DragonFly BSD 6.4 • Hacker News Board

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#11

Post by amalgamated_inc » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 12:05 AM UTC

todd8 wrote: post #7

amalgamated_inc wrote: post #2

Can 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 h…

Yea, I checked the about section of the website a bit and honestly didn't get it :) Not familiar with most of the terms.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#12

Post by amalgamated_inc » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 12:07 AM UTC

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #10

amalgamated_inc wrote: post #2

Can 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…

> FreeBSD user of several years either as a server OS, workstation OS

Oh, could you give a bit of an overview of the State of FreeBSD on the Desktop (or laptop)? I'm playing with the idea. Tried OpenBSD for a while but it just wasn't very consumer-ready. No bluetooth support at all, videos would have audio and video lag, and other issues. Is FreeBSD more suited to daily consumer laptop use? I use Arch btw

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#13

Post by rubyfan » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 12:12 AM UTC

amalgamated_inc wrote: post #2

Can 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 was an OpenBSD and FreeBSD user at that time DragonFly was announced so I remember the original fork. Improving SMP (or SMP at all) was a thing a few of the BSDs were working on around this time as I believe processors were starting to add hyper-threading. I think that was the core rationale for the fork but Matt Dillon had a few other things he was trying. There have been a few similar forks like this where someone wanted to go their own way some with better success than others.

See Annoucning DragonFly BSD!

https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2003-Jul...

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#14

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 12:17 AM UTC

amalgamated_inc wrote: post #12

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> FreeBSD user of several years either as a server OS, workstation OS Oh, could you give a bit of an overview of the State of FreeBSD on the Desktop (or laptop)? I'm playing with the idea. Tried OpenBSD for a while but it just wasn't very consumer-ready. No bluetooth support at all, videos would have audio and video lag, and other issues. Is FreeBSD more suited to daily consumer laptop use? I use Arch btw

It's been a couple years since I daily drove FreeBSD on, my desktop/workstation and I never ran it on a laptop. Still chugging along on my home built NAS(read: shitty old tower with a bunch of disks in it) though.

I switched over from Arch on the desktop for a couple years at one point, and overall I was very happy. The FreeBSD project is still going strong, and they've been greatly improving their Linux syscall compat layer the last few years. ZFS support is great. It's perfectly viable as a desktop OS if you're experienced with Arch and you don't use a lot of weird hardware or software.

What I did when switching was just to install it and start slowly rebuilding my Arch setup as much as possible. It's a fun weekend project with some patience, and you'll quickly find what the pain points might be that way.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#15

Post by amalgamated_inc » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 12:20 AM UTC

bmacho wrote: post #3

amalgamated_inc wrote: post #2

Can 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/ [1] : https://www.dragonflybsd.org/features/ [2] : https://www.dragonflybsd.org/history/

Maybe just cause allegedly Netflix uses it for servers.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#16

Post by 0x457 » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 12:22 AM UTC

amalgamated_inc wrote: post #2

Can 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?

Dragonfly BSD is very good at being bad at taking constructive feedback /s

It was born out of disagreement about how SMP should work in FreeBSD around Northwood P4 era (first HyperThreaded consumer CPU). Around that time, every general purpose OS as absolutely horrible at utilizing more than one logical cores.

FreeBSD first gained SMP support at 5.0, and it was actually usable at 5.2. DragonFly BSD author had a disagreement how to implement it and though 5.x direction is bad, so, IIRC, he forked 4.x line and implemented his own vision from there. Then it was "FreeBSD does it, so I'm going to do it differently", at least that's how it looks from an outside perspective.

