, Wikimedia and similar initiatives seems to be a good way to pay for their valuable work. I make a donation every year and invite all /. readers to do the same.
--- Signature? You must be kidding!
Oh, I only have a couple:
* Fix USB device enumeration, you know, like you said you would in 8.1
* Either remove or update storage controller drivers which are no longer maintained and have been
* replace sysinstall outright with something which is more likely to work consistently
* fix the release cycle to have something between "cutting edge requiring a regular rebuild of the system" and "stale binaries released when the release goes STABLE, and more often than not made unavailable completely as soon as they become stable and/or vulnerable".
* Would also be nice if they could make it so the all-too-common upgrade problem where you start an upgrade, but a dependency gets changed while you're upgrading and you end up half-broken (requiring you to run 2+ freebsd machines per release if you want to run one in a production state).
Of course, I'd submit these officially, but like is typical with FreeBSD, "it's your fault, there is no problem, X works fine, moving on" is likely to be the response (if there is one at all).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
FBSD may not need Wayland, since it's possible that a lot of their users do use X for remote accessing. But for PC-BSD, Wayland should be ported, and KDE 5 and other DEs that support Wayland should be supported on it.
Which brings to mind another point - FBSD needs a team that do just one thing - ensure that every peripheral that sells today has supported drivers, be it open source or not. The goal should be making (F)BSD as automatic an install as Windows usually is. Once that's there, w/ complete plug-n-play, there are some chances of OEMs bundling PC-BSD w/ newer desktops, instead of Windows 8.
Two more things. Have one team whose sole purpose is to proliferate FBSD support to as many known peripherals and devices as possible, so that it's as easy to proliferate PC-BSD on as many laptops as possible, w/o worrying about whether it supports all the hardware or not.
Other - have something like Wine for PC-BSD to run XP and Windows 7 programs. Not so well that nobody wants to develop stuff for PC-BSD, but well enough so that the last essential programs that may not have a unix equivalent can be run emulated, while the bulk of other things run on PC-BSD.
FreeBSD already has a virtual edition called VirtualBDS. On top of that, it also supports jails of Linux (Debian & Gentoo) and BSD itself. Only thing it'd need might be VMware for Windows support, but other than that, I'd say it's there.