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Matt Dillon On FreeBSD 5.0 VM System And More
JigSaw writes: "OSNews features a very interesting interview regarding FreeBSD 5 with the guy responsible for the very good (technically) FreeBSD VM among other things. Matt Dillon talks about everything: FreeBSD 5, Linux, .NET and much more. Additionally, OSNews also includes two mini interviews with the NetBSD and OpenBSD head developers."
Great to here BSD news after the wind river story a few days back...thanks FreeBSD crew...
Guttermouth is a really good band.
There are also a few comments from Theo de Raadt, the OpenBSD Founder himself. Be sure to check them out at the very bottom of the page!
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
I didn't know that there's such a following by Hollywood actors of alternative Operating Systems.
Maybe the last big movie he was in should have been called "There's Something About BSD".
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
True as hell. There are way to many companies leeching of the Linux name without o real business model...
As a note (not a flamebait) about how FreeBSD compares with Linux regarding the VM implementations, remember that Linux has actually 2 VM managers (you can choose which one you want in the kernel build configuration), both of exterme poor quality. That seems to be a common problem in linux, where people write sensible code just to learn how to do it, and it becomes the standard in the kernel. Now compare that with any of the BSD's and you'll see why linux is actually very hyped, and why the BSD's are technically so strong.
Matt tells us that Somthing About Mary 2 will be fully compatable with FreeBSD
Just because one actor follows "alternative Operating Systems", you conclude that there is such a following?
Way to generalize! Have a cookie.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
Of the breakfast club ? and St Elmo's Fire ? I never knew he was a coder/hacker. How can this have been kept quiet for so long ? Did Matt's agent keep it secret so Matt didn't appear to be homosexual (like a large number of Linux users) ?
FreeBSD, VM, etc. etc.. What about Festus and Miss Kitty and the other goings on in Dodge City? Slashdot isn't just about computers you know, its about people too!
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Slashdot Faq, please see tip #3.
You might not think it is funny, someone else might enjoy the humor. Personally, I would rather have my screen wasted on stupid comments than on your humorless lectures.
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
This guy makes several good arguments for *BSD, mainly, the difference between *BSD and Linux for the desktop. Many people think that *BSD is only the shell, but GNOME and KDE can be compiled on it just as easily as on Linux, no compatability code needed. Also, his point about .NET is a good one, that Microsoft is just using it as buzzword VaporWare to name whatever the new latest and greatest product that will "change the world".
Consider one of Dillon's points: "A great deal of what people label as 'Linux' isn't actually Linux."
As a long-time FreeBSD user, I am fascinated when Linux users go to bat citing so many popular open source applications as Linux applications. Very few of the thousands of applications out there need to run in Linux "emulation" mode on FreeBSD. Almost all applications build and run similarly on FreeBSD as Linux.
I read print magazines such as Linux Journal and visit many Linux web sites, knowing that the content is very much applicable to my OS of choice.
I can guess that MFC means 'backported', but I don't understand the acronym. SMPng is probably 'SMP Next Generation', but I can't figure out what KSE is... Kernel Security Enchancements? Any BSDer's out there to help a poor linux-using slob? :)
-_Quinn
Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.
It was interesting to read that Matt Dillon is supporting Rik van Riel's work on the VM in Linux. There has been a lot of controversy ove the Linux VM, with a number saying that the latest one - based on Rik's work - had made a poor comprimise: more smooth operation for lower overall performance, making it better suited to interactive applications than server applications.
Not being a kernel-list follower, I don't know much about the details, but I'm sure there are other Slashdot readers who are much more familiar with them. I would have thought that lower expected latencies from the VM would improve most server-based tasks as well, at the possible cost of reducing the maximum amount of work the machine could do - but then, it seems counterproductive to talk about performance in such a heavily-loaded environment when the best solution would be typically to add more hardware (RAM, CPUs or split across multiple machines.) Do I have this all wrong?
Also, is anyone able to describe the degree to which the new VMs of both Linux and FreeBSD are similar? What are the concepts behind them that distinguish them from other and earlier VMs?
