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DragonFly BSD 4.8 released

dragonflybsd.org

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Re: DragonFly BSD 4.8 released

#21
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a little VPS on DragonFlyBSD that I use for misc hobby projects and personal file hosting. Mostly it runs Postgres. It's quite fast. I had redis running on there as a message queue for a distributed web crawler for a while. I benchmarked it against Arch Linux (which is what I was using on that server before DragonFly) and it was somewhat faster. HAMMER is a really nice filesystem. It's not one of the fancy COW…

What benchmarks showed an improvement between Arch and DragonFlyBSD?

redis's redis-benchmark utility. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Re: DragonFly BSD 4.8 released

#22
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you probably meant "gold standard" but I was amused thinking about what a golf standard might mean ;)

Why do you assume he meant "gold standard"? Have you ever seen how fast a golf ball flies just after a strong hit?

Never from the point of view I'd like to see it from.

Re: DragonFly BSD 4.8 released

#23
post #16
post #3

In case people are wondering what makes DBSD so interesting, DragonflyBSD is: - focused only on x64 architecture - has an extremely small but exceptionally talented team of developers (e.g. Matt Dillon from DICE and Amiga fame) - has it's own unique filesystem called Hammer (and work is being down on Hammer2 which is a complete rewrite) - Network performance is particularly good with Dragonfly and even better than Fr…

HAMMER2 has been worked on for at least 6 years; AFAICT by one guy. Every year it is supposed to be happening Real Soon Now, but never appears to make any evident progress. Matt Dillon does very impressive work, but the critical mass just isn't there.

It's possibly too big a task for one person, I agree. If he manages to get something usable in even 10-15 years, though, I'd be impressed. HAMMER2 is a clustering file system with POSIX semantics, and by the standards of that category, I don't think it's going all that slowly, to be honest. Ceph has had probably hundreds of person-years of development put into it, and only very recently have people started claiming CephFS is production-ready (and still many don't trust it).

Re: DragonFly BSD 4.8 released

#24
post #23
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HAMMER2 has been worked on for at least 6 years; AFAICT by one guy. Every year it is supposed to be happening Real Soon Now, but never appears to make any evident progress. Matt Dillon does very impressive work, but the critical mass just isn't there.

It's possibly too big a task for one person, I agree. If he manages to get something usable in even 10-15 years, though, I'd be impressed. HAMMER2 is a clustering file system with POSIX semantics, and by the standards of that category, I don't think it's going all that slowly, to be honest. Ceph has had probably hundreds of person-years of development put into it, and only very recently have people started claiming C…

In $dayjob, I'd still go for gluster over ceph, with zfs on my storage nodes -- this obviously depends on what you're doing but in my case this would be shared storage for everything from images, logs and dataflow between some chunky legacy apps.

Why this stack? For no other reason really other than it works perfectly, has caused me almost no pain in the 6+ years I've used it for this kind of DFS stuff (across several clients) and there are no features I need in ceph which would make me take the less mature option.

I've been using LeoFS a little lately also again ontop of ZFS and it's working reasonably well (S3 compat stuff).

Currently why anyone would use HAMMER2 or BTRFS for anything important escapes me.

Re: DragonFly BSD 4.8 released

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - has it's own unique filesystem called Hammer (and work is being down on Hammer2 which is a complete rewrite) You said "interesting", but superficially "a complete rewrite" WIP doesn't sound like a plus when choosing a production system OS. If anyone is interested, this is what the DBSD man page says about hammer: HAMMER file systems are designed for large storage systems, up to 1 Exabyte, and will not operate eff…

In all fairness to Dragonfly, Apple themselves just today released an entirely new file systems that was a complete rewrite as well. With the advent of SSD and NVME, how you achieve maximum performance and ensure long term "disk" endurance has radically changed in recent years. You're no long write data to a physical platter anymore. Which radically changes huge fundamental assumptions in how legacy file systems were…

Only history proves stability.

Re: DragonFly BSD 4.8 released

#26
post #3

In case people are wondering what makes DBSD so interesting, DragonflyBSD is: - focused only on x64 architecture - has an extremely small but exceptionally talented team of developers (e.g. Matt Dillon from DICE and Amiga fame) - has it's own unique filesystem called Hammer (and work is being down on Hammer2 which is a complete rewrite) - Network performance is particularly good with Dragonfly and even better than Fr…

> Really interesting to see the Samsung NVME device come out on top and Intel in last. This is a good read even if you don't run Dragonfly. The Intel device tested was their absolute lowest end consumer part. The 750 and above drives are completely different beasts, especially at the server level.

The 750 series also costs a lot more, while the 600p is comparable in price to Samsung's 960 EVO. The numbers are still interesting :-).

Re: DragonFly BSD 4.8 released

#27
post #3

In case people are wondering what makes DBSD so interesting, DragonflyBSD is: - focused only on x64 architecture - has an extremely small but exceptionally talented team of developers (e.g. Matt Dillon from DICE and Amiga fame) - has it's own unique filesystem called Hammer (and work is being down on Hammer2 which is a complete rewrite) - Network performance is particularly good with Dragonfly and even better than Fr…

I know you probably meant "gold standard" but I was amused thinking about what a golf standard might mean ;)

I just assumed "golf standard" was some QA term I hadn't heard of before.

Re: DragonFly BSD 4.8 released

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - has it's own unique filesystem called Hammer (and work is being down on Hammer2 which is a complete rewrite) You said "interesting", but superficially "a complete rewrite" WIP doesn't sound like a plus when choosing a production system OS. If anyone is interested, this is what the DBSD man page says about hammer: HAMMER file systems are designed for large storage systems, up to 1 Exabyte, and will not operate eff…

In all fairness to Dragonfly, Apple themselves just today released an entirely new file systems that was a complete rewrite as well. With the advent of SSD and NVME, how you achieve maximum performance and ensure long term "disk" endurance has radically changed in recent years. You're no long write data to a physical platter anymore. Which radically changes huge fundamental assumptions in how legacy file systems were…

> Apple themselves just today released an entirely new file systems that was a complete rewrite as well.

Without CRCs or checksums on the blocks. Grr...

"Silent data corruption is real" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13851349

Re: DragonFly BSD 4.8 released

#29
Awesome news, and props to the DBSD team for all the consistent hard work they put into it, usually without much fanfare. I'm a pretty hardcore GNU/GPL guy, but I have said before if I were starting an ISP I would probably be doing it with DBSD. The networking stack alone is top-notch, and once HAMMER2 rolls out I honestly expect it to get the momentum to compete with ZFS and BTRFS. (not much traction now though, so as others have said, probably years down the road).

Re: DragonFly BSD 4.8 released

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you probably meant "gold standard" but I was amused thinking about what a golf standard might mean ;)

I just assumed "golf standard" was some QA term I hadn't heard of before.

It could be part of MIL-SPEC evaluation. They'd be concerned with how many times you could hit the evaluated product with a golf club before its effectiveness degraded. Also how many times before it stopped working. These numbers would provide actionable intelligence to acquisitions officers in the military on how to order just enough replacements for given scenarios while minimizing the amount of unnecessary orders.

Long story short, applying the golf standard in your QA process can both increase longevity of the product and reduce replacement costs. Many government organizations and enterprises running mission-critical applications might find DragonflyBSD servers attractive if they passed the golf standard. They could combine it with their Five 9's middleware.

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