10 ms·

DragonFly BSD 5.4

114 points by stargrave 8y ago

reconbot 8y ago
I had no idea what dragonofly is, it looks to be an experimental BSD based OS https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release54/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release54/ DragonFly belongs to the same class of operating systems as other BSD-derived systems and Linux. It is based on the same UNIX ideals and APIs and shares ancestor code with other BSD operating systems. DragonFly provides an opportunity for the BSD base to grow in an entirely different direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD series. DragonFly includes many useful features that differentiate it from other operating systems in the same class.
- keithpeter 8y ago
  Google tells me that this is a fork of FreeBSD from some years ago, and that there is some desktop support and some degree of support for laptops, especially Thinkpads from a few years ago. Anyone else care to comment?
  - xte 8y ago
    I'v tried it in the past because of Hammer storage (please do not call it fs), hw support at that time was far from good and desktop usability is reasonably low (though not much lower than {Open,Net}BSD) but without counting cluster's hammer by itself it's simply the storage we desperately need. Think of a zfs log-structured instead of offer only snapshots. This means a complete protection against any accidental delete/overwrite since any write on disk create a new "checkpoint" and with proper file manager integration this means you can "browse history" of your's files and trees like they came from a VCS software.
    - keithpeter 8y ago
      So I could recover previously saved versions of e.g. a word-processing file? Used to use that back per-millennium on a Novel network with shared drives and it was very useful indeed. I've always wondered why that feature wasn't available in later systems.
      - ams6110 8y ago
        I think in those days it was simple filename versioning (VMS had it in the 1980s) and not based on diffs or COW.
      - xte 8y ago
        Yes and not only, you can see file history, just like commit history in git&c, you can compute diff on-the-fly both for single file and entire trees, you can "undo" last write etc There is zero filemanager integration, so only manual CLI operation with a UI a bit less comfortable than zfs, encryption have few limitations, physical volume management does not offer "built-in raids implementation" of zfs (but you can create volume on top of any supported raid config), deduplication is a bit resource intensive, replication is not clustered even if you can "mirror" (incremental mirrors included) any volume locally or on a remote machine in a way similar to zfs one... Essentially is a zfs with a raw and a bit less intuitive UI with logfs and few nice extras.
        loeg 8y ago
        > deduplication is a bit resource intensive That's true everywhere, outside specialized hardware offload.
        xte 8y ago
        Yep, I mean compared to zfs live dedup it use less ram but generate an I/O load similar to a full resilvering... In that sense from my point of view it's "intensive", however consider that I only play with it, I do not have a solid idea on how it can be in real world scenarios...
  - loeg 8y ago
    This is all accurate. It's a FreeBSD 4 fork that targets amd64 exclusively. (The latest FreeBSD release is 12.0.) That's not to say it is stale or anything like that; the BSDs share quite a bit of code heavily thanks to the license. And DFBSD has some novel things that FreeBSD does not have: in particular the SMP model is still distinct; they have the novel HAMMER filesystem, which no other operating system has; and they lead FreeBSD on DRM graphics drivers porting from Linux and non-uniform NUMA support (i.e., Threadripper 2990WX). There are certainly other things I am forgetting or simply don't know about; I develop FreeBSD and don't use Dragonfly myself.
- andrewl 8y ago
  It may be experimental in that it's diverged significantly from FreeBSD, from which it was forked. But experimental does not mean new. Release 1.0 was in July 2004. Apparently the lead developer's experience with the Amiga OS influenced the project to some degree.
  - loeg 8y ago
    Yeah, Dillon (lead developer) forked FreeBSD 4 over (at least) a dispute in how SMP should be implemented. (FreeBSD 5 was the first release to support SMP.) DragonFlyBSD => DFBSD => Dillon's FreeBSD.
    - tedunangst 8y ago
      FreeBSD 3 supported SMP. FreeBSD 5 had the "new" SMP.
      - loeg 8y ago
        Mea culpa. This all predates my involvement.
