Not that my voice has any weight, but I applaud and welcome a 3.0 release. :)
-Toby. On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 4:01 PM, Matthew Dillon <dil...@apollo.backplane.com> wrote: > Hello everyone! First, I apologize for the aborted 2.12 release. We > got as far as rolling it but I decided to make a real push to try to > fix the occassional random seg-fault bug that we were still seeing > on 64-bit at the time. > > The seg-fault issue has now been resolved, I posted an exhaustive > synopsis to the kernel@ list just a moment ago. Basically it appears > to be an AMD cpu bug and not a DragonFly bug. We don't have final > confirmation that it isn't a DragonFly bug because it is so sensitive > to %rip and %rsp values that reproducing the environment to test it > on other OSs (even FreeBSD) is difficult, but I'm 99% certain it's an > AMD bug. Add a single NOP instruction to the end of one routine in > the gcc-4.4 codebase appears to work around the bug. > > So moving on to rolling an official release... > > (1) Through past experience we will NOT do a release during the > holidays! So everyone please enjoy Christmas and New Years! > > (2) I would like to call the release 3.0. Why? Because while > spending the last ~1-2 months tracking down the cpu bug a whole lot > of other work has gone into the kernel including major network > protocol stack work and major SMP work. My contribution to the SMP > work was to completely rewrite the 64-bit pmap, VM object handling > code, and VM fault handling code, as well as some other stuff. > > This has resulted in a phenominal improvement in concurrency and > in particular concurrent compilations or anything that takes a lot > of page faults. SMP contention was completely removed from the > page fault path and for most VM related operations, and almost > completely removed from the exec*() path. > > Other related work has continued to improve mysql and postgresql > numbers as well. > > (3) Release date is as-yet undecided. It will probably be mid-February > to end-February in order to synchronize with the pkgsrc 2011-Q4 > release and give things time to settle. The release meisters will > be discussing it on IRC. > > I will say that there are NO serious showstoppers this time. I'd > like us to take our time and make this the best release we've ever > done! > > -Matt >
