Hi everyone,

I have some servers with RHEL4 installed on them, and I’ve noticed a problem every time I start processes that saturate the I/O channels, such as VMware’s vmware-vdiskmanager. This tool performs various operations on VMware virtual disk files, and when creating a new one, the load average on the server tends to spike into the double digits. As you can imagine, this negatively affects virtual machines running at the same time!

After some searching, I found the ionice tool that looked like a perfect solution to the problem. Unfortunately, it doesn’t run on the 2.6.9 vintage kernel supplied with RHEL4. Back to the drawing board!

After more searching, I came across a forum thread and a link to an ionice replacement for RHEL4, written in Perl. I downloaded it and tried it out, and it appears to work as advertised. My heavy I/O operations take longer now (fine), and the load average stays within acceptable limits (great!).

The script has some hard-coded values, and it can be easily tweaked as needed. Thanks to Greg Bell at ServEdge for writing it!

Hi everyone,

As I’ve been writing over the past couple of weeks, there are a large number of FreeBSD ports that are unmaintained and would benefit greatly from a new maintainer. Today, we’ll visit with a particularly tragic strain of port:

Unmaintained and BROKEN!

Bill Fenner sends out a periodic automated email to the freebsd-ports mailing list with links to ports that do not build: http://people.freebsd.org/~fenner/errorlogs/.

This is a useful page for any port maintainer to visit periodically to make sure all of his/her ports are humming along. If a port remainis unbuildable for too long, portmgr will likely mark it BROKEN after a while, and if it stays BROKEN too long, it will be removed from the tree.

The problem is that when a port is unmaintained, it’s likely that no one will notice that it doesn’t build, and it won’t be fixed in time to save it from removal. One place to start if you’re interested in adopting a port is the page detailing unmaintained ports that are broken on one or more platforms:

http://people.freebsd.org/~fenner/errorlogs/ports@freebsd.org-date.html

There are many different reasons that ports refuse to build, including (sample log follows each):

• Unfetchable upstream distribution files (log)
• GNU configure errors (log)
• Compiler/linker errors (log)
• Package building problems (log)

Fixing a broken port may be as easy as correcting a download URL or as complex as patching source code so it builds correctly on the AMD64 platform. There are many different ways to get your feet wet, so I encourage you to check some of the broken build log files and see if you can fix, and possibly adopt, one of these ports!

Greetings all,

I’m here with some more statistics about the FreeBSD ports tree and the unmaintained ports in it. Today, I calculated the top five categories with the largest number of unmaintained ports in each:

Category	Unmaintained Ports	Sample Ports
devel	461	ace allegro-devel p5-Yada-Yada-Yada
games	381	gnomesudoku gnuchess xasteroids
textproc	352	diffutils flex xerces-c
graphics	298	Coin bmeps xfpovray
audio	245	icecast rioutil zinf

There is a huge variety of software to explore in the ports tree, and if you’re interested in maintaining one or more ports, I suggest looking for something you’ve already used in the past or a piece of software in your area of interest.  For instance, there are a number of astronomy and biology-related ports that could use some help!

Another great place to find ports that need some help, be it maintainership or submitting PRs to fix them, is the pointyhat build cluster status page: http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/.

If you’re just getting your feet wet and don’t know where to start, subscribe to the freebsd-ports mailing list or browse its archives. You’ll find a lot of questions and solutions to common problems as you learn more about the ports infrastructure.

Hi everyone,

To prepare for the upcoming inaugural International FreeBSD Adopt-A-Port Day on June 15th, 2009, I am publishing some interesting (???) statistics about the FreeBSD ports tree.

First up (cue the violins): The most unloved FreeBSD port!

This port has been a workhorse since the year 1996, back in the days before the Internet you now know, when a fast connection was 56k and we often disabled image loading in our browsers to speed up the browser! Those days, there were fewer than 500 ports in the tree, a far cry from the 20,000+ we now enjoy.

And now, I give you (drumroll, please)….

print/ghostview

The CVS log shows that this port has been unmaintained since 17-Nov-96, so it’s been nearly 13 years that ghostview has been wandering aimlessly through the tree, waiting for someone to adopt her/him/it. The ghostview port won’t require a lot of care and feeding, but if a new upstream version is released, the port would like a FreeBSD maintainer that will submit a PR to keep it in sync.

So, wouldn’t you like to help a port regain its standing in the tree and become all that it can be and more? Contact me at glarkin@FreeBSD.org to get involved and help out!

FreeBSD developers know Martin Wilke (miwi@) and Ion-Mihai Tetcu (itetcu@) and their dedication to the success of the project. Martin is the top committer to the ports tree as well as a member of the Security Team, and Ion-Mihai is the creator of the much-revered “QA Tindy” to keep the committers on their toes and improve the overall quality of the ports tree.

Martin and Ion-Mihai have just been honored as the newest portmgrs. Congratulations, Martin and Ion-Mihai, and thank you for your help to me and all other port maintainers and committers as we learned (and continue to learn) the ropes!

Hi everyone,

Just for fun, let’s designate June 15th as the inaugural International FreeBSD Adopt-A-Port Day for 2009!

My colleague and co-mentor to Alexander Logvinov, Thomas Abthorpe, posted to the freebsd-ports mailing list in March looking for folks to adopt unmaintained FreeBSD ports and keep them up to date.

I’d like to continue Thomas’ effort and find out who in the FreeBSD community is interested in taking on one or more unmaintained ports. Some current stats:

FreeBSD ports info page (20325 total ports as of June 4th, 2009)

FreeBSD unmaintained port list (4719 as of June 4th, 2009, 77 with build errors)

FreeBSD unmaintained ports that need upgrading (253 as of June 4th, 2009)

If you are interested in maintaining a port, contributing PRs for port upgrades, and perhaps eventually becoming a ports committer, read the following documents to get a good overview of the process:

• http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/contributing-ports/index.html
• http://wiki.freebsd.org/PortsTasks
• http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2002/01/31/Big_Scary_Daemons.html

I started my own path to becoming a FreeBSD ports tree committer by discovering that a web application (WebCalendar) that we use at SourceHosting.net was not part of the tree.  I read up on how to create a new port, submitted a PR for it, and after review by an existing FreeBSD committer, it was added to the tree.  Now other WebCalendar users can install it on FreeBSD as easily as typing:

cd /usr/ports/www/webcalendar && make install clean

After a port is added to the tree, a maintainer keeps track of upstream package releases, updates the port to track the new version, adds any needed configuration options and makes sure that it builds and installs on the FreeBSD supported platforms. As payback, you’ll often hear from folks using your port, whether sending thanks, enhancement requests or the occasional bug report!

Since submitting that first PR, I have created a number of new ports for tools used at SourceHosting.net or just in my areas of interest.  I have adopted many as well. Most unmaintained ports are very undemanding and just need some minor TLC! It’s a great way to support a project that has contributed directly to the success of my Real Job.

Have any questions or guidance? Email me at glarkin@FreeBSD.org, follow me on Twitter or comment here. We’d love to work with you!