DragonFly BSD

To quote Matthew Dillon:

While I hope to avoid any destabilization, I am fiddling with some pretty hairy code in the VM system so this is a head’s up!I have successfully implemented a basic MAP_VPAGETABLE feature that allows a mmap()’d section of memory to be governed by a virtual page table. Basically the backing store for the mmap()’d space is the‘physical memory’ used to map the space, and the mapping of the space is then governed by a ‘page table’ stored in that physical memory.(It is only physical memory from the point of view of the virtual kernel, not the real kernel of course). The mapping will store a physical page directory offset to tell the VM system where the page table is.

Jeffrey Hsu (a well known FreeBSD and DragonFly networking stack developer) has committed first cut of TCP ABC implementation for DragonFlyBSD. Described in RFC 3465, this is an improvement that can provide better throughput.

So I finally tried DragonFly on one of our test servers (not my desktop :-). It seems that DragonFly still have some issues with the SATA devices. I am trying to fix it, maybe by porting some good FreeBSD ATAng code.

DragonFly has gave us some good examples that how a user-friendly operating system should, and some different way on designing a MP-capable architecture. Thanks, Matt!

They did it again!

CAN-2005-0176
CAN-2005-0177
CAN-2005-0178
CAN-2005-0449

Before patching your already fragile kernel, consider other true Open Source operating systems, like FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD!

I have set up a mirror for the major BSD software, especially DragonFly/Free/Open/NetBSD and KAME at my personal server, tarsier.delphij.net for about two weeks. Today I have annouced that on kernel@dfly and Liam Foy has added it to the official download list.

Some cvsweb and other related site is ongoing. I’m very pleased that I can support BSD related software, no matter joining their development, or providing mirrors for wider spread.

Matt has committed a critical VM fix and kindly reminded that FreeBSD has also the issue. I have ported the patch here and requested a review by Dr. Alan Cox. I’d like to commit it at once it is approved.

Today DragonFly has buryed GNU awk. G’bye, amen! :-D

To quote his “I would recommend against per-thread caches. Instead, make the per-cpu caches actually *be* per-cpu (that is, not require a mutex).”

Then, he has pointed out that there is potential problems in FreeBSD’s SLAB allocator which is different from DragonFly’s. (Not too surprisingly, he is again advertising his IPI message approach).

今天 FreeBSD 的 src tree 正式为 5-STABLE 冻结！

Robert Watson很仗义(这个词，嘿嘿)地在 code freeze 之前的最后一刻 commit 了我的 patch。这一变动将使得未来 5/6 MFC 变得容易，同时，也让 DragonFly 和 FreeBSD 的 diff 变得更小。

Howard has set up a mirror for ISO.

Forked from FreeBSD 4-STABLE at a post-4.8 point, DragonFly is an excellent operating system adopting a different way 5-CURRENT has taken. Also, it was said to have the fastest TCP/IP stack in the world (With Jeffrey Hsu’s efforts, of course ;-) ).