An important milestone

Yesterday, with very little fanfare, illumos passed an important milestone.

This milestone was the integration of 195 Need replacement for nfs/lockd+klm

This is work that I originally tasked Gordon Ross and Dan Kruchinin to work while we were colleagues at Nexenta.  Gordon started the work, picking up bits from FreeBSD as a starting point and gluing it to the illumos entry points.  Dan continued with it, and fleshed out a lot of the skeleton that Gordon had started.  It was subsequently picked up by the engineers at Delphix, and -- after some important bug fixing work was completed -- was integrated into their product quite some time ago -- reportedly its been stable since December in their product.

The reason this is such an important milestone, is two fold:

First, this represents a substantial collaborative effort, involving contributions from parties across several organizational boundaries.  The level of collaboration achieved here is a win for the greater good of the community.

Second, this effort represents the replacement of the last of the truly closed source code in our kernel proper.  There are still some closed source drivers (although I will point that we're now seeing more traction with vendors to supply open drivers, with recent open source code contributions coming from places like SolarFlare, LSI, and HP.  (HP's contribution -- through illumos partner Joyent -- means that at least one important closed source driver will soon be open -- cpqary3.)

I want to personally thank everyone who contributed to make the integration of the new open source NFS lock manager possible. You've done a big service to the community, and we are grateful!

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