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

Linux: the moribund wraith

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux: the moribund wraith

When Linux kernel hits version 2.8
and you begin to cry,
turn from Linux to BSD
or along with Linux you, too, shall die.

No amount of kernel hacking
can save Linux from demise,
your skills and knowledge are lacking,
which, frankly, is no surprise.

For your kernel is not eternal,
it is a mere toy which will fry
in the blazing flames of glory
of the BSD flags raised high.

With BSD you get diversity,
with BSD you get stability,
with BSD you get security,
with BSD you get performance and tranquility.
Your kung fu is no match for our ability.

Can you hear him sobbing, your beloved Tux?
He knows what's coming and he, too, thinks Linux sucks.

It just needs the right spin...

[0x69]

First, put it in the Apple section. Then re-write it as:

"Jordan Hubbard, Apple's Darwin OS leader, and Matt Dillion, DragonFlyBSD founder & head guru, both formerly leading developers at the FreeBSD project that was the basis for Darwin, are refusing to confirm that the awesome new multi-processing and clustering technologies in DragonFlyBSD will be the rocket fuel that takes Darwin, Mac OS XI (G6 CPUs), and Mac OS XII (Cell-based CPUs) to #1 on the TOP500 Supercomputer list and keeps them there.

"With the run-away successes of the G5 Xserver and Mac Mini, Apple is clearly positioning itself to deliver blockbuster breakthrough distributed computing everywhere from average people's homes to the world's cutting-edge research laboratories...

"Continuing their 'hide it in plain sight' development of these awesome new technologies, Matt Dillion gave an interview..."

Do it that way, and i'll guarantee you 1000+ responses in 3 hours.

In a more sober vein, there probably aren't many people here who know much about DragonFlyBSD or are interested in the low-level technologies that Matt's focused on.

Hopefully

[BossMC]

Hopefully Matt Dillon and his team of developers can come through for us, and make a great OS that meets the hype. Currently, I feel that DragonflyBSD has a high sticker-to-horsepower ratio, which is not so much the fault of the developers, but rather the fault of a large pack of fanboys having premature ejaculations over an OS that is by no means finished yet.

Years ago, FreeBSD fanboys said that FreeBSD's SMP implementation was going to be the best the world ever saw. Now, those same people are saying how much it sucks, and that DragonFlyBSD's is the boss of the boat. How about instead of all of this talk, we let the installations speak for themselves? FreeBSD is approaching a fully mpsafe kernel (albeit somewhat asymptotically) and I continue to be impressed with each release of the 5.x series. DragonFlyBSD has had one release, and it looks fine, but fact of the matter is, it's just not finished yet. I'm getting a little tired of all of the talk. Show me these DragonFlyBSD machines making water into wine. What we are dealing with is the classic "penis size" argument, and yet no one has brought a ruler to the scene.

I hope that DragonFly _does_ trounce FreeBSD in both performance and useability, so that I have a new OS that is greater than the greatest. I'm just going to wait until it's finished and showing it's stuff before I start playing with myself.

Re:Hopefully

[ArbitraryConstant]

I think the 1.0 release was more of a "technology preview" type thing. I don't have a link handy, but Dillion mentioned that 1.0 was about getting a good chunk of the ideas working if not optimized. I imagine it will be a few years before we start seeing performance results.

But frankly I'm not in the habit of picking OSes for performance. I use OpenBSD instead of a faster OS because of the features (stability, security, very nice firewall (yes all the BSDs have ported PF, but Open is always a few months ahead of on features)).

With DragonFlyBSD, it's apparent that VERY cool features will be possible. I can't be sure they'll deliver, but if they do they can win without necessarily beating FreeBSD or Linux in terms of performance.

Also... if they can provide an efficient and reliable SSI cluster, they're going to be HUGE regardless of their performance on a single machine.

But as you say, it's all in the future. The biggest accomplishment of 1.0 was changing a bunch of behind the scenes stuff without breaking everything. We will see what happens in the future.

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:More like a memorial service...

[TheRaven64]

In what way is FreeBSD behind Linux in being ready for the desktop? It has 3D support from nVidia, the same desktop environments as Linux, and it has had kernel sound mixing (virtual /dev/dsp devices) since 4.x (maybe earlier). In 5.x new /dev/dsp devices are created as needed, so you can use GNOME and KDE sound dæmons at the same time as well as maybe a media player and a game that write to the raw device - something essential on the desktop that was missing from Linux last time I looked.

Oh, and *BSD is more ready for the desktop than Linux in at least one form - I've been using OS X on a desktop for some time now.

Re:The problem iwth BSD...

[drmerope]

Actually, I think what goes on is a philosphical difference rather than an inadequacy of *BSD.

First FreeBSD ports was so well regarded that someone decided to make gentoo which might well be called "FreeBSD Ports, linux style"

And here we get to the _key_ difference between the BSD culture and linux.

Recently, I downloaded some source (the pm3 compiler, ~1 year old). Much to my surprise the linux version didn't build cleanly. Why? Glibc introduced incompatibilities going from 2.2.5 to 2.3.x but the library version number was left unchanged. This forced me to spend a while fixing up the pm3 source to build against glibc 2.3.2. When I mentioned this to a friend of mine, he replied, "Well that's what you're supposed to do; that was an old outdated interface" I don't mind newer versions dropping outdated features or implementation but not when I must decide to put EITHER the new OR the old libraries on my systems.

This particular problem would never occur on a FreeBSD system. Changes like that simply are not tolerated. Breakage of that sort is confined to major releases and when that happens the library version number changes as well--allowing you to keep the old libc on your systems. Moreover, the old libc will continue to get security fixes for years.

I've often heard people complain that ports isn't very good at updating all the installed packages at once. I have almost no interest in doing this. I upgrade software selectively because I have a specific reason to do so. Updates tend to simply replace known bugs with unknown bugs and as such are not to be taken lightly. The linux breakage model simply is not acceptible in a corporate environment (it's great if you think maintaining your system is fun). This is the reason companies like redhat are slow to upgrade components and rely so heavily on internal patches.

As for your complaints about the base system versus packages. Packages are maintained not as agressively, but they are maintained. e.g., at the very least the FreeBSD security officer keeps track of vulnerabilities in ports. FreeBSD maintains a database of said vulnerabilties and my system emails me notices when a bit from ports has had a security advisory posted against it.

The base system exists:
1) To provide a self-hosting build system
2) To provide ABI, and API stability I mentioned earlier (you'll often see this as POLA - policy of least astonishment)
3) To create a set of tools which are integrated together and have known symantics.
3a) Choice simply isn't that useful to many people. e.g., I dislike that gentoo provides several different system loggers and makes no effort to have uniform and reasonable default configurations.
3b) Most of the BSD projects I am familar with are interested in creating complete systems. This is a priori missing from linux distributions because the kernel development is not well connected to any of the userlands. Redhat attemps some integration within the userland and through some patching of the kernel. But Debian or Gentoo have very minimist conceptions of a "system" which consists essentially of a packaging framework and not much else.

Overview: What you see as limitations/flaws others see as Features and Functionality. Luckily, I can have my feature and functionality running FreeBSD and you can have your knobs running whatever distribution you use.