... the load of the box you're building Gentoo packages on can't hit the number of processors because it can't download source code fast enough when it's comming in at 1.6MB/s.
Not too much been happening. Building lots of Gentoo binary packages for possibly installing on department lab machines next year (see above). Point to note: the userpriv option breaks stuff.
Maybe with 64-bit address spaces we can finially get rid of filesystems as a user visiable system and all switch to single-level persistent object stores. Anyway, AMD looks like they have the best 64-bit offering at the moment and EROS's 2002 paper on single-level store design is here