If you take anything away from this article, this is quote is it. It is so important for the Linux community to understand if they are going to have a chance of breaking Microsoft's strong hold of Jo Six-packs computer.
Both Linux and FreeBSD are in the same boat there... the only way to drive desktop acceptance is to ship machines pre-installed with the OS (whatever OS) and preconfigured with a desktop so when you turn the thing on, you are ready to rock. The only way to do that is for the PC vendors to pre-install Linux (or FreeBSD, or whatever).
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Important stuff:
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"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepeneur'." -George W. Bush
Coder, longtime FreeBSD hacker, actor
I think Linux is going through a somewhat painful transition as it moves away from a Wild-West/Darwinist development methodology into something a bit more thoughtful. I will admit to wanting to take a clue-bat to some of the people arguing against Rik's VM work who simply do not understand the difference between optimizing a few nanoseconds out of a routine that is rarely called verses spending a few extra cpu cycles to choose the best pages to recycle in order to avoid disk I/O that would cost tens of millions of cpu cycles later on. It is an attitude I had when I was maybe 16 years old... that every clock cycle matters no matter how its spent. Bull!
This has got to be the BEST description of the Linux development to date that I've heard! (And it's got me rolling on the floor with laughter!)
Seriously, when are people (in Linux, Windows, C, C++, Java, etc. camps) going to learn that design is paramount? We don't design things because we are old farts who have no clue about "how to make a system fast", we design them to get the best tradeoff between performance, stability, structure, and maintainability. Anyone who says "I don't care about those things" is talking out of his ass and will not truely become a good programmer until (s)he can admit that code should be well designed.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
M. Dillon writes:
Open-source operates behind the scenes far more then it operates in the public eye, and it's hard to sell support to hackers who actually have *fun* trying to figure out a problem. In some respects Linux and the BSDs are poor commercialization candidates because they are *too* good... that they simply do not require the level of support that something like Windows-NT or Oracle might require in a back-office setting.
This sounds like sane reasoning but conraditory to quite a few "service and support" business models (e.g Red Hat). It will be interesting to see who's right. Perhaps proprietary solutions build as userspace applications running on top of Free platforms would be a better? Would that be frowned on by anyone? Not me.
Ok, I'm a dumbshit, the interviewer asked about KSE & SMPng. Sorry. :( Still wondering about MFC, though.
-_Quinn
Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.
KSE = Kernel-Scheduled Entities
"The FreeBSD kernel-scheduled entity (KSE) project is striving to implement new kernel facilities that allow the implementation of SMP-scalable high-performance userland threading, as well as a new userland POSIX threads library (libpthread). KSEs are heavily based on a technology referred to as scheduler activations, and differ only to the degree necessary to support features that the original research does not address. The new libpthread uses as much of libc_r as is reasonably possible."
...It's like in Office Space:
"THE Matt Dillon? I celebrate the man's whole catalogue! What's your favorite of his movies?"
Managers == Trolls
Isn't parody the sincerest form of flattery? Does the silly original really merit this unfunny retort?
Nor was he in St. Elmo's Fire. I think you're thinking about Judd Nelson. Matt Dillon was in The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, My Bodyguard, and slew of other decent 80's movies. ...and a whole lot more bad ones.
wow. all this hacking and he still has time for movies. loved 'something about mary', keep up the good work.
"i was saying gnu-rd"
[...] an I/O descriptor representing a TCP connection could be migrated entirely off the original machine
Now that'd be a tasty bean.
Is the BSD VM really that much better than the Linux VM anymore? It seems that Linux's VM is looking forward to machines with lots and lots of processors (NUMA). BSD seems to still be working out basic SMP. There was a patch for the Linux 2.4 kernel to make it behave like the BSD VM. What sets the BSD VM appart?
Am I the only one that is sick to death of hearing about "joe sixpack"? I don't give a shit about joe sixpack! I care about what OS other's use about as much as I care about what kind of car other people drive. Zilch.
This would indeed be a nice thing to have, and was, in fact, the subject of two years of work at my previous employer.
