During this summer we have been working on the project, and despite the lack of time (daily job, traveling, etc.), some important features were introduced, so we are happy to highlight them.
First of all, the project has it's own wiki now, as well as a separate bug/feature tracker. For a long time, there was only a single page with brief description within the OsmocomBB project wiki. Having a dedicated project in Redmine, we are able to provide well structured description and documentation for our milestones. Kudos to Harald Welte!
A few weeks ago, the first milestone has been completed - "Ability to run GSM network on any frequency"! We have managed to run a GSM network in 2.4 GHz WiFi band, connect an SDR-based phone and successfully tested the regular subscriber's activity, such as SMS messaging and voice calls. More details about this feature will be shared soon.
There was a lot of work at the front of audio integration (see https://osmocom.org/versions/133). TCH/H channel coding implementation (see https://osmocom.org/issues/3419) in trxcon has been sent for review. In addition to Full Rate (GSM FR codec) speech, both HR (Half Rate) and EFR (Enhanced Full Rate) codecs are supported as well now! At the moment, all changes related to audio support in OsmocomBB can be found in a separate branch: https://git.osmocom.org/osmocom-bb/log/?h=fixeria/audio
Work on frequency hopping is also ongoing. Up to this point we used OsmoTRX for the purpose of testing of new features in the real world. As OsmoTRX currently doesn't support frequency hopping, we needed to find something else to test this functionality. For this purpose we hooked our mobile station to a Racal 6103E tester (kudos to Sylvain Munaut) that has support for frequency hopping, and currently it is possible to perform location registration and assignment of a traffic channel with it.
The Osmocom project (if you count its predecessor OpenBSC) have been running for close to 10 years, creating a large number of Open Source projects related to mobile communications. We have never needed nor wanted any legal entity for it. It's a pure/classic FOSS project, open to contributions from anyone.
Until today, you could only contribute in one of the following forms:
- by writing code (bug fixes, new features, etc) and submitting it (which means you need to be a developer)
- by writing documentation / improving the wiki
- helping other users on the mailing lists, IRC, or in other forums
- donating cellular equipment (which many don't have)
- hiring a freelancer or a company to write code and contribute to Osmocom on your behalf
- buying products or services from companies who dedicate lots of work to Osmocom
However, we've repeatedly getting requests from some individuals who wanted to contribute to the project in an easy way, even if they are not a developer, and/or don't have time, and/or don't have the size of a budget to fund development of entire new features or sub-systems.
Today, Osmocom announces that we have joined Open Collective in order to enable you to make financial contributions, either one-off or recurring.
We'll be using the funds (if we get any!) according to our funding policy outlined at https://opencollective.com/osmocom/expenses/new# in order to pay for expenses such as hosting costs for our servers / IT infrastructure, travel funding for the annual developer conferences, etc. Any and all expenses paid from those funds will be visible on the OpenCollective website. You cannot ask for more transparency than that :)
Thanks in advance for your kind assistance!
We've upgraded our redmine project management software from 3.2 to 3.4, which gets us a number of interesting new features and fixes.
This opportunity was also used to install a number of interesting redmine plugins.
Among the intresting new features are:
- ability to attach tags to issues and wiki pages
- projects overview page now with multiple columns and no side-pane
- preview of image attachments at bottom of issues / wiki pages
- PDF attachment preview in lightbox
- uploading/attaching of images from clipboard, including browser-based image cropping
- links to individual users/developers using the "@" notation like "@laforge" leading to laforge
- ability to add [temporary] banners and/or footers to the site
Let us know if anything was broken during the upgrade.
*
one of the difficulties with OsmoCon2017 last year was that almost nobody submitted talks / discussions within the deadline, early enough to allow for proper planning.
This lead to the situation where the sysmocom team had to come up with a schedule/agenda on their own. Later on much after the CfP deadline,people then squeezed in talks, making the overall schedule too full.
It is up to you to avoid this situation again in 2018 at OsmoCon2018 by submitting your talk RIGHT NOW. We will be very strict regarding late submissions. So if you would like to shape the Agenda of OsmoCon 2018, this is your chance. Please use it.
We will have to create a schedule soon, as [almost] nobody will register to a conference unless the schedule is known. If there's not sufficient contribution in terms of CfP response from the wider community, don't complain later that 90% of the talks are from sysmocom team members and only about the Cellular Network Infrastructure topics.
You have been warned. Please make your CfP submission in time at https://pretalx.sysmocom.de/osmocon2018/cfp before the CfP deadline on 2018-05-30 23:59 (Europe/Berlin)
Thanks for your kind attention.
The deadline of the Call for Participation (CfP) to the OsmoCon2018 has been extended by two weeks.
This means you still have time until May 30, 2018 to submit your proposal and meet us in October 2018 to talk about your experience, or to share your ideas about Open Source Mobile Communications.
You can find our CfP at https://pretalx.sysmocom.de/osmocon2018/cfp
The Osmocom project has released new version of the CNI (Cellular Network Infrastructure) software, including OsmoBTS, OsmoBSC, OsmoMGW, OsmoMSC, OsmoHLR, OsmoSGSN, OsmoGGSN.
Those new tagged/released versions contain half a year of work since the previous versions released in early November 2017. The primary focus was on bug-fixing and stabilization. Many bugs were introduced during the split of the NITB into individual network elements during 2017, and even more bugs exposed by our ever-growing test coverage, particularly in the Osmocom TTCN-3 test suites.
All-in-all, the post-NITB stack has gained a lot in terms of spec compliance, robustness, stability and features during this period.
