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DragonFly BSD 6.4

dragonflybsd.org

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Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#31

Post by alberth »

0x457 wrote: post #29
alberth wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> * I do wish that split never happened*

I too wish the split hadn’t happened, and for Matt’s ideas to have landed in FreeBSD.

Dragonfly today is remarkable, still competing head to head with FreeBSD 15 years later but with a development team literally 1/50th the size.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#32

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

mardifoufs wrote: post #23
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…

Is it still aiming for being a distributed OS?

Not explicitly it seems, although it certainly has a lot of the necessary features, like a message passing layer and network mirroring support in HammerFS.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#33

Post by loeg »

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?

DragonFlyBSD is Dillon’s FreeBSD. It’s a fork because of personality disagreements between Dillon and other developers in the FreeBSD 5.0 timeframe. It does some interesting experimental stuff like HammerFS but isn’t really suitable for general use.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#34

Post by loeg »

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/

FreeBSD focuses on performance moreso than Net or OpenBSD.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#35

Post by loeg »

alberth wrote: post #31
0x457 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> * I do wish that split never happened* I too wish the split hadn’t happened, and for Matt’s ideas to have landed in FreeBSD. Dragonfly today is remarkable, still competing head to head with FreeBSD 15 years later but with a development team literally 1/50th the size.

FreeBSD doesn’t have 50 active core developers so it’s hard to imagine how Dragonfly could be 1/50th the size.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#36

Post by canadianfella »

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…

[dead]

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#37

Post by abudabi123 »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #9
nortonham wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought it was centered around the HammerFS.

Based on the Wikipedia page, HammerFS does basically everything.

Would be interesting to know the hardcore performance benchmarks for memory handling, comparing Darwin, Linux, Dragonfly and sw-engineer's aesthetics.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#38

Post by alberth »

loeg wrote: post #35
alberth wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * I do wish that split never happened* I too wish the split hadn’t happened, and for Matt’s ideas to have landed in FreeBSD. Dragonfly today is remarkable, still competing head to head with FreeBSD 15 years later but with a development team literally 1/50th the size.

FreeBSD doesn’t have 50 active core developers so it’s hard to imagine how Dragonfly could be 1/50th the size.

FreeBSD (402)

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/contributors/#staff-com...

vs.

DragonflyBSD (67)

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/team/

So, correct. Not 1/50th.

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#39

Post by lmm »

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

I ran FreeBSD on my desktop for a while; it's fine as a daily driver. I can't speak to bluetooth, and I'm not sure I'd trust it on a laptop (given how hard it is to get suspend working properly even on Linux), but wifi and video work great (you can run the proper nvidia drivers same as Linux).

Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4

#40

Post by rgrmrts »

0x457 wrote: post #28
rgrmrts wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, my bad -- I misread the 'or' as 'and'. Agreed, lack of n/ac/ax has been an issue! Especially when cloning large repos I didn't realize how much I take >500mbps on wifi for granted.
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