Regarding the benchmarking framework – that’s me. Yes, I’m mostly out of time right now, but I’d like to offer help if someone wants to pick up the project. It consists of a tinderbox-like build script for a build server, a script to run benchmarks on at least one slave, and a database and web fronted to aggregate and visualize results. The framework is designed specifically to track performance over time by compare revisions of FreeBSD, everything else being equal.
The framework does work as-is, but it really needs to be updated. CVS -> SVN, better visualization on the web fronted, and a benchmarking script that is easier to extend. Also, I don’t have hardware available to run the benchmarks.
If you’re interested, just Google for my email address.