From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Feb 6 17:50:10 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A328516A419 for ; Wed, 6 Feb 2008 17:50:10 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from millueradfa@yahoo.com) Received: from web34512.mail.mud.yahoo.com (web34512.mail.mud.yahoo.com [66.163.178.178]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 4FC5C13C43E for ; Wed, 6 Feb 2008 17:50:10 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from millueradfa@yahoo.com) Received: (qmail 34960 invoked by uid 60001); 6 Feb 2008 17:23:28 -0000 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=s1024; d=yahoo.com; h=X-YMail-OSG:Received:Date:From:Subject:To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding:Message-ID; b=Ha3acHEKfMIPKRSJeUP40u4AOcklRXo88S2g6/WOyADvrWn0Wx/s4AizQgXzERCZRmMvWlJlcLIkgZ0Od6+3mpxbAja6oiCO6umOAdmqyo3G216piaRNdoGB03DCUwDMrXeIUNDRLd0gQLhP64mSZtya29PIVbEHbgwJqFJw4Gc=; X-YMail-OSG: VnKR4MIVM1n5VI6PFs_1e1swz0dT59yMxWUDMyXMRsnC8K_yXC4E4k2ur2H2U9Wn.R4Ifhdd5MiOgAyPmFoFqkXNaOKVGe5tbnqMCQoOKwYta_HNP9I- Received: from [72.187.244.205] by web34512.mail.mud.yahoo.com via HTTP; Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:23:28 PST Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2008 09:23:28 -0800 (PST) From: "millueradfa@yahoo.com" To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-ID: <50460.33951.qm@web34512.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Subject: Some ideas for FreeBSD X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:50:10 -0000 Dear FreeBSD Developers, I have a few suggestions for how FreeBSD can be improved in an upcoming release. My first is to allow for dynamically resizeable swap file of some sort, and via kqueue, a notification facility to notify a program when swap is about to run out, when a program has made a memory request which requires more swap space than is avialable, and when swap space is run out. There should also be commands that can shrink the swap files, and see how much is being used in the swap files. This allows for the user to write customised programs that can manage and allocate new swap space as needed. The OS can come with a standard version of such a program that allows a user to specify a maximum swap file size (including infinite). I have also run into problems with making multiple space files on the same disk, in trying to address these swap exhaust problems, which caused thrashing. I believe this happened to when the swap partition and a swap file were on the same drive. Perhaps a way should be looked at to have multiple swap partititions and files on the same disk. That could also allow another way for additional swap space to be allocated, but I dont know if having the possibility of a large number of swap files is less efficient than a dynamically growing swap file. There should also be a feature to see how much of the swap file is used. I would much rather have dynamically allocated and deallocated swap space so I do not have large unused swap space eating up the disk, than having to predefine the swap size. Another idea I have is for setting the Do Not Fragment flag on a per connection option for UDP connections, and a per connection option to disable UDP checksum. The third idea is for more of a move to Linux and, SUS , and POSIX source compatability in regards to additional features supported by these systems. I still in 6.0 run into some calls that are not supported by FreeBSD that is a real headache. I ran into this with posix_memalign in some software. Although posix_memalign is more modern, If it would be trivial to add support for linux specific valloc and memalign why not do so as well, to maintain compatability with older Linux software. It is better to just make FreeBSD be as compatable and for stuff to compile out of box, as possible than to haggle over conditional ifdefs and changing lines of code in software. thank you for your reading these suggestions, it is greatly appreciated. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs