Matthew Dillon (computer scientist)

For other people named Matt Dillon, see Matt Dillon (disambiguation).

Matthew Dillon
Born	1966
Known for	DragonFly BSD, HAMMER

Matthew Dillon (born 1966) is a computer scientist living in Berkeley, California. He is best known for his contributions to FreeBSD and for starting the DragonFly BSD project.

Dillon studied electronic engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he first became involved with BSD in 1985. He also became known for his Amiga programming, his C compiler DICE and his work on the Linux kernel. He founded and worked at Best Internet from 1994 until 1997, contributing to FreeBSD in that time. His "Diablo" internet news transit program was very popular with many ISPs.

In 1997, Dillon gained commit access to the FreeBSD code and heavily contributed to the virtual memory subsystem, amongst other contributions.

Concerned with problems he saw in the direction FreeBSD 5.x was headed, and coupled with the fact that Dillon's access to the FreeBSD source code repository was revoked due to a falling-out with other FreeBSD developers, he started the DragonFly BSD project in 2003. That project also led to the development of a new file system, called HAMMER, which he created using B-trees.

External links

• Matt Dillon home page
• KernelTrap interview, January 2002
• KernelTrap interview, August 2007
• Matt Dillon IRC interview from SlashNet
• OSNews interview (March 13, 2004)