Plans for 1.5

[Matthew Dillon]

    Starting in January, major surgery is going to occur on HEAD.  PEOPLE
    NEEDING STABLE SYSTEMS SHOULD EXPECT TO STICK WITH THE 1.4 RELEASE
    FOR A GOOD 3-4 MONTHS!

		-----------------------------------------------

			    STAGE 1 - Networking MPSAFE work
				Starting early January!

    * Jeff's parallel routing code will be integrated

    * TCP and UDP threads, and the network interrupt code will be made MPSAFE
      with the exception of the firewall and IP filter code.

    * The mbuf subsystem will get a makeover (Jeff and I will be embedding
      a message structure in the mbuf header to avoid a per-packet malloc
      and greatly improve performance).

    NOTE: I will not personally be working on the firewall/filter code 
    so once the above items are stable I will be soliciting developers to
    work on those subsystems (to make them MPSAFE).  The network paths will
    not be entirely MPSAFE until those last bits are done.

    I am deliberately choosing a chewable piece of work for stage 1 so I can
    get it done and move on to stage 2.

		-----------------------------------------------

			    STAGE 2 - I/O Subsystem
			    Starting early February!

    * I will be designing and implementing our cache coherency management
      system (CCMS).  Since cache coherency must be tightly integrated into
      the management of offset ranges for files, block devices, VM pages,
      and so forth, this technology will also serve as an offset/range
      locking subsystem for high level operations such as read() and 
      write(), as a locking and cache coherency mechanism for mid-level
      subsystems such as the buffer cache, and as a cache coherency 
      mechanism for the VM system.

      This will be a crucial step in allowing us to implement cache-coherency
      across physical machines.  For example, the ability to have fully
      coherent mmap()'d shared memory across physical machines.

      CCMS will be vnode-based.

    * CCMS will be used to encapsulate read(), write(), and truncate().

    * The buffer cache will be converted from being block-number-based to
      being offset-range-based and will use CCMS for management.  

    * The VM subsystem will be converted to using CCMS for management.
      To cut down on clutter, ranges of pages may be managed under the
      same CCMS lock and may be broken down or merged as necessary to
      control kernel memory use.

    * All VM Objects will be given vnodes for management purposes, including
      anonymous memory objects.

      This is a precursor to being able to do process migration across
      machines.

    * All VNODES will be given a mandatory VM object for CCMS and buffer
      cache management purposes.

      Alternatively we will do away with the VM_PAGE->VM_OBJECT mapping
      entirely and instead simply have a VM_PAGE->BUFFER_CACHE mapping,
      which might actually be better.

    * read() and perhaps write() will be modified to use CCMS to directly
      access VM OBJECTS and/or the buffer cache, allowing cached data to
      be directly copied to the user process without having to run
      through the VFS subsystem.

    * I intend to construct a fully cache-coherent Inter-machine transport
      layer for VNODEs using TCP.  This will allow NFS-style cross mounting
      between DragonFly hosts that are 100% cache coherent.


    NOTE: I am deliberately not listing conversion of the I/O subsystem from
    mapped buffers to page lists (XIO's) because I feel this might be too big
    a piece of bite off with the other things I want to do in this stage,
    and I don't want to hold up STAGE 3.

		-----------------------------------------------

			     STAGE 3 - ZFS PORT
			  Starting March or April!

    I am really quite impressed with Sun's ZFS.  People wishing to look at
    the Sun ZFS code can find it on LEAF in the OpenSolaris source tree:

	cd /archive/OpenSolaris-20051207/usr/src/

	    common/zfs
	    uts/common/fs/zfs
	    uts/sparc/zfs
	    uts/intel/zfs
	    cmd/fs.d/zfs
	    cmd/mdb/common/modules/zfs
	    cmd/mdb/intel/ia32/zfs
	    cmd/mdb/intel/amd64/zfs
	    cmd/mdb/sparc/v9/zfs
	    cmd/zfs

    I have perused the ZFS code and I am impressed.  Very impressed!  It is
    well documented, nicely modular, and easy to read.

    I am tentatively scheduling the port for March.  It may occur sooner or
    later then that (hopefully sooner), but I just don't know how hard 
    STAGE 2 is going to be.

    I really want to start the port immediately, but I think I am really 
    going to need userland VFS working for such a port to be able to proceed
    at a good clip.

						-Matt