The GoBSD Community site has information about sub-projects such as adding DragonFly support into Pkgsrc and other developments to help make DragonFly a good general-purpose operating system.
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- DragonFly-1.0 RELEASED!-12 July 2004+DragonFly-1.2.0 RELEASE PENDING!+08 April 2005 |
+Stay tuned this space, the 1.2.0 release is about to occur! +
--One year after starting the project as a fork off the FreeBSD-4.x tree, -the DragonFly Team -is pleased to announce our 1.0 release!
- --We've made remarkable progress in our first year. We have replaced nearly -all of the core threading, process, interrupt, and network infrastructure -with DragonFly native subsystems. We have our own MP-friendly slab allocator, -a Light Weight Kernel Threading (LWKT) system that is separate from the -dynamic userland scheduler, a fine-grained system timer abstraction for -kernel use, a fully integrated light weight messaging system, and a core -IPI (Inter Processor Interrupts) messaging system for inter-processor -communications.
- --We have managed to retain 4.x's vaunted stability throughout the development -process, despite ripping out and replacing major subsystems, and we have -a demonstratively superior coding model which is both UP (Uni-Processor) and -MP (Multi-Processor) friendly and which is nearly as efficient on UP systems -as the original 4.x UP-centric code is on UP systems.
- --We have made excellent progress bringing in those pieces from FreeBSD, NetBSD, -and OpenBSD that fit our model. For example, NEWBUS/BUS_DMA, the USB -infrastructure, RCNG (next generation system startup infrastructure), and -so forth. We have made an excellent start on reformulating the build -and release infrastructure including an excellent new system installer -which, while still in its infancy for the 1.0 release, has been coded in -a manner that will allow us to greatly improve and expand its capabilities -in coming months.
- --We have done so much that it cannot all be listed here. Please check out the -Diary for -technical details.
- --The two largest user-visible subsystems that still have major work pending -are the userland threading and ports/packages subsystems. People will find -that the DragonFly-1.0 release is still using the old 4.x pthreads model, -and at the moment we are relying on the FreeBSD ports tree with DragonFly -specific overrides for third party application support... about as severe a -hack as it is possible to have. These two stop-gap items will be at the -forefront of the work for the next year, along with a major move to start -removing the BGL (Big Giant Lock, also known as the MP lock) from code -inherited from 4.x, threading the VFS (Virtual File System) subsystem (the -network subsystem is already threaded as of 1.0), and implementing -asynchronously messaged system calls. And that is just the tip of the iceberg, -for we will be achieving far more in the coming year!