Jeff Roberson Begins FreeBSD SMPng VFS Integration
A FreeBSD User writes "Jeff Roberson has announced that he has has begun integrating the Giant-lock free VFS code into the FreeBSD 6.x development tree. These changes will permit the UFS file system to run on multiple CPUs at a time on SMP systems (hyper-threaded, dual-core, or regular SMP), leading to substantially improved efficiency. It will also permit the VFS code to be fully preemptible on uni-processor systems, improving interrupt handling latency. With this change, almost all of the FreeBSD kernel is able to run fully threaded and in parallel on multiple CPUs with much less contention. He anticipates merging this work as an "opt-in" feature to the FreeBSD 5.x branch in the future. He indicates that the testing will be "opt-in", i.e., this change will not be fully enabled by default for the time being, and that it will take a while (a few hours) to complete the merge, so users of the 6-CURRENT branch may want to hold off updating for a few hours while he finishes the merge. The work was sponsored by Isilon Systems."
... facts are facts. ;)
FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."
NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)
OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
*BSD in general:
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.