From anne@freebsdfoundation.org Mon Jan 11 15:26:03 2016 Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 15:25:56 -0500 From: Anne Dickison To: Benjamin Kaduk Cc: Deb Goodkin Subject: Re: call for FreeBSD Foundation 2015Q4 quarterly status report Hi Ben, The text for the Foundation quarterly report is below. Please let me know if you’d like it in a different format or if you have any questions. Thanks Anne Anne Dickison Marketing Director FreeBSD Foundation 510.332.8323 ============ Contact: Deb Goodkin The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide. Funding comes from individual and corporate donations and is used to fund and manage development projects, conferences and developer summits, and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers. The Foundation purchases hardware to improve and maintain FreeBSD infrastructure and publishes FreeBSD white papers and marketing material to promote, educate, and advocate for the FreeBSD Project. The Foundation also represents the FreeBSD Project in executing contracts, license agreements, and other legal arrangements that require a recognized legal entity. Here are some highlights of what we did to help FreeBSD last quarter: On the advocacy front, the Foundation attended and sponsored EuroBSDcon, which took place Oct 1-4 (https://2015.eurobsdcon.org/ )in Stockholm, Sweden. Two days prior during the developer summit, Deb Goodkin ran a session on Recruiting to FreeBSD. The Foundation was also very active during the event itself. In addition to Deb, we had Dru Lavigne, Kirk McKusick, Erwin Lansing, Ed Maste, Hiroki Sato, and Edward Tomasz Napierała attend the conference. Deb and Ed gave a presentation on how the Foundation supports a BSD project. Kirk gave a presentation on "a Brief History of the BSD Fast File System," and he taught the two-day tutorial "Introduction to the FreeBSD Open-Source Operating System.” Deb then attended the 2015 Grace Hopper Conference was held in Houston, TX, October 14-16. The conference is for women in computing and most of the attendees were female computer science majors, female software developers, and college professors. The Foundation was proud to be a Silver Sponsor. The conference was very successful for the us. Our presence allowed us to to raise awareness of the Project, help recruit more women, and get more professors to include FreeBSD in their curriculum. George Neville-Neil traveled to Bangkok, Thailand to present talks on DTrace, FreeBSD and teaching with DTrace at Chulalongkorn University, which the largest University in Thailand with the largest engineering school. The first talk he gave was his practitioner's introduction to DTrace in which he explains the technology, history and usage, without diving into all the kernel subsystems. The second was the sales pitch for teaching with Dtrace and with FreeBSD. The pitch was well received and there was some very good points made by the audience. The facts that the course materials are both open source and hosted on github were also well received. Kirk McKusick completed a 10-hour tutorial about FreeBSD for Pearson Education in their ``Live Lesson'' program. In particular, there is a great free snippet from that course comparing FreeBSD versus Linux here: youtu.be/dTpqALCwQ1Y?a Find out more about the whole session at: http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=NZS3W7D*uS0&subid=&offerid=163217.1&type=10&tmpid=3559&RD_PARM1=http%253A%252F%252Fwww.informit.com%252Fstore%252Fintroduction-to-the-freebsd-open-source-operating-system-9780134305868 Anne Dickison resumed the Faces of FreeBSD series with interviews featuring Michael Dexter and Erin Clark. She also continued to produce and distribute FreeBSD materials for conferences, as well as advocating for FreeBSD over our social channels. George Neville-Neil headed up the latest Silicon Valley Vendor and Developer Summit, November 2-3, at the NetApp campus in Sunnyvale, California. Topics of discussion ranged over new developments in persistent memory, the use of FreeBSD by a company that builds rackscale systems, developments in our compiler and tool suite, as well as others. Additional Foundation Board and Staff attending the summit included: Deb Goodkin, Glen Barber, Justin Gibbs, Kirk McKusick, Ed Maste, and Hiroki Sato. The complete schedule, and some of the slides, are available on the FreeBSD Wiki https://wiki.freebsd.org/201511VendorDevSummit. Notes from the always lively “Have/Need/Want session are available here. https://wiki.freebsd.org/201511VendorDevSummit/HaveNeedWant While in the Bay Area, some Foundation members visited commercial users of FreeBSD to help understand their needs, update them on the work the Foundation is doing, and facilitate collaboration between them and the Project. We were a sponsor of the 2015 OpenZFS Developer Summit, which took place October 19-20, in San Francisco, CA. Justin