Randall Stewart of Cisco Systems gave a talk titled SCTP, what it is and how to use it, discussing the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). A paper that was displayed on the overhead projecter before the talk began summarized:

"Integrated into FreeBSD 7.0 -- first standardized by the Internet Engineering Task force (IETF) in October of 2000, in RFC 2960 and later updated by RFC 4960. SCTP is a message oriented protocol providing reliable end to end communication between two peers in an IP network."

Randall explained that SCTP is an alternative protocol to TCP, UDP. To describe SCTP, he suggested you start with TCP features, including: reliable retransmission, congestion control, flow control, connection oriented, and selective acknowledgements. You then add to it more features, including: "association" 4-way handshake, framing and ordered service, multistreaming, multihoming, and reachability.

"This report covers FreeBSD related projects between July and October 2007," began the latest FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report, posted by Brad Davis. He included a summary of the recent Google Summer of Code projects noting, "lots of participants are working getting their code merged back into FreeBSD." Regarding the upcoming FreeBSD 7.0 release he noted, "the bugs in the FreeBSD HEAD branch are being shaked out and it is being prepared for the FreeBSD 7 branching. If your are curious about what's new in FreeBSD 7.0 we suggest reading Ivan Voras' excellent summary."

Among the many projects discussed in the status report was work by Marko Zec on network stack virtualization, "the network stack virtualization project aims at extending the FreeBSD kernel to maintain multiple independent instances of networking state. This allows for networking independence between jail-like environmens, each maintaining its private network interface set, IPv4 and IPv6 network and port address space, routing tables, IPSec configuration, firewalls, and more." Another project discussed was the porting of Linux KVM, "a software package that can be used to create virtual machines fully emulating x86 hardware on top of machines supporting Intel VT-x or AMD-V virtualization extensions." The report noted, "Linux KVM has been ported to FreeBSD as a loadable kernel module, using the linux-kmod-compat port (in /usr/ports/devel/) to reuse as much as possible of the original source code, plus an userspace client consisting in a modified version of qemu, that uses KVM for the execution of its guests."

"I'm a bit behind after investigating the TCP performance issues that turned out to be HW specific problems. It's a bit of a disappointment, I thought maybe there was a cool bug to fix in TCP :-)" explained David Miller, posting his networking merge plans for the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel. He noted, "I merged in Jeff Garzik's and John Linville's latest and I'm running the current tree on my workstation most of today with good results so far." David added, "I plan to commit my Neptune driver in it's current state, and that's the last new feature going in."

In an earlier discussion last month on the Linux netdev mailing list, David described how many changes were in his net-2.6.24 git tree, "it's to the point where every single bug fix put into Linus's tree creates a merge conflict with net-2.6.24, we are simply touching that much stuff. :-)" He added, "we've touched so much in net-2.6.24 that we really should be auditing the thing and fixing any bugs that have been added. If you're bored and looking for something to do, pick an odd NAPI driver and audit it in the net-2.6.24 tree."