Re: Interview with Matt on bsdtalk about 1.6

:On Thu, July 13, 2006 10:01 am, Dimitri Kovalov wrote:
:
:> I listen to this. Very interesting. I only challange one
:> thing. You say that 1.6 is more stable than FreeBSD 4.x.
:> How can you make this claim? FreeBSD 4.x is installed in
:> 1000s of servers and network devices for many years, and I
:> don't hear of anyone using Dragonfly for more than a
:> corporate server or firewall. So how can you claim such
:> stability before it is battle tested?
:
:Because a good number of the issues fixed date back to FreeBSD 4.x?

Because I'm an optimist. It's definitely more of a gut feeling then
anything specific, from having used and worked on FreeBSD almost
exclusively until I started the DragonFly project.

In anycase, I really do think that DragonFly is now more stable then
FreeBSD-4 ever was. And, yes, a good chunk of the bugs that have been
fixed, in particular to the buffer cache and softupdates, but also
issues with IPSEC, the tcp stack, and a few others, were all present
in FreeBSD-4.

-Matt
Matthew Dillon
<dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

The volume, nature, and high level of competance of the *massive* code-clean-up
that was the first big chunk of the DFLY project says it has to be at least
partially true that *parts of* DFLY are superior to FreeBSD 4.X.

OTOH, subsequent progress toward DFLY's goals has led to never-ending need to
alter all manner of things that arguably 'ain't broke' in their comparable
position in the 4.X BSD world.

It might have been more accurate to have said that DragonFly *can be* more
stable than 4.X BSD, as this seems to be highly dependent on what one chooses to
use either of them for.

Arguably 4.X BSD or even 6.X BSD retain advantages in an 'all known
possibilities' environment, if only w/r greater certainty that a larger number
of ports, drivers, and CPU architectures work 'well enough' for production use.

Many of the items fixed in FreeBSD - legitimately in need of fixing or not, were
simply not problematical at typical production stress levels.

The more curious point of your chat to me was that DragonFly - aimed at serious
clustering, among other goals - is not yet concentrating on the AMD-64/enhanced
Intel features.

Given where dualcore hardware, energy/heat loads, and costs seem to be heading,
IMHO one could do worse than to drop all else and focus *exclusively* on those.