You can find pew-compiled binary packages of our latest release for a variety of Debian and Ubuntu GNU/Linux versions at
Latest_Builds.
The developer performing the release related work was Pau Espin. Thanks!
List of tagged versions and link to related ChangeLog¶
Noteworthy Changes¶
Misc¶
- GnuTLS fall-back for obtaining randomness
- support for three-digit MNC throguhout the code-base
- add talloc introspection via VTY
- tighter CRTL input parsing
- stricter VTY config file parsing
- allow to print only basename of source code file in logging
- print log level with color-keying of the level name
- OsmoTRX has now a VTY interface and uses Osmocom-style logging + config file
- use GNU autotest, like other osmocom projects
- re-introduce support for USRP1 devices
- build multiple binaries rather than selecting UHD / USRP1 at compile time
- EFR decoding fixes
- fix dynamic detection/use of CPU optimization (SSE3 vs SSSE3)
- various parsing/encoding fixes for trx-control interface
- add example config file for USRP B200
- higher accuracy reporting of time of arrival
- fix LAPDm UA memory leak
- put useful information into RTCP SDES packets
- fix AMR DTX FSM related crash
- many fixes related to measurement processing + reporting
- more robust RSL message parsing + error reporting
- implement DELETE INDICATION on AGCH overflow
- fix crashes in IPA DLCX processing
- fix operation without System Information Type 1
- support all types of Cell Identifier Lists in BSSMAP PAGING
- fix intra-BSC hand-over (used to work in NITB)
- fix various error paths in hand-over logic
- introduce new "handover 2" algorithm from Andreas Eversberg
- introduce load-based hand-over to balance channel load between overlapping BTSs
- implement SI2ter + SI2bis rest octets
- switch to osmo-mgw for handling media/user plane (instead of old osmo-bsc_mgcp)
- introduce osmo_fsm for subscriber_connection
- reduce several GSM timers to more reasonable default values (T3113, T3109, T3101, ...)
- permit codec list with both TCH/F and TCH/H channels
- permit network supporting more than one A5 cipher
- fix missing L2 pseudo-length in SI5/SI6 messages
- introduce Access Control Class (ACC) ramping to deal with overload situations on network power-up
- switch to "late assignment" by default (we used to do early / very early assignment)
- many fixes related to 3GPP spec / protocol compliance
- fix various use-after-free in GSUP and CC
- fix GSM-MILENAGE in presence of 2G keys
- cancel all paging on IMSI DETACH
- many fixes related to 3GPP spec / protocol compliance
- permit network supporting more than one A5 cipher
- properly pass bearer capabilities between MNCC and CC
- switch to osmo-mgw for handling media/user plane (instead of old osmo-bsc_mgcp)
- use dynamic MGCP endpoint allocation using wildcard
- migrate away from openssl to new libosmocore rand abstraction
- fixes related to SMS validity time
- delete expired SMS automatically
- fix transmission of MM INFO messages
- fix SMS to non-local subscriber
- fix various crashes
- fix response to PURGE_MS
- notify GSUP clients (MSC, SGSN) when HLR subscriber information changes
OsmoMGW (and libosmo-mgcp-client)¶
- Introduce osmo_fsm client API
- various fixes of SDP parser
- significantly improved compliance with MGCP spec
- wildcarded endpoint allocation in CRCX
- integrate libsofia-sip logging with libosmocore logging
- add systemd service file
OsmoSTP (and libosmo-sigtran)¶
- fix various memory leaks
- introduce IPA/SCCPlite support (allows translation of SCCPlite to M3UA/SUA)
- fix some crashes
- migrate away from openssl to new libosmocore rand abstraction
- fix display of GTP addresses in VTY
- re-introduce support for kernel GTP acceleration (was temporarily removed when migrating from OpenGGSN)
- fix byte-order of IPCP IPv4 DNS server addresses
- add support for IPv4v6 End User Addresses
- Validate packet src addr from MS
- various sgsnemu fixes
This Sunday (May 13), we're planning to do some of the pending migration of osmocom.org services from our old server to a new machine.
This will cause some downtime. Hopefully it will be minimal, but for sure there will be unexpected events that will mean some of the osmocom.org services will be unavailable at some point during Sunday :/
In terms of priorities, gerrit is high up on the list, so this is the primary focus. If that goes well, redmine is the next on the list.
In case you're interested in the gory details, #3076 is the overview ticket.
All of the video recordings made at the recent 2018 Osmocom Developer Conference (OsmoDevCon2018) have meanwhile been released.
You can find the recordings at https://media.ccc.de/b/conferences/osmocon/osmodevcon18 with a back-up at this youtube playlist
Please excuse the bad audio quality in the Welcome to OsmoDevCon 2018 talk. We didn't pay attention to the clipping and only resolved it towards the end of that talk. All other videos have proper audio quality.
The Ettus USRP1 hardware was the first SDR device that could be used to implement a GSM base station. At Osmocom we never removed the related support from OsmoTRX, but it was getting rather hard to use with USRP1 due to two reasons:
- libusrp had been removed from gnuradio after gnuradio 3.4.2 in FIXME
- OsmoTRX could only be built with either UHD (for USRP2/B2x0/... devices) or with libusrp/USRP1 support
In recent weeks, we have improved the situation by the following measures:
- Alexander Huemer took the last released libusrp from gnuradio-3.4.2 and released it at http://git.osmocom.org/libusrp/
- Pau Espin packaged this libusrp for Debian, it is now part of our nightly and latest Binary_Packages
- Pau Espin re-structured OsmoTRX to build two binaries from one build:
osmo-trx-uhd and osmo-trx-usrp
