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OpenBSD 4.5 was released on May 1st. I had the privilege to collect some q&a with multiple developers about new features and improvements included in this release.

WAPBL stands for "Write Ahead Physical Block Logging". WAPBL provides metadata journaling for file systems. In particular, it is used with the fast file system (FFS) to provide rapid file system recovery after a system outage. It also provides better general-use performance over regular FFS through less on-disk metadata updates - these are coalesced in the journal. WAPBL was developed by Wasabi Systems, and recently Wasabi contributed that work back to NetBSD. Wasabi has been using WAPBL in its storage products for about four or five years now.

Jedi apprentice Federico Biancuzzi contacted the Council and interviewed 27 Master Developers to talk about how they liberated OpenBSD 4.4 from the Empire. Details on the operation are not completely disclosed yet, but you can already see a picture of the Uniform, of the team Team, and of the elite PuffySet.