[FreeBSD-Announce] Foundation Project Announcement

[Deb Goodkin]

Dear FreeBSD Community,

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce one of the projects from
the accepted project proposals!

The project is to make FreeBSD tolerate the removal of active disk
devices, such as when a USB flash device with a mounted filesystems is
physically detached by a user.  Currently the system may panic in this
situation. The work involves adding proper reference counting to
strategic portions of the kernel and modifying filesystems to properly
handle "device lost" errors.

Edward Tomasz Napierala is the developer working on this project.

"We are very excited to be able to fund this project, which we know is
of great interest to our users, especially in the desktop space," said
Robert Watson, president of The FreeBSD Foundation.

Robert also said, "The removable USB disk causing a crash turns out to
be our #1 reported bug."

"I am very happy to have the opportunity to work on this exciting
project," said Edward Tomasz Napierala, FreeBSD developer. "It's just
wrong when the system panics because you removed the pendrive!," he added.

The project will be completed by February 2009.

Sincerely,

The FreeBSD Foundation