[continued from previous message]

In this quarter, a new development release has been made available for flashing and testing on a PinePhone Pro. It includes a newly added touch driver, and a minimal desktop environment with an on-screen keyboard. You can simply flash this build to an SD card and boot it up, provided you have the correct version of U-boot bootloader installed (details at the repository). The image also contains the kernel and drivers source code, along with editors/vim editor and build tools, allowing for development of drivers on-device.

To facilitate testing and driver development, network access has been enabled via the headphone jack (using the headphone-to-USB-serial adapter). It works by using Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) to access the network via your PC. Details of setting this up are in the repository README file.

Work is now under way to develop USB and WiFi drivers. As always, contributions in the form of testing, feedback, upstreaming, driver development, or just words of encouragement are welcome.

See the post on the FreeBSD Forum for more: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/porting-freebsd-to-pinephone-pro-help-needed.95948/

Sponsor: Honeyguide Group

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Cloud

Updating cloud-specific features and bringing in support for new cloud platforms.

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FreeBSD on EC2

Contact: Colin Percival <[email protected]>

FreeBSD is available on both amd64 (Intel and AMD) and arm64 (Graviton) EC2 instances.

In the past quarter, the final bits needed for "hot plug" (and unplug) landed, allowing this to be fully functional in FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE. FreeBSD "AMI Builder AMIs" are now being produced as part of the FreeBSD release building process (including for 14.3-RELEASE).

Sponsor: Amazon
Sponsor: https://www.patreon.com/cperciva

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Documentation

Noteworthy changes in the documentation tree, manual pages, or new external books/documents.

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Documentation Engineering Team

FreeBSD Documentation Project URL: https://www.freebsd.org/docproj/
FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer for New Contributors URL: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/fdp-primer/
Documentation Engineering Team URL: https://www.freebsd.org/administration/#t-doceng

Contact: FreeBSD Doceng Team <[email protected]>

The doceng@ team is a body to handle some of the meta-project issues associated with the FreeBSD Documentation Project; for more information, see FreeBSD Doceng Team Charter.

During the last quarter the following commit bits were taken for safekeeping:

• ale

• brueffer

• danger

• glewis

• hrs

• ygy

Team changes:

• doceng@ welcomes ebrandi@ as a new member (lurker).

• carlavilla@ stepped down from doceng@. doceng@ thanks him for his service.

• dbaio@ stepped down from doceng@. doceng@ thanks him for his service.

• fernape@ stepped down from doceng@. doceng@ thanks him for his service.

Document changes

• Handbook

□ The jails chapter has been updated

□ The Wi-Fi information have been updated

• Website

□ Plausible Analytics have been added to the website

• Porter’s Handbook:

□ Document Uses=gnome:gnomedesktop4

Many typos have been fixed in all related documents.

• Documentation repository:

□ Added manpages for macOS 10.12.0, 10.15.0, and 11.1

□ Updated manpages for macOS to 15.5.0

□ Added OpenIndiana manpages for 2013.08, 2015.10, 2020.10, 2022.10, and
2024.10

□ Added manpages for NetBSD 9.4

□ Added manpages for OpenBSD 7.7

□ Updated Debian manpages to 12.11.0

FreeBSD Translations on Weblate

Translate FreeBSD on Weblate URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Doc/Translation/Weblate
FreeBSD Weblate Instance URL: https://translate-dev.freebsd.org/

Q2 2025 Status

• 20 team languages

• 252 registered users

6 new translators joined Weblate:

• @mohamad (fa)

• @v.popolitov (ru)

• @SochiByte

• @carlosdaniel26

• @tj (nl_NL)

• @Natthachai043 (en)

Languages

• Chinese (Simplified) (zh_CN) (progress: 7%)

• Chinese (Traditional) (zh_TW) (progress: 3%)

• Dutch (nl_NL) (progress: 1%)

• French (fr_FR) (progress: 1%)

• German (de_DE) (progress: 1%)

• Greek (progress: 1%)

• Indonesian (progress: 1%)

• Italian (it_IT) (progress: 4%)

• Korean (progress: 30%)

• Norwegian Bokmål (progress: 1%)

• Persian (progress: 3%)

• Polish (progress: 1%)

• Portuguese (progress: 0%)

• Portuguese (Brazil) (progress: 23%)

• Russian (progress: 37%)

• Spanish (progress: 35%)

• Turkish (tr_TR) (progress: 1%)

We want to thank everyone that contributed, translating or reviewing documents.

And please, help promote this effort on your local user group, we always need more volunteers.

Packages maintained by DocEng

During this quarter the following work was done in packages maintained by doceng@:

• www/gohugo: update to 0.147.8

Open issues

There is 1 Open PRs in Bugzilla assigned to doceng@:

• 267274 Please remove the zh-CN Handbook of the current FreeBSD website

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FreeBSD Wiki

Links:
FreeBSD wiki front page URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/FrontPage

Contact: Mark Linimon <[email protected]>
Contact: Wiki admin <[email protected]>

Since the last status report, several people have expressed an interest in bringing the wiki up to the level it ought to be.

