To the untrained eye this might look like "just another bsd fork", but if you look further and read the design goals in detail you'll find some very interesting ideas. Some of it could be more than just good discussion material. There might be a (small?) research project or another nice hobby kernel, maybe even good ideas to implement in Linux ? I'll be watching this project... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 12:42:07 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> Subject: Announcing DragonFly BSD! Announcing DragonFly BSD! http://www.dragonflybsd.org/ Hello everyone! For the last few months I have been investigating and then working on a new approach to the BSD kernel. This has snowballed into a far more ambitious project which is now ready for wider participation. It is the intent of this project to take over development of the 4.x tree, to move kernel development along an entirely new path towards SMP, and to completely rewrite the packaging and distribution system. We eventually intend to backport many FreeBSD-5 features into the new tree, but that is not where the initial focus will be. The preliminary 'proving' work I have done is now available on the new DragonFly site. You can access it through cvsup or browse it through ftp. This proving work involved implementing much of the earlier UP->SMP converstion work that was done when 5.x first branched, but under an entirely new mutex-free light weight kernel threading infrastructure. It includes the LWKT system, interrupt threads, and pure threads for system processes amoung other things. For obvious reasons the codebase will only run on i386 for now, and ports to other platforms will not happen until the MD infrastructure is cleaned up and finalized. I considered starting with a 5.x base but it is simply too heavily mutexed, it was actually faster to start with 4.x and move forward rather then to start with 5.x and move backwards. I have both UP and SMP builds working in the current codebase. I believe it proves out the core concepts quite nicely and there is much more work coming down the pipeline. The site is: http://www.dragonflybsd.org/ Hopefully my T1 can handle the cvsup load. Eventually I'll colocate some boxes to deal with that issue. For the next few months the project is going to concentrate on low level kernel development. There are still a number of big ticket items that have to be accomplished, primarily in converting the I/O path to using VM Object/range lists, before work can branch out into other areas. I expect the project to start fairly slowly but then for momentum to build. Anyone interested in working on or discussing the project is welcome! I have created a mailing list server and newsgroup forums and I am working on web-accessibility to same for passive listeners. I will be posting periodic updates to freebsd-hackers as well. Again, the site is below. It contains a great deal of documentation and other information. I even have a mascot! And, hopefully, it will all work from outside my LAN :-) http://www.dragonflybsd.org/ -Matt -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
