Questions and suggestions about some of the goals

[Francois Tigeot]

On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 10:58:20AM +0100, Mads Worsøe Duun wrote:
> 
> All around you read that dbsd has a "hybrid" kernel, which means that
> e.g. devices
> can operate as user processes instead of a kernel process. Personally I
> think that neither a microkernel or a monolithic kernel is the best
> solution, but something in between. Therefore, how much can of dbsd can
> already be running as a user processes, and witch part is already running
> as a user processes in dbsd?

The DragonFly kernel is still monolithic; no part of it runs as regular
user processes. AFAIK, there were some ideas about userland services and
some minor infrastructure had been created (upcall mechanism) but in the
end it was not used.

> Concerning Hammer, is it today possible to make some kind of “boot
> environment”, as you can with ZFS on Solaris/FreeBSD?

If I understand correctly, a "boot environment" in the solaris sense means
booting on a snapshot.
There is no provision to do it. Even if someone started to hack on it now,
Hammer snapshots are read-only so that would probably entail considerable
work before becoming usable.

> About packages installation, the new pbi format from PC-BSD, sounds like it
> could do much of the stuff from the packages installation section on the
> Goal page. I have asked on the PC-BSD forum, how much work it would take to
> port the pbi format to use pkgsrc instead of FreeBSDs ports, and it seems
> that it would be relative simple. What do you think?

Someone else would have to answer this one; all I can say is most of the
ideas you're speaking about seem to be dated from the first years of the
project and many things went in other directions.

ATB,

-- 
Francois Tigeot