Goals for first release (June/USENIX)

[Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    I think this would be a good time to start a discussion on what our
    goals should be for our first release.  I will begin by talking about
    my personal development goals.

    After a great deal of thought I have decided that the AMD64 port can wait
    until after the first release.  Instead, I would like to finish up and
    make operational (hopefully) three major infrastructure interfaces.  I
    have my work cut out for me, to say the least.  Here are my personal
    goals:

    * Directory services.  Most of the infrastructure is now in place, the
      next step for me is to start integrating support into libc.

    * Syscall interface layer and messaging (true async syscalls), and
      related upcall and other interfaces, such as placing the syscall
      compatibility layer into userland.

      I'm not happy with the current infrastructure.  I am going to rework it
      and use a shared memory segment between userland and the kernel that
      the messages would be transfered through, allowing us to avoid 
      copyin/copyout.  The same rendezvous memory API could be used to
      augment the directory services IPC syscalls (CAPS calls) to greatly
      improve their performance as well.

      I don't know if I will have time to actually move the compatibility
      layer (sysv, ibcs, linux compat) to userland before the first release,
      but I'll try.

    * Userland VFS and DEV interfaces.  Not yet started.  I'll consider this
      goal as 'done' when I have sucessfully created a userland 'vn' like
      device and migrated, say, ext2fs, to userland.  As part of this I
      am going to try to 'fix' the buffer cache code to reduce the number
      of kvm mappings it has to do.

    Those are my personal goals.  Others can post their own personal goal
    set for the first release.  There are lots of categories that are being
    worked on by various developers and, of course, lots of things that need
    to be done.  My focus is to do the 'hard part' of the basic infrastructure
    in order to enable others to then augment, expand, and otherwise 
    implement things on top of that infrastructure.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>