The following timescale was suggested at 201005DevSummit:

7.4-RELEASE, then 8.2-RELEASE, then 9.0-RELEASE (aim for 2011-05)

• (E) Ability to compile INET6 Only kernel
• (EC) VIMAGE: More virtualization (BjoernZeeb)
• (E) Remove if(4) send queue
• (EC) Dispatch sets of packets (Packet batching) (JeffRoberson has some patches)
• (EC) PCPU packet dispatch / Net taskq
  • Arguably this should be a generic interrupt thread task to convert interrupt threads to use more of a taskqueue-like model where interrupt handlers are scheduled events to reduce context switch overhead for processing concurrent interrupts.
• (EC) Revised mbufs + tags (JeffRoberson / LuigiRizzo)
  • Align mbuf data and use extra space in resulting mbuf header area to store tags
• (E) Pass input queue info up from device
  • Allow bpf to tap a specific input queue on a multiqueue NIC for example
• (E) Fixing carp(4)
• (EC) Multiq transmit support (if_transmit)
• (EC) TCP Connection groups locking paradigm (RobertWatson) - Expected ~June/July 2010
• (EC) CPU cache analysis, should we prefetch parts of mbufs (headers), etc.
• (E) IEEE 802.1p (this may be already implemented?)
• (C) mbuf performance optimisations (JeffRoberson) (~December 2010)
• (C) Software TSO
• (C) SIFTR
• (C) TCP reassembly
• (C) Modular Congestion Control (LawrenceStuart?)

• (EC) 802.11n - High Throughput (RuiPaulo)

• Parallel device attach
  • The idea here is running device probe and attach routines concurrently to reduce boot time.
  • Some tricky questions here are that non-deterministic device names across boots would be a substantial POLA violation and that many bus drivers may not be ready for this complexity.
• USB video device support
• Express Card
• External hardware integration
  • Not entirely sure what this is about – jhb@
• Flattened device tree support
  • FlattenedDeviceTree
• Further ATA/CAM work
  • Resolving different disk geometry under adaX vs adX?
  • Device naming
• Device I/O resource management (PnP OS support) (JohnBaldwin)
• Starting the scheduler sooner for most of device attach (JohnBaldwin)
• Power management
  • Option to power down NICs (D1/D2/D3) when they are down (may multiple policies here)
  • Handle C2+/C1E where local APIC timer is turned off (need backup timer (HPET?))

• Virtualize more subsystems (VIMAGE)
• More embedded platform support
  • avr32
  • mips64
• Further work on improving scaling to large numbers of cores (e.g. 128)
  • Queued spin locks
• Dynamic CPU configuration (allowing CPUs to go offline/online)
• ccNUMA support
• Remove Giant if possible
  • SYSINIT()'s
  • module event handlers
  • !MPSAFE filesystems
• Unmapped disk I/O buffers (sglist in bio)
  • bus_dmamap_load_bio()
  • bio_adjust() / bio_start
• Fix the lemming syncer
• Per-mount syncer threads
• Modularity Hygiene (ask phk@ for more details)
  • Are optional things still optional or are things so intertwined that things are de facto required.
• MAC for ZFS
• Flash FS support / NAND filesystem?
• TRIM support
  • Depends on BIO_DELETE support in filesystems, would be implemented by BIO_DELETE requests
• tickless kernel / deadline scheduling
• BIODELETE support for filesystems
• per-thread credentials (ZachLoafman)
• Kernel capabilities (RobertWatson)
  • Process file descriptors and capability rights used to sandbox processes.
• Performance monitoring counters (hwpmc(4)) support for embedded platforms
• 64-bit quotas for UFS (KirkMcKusick and DagErlingSmorgrav)
• Hibernate support (S4)
• VOP_OPLOCK support for allowing shared locking state between SMB / NFS, etc. (ZachLoafman)
• Shared page data to allow pure userland implementations of certain system calls
  • Virtual system call proposal was probably related with this one
• Non-executable stack
• Disallow mmap() to offset 0 from userspace (AlanCox and RobertWatson)
• Clock / power domain management
• Address space randomization
• Start using disk labels to mount filesystems more aggressively / by default
• Enable some sort of kernel debugging by default in release kernels
  • At minimum we want to get a DDB stack trace by default.
  • Possibly textdumps and/or kernel dumps with crashinfo enabled by default.
• Better config(8)
  • Able to build modules with a custom set of kernel options
• Xen DOM0
• Infiniband
• ZFS as default
  • sysinstall support
  • Licensing?
• Linux 64-bit binary support in FreeBSD/amd64
• Transactional NFS export updating
• Move to disklabels
• Faster reboot (kernel part):
  • Don't go to the BIOS at 'reboot', but start the kernel from the beginning

• Get llvm into the tree alongside gcc
• Userland DTrace
• Startup dependencies (MartinBlapp)
  • Change /etc/rc.d/foo scripts to autostart dependencies in single user mode (as an example)
• A library to provide multi-platform support for backtraces in userland applications
• Witness for pthreads (Warner)
• Better support for debugging tools: pstack/ltrace/strace
• Compiling 32-bit i386 binaries on amd64
• Improved support for running i386 binaries on amd64
• Better VirtualBOX support
• Always put 64-bit kernel on amd64-capable hardware
• Common install DVD for i386/amd64
• Better support for binary only systems
  • Make GENERIC more generic so common tasks don't require custom kernels (network stack modularization may help with this) so that freebsd-update can update the kernel.
• Faster reboot
  • Several possible ideas here including parallelized rc.d scripts
• Manual IPv6 support in sysinstall

• “Ports STABLE”
• Better Binary Support
  • Not sure exactly what this is referring to – jhb@
• Parallel pkg_add (fetching and adding packages concurrently)
• Switch pkg_add to using http instead of ftp by default due to firewalls, etc.
• Provide more package variants (e.g. -nox11 package builds)
  • Possibly add a ports variants concept ala MacPorts to avoid a profileration of metaports that exist solely to force variant packages to be built
• Cross building ports infrastructure
• Signed packages
• Building packages for a subset of ports/ tree (useful for embedded)
• Better jail management
• Connection manager-like facilities (more info needed about this one)