A large chunk of the kernel still runs under the big giant
lock, including the light weight processes that libthread_xu
uses, so something like mysql is going to hit a lot of BGL
contention.
You may be able to get DragonFly to run on the machines you
were having problems with by compiling it with SMP but
without APIC_IO. With that combination DragonFly will use
the PIC in SMP mode, which usually works.
I'd use 1.8 for any testing, or 1.9 Preview. A lot of
dangerous stuff is going into 1.9 HEAD right now (in particular,
moving to a pluggable MBR/disklabel architecture so we can support
64 bit disklabels and GPT and such.
-Matt
