Thinking out loud...

[Ryan Dooley]

Hey Folks,

While I'm waiting for my new machine to arrive (vmware is just too 
painful on my work machine) I got to thinking about Dragonfly.  I 
figured I'd just put them out here for comment so...

1) I'd like to see something like OSDL's push for "data center" grade 
Dragonfly (see http://www.osdl.org/lab_activities/data_center_linux/ for 
  what OSDL is pushing for Linux).

While I'm not sure how much is relavent work could be started on getting 
NUMA support for Dragonfly.  We could solicit vendors for NUMA hardware 
and the like.  I'm willing to start up that campagin.

Hotplug PCI/CPU support.  There is a lot of heavy duty hardware that has 
this option.  I don't think any of the BSDs have hot-plug support. 
Again I'd look for hardware to work on.

I'd also like to see something like "domain" isolation for CPU and 
memory (think Solaris).  I have no idea where to start with this.

2) While Matt and others work on the VFS replacement we should probably 
come up with something in addtion to SGI XFS as a file system option.  W 
It would be good if we had some answer to Microsoft's WinFS (some sort 
of "database-like" thing).

I recently saw on Windows 2003 to use SQL like statements to query 
different parts of the system.  BeOS I believe had something similar for 
BFS IIRC.

3) I'd like to see a binary update service.  For FreeBSD there exists 
freebsd-update (http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-update/) and that 
would be a good starting point.  In the long run maybe something like an 
 automated update service for those who don't want to deal with 
patching source.  (I totally agree that patching the source is just too 
easy and just plain convienent - That should be an option.  I think that 
there are some sites that don't want to do that for one reason or 
another and would prefer to have a binary update "service".)

4) I know that Robert Watson put up a LXR service 
(http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/?v=DFBSD).  What about setting up a 
Bugzilla server as well?

. ..

I realized while typing this up; A lot of this probably sounds like 
"well {Linux, Sun, whoever} is doing this so we should to."  I think 
that there might be a little bit of it in there and all of this just 
maybe outside of the scope of what Matt has in mind for Dragonfly.

Anyway, like I said I'm just putting this out there for comments.

Cheers,
Ryan