Enterprise Working Group

CHARTER

The mission of the Enterprise WG is to bring clarity to feature and other gaps that limit enterprise (e.g. business or end user) adoption of FreeBSD as a general-purpose server platform and provide a supportive group to help developers close these gaps. For our purposes, we are defining general purpose enterprise server as servers used by businesses and other organizations to support business applications and end users. Typical applications include Active Directory, Samba, kerberos, ERP and other apps often written in Java, and increasingly AI workloads and cloud native apps.

The Scope of the WG is: For the remainder of 2023, the WG will focus on the set of features identified initially and refined during the WG’s first meetings. The WG will also concern itself with onboarding a semi-permanent group of developers and users to look after the ongoing utility of FreeBSD for general purpose enterprise server workloads.

Our success metrics are:

The deliverables are:

We operate according to the FreeBSD Code of Conduct

Status

Assess interest in an Enterprise WG

DONE: The Google Group now has 69 members

Charter the WG

DONE: See above

Compile list of gaps

DONE

Feature

Description

OCI

Important to have an OCI runtime

bhyve manageability

This is a pain in the enterprise. FreeBSD has exceptional jails & hypervisor with a lot of possibilities, but everything has to be done manually

AD/DNS Integration

This is needed. In a large environment it is impossible to email the DNS admin about every single change, therefore Active Directory makes heavy use of dynamic DNS updates authenticated via GSS-TSIG (requires Kerberos)

NVIDIA GPU support

HPC, AI workloads. Many in these industries like FreeBSD but need more native support in nvidia. security is key for these workloads

Java / OpenJDK

No upstream BSD port in OpenJDK

Samba 4.x

Since the inception of their new VFS layer, it has become harder for FreeBSD. Too many changes living now in downstream (port). FreeBSD core pillars of ZFS and network capability must be in sync with Samba's features to have great file hosting

smbfs 2.0/3.0

The current smbfs driver is 1.0, totally unusable

Kerberos

Heimdal base is old. Splitting of MIT Kerberos port into client and server would be ideal

eBPF

eBPF page

Prioritize feature list

DONE

Feature

Mean rank (lower is more important)

Mean difficulty (higher is harder)

OCI

2.9

4.1

bhyve manageability

3.3

2.3

AD/DNS Integration

3.7

3.3

NVIDIA GPU support

4.0

3.9

Java / OpenJDK

4.6

3.4

Samba 4.x

4.8

3.4

smbfs 2.0/3.0

5.0

4.0

Kerberos

5.1

3.5

eBPF

5.8

4.6

Assign/volunteer

IN PROCESS. See Workstreams below

Create phased plan

PLANNED, NOT STARTED

Participation

This group is open to anyone who would like to contribute in support of its charter. We are currently using Google Groups to communicate.

Please complete this form to register your interest. Enterprise WG Interest Form

We need all kinds of perspectives and expertise - developers, end users, project managers, testers. Questions please email greg at freebsdfoundation dot org

Our Next Workgroup Call

The next call has not been scheduled yet. Please sign up with the work group via the Enterprise WG Interest Form to receive the next meeting link.

The agenda for the next call:

Workstreams

OCI runtime

bhyve manageability

AD/DNS

NVIDIA GPU support

Java / OpenJDK

Samba 4.x

smbfs 2.0/3.0

Resources


CategoryProject

EnterpriseWorkingGroup (last edited 2023-12-01T18:30:57+0000 by ChrisMoerz)