Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 16:08:28 -0700 From: Nick Sayer <nsayer@quack.kfu.com> To: matrix@ipform.ru, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Let me drool a lil' bit about fbsd5 Message-ID: <3B33CFEC.2070007@quack.kfu.com>
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The big changes happening in -current are almost too numerous to list. I will mention a few I can think of, but I'm sure to miss a few. Note that at the moment most of these features are rather early in their development cycle. -current is not approprate for users who are not prepared to deal with a bumpy ride. Background FSCK. Unclean shutdown/reboot cycles will result in a filesystem check that runs in parallel with the rest of the system startup. Replacment of the SMP "giant" lock with localized locking. Currently much of the kernel is not thread-safe. There is one large lock (called Giant) that protects almost all of the kernel from simultaneous use by more than one processor. In the future, the kernel will have localized data locks that insure that processors trying to do the same thing at the same time will not interfere with each other, but that two processors in the kernel doing tasks that don't interfere with each other can run at the same time. This is the same model as the Solaris 2.x kernel. This is where a lot of the work on -current is taking place. ACPI support. Work is in progress to integrate ACPI support which will hopefully both improve device initialization and driver support. Cardbus support. I'm not sure, but rumors of Firewire/iLink support were also mentioned once upon a time. Check in on the freebsd-current mailing list (and its archives) to get more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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