Lack of FreeBSD coverage in the UK media

[Robert Watson]

On Wed, 28 Mar 2007, Christian Weisgerber wrote:

> Daniel Seuffert <DS at praxisvermittlung24.de> wrote:
>
>> I don't know much about the specific situation in the UK, but I can confirm 
>> BSD is not well represented in the media.
>
> "We'd like to print more BSD articles but nobody is submitting any." 
> (Standard reply at German LinuxTag when you ask the press people about 
> this.)

Some things that might be neat to see articles about in the next six months as 
7.0 approaches:

- The FreeBSD ZFS port, especially in a week's time or so once it's committed.
   Introduction to ZFS highlighting its features, some tutorial content on
   using it with FreeBSD, etc.  I've had countless people approach me over the
   last month at various UNIX and BSD conferences, and they're very excited
   about ZFS on FreeBSD.  In fact, it's frequently cited as a reason to try
   FreeBSD instead of Linux.

- Using the pf firewall and its associated features (pfsync, carp, etc) with
   FreeBSD.  OpenBSD successfully makes a lot of noise about the availability
   of these features on their platform, and for good reason: they're great
   features.  We should be making more noise about them being available on our
   platform -- especially given our SMP network stack support.  This might be
   best backed up by a bit of measurement and optimization.

- FreeBSD audit support -- we've had some articles on this already, but it's
   worth a few more.  Integrated audit with portable APIs and file format set
   us apart from Linux, and there are some nice opportunities to bring in new
   volunteers to develop audit tracking and management tools.  Support in 6.2
   is considered experimental, but we'd like it to be production-quality in
   6.3.

- FreeBSD SCTP support -- SCTP has some really great protocol features, and
   FreeBSD 7.x will ship with it.  This is a chance to highlight some exciting
   new technology, and the fact that FreeBSD has a reference implementation of
   it.

- FreeBSD support for sun4v and sun4v technology generally -- again, a chance
   to highlight FreeBSD as being involved in a cutting edge technology
   platform.

- FreeBSD and high SMP scalability -- now that many of the patches used to
   accomplish very high database scalability on FreeBSD are going into the base
   CVS tree for inclusion in 7.x, it would be really interesting to see an
   article on the process by which the FreeBSD team measured and optimized
   FreeBSD performance for 8+ core systems, from new thread libraries to
   changes in kernel synchronization, time management, scheduler, etc.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge