From owner-freebsd-arch Wed Jun 26 17:35:53 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mta05ps.bigpond.com (mta05ps.bigpond.com [144.135.25.137]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 07B1D37CFC7 for ; Wed, 26 Jun 2002 17:31:33 -0700 (PDT) Received: from areilly.bpc-users.org ([144.135.25.72]) by mta05ps.bigpond.com (Netscape Messaging Server 4.15 mta05ps Apr 29 2002 13:22:02) with SMTP id GYC9GF00.3KL for ; Thu, 27 Jun 2002 10:31:27 +1000 Received: from CPE-144-132-188-183.nsw.bigpond.net.au ([144.132.188.183]) by PSMAM02.mailsvc.email.bigpond.com(MailRouter V3.0n 74/20869221); 27 Jun 2002 10:31:27 Received: (qmail 62096 invoked from network); 27 Jun 2002 00:31:27 -0000 Received: from localhost (andrew@127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 27 Jun 2002 00:31:27 -0000 Subject: Re: Where do you see FreeBSD in 10 years? From: Andrew Reilly To: Terry Lambert Cc: arch@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <3D06EBDC.99C72671@mindspring.com> References: <3D06EBDC.99C72671@mindspring.com> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.0.7 Date: 27 Jun 2002 10:31:27 +1000 Message-Id: <1025137887.15145.46.camel@gurney.reilly.home> Mime-Version: 1.0 Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi Terry, Not many followups. Did you get any direct responses? I'm interested in the answers myself, so here's a few thoughts from a non-developer but long-time BSD user ('85 or '86). On Wed, 2002-06-12 at 16:36, Terry Lambert wrote: > 1) Where is your "stake in the ground", your "line in the sand"? > What is your goal for the FreeBSD project? I'm not sure that I understand the first question, but I'd like to think that the second was something like: Be the most useful, reliable and efficient way to use the popular computer hardware of the day. (And still freely available for any use.) I would hope that the measure of FreeBSD's success would continue to be based on internal consistency and equal measures of academic rigor and pragmatism, rather than marketing-style dot-point competition with the the alternatives (assuming that there are any). > 2) Where do you see FreeBSD in 10 years? In the pursuit of the aforementioned goal, I would hope that in those 10 years we would have comprehensively brought FreeBSD aka Unix up to date with all of the good ideas from academic OS research: to be a truly state of the art system. A few dot-points along that path might be: * sufficient modularity that the future FreeBSD can be one-size fits all: swappable schedulers, authentication systems, user-land utility sets. Servers do (and will) run the gamut from single-processor appliances to multi-processor enterprise behemoths, and I can't think of a reason not to be suitable for them all. Workstations are servers with a graphics subsystem, so we should be able to do that too. Modularity might not ultimately prove necessary where a basic system can be made sufficiently flexible all on it's own. * I don't know how much distortion of the Unix mold this introduces, but I would like to see mounting file systems, particularly remote ones and dynamic ones (say on flash cards, or pluggable disks) be something that user's can do, and that affect only that user (plan-9 style). Perhaps that is something that can be managed adequately in user-land libraries, like the GNOME VFS stuff, or some future modification of automount but that seems needlessly redundant. * Of course the SMP scalability issue will be well-and-truly licked by then, and FreeBSD will happily control 1000-node NUMA HPC racks as well as more distributed systems, cluster-style. This will have brought hard-real-time capabilities with it, so that FreeBSD can be used in medical, mechanical and other types of "equipment". * I expect that NetBSD will be the first to bite this particular bullet-point, but perhaps I can hope that by that time the systems will still be sufficiently close (if not actually the same) that FreeBSD will get this too: I expect that processor architecture is likely to diversify, and for there to certainly be a diversity of instruction sets in common use across the range of platforms. I'd like to think that FreeBSD could attract commercial applications, and expect that these would be provided as binary executables. It is still convenient to supply pieces of FreeBSD itself as pre-compiled binaries (packages). Taken together, I think that this implies either an emulator framework or (I would prefer) a TAO-style intermediate VM for distributed object code. Even pico-java or IA32 would probably do, and be useful in any case. Not sure why I like this particular idea, I just do. I strongly suspect that dynamic recompilation is going to prove necessary for Itanium systems to be competitive in any case. From the FreeBSD perspective, this is really a tool-chain issue. But it's one of those issues that sits at the junction between OS and tool-chain: where do you draw the line --- how much work does the linker/loader really do... Oh, well, there's my ramble for the morning. -- Andrew To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message