Updated TCP Proposals and FreeBSD

There are a number of proposals for improving TCP performance coming out of Google that have some implications for FreeBSD. These proposals have taken the form of a group of IETF proposals, RFCs, patches to the Linux kernel, and research publications. A nice summary of the different initiatives is available from Lets Make TCP Faster on the Google Code Blog.

TCP Fast Open by Radhakrishnan, Cheng, Chu, Jain, and Raghavan is based on the observation that modern web services are dominated by TCP flows so short that they terminate a few round trips after handshaking. This means that the 3-way TCP handshake is a significant source of latency for such flows, and they describe a new mechanism for secure data exchange during the initial handshake to reduce some of the round-trip network transmission and associated latency for such short TCP transfers. This work shares many goals and challenges with T/TCP, which was previously in FreeBSD but suffered from some security vulnerabilities.

David Malone posted some thoughts on my Google+ post about how FreeBSD could implement the various changes. Maybe we could have some Summer of Code students work in this area this summer?

Two New Videos: SuperPages and NanoBSD

Thanks to Kirk McKusick, I'm happy to announce two new fully edited high quality videos from BSDCan 2011 in the BSD Conferences YouTube channel. I've also created a new playlist for the BSDCan 2011 videos.

The first talk is "Superpages in FreeBSD" by McKusick, and it describes the addition of superpage support to the FreeBSD 8 kernel on the Intel PC architecture. Superpages aggregate together standard-sized hardware pages into much larger "superpages". Each superpage requires only one entry in the page table replacing the numerous entries used by the standard-sized hardware pages.



The second talk is "Updates from NanoBSD: FreeNAS drives NanoBSD development" from Warner Losh, and it describes the basics of NanoBSD and how FreeNAS moved over to NanoBSD.



We now have 108 high-quality videos in the BSD Conferences channel. These videos have been watched in aggregate over 400,000 times, and our most popular video remains McKusick's FreeBSD Kernel Internals Lecture.

As a reminder, this channel was setup specifically for the BSD technical community and does not have the standard limitations on video size for other types of YouTube uploads. If you have additional video content from a conference, presentation, or class about BSD Unix please get in touch and I'd be happy to help you publish the content here.

Luigi Talks Netmap on Google Tech Talks Channel

Last week, Luigi Rizzo visited Google and gave a talk on high-speed networking with Netmap.



This was Luigi's second talk at Google and the third talk about FreeBSD in the Google Tech Talks YouTube channel. We also have more than 100 videos available in the BSD Conferences channel.

FreeBSD at GSoC Mentor Summit

As in previous years, Google held a "Mentor Summit" to bring together representatives from the open source organizations that participated in the Google Summer of Code to share experiences of what worked, what didn't, and generally learn from each other about shepherding students through the program. The mentor summit is always run Unconference-style and it is a great opportunity to meet, learn, and socialize with the many other open source organizations.

In addition to several hours of face to face FreeBSD-related catch-up with Brooks Davis over pizza and beer, I particularly enjoyed catching up with old colleagues and learning about the current state of a variety of other open source projects I use such as R, Boost, NTP, and Ganeti.

This weekend Brooks and I were the only FreeBSD representatives. Given that I'm local and Google sponsors the travel of 2 representatives from each open source organization it's quite unfortunate we couldn't get another FreeBSD mentor here this year. I would strongly encourage some of the other mentors that have never participated in this forum to volunteer to represent FreeBSD next year. This program has funded approximately 117 students to work on FreeBSD over the past 5 years and the mentor summit is best way I know of to improve the experience for students and open source projects next year.

Thanks again to all the FreeBSD mentors that worked with students this summer and hope to see some of you at the post-GSoC Mentor Summit next year...

FreeBSD Summer of Code Students Highlighted on Google Blog

As in previous years, I've posted a summary of FreeBSD Project participation in Google Summer of Code on the Google Open Source Blog.

By my count we have now mentored at least 117 students on FreeBSD development through this program. As in previous years it was tough to identify a few student projects to highlight given how much cool work is going on here. My list is certainly not complete but at least a few other people mentioned that Efstratios Karatzas, Zheng Liu, and David Forsythe had done a lot of excellent work this summer. Hats off to them, all the students and mentors this summer, and Brooks and Robert for serving as administrators of this whole thing for us.

MeetBSD 2010 Videos in HD on YouTube

Thanks to Tomasz Dudzisz we now have 14 videos from MeetBSD 2010 in Poland. Tomasz has created a playlist for the BSD Conferences YouTube channel, or you can select a video directly from the list below. These videos are all in HD quality and most are in English and a few are in Polish. Thanks Tomasz and the MeetBSD organizers for being so organized with the video recordings again this year.

Dru Lavigne - Update on BSD Certification

Hans Peter Selasky - The new USB stack in FreeBSD

Jakub Klama - FreeBSD on DaVinci DMSoC (polish)

Jan Srzednicki - What ideas can FreeBSD borrow from AIX?

Attilio Rao - The VFS/vnode interface in the FreeBSD kernel

Marko Zec - Network emulation using the virtualized network stack in FreeBSD

Paweł Jakub Dawidek - HAST -- Highly Available storage for FreeBSD (polish)

Paweł Jakub Dawidek - HAST -- Highly Available storage for FreeBSD (questions, polish)

Nikolay Aleksandrov - FreeBSD-based solution for Internet traffic management
Sławek Żak - NoSQL

Ramon Tancinco - meetBSD 2010 Welcome Intro

Martin Matuska - mfsBSD

Dmitri Epshtein - Advances in Embedded ARM processors, for performance driven applications

Warner Losh - Using FreeBSD in a Commercial Setting

BSDCan on Google's Open Source Blog

A coworker of mine, Kirk Russell, just posted an excellent summary of BSDCan through the years on the Google Open Source Blog.

I wasn't able to make it to BSDCan this year due to family commitments, but I did make it to another open source conference later this summer that I also wrote about on Google's open source blog.

Kirk and I haven't worked closely together but we both do our best at evangelizing BSD and open source inside our respective corners of the company. It's great to see his post about all the excellent work happening in the BSD community on a corporate blog.