diary

Fri 03 August 2007

NATA is now the default ata driver.
Major changes made to the disk abstraction layer.
Significant changes made to disk device minor numbers in /dev.
GPT and 64 bit disklabel support added (non booting).
The LWP (Userland threading work) is now essentially done.
Major work on vinum to remove its roll-your-own disklabel layer and to remove its assumptions about the device layer's DMA capabilities.
Introduce libpthread as a softlink allowing libthread_xu or libc_r to be selected. All multithreaded programs are now linked against libpthread. libc_r is the default as there are still a few issues that need to be worked out with libthread_xu.
Major improvements to wireless networking drivers.
Many new USB and PCI devices added.
Numerous new PCI drivers added, particularly w/ networking.
Userland syslink API is now finished.
Link state changes are now reported through the routing socket.
Signal and proper stop/continue support added to LWPs
Entire kernel is now LWP and thread centric instead of process and thread centric.
Bind 9.3.4 integrated
GCC 4.1.2 integrated, selectable with CCVER. GCC-3 is still the default.
Add an abstraction layer to vn_strategy() to hide DMA limitations of underlying devices.
Fix symbol resolution issues with loaded modules.
Both GCC-3 and GCC-4 are now built by default.
Improve virtual kernel disk and networking support. Multiple disks and network interfaces are now supported.
Implement SMP support for virtual kernels (mainly as a testbed).
Many documentation updates.
Enhance kinfo_proc to return LWP info.
Enhance the virtual kernel's console.
Replace gnu tar with BSD tar.
Fix a single stepping bug that could lead to a panic.
Allow multiple kernels to be supplied on the release ISO and supply a VKERNEL kernel in addition to the normal kernel.
Get rid of the UAREA for good.
Synchronize zoneinfo changes with recent standards changes.
Fix a mbuf leak in sbappendcontrol().
Fix an exec*() syscall memory leak that can lock a machine up when the exec temporary argument space becomes exhausted.
Bring in the latest libarchive, bsdtar, sendmail, awk, ping, file, less, and openssh.
Bring in binutils 2.17.
Support MBs that do not have keyboard controllers by placing an upper limit on the keyboard controller probe timeout.
Remove IPV6 type 0 router header support entirely.
Implement SYSREF for the kernel - this structure and API implements MP-safe reference counting and also associates a unique 64 bit id with the structure allowing the structure to be referenced off-machine. SYSREF is part of the clustering work.
Use SYSREF for struct vmspace and struct vnode, including doing a major revamping of the vnode reference handling code.
Do a major reordering of many SYSINITs and a major reordering of where device configuration occurs in the boot sequence. Device configuration now occurs far later in the boot sequence and has access to most major subsystems including threading and major memory subsystems. Interrupts are now enabled during device configuration. This is somewhat experimental but works great in allowing us to locate ordering issues in various device init functions related to their interrupts.
Implement asynchronous device attachment but default to disabled for 1.10.
Reformulate disk management layer ioctls and remove data pollution. Do not store filesystem-specific data such as the fragment size in the disklabel any more.
Expand the SCSI subsystem to handle 16-byte commands, allowing > 32 bit block addressing for devices that support it.
Change the 'make upgrade' target to attempt to rebuild the devices found in /dev instead of just rebuilding base devices.
Distributions now include a Makefile in /usr with easy-to-use targets for creating and synchronizing /usr/src and /usr/pkgsrc.
Greatly simplify LWKT messaging within the kernel.
Add virtual CDROM support to the virtual kernel.
Add halt and reboot support to the virtual kernel.
Fix a bug in bus_dmamap_load() that was not properly following boundary and maximum segment size limits.
Save and restore a USB keyboard's translation mode, allowing the keyboard to be un-plugged and re-plugged.
Remove the last source of major SMP TLB invalidations in the fork/exec/exit/wait critical paths, significantly reducing IPI traffic and improving fork/exec performance.
ktrdump now has an option to loop waiting for new input.
Fix mouse jumpiness when emergency interrupts are enabled by not polling PS/2 mouse interrupts.
Fix numerous CAM/USB issues so we do not panic or crash if a USB mass storage device is pulled while still mounted. Make sure umount -f works on pulled devices.
Synchronize the sound subsystem with FreeBSD.
Timeout positive hits in the namecache as well as negative hits for NFS mounts. Otherwise rename-over's can result in a stale namecache that doesn't auto recover.
Add MPLS support to traceroute and add a protocol entry in /etc/protocols for MPLS-in-ip.
Bring in a number of math library fixes from FreeBSD.
dntpd now properly handles DNS failures, supports DNS pools, and does a quorum consistency check when told to use more then one source.
Fix a bug in the checkpointing code that was preventing a program from being re-checkpointed properly.
Major USB code cleanup.
Adjust dynamic objcache sizing to handle certain degenerate conditions.
Synchronize with the Adaptec SCSI code from FreeBSD.
Retire the original ports packaging tools.

Tue 30 January 2007

Implement Virtual Kernel support and add a VKERNEL target. Virtual kernels are run as userland processes and provide a complete (minus hardware drivers) working kernel environment. A simulated disk driver is included and a simulated network driver using the TAP interface is included, allowing network access. See the vkernel(7) manual page for more information.
Introduce getcontext(3), setcontext(3), and friends
Release 1.8.0!