We were developing a filesystem named, variously, Charon, CXFS, and SSFS (Charon and CXFS turned out to be other people's trademarks).
It was a 64-bit journaled filesystem that used extensible hashing for directory layout, and provided named streams, ACLs and per-object quotas (i.e., per-volume, per-directory and per-file block and inode quotas). It used a distributed journaling system to synchronize data among several peers, and could perform partial filesystem replication (i.e., client local fs device size is smaller than server local fs device size, but client fs appears to be as large as the server's fs).
It included a system for mapping the local OS authentication and security identifiers to those from the other OSes participating in a replication group (such as unix UIDs/GIDs to NT SIDs, to kerberos tickets, etc.). All filesystem entities has 128-bit UUIDs to aid in this mapping.
We had begun port to FreeBSD and Windows 2000.
We were about 4 months short of having an alpha relase on Linux 2.4 before the company went bust. In short, it was over-engineered, and too ambitious. We should have started smaller; for instance, Linux 2.4 only, with nfs-style 'security'. Or FreeBSD-only.
After the sudden, complete, and total demise of the company we worked for, all of us on the team had to put our energy into paying bills and finding a job. So not much has happened since The End.
I can provide design info and even code if someone wants to help.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Am I the only one that is sick to death of hearing about "joe sixpack"? I don't give a shit about joe sixpack! I care about what OS other's use about as much as I care about what kind of car other people drive. Zilch.
... and this is why Microsoft will always dominate the Desktop.
Not trying to nitpick or anything (interesting interview), but there does seem to be an apparent contradiction in Matt's answers.
... :)
1) And if you didn't hear me mention so-called 'clustering' solutions currently available from unnamed vendors, it's because they can't actually deliver these things -- not true Q.O.S. That's my opinion, anyway. Using a cluster to hide the fact that the underlying systems crash regularly is an extremely dangerous way to manage a computing environment.
2) Q.O.S. means having redundant hardware at the very least.
Or perhaps I'm missing something
This article contains some of the most important home truths that the open source community must face, some in particular relating to Linux.
This guy is talking sense, the two quotes that stand out being:
1. The one on the GPL (Non)Business Model
2. The attitude of the projects
I'm a BSD user, primarily because I didn't believe that these quantities existed in the Linux world in suitable amounts.
- Another AC
I agree with you about not ever needing to compile, but I think his real point was not any of BSD's strong points (features included, packages/ports, etc) but rather that Linux is way out in left field as far as "across the board" unix compatibility.
I know what you're thinking
I'm sure this will be modded to lowest plane of
KSE can be described as
"Well, we've copied lots of other things from Solaris; let's copy LWPs too, but rename them so Sun doesnt sue us"
matt was great in "soething about mary", but how much can he really know about linux?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Obviously he has not tried it yet. It's very real. He's just in denial, and it's sad to see.
I'm sure some people called FreeBSD vapor when it first started out too. There were probably people out there who did not like the idea of another BSD, and thought that it would not succeed.
Oh, I also like how Theo sounds like a jerk, as usual, LOL.
1) And if you didn't hear me mention so-called 'clustering' solutions currently available from unnamed vendors, it's because they can't actually deliver these things -- not true Q.O.S. That's my opinion, anyway. Using a cluster to hide the fact that the underlying systems crash regularly is an extremely dangerous way to manage a computing environment.
Bullshit. No amount of bug fixes will eliminate crashes. I've seen smoke pouring from servers due to short circuts on the motherboard. I've seen array controlers give up the ghost, network cards bid this cruel world goodbye and absent minded tech power cycle the wrong box. I've worked for 3 (!) companies that have had entire datacenters lose power due to human error (Microsoft, Voicestream and Group Health).
Crashes happen and you have to have redundancy to deal with this. If you want to see a truly stable system, don't look at any Un*x. Un*x clustering solutions are bolted on and it shows. You want to look at a real high availability system like a Tandem system.
On a Tandem system you can lose a processor without dropping a single connection. You can lose a server and recover. It's built fault tolerant from the ground up.
