DragonFly BSD 6.4
dragonflybsd.org
DragonFly BSD 6.4
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Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#2Can somebody explain the niche or role of Dragonfly BSD? I'm only vaguely familiar with BSDs. So far my impression is that OpenBSD is the secure one, FreeBSD is the fast one (for servers). What's DragonFly good at?
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#3Can somebody explain the niche or role of Dragonfly BSD? I'm only vaguely familiar with BSDs. So far my impression is that OpenBSD is the secure one, FreeBSD is the fast one (for servers). What's DragonFly good at?
I don't think it has a niche or role anymore. Some years ago they claimed to be fast. [0,1,2]
I don't know where did you get that FreeBSD is regarded as the fast one. I think it is considered the popular/general purposed one, without a single aim like openBSD or netBSD have.
[0] : https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#4Can somebody explain the niche or role of Dragonfly BSD? I'm only vaguely familiar with BSDs. So far my impression is that OpenBSD is the secure one, FreeBSD is the fast one (for servers). What's DragonFly good at?
I always thought it was centered around the HammerFS.
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#5Can somebody explain the niche or role of Dragonfly BSD? I'm only vaguely familiar with BSDs. So far my impression is that OpenBSD is the secure one, FreeBSD is the fast one (for servers). What's DragonFly good at?
From Wikipedia:
Intended as the logical continuation of the FreeBSD 4.x series, DragonFly has diverged significantly from FreeBSD, implementing lightweight kernel threads (LWKT), an in-kernel message passing system, and the HAMMER file system. Many design concepts were influenced by AmigaOS.
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#6Can somebody explain the niche or role of Dragonfly BSD? I'm only vaguely familiar with BSDs. So far my impression is that OpenBSD is the secure one, FreeBSD is the fast one (for servers). What's DragonFly good at?
Scalability.
filesystem designed with cluster in mind (Just the design - the implantation still experimental). Process checkpointing. etc
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#7Can somebody explain the niche or role of Dragonfly BSD? I'm only vaguely familiar with BSDs. So far my impression is that OpenBSD is the secure one, FreeBSD is the fast one (for servers). What's DragonFly good at?
First two paragraphs of History section found on DragonFly web site[1]:
> A technical introduction: The ultimate goal of the DragonFly project at its inception was to provide native clustering support in the kernel. This type of functionality requires a sophisticated cache management framework for filesystem namespaces, file spaces and VM spaces. These and other features eventually culminate in the ability to allow heavily interactive programs to run across multiple machines with cache coherency fully guaranteed in all respects. This also requires being able to divide resources, including the CPU by way of a controlled VM context, for safe assignment to potentially unsecured third-party clusters over the internet. This original design direction, although no longer the primary goal of the DragonFly project, has influenced many of the design decisions made in the intervening years. While full cache coherency is no longer a top level goal, filesystem coherency is, and that direction continues to guide the project in a number of ways.
> DragonFly BSD was forked from FreeBSD 4.8 in June of 2003, by Matthew Dillon. The project was originally billed as "the logical continuation of the FreeBSD 4.x series", as quoted in the announcement, but this description has long since become obsolete. From a performance perspective DragonFly's only real competitor these days is Linux.
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#8Can somebody explain the niche or role of Dragonfly BSD? I'm only vaguely familiar with BSDs. So far my impression is that OpenBSD is the secure one, FreeBSD is the fast one (for servers). What's DragonFly good at?
Perhaps a bit too scandalous (I don't know), but my understanding is that there was also a falling out of sorts between the DragonFly lead and BSD people, largely caused by allegedly abusive behaviour form the DragonFly lead while they were still working on BSD main. As I understand it, DragonFly came after this. Maybe doesn't answer your question, but it contextualises (however accurately!) part of how it came to be.
My source on that is a LinuxConfAU talk I can't recall off the top of my head (the same speaker gave a somewhat notable talk in defence of SystemD)
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#9Can somebody explain the niche or role of Dragonfly BSD? I'm only vaguely familiar with BSDs. So far my impression is that OpenBSD is the secure one, FreeBSD is the fast one (for servers). What's DragonFly good at?
I always thought it was centered around the HammerFS.
Based on the Wikipedia page, HammerFS does basically everything.
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#10Can somebody explain the niche or role of Dragonfly BSD? I'm only vaguely familiar with BSDs. So far my impression is that OpenBSD is the secure one, FreeBSD is the fast one (for servers). What's DragonFly good at?
Originally it was planned to be a distributed OS. The main reason for the fork from FreeBSD was disagreement about what the threading primitives and their semantics should be, IIRC. One major early goal was cache coherency between different machines, though that seems to be abandoned or indefinitely on hold. Other projects have been HammerFS(a filesystem similar to ZFS, and I believe it started before ZFS was ported to FreeBSD), moving more towards a microkernel approach, and dropping support for all platforms other than x86_64. This makes the implementation of things like threading much simpler.
In short, DragonflyBSD is Dillon's experimental OS with ideas he would never be able to get into FreeBSD. It's never really found a niche for production use as far as I can tell, but I'd love to be proven wrong on that.
Source: FreeBSD user of several years either as a server OS, workstation OS or both. And I've dabbled with Dragonfly and love reading about obscure unices and their quirks.