Plan and funding of SMP Networking projects

[Julio Merino <jmmv%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

Hello,

On September 13th, 2011, the Board of Directors posted a news item [1]
requesting project specifications to get rid of the big kernel lock
surrounding the networking code. Unfortunately, nobody has taken
advantage of the offer and, therefore, the Board has not received any
applications to this date.

In order to lower the entry barrier, the Board has prepared a set of
smaller project proposals that, in aggregate, help in achieving the goal
of making the networking stack suitable for SMP systems.  Please note
that these projects cover a very wide range of topics: there are
projects whose only purpose is to add new data structures to the kernel,
while others involve refactoring parts of the existing code to make
adding locking easier.

The list of projects for funding and the tentative plan can be found in
the new SMP Networking project page [2].

All of the individual projects that can help in achieving the goal of
SMP Networking are suitable for funding.  If you are interested in
applying for any of them, please contact board@ and core@ directly.  The
project application how-to [3] may be of help.

Thank you.

Julio Merino,
On behalf of the Board of Directors

1: http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/request_for_project_specs_to
2: http://wiki.netbsd.org/projects/project/smp_networking/
3: http://wiki.netbsd.org/projects/application/