Mon 1 January 2007

Jails are now IPv6 aware and support multiple IP addresses.
Bridging support has been greatly improved.
Many, Many new network drivers and chipsets have been added.
Major infrastructure for 802.x wireless support added (WPA, TX rate control, major API layer for all wireless network devices, better ifconfig integration, and more).
The cpdup program has been greatly enhanced and now supports remote copies via ssh..
Improved support for old-style disklabels.
Kernel sources are now included on release CDs.
Major rewrite of the vnode operations infrastructure, greatly simplifying the layer.
Fix a bug related to POSIX locking.
Tons of documentation updates and code readability cleanups.
Restructure the kernel build to accomodate multiple architectures. Start separting platform components from cpu components.
Synchronize a bunch of AMD64 related items (but we don't support 64 bit mode yet).
Major rewrite of the mount glue infrastructure and NULLFS which allows the namecache topology to be shared for multiple NULLFS mounts and also allows arbitrary stacking of read-only and read-write NULLFS mounts with basically zero kernel overhead.
Unconditionally associate a namecache reference with all file descriptors, allowing us to share vnodes across different mounts (NULLFS).
NULLFS mounts may now be arbitrarily stacked and distinct paths are no longer required.
Properly dereference mount point roots when unmounting. Raise hell if unmounting a filesystem which still has references.
Do a massive reorganization of the device operations vector and remove many instances where devops functions were dependant on the calling process or thread to obtain cred information.
Do a run through of all system header files to make sure they include any dependancies themselves, instead of requiring the originating source file to include the dependancies first. This greatly reduces the effort required to use kernel header files in new sources.
Synchronize MII support with NetBSD and OpenBSD, including adding standard conforming GMII support. Er. In otherwords, improve driver support for physical network interfaces (phys's).
Remove VOP locking vectors. Make VOP locking functions direct calls (and thus mandatory).
Control access to vnode ref count fields with a spinlock
Fix a dubious construct in usr.bin/tail (no, really! That's what the commit message said!).
Add support for %j to the kernel printf.
Major symbol separation for most kernel functions which inexactly mimic libc functions. e.g. printf -> kprintf, in order to allow user-mode kernels to be linked against libc.
Update to sendmail to 8.13.8.
Update to OpenSSL to 0.9.8d
Update to OpenSSH 4.5p1
Update to Bind 9.3.2-P1
Update to less 3.9.4
Update to awk 20050424
Update to file 4.19
Update to tcpdump 3.9.5
Update to libpcap 0.9.5
Synchronize m4 with FreeBSD
Import libarchive
Import bsdtar 1.3.1 and make bsdtar our default tar. GNU tar is still installed as gtar.
Import NetBSD's ftp client under its new name (tnftp).
Bring in GCC-4.1 (setenv CCVER GCC41 to use).
Significant code cleanups to make the world and kernel compile under GCC-4.1. Note that the default compiler is still GCC 3.4 (GCC-4.x will probably become the default sometime in 2007).
More work on LWP/THREAD/PROC separation for 1:1 threading support.
Fix a major bug in /bin/make that can cause make (or some child make in a large build) to ignore ^C. make temporarily installs SIG_IGN when polling whether a signal is being ignored or not. Fix the code to not do this.
Fix a long standing signal/fork race that could cause a process group signal to not make it to a newly fork child if it occurs while the fork is in progress.
Synchronize the zoneinfo database with tzdata2006p.
Add an ECC detection device, currently supporting AMD64's memory controller.
Greatly reduce the memory allocated by fsck when fscking filesytems with a huge number of directories (primarily mirors with lots of hardlinked files). Otherwise fsck can run out of memory on such filesystems.
Adjust RCNG to support 'blah=YES/NO' as well as 'blah_enable=YES/NO', giving us better compatibility with PkgSrc based RC scripts.
Fix a bug related to ALTQ when setting the algorithm for a queue on which packets are already present.
Do a major clean up of the BUSDMA header file architecture.
We have a new web site layout!
Use spinlocks in the objcache instead of tokens (the critical path is still lockless).
Replace the global VM page hash table with a per-VM-object Red-Black tree.
A considerable amount of work on IPSEC support has been done.
NATA has been ported from FreeBSD and is currently being tested.
Sync USB support with FreeBSD6 - use task queues to handle operations that cannot be handled from an interrupt thread.
Explore low-speed USB busses during cold boot so the USB keyboard starts working earlier in the boot sequence.
Start introducing glue for the SYSLINK and CCMS infrastructures. (system link protocol and cache coherency management subsystems).
Introduce a system call skeleton and test code for SYSLINK.
Introduce the algorithm and structural topology that will be used for cache coherency into the VFS path.
Introduce a user-managed virtuallized page table infrastructure which can be accessed via mmap(), as part of the infrastructure to support virtual kernels running in userland (MAP_VPAGETABLE).
Introduce vmspace_*() system calls which allows a user process to manage and control multiple VM spaces, as part of the virtualization support effort.

Wed 12 July 2006

Continued work on LWP/PROC separation.
Continued pkgsrc integration.
Fix refcount bugs in the kernel module loader and unloader.
Lots of netif and serializer cleanups and fixes.
Lots of softupdates, filesystem, and buffer cache related fixes.
Remove more of the old ports-related infrastructure.
Major documentation cleanups.
Major code cleanups, ansification.
Change the system #include topology so that each include file is responsible for #include'ing any dependant include files.
Fix a bug in the PF fragment cache.
Random number generator: Instead of generating entropy from selected interrupts (and none by default), we now generate entropy from all interrupts by default and rate limit it to not interfere with high performance interrupts. Completely
Random number generator: Completely replace the algorithms, remove limitations on returned bytes from /dev/random (which only served to cause programs to not use /dev/random due to its lack of dependability). Add the ability to seed the RNG. Do some automatic initial seeding at boot.
Adjust ssh to find the pkgsrc X11BASE instead of the old ports X11BASE.
Fix some compatibility issues in /bin/sh.
Fix a small number of critical section enter/exit mismatches.
Bring in a bunch of new malloc() features from OpenBSD (guard pages, free page protection, pointer guard, etc).
Clean up the DragonFly build system's automatic .patch handling.
Bring in openssh 4.3p2.
Retire libmsun. It was replaced by NetBSD's libm.
Fix a bug in the NFS timer/retry code.
Fix issues related to wide-char support.
Fix a number of private TSS bugs related to threaded programs.
Completely rewrite the user process scheduler and usched APIs.
Add system calls that allow a blocking/non-blocking flag to be passed independant of the O_NONBLOCK state of the descriptor.
Remove all fcntl(... O_NONBLOCK) calls from libc_r, use the new system calls instead. This solves numerous problems with file descriptors shared between threaded and non-threaded programs getting their non-blocking flag set, and then blowing up the non-threaded program.
Add additional red-black (RB) tree function support for ranged searches.
Get rid of gdb -k, replace with a separately built kgdb, and build a separate libgdb as well.
Implement a VM load heuristic. Remove the full-process SWAP code which never worked well and replace with page-fault rate-limiting code based on the VM load.
Fix a serious bug in adjtime()'s microseconds calculation.
Fix a serious bug in libc's strnstr() function. The function was testing one byte beyond the specified length limit. This can cause a seg-fault when, e.g. using strnstr() on a memory mapped file whos last byte abuts the end of the VM page.
Bring in sendmail 8.13.7.
Bring in SHA256 support from FreeBSD.
Implement a hardlink-mirroring option (-H) in cpdup.
Add missing code needed to detect IPSEC packet replays.
Enable TCP wrappers in sshd.
Restrict recursive DNS queries to localhost by default.
Massive reorganization and rewrite of the 802_11 subsystem, with many pieces taken from FreeBSD.
Fix a number of issues with user-supplied directory offsets blowing up readdir/getdirentries for NFS and UFS.
Normalize internal kernel I/O byte lengths to 'int' and remove a ton of crazy casts to and from unsigned int or size_t.
Remove NQNFS support. The mechanisms are too crude to co-exist with upcoming cache coherency management work and the original implementation hacked up the NFS code pretty severely.
Remove VOP_GETVOBJECT, VOP_DESTROYVOBJECT, and VOP_CREATEVOBJECT. They never lived up to their billing and DragonFly doesn't need them since DragonFly is capable of aliasing vnodes via the namecache. Rearrange the VFS code such that VOP_OPEN is now responsible for assocating a VM object with a vnode.
Formalize open/close counting for the vnode and assert that they are correct.
Remove the thread_t argument from most VOP and VFS calls. Remove the thread_t argument from many other kernel procedures.
Integrate FreeBSD's new ifconfig(8) utility.
Fix a race condition in the floating point fault code that could sometimes result in a kernel assertion.
Fix a crash in the TCP code when the MTU is too small to support required TCP/IP/IPSEC options and headers.
Separate EXT2 conditionals from the UFS code, copying the files in question to the EXT2 directory instead of trying to conditionalize them. Also remove function hooks and other code mess that had been implemented to allow the UFS code to be used by EXT2.
Greatly simplify the lockmgr() API. Remove LK_DRAIN, LK_INTERLOCK, and many other flags. Remove the interlock argument.
Fix a bug in the POSIX locking code (lockf). Actually, completely rewrite the POSIX locking code. The previous code was too complex and mostly unreadable.
Do a major clean up of all read() and write() system calls, and iovec handling.
Replace many instances where LWKT tokens are used with spinlocks.
Make spinlocks panic-friendly. Properly handle the detection of indefinite waits and other deadlock issues.
Improve network performance by embedding the netmsg directly in the mbuf instead of allocating a separate netmsg structure for each packet.
Implement both shared and exclusive spinlocks. Implement a much faster shared spinlock. Cache the shared state such that no locked bus cycle operation is required in the common case.
Implement msleep(). Use a novel approach to handling the interlock that greatly improves performance over other implementations.
Add cpu-binding support to the scheduler and add a system call to access it. A user process can be bound to a subset of cpus.
Prefix all syscall functions in the kernel with 'sys_' to reduce function prototype pollution and incompatibilities, and to eventually support virtualized kernels running in userland.
Port the enhanced SpeedStep driver (EST) for cpu frequency control.
Remove the asynchronous syscall interface. It was an idea before its time. However, keep the formalization of the syscall arguments structures.
Add a facility which statistically records and dumps program counter tracking data for the kernel.
Improve kernel SSE2-based bcopies by calling fnclex instead of fninit.
Major BUF/BIO work - make the entire BUF/BIO subsystem BIO centric.
Major BUF/BIO work - get rid of block numbers, use 64 bit byte offsets only.
Major BUF/BIO work - Clean up structures and compartmentalize driver-specific private fields. Rewrite and simplify device and vnode strategy APIs.
Major BUF/BIO work - Remove B_PHYS. There is no longer any differentiation between physical and non-physical I/O at the strategy layer.
Major BUF/BIO work - Replace the global buffer cache hash table with a per-vnode RB tree. Add sanity checks. Require that all vnode-based buffers be VMIO backed.
MPSAFE work - Implement the parallel route table algorith.
MPSAFE work - Make the user process scheduler MPSAFE.
MPSAFE work - File descriptor access is now MPSAFE. Many fd related functions, like dup(), close(), etc, are either MPSAFE or mostly MPSAFE.
MPSAFE work - Push the BGL deeper into the kernel call stack for many system calls.
MPSAFE work - Make the process list MPSAFE.
MPSAFE work - Make all cred functions MPSAFE.
NRELEASE - compilable kernel sources are now included on the ISO.