    - jabl 8y ago
      I recall back then Dillon had some unconventional ideas how to do SMP compared to the traditional approach of ever more fine-grained locking as done by FreeBSD and Linux. Is DragonFlyBSD still following this design, and if so, how well did it work out, or if not, did they revert to a more traditional approach?
      - loeg 8y ago
        I don't follow DFBSD development too closely, but it looks like they still have the somewhat novel lock tokens: https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/Locking_and_Synchronization/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/Locking_and_Sync... I don't know how well it works for them or if they've gone back to using more typical locking more recently.
- walrus01 8y ago
  https://www.dragonflybsd.org/history/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/history/
zandl 8y ago
Every time I read about DragonFly I’m never quite sure what it can do that’s different than other OSes that makes it interesting. The best I can tell it’s just that some of the subsystems are different and it’s more of an experiment for under the hood OS features.
- Koshkin 8y ago
  Looks like its goal is to provide a built-in support for implementing distributed systems (clustering, NUMA, etc.).
  - philjohn 8y ago
    It started off when Dillon disagreed with the way FreeBSD was doing NUMA. He had his own ideas, so went off to ferment them.
    - loeg 8y ago
      SMP, not NUMA, but otherwise yes.
      - org3432 8y ago
        I vaguely recall this as well, do you remember what was better about his approach?
        loeg 8y ago
        Hah, I wasn't around at that time. I believe FreeBSD 5 went ahead and did the same thing most other BSDs and Linux did initially, which was the so-called "Giant" lock scheme, where only one CPU could be in the kernel at a time. The plan being to gradually break things into smaller locks. That's more or less worked (for FreeBSD and maybe NetBSD — OpenBSD still has notoriously poor kernel concurrency in 2018), but didn't yield high concurrency up front, and there are still vestigial uses of Giant in FreeBSD. I think Dillon had some sort of lock token thing? It looks like they're described here, under "LWKT Serializing Tokens:" https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/Locking_and_Synchronization/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/Locking_and_Sync... . Looks somewhat easier to integrate but also some tradeoffs — proper restart when all your lock tokens get dropped seems like it might be fiddly.
tiffanyh 8y ago
I’m a big fan of DragonflyBSD and for all who don’t know DragonflyBSD well, here’s my summary of the OS when v5.0 was released [1] It really doesn’t get the recognition it desires. It’s has highly advanced features and performance and frankly more people should be using it. Given the recent ZFS/FreeBSD news - I’d love more people to adopt DragonflyBSD for its Hammer2 filesysten. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15484735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15484735
- drewg123 8y ago
  Why do you think the ZFS/FreeBSD news is bad? I run FreeBSD ZFS on my desktop and have for years, and we're thinking of using it (for the root fs) at work. I considered the ZOL integration to be good news. We'll get better CI, and we'll share features with ZOL faster. I don't really see the downside. I've also run ZOL for 7 years on my wife's desktops..
  - Crontab 8y ago
    I personally don't like the idea of FreeBSD being downstream from a project that can't even be included with the OS it is being designed for.
    - equalunique 8y ago
      This. ZoL may have more development activity behind it, but due to licencing, it will never be a first-class citizen in Linux like it is on FreeBSD/Illumos. That limitation makes the decision to turn OpenZFS (essentially, ZoL) into the upstream seem unwise.
      - loeg 8y ago
        Honestly, due to the licensing it's not exactly a first-class citizen on FreeBSD either. It's a copyleft license that doesn't pollute other source files, but it's still copyleft for ZFS itself. That is contra to the BSD license.
xte 8y ago
My biggest interest in DragonFlyBSD is hammer storage, while I of course appreciate the general hard work hw support and general usage does not suite most of my needs, especially when I start using NixOS/GuixSD with the wonderful idea of having declarative/functional systems that's the future of ANY OS IMVHO but hammer by itself is fantastic. It deserve a future not different than SSH. On GNU/Linux I "mimic" it with a classic poor man's solution (mdraid+LUKS+LVM+nilfs2), in the past I've used zfs first on OpenSolaris (SXDE/CE/Indiana) and after even on GNU/Linux but while remain a fantastic pioneer hammer being a logged fs is far superior. Thanks so for the hard work!
