
The sixth major
DragonFly BSD release, version 1.10, was
announced today by project creator Matthew Dillon. Billed as "more stable than the 1.8 release", it includes improved virtual kernel support, a new disk management infrastructure, improvements to wireless networking, and support for the new syslink protocol. As to what all that means, KernelTrap has just posted an
interview with Dillon. Going beyond today's 1.10 release, the interview explores DragonFly's new clustering high-availability filesystem which sounds superior to ZFS, the project's goals for the 2.0 release expected in six months, and a comparison of the BSD license versus the GPL.
Member since:
2005-07-06
"I was surprised to learn that the Matt is developing the clustering filesystem via the userspace VFS API instead of putting it in the kernel. Perhaps there are plans to port it to the kernel once the userspace implementation reaches a certain milestone."
The same reason he developed the virtual kernel (running kernel in userland), it's so much easier to develop. You don't have to reboot your computer to see if it worked, and if it doesn't you wont crash the whole system. I suspect that, like you said, when the code reaches a certain maturity level it will be put in kernelspace, you simply can't get enough performance in userland.