Kind of wish HAMMER2 development switched to Linux and got a big boost in visibility and exposure. I've been excited about it for ~15 years, but I've never gotten enough round-tuits to put it to any real use. I'd love to switch my rsync+ZFS snapshots backup servers over to HAMMER, but ZFS works great except for deduplication.
DragonFly BSD 6.4
51–60 of 60 posts
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#52Earlier 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/
>Some years ago they claimed to be fast. It is fast, maybe the fastest of all BSD's: https://www.phoronix.com/review/bsd-linux-eo2021/2
You are right, it seems much faster than freeBSD in a lot of areas and relevant benchmarks (real world programs and scenarios).
They got similar overall results, but as far as I see, freeBSD is mainly faster in irrelevant benchmarks. (This is an opinion based on a glance of the phoronix article. I haven't spent much time looking at the results, also I am not an expert at benchmarking.)
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#53Kind of wish HAMMER2 development switched to Linux and got a big boost in visibility and exposure. I've been excited about it for ~15 years, but I've never gotten enough round-tuits to put it to any real use. I'd love to switch my rsync+ZFS snapshots backup servers over to HAMMER, but ZFS works great except for deduplication.
Linux has a history of rejecting any actually good file systems.
This includes but isn't limited to Tux3 and ReiserFS 4 & 5.
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#54Kind of wish HAMMER2 development switched to Linux and got a big boost in visibility and exposure. I've been excited about it for ~15 years, but I've never gotten enough round-tuits to put it to any real use. I'd love to switch my rsync+ZFS snapshots backup servers over to HAMMER, but ZFS works great except for deduplication.
Linux has a history of rejecting any actually good file systems. This includes but isn't limited to Tux3 and ReiserFS 4 & 5.
What was the story with tux3? It looks like it "read and wrote it's first file" in August 2008, and then had it's last update a few months later in Dec 2008. If if never got out of heavy development phase, being in the kernel wasn't the right place for it.
ReiserFS 4, it's been a very long time since I thought about it, but ISTR there were technical issues the needed to be addressed to bring it in mainline, and personality issues didn't help any, but that's a fading memory. Which is unfortunate, because ReiserFS had some great features.
On the other hand, btrfs made it into the kernel fairly easily, as a counterpoint. It's a unusual situation because it's been fairly broken and in heavy development for much of it's life in kernel, but early in-kernel versions were actually working fairly good (in my experience, I ran some fairly early versions in my laptop for a year or two with good luck, then an OS update brought in a new version and I had terrible corruption issues.
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Some years ago they claimed to be fast. It is fast, maybe the fastest of all BSD's: https://www.phoronix.com/review/bsd-linux-eo2021/2
You are right, it seems much faster than freeBSD in a lot of areas and relevant benchmarks (real world programs and scenarios). They got similar overall results, but as far as I see, freeBSD is mainly faster in irrelevant benchmarks. (This is an opinion based on a glance of the phoronix article. I haven't spent much time looking at the results, also I am not an expert at benchmarking.)
I mean it's just impressive for such a small project, and benchmark's...well they just count for your very own workload..it's good to find regressions but not much else.
BTW i run FreeBSD ;)
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#56Kind of wish HAMMER2 development switched to Linux and got a big boost in visibility and exposure. I've been excited about it for ~15 years, but I've never gotten enough round-tuits to put it to any real use. I'd love to switch my rsync+ZFS snapshots backup servers over to HAMMER, but ZFS works great except for deduplication.
>I'd love to switch my rsync+ZFS snapshots backup servers over to HAMMER
Why don't you do that? You don't need linux to be happy, quite be opposite actually, install DFly and have fun.
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#57Kind of wish HAMMER2 development switched to Linux and got a big boost in visibility and exposure. I've been excited about it for ~15 years, but I've never gotten enough round-tuits to put it to any real use. I'd love to switch my rsync+ZFS snapshots backup servers over to HAMMER, but ZFS works great except for deduplication.
>I'd love to switch my rsync+ZFS snapshots backup servers over to HAMMER Why don't you do that? You don't need linux to be happy, quite be opposite actually, install DFly and have fun.
As I said, I haven't made the time: it's not just installing DFly, I've got to convert all my backup code to work with HAMMER, track down issues, figure out updates, etc... Really the thing I want to try about HAMMER is the deduplication, ZFS deduplication perpetually seems to require more RAM than I have to give it
HAMMER2 is really impressive, and Matthew Dillon's work on it and the rest of DragonFly is spectacular. I guess I feel like DragonFly is limiting the exposure that HAMMER could have. I know long ago there was an early aborted effort to port it, not sure it was ever very serious.
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#58Can 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 am a bit of a BSD outsider, but I've been exploring them recently.
I'd say it's more like:
• NetBSD – the oldest, aims at the widest platform support
• FreeBSD – next oldest, aims at modern hardware, best hardware and desktop support, native ZFS.
• OpenBSD – a bit younger, aims at correctness and security, so very basic hardware support, e.g. no Bluetooth at all. But that means it supports some of the newest kit, e.g. Apple M1 and M2, because its idea of "support" is so rudimentary.
• Dragonfly BSD – the youngest, the most experimental. X86-64 only. Aims at supporting lots of CPUs, lots of memory, lots of disk via a homegrown fancy modern FS, HAMMER2.
So, no, I suspect DragonFly is the fastest.
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can use WifiBox[1], being a user of FreeBSD myself (Laptop, Workstation and many servers) it would be nice to have "native" ac/ax. [1] https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox
Yes, I've mentioned that solution. It isn't really "FreeBSD support wireless" if I have to run a VM for it, is it?
Re: DragonFly BSD 6.4
#60Earlier 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.
I remember explaining why I used FreeBSD instead of Linux back in the day, and just after I said "it's a bit more stable than Linux" the system completely froze. Ouch, embarrassing. Needless to say, no one was especially convinced. That was on 5.0 or 5.1 IIRC. (These days, there isn't too much of a difference any more; Linux has come a long way in the last 20 years.)
My whole journey to freebsd started because I had a very old PC that I used as PPTP server while running not-so-legal ISP in the neighborhood. FreeBSD happened to be the greatest for this because of in-kernel support thanks to netgraph, but the real reason why - Linux couldn't finish the installation on that machine without crashing. FreeBSD meanwhile kept working until I made enough money to buy a better hardware.
Just for that reason, I will forever love it, but won't be using it on desktop - I can't use 10 years for GPU drivers on my main rig.