Will Backman (BSDtalk) has uploaded an interview with Richard Stallman on GNU and Free Software in general.
To listen click here. Mr Stallman has requested that this podcast only be distributed in the free/open source OGG format.
The FreeBSD network stack virtualization project aims at extending the FreeBSD kernel to maintain multiple independent instances of networking state. This will allow for complete networking independence between jails on a system, including giving each jail its own firewall, virtual network interfaces, rate limiting, routing tables, and IPSEC configuration. This project is focused at virtualizing the networking stack in FreeBSD -CURRENT.
For more information and downloading, please refer to the project page
BSDTalk has a podcast with Marko Zec at EuroBSDCon 2007.
Google is increasing the amount of storage it provides as part of its Gmail service.
Rob Siemborski, an engineer on Google’s webmail service, made the announcement on the company’s official Gmail blog.
Google originally started increasing Gmail’s storage in April 2005 as part of the company’s Infinity+1 storage plan. Siemborski:
At that time, we realised we’d never reach infinity, but we promised to keep giving Gmail users more space as we were able. That said, a few of you are using Gmail so much that you’re running out of space, so to make good on our promise, we are speeding up our counter and giving out more free storage.
Google Sponsors Improvements to FreeBSD’s Performance Measurement Toolkit
Recently, Google sponsored the development of an oft requested enhancement to FreeBSD’s PmcTools: that of capturing the call chains leading to “hot” locations in the code. Call chains provide additional insight into the behavior of the system; in addition to determining the “hot” locations in the code, developers gain insight into why these locations became “hot” in the first place.
HWPMC and associated userland tools have been invaluable to the FreeBSD community in improving the scalability and performance of the upcoming FreeBSD 7 release. Kris Kennaway of the FreeBSD Project notes that
hwpmc is one of our most powerful tools for measuring and understanding CPU performance on FreeBSD. Support for profiling of call graphs was an important missing piece that will simplify the ability of developers to analyze performance bottlenecks in the kernel and in application code.
More on the Google Code Blog.
The third annual pfSense Hackathon starts this coming weekend through the following weekend, in Louisville, KY US. Two developers (Holger and Seth) will be coming in from Europe, as well as Bill from the Chicago area, Gary with Centipede Networks from Tulsa, and Scott and I who both live in Louisville.
This is the longest hackathon yet, at 8 days from start to finish time.
If you’re interested, have a look at the ideas page with a list of things that may/may not be worked on. If you know of something you’d like to see, please contact Chris and it may get added to the list.
For contact details and more details, read the full post here.
A few weeks ago the Google Summer
of Code finished. This is the update from FreeBSD with regards to the FBSD projects:
“The FreeBSD Project is proud to have taken part in the Google
Summer of Code 2007. We received more high quality applications this year than ever before. In the end it was a very tough decision to narrow it down to the
25 students selected for funding by Google. These student projects included security research, improved installation tools, new utilities, and more. Many of
the students have continued working on their FreeBSD projects even after the official close of the program.
We are happy to report that all students made
some progress towards their goals for the summer, and the 22 students listed below completed the program successfully.
Information about the student
projects is available from our Summer of Code wiki and all of the code is checked into Perforce. The
summaries below were submitted by the individual students and their mentors with minor editing for consistency.”
href="http://www.freebsd.org/projects/summerofcode-2007.html">These
project)
This report covers FreeBSD related projects between July and October 2007. The sixth EuroBSDCon was held in Denmark in September. The Google Summer of Code project came to a close and lots of participants are working getting their code merged back into FreeBSD. (link to FBSD update on GSoC here).
The bugs in the FreeBSD HEAD branch are being shaked out and it is being prepared for the FreeBSD 7 branching. If your are curious about what’s new in FreeBSD 7.0 we suggest reading Ivan Voras’ excellent summary here .
Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! We hope you enjoy reading.
Read the whole report here
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