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Experts Exchange Employee Gives Back to Open Source Community
BID:: 5144
In April, we informed EE-Tech-News readers that a patch submitted by two of Experts Exchange’s system administrators, Phil Phillips and Jason Helfman, had been committed to The FreeBSD Project. The patch, which closed a bug that had been open with FreeBSD since 2007, was for postgreSQL database server ports and allowed a configurable user and group for running the database.
While the April patch was Phil’s first submission to FreeBSD, Jason has been contributing to the FreeBSD project for years now and last week, a new software port submitted by Jason for libvirt was committed to the FreeBSD project.
If you spend your time in the Unix zone, you’re definitely familiar with FreeBSD and you probably know about Jason’s work as well. If not, here’s a bit more about The FreeBSD Project, Jason’s contributions and how both can benefit your business.
What is FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free operating system that runs on a Unix-like platform. FreeBSD APIs and internal workings are compliant with UNIX and the code base has become part of numerous other operating systems like Mac OS X. In fact, FreeBSD accounts for more than three quarters of all installed systems running free, open-source BSD derivatives. Because all of the components of the operating system (the kernel, device drivers and all of the userland utilities) are contained in the same source code revision tracking tree, FreeBSD is known as a “complete” operating system.
FreeBSD is run by a large group of developers who have commit privileges and do engineering work on the FreeBSD source code. However, because FreeBSD is an open source project, anyone can contribute to the project. Once a contributor finds an area of FreeBSD that he/she wants to improve or make changes to, he/she can submit the changes by means of send-pr or a committer, if he/she knows one. Once a change has been submitted, it is reviewed by the aforementioned group of developers with commit privileges and added to the project upon approval.
Experts Exchange and FreeBSD
In 2009, Experts Exchange system administrator Jason Helfman documented how to build your own FreeBSD Update Server. For users that think it is convenient to update their systems against an official update server, building their own FreeBSD Update Server may help to extend its functionality by supporting manually-tweaked FreeBSD releases or by providing a local mirror that will allow faster updates for a number of machines. The initial FreeBSD update-server-software was written by Colin Percival and Jason worked with Colin to commit his work.
But Jason’s contributions didn’t stop there. Jason’s most recent work includes a new software port for libvirt, a toolkit to interact with the virtualization capabilities of Operating Systems.
According to Jason, FreeBSD has virtualized portions of the operating system, but as he has learned from Bernhard Froehlic, who committed Jason's latest port, there are still a few missing pieces.
“FreeBSD is currently catching up with virtualization support; and virt-manager should give us support for managing VirtualBox, QEMU and Xen VMs on FreeBSD. However, work will need to continue on a virt-manager port,” Froehlic says.
Fortunately for FreeBSD users, Jason has recently submitted the virt-manager port for consideration to FreeBSD, which requires the newly added libvirt port.
“FreeBSD allows one to interface with systems running other virtual machines. The piece that’s missing on FreeBSD is extended virtualization support,” Jason explains. “This library allows the community to test changes they are making to the operating system, and it opens the gates for future contributions. Working with the FreeBSD project and having the opportunity to give back to the open source community is extremely rewarding. I plan to continue working and contributing to The FreeBSD Project.”
To learn more about FreeBSD and how it can benefit your business, visit www.freebsd.org.
While the April patch was Phil’s first submission to FreeBSD, Jason has been contributing to the FreeBSD project for years now and last week, a new software port submitted by Jason for libvirt was committed to the FreeBSD project.
If you spend your time in the Unix zone, you’re definitely familiar with FreeBSD and you probably know about Jason’s work as well. If not, here’s a bit more about The FreeBSD Project, Jason’s contributions and how both can benefit your business.
What is FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free operating system that runs on a Unix-like platform. FreeBSD APIs and internal workings are compliant with UNIX and the code base has become part of numerous other operating systems like Mac OS X. In fact, FreeBSD accounts for more than three quarters of all installed systems running free, open-source BSD derivatives. Because all of the components of the operating system (the kernel, device drivers and all of the userland utilities) are contained in the same source code revision tracking tree, FreeBSD is known as a “complete” operating system.
FreeBSD is run by a large group of developers who have commit privileges and do engineering work on the FreeBSD source code. However, because FreeBSD is an open source project, anyone can contribute to the project. Once a contributor finds an area of FreeBSD that he/she wants to improve or make changes to, he/she can submit the changes by means of send-pr or a committer, if he/she knows one. Once a change has been submitted, it is reviewed by the aforementioned group of developers with commit privileges and added to the project upon approval.
Experts Exchange and FreeBSD
In 2009, Experts Exchange system administrator Jason Helfman documented how to build your own FreeBSD Update Server. For users that think it is convenient to update their systems against an official update server, building their own FreeBSD Update Server may help to extend its functionality by supporting manually-tweaked FreeBSD releases or by providing a local mirror that will allow faster updates for a number of machines. The initial FreeBSD update-server-software was written by Colin Percival and Jason worked with Colin to commit his work.
But Jason’s contributions didn’t stop there. Jason’s most recent work includes a new software port for libvirt, a toolkit to interact with the virtualization capabilities of Operating Systems.
According to Jason, FreeBSD has virtualized portions of the operating system, but as he has learned from Bernhard Froehlic, who committed Jason's latest port, there are still a few missing pieces.
“FreeBSD is currently catching up with virtualization support; and virt-manager should give us support for managing VirtualBox, QEMU and Xen VMs on FreeBSD. However, work will need to continue on a virt-manager port,” Froehlic says.
Fortunately for FreeBSD users, Jason has recently submitted the virt-manager port for consideration to FreeBSD, which requires the newly added libvirt port.
“FreeBSD allows one to interface with systems running other virtual machines. The piece that’s missing on FreeBSD is extended virtualization support,” Jason explains. “This library allows the community to test changes they are making to the operating system, and it opens the gates for future contributions. Working with the FreeBSD project and having the opportunity to give back to the open source community is extremely rewarding. I plan to continue working and contributing to The FreeBSD Project.”
To learn more about FreeBSD and how it can benefit your business, visit www.freebsd.org.
About This Blog
The EE Tech News blog is produced by Jenn Prentice, Gary Weyel and Matt Stanford. Prior to joining Experts Exchange in 2009, Jenn worked as an editor at Metro Magazine (Raleigh, N.C.). Gary is a 10-year veteran of the advertising/marketing industry and has done work for numerous global brands. Matt is the Experts Exchange Marketing Coordinator by day and Penn State legal student by night.
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by: mark_wills on 2011-06-14 at 08:10:38ID: 28652
Well, about the nice work and thanks... Not the debian thingy
Keep up the great work :)
Cheers,
Mark Wills