- SMPng -- FreeBSD currently has less than impressive SMP support.
due to a recent merger between BSDi and Walnut Creek CD-ROM, the
FreeBSD developers were given access to the current development source
to BSD/OS, which has considerably better SMP. the end result of this
has been a massive project to completely redo the SMP capabilities of
FreeBSD, based on the work done in BSD/OS. the first part of the work
has been completed, and way committed to CURRENT on sept 6th. this has
cleared the way for the multithreading of the remainder of the kernel,
which is currently underway.
check out this link
for the SMPng project home page. also read the freebsd-smp and
freebsd-current mailing lists to see what's currently going on.
- Crypto -- just before the release of 4.0-RELEASE, openssl and
openssh were added to FreeBSD. until recently though, if you were in
the usa you had to download the RSA libraries separately (as a port).
due to the recent release of RSA into the public domain, that is no
longer necessary, and FreeBSD now has working ssh out of the box. this
is by no means limited to FreeBSD, but it's still pretty neat.
a lot of the discussion of these issues is going on in the
freebsd-security and freebsd-current mailing lists, among other
places.
- IPv6 -- FreeBSD can now function completely on an IPv6 network.
the last barrier (instalation) was recently removed, and now you can
install over an IPv6 network just fine (assuming you use the right
network mirrors, as only a few have the capability). FreeBSD shares
IPv6 code (from the kame project) with the other BSD os's, and it is
one of the few os's out there with decent support. this also includes
support for IPSEC, which i'm personally very interested in.
check out kame.net for a lot of
info on IPv6 for BSD.
- Darwin -- the core for apple's OS X uses FreeBSD code (along with
code from Net and OpenBSD). apple is currently in the process of
synching it's libraries and userland with FreeBSD, and several apple
engineers have become FreeBSD committers as a result of the
project.
darwin's home page is at publicsource.apple.com (i think, i can't currently reach the site)
- Openports -- the three open source BSD os's all have ports trees,
but they are separate. the openports project is trying to unify them,
so all the BSD's can benefit from each other's work. each ports
system has its own strength, and it'll be interesting to see if they
can come up with a good combination.
check out openpackages.org
for more info, although there doesn't seem to be much there yet.