Gibbs and Kirk McKusick attended the conference. Justin Gibbs continued his semester long class teaching Intro to Computer Science using FreeBSD at a middle school. Ed Maste, Edward Tomasz Napierała and Konstantin Belousov continue to make progress on Foundation funded development projects. More specifically: -- Ed Worked on a number of items relating to the tool chain: LLD linker, ELF Tool Chain components, LLDB debugger and tested, integrated, and merged outstanding UEFI work. — Edward finished work on reroot as well spending some time on certificate-transparency port. He also implemented a prototype for disk IO limits support in RCTL. — Konstantin rewrote the out of memory killer logic, which, in particular, fixed FreeBSD operation on systems without swap, esp. the small memory systems. The later is becoming more and more common with popularity of embedded ARM platforms were FreeBSD runs, but it also affects large systems which are usually configured without swap. He also finalized and committed the shared page support for the ARMv7 and ARMv8 systems. This gives non-executable stack for ARMv7, and much faster, userspace gettimeofday(2) for both, similar to x86. Ed Maste presented FreeBSD/arm64 talk and hands-on demo at ARM Techcon, which took place November 10-12, 2015, in Santa Clara, CA. We continued publishing our monthly newsletters and acquiring new company testimonials about using FreeBSD including those by Verisign and Nginx. Anne Dickison, Dru Lavigne and Glen Barber represented the Foundation at USENIX LISA ’15, which took place November 3-8, in Washington D.C.. The Foundation had a booth in the Expo Hall and participated in a BoF. In addition to connecting with current community members, we spoke with attendees who were interested in getting involved with the Project, and helped set them on the correct path. We also took the opportunity to remind those who hadn’t used FreeBSD in a while, what they were missing. Glen also attended the USENIX Release Engineering Summit, which was co-located with LISA ’15. We published the Sept/Oct and Nov/Dec issues of the FreeBSD Journal. George Neville-Neil and Robert Watson announced the release of their TeachBSD initiative. http://teachbsd.com/. TeachBSD offers a set of reusable course materials designed to allow others to teach both university students and software practitioners FreeBSD operating system fundamentals. The Foundation is proud to have partly sponsored their efforts to teach the initial graduate level course on operating systems with tracing at the University of Cambridge. Deb Goodkin invited a representative from the Outreachy program to talk at the Ottawa FreeBSD Developer Summit about the program and how we can get involved. Deb also started discussions with CS professors from the University of Colorado, Boulder to offer some Intro to FreeBSD workshops. Glen Barber continued wearing many hats to support to the Project. For Release Engineering: - Added support for building BANANAPI, CUBIEBOARD, and CUBIEBOARD2 arm images. - Deprecated use of MD5 checksums used for verifying installation media downloaded from the FreeBSD Project mirrors. - Various miscellaneous updates and fixes to release build code. - Continued providing regular development snapshot builds. Under Systems Administration: - Assisted the Admins team with migrating various services to two new colocation facilities near Sunnyvale, generously provided by RootBSD and LimeLight Networks. - Moved email services for the Foundation to a new server. Ed Maste attended the Reproducible Builds World Summit, which took place in Athens, Greece, December 1-3, 2015. We wrapped up our 2015 fundraising efforts with our End-of-Year fundraising campaign by participating in #GivingTuesday, and continuing with weekly email and social media requests for support of the Foundation. Final fundraising numbers will be available in Q1 2016. > On Jan 8, 2016, at 12:05 PM, Benjamin Kaduk wrote: > > Hi Deb, Anne, > > I think even if something came in on Tuesday the 12th we could still sneak > it in. > > -Ben > > On Fri, 8 Jan 2016, Deb Goodkin wrote: > >> Hi Ben, >> >> I added Anne Dickison, our Marketing Director, who is still waiting for some input >> to complete our report. What’s the drop dead date for us to submit this? >> >> Thanks, >> >> Deb >> >> >>> On Jan 7, 2016, at 10:27 PM, Benjamin Kaduk wrote: >>> >>> Hi Deb, >>> >>> I just wanted to give a personalized reminder about the quarterly status >>> report -- do you have a sense for how long you'll need to get something >>> assembled? Sorry this reminder is later than usual :( >>> >>> Thanks, >>> >>> Ben >>> >>> Links from the broadcast email that might be helpful: >>> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/monthly.cgi >>> http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-sample.xml >>> http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/howto.html >>