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DragonFly BSD 6.4

dragonflybsd.org

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Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#21

Post by 0x457 »

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

WiFi - doesn't work, you're going to run a VM with linux and pass Wi-Fi device there or deal with 802.11g speed if card even works at all.

GPU - if you're okay with Nvidia blob, then it's all good. If not, then I hope you're okay with RX580 era AMD.

Bluetooth...I don't think people in community know what it is because stack was broken for probably a decade.

Consumer NICs sometimes don't work out of the box.

It's very unfriendly for consumer, which is what I liked, but at one point I had enough and switched to Linux. Still running FreeBSD on home server, tho because i'm too lazy to switch it...

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#22

Post by nortonham »

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

Just check that your hardware is supported before installing.

https://bsd-hardware.info/

>Is FreeBSD more suited to daily consumer laptop use? I use Arch btw

It can be, it depends on what you use your laptop for. For example, if you game, maybe sticking with Arch is for the best. Bluetooth is supported on Free and NetBSD, but I haven't used it on those os's. EDIT: FreeBSD supports bluetooth, but support might be spotty/depend on how old/new the hardware is. On Free/Net, bluetooth also seems less straightforward ("user friendly) than on linux or commerical OS's like MacOS.

Since you're used to arch, installing, configuring, and maintaining FreeBSD shouldn't be too difficult. Try it in a VM for a while until you get used to using vs linux.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#23

Post by mardifoufs »

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…

Is it still aiming for being a distributed OS?

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#24

Post by rgrmrts »

0x457 wrote: post #21
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

WiFi - doesn't work, you're going to run a VM with linux and pass Wi-Fi device there or deal with 802.11g speed if card even works at all. GPU - if you're okay with Nvidia blob, then it's all good. If not, then I hope you're okay with RX580 era AMD. Bluetooth...I don't think people in community know what it is because stack was broken for probably a decade. Consumer NICs sometimes don't work out of the box. It's very…

Have you tried iwlwifi?

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#25

Post by alberth »

0x457 wrote: post #16
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 disag…

A lot of people would consider FreeBSD 5.x a horrible release (especially given how rock solid 4.x was), and things not stabilizing again until 8.x (many years later).

Some would argue that in hindsight, Matt was correct at the time for the fork - from a technical standpoint.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#26

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

amalgamated_inc wrote: post #11
todd8 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Roughly the original idea was similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image That is, make a cluster of machines look like a single BSD instance, by allowing virtual memory to span multiple machines, processes to move, etc, all while preserving cache coherency.

Obviously this is an insanely difficult goal, which is why DragonFly didn't make it particularly far towards it. Additionally we've seen the rise of virtualization and systems like k8s for managing clusters, which would reduce interest from potential collaborators.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#27

Post by mistrial9 »

amalgamated_inc wrote: post #15
bmacho wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28584738

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#28

Post by 0x457 »

rgrmrts wrote: post #24
0x457 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WiFi - doesn't work, you're going to run a VM with linux and pass Wi-Fi device there or deal with 802.11g speed if card even works at all. GPU - if you're okay with Nvidia blob, then it's all good. If not, then I hope you're okay with RX580 era AMD. Bluetooth...I don't think people in community know what it is because stack was broken for probably a decade. Consumer NICs sometimes don't work out of the box. It's very…

Have you tried iwlwifi?

Yes, it works exactly like I've described:

While iwlwifi supports all 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax the compatibility code currently only supports 802.11 a/b/g modes. Support for 802.11 n/ac is to come. 802.11ax and 6Ghz support are planned.

We will get wider IPv6 adoption before 802.11n works on FreeBSD in stable way.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#29

Post by 0x457 »

alberth wrote: post #25
0x457 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disag…

A lot of people would consider FreeBSD 5.x a horrible release (especially given how rock solid 4.x was), and things not stabilizing again until 8.x (many years later). Some would argue that in hindsight, Matt was correct at the time for the fork - from a technical standpoint.

Oh, I know. I suffered the entire way to 8.0. Until 5.2 it was completely unusable. I also remember unplugging or plugging USB device would often lead to kernel panic until 9.0 IIRC.

I agree that he was correct at the time. Likewise, I do wish that split never happened, though.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#30

Post by unquietwiki »

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…

I used it to help recover a messed-up Linux instance, copying files over with either Samba or NFS; think NFS kept messing up. But yeah, it'll work as a Windows-friendly file server!
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