If you're serious about high availability, this is the only way to go. Unix clustering is mostly shit - you really don't want it running a system that absolutely, positively can't go down.
Sure NT clustering is worse -- I did a study at Voicestream and found that our NT clusters had more downtime on average than our standalone NT systems, but Un*x clustering is nothing to write home about either. Saying that Un*x is more stable than NT is like saying that it's better to drink urine than eat shit. Sure it's true, but it's missing the big picture. VMS clusters are more stable than any Un*x solution and Tandem systems won't go down even if you start smashing processors with a mallet. That's what real stability means.
--Shoeboy
I completely agree, 100%!!
In regards to the desktop... well, I'm not sure exactly what you are asking. Both Linux and FreeBSD are in the same boat there... the only way to drive desktop acceptance is to ship machines pre-installed with the OS (whatever OS) and preconfigured with a desktop so when you turn the thing on, you are ready to rock. The only way to do that is for the PC vendors to pre-install Linux (or FreeBSD, or whatever).
I think this is bunk. As he pointed out earlier open source software is a poor candidate for commericial support. I think it is a poor candidate for pre-installation too. No self respecting sysadmin would want Dell to preload Linux or FreeBSD for their companies desktops (or servers). It is a far easier to support systems that are configured in the same manner and style and each sysadmin has their own preferences which become company policy. If we are talking about pre-installed systems for the home market than ok - it would be a selling point. But I think the market for such a system would be so low as to make it not worth the cost to a large company like Dell.
None of the open source operating systems are ready for the average home users desktop. The desktop environments need to be stable and established. The system update procedures as simple as Windows Update (apt is very close but not enough). There are too many rough edges right now for the average user. Compare the rate of change in the Windows desktop to that of KDE or Gnome. KDE and Gnome have to change because we demand and expect the same ease of use that the Windows desktop environment provides but in the same vain they won't be useful for the average user until they stabilize.
Can you imagine dumbed down debian with a graphical installer and a graphical web-based update like windows update? Instead of seeing all the package details we would only see the meta packages that hold all the updates for a particular component like KDE or X11 or the base system. A simple click and the download and upgrade begins... I'm sure some of us would be horrified by the idea of dumbing it all down so much but I think it will be neccessary - and I wouldn't mind running such a system as my stable desktop while running something a bit hairier on my development system.
MFCd? Giants? At least they explained what KSE and SMPng are, but it would have been nice to have that at the beginning of the article.
Can we put all the "wow, I loved Something About Mary!!" and "the Outsiders rocked!" Comments inside this one thread, to save the rest of this discusion from having to read it? I know I can't dissuade you from thinking it is original or funny, but I can at least try to contain it..
Stay Gold, Penguin-boy.
Scheduler activations by Anderson et.al. paper
appeared way before Solaris introduced its LWP
based threads.
I will be really surprised, if Sun will sue
FreeBSD folks on that ground.
Dude...this guy had a 3-way with Neve Campbell and Denise Richards. If he says Win3.x is better than BSD or whatever, you'd better listen!
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
As far as I can tell, he wasn't talking about about syscall interfaces and libc, he was talking about obscure libraries that must be installed seperately, and may in turn require others. It must be in terms of a source compile, since package managers like rpm and deb, etc. handle dependencies automatically.
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
MFC = Merged From Current
Just means that changes in the -CURRENT tree were merged into the -STABLE tree for inclusion in the next -RELEASE.
9. What is your opinion on .NET and do you think that it may be possible that .NET change the OS "map" as we know it?
.NET is Vapor. It's a marketing term dreamed up by Microsoft that will magically morph into whatever Microsoft eventually winds up delivering. MS announces grandiose ideas with cute catch phrases all the time, and as with any good vapor there is always some basis in truth (if only a little pinprick). The reality is a little different though... remember, these are the people that hyped windows-ME up the wazoo and all we got out of it was a speech-synthesized windows installation wizard! These are the people that called NT the unix-killer and told people it was as reliable as UNIX. .NOT is probably a more descriptive term for .NET. My guess is that it will turn into Microsoft-proprietary rent-a-service glue, and that it will introduce an order of magnitude more security issues then IIS.
