FreeBSD 7, DragonFly's status

[Matthew Dillon]

    Stability is important to me but I also recognize that even the best
    project can become stale if one does not choose to develop the right
    aspects of it.  A weakness in DragonFly is that it took a while to get
    to the more interesting things, like HAMMER, and will take yet longer
    to get to SSI.  One of FreeBSD's strengths is that its brute-force
    method of development tends to pull in more interest simply by the sheer
    number of projects being worked on parallel.  One of its weaknesses 
    is a lack of stability.  

    I far prefer our low level infrastructure.  Our abstractions are an
    order of magnitude cleaner:  VFS, timers, schedulers, cpu messaging,
    threading, namecache, VM paths, virtualization, PRNG, network drivers,
    network protocols, route table, and the list goes on.  I am also very
    happy that all that infrastructure work is now basicaly done and I can
    focus on the more interesting aspects of the project.  How do I explain
    to a lay person why moving the responsibility for namespace and I/O
    atomicy (range locking) into the kernel was important?  It's hard.

						-Matt