Dear FreeBSD Community, The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce one of the projects from the accepted project proposals! The project is to make FreeBSD tolerate the removal of active disk devices, such as when a USB flash device with a mounted filesystems is physically detached by a user. Currently the system may panic in this situation. The work involves adding proper reference counting to strategic portions of the kernel and modifying filesystems to properly handle "device lost" errors. Edward Tomasz Napierala is the developer working on this project. "We are very excited to be able to fund this project, which we know is of great interest to our users, especially in the desktop space," said Robert Watson, president of The FreeBSD Foundation. Robert also said, "The removable USB disk causing a crash turns out to be our #1 reported bug." "I am very happy to have the opportunity to work on this exciting project," said Edward Tomasz Napierala, FreeBSD developer. "It's just wrong when the system panics because you removed the pendrive!," he added. The project will be completed by February 2009. Sincerely, The FreeBSD Foundation