Matt Dillon: I believe
Yes, I just blatantly copied this over. Sorry. But it's a choice comment. I bet he's right too.
For some reason this post made me laugh out loud.
I don't know why this is modded as troll...
I mean sure swapping is probably a major issue on a 486 with 8 megs of ram...
But now a days when fricken video cards come with 64 megs of ram, and having 1-2 gigs of ram in a server is normal i don't the see the VM being so important.
If your swapping so much that you even care about the VM you need to cough up some cash and buy some ram.
The parent post has a valid point. Seriusly, do you ever go in a machine room and see a rack of servers hitting the swap? And if you did would you let it continue or would you buy the ram you need to properly maintain the systems?
No sorry, excessive swapping on the pentium 90 with 16 megs of ram you bought at a yard sale for 20$ is not a major priority mmmkay.
Not everyone has 1-2 gig. They have 256 Meg or 512 Meg.
I will admit to wanting to take a clue-bat to some of the people arguing against Rik's VM work who simply do not understand
Actually I think the main problem with Rik's VM is Rik. He's always got some arrogant comment or critisizing Linus publically about something. The fact is, his code was stuck in a loop (literally) and no one knew how to fix the damn thing. People kept submitting all sorts of little patches but they were just tipping all over each other (Alan claims to have been much more conservative about what he allowed into his Kernal which is performing well). I think when Linus saw that Andrea's total rewrite showed good performance he jumped at the opportunity if for no other reason to just get Rik off his back. And so far the results have been pretty good. Linus still does not approve of the classzone design, the code is supposedly really messy, and there are little annoying incongruencies. Alltogether this meaning the stuggle is not over on this front
I don't see where he was acting like a jerk at all. That's part of the problem with this industry (and the world in general, I might add). Some people cry and whine about how important they are as users/customers, and that every business they frequent or do business with should KISS THEIR ASS and be thankful for their patronage. Then without skipping a beat, these same fools usually followup with a diatribe about how the "market" will decide and they'll "vote with their dollar" and all that. I say... go ahead. You are the kind of people that haven't or wouldn't pay for OpenBSD ANYWAY !!! So in closing, you're not wanted, you're a non-customer.
Sorry....went off a little bit, but anyway I hope you get my point. He may be somewhat abrasive, even a little dry and too uptight for your delicate ego, but (here's the important part) I didn't see him attacking anyone or being an asshole to anyone in any of his statements. If you need coddling, however, in order to accept someone's products or ideas, then there are plenty of salesmen at your local mall that would LOVE to kiss your ass to get you to listen to them. Theo doesn't seem to be that type of person (although he can be ..outspoken :)
Microsoft Foundation Classes
It's Microsoft coding.
Theo is just your run of the mill trolling asshole, except somehow he ended up in charge of a BSD project.
The guy is a fucking prick, just cuase he is the dictator the of the OpenBSD project doesnt mean he's not a dick.
Really? It's because one AC doesn't care what OS other people use?
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
This is one of the best articles I've seen on Slashdot in the recent past. Great article find, great detail, knowledgable comments and good discussion.
Excellent work - here's to wishing for more like this.
Whoa! The BSD troll just ate itself.
Interesting how really smart people never seem to quit being smart.
OSX == FreeBSD
The one on the GPL (Non)Business Model
If the GPL is/has a "non-business model", then why have the major computer manufacturers that have embraced Free Software pretty much all chosen Linux over any form of BSD? (IBM, HP/Compaq, Dell)
The answer is really simple: When companies like IBM & HP make contributions to the Linux source code base, they don't want someone (like Microsoft, for example) to come along and take the code and make it proprietary and closed-source. The BSD license allows this, the GPL doesn't.
These companies seem to either want to keep the code completely closed (AIX, HP-UX, Lotus Notes, etc.) or completely open so that it must stay open.