Sat 7 January 2006

Add the closefrom() system call.
GCC 3.4 is now the default compiler. 2.95.x is no longer supported (it can't handle the new threading storage classes properly).
Import Citrus from NetBSD.
Implement direct TLS support for programs, whether threaded or not.
Major library and user-visible system structure changes (dirent, stat, errno, etc), and other work requires a major library bump for libc and other libraries. libc is now libc.so.6.
stat: inode size now 64 bits, nlink now 32 bits. new fields, added pad.
dirent: inode size now 64 bits, various fields disentangled from the UFS dirent.
statfs: new fields, added pad.
Clean up RC scripts that are not used by DragonFly.
Remove the OS keyword requirement for RC scripts.
Add support for unsigned quads to sysctl.
Implement DNTPD, DragonFly's own NTP client time synchronization demon.
Correct a large number of bugs in the third party ntpd code, but for client-side operations we now recommend you use dntpd.
Add a framework for aggregating per-cpu structures for user reporting.
Userland TLS (data spaces for threads) support added.
Create a binary library compatibility infrastructure that allows us to install and/or upgrade older revs of shared libraries on newer machines to maintain compatibility with older programs.
Fix issues related to the expansion of symbolic links by the bourne shell.
Many, many mdoc cleanups and fixes.
Update cvs, openssl, ssh, sendmail, groff, and other numerous contributed applications.
Bring in a brand new PAM infrastructure.
Introduce pkgsrc support.
Get rid of libmsun.
Implement backwards scanning and partial-transaction handling features in jscan.
FreeBSD-SA-05:06.iir - major disk access vulnerability for IIR
FreeBSD-SA-05:04.ifconf - memory disclosure vulnerability
FreeBSD-SA-05:08.kmem - memory disclosure vulnerability
FreeBSD-SA-05:16.zlib - possible buffer overflow in zlib
FreeBSD-SA-05:18.zlib - possible buffer overflow in zlib
FreeBSD-SA-05:15.tcp - fix TCP RESET window check (DOS attack vulnerability)
? - a bzip2 vulnerability
Fix a bug in the TCP NewReno algorithm which could result in a large amount of data being unnecessarily retransmitted.
Fix numerous TCP buffering issues.
Implement TCP Appropriate Byte Counting
Bring in ALTQ and reorganize the IF queueing code to remove per-driver dependencies on ALTQ.
Strip away numerous TCP hidden indirections that make code hard to read and understand.
Introduce BPF_MTAP which includes an address family parameter.
Reimplement network polling with a systimer, allowing the frequency to be adjusted on the fly.
Remove the really bad hack that was calling the network polling code from the trap code.
Completely rewrite network polling support.
Make the network IF serializer mandatory for all network device driver interrupts, ioctl's, and if_ callbacks.
Implement a very fast memory object caching infrastructure. This will eventually replace zalloc() (but not yet).
Rewrite the mbuf allocator using the new memory object caching infrastructure. Remove many crazily-large mbuf macros in favor of the new infrastructure.
Convert all remaining uses of the old mbuf m_ext API to the new API. Remove support for the old API.
Reorder the detach sequence in all network drivers. Unhook the interrupt first rather then last.
Fix all instances where an mbuf packet header and mbuf data buffer were being referenced by the wrong name and all instances where the packet header flag was being improperly set or cleared.
Fix a number of mbuf statistics counting bugs.
Fix numerous bugs in ipfw/ipfw2 where m_tag data was not being stored in the right place, resulting in a panic.
Add support for the experimental SCTP protocol.
Fix an issue with cloned interfaces being added twice.
Add a passive IPIQ call for non-time-critical events such as memory free() calls.
Add TLS support for threads using the GDT instead of the LDT.
Greatly simplify and demystify the NTP kernel interface. Convert most aspects of the interface over to sysctls.
Implement ranged fsync's in-kernel. This capability will eventually replace the write-behind heuristic.
Introduce MP-safe mountlist scanning code.
Introduce rip-out-safe red-black tree scanning code.
Use the new RB scanning code to get rid of VPLACEMARKER and generally use the new RB scanning code to handle all RB tree scanning in a safe way (allowing the scan code callback to block).
Zoneinfo upgrades
Rename cpu_mb*() functions to cpu_mfence(), cpu_lfence(), and cpu_sfence() to make their function more apparent.
Fix bugs in the LWKT token code related to token references being lost due to a preemption or blocking condition.
Fix bugs in the LWKT rwlock code relating to preemption occuring during token acquisition.
Fix a bug in the LWKT thread queueing and dequeueing code related to a preemption.
Increase the size of the physmap[] array to accomodate newer PCs which have a larger number of memory segments and fix an overflow bug.
Use the ACPI timer if present instead of one of the other 8254 timers (which are not dependable because BIOS calls might manipulate them).
Change cpu statistics to be accounted for on a per-cpu basis.
Make network routing statistics per-cpu.
Extend the interrupt vector code to pass a frame as a pointer.
Remove the last vestiges of the old mbuf tagging code.
Add a serializer API and code (basically blockable mutexes).
Add interrupt enablement and disablement features to the new serializer module to deal with races against blocked serializer locks when e.g. removing a driver.
Remove bus_{disable,enable}_intr(), it was not generic enough for our needs.
Remove all spl*() procedures and convert all uses to critical sections.
Do not try to completely halt all cpus when panic()ing as this will likely leave the machine in a state that prevents it from being able to do a dump.
Try to unwind certain conditions when panic()ing from a trap in order to give the machine a better chance to dump its core.
A number of malloc()'s using M_NOWAIT really needed to be using M_WAITOK.
Attempt to avoid a livelocked USB interrupt during boot by delaying the enablement of the EHCI interrupt until after all companion controllers have been attached.
Reimplement the kernel tracepoint facility (KTR) to greatly reduce the complexity of the API as well as remove all hardwired flags and values. In addition, record two levels of call backtrace for each entry, if enabled.
Beef up ktrdump to display symbolic results when possible.
Beef up the slab allocator build with INVARINTS by adding a bitmap to detect duplicate frees and such.
Remove the 16 bit count limit for file descriptors.
Replace the file descriptor allocator with an O(log N) full-on in-place binary search tree.
Allow the initial stack pointer for a use process to be randomized.
Fix numerous scheduling issues that could cause the scheduler to lose track of a reschedule request, resulting in poor interactive performance. Rewrite the interactive/batch heuristic.
Begin to implement a management system to allow multiple userland schedulers to be configured in a system.
Add rm -I and add an alias for interactive shells to use it by default. -I is a less invasive -i.
Fix a bug in the pipe code that was not handling kernel-space writes correctly. Such writes can occur whenever the kernel writes KVM-referenced data to a descriptor, such as that journaling code might do.
Fix many issues with the high level filesystem journaling code. High level journal records are now considered fairly solid.
Implement the transactional features of the high level journaling subsystem by allowing a journaling record to be written prior to the VFS operation being executed, then aborted if the VFS operation fails.
Implement UNDO records for most journaling transaction types.
Implement the journaling code's full-duplex ack protocol feature which allows journals to be broken and restarted without losing data.
Implement a stat-visible FSMID (filesystem modification id). This identifier changes whenever any modifying operation on the file or directory occurs, and for directories this identifier also changes if anything in the sub-tree under the directory is modified (recursively). The FSMID is synthesized for filesystems which do not implement it directly in order to guarantee its usefulness for at least a subset of operations.
Implement pesistent storage of the FSMID for UFS.
Implement shutdown() support for pipes.
Implement a low level spinlock facility. Basically the implementation gives us an MP-safe critical section type of vehicle. However, being a spinlock the facility may only be used for very short sections of code.
Fix a bug with USB<->CAM communication for USB mass storage devices.
Fix numerous bugs in USB, primarily EHCI.
Fix multiple panics when a fatal trap occurs from an IPI or FAST interrupt. Interlock panics on multiple cpus so only the first is recognized as the 'real' panic.
Add a large number of assertions to the scheduler and interrupt subsystems.
Fix a critical IPI messaging bug (SMP only).
Do not compile the kernel with the stack protector. The stack protector generates weird incorrect or unexpected code in some cases which interfere with the C<->assembly interactions in the kernel build
Various bug fixes to softupdates.
Fix a bitmap scanning bug in UFS which could sometimes result in a sanity check panic, but no data corruption.
Fix a deadlock in UFS's ffs_balloc() related to an incorrect buffer locking order.
Continued work on the buffer cache.
Separate out APIC and ICU interrupt management.
Rewrite the interrupt setup code.
Major rewriting of the VFS directory scanning code. Add a new function vop_write_dirent() to create the dirent for return to userland. The new API is mandatory and filesystem code (not even UFS) may not make assumptions about the size of the userland-returned dirent.
Major cleanup of the device identification method.
Lots of driver updates.
ANSIfy a great deal more of the codebase.
Remove the now obsolete smp_rendezvous() mechanism.
Compile up both the TFTP and the NFS PXE bootp code rather then the (previous) make.conf option to select one or the other.
Convert the lockmgr interlock from a token to a spinlock, also incidently fixing an issue where non-blocking locks would still potentially issue a thread switch.
Fix bugs in the interrupt livelock code.
Rewrite the code handling stopped user processes.
Rewrite tsleep()/wakeup() to be per-cpu and MPSAFE. Reorganize the process states (p_stat), removing a number of states but resynthesizing them in eproc for 'ps'.
Integrate the new if_bridge code from Open/Net/FreeBSD.
Add an emergency interrupt polling feature that can be used to get an otherwise non-working system working.

