FreeBSD Progresses With ZFS, Intel DRM, LLVM/Clang

There's a new FreeBSD quarterly status report available. This status report provides a concise, public update on the FreeBSD project. Among the work this past quarter has been updating the ZFS file-system, the Intel kernel DRM GPU driver progressing, and the LLVM/Clang compiler is maturing rapidly.

A few of the interesting notes from this latest status report:

- On the Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) and the C/C++ Clang front-end replacing GCC in FreeBSD base: There's a new snapshot of LLVM/Clang with many new features. Recently there's been performance improvements, MIPS and PowerPC architecture improvements, and enhancements to the ARM/i386/AMD64 support. There's a buildbot that's routinely building LLVM/Clang on FreeBSD for i386 and AMD64. There's more than 15,000 ports being built right now using the Apple-sponsored Clang compiler.

- FreeBSD for the Sony Playstation 3 will be part of the FreeBSD 9.0 release. Most parts, including USB and Bluetooth and Ethernet are now supported. FreeBSD can be installed to the internal hard disk on the Playstation 3.

- The Intel DRM GPU driver that's being ported from the Linux kernel is still under heavy development.

- Qt on FreeBSD can now be built with Clang. Upstream in FreeBSD is now Qt 4.7.3 and KDE SC 4.6.3/4.6.4/4.6.5.

- The OpenAFS distributed network file-system is now being ported to FreeBSD.

- ZFS pool version 28 is now uploaded to FreeBSD 8-STABLE. There's several bug-fixes and improvements in FreeBSD ZFS version 28 via the Illumos Solaris project.