A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Matthew Dillon is making major changes to the namecache over the next 24 hours or so; watch out until it stabilizes. These changes should make nullfs mounting more memory-efficient, among other things, and lays a foundation for union or shadowing filesystems.
Matthew Dillon described his ‘stage 7b’ in a commit message, which includes a description of an upcoming improvemwnt to NFS.
Matt Dillon’s posted about the namecache work he plans to be doing now; his summary is included here.
Matt Dillon posted a patch for the next stage of his namecache work. I’m pasting the intro here, where he talks about what this patch does, and some of what the last stage will do.
Matt Dillon posted a longer explanation of his namecache work; I’m quoting it here because I’m not knowledgeable enough to summarize. Quoted text follows:
Matt Dillon is starting work on cache_lookup(), for at least the next week or so. When implemented, it should lead to some very interesting changes in the filesystem. This may be backportable to FreeBSD, too. Quoted text follows:
Matthew Dillon warned that the namecache work (stage 6 is committed) may destabilize the system somewhat while it is in flux; crashes may happen, though data should be generally safe. Use the DragonFly_Stable tag in your supfile if this is a problem and you’d like to upgrade…
Rahul Siddharthan pointed at this post as evidence of softupdates not working as quickly as it used to, for FreeBSD and by extension DragonFly. Matt Dillon replied that: “FreeBSD-5 has a lot overhead, especially when it comes to the buffer manipulation that softupdates does. DFly should be nearly the same as 4.x in regards to …
David P. Reese, Jr. noted that he will be at the Neal Stephenson talk in the Menlo Park Kepler’s Books on the 26th, and if there’s any other developers around, he’d like to meet up afterwards. Also, Matt Dillon noted he should throw a party when the namecache work is done.
Matt Dillon pointed out that GEOM in FreeBSD may be something DragonFly can present a compatible API for, but it requires the messaging work for VFS and DEV first. Incidentally, Matt will be working on namecache, VOP_LOOKUP, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s prebinding, and Jeffrey Hsu’s changes to ifq. If, like me, you are clueless on what …