Thu 7 April 2005

Fix numerous issues in the new namecache code. The new code is now considered to be solid (Matt).
Fix numerous issues in the NFS code related to cache timeouts not working properly, truncate operations not working properly in certain circumstances, and TCP disconnections due to races in accessing the streamed data. NFS was also not properly setting TCP_NODELAY which resulted in poor performance over TCP connections (Matt).
Split out kernel information access abstraction into libkcore and libkinfo (joerg).
Optimize the interrupt processing code a bit (Matt).
Significant progress in the journaling layer has been made, but it isn't ready for production use yet. The journaling layer is now capable of encoding a forward journaling stream (the undo data is not yet being encoded). Still TODO: undo data, two-way transaction acknowledgement protocol, and emergency swap backing to allow system operation to proceed in the event of a long-term journaling stream stall. (Matt)
Fix numerous issues related to SMP-distributed wildcard listen sockets for TCP. (Jeff, Matt)
Major cleanup of the route table code in preparation for SMP replication work (Jeff)
ALTQ Integration (Joerg)
Fix MTU discovery which appears to have been broken forever (Jeff).
Miscellanious driver updates. (Various)
Miscellanious ACPI updates.
Fix a security issue with sendfile() (Various)
Lots of work on the make program (Max)
Add TLS support calls to the kernel to create segments suitable for loading into %gs. (Matt, David Xu)
Add TLS support to the dynamic linker (David Xu, Joerg)
Add kernel support for mmap-based userland mutexes
Continuing work on a new threading library (David Xu)
Add jail support for varsyms (Joerg)
Incorporate the Minix MINED editor into the /bin build for use as an emergency editor while in single-user.
Fix an issue with PCMCIA card removal.
Replace the VM map lookup data structures with a red-black tree.
Fix a potentially serious issue with inodes being reused before their associated vnodes have been entirely recycled. This also prevents unnecessary stalls on recycle flushing against new file creation that would otherwise have to block waiting for the inode it chose to finish cycling.
Fix some minor issues with /dev/tty operations.
Fix an issue with the vnode recycler. Certain types of file extractions could cause it to stop oprating due to not being able to clean out the namecache topology. This most often occured when extracting archives with a large number of hard links.
Fix two issues that caused the system's time of day tracking to either stop operating or operate incorrectly.
Enhance the checkpointing code to save and restore the signal mask.
Major work on the XIO and MSFBUF infrastructures as we begin to use them in the kernel more. (Hiten, Matt)
Implement CLOCK_MONOTONIC for the clock_*() system calls.
Fix a bug in the TCP limited transmit code.
Fix a crash that sometimes occurs when using the firewire console.

