Interview With Matt Dillon of DragonFlyBSD

animus9 writes "There is an interesting interview with Matt Dillon regarding the current status and future of DragonFlyBSD. In it he compares the difference between serializing tokens and the mutex model (a nice contrast to the previously posted Scott Long SMPng interview). He also describes the work being done in the VFS, along with his plans for Journaling, SSI Clustering, packaging, and more."

Comments

Re:*BSD is dying

[0racle]

NeXT is no more BSD Unix based or descended from then OS X is based or descended from FreeBSD. NeXT was a commercial implementation of the Mach kernel from CMU. Now like Linux, Mach was just a kernel, and in places an incomplete one. In the spirit that BSD Unix was distributed with, instead of waiting to make an entire OS, when they wanted to show this new-fangled micro-kernel they had created, they ported some Userland tools, and later tacked on some networking from BSD Unix and showed it off. NeXT takes that reference and makes it better, a better desktop, nice programming tools and many new utilities, at the same time as updating the system from its original sources. Apple acquires NeXT and begins to make the NeXT parts better, and once again updates the Unix sources. Neither descended from Unix, they just make use of it in certain areas of the system.

Re:*BSD is dying

[ArbitraryConstant]

"OSX is not FreeBSD based. It borrows from FreeBSD and recognizes it as th successor to UCB's BSD. Apple uses FreeBSD as the reference platform for "what constitutes BSD Unix"."

Well, a number of points.

-It's a different kernel but Apple made it system call compatible. Mostly[1]. They have some extra ones I think.

-They took a lot of FreeBSD userland libraries and programs. With a compatible kernel there's simply no point in duplicating this work. A lot of the man pages are even marked FreeBSD.

-I've heard vague talk about FreeBSD kernel code making its way into Darwin (the OS X kernel). It's legal so it seems plausible enough. I have not specifically investigated this.

I don't know what it takes to be considered a BSD. OS X is missing a ports tree (Fink is available but not included by default). It's also not a direct genetic decendant of BSD, at least not in the kernel. It also doesn't feel like a BSD when you're at the command line.

1 - They don't have jail(). Grr.