The business model behind Linux and other GPL-based software is simple: build a turnkey solution that meets the customer's needs/wants and they will pay top dollar for it. There is a company here in Washington State that runs all their systems on Linux: mail, web, desktop, and a custom billing/scheduling system based on MySQL (I believe). They have hired one good Linux hacker (not me, he's a friend of mine) to custom build their solution.
If he had done all this with BSD-licensed software, other companies could come along and steal his code, modify it, close it and sell it as their own. Since it's under the GPL, they can use it if they like, but they must keep it open and give him credit.
IBM is doing the same thing with their work. You can use their modifications to Linux if you like, but you must keep them open and you probably have to give credit to IBM somewhere along the way (I may be mistaken about this, please correct me if I'm wrong). This protects them from competitors stealing their code, not only because it's illegal due to the license, but also because I'm sure HP wouldn't want to use code where they had to give credit to IBM. Individuals and small companies wouldn't mind that, though.
OpenBSD's primary goal is security. If Theo can't be a "nice guy", seems like a small price to pay.
.NOT is probably a more descriptive term for .NET. My guess is that it will turn into Microsoft-proprietary rent-a-service glue, and that it will introduce an order of magnitude more security issues than IIS.
.NET will bring out the "intelligent" varities.
I've described SirCam and Nimda as "semi-intelligent".
Is this the same Matt Dillon who wrote the Amiga c compiller called Dice??
When Ballmer visited The Netherlands a couple of months ago, he said after being asked which Microsoft-software product was the biggest and most important one: "Visual Studio.net. It's bigger in codebase than all windows versions together. It's also the most important product for us for the coming future.". Hard to believe the codebase size comment though, but it underscribes nevertheless the realness of VS.net. Microsoft understands very clearly that the one thing needed for a succesful .NET is a large, succesful group of developers. The only way to attrackt developers is to provide the best dev-environment on the planet, and looking at Beta2 of VS.net, I think they'll succeed.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
"Open-source operates behind the scenes far more then it operates in the public eye, and it's hard to sell support to hackers who actually have *fun* trying to figure out a problem. In some respects Linux and the BSDs are poor commercialization candidates because they are *too* good... that they simply do not require the level of support that something like Windows-NT or Oracle might require in a back-office setting."
.
Excuse me? Windowses require much more support than their open source counterpart because
1. it takes less experience to be classified as a "windows administrator"
2. if there's something wrong in windows/oracle, either you are a microsoft/oracle developer and know where to put your hands, or you ask for support. On the other hand, in the open source world you CAN put your hands where you want to, and this reduces the need for support for those that know how to hack it.
In my opinion it's not a matter of being 'too' good, it's just a matter of state of mind of the admins. What do you think?
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
FreeBSD is 80x24 based? I'm running XFree86-4 just fine on dual monitors. Darn newbies!
DavidJA said
"If you take anything away from this article, this is quote is it. It is so important for the Linux community to understand if they are going to have a chance of breaking Microsoft's strong hold of Jo Six-packs computer."
quoting the article
"Both Linux and FreeBSD are in the same boat there... the only way to drive desktop acceptance is to ship machines pre-installed with the OS (whatever OS) and preconfigured with a desktop so when you turn the thing on, you are ready to rock. The only way to do that is for the PC vendors to pre-install Linux (or FreeBSD, or whatever)."
This is a valid and important point. But I feel it is more important to create cross platform applications. If you get other programs to to follow Abiword, The Gimp, Open Office and Mozilla onto the Mac OS and Windows, and get people to use them, then the phrase "Where do you want to go today" will have some meaning.
Later, Seeker
I think you are confusing something here: Virtual memory management is not only swaping, it's about mapping physical memory pages to the logical adress space of the CPU(s), managing access rights of different CPU modes and so on, the swapping stuff is just an added bonus.
Without virtual memory it's not possible to run a multiuser/multitasking OS.
Could you please decide what you think on this message, dear moderators? In a few hours, it has been 1:Informative, 1:Troll, 2:Interesting, 1:Flamebait.. What's next? -1:Offtopic?
As someone else told, crack can harm your brain..