So, it's good at SMP if we're going by that outdated classification of BSD systems.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#17

Post by tcmart14 » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 12:25 AM UTC

amalgamated_inc wrote: post #12

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> FreeBSD user of several years either as a server OS, workstation OS Oh, could you give a bit of an overview of the State of FreeBSD on the Desktop (or laptop)? I'm playing with the idea. Tried OpenBSD for a while but it just wasn't very consumer-ready. No bluetooth support at all, videos would have audio and video lag, and other issues. Is FreeBSD more suited to daily consumer laptop use? I use Arch btw

There are some tricks with OpenBSD. First, with blueooth, if I recall, OpenBSD devs are not a huge fan of bluetooth. OpenBSD takes a security above all else approach I believe this plays a bit of a role since bluetooth is often poorly implemented by bluetooth devices, so there isn't a huge drive for it to work well on OpenBSD. Bluetooth is also a nightmare to implement and the interest in picking up the torch probably isnt there. Second, small dev team with limited access to hardware. If you want to get the best support for OpenBSD, I've always heard that running Lenovo Thinkpads are the way to go. Quiet a bit of the dev team mains Thinkpads for laptops and they dog food their own code. So the Thinkpads often get the fastest and best support.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#18

Post by somat » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 12:25 AM UTC

amalgamated_inc wrote: post #2

Can 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?

My impression(i only really use openbsd)

Freebsd has the most developer resources and tends to be good at optimizing for speed but the userland always feels, it is hard to explain, but off, if you are fine with with the linux userland this will be a step up, openbsd, a step down. It has very good zfs integration and that is a solid reason for using it alone.

Netbsd just sits in the corner doing their own thing, I am not sure what that is but I suspect if I had not fallen for openbsd I would be using netbsd. A good solid small OS.

Dragonfly has an incredible main developer who has strong views about how parallel systems should be structured and the programing chops to pull it off. If you can take using a system with absolutely minuscule developer resources you will find real gems here, an amazing filesystem and very good multiprocessor support.

Openbsd strives for correctness above all else, speed tends to be a second class citizen, that is, if the developers have to make a choice between a simple obviously correct solution and a messy but quick one, they will almost always go for the simple one. speed is fine but not at the expense of readability. the system is probably the most full featured. With an emphasis on network daemons. but limited developer resources keep everything simple. I think of it as the best desktop system due to it's ease of administration and excellent ports system.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#19

Post by nortonham » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 12:30 AM UTC

somat wrote: post #18

amalgamated_inc wrote: post #2

Can 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?

My impression(i only really use openbsd) Freebsd has the most developer resources and tends to be good at optimizing for speed but the userland always feels, it is hard to explain, but off, if you are fine with with the linux userland this will be a step up, openbsd, a step down. It has very good zfs integration and that is a solid reason for using it alone. Netbsd just sits in the corner doing their own thing, I am…

>Netbsd just sits in the corner doing their own thing, I am not sure what that is but I suspect if I had not fallen for openbsd I would be using netbsd. A good solid small OS.

Portability, pkgsrc, some neat innovations, and a small and welcoming community. I'm not qualified to judge this, but they also value code quality and security.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#20

Post by nortonham » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 12:32 AM UTC

tcmart14 wrote: post #17

amalgamated_inc wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FreeBSD user of several years either as a server OS, workstation OS Oh, could you give a bit of an overview of the State of FreeBSD on the Desktop (or laptop)? I'm playing with the idea. Tried OpenBSD for a while but it just wasn't very consumer-ready. No bluetooth support at all, videos would have audio and video lag, and other issues. Is FreeBSD more suited to daily consumer laptop use? I use Arch btw

There are some tricks with OpenBSD. First, with blueooth, if I recall, OpenBSD devs are not a huge fan of bluetooth. OpenBSD takes a security above all else approach I believe this plays a bit of a role since bluetooth is often poorly implemented by bluetooth devices, so there isn't a huge drive for it to work well on OpenBSD. Bluetooth is also a nightmare to implement and the interest in picking up the torch probabl…

> if I recall, OpenBSD devs are not a huge fan of bluetooth

iirc, when they went to implement it in OpenBSD, it was decided the bluetooth stack was basically just too poorly implemented and not really secure. I think if we ever see bluetooth in OpenBSD it will be a rewrite by some of their devs; basically when one of them decides to scratch an itch.