Tables are cluttered with laptops, servers, switches, cables and cords as the 2006 OpenBSD hackathon continues in Calgary, Canada. Small groups of developers talk and debate around LCD screens, while others work individually on their own projects. Behind the scenes, a donated 10 megabit wireless connection provides Internet access to all. IP addresses and DNS are provided by stock bind and dhcpd processes running on an OpenBSD server. Among other things, the infrastructure area hosts an HP DL385 with 24 GB of memory that was recently donated by HP, a G5, several Sun Blade 2000's, and an assortment of PowerPC, Alpha and Opteron-based servers. A console server provides serial connections to the servers along with logs of what went on on the serial console, useful for debugging. Power issues on the first day were resolved by evenly spreading the servers and many laptops across the available circuits in the hackathon room. Chris Kuethe explained, "the whole point of the infrastructure is that it's not supposed to be exciting, it's just supposed to be there, like a light switch."

I have spoken with another 28 OpenBSD developers from Turkey, Iceland, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Australia, Austria, Hungary, the US, and Canada. Efforts are being made on ACPI, the VFS subsystem, link-layer authentication, OpenBGPD, tcpdump, XFree86, pf, CARP, dvmrpd as a replacement for mrouted, OpenRCS, OpenCVS, the USB layer, prebinding, ipsecctl, 10 gig Ethernet support, link layer path mtu discovery, several new and improved drivers, amd64 large memory support, new CD and DVD recording features for cdio, improvements to mg, support for new architectures, numerous new and updated ports, and much more.

cdio [1]. At this time, cdio is simply an old tool for playing audio tracks; however, by the time Michael is finished he sees it as a complete replacement for cdrecord and growisofs, "the all singing-dancing-burning tool." He's already implemented all the functionality in his own little test tool, so now what's left is to integrate it into cdio. He hopes to have things fully working by the end of the hackathon.

trunk [2] driver that will be compatible with most switch implementations. He will also be working on implementing link layer path mtu discovery for jumbo frames. Different devices support different maximum packet sizes, and when finished OpenBSD will be able to automatically discover and use the maximum for each device.

wdt [3] watchdog driver to use the OpenBSD watchdog framework like all other watchdog drivers do. He's also investigating how to best use additional sensors available on certain models. Michael hopes to finish the work on the wdt driver while at this hackathon, however he doesn't have hardware to test it on and is relying on sending diffs to a user in France with the hardware. He welcomes anyone else to contact him [4] that has the hardware that is willing to test diffs, "the device will show up in dmesg as not configured". Also at the hackathon Michael has been involved in the time-delta discussions.

story [5]] including making pfctl work as a compiler to offer more complicated optimizations and error checking. The past year has been busy in personal life and work, so he's now working to clear out a backlog of projects, including reviewing a pile of fixes to sasyncd. Also at this hackathon Ryan is going to start working on his third major rework of the state code in pf, and is looking to improve the routing performance of OpenBSD.

xge [Array] Netorion 10 gig driver, as well as helping with link layer path mtu discovery by debugging bugs found in jumbo frames support.

part one [6] of this article.