Interview with Matthew Dillon of DragonFly BSD 233
JigSaw writes "Well-known FreeBSD/DragonFly/Linux/Amiga system hacker Matthew Dillon discusses a number of interesting points regarding where the BSDs are going, the status and goals of his latest project DragonFly BSD, the status of his innovative Backplane distributed database, his exciting plans to develop DragonFly into a transparently cluster-capable system implementing native SSI (Single System Image) which is something that no other operating system can do today, and more."
Re:I guess that'll show em. (Score:4, Insightful)
That said, some tools (esp those using kmem) should be kept in sync with the kernel, and when at it, why not just build a new userland, its easier then figuring out what you have to update.
The concurrently developing BSD variatiens allow trying out a variety of low level solutions to problems while sharing a lot of their experiences.
Such diversity doesn't really exist in Linux despite its zillion distributions (which provide a lot of variation in user experience tho)
Re:Divide and conquer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: SSI? (Score:1, Insightful)
The ultimate goal of which Matt speaks will go far beyond even that, and it'll take time. For Linux to do the same thing, they'd basically have to reinvent their kernel as Matt has done with FreeBSD's, and that's not about to happen.
Learn to think.
Re:Different threading model (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you do anything special in the mutex code to take advantage of the four async top level threads and prevent mutex waits?
Re:Different threading model (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I guess that'll show em. (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is unfortunate in many ways. For example, Matt has introduced variant symlinks into DragonFly, and has major plans involving vfs namespaces etc which will really solve a lot of problems in package management, like allowing two different conflicting versions of a package to exist at the same time. He can do all this because he's looking at the whole picture, and so are the others: the entire source tree for the base system is there on my machine, in one nicely-arranged subdirectory. I don't foresee major changes happening in the linux kernel driven by distributors. To this day, breakages with binary-incompatible glibc etc are constant annoyances with linux unless you choose a stable distributed version from a branded linux distro and stick to it. the linux kernel is what "linux is supposed to look like" to linus.
What is "the linux kernel"? There's a Red Hat kernel, a Mandrake kernel, a SuSE kernel, and you can't really drop a generic Linus kernel into any of the commercial distros and expect it to work properly. (Debian and Gentoo are better.)
I'm not dissing linux, it's better than the mainstream alternatives and has far better hardware support and graphical system administration tools than the BSDs. In fact after 2 years with FreeBSD I myself had switched to Linux on my new machine because of hardware issues (I've now mostly switched to DragonFly and the hardware issues are mostly gone). And I use Linux at work and have no desire to change that. But there are reasons why a lot of technically aware people find the BSDs nicer systems to play with.
Re:I guess that'll show em. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I guess that'll show em. (Score:5, Insightful)
Merely my brief experience with Gentoo, when they first upgraded glibc (from 2.2 to 2.3 iirc) and broke half the packages, then downgraded it again and broke everything else. This is really a pet peeve: aren't minor versions supposed to be compatible? And a zillion similar but smaller-scale annoyances, well expressed by Bill Paul many years ago [freebsd.org] and the years haven't eased the pain all that much.
And BSDs are more likely to introduce binary incompatibilities
Clearly you haven't used the BSDs. You may have library incompatibilities between major versions, but just install the earlier "compat libraries" and you're set. I upgraded from FreeBSD 4 to FreeBSD 5 -- a huge upgrade, over 2 years in the making -- and all my software just worked, even complex stuff like KDE and Mozilla that had been compiled under 4.x.
Re: SSI? (Score:4, Insightful)
You need to take a break IMHO. It seem it is you who has some sort of imbecile rage against BSD, as if it killed one of your relatives or something. Saying things like 'this will be better than what linux has or will probably have' shouldn't throw you in such a fit. Look. Matt might be up to something. He might succeed. He might not. Either way,(even linux) developers might/will learn something from this 'experiment'. Can't hurt, right?
Now go, fetch that valium before you have stroke.
ps: (modded as insightful? - come on ...)
