This quarter had rather a lot of work achieved, together with however definitely not limited to, in areas regarding every thing from multiple architectures resembling x86, aarch64, riscv, and ppc64 for each base and ports, over kernel adjustments resembling vectored aio, routing lookups and multipathing, an alternative random(4) implementation, zstd integration for kernel dumps, log compression, zfs and preparations for pkg(8), along with wifi adjustments, adjustments to the toolchain like the new elfctl utility, and all the option to massive changes like the git migration and transferring the documentation from DocBook to Hugo/AsciiDoctor, as well as many other issues too numerous to say in an introduction. This report with 42 entries, which don’t hold the answer to life, the universe and everything, could not have occurred without all the people doing the work additionally writing an entry for the report, so the quarterly group wish to thank them, as otherwise, we would not have anything to do. We hope you may enjoy studying as a lot as we enjoyed compiling it.
Daniel Ebdrup Jensen, on behalf of the quarterly team. Entries from the various official and semi-official teams, as found within the Administration Page. The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit group dedicated to supporting and selling the FreeBSD Project and neighborhood worldwide. Funding comes from particular person and corporate donations and is used to fund and handle software development tasks, conferences and developer summits, and provide travel grants to FreeBSD contributors. The foundation purchases and helps hardware to improve and maintain FreeBSD infrastructure and offers assets to improve safety, quality assurance, and launch engineering efforts; publishes marketing material to advertise, educate, and advocate for the FreeBSD Project; facilitates collaboration between commercial vendors and FreeBSD builders; and finally, represents the FreeBSD Project in executing contracts, license agreements, and different legal arrangements that require a recognized legal entity. Like most organizations, we transitioned all of our employees to earn a living from home. We additionally put a temporary ban on travel for employees members, which didn’t affect our output too much, since most conferences went virtual.
We continued supporting the community and Project, regardless that a few of our work and responses might have been delayed due to adjustments in a few of our priorities and the impression of restricted childcare for a number of of our employees members. We help facilitate collaboration between commercial customers and FreeBSD developers. We additionally meet with firms to debate their wants and convey that info back to the Project. Not surprisingly, the keep at home orders, mixed with our company ban on travel throughout Q4 made in-particular person conferences non-existent. However, the workforce was in a position to proceed assembly with our companions and commercial customers nearly. These meetings help us understand a few of the purposes where FreeBSD is used. An event we help plan and set up, that helps with vendor/developer engagement, is the annual Bay Area Vendor Summit. We weren’t going to let a pandemic cease us from holding this invaluable yearly occasion, so we went digital!
From the feedback we acquired from the vendor group on how we should always run this, so it could be useful for them, we determined to hold this over 3 half days in November. One unexpected result was that more business users from around the world attended. Since a Vendor/Developer Summit is typically invitation solely, we opened this as much as FreeBSD contributors from around the globe to observe the livestream. Due to the success and excitement of this occasion, we are planning to hold another one round June or July. We wish to take a second to say thank you to all of the people and corporations that stepped up to assist fund our efforts final yr. As of this writing, we raised $1,235,926, and may have the ultimate tally by mid-January. The companies that gave generous monetary contributions embrace Arm, NetApp, Netflix, Juniper Networks, Beckhoff, VMware, Stormshield, Tarsnap, and Google. We also need to say thanks to the Koum Family Foundation for awarding us a big grant, and to the workers of Nginx who also made generous monetary contributions.
