Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund throws cash at FreeBSD and Samba

Unix-like to work on infrastructure, SMB reimplementation on 'key milestones'

EuroBSDCon Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), which is backed by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, is funding open source work again. This time, the recipients are the FreeBSD Foundation and SerNet, which is one of the backers of the Samba Project.

The STF gave the GNOME ecosystem €1 million in 2023, as we mentioned in July, but clearly the fund has broader aspirations. The Register has previously mentioned that FreeBSD also received funding. Now it looks like the foundation will spend its €686,400 ($767,200, or £573,000) by investing it in its infrastructure.

These efforts are alongside an effort to improve laptop support in the OS, which has been funded by a separate investment from Quantum Leap Research (QLR). QLR's website is less than forthcoming about what it does, but the FreeBSD folks mention that it "is focused on tackling some of the most complex problems faced by the Department of Defense and the US Intelligence Community." It seems multiple governments are bunging cash at FreeBSD.

This is on top of recent FreeBSD audio stack work. Some of this new effort, the team told us at this year's EuroBSDCon in Dublin, is going toward improving power management, especially suspend/resume support, audio support including better microphone handling and utilizing media-playback keys, and, perhaps most of all, improving its Wi-Fi support.

FreeBSD can talk Wi-Fi, especially if you have an older WLAN NIC, but its ability to drive modern hardware is lacking. This is so problematic for some users that a project called Wifibox has a radical solution: it runs a dedicated Linux VM under bhyve, forwards the Wi-Fi hardware to that VM, and lets Linux control the WLAN with its more modern drivers, and then passes the resulting network connection back to the host machine. It reminds us of the bad old days of using ndiswrapper to run Windows Wi-Fi drivers on Linux.

The STF has also handed SerNet €688,800 ($769,937, or £574,924) to improve SAMBA, the FOSS stack for networking with Windows computers. SerNet is the company behind SAMBA+, which is an enhanced version of the FOSS Samba codebase aimed at enterprise customers.

In its announcement, SerNet says: "Over the next 18 months, Samba core developers will tackle 17 key milestones in six target groups aimed at enhancing Samba's security, scalability, and functionality." The project's Johannes Loxen told The Reg:

The proposed work aims to improve Samba, focusing on interoperability, security, and scalability. By improving features like transparent failover, SMB3 UNIX extensions, and security protocols, and integrating modern technologies like SMB over QUIC and io_uring, the work contributes to the reliability and performance of Samba and makes it compatible with the latest protocols.

These activities align with STF's mission by supporting critical IT infrastructure and strengthening the open source ecosystem.

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Bootnote

It will be interesting to see how increased use of the Linux kernel's io_uring calling system – which got the ability to handle a couple more syscalls in the latest kernel – fits in with using Samba on FreeBSD, as the system is Linux-only.