Fans of DragonFly BSD will be getting their Christmas present late this year, and plans for 1.5 have been announced. MP safe networking code, the long awaited cache coherency management system, and a port of Sun's ZFS. Read here for more. Update: Refresh, empty cache, whatever, and check the shiny new beastie icon! And there was much rejoicing. Can we now please discuss DragonFly BSD?
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Member since:2005-07-11
Member since:In what ways would it be "technically superior" to other operating systems?
Clustering, clustered filesystems, etc have been around
for quite a long time and operating systems like OpenVMS
and Linux are quite good at them.
SSI shared memory clusters are possible today with Linux
using a page based coherency protocol. I don't think
they're particularly practical because non-transparent
cluster software is really mature now and one actually
needs to program for a cluster in a non-transparent
way (far more important than even a slow NUMA) to get
decent performance.
However I'm not sure about what sort of SMP scalability
DFBSD would have if all code was fully MP safe using
LWKT as you say, nor advantages of XIO or ZFS.
Member since:2005-07-06
Now the iconbusiness is out of the way, let's discuss.
ZFS no advantages? ZFS has numerous advantages over older filesystems, all to do with data-coherency, capacity and speed. Being one of the first BSDs to implement it would be a good thing.
And if the LWKT model works out, it would provide an excellent basis for SSI, wether or not Linux does it as well.
Member since:Well that is the the reason (cache locality) that Light Weight Kernel Threads were developed. The processes themselves are per CPU and are migrated (and communicate via a light weight messaging protocol.) This suits itself to clustering because you have an increased L2 utilization and a means of migrating processes to systems with heavy loads to other non-taxed systems in a cluster. Cache coherency systems are not new, however they are new to this system and because of the way the system is developed it has a potential to perform and scale really well in a clustered environment, talk on ZFS which Matt Dillon thinks will work very well in such an environment and you may end with something that works VERY well.
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Member since:
If the DragonFly BSD project is successful in geting their goals completed for the 1.6 release - including getting the cache coherency scheme functional (clustered systems where processes can be migrated based on load) and succeed in getting their code fully MP safe using LWKT, and (perhaps) XIO all whilst using ZFS for their filesystem - would their then be considerable interest in this operating system?
In other words, if DragonFly is successful in becoming a technically superior operating system, is there a possibility that this operating system would make significant inroads. Or is it possible that no matter how technically correct or advanced an operating system is, if it doesn't have enough hype it won't flourish?