The ongoing discussions (mostly taking place on the FreeBSD Discord) are concerned with the topics of:

• Defining what content we consider useful.

• Ensuring that the useful content is kept current.

• Figuring out a way to keep obsolete content away from search engines.

• Add basic analytics to existing site to see what pages, if any,are actually
being accessed.

• Decide on whether MoinMoin can still be useful for purpose in the
short-term while we consider the longer-term needs listed above.

We do not yet have consensus on these issues.

Please join us on the FreeBSD Discord #documentation under the #wiki subthread.

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Vision Accessibility

Link:
Project Repository URL: https://gitlab.com/alfix/freebsd-accessibility

Contact: FreeBSD Accessibility mailing list <[email protected]> Contact: Alfonso Sabato Siciliano <[email protected]>

This quarter, the review for the FreeBSD Accessibility Handbook was submitted and is available at: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D50894. The review includes a link to an HTML preview.

The handbook aims to document assistive technologies for vision accessibility available in FreeBSD, covering both the BASE system and the Ports Collection. It is divided into two parts and contains six chapters:

1. Help — Covers how to request assistance effectively through appropriate
FreeBSD communication channels.

2. Virtual Terminal — Documents vision-related accessibility features of the
FreeBSD console (vt(4)).

3. Colors — Explains how to configure color schemes, including high-contrast
themes and adjusting screen colors for ambient lighting.

4. Low Vision — Outlines accessibility tools in graphical desktop environments
for users with low vision, such as screen magnifiers, readable fonts, and
scaling.

5. Blindness — Describes assistive technologies for blind users, focusing
primarily on screen readers and compatible tools.

6. Development — Provides resources for developers to make their software
accessible, test accessibility, and improve support for users with visual
impairments.

The handbook deliberately avoids images and minimizes non-plain-text elements to enhance compatibility with assistive technologies. Tips and new ideas are welcome. If possible, send reports to the FreeBSD Accessibility mailing list, to share and to track discussions in a public place.

Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation

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Ports

Changes affecting the Ports Collection, whether sweeping changes that touch most of the tree, or individual ports themselves.

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Security Hardening Compiler Options for the Ports Collection

Links:
Commit of the features URL: https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/commit/Mk/Features/fortify.mk?id=7a489e95c51f47f5e25a5613e375ec000618e52a
FreeBSD security hardening with compiler options URL: https://www.leidinger.net/blog/2025/05/24/freebsd-security-hardening-with-compiler-options/

Contact: Alexander Leidinger <[email protected]>

The Ports Collection gained the possibility to enable some security features of modern compilers for package builds. As not all ports are compatible with them, this is not enabled by default.

The 3 new features which can be enabled for the Ports Collection in make.conf are:

• WITH_FORTIFY=yes: This enables mitigations of common memory safety issues,
such as buffer overflows, by adding checks to functions like memcpy,
strcpy, sprintf, and others when the compiler can determine the size of the
destination buffer at compile time. This requires support from the FreeBSD
base system and may only be available in FreeBSD 15 onwards.

• WITH_STACK_AUTOINIT=yes: This enables a compiler specific option to
automatically initialize local (automatic) variables to prevent the use of
uninitialized memory.

• WITH_ZEROREGS=yes: Zero call-used registers at function return to increase
program security by either mitigating Return-Oriented Programming (ROP)
attacks or preventing information leakage through registers. This depends
upon support from the compiler for a given architecture. This is disabled
for python ports; currently there are issues.

The blog post referenced in the links section explains how to use them, how to exclude certain ports if needed, and provides a more detailed explanation of those 3 new features along the already existing build-time security options of the Ports Collection and the basesystem build.

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Improve OpenJDK on FreeBSD

Links:
Project description URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/project/improving-openjdk-on-freebsd/
Project repository URL: https://github.com/freebsd/openjdk

Contact:
Harald Eilertsen <[email protected]>
FreeBSD Java mailing list <[email protected]>

The goal of this project is to improve OpenJDK support for FreeBSD/amd64 and FreeBSD/arm64.

Java is an important runtime environment for many high performance, critical enterprise systems. Making sure Java based applications run correctly and efficiently on FreeBSD is important to ensure that FreeBSD will continue to be a viable and attractive platform for enterprises, as well as businesses and organizations of all sizes.

In this quarter the following issues/milestones were reached:

• The OpenJDK 24 port was updated to OpenJDK 24.0.1 at the beginning of the
quarter, soon after it was released by upstream.

• A recurring issue with the PPC ports was fixed (thanks to Piotr Kubaj).

• A new way of bootstrapping OpenJDK ports was suggested and discussed – this
is a prerequisite to get the FreeBSD port integrated into the OpenJDK CI
environment.

• A CI job for building and testing the jtreg test harness for FreeBSD was
integrated using GitHub Actions - in part to get familiar with the CI
framework used by OpenJDK projects, but also to make sure the test harness
builds and works on FreeBSD.

