binutils

Kai Wang has announced today the BSD ar(1) is available for wider testing. This is amazing work, the creation and list speed are 5-20 times faster than GNU ar(1), and extraction speed is also slightly better than GNU ar(1).

It is also important to note that this version is completely BSD-licensed (yes, that means that you are free from the lair’s license), and is a piece of the vital parts of the FreeBSD DTrace work.

I will release third (more or less unstable) release ISO if nothing will prevent me from doing that :-) The latest delphijfork includes several new features, which is tend to exhibit new technologies and possiblities of FreeBSD:

• An implementation of RFC 3522 ported from DragonFlyBSD
• An implementation of Early Retransmission ported from DragonFlyBSD

Also, FreeBSD-CURRENT has several new features, including:

• In progress import of binutils 2.15
• pf 3.5. Including several new features and works better with spamd.
• better ACPI support

David O’Brien has just imported binutils 2.15 snapshot into FreeBSD src repository. What’s more, he stated that he will do gdb 6.x import soon. This will drastically improve the debug and development environment in FreeBSD.