implemented features (Re: Decision time....)

[Justin C. Sherrill]

On Mon, June 4, 2007 4:45 am, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> I found this comment on Dmitri's blog possibly unfair, but somewhat
> reflecting my own perception as well:
> http://spetskod.blogspot.com/2007/05/immature-optimization.html#comment-8539868674748140994
>
> DragonFly was forked from FreeBSD-4 because of dissatisfaction with
> FreeBSD 5's approach to many things, including SMP.  But nothing
> visible to the user seems completed yet, especially not SMP.  And it
> looks like it won't be completed for 2.0 either.

I agree in that I'd like to have something significant for a 2.0 release,
and we're not going to have something that is a visible justification of a
major increment.  I'd rather have a 1.10 and go to 2.0 when it's clear
it's a major change.

I don't think it's realistic to expect SMP to be working any time soon -
it's all tied up in clustering, and clustering is like pregnancy - you
can't be a little bit pregnant, just like you can't have your systems a
little bit clustered.  We are eventually going to reach a point where
bang!  we can create a single system image - but everything else has to
happen first.

64-bit support just needs what everyone has the least of - the time to sit
and work on it.

Documentation of what's changed would be good too - as was pointed out,
journaling works, but it's not as public as it could be.  Sascha and
others have been doing an excellent job with the man pages, but the
handbook needs to be updated too.

Of course, I'm the one that touches the handbook the most.  I've reached
the point where I keep a notebook just to track the tasks I'd like to do
for DragonFly.  Not that I have the time, but maybe I'll win the lottery
someday.