Mon 20 December 2004

The old timeout() API has been completely ripped out and replaced with the newer callout_*() API.
USB support has been synchronized with FreeBSD and NetBSD
USB keyboard detachment and reattachment while X is active no longer messes up the translation mode.
Fix a keyboard lockup issue (the new callout code was not being properly called in an ATKBD hack to deal with lost interrupts).
TCP SACK support is now considered production stable (Jeff).
A TCP connection closing bug has been fixed, related to changes we've made to the TCPS state values.
Expand TCP's header prediction case to handle common window updates (Jeff), greatly improving cpu efficiency.
Implement tail-append to sockbufs for the TCP stack, greatly improving cpu efficiencies when dealing with large TCP buffers.
Lots of miscellanious network layer cleanups (Joerg).
Fix an IPv6 pcb replication issue that was creating problems with e.g. Apache-2.0.
kernel event logging ported from FreeBSD (eirikn).
DCONS (console over firewire) support added (simokawa/from FreeBSD)
Additional GigE drivers added.
Major VFS messaging and interfacing progress. The old namei() and lookup() API has been completely removed. All high level layers now use the new API and run through a compatibility layer to talk to VFSs which still for the most part implement the old VOP calls. Use locked namespaces to protect RENAME, REMOVE, MKDIR, and other calls rather then depending on locked vnodes for those protections.
More VFS work. Keep track of the current directory with a namecache pointer rather then a vnode pointer.
More VFS work. Rewrite the vnode interlock code during deactivation and disposal. Begin consolidating v_lock.
Adjust the boot code to operate more deterministically by always using EDD (linear block number) mode first, only falling back to CHS if EDD fails. Before it would try to use CHS for cylinders < 1024, resulting in non-deterministic operation on modern machines.
Separate out loader configuration files for BOOTP vs non-BOOTP boots.
IPSEC code moved to netproto/ipsec, update, and cleanups (Pawel Biernacki).
Minor fixes to PPP.
Performance cleanup of if_em. Fix alignment requirements to reduce instances where bounce buffers are allocated (from FreeBSD).
Kernels built with debug info are now installed with debug info, greatly improving normal enduser's ability to provide useable bug reports. The backup copy of the kernel is stripped when the copy is made.
A number of bug fixes to the VM system seem to have fixed the few remaining long-term panics in DragonFly. In particular, a very serious bug in contigmalloc() inherited from FreeBSD-4.x has been fixed We now consider DragonFly as stable as FreeBSD-4.x.
Many minor driver bug fixes here and there, including one to the serial driver which was responsible for machine lockups in certain cases.
Major expansion of the checkpoint code API. You can now re-checkpoint programs that have been checkpoint-restored.
The system call for checkpointing and checkpoint restore functions is now official. Certain VM area issues have been fixed. And it is now possible (and easy!) to write checkpoint-aware programs.
Abstract kernel structure access via libkinfo (joerg).
Fix a number of timer issues related to the 8254, sleep/wakeup, and recovery from clock jumps due to high latencies.
Do better ESTALE checking for NFS clients to reduce instances where ESTALE makes it all the way back to the application layer.
Improved polling support for UHCI USB (drhodus).
Fix /boot/loader's handling of extended DOS partitions. There was an off-by-one issue that prevented the boot loader from passing the proper slice number to the kernel in certain cases (walt).
Integration of PF as third firewall (joerg, corecode, Devon O'Dell, from FreeBSD/OpenBSD)

Sat 18 September 2004

DragonFly has adopted the 3-clause BSD license as its official license.
NFS - increase the size of the nfsheur hash table as per a Freenix track paper. nfsheur is used for sequential I/O heuristic in NFS. The increase greatly improves clustering under parallel NFS loads.
More VFS work: make vnode locks mandatory, get rid of nolock kludges in NFS, procfs, nullfs, and many other filesystems. Remove the vnode_if.m dynamic dispatch algorithms and replace with a fixed structure (in preparation for upcoming VFS work). Rewrite the VOP table parsing code. Redo vnode/inode hash table interactions to close race conditions (Matt).
Reorganize the boot code to consolidate all fixed ORG directives and other dependancies into a single header file, allowing us to re position the boot code and eventually (not yet) move it out of low BIOS memory. Change the way the BTX code clears BSS
```
to make it more deterministic and more gcc3 compatible.
```
A major cleanup of ipfilter has been done (Hiten).
Fix a very old but serious bug in the VM system that could result in corrupt user memory when MADV_FREE is used (from Alan Cox).
Rewrite most of the MBUF allocator and support code. Get rid of mb_map and back the mbuf allocator with malloc. Get rid of the old-style m_ext support and replace with new style m_ext support (which is somewhat different then FreeBSD's new code). Cleanup sendfile() to use the new m_ext callback scheme.
Lots minor/major bug fixes, cleanups, new driver support, etc.
More GCC3 work. The system mostly compiles and runs GCC3 builds but the boot/loader code still has some issues (Various people).
Work on the userland schedule. Introduce an 'interactivity' measure in an attempt to do a better job assigning time slices. Fix some scheduler interaction bugs which were sometimes resulting in processes being given a full 1/10 second time slice when they shouldn't be.
A major import of the FreeBSD-5 802_11 infrastructure has been accomplished (Joerg).
NDis has been ported from FreeBSD, giving DragonFly access to many more 802.11 devices via windoz device drivers (Matt).
Add thermal control circuit support (Asmodai).
Generally add throttling support to the system.
Add TCP SACK support (Jeffrey Hsu). This is still considered experimental.
Make the syncache per-cpu and dispatch syncache timer events via LWKT messages directly to the appropriate protocol thread (Jeffrey Hsu). This removes all race conditions from the syncache code and makes it 95% MP safe.
Greatly reduce the number of ACKs generated on a TCP connection going full-out over a GigE (or other fast) interface by delaying the sending of the ACK until all protocol stack packets have been processed. Since GiGE interfaces tend to aggregate 8-12(+) received packets per interrupt, this can cut the ACK rate by 75% (one ack per 8-12 packets instead of one ack per 2 packets), and it does it without violating the TCP spec. The code takes advantage of the protocol thread abstraction used to process TCP packets. (Matt)
Greatly reduce the number of pure window updates that occur over a high speed (typ GigE) TCP connection by recognizing that a pure window update is not always necessary when userland has drained the TCP socket buffer. (Jeffrey Hsu)
Rewrite the callout_*() core infrastructure and rip out the old [un]timeout() API (saving ~800K+ of KVM in the process). The new callout infrastructure uses a DragonFly-friendly per-cpu implementation and is able to guarantee that callouts will occur on the same cpu they were registered on, a feature that the TCP protocol stack threads are going to soon take major advantage of.
Cleanup the link layer broadcast address, consolidating many separate implementations into one ifnet-based implementation (Joerg).
BUF/BIO progress - start working the XIO vm_page mapping code into the system buffer cache (Hiten). Remove b_caller2 and b_driver2 field members from the BUF structure (Hiten) (generally we are trying to remove the non-recursive-friendly driver specific fields from struct buf and friends).
The release went well! There were a few gotchas, such as trying to run dual console output to the serial port causing problems on laptops which did not have serial ports. A bug in the installer was serious enough to have to go to an '1.0A' release a day or two after the 1.0 release. But, generally speaking, the release did its job!
More USB fixes. Clean up some timer races in USB/CAM interactions related to pulling out USB mass storage cards. Fix a serious bug that could lead to lost transactions and create confusion between the USB code and the device.
Async syscall work: clean up the sendsys2() syscall API into something that's a bit more reasonable (Eirik Nygaard)
Add a generic framework for IOCTL mapping (Simon).
Add VESA mode support, giving us access to bitmapped VESA video modes (Sascha Wildner).
Fix USB keyboard support by giving the USB keyboard preference even if a normal keyboard is detected earlier in the boot process. This is necessary due to hardware/firmware level PS/2 keyboard emulation that many USB chipsets and BIOSes offer.
Installer Updated: Lots of bug fixes have been made.
Stability: Spend two weeks stabilizing recent work in preparation for another big push.