Re:Divide and conquer (Score:4, Insightful)
hold on cowboy...
linux drove usb support? check your history...
linux has better support for smp? right... 'cos the linux smp support isn't a rip of free-bsd's first smp incarnation, and free's 'new' smp code is some hack up by a big school kid is it?
linux has better support for enterprise hardware? shall we start with... i dunno... scsi support... get your history book out and do some experimenting with old linux v's old *bsd installs - try backing up a raid and restoring, then come back and tell me how good scsi isn't fundamental enterprise computing...
next you'll tell me that open's code auditing and goal of bug-free secure code is inferior to linux's free for all crap-code fest
excuse my rant, i'd don't mean to bag linux - every OS has its place - even windows.
but man... linux zealots and their damn superiority complex, re-writing history... i even heard someone try to explain the sco crap the other day... he actually said that 'unix is a brand of linux'
Re:SSI? (Score:5, Insightful)
The commercial world is full of SSI systems although its never been clear if transparent SSI is the right answer to any problem except "I need it to work now", because coding good apps for SSI setups is hard.
Dragonfly looks a good project, and looks like it has old BSD folks who actually knew what they were doing working on it.
Re:Divide and conquer (Score:1, Insightful)
I was Solaris SysAdmin for four years. And SysV-style inits only ever got in the way. Having learnt all about SysV run levels, the fact that I can hardly remember a thing about them surely tells us that this is not really a significant BSD/SysV differance.
The new style rc scripts BSD are not perfect. But in my opinion are just a tiny bit less irritating than SysV. BSD scores because it's a developing system... so the irritations will grow smaller.
And methods, and quirks to learn. And they sooner or later reinvent the same things. Not necessarily an advantage.
Indeed, but not necessarilly a disadvantage either. By your argument there should be one Linux distro. Competition breeds innovation. End of argument.
I mean, there's a reason why all the BSDs make an effort to run Linux binaries, not the other way around.
In my book that makes Linux look bad. If Linux truly is the ultimate operating system, it would be nice if it was atleast partially compatible with BSD.
The BSDs freely admit they lift stuff from Linux because that stuff is a good idea. From your comments looks like it would be hard to persuade you to lift anything from BSD... no matter how much of a good idea it happened to be.
The way I see it, BSD users who want nothing but a decent OS and a quiet life. Linux users want a religion, and to fight holy-wars. Seeing as I don't argue religion publically, please excuse me for posting anonymously.
Re:Divide and conquer (Score:1, Insightful)
linux drove usb support? check your history...
USB support in both of these evolved around the same time (kernel 2.2 / FreeBSD 3.0). There are more drivers available for Linux though.
linux has better support for smp? right... 'cos the linux smp support isn't a rip of free-bsd's first smp incarnation
Woah, way to rewrite your history. Linux was first to even have SMP support in 1996. FreeBSD followed in 1998. Linux developers steadily worked on improving SMP, causing Matt [google.com] to note that Linux was about a year ahead in 2001. Around the time that FreeBSD decided to import SMPng from BSD/OS in an effort to keep up.
and free's 'new' smp code is some hack up by a big school kid is it?
I didn't claim BSD was in any way bad. Heck, I've been a long time fan myself. I simply noted that Linux drove development.
linux has better support for enterprise hardware? shall we start with... i dunno... scsi support... get your history book out and do some experimenting with old linux v's old *bsd installs - try backing up a raid and restoring, then come back and tell me how good scsi isn't fundamental enterprise computing...
Can you be any more specific? This seems a vague generalisation. Certain cards and drivers have had more problems than others. You make it sound as if Linux SCSI support was unusable. What about today? Would you call SCSI support under Linux unstable? And where is BSD when it comes to support for such things like NUMA, or the 256 processor boxes SGI is starting to sell?
next you'll tell me that open's code auditing and goal of bug-free secure code is inferior to linux's free for all crap-code fest
That has nothing to do with what I said. But now that you mention it, yes, in some ways it is. OpenBSD development does not proceed as briskly as that of FreeBSD, let alone Linux. By choice. And that's fine.
excuse my rant, i'd don't mean to bag linux - every OS has its place - even windows.
but man... linux zealots and their damn superiority complex, re-writing history... i even heard someone try to explain the sco crap the other day... he actually said that 'unix is a brand of linux'
You can't blame me for the misguided views of other Linux users. There happen to be a lot of them. Similarly, I might say that it is amusing that many BSD fans seem to have the need to call Linux crap, cruft and bloated and would never acknowledge the many good things that it has going for it.
Re:Divide and conquer (Score:1, Insightful)
FUD? Yeah like the stability and security and scalability and performance under load crap. And this isn't a few "years old" remarks, open your eyes, the BSD mailing lists are full of this crap.
(Sorry, post is directed mainly to the grandparent)