Re: warning of pending commit attempt.

Brooks Davis wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 08:44:56PM -0800, Julian Elischer wrote:
> 
>>At some stage in the next few weeks I will be trying to commit
>>Marco Zec's vimage code to -current. (only 'trying' not
>>for technical reasons, but political).
...
>>Why now?
>>  The code is in a shape where teh compiled out version of hte system is 
>>stable. In the compiled in version, it is functional
>>enough to provide nearly all of what people want. It needs people with 
>>other interests to adapt it to their purposes and use it so that it can 
>>become a solid product for future releases.
> 
> The website has a snapshot with a date over a month old and many
> comments about unstable interfaces.  I've seen zero reports of
> substantial testing...

What about locking and SMP scalability?  Any new choke points?

Having a patch set to glance over would be helpful as well.

>>Solaris and Linux have seen what BSD can do with jails and have upped
>>the ante. it's time for FreeBSD to tak our jails to teh next logical
>>step.
>>
>>As it will be committed it does have some missing parts to the jigsaw, but 
>>it is complete enough that a system compiled in  this manner can
>>be fully functional and fully backwards compatible.
>>
>>Basically no userland changes need be made to get the full effect.
>>
>>I expect the usual  nay-sayers no matter what is proposed, but
>>I hope we can have a decent discussion about this..
> 
> From purely procedural perspective, the "next few weeks" seems rushed and
> poorly motivated.  We're still finding and fixing bugs from the last
> major round of network changes.  We should at least get the first batch
> of 7.0 errata out the door before making changes that will certain make
> merging non-trivial network stack changes more difficult.  We also need
> credible, qualitative reports verifying that it works and what it's
> impacts are.

Seconded.  Waiting until 7.0 has left the barn and got some exposure would
be preferrable.

> Don't get me wrong.  I think this is interesting work and that it could
> be a major asset to FreeBSD.  I also recognize that it should go in
> in the next 6-9 months (12 at the outside) if it's not going to cause
> problems with 8.0.  I simply don't see any valid motivation for doing it
> with undue haste.

We also need detailed briefing on how to work with virtualization.  What
have we to be careful about?  How are kld's and network drivers affected?
New network related kernel structures?  And so on.

-- 
Andre