Sun 11 July 2004

Master ISO for the 1.0-RELEASE is now on the FTP site, we release on Monday 12-July-2004.
Major revamping of the boot code. Support dual-console mode (video and serial). Properly detect missing serial ports (common for laptops). Initialize the serial port to 96008N1.
Bring ACPICA5 uptodate and integrate it into the build as a KLD, just like FreeBSD-5. Fix additional issues as well. Nearly all of this work was done by YONETANI Tomokazu. Use the latest INTEL code (20040527). This greatly improves our laptop support.
Make the kernel check both CDRom drives for a root filesystem when booted with -C, which allows the boot CD to work in either drive on systems with two drives.
Integrate the DragonFly Installer into the release build. The DragonFly Installer is a from-scratch design by Chris Pressey, Devon O'Dell, Eirik Nygaard, Hiten Pandya & GeekGod (aka Scott Ullrich). The design incorporates a worker backend and multiply targetable frontends. Currently the console frontend is enabled, but there is also a CGI/WWW frontend which is on the CD but still considered highly experimental.
Fix a bug in the polling backoff code for the VR device
Implement interrupt livelock detection. When an interrupt livelock is detected the interrupt thread automatically throttles itself to a (sysctl settable) rate. When the interrupt rate drops to half the throttle limit the throttling is removed. This greatly improves debugability, especially on laptops with misrouted interrupts. While it doesn't necessarily fix the broken devices it does tend to allow the system to continue to operate with those devices that do still work.
Properly probe for the existance of the serial port in the kernel, which allows us to run a getty on ttyd0 by default for the release CD. Prior to this fix attempting to use ttyd0 would result in a system deadlock.
Bring in some pccard driver improvements from FreeBSD, including increasing the CIS area buffer from 1K to 4K and properly range-checking the CIS parser (which avoids panics and crashes).
Update our DragonFly Copyright and update date specifications on a number of copyrights.
Add support for randomized ephermal source ports.
Do some network driver cleanups.. basically move some common code out of the driver and into ether_ifattach() (work by Joerg).
Try to be more compatible with laptop touchpads whose aux ports return normally illegal values (Eirik Nygaard).
Add common functions for computing the ethernet CRC, work by Joerg, taken from NetBSD.
Add support for additional AGP bridges - taken from FreeBSD-5.
Add support for the 're' network device.
Bring OHCI and EHCI up-to-date with NetBSD.
Miscellaneous driver fixes to ips, usb (ugen), sound support.
Miscellaneous Linux emulation work, by David Rhodus, taken from FreeBSD-SA-04:13.linux.

Sun 27 June 2004

We are going to release 1.0RC1 tonight.
Implement interrupt livelock detection and rate limiting. It's still a bit raw, but it does the job (easily testable by plugging and unplugging cardbus cards at a high rate). The intent is to try to make the system more survivable from interrupt routing and other boot-time configuration issues, and badly written drivers.
Implement an emergency polling mode for the VR device if its interrupt does not appear to be working.
Implement dual console (screen and serial port) support by default for boot2 and the loader.

Mon 21 June 2004

Joerg has brought GCC-3.4-20040618 in and it is now hooked up to the build. GCC-3.3 will soon be removed. To use GCC-3.4 'setenv CCVER gcc34'.
The world and kernel now builds with gcc-3.4. The kernel builds and runs with gcc-3.4 -O3, but this is not an officially supported configuration.
More M_NOWAIT -> M_INTWAIT work. Most of the drivers inherited from FreeBSD make aweful assumptions about M_NOWAIT mallocs which cause them to break under DragonFly.
/usr/bin/ps now reports system thread startup times as the boot time instead of as Jan-1-1970. The p_start field in pstats has been moved to the thread structure so threads can have a start time in the future - Hiten.
Zero the itimers on fork() - Hiten / SUSv3 compliance.
MMX/XMM kernel optimizations are now on by default, greatly improving bcopy/bzero/copyin/copyout performance for large (>4K) buffers.
A number of revoke() related panics have been fixed, in particular related to 'script' and other pty-using programs.
The initial MSFBUF scheme (multi-page cached linear buffers) has been committed and is now used for NFS requests. This is part of the continuing work to eventually make I/O devices responsible for any KVM mappings (because most just set up DMA and don't actually have to make any) - Hiten.
Continuing ANSIfication work by several people - Chris Pressey.
Continuing work on the LWKT messaging system. A number of bugs in the lwkt_abortmsg() path have been fixed.
The load average is now calculated properly. Thread sleeps were not being accounted for properly.
Bring in a number of changes from FreeBSD-5: try the elf image activator first.
Fix a number of serious ref-counting and ref holding bugs in procfs as part of our use of XIO in procfs - GeekGod and Matt
Use network predicates for accept() and connect() (using the new message abort functionality to handle PCATCH) - Jeff.
Convert netproto/ns to use the pr_usrreqs structure.
Implement markers for traversing PCB lists to fix concurrency problems with sysctl.
Implement a lwkt_setcpu() API function which moves a thread to a particular cpu. This will be used by sysctl to iterate across cpus when collecting per-cpu structural information.
Redo netstat to properly iterate the pcb's across all cpus.
Significant mbuf cleanup - dtom() has now been removed, and a normal malloc() is used for PCB allocations and in other places where mbufs were being abused for structural allocations.
dup_sockaddr() now unconditionally uses M_INTWAIT instead of conditionally using M_NOWAIT, making it more reliable.
Fix a number of USB device ref counting issues and fix issues related to UMASS detaching from CAM while CAM is still active, and vice-versa.
Optimize kern_getcwd() some to avoid a string shifting bcopy().
Continued work on asynch syscalls - track pending system calls and make exit1() wait for them (abort support will be forthcoming).
Add a negative lookup cache for NFS. This makes a huge difference for things like buildworlds where /usr/src is NFS mounted, reducing (post cached) network bandwidth to 1/10 what it was before.
Add the '-l' option to the 'resident' command, listing all residented programs and their full paths (if available). -Hiten.
Implement the 'rconfig' utility (see the manual page) - for automatic search/config-script downloading and execution, which makes installing a new DFly box from CDBoot a whole lot easier when you are in a multi-machine environment.
Revamp the BIO b_dev assignment and revamp the 'disk' layer. Instead of overloading the raw disk device the disk layer now creates a new device on top of the raw disk device and takes over the (user accessible) CDEV (major,minor). The disk layer does its work and reassigned b_dev to the raw device. biodone() now unconditionally setes b_dev to NODEV and all I/O ops are required to initialize b_dev prior to initiating the op. This is precursor work to our DEV layering and messaging goal.
Fix the rootfs search to specify the correct unit number rather then using unit 0, because CDEVSW lookups now require a valid minor number (CDEVSW's are now registered with a minor number range and the same major number can be overloaded as long as the minor ranges do not conflict). Fix by Hiroki Sato.
Fix a wiring related page table memory leak in the VM system.
Fix a number of ^T related panics.
Properly ref-count all devices.

