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I'm not an expert on DragonFly, but from what I know it's design differences aren't really that radical. It differs substantially from FreeBSD, but it's not lik

by gh02t 9y ago

I'm not an expert on DragonFly, but from what I know it's design differences aren't really that radical. It differs substantially from FreeBSD, but it's not like a fundamental re-imagining optimized for SMP. Performance is a bit better in some places, and about the same in others. I do think DragonFly is neat and quite interesting, but I suspect it didn't gain as much momentum because the community behind BSD is already small and reluctant to fracture without stronger reasons. It's worth noting that this is not like spinning off a new Linux distro where you're ultimately just repackaging different variations of the same basic OS - DragonFly is effectively an entirely different OS since the kernel is significantly different. Slightly out of date, but still relevant benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=freebsd11-beta-benchmarks&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=freebsd1...

agar 9y ago
Thanks, I took a look through that and most (all?) of the benchmarks seemed to be fairly traditional tasks, some not even highly threaded. I guess I'm wondering if complex, multi-box, cloud-scale workloads have any advantage on Dragonfly - or if the optimizations for clustering are in such a narrow band of use cases that modern architectures have passed it by just through brute force. There's an irony here, in that Matt Dillon was an ex-Amiga hacker (IIRC, some of Dragonfly's architectural choices were inspired by the Amiga). Anyway, the Amiga's linear memory, co-processor-driven architecture was ridiculously more elegant than the PC's segmented memory, CPU-bound approach. Didn't matter though, a huge investment in working around the PC's limitations led to its market dominance. So, if massive technical accommodations for less efficient OS architectures end up marginalizing Dragonfly, it would be a bit of history repeating itself. And I'm sure the irony wouldn't be lost on Mr. Dillon.

by gh02t 9y ago

agar 9y ago

Thanks, I took a look through that and most (all?) of the benchmarks seemed to be fairly traditional tasks, some not even highly threaded. I guess I'm wondering if complex, multi-box, cloud-scale workloads have any advantage on Dragonfly - or if the optimizations for clustering are in such a narrow band of use cases that modern architectures have passed it by just through brute force. There's an irony here, in that Matt Dillon was an ex-Amiga hacker (IIRC, some of Dragonfly's architectural choices were inspired by the Amiga). Anyway, the Amiga's linear memory, co-processor-driven architecture was ridiculously more elegant than the PC's segmented memory, CPU-bound approach. Didn't matter though, a huge investment in working around the PC's limitations led to its market dominance. So, if massive technical accommodations for less efficient OS architectures end up marginalizing Dragonfly, it would be a bit of history repeating itself. And I'm sure the irony wouldn't be lost on Mr. Dillon.