VFS ROADMAP (and vfs01.patch stage 1 available for testing)

[Rakhesh Sasidharan]

On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 12:50:27 +0200, "Martin P. Hellwig"
<mhellwig at xxxxxxxxx> said:
> Matthew Dillon wrote:
> <cut>
> >     Yes, I think you could.  The cluster abstraction would be
> >     a superset of the jail abstraction.  So much so, in fact, that the
> >     jail concept would be obsoleted.   e.g. the cluster will partition off
> >     cpu, network, and memory resources.  In fact, I think the cluster
> >     abstraction might even end up running a subset of the kernel itself as
> >     a loadable module... kind of a kernel within a kernel.   This would
> >     automatically isolate resource monitoring and related activities and
> >     sysctls to just what is visible within the pseudo-kernel, and the
> >     'real' kernel (or the 'parent' of the pseudo kernel) would control
> >     the actual hard resource allocation and scheduling.
> > 
> >     It will be a while before my thoughts solidify on how best to 
> >     implement a cluster (and input is always welcome).  
> > 
> 
> So, simply put (as far as I can understand this material), DragonFly 
> will provide an API that has the hardware abstracted to an virtual 
> hardware (which is clusterable over multiple nodes with different types 
> of machine) kind of a distributed virtual machine (DVM). On top of that 
> DVM there is a kernel which is specialized in the "DVM" hardware and has 
> the understanding how to distribute, load-balance, replicate and 
> fail-over system processen and other daemons. On top of that you can do 
> anything like you would do with a normal OS, if you want only ,say 
> PostgreSQL, thats fine but a whole full blown installation with multiple 
> services is also possible.

Thanks for summarizing things up that neatly. I had been following this
discussion for a while, but things weren't entirely making sense to me
(coz I am not familiar with the topics material, but was following them
coz they sounded interesting) and now it all makes sense. Ah, the joy of
enlightenment! ;) Thanks again! 

Rakhesh