Sun 2 May 2004

NEWTOKENs replace old tokens. The new token abstraction provides a serialization mechanism that persists across blocking conditions. This is not a lock, but more like an MP-capable SPL, in that if you block you will lose serialization but then regain it when you wakeup again. This means that newtokens can be used for serialization without having to make lower level subsystems aware of tokens held by higher level subsystems in the call stack. This represents a huge simplification over the FreeBSD-5 mutex model.
Support added for the Silicon Image SATA controller.
DragonFly now supports 16 partitions per slice (up from 8).
Wildcarded sockets have been split from the TCP/UDP connection hash table, and the listen table is now replicated across cpus for lockless access.
UDP sendto() without a connect no longer needs to make a temporary connect inside the kernel, greatly improving UDP performance in this case.
NFS performance has been greatly improved.
Fix some major bugs in the USB/SIM code, greatly improving the reliability of USB disk keys and related devices.
NEWCARD has been brought in from FreeBSD-5.
A bunch of userland scheduler performance issues have been fixed.
Major syscall procedural separation has been completed, separating the user interfacing portion of a syscall from the in-kernel core support, allowing the core support functions to be directly called from emulation code instead of using the stackgap junk.
An optimized MMX and XMM kernel bcopy has been implemented and tested. Most of i386/i386/support.s has been rewritten and a number of FP races in that and npxdna() have been closed.
Brought in the SFBUF facility from FreeBSD-5, including all of Alan Cox's (the FBsd Alan Cox) improvements, plus additional improvements for cpu-localized invlpg calls (and the ability to avoid such calls when they aren't needed).
A major PIPE code revamp has occured, augmenting the SFBUF direct-copy feature with a linear map. Peak standard pipe throughput with 32KB buffers on an AMD64 3200+ now exceeds 4GBytes/sec.
Implement XIO, which is a multi-page buffer wrapper for SFBUFs and will eventually replace linear buffer management in the buffer cache as well as provide linear buffer mappings for other parts of the system.
Added a localized cpu pmap_qenter() called pmap_qenter2() which is capable of maintaining a cpumask, to avoid unnecessary invlpg's on target-side linear maps. It is currently used by the PIPE code and the CAPS code.
Joerg has brought in most of the KOBJ extensions from FreeBSD-5.
Major continuing work by Jeff on the threading and partitioning of the network stack. Nearly the whole stack is now theoretically MP safe, with only a few niggling issues before we can actually start turning off the MP lock.
The last major element of the LWKT messaging system, lwkt_abortmsg() support, is now in place. Also it is now possible to wait on a port with PCATCH.
Hiten has revamped the TCP protocol statistics, making them per-cpu along the same lines that we have made vmstats per-cpu.
propolice has been turned on by default in GCC3.
CAPS (DragonFly userland IPC messaging) has been revamped to use SFBUFs.
acpica5 now compiles, still needs testing.
SYSTIMERS added, replacing the original hardclock(), statclock(), and other clocks, and is now used as a basis for timing in the system. SYSTIMERS provide a fine-grained, MP-capable, cpu-localizable and distributable timer interrupt abstraction.
Fix RTC write-back issues that were preventing 'ntpdate' changes from being written to the RTC in certain cases.
Finish most of the namecache topology work. We no longer need the v_dd and v_ddid junk. The namecache topology is almost ready for the next major step, which will be namespace locking via namecache rather then via vnode locks.
Add ENOENT caching for NFS, greatly reducing the network overhead (by a factor of 5x!!!) required to support things like buildworld's using an NFS-mounted /usr/src.
Jeff has added predicate messaging requests to the network subsystem, which allows us to convert situations which normally block, like connect(), to use LWKT messages.
Lots of style cleanups, primarily by Chris Pressey.

Sun 15 February 2004

Newcard is being integrated.
A longstanding bug in PCI bus assignments which affects larger servers has been fixed.
The IP checksum code has been rewritten and most of it has been moved to machine-independent sections.
A general machine-independent CPU synchronization and rendezvous API has been implemented. Older hardwired IPIs are slowly being moved to the new API.
A new 'SysTimer' API has been built which is both MP capable and fine-grained. 8254 Timer 0 is now being used for fine-grained timing, while Timer 2 is being used for timebase. Various hardwired clock distribution code is being slowly moved to the new API. hardclock and statclock have already been moved.
A long standing bug in the NTP synchronization code has been fixed. NTPD should now lock much more quickly.
Clock interrupt distribution has been rewritten. Along with this, IPI messaging now has the ability to pass an interrupt frame pointer to the target function. Most of the old hardwired clock distribution code has been ripped out.
nanosleep() is now a fine-grained sleep. After all, what's the point of having a nanosleep() system call which is only capable of tick granularity?
Critical fixes from FreeBSD RELENG_4 integrated by Hiten Pandya.
Firewire subsystem updated by a patchset from Hidetoshi Shimokawa.
USB subsystem has been synced with FreeBSD 5 and NetBSD.
GCC 3.3.3 and Binutils 2.14 have been integrated into base.
An aggregated Client/Server Directory Services syscall API has been completed.
An amiga-style 'resident' utility program + kernel support has been implemented, and prelinking support has been removed (because the resident utility is much better). You can make any dynamically loaded ELF binary resident with this utility. The system will load the program and do all shared library mappings and relocations, then will snapshot the vmspace. All future executions of the program simply make a copy of the saved vmspace and skip almost right to main(). Kernel overhead is fairly low, also. It still isn't as fast as a static binary but it is considerably faster then non-resident dynamic binaries.

Mon 1 December 2003

A great deal of new infrastructure is starting to come to fruition.

We have a new CD release framework (/usr/src/nrelease) in. Development on the new framework is proceeding. Basically the framework is based on a fully functioning live CD system and will allow us to build a new installation infrastructure that is capable of leveraging all the features available in a fully functioning system rather then being forced to use a lobotomized set.
A new IPC framework to reliably handle things like password file lookups is proceeding. This framework is intended to remove the need for DLL or statically-linked PAM/NSS and at the same time make maintainance and upgrades easier and more portable.
The FreeBSD-5 boot infrastructure has been ported and is now the default.
RCNG from FreeBSD-5 has been ported and is now the default.
Work is proceeding on bringing in ATAng from FreeBSD-4, with additional modifications required to guarantee I/O in low memory situations. That is, it isn't going to be a straight port. The original ATA code from FreeBSD-4.8, which we call ATAold, has been given interim fixes to deal with the low memory and PIO backoff issues so we don't have to rush ATAng.

Sat 18 October 2003

Wow, October already! Good progress is being made on several fronts.

K&R function removal.
VM function cleanups by Hiten Pandya.
General kernel API cleanups by David Rhodus.
Syscall Separation work by David Reese.
Removal of stackgap code in the Linux Emulation by David Reese.
Networking work by Jeffrey Hsu.
Interrupt, Slab Allocator stabilization.
Introduction of KERNELSTRUCTURES ... a better way for userland programs to access kernel header files rather then them setting _KERNEL.
Bring the system uptodate on security issues (David Rhodus, others)
NFS peformance improvements by David Rhodus and Hiten Pandya.
GUPROF and kldload work in the kernel by Hiten Pandya.
Major progress on the checkpointing code in the kernel primarily by Kip Macy.
All work through this moment has been stabilized with major input from David Rhodus.

