FreeBSD Status Report Second Quarter 2005

The latest FreeBSD Status Report makes for interesting reading. Many of the ongoing tasks are Google Summer of Code projects. Nmap author Fyodor posted that Google is spending $2 million to fund projects this summer, including ten for Nmap itself. I highly commend Google for devoting a small portion of its market capitalization to these coding efforts.

• Emily Boyd will redesign FreeBSD.org. Previous work includes the PostgreSQL Web site. Previews are posted here.


• Dario Freni is reengineering and rewriting FreeSBIE to include it in the source tree.


• Andre Oppermann is trying to raise enough money to fund three full months of dedicated development on improving the TCP/IP stack. I will contact the FreeBSD Foundation to see if they will accept tax-deductible donations on his behalf.


• Chris Jones is working on making gvinum ready for prime time.


• Andrew Thompson has an OpenBSD-like if_bridge interface ready for FreeBSD 6.0.


• Andrew Turner is integrating into FreeBSD the BSD Installer originally used in DragonFly BSD and then FreeSBIE.


• Brian Wilson is working on journalling for UFS. This Slashdot post examines different journalling options.

There are also many improvements in SMP and TrustedBSD that will appear in FreeBSD 6.0, probably in September.