[3][5][6][7] Dillon studied electronic engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he first became involved with BSD in 1985.

[3][11] The DragonFly project also led to the development of a new userspace kernel virtualisation technique in 2006, called Virtual Kernel,[3][12] originally to ease the development and testing of subsequent kernel-level features;[13] a new file system, called HAMMER, which he created using B-trees; HAMMER was declared production-ready with DragonFly 2.2 in 2009;[12] and, subsequently, HAMMER2, declared stable in 2018 with DragonFly 5.2.

In 2007, this was after Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD raised the alarm around the seriousness of some of the errata for Intel Core 2 family of CPUs.

[15] Dillon continued his work around CPU issues as late as 2018, presenting solutions to tackle the latest security vulnerabilities like Meltdown, some of which have been subsequently adopted by OpenBSD as well.

[16] Dillon was a frequent guest on bsdtalk during the runtime of the show,[17] and was interviewed several times for KernelTrap.