The fourth quarter of 2015, from October to December, saw a great deal
of activity for &os;; this is now the third quarter running for which
I can say that this is the largest report yet published!  Many thanks
to the developers who proactively submitted topics and entries; it
is great to have more complete coverage of ongoing development for
the community to learn about in these reports.

This quarter has seen an experimental new team formed, to triage new
bugs in bugzilla, and improve the procedures and tooling for managing
bug submissions.  Making more effective use of automation and tooling
can help to increase developer productivity and the quality of &os;, just
as the adoption of Jenkins and continual integration tooling is
catching regressions quickly and maintaining the high standards for
the system.

Efforts to bring our BSD high standards to new architectures
continue, with impressive work on arm64 leading to its promotion
to Tier-2 status, and a flurry of work bringing up the new RISC-V
hardware architecture.  Software architecture is also under active
development, such as in the area of system startup and service
management, with a handful of potential init system replacements
under development (launchd, relaunchd, and nosh are mentioned in
this report).  Architectural changes are underway that are
instigated both from academic research (multipath TCP) and from
the realities of industry (sendfile(2) improvements); &os;
provides an excellent platform where contributions from both research
and industry are encouraged.

To all the readers, whether from academia or industry, hobbyist
or professional: I hope you are as excited as I am to read about all of
the progress and projects covered in this report, and the future
of &os;!

—Ben Kaduk