Bob Beck announced the creation of the OpenBSD Foundation with three directors including himself, Kjell Wooding, and Ken Westerback. "The OpenBSD Foundation is pleased to announce today it has completed its organization as a Canadian federal non-profit corporation and is ready for public interaction," the press release began, going on to explain:

"The OpenBSD Foundation has been formed for the purpose of supporting the OpenBSD project, and related projects such as OpenSSH, OpenBGPD, OpenNTPD, and OpenCVS. In particular it will act as a single point of contact for persons and organizations requiring a legal entity to deal with when they wish to support OpenBSD in any way.

"The OpenBSD Foundation will initially concentrate on facilitating larger donations of equipment, funds, documentation and resources. Small scale donations should continue to be submitted through the existing mechanisms."

Bob Beck announced the availability of OpenBSD 4.1 today:

"We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.1. This is our 21st release on CD-ROM (and 22nd via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of ten years with only two remote holes in the default install. As in our previous releases, 4.1 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system".

OpenBSD 4.1 can be purchased as a 3-CD set to help support the OpenBSD project [story], or freely downloaded. Read on for Bob's detailed overview of what's new in this latest OpenBSD release.

The 2006 OpenBSD Hackathon, c2k6, is well underway in a conference room at a hotel in downtown Calgary, Canada. The event started yesterday, May 27th, attended by nearly 50 OpenBSD developers from all over the globe. OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt [interview] is thrilled by what is already proving to be another successful event, "I don't think anybody else does this, developers suspend their lives for a week to focus entirely on just development." Theo explains that he doesn't get much coding done himself at these hackathons, but instead focuses on ensuring beneficial communication between developers, an obvious advantage to assembling so much talent in a single room.

Walking among the cluttered tables, I've been talking with the high energy attendees of this year's hackathon, learning who's here and what they're working on. In this first installment I've talked to 18 developers from France, Switzerland, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, Dominica, the US, and Canada. They each talk a little about how they discovered OpenBSD and what they're working on here at the hackathon, including introducing new ports, support for SD devices, local OpenCVS functionality, improvements to OpenNTPD, improved SCSI controller support, initial support for the UltraSparc III architecture, and much more. The hackathon continues around the clock through June 2nd.

Bob Beck is an OpenBSD developer from Edmonton in Canada. He's one of around 60 OpenBSD developers currently working in an undisclosed hotel somewhere in downtown Calgary at the 2005 OpenBSD hackathon [story]. Bob was involved in setting up the infrastructure [story], and was responsible for the annual barbecue at OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt [interview]'s house [story]. Following these two days of effort that helped to make the hackathon possible, he finally sat down to work on spamd and catch up on email. One of the emails in his inbox caught his attention, leading to a day's effort about which he notes, "some Days end up far far far from where they start."

In the following article, Bob provides a first-person account of tracking down what began simply as a RAID performance issue, but ultimately turned out to be a problem with the idle loop that when fixed resulted in an impressive performance boost. Bob noted, "the idle loop is where the kernel spins when there is no work to do in userland, because of this, it's also where we catch and service many of our interrupts from drivers that may queue work to the device and then tsleep waiting for an interrupt from the card saying the work is done." Bob went on to explain that prior to today's fix, interrupts were handled appropriately when there was userland work happening, but not when there was nothing happening in userland and the kernel was simply waiting for device input/output. Read on for Bob's full account of the day, leading up to the discovery of the problem and the implementation of the fix, including performance numbers.