Re: starting alpha releases

[PALI Gabor Janos <pgj@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Anil,

On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 09:50:53AM +0100, Anil Madhavapeddy wrote:
> Then, we can start merging in all the outstanding features for the first 
> 'public' release, including:
> 
> - kFreeBSD backend (Gabor)

Is there an exact deadline for this?

I have not had the chance to put larger amount of stress on this backend,
although it implements the mirage-os interfaces.  I was pondering perhaps
I could test this with the mirage web site application.  I do not see too
many obstacles except the eliminiation of use of floating-point numbers
in the packages, but the devil is in the details.

Speaking of floating-point numbers: it is essentially a requirement to
switch from real-valued time representation of OCaml to microseconds,
otherwise we will not be able to merge the kFreeBSD backend.

On the other hand, the FreeBSD pfil(9) hook interface has just been changed
to support for link-layer filtering [1] so we can stop piggybacking on
ng_ether(4).  If I had some time I could adapt my code to use this.

Note that my current code has a build solution different from OPAM, so it
would require some effort to make fit with it.  I think this will be
another thing we should be aware of.


[1] http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-src-head/2012-September/040067.html