In addition, a lot of time was spent cleaning up and refactoring the BSD port for Aarch64, fixing various issues and working towards making the BSD port up to date with the OpenJDK mainline.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

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GCC on FreeBSD

Links:
GCC Project URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/
GCC 12 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-12/
GCC 13 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-13/
GCC 14 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-14/
GCC 15 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-15/
GCC 16 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-16/

Contact: Lorenzo Salvadore <[email protected]>

The exp-run to update GCC default version from 13 to 14 is still suspended. As a reminder, it has been noticed that FreeBSD 13.4 lacks symbols that are used by GCC 14 for linking; please see https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/ show_bug.cgi?id=284499#c0 for a more detailed explanation. The symbols are however already present in higher FreeBSD versions. At the time this report is written, FreeBSD 13.4 is expected to go out of support soon (on June 30th), so it has been decided that it is preferable to suspend the exp-run until then. Thus it will get back on track on July 1st.

Meanwhile, GCC 15 has been released. As usual, the new port package lang/gcc15 has been created, as well as lang/gcc16-devel that tracks the latest GCC development.

More bugs have been addressed. Bug 285711 about issues with some CPUTYPE values has been fixed with a temporary workaround. The workaround will be needed until commit 22e564c74eb2 is included in all supported FreeBSD releases.

A build failure has been found on aarch64 machines, see bug 282797. A fix has been found and is about to be submitted upstream.

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Third Party Projects

Many projects build upon FreeBSD or incorporate components of FreeBSD into their project. As these projects may be of interest to the broader FreeBSD community, we sometimes include brief updates submitted by these projects in our quarterly report. The FreeBSD project makes no representation as to the accuracy or veracity of any claims in these submissions.

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Chinese FreeBSD Community (CFC)

Chinese FreeBSD Community (CFC) URL: https://bsdcn.org/

The community currently comprises 316 members in the QQ group and 175 members in the WeChat group.

Documentation Project

Links:
FreeBSD-Ask Documentation Project on GitHub URL: https://github.com/FreeBSD-Ask/
FreeBSD-Ask Documentation Project URL: https://book.bsdcn.org/

It is noteworthy that all prior FreeBSD documentation has been fully translated into Chinese, including but not limited to the following materials:

• FreeBSD Release Notes (i386 or amd64)

• FreeBSD Status Reports

• FreeBSD Handbook

• FreeBSD Porters Handbook

• FreeBSD Articles

• FreeBSD Architecture Handbook

• Developers' Handbook

In addition, two classic works have been translated.

• A Quarter Century of Unix

• The UNIX-HATERS Handbook, an humoristic book written in 1994 about issues
that some users found in the UNIX operating system. It includes an
anti-foreword from Dennis Ritchie, one of the authors of UNIX, which he
wrote in a style similar to the one used in the handbook itself.

FreeBSD-Ask

Links:
FreeBSD-Ask on GitHub URL: https://github.com/FreeBSD-Ask/FreeBSD-Ask FreeBSD-Ask on Website URL: https://book.bsdcn.org/

Contact: ykla <[email protected]>
Contact: Voosk <[email protected]>

The FreeBSD-Ask was initiated on 14 March 2021 by ykla from the Chinese FreeBSD Community (CFC). It is an open-source publication written in Simplified Chinese that aims to provide introductory knowledge about the FreeBSD operating system.

Quarterly Updates

• Documentation Additions:

□ Overview of FreeBSD Desktop Distributions

□ Installing databases/postgresql17-server with pgAdmin4

□ Migration Guide for Windows Users

□ FreeBSD as a Host with VirtualBox

• Rewritten Documentation:

□ Games on FreeBSD (Renpy and Minecraft)

□ Installing sysutils/podman-suite

□ Installing x11/gnome(to 47)

□ Installing net/rsync

□ Installing net/samba420

□ Graphic card drivers

□ Printing

□ Wubi Input Method(Based on textproc/fcitx5 or textproc/ibus)

□ Installing x11-wm/xfce4

• Miscellaneous:

□ The tutorials pertaining to DragonFly BSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD have
undergone comprehensive translation, updating and rewriting.

□ Several GitHub Actions have been added to verify that images are
referenced correctly.

□ We now support exporting FreeBSD-Ask to the ePub format.

□ A tutorial about the security/py-fail2ban port (utilizing ipfw(4), pf
(4), and ipf(4)) has been submitted to the FreeBSD Journal for review.

It is hoped that an increasing number of contributors will join the documentation efforts. The primary objective of this project is to undertake a comprehensive modernisation and rewrite of the FreeBSD Handbook with a view to promoting the development and adoption of FreeBSD.

Ports

QQ Port on GitHub URL: https://github.com/FreeBSD-Ask/QQ-Port/
Bug 287292 - [NEW PORT] net-im/qq: consider restoring QQ port due to resumed upstream development URL: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=287292

In the current quarter, a port was created for QQ, one of the most popular instant messaging applications currently in use in mainland China. The bug report remains open and has not yet been assigned any reviewers.

Sponsors: Chinese FreeBSD Community (CFC)

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