Re: Goals for first release (June/USENIX)

[James Frazer <jfrazer@xxxxxxxx>]

I'm wondering if this first release is going to include much in the way 
of pre-compiled packages?  Because my old box just doesn't have the 
steam to compile everything from ports.


--James



Matthew Dillon wrote:
>     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>