Release Schedule for 1.8

[Matthew Dillon]

:What's the status of VKERNEL stuff? was one of the major things for
:this release.

    I am going to try to get it done in 2 weeks.  No guarentees.  It
    can't hold up the release.  

    But it won't be production for at least two months after that.  e.g.
    we'll need to write a network driver and do some other bits to make
    it truely useful.  Once I get the initial virtual kernel working
    I will impose on other developers to work on some drivers for it :-)

:We are having a lot of problems with our IRQ routing code, i remember
:you proposing a solution for it some time ago, do you think that it's
:doable in time for the release? I wouldn't like to ship with stability
:problems and in my opinion we should delay the release until that is
:fixed.

    The IRQ issues are the same we've had since inception.  i.e. no better
    and no worse then before.  We have workarounds (build SMP without
    APIC_IO,and use the emergency interrupt poll sysctl).  I don't think
    we can rush a solution in two weeks.

:About testing, i think that we should start looking to do automated
:regression testing of the system as much as we can. TET[1] looks like
:a very good solution and FreeBSD is probably going to use it[2], so we
:could get a lot of regression tests for free that apply to DragonFly.
:
:[1]: http://tetworks.opengroup.org/
:[2]: http://wikitest.freebsd.org/TetIntegration

    I dunno.  I'm always skeptical about such frameworks and wonder 
    whether porting them actually saves us any time over building
    our own.  I do think testing will become a lot easier with the
    virtual kernel giving us a totally self contained environment for
    three files (kernel binary, memory image file, disk image file).

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at backplane.com>