Matthew Dillon has committed a huge update to the system initalization code, which, among other things, allows parallel processes during boot. This means that system initialization can be greatly sped up, which he plans to have working by Monday.  (and is already starting on it!)

(Reminds me of my old BeOS/PPC system - a desktop within 10 seconds.)

Matthew Dillon has synchronized the Preview version of DragonFly with the bleeding edge code, since his commit of the SYSREF system may cause some stability problems.  The first commit incidentally fixes some other issues he found.

Peter Avalos has updated libarchive to version 2.1.9.

Matthew Dillon posted an update on how he’s organizing syslink to handle the sharing of machine resources in a cluster.

It is possible to use multiple make processes when building from pkgsrc, similar to using -j when performing buildworld to speed things up.  It can be set in mk.conf or as an environment variable, and turned off for specific packages if it causes trouble.

Joerg Sonnenberger has binary packages of the 2007Q1 pkgsrc release now available on his server.

Aggelos Economopoulos’s second article about DragonFly’s virtual kernel is now available to non-subscribers on lwn.net. (The first article is also available.)

Welcome our newest committer: Hasso Tepper.  In addition to his recently committed patched for DragonFly, he’s also been working on KDE support for DragonFly.

rsync.net (which offers Backup Done Right, as far as I can tell) is offering a number of code bounties for various (mostly FreeBSD) projects.  One of them is a standardized stress test for UFS2 - a general filesystem testing framework would do everyone good - especially someone using a distributed file system…