Poul-Henning Kamp (one of the core FreeBSD developers) is asking for donations, and saying that if he gets them he will complete [link|http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/plan.html|a series of I/O improvements] by the end of this year, rather than in the next couple of years.
[link|http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/funding.html|http://people.freebs...~phk/funding.html]
Commentary from Ziggy at [link|http://use.perl.org/~ziggy/journal/18315|http://use.perl.org/~ziggy/journal/18315] suggests that Ziggy, for one, thinks highly of Poul-Henning Kamp's abilities. I have a high respect for Ziggy's opinions. OTOH I don't use FreeBSD.
Cheers,
Ben