Matt's current focus continues to be on rewriting the namecache code. Several intermediate commits have already been made but the big changes are still ahead.

Galen has started experimenting with userland threads, by porting the LWKT subsystem (which is mostly self contained) to userland.

Wed 27 August 2003 - Slab Allocator, __P removal

DragonFly now has slab allocator for the kernel! The allocator is about 1/3 the size of FreeBSD-5's slab allocator and features per-cpu isolation, mutexless operation, cache sensitivity (locality of reference), and optimized zeroing code.
The core of the slab allocator is MP safe but at the moment we still use the malloc_type structure for statistics reporting which is not yet MP safe, and the backing store (KVM routines) are not MP safe. Even, so making the whole thing MP safe is not expected to be difficult.
Robert Garrett has made great process removing __P(), Jeffrey has been working on the nework stack, David has been backporting bug fixes from FreeBSD and doing other cleanups, and Hiten and Jeroen have been investigating documentation and source code reorganization.

Sun 10 August 2003 - Source Reorganization

A major source tree reorganization has been accomplished, including separation of device drivers by functionality, moving filesystems into a vfs/ subdirectory, and the removal of the modules/ subdirectory with an intent to integrate the module makefiles into the normal sys/ tree structure.
Work on syscall messaging is ongoing and we will soon hopefully have a fully working demonstration of asynch messaging.

09 July 2003 to 22 July 2003 - Misc work, DEV messaging

A large number of commits related to the messaging infrastructure have been made, and DEV has been message encapsulated (though it still runs synchronously).
Announced the official start of work on the userland threading API: misc/uthread.txt

27 June 2003 to 09 July 2003 - MP operation

This section contains work completed so far. Some items have not yet been integrated into the next section up.

(done) Get it so user processes can run simultaniously on multiple cpus. User processes are MP, the kernel is still mostly UP via the MP lock.
(done) Run normal interrupts and software interrupts in their own threads.
(done) Implement interrupt preemption with a block-return-to-original-thread feature (which is more like BSDI and less like 5.x).
(done) Finish separating the userland scheduler from LWKT. The userland scheduler now schedules one LWKT thread per cpu. Additionally, the realtime, normal, and idle priority queues work as expected and do not create priority inversions in the kernel. Implement a strict priority+rr model for LWKTs and assign priorities to interrupts, software interrupts, and user processes running in kernel mode. Deal with ps, systat, and top. Fix bugs in the sysctl used to retrieve processes. Add threads to the information returned by said sysctl.
Replace the UIO structure with a linked list of VM objects, offsets, and ranges, which will serve for both system and user I/O requests.
Move kernel memory management into its own thread(s), then pull in the SLAB allocator from DUX3, implement a per-cpu cache, and get rid of zalloc*().
Implement virtual cpus, primarily for testing purposes.
(done) Separate scheduling of user processes from the LWKT scheduler. i.e. only schedule one user process in the LWKT scheduler at a time per cpu.
Change over to a flat 64 bit I/O path.
(done) Get real SMP working again... implement the token transfer matrix between cpus, keep the BGL for the moment but physically move the count into the thread structure so it doesn't add (much) to our switching overhead.
Fix BUF/BIO and turn I/O initiation into a message-passing subsystem. Move all DEVices to their own threads and implement as message-passing. VFS needs a major overhaul before VFS devices can be moved into their own threads to the reentrant nature of VFS.

17 June 2003 to 26 June 2003

Add light weight kernel threads to the tree.

This work has been completed. It involved creating a clearly defined thread/process abstraction.

(done) embed a thread structure in the proc structure.
(done) replace the curproc global with curthread, create macros to mimic the old curproc in C code.
(done) Add idlethread. curthread is never NULL now.
(done) replace the npxproc global with npxthread.
(done) Separate the thread structure from the proc structure.
(done) remove the curpcb global. Access it via curthread. ('curthread' will be the only global that needs to be changed when switching threads. Move the PCB to the end of the thread stack.
(done) npxproc becomes npxthread.
(done) cleanup globaldata access.
(done) Separate the heavy weight scheduler from the thread scheduler and make the low level switching function operate directly on threads and only threads. Heavy weight process switching (involving things like user_ret, timestamps, and so forth) will occur as an abstraction on top of the LWKT scheduler. swtch.s is almost there already. The LWKT switcher only messes with basic registers and ignores the things that are only required by full blown processes ( debug regs, FP, common_tss, and CR3 ). The heavy weight scheduler that deals with full blown process contexts handles all save/restore elements. LWKT switch times are extremely fast.
(done) change all system cals from (proc,uap) to (uap).
(done) change the device interface to take threads instead of procs (d_thread_t is now a thread pointer). Change the select interface to take thread arguments instead of procs (interface itself still needs to be fixed). Consolidate p_cred into p_ucred. Consolidate p_prison into p_ucred. Change suser*() to take ucreds instead of processes.
(done) Move kernel stack management to the thread structure. Note: the kernel stack may not be swapped. Move the pcb to the top of the kernel stack and point to it from the thread via td_pcb (similar to FreeBSD-5).
(done) Get rid of the idiotic microuptime and related crap from the critical path in the switching code. Implement statistical time statistics from the stat clock interrupt that works for both threads and processes without ruining switching performance (very necessary since there is going to be far more kernel->kernel done with this design, but it also gets rid of a serious eyesore that has been in the FreeBSD tree for a long time).
(done) Translate most proc pointers into thread pointers in the VFS and DEV subsystems (which took all day to do).
(done) Cleanup VFS and BUF. Remove creds from calls that should not pass them, such as close, getattr, vtruncbuf, fsync, and createvobject. Remove creds from struct buf. All of the above operations can be run in any context, passing the originator's cred makes no sense.
(95% done and tested) Remove all use of curproc and curthread from the VFS and DEV subsystems in preparation for moving them to serializable threads. Add thread arguments as necessary.
(95% done and tested) Finish up using thread references for all subsystems that have no business talking to a process. e.g. VM, BIO. Deal with UIO_COPY.
(done)Make tsleep/wakeup work with pure threads.
(done, needs more testing. buildworld succeeds on test box) Move kernel threads (which are implemented as heavy-weight processes to LWKT threads).

16 June 2003 -

Completed repository fork, $Tag change, and various cleanup.
Creating a new repository required a bit of work. First the RELENG_4 tree had to be checked out. Then a new cvs repository was created with a new cvs tag. Then a combination of scripts and manual work (taking all day) was used to move the $FreeBSD tags into comments and add a new tag to all the source files to represent the new repository. I decided to cleanup a large number of FBSDID and rcsid[] declarations at the same time, basically moving all tag descriptions into comments with the intent that a linking support program would be written later to collect tags for placement in binaries. Third party tags in static declarations which contained copyright information were retained as static declarations.
Some minor adjustments to the syscall generator was required, and I also decided to physically remove UUCP from the tree.
Finally, buildworld and buildkernel were made to work again and the result was checked in as rev 1.2 (rev 1.1 being the original RELENG_4 code).