Matthew Dillon | |
|---|---|
_on_bicycle_with_bicycle_helmet--2008-08.jpeg) Matthew Dillon on bicycle, August 2008 | |
| Born | (1966-07-01)1 July 1966 (age 59)[1] |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
| Occupation | Software engineer |
| Known for | Amiga DICE,[2][3] DME;[4]FreeBSD,DragonFly BSD,HAMMER |
| Website | apollo |
Matthew Dillon (born 1966) is an Americansoftware engineer known forAmiga software,[3] contributions toFreeBSD and for starting and leading theDragonFly BSD project since 2003.[3][5][6][7]
Dillon studiedelectronic engineering andcomputer science at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, where he first became involved withBSD in 1985. He also became known for hisAmiga programming,[3] his C compiler DICE[2] and his work on theLinux kernel.[8] He founded and worked atBest Internet from 1994 until 1997, contributing toFreeBSD in that time.[9] His "Diablo" internet news transit program was very popular with many ISPs.
In 1997, Dillon gainedcommit access to the FreeBSD code and heavily contributed to thevirtual memory subsystem,[10] amongst other contributions.
Concerned with problems he saw in the direction FreeBSD 5.x was headed in regards toconcurrency,[10] and coupled with the fact that Dillon's access to the FreeBSD source code repository was revoked due to a falling-out with other FreeBSD developers, he started theDragonFly BSD project in 2003, implementing theSMP model usinglight-weight kernel threads.[3][11] The DragonFly project also led to the development of a newuserspace kernelvirtualisation technique in 2006, calledVirtual Kernel,[3][12] originally to ease the development and testing of subsequent kernel-level features;[13] a newfile system, calledHAMMER, which he created usingB-trees; HAMMER was declared production-ready with DragonFly 2.2 in 2009;[12] and, subsequently,HAMMER2, declared stable in 2018 with DragonFly 5.2.
Most recently, Dillon has gotten a number of headlines aroundCPUerrata. In 2007, this was afterTheo de Raadt ofOpenBSD raised the alarm around the seriousness of some of the errata forIntel Core 2 family of CPUs.[14] Dillon has independently evaluated Intel's errata, and did an overview ofIntel Core errata as well, suggesting that several of them were so serious as to warrant avoiding any processor where the issues remain unfixed.[14] Dillon has since been a fan ofAMD processors, and, subsequently in 2012, he has discovered a brand-new deficiency in someAMD processors for which no existing erratum existed at the time.[15] Dillon continued his work around CPU issues as late as 2018, presenting solutions to tackle the latest security vulnerabilities likeMeltdown, some of which have been subsequently adopted byOpenBSD as well.[16]
Dillon was a frequent guest on bsdtalk during the runtime of the show,[17] and was interviewed several times forKernelTrap.[5][6]
I loved Matt Dillon's editor DME, did anyone else come across that ?
Already a veteran hacker (contributor to Linux and FreeBSD, among many other projects), …
The panelists are:BSD/OS,Paul Vixie [Internet Software Consortium founder];FreeBSD, Matt Dillon [Systems Architect at Best Internet]; …
In creating DragonFly BSD, Matt Dillon observed that there was no point in creating an N:M threading model—where N userspace threads are multiplexed on top of M kernel threads—because C code that uses more than a handful of threads is very rare.
Part of the OpenBSD solution used the approach employed by Matthew Dillon in his DragonFly BSD – the per-CPU page layout aspect.
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