Heres a plug against you Linux people ;)
Last week, I read about the ATA drivers from BSD, were re-done in a "search n' replace" manner, in the linux community.
They say that copy-cat is the best flattery, and I accept that open-arms - natrually outside the give credit where credit is due arguments.
So kudo's to BSD for being "real" in an "un"-real OS environment.
Atleast we know ONE thing. M$ doesn't steal BSD code. If they did, the sh@# would atleast RUN well. ;)
Keep up the good work guys!
He wrote DME, a lightweight opensource editor which had a macro programming facility. (I studied a lot of source back then to learn techniques.)
And he also wrote DLink, which would multiplex terminal sessions, forward tcp connections, and do remote filesystem operations over a terminal session to an Amiga or Unix box. (I hacked support for it into the Amiga Mosaic Port many years ago.)
Nice to know he's still working on opensource projects. Too bad the BSD people got him.
How dare Matt Dillion spent time on that fly by night OS when he could still be writing for the Amiga!. Just kidding. As an old Amiga programer it is nice to see that Matt is still goding such good work. Loved Dice Matt, keep up the good work.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I think these kernel scheduler entities are a very nifty feature. As far as I understand it you can have many userspace threads for each process, and when one of these userspace threads does a blocking system call the userspace scheduler for the process is notified and can activate another userspace thread. When the system call is done the userspace scheduler is notified again.
The result is that you have very fast thread switching and still all the advantages of SMP.
I think the current Linux pthreads implementation implements threads as heavyweight processes that share the same memory. The effort of switching threads in linux is thus almost the same as switching processes. This is not good!
Does anybody know wether there is a mechanism similar to KSE in the linux 2.4 kernel?
I know that there is a huge amount of confusion about the .NET architecture. Microsoft basically labels everything new they produce .NET, and they themselves never made it entirely clear what the core aspect of .NET is.
But hidden deep in a cloud of marketing buzzwords there is a new and quite interesting development technology. The most important use of .NET will be as a replacement for the old win32 API. Of course it also defines data interchange and storage formats, so it can also be used for data exchange between different (windows) machines.
But basically, .NET is win32 TNG.
If you want to know what parts of the .NET architecture are really interesting technologies and not just buzzwords, take a look at
How about a complete and precise definition of what .NET is? That would really show him.
Must be a chaos theory thing...
Just junk food for thought...
To upgrade your system requires simply typing: apt-get upgrade
There's nothing more simple than that. Just because it's not graphical doesn't mean it's difficult, and in fact, it can be easier. Regardless, the average user who you say wouldn't be able to use apt doesn't even use Windows Update. The fact is the people who wouldn't be able to find it or remember what to do with apt are not able to figure out Windows Update.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
If you have a penguin dick you should really see a doctor. No, seriously. Inviting people to suck it is the last thing you should be doing.
well, I wasnt really meaning sun completely invented the idea of a lightweight process. More of the "Hey, solaris has it, we should add it too" trend.
Yes, I've looked at it and used it quite a bit.
Mosix is the kind of thing we are talking about.. EXCEPT...
.
Mosix only migrates the user context of a task to another machine. The process is still effecitvely tied to the node it started on; if that node crashes, bye-bye process.
What is meant in the article, though, is complete migration... having a process able to move to whichever hardware it wants to.
Sun developed LWPs in Sun OS 4, which was based on 4.3BSD. Sun contributed lots of stuff back to BSD, like vnodes, NFS, RPC, and their SysV shared library and shared memory incorporation. Sun never patented any of it, so they can't sue. The core of Solaris 2 is from AT&T SVR4 anyway.
How many guys YOU know can claim both of the following:
1) An extensive knowledge of the FreeBSD VM.
2) A filmed threesome with Neve Campbell and Denise Richards.
Heh.
=== "Some people see the glass as half-empty. Others see it as half-full. I see the glass as too big." -G. Carlin.
OSX == NeXT.
You are an ass clown. MFC means "merge from current", pulling code from -CURRENT into -STABLE.
even so you _STILL_ need "virtual memory" to access it all.