> DragonFly-1.0 RELEASED!
>
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/
> 12 July 2004
>
> One year after starting the project as a fork off the FreeBSD-4.x tree,
> the DragonFly team is pleased to announce our 1.0 release!
>
> We've made excellent progress in our first year. We have replaced nearly
> all of the core threading, process, interrupt, and network infrastructure
> with DragonFly native subsystems. We have our own MP-friendly slab allocator,
> a Light Weight Kernel Threading (LWKT) system that is separate from the
> dynamic userland scheduler, a fine-grained system timer abstraction for
> kernel use, a fully integrated light weight messaging system, and a core
> IPI (Inter Processor Interrupts) messaging system for inter-processor
> communications.
>
> We have managed to retain 4.x's vaunted stability throughout the development
> process, despite ripping out and replacing major subsystems, and we have
> a demonstratively superior coding model which is both UP (Uni-Processor) and
> MP (Multi-Processor) friendly and which is nearly as efficient on UP systems
> as the original 4.x UP-centric code is on UP systems.
>
> We have made excellent progress bringing in those pieces from FreeBSD, NetBSD,
> and OpenBSD that fit our model. For example, NEWBUS/BUS_DMA, the USB
> infrastructure, RCNG (next generation system startup infrastructure), and
> so forth, and we have made an excellent start reformulating the build
> and release infrastructure including an excellent new system installer
> which, while still in its infancy for the 1.0 release, has been coded in
> a manner that will allow us to greatly improve and expand its capabilities
> in coming months.
>
> We have done so much that it cannot all be listed here. Please checkout the
> diary on our main site for the technical minutia.
>
> The two largest user-visible subsystems that still have major work pending
> are the userland threading and ports/packages subsystems. People will find
> that the DragonFly-1.0 release is still using the old 4.x pthreads model,
> and at the moment we are relying on the FreeBSD ports tree with DragonFly
> specific overrides for third party application support... about as severe a
> hack as it is possible to have. These two stop-gap items will be at the
> forefront of the work for the next year, along with a major move to start
> removing the BGL (Big Giant Lock, also known as the MP lock) from code
> inherited from 4.x, threading the VFS (Virtual File System) subsystem (the
> network subsystem is already threaded as of 1.0), and implementing
> asynchronous messaged system calls. And that is just the tip of the iceberg,
> we will be doing far more in the coming year!
>
>
> -The DragonFly Team-
>
