Jordan Hubbard Interviewed On OPN's #FreeBSD

flynn_nrg writes: "As a lot of you already know, an interview with Jordan was held Sunday January 27 at 10:30 PM EST. The log of the interview has been posted in bsdvault.net. The complete text of our question and answer session with Jordan Hubbard can be found here. Jordan was mainly asked about his work at Apple and SMPng, the new SMP code that will debut on 5.0. Enjoy ..."

preemptive multitasking

[Moderator]

[23:32] I think the coolest feature of 5.0 will be the ferret thread. This is a kernel thread which runs around throughout the system and randomly moves things around, playfully changes file modes, "bites" through open connections and just generally raises havok. We feel that this

[23:32] feature will make the computer more of a pet than a simple inanimate object



Lol, this sounds more like a Microsoft feature.

BTW, was anyone else annoyed that this 'interview' was done in an IRC style format? I mean, it's kind of hard to sort out and read that way.

More on the scheduler changes

[Roger Watson]

the scheduler rewrite is about to hit its first major milestone with KSE 3, which will be presented and discussed at BSDCon

There's a bit of background here: currently FreeBSD has a much-maligned userland thread scheduler, typically used to handle pthreads and other rightful divisions of a process. It also uses a simple round-robin kernel scheduler to handle "heavy" processes. KSE 3, OTOH, will support many new features: [google.com]

• LWP support for both user and kernel threads. This is similar to the implementation in Solaris, which has an extraordinarily well-written scheduler.
• More progress has been made toward a fully pre-emptable kernel, which will be very useful on large SMP systems.
• Real-time scheduling (as in QNX and RTOS) will be supported, which should greatly improve performance on native video recording and playback software as well as games.
• FIFO support will be added, as well as a more fine-grained way to set priorities.

--rwatson

here is the original log.

[sinserve]

[00:11] thanks for organizing this
[00:11] talk to y'all later!
[00:11] * _jkh waves
[00:11] *** _jkh ([e-mail]) has left #freebsd

a minute later ...

[00:13] *** rootkid ([e-mail]) has joined #freebsd
[00:13] whaz000p bitches; I am back for idling.