The last month has been crazy busy. Development of the engine is progressing nicely. My own role has been assigning tasks to our coders, guiding them, reviewing their work, integrating it and of course write code. We currently have nine people coding, not all full time though, and are still looking for more coders.

Progress has been made on a number of things: we have many more decoders, threading updates, a stats subsystem, stream tracking and reassembly, a L7 protocol parser framework and many more unittests. We’re working on OpenCL hardware accelaration, although we’re running into driver issues, so that may take some time before it’s usable.

On the QA side Will Metcalf is busy setting up an automated test rig, doing daily tests runs of our unittests on various platforms and with different compiler settings and such. When that is done pcap based tests and live traffic testing is next.

We have set up a number of “working group” mailinglists that discuss different subjects such as a configuration language and a rule language. Most are still ongoing, however the configuration language discussion seems to have come to a conclusion.

For the configuration language the discussion has settled on using YAML, a structured but still nicely editable format. It has many language bindings, so I hope management tools will be built for it later.

Other discussions, such as about the ip reputation, are still ongoing. You are very welcome to share your ideas with the group.

Like stated above, we’re still looking for coders. If you are a C coder and you’re interested in working with and for us, send us your resume!