What FreeBSD Achieved In Q3'2011

Here's a look at what the FreeBSD project managed to achieve during the third quarter, from July through September. There's a few noteworthy items.

The FreeBSD project today issued its latest quarterly status report, which can be viewed on this FreeBSD.org page. Key items from this past quarter include:

- Improved Atheros 802.11n support.

- There's now PCI Expres and SMP support for the Marvell Armanda XP SoC solution, which is derived from the Marvel Sheeva processors. The ARM port of FreeBSD presented these ongoing Marvell Armanda XP improvements. Next up will be finishing the SMP support, L2 cache support, and a Serial ATA (SATA) driver.

- GELI, the full-disk FreeBSD encryption method using the GEOM class, now has support for suspend/resume, AES-NI performance improvements for the AES-XTC algorithm, and other improvements.

- When it comes to the KDE desktop on FreeBSD, the LLVM/Clang compiler can now build Qt and there's various package updates. Notably there is now Qt 4.7.3, KDE SC 4.6.5, Amarok 2.4.1, and other packages.

- The OpenAFS 1.6 file-system has been ported to FreeBSD. This distributed network file-system is working under light load, but under heavy load there are reported to be some issues.

- ZRouter.org is a new project to provide a FreeBSD-based firmware for embedded devices. There's ZRouter firmware for various D-Link routers and other devices. The developers hope to have a web-based GUI by the next quarter along with more device drivers, control scripts, and other features.

Meanwhile, FreeBSD 9.0 should be released later this month. Benchmarks of this popular BSD distribution are being worked on next.

The previous FreeBSD status report can be read here. Improvements last quarter were made to LLVM/Clang, the Intel DRM driver porting, and other work. Sadly there isn't any Intel open-source graphics driver advancements to report on for this quarter.