A long time discussions and development had been done on USB. Hans Peter Selasky (hps) had rewritten the entire USB stack and it seems to be moving forward enough so that Alfred Perlstein is willing to commit this into the FreeBSD tree.

Ofcourse things do not go without resistance, there are always (and will always be) people that are sceptic, against it, afraid of it etc. Not only developers, but consumers and people using this commercially as well. Nothing new there, nothing wrong there either.

So, with a bit of luck the new code will be in so that it can mature for the 8.0 release of FreeBSD.

Did you all know that there had been a lot of development for 8.0 btw? MPsafeTTY, USB, Dtrace, new ZFS drop, we migrated from CVS to SVN, we are working on LLVM (Contribute people!), even beter ULE support, Superpages got improved by alc@, NFS Locking and GSSAPI crypto, perhaps NFSv4, VImage (Marco Zec’s virtualized networking stack), and many many more new features that are not in the current -RELEASE tree’s, and will probably never be in these tree’s (it will be in future branches ofcourse). Ofcourse the above is no promise it will actually be in there, but as it currently looks like: chances are they will be there ;-)