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.

IPv6 DHCP gui

[Anomalyst]

Include support of LDAP and static leases. A wizard for requesting & configuring IPv6Tov4 tunnels thru current IPv6 providers would be a major boon

Drivers & ports

[unixisc]

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

Re:

[unixisc]

Fully second this!!! Have a DHCP6 manager that assigns static and dynamic address pools, and allow for the interface ID addresses to be grouped in any way that's convenient. Such a utility would be particularly great in router/firewall gear such as m0n0wall and pFsense, if not in FBSD itself. It should have direct hooks to the relevant /etc/ files so that one doesn't have to whip up an editor and manually edit such stuff.

Other suggestions - all IPv6 related. One - have an utility that allows virtual w

Re:

[SuricouRaven]

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.

Better /etc/hosts support

[Anonymous Coward]

They should get rid of the insecure and buggy libresolv and replace it with /etc/hosts for all DNS lookups.

Re:

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

For those of you keeping track, that's the funniest thing on /. today.

Re:

[Bengie]

He made fun of a common troll/spam. I love it.

Re:

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Thank you for shedding light where there was no darkness.

Re:

[Gothmolly]

+1 Internets to you, sir.

Spend it all on marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

Spend it all on marketing, then maybe you'll get more than 5 people to give a crap about FreeBSD. Serious suggestion.

Re:

[Bengie]

I'm torn between troll and funny. Something about spending charity money, for an Opensource project that gets most of its support from volunteers, on marketing seems funny.

Commit useful new code back from the OSX fork

[muon-catalyzed]

The OGL implementation for example.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

OSX was never forked from FreeBSD.

Re:

[fnj]

You don't have to fork BSD-licensed code. That's the point. Just take the code and use it. Make any changes you want. You don't have to give them anything or tell them anything.

ZFS boot support

[rhavenn]

stable and installer supported ZFS boot support for the / volume.

Re:ZFS boot support

[Bengie]

I think PC-BSD has support to setting up a ZFS boot on fresh install, while allowing a naked FreeBSD install.

Re:

[RicktheBrick]

I want a program that would maintain a backup of the hard drive on a network drive every time the computer is shut off. I want an installation disk that would look for a backup on the network drive and install that backup instead of a new installation.

Re:

[Sadsfae]

stable and installer supported ZFS boot support for the / volume.

It's definitely stable (running 9.1-RELEASE here in a few places) but not in the installer until later.
Setting up a ZFS / install now isn't too difficult but does require using a livecd.
There is a great thread covering it from many angles here, including HD encryption.

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=31662 [freebsd.org]

One thing I did here was go upwards of 50-60G for root, I find the 10g or 20g in the
examples isn't sufficient for keeping full /usr/src and /usr/ports populated + port builds.

Re:

[The Moof]

Traditional FBSD practice doesn't place /usr and / on the same partition. I usually take it a step further and put /usr/ports onto its own partition due to the nature of that beast.

Java

[FeatherBoa]

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.

Re:

[X0563511]

I don't see why they can't work with OpenJDK. It's not under a stupid license like the Sun/Oracle JRE.

Everything from DragonflyBSD

[bluefoxlucid]

Catch up to DragonflyBSD, which forked FreeBSD in the direction it SHOULD have gone and now has superior just-about-everything.

Re:

[fnj]

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.

Re:

[bluefoxlucid]

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 da

Re:

[fnj]

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?

Re:

[unixisc]

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.

Are there bootable backups ?

[Marrow]

Something to completely restore a machine?

Double Guitars

[bradgoodman]

You know those guitars that are like, double guitars?

Re:

[unixisc]

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.

Printer and scanner support

[Builder]

If FreeBSD supported more printers and scanners / MFC devices, I'd be back on it tomorrow.

Re:

[unixisc]

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

Linux Parity

[snadrus]

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

Re:

[unixisc]

How many concurrent versions of FBSD do you want running? 9.1 was announced a few weeks ago, 8.4 beta has just been released. I fear that FBSD has a lot of de facto forks running at the moment.

I'm proud I gave them a hundred bucks!

[MythicalMan]

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.

oh, just a couple

[CAIMLAS]

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