Submitted by The DragonFly project has been making progress of late adding features desired for their upcoming release. In addition to the ongoing work to prepare the system to run free of the MP lock, a number of smaller, but important subprojects are nearing completion.Among them are a number of pkgsrc changes that will finally allow the developers to retire the aging FreeBSD 4 ports system, and allow the use of much more up to date third party software. This is being done on the develpoment branch of DragonFly almost exclusively so as to make sure it should be ready for 1.4-Release.
Another long anticipated feature that is now on the road to completion is kernel assisted userland threading, which will map one kernel thread to every userland light weight process (a 1:1 threading implementation).
A few minor security enhancements have also been added.
Matt Dillon has set up a bug tracking database called Dunebuggy, that uses the now GPL’d Backplane database.
I can not await to run dragonfly on xen 3.0 with new virtualization empowered AMD-SVM architecture CPU.
[1] http://www.linux-mag.com/content/view/2264/
[2] http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_…
the polarizer
http://www.codixx.de/polarizer.html
So finally there’s a opensource BSD who goes 1:1 instead of M:N! Just like linux, windows and solaris 10. Actually, solaris spent years doing M:N until they suddenly put an alternative 1:1 threading library in solaris 8 and they realized that 1:1 was making things simpler & faster and they dropped M:N – {Free,Open,Net}BSD still seem to believe they can do a performant M:N implementation but hey, they’re free to try to do what sun with all their money & engineers couldn’t do
(A great link about why linux developers consider M:N to be a worse design decision than 1:1 can be found at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=103284879216107&w=2 )
I’m happy to see a BSD going 1:1, that will make dragonfly beat the other open BSDs in threading and hopefully the other BSDs will switch to 1:1 instead of M:N
Actually, you can use either in FreeBSD 5.x or higher, and you can do it per application if you desire.
http://www.freebsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?threadid=8108
Personally I think that M:N threading is better; when done properly, as with the case of Tru64, the performance is pretty damn good; the downside is that its bloody complicated to implement AND get optimise to get the same sorts of performance as 1:1 threading, but in terms of scalability, it does a better job.
With that being said, however, with the nature of how hardware is changing, and the eventual move to processors with multiple cores, 1:1 will squeeze ahead as any advantage that M:N had will be pretty much killed with the move to multicore.
Hmm, I should have posted the following as well:
“The libthr 1:1 threading library is now built by default.”
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.2.1R/relnotes-i386.html
Also, OpenBSD currently supports niether 1:1 or N:M threading, it has a pure userspace threading library, an N:1 implementation.
Heh, well, David Butenhof doesn’t agree:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.programmer/msg/7295a73671f…
If you get M:N working right, it has real advantages to 1:1.
Let us see what dragonflyBSD will add to FreeBSD
Personally I do not think DragonflyBSD is a need to market while if DragonflyBSD team work on freebsd project they will add more power to FreeBSD server it self..
I future in FreeBSD
P.S. their wireless new componenet is great
also i advisse that you visit: http://www.pcbsd.com
Anyway..
Anthony
http://www.kyliptix.net
More important to me is the updating of ports off of the 4 series. With all of the recent “easy-to-use” desktop BSD’s coming out, it would be good for DragonFly to release an updated version. Maybe before the 6 series starts! I really like the LiveCD/Install combination.
You didn’t actually whole news piece did you?
You didn’t actually whole news piece did you?
I’m not sure what you mean. My comments were based on the following:
Among them are a number of pkgsrc changes that will finally allow the developers to retire the aging FreeBSD 4 ports system, and allow the use of much more up to date third party software. This is being done on the develpoment branch of DragonFly almost exclusively so as to make sure it should be ready for 1.4-Release.
I assume this means people will be able to use something newer that FreeBSD 4 ports. If I am mistaken in that assumption, I am sorry.
pkgsrc is NetBSD’s ports-like update system. DragonFlyBSD announced they would use it after updates had been made to allow most builds to work.
This system is available to BSD, Linux, Solaris and even Windows SFU.
http://pkgsrc.org
Updating should be familiar to you. I would suggest though that you check out pkgsrc/pkg_comp and pkgsrc/pkg_chk, which make building and rebuilding the entire system a trivial task.
There have much more info here:
http://www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlog/
http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/index.php/DragonFly_Status
http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/index.php/Network_Stack_Status
If anyone want to help clean up the base system or do the different projects, check other links.
http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/index.php/Cleanup_Base
http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/index.php/Projects_Page
Dear Friends:
Wouldl like to sharwe with you following:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/article/2005-10-14_a_comparison_of_so…
What are yor thougts?
Sincerely
Anthony
http://www.kyliptix.net“>Kyliptix