- equalunique 8y ago
  A applaud your repertoire of OS experience. Perhaps because HAMMER (+HAMMER2) is BSD licenced, it might have better potential as a Linux kernel module. I also recommend trying out Bcachefs. It's developed on Debian so that's your best bet to give it a shot.
  - xte 8y ago
    I tried out bcachefs in the recent past but... Well... for now it's only a classic, usable, stable fs... All the nice features are only promises in development, no snapshot, no replication, nothing is there only a stable fs that seems no different than ext... On license of course there is a problem but if we have zfs ported well... I think it can be circumvented, only I fear that in GNU/Linux land (especially -Linux part) there are too many people that do not consider at all modern needs, most of them are programmer's with no sysadmining background, they do not even understand why we desperately need new storage and "Big&Powerful" are absolutely happy because actual paleolithic storage solution means business opportunities... Remember Andrew Morton with it infamous "rampant layer violation" against zfs or NetApp that ask SUN "to unfree" zfs to avoid disrupting storage market... IMO we have lost after Ubuntu ditch desktop the opportunity of a generic end-users GNU/Linux desktop and due to hw&sw evolution commercial-side we desperately need to innovate again as a FOSS community, DragonflyBSD is a very little substantial single-man-show project but it innovate, GNU keep innovate a bit despite a super-slow evolution and GuixSD is IMO the future of any OS, like it's "father" NixOS, the first IaC-builtin OSes in the world, but we need more, and with more manpower instead of wasting energy in evanescent crappy web-derived tech from GnomeShell extensions to Electron-based (cr)apps. Storage in that sense is the basis since on storage we can design package managers and init systems, so in turn installers and in turn the rest of the OS. Having a modern, powerful storage, something like Plan9 propose years ago, something like Hammer, zfs, nilfs2, stratis etc are a thing that need to evolve and spread in GNU/Linux world or we can't really evolve...
karmakaze 8y ago
Just myself trying to fit the various *BSD's in my mind, I found this[0] which might be helpful: [...] each one has a specific purpose. OpenBSD security, FreeBSD more desktop/server, NetBSD “run on anything and everything”, DragonFlyBSD scaling and performance. [0] https://itsfoss.com/why-use-bsd/ https://itsfoss.com/why-use-bsd/
- ajross 8y ago
  That's sort of reconned, though. NetBSD split from FreeBSD because the former was a bunch of Unix hackers working on Unix hardware and the latter wanted to focus on the 386 port. Both OpenBSD and DragonFlyBSD stem, ultimately, from personality conflicts within the developer community in FreeBSD. They all found their purpose after the splits, not before.
  - loeg 8y ago
    NetBSD and FreeBSD both forked 386BSD; NetBSD didn't fork/split from FreeBSD. OpenBSD forked NetBSD and Dragonfly forked FreeBSD. > Both OpenBSD and DragonFlyBSD stem, ultimately, from personality conflicts within the developer community in FreeBSD. > They all found their purpose after the splits, not before. Indeed. And both are still heavily influenced by the forking BDFL figures (Theo, Dillon).
  - Crontab 8y ago
    NetBSD is older than FreeBSD.
    - hestefisk 8y ago
      NetBSD was forked from 386BSD and then repatched with Net/2 code.
- LeoPanthera 8y ago
  OpenBSD has a reputation for security but if you ask me its killer features are ease of use, documentation (the man pages are so good), and laptop compatibility.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
w323898 8y ago
How's the EFI support on this in comparison to other BSDs?
gigatexal 8y ago
Are there benchmarks that show Hammer2 faster than a decently configured ZFS setup? What’s it offer that ZFS and snapshots and the like doesn’t? I’m not trying to start a flame war just curious
- linsomniac 8y ago
  I keep looking at it because ZFS deduplication is unusable for me. In every instance I've tried using it, it has resulted in kernel panics likely due to out of memory. My current backup server, where I'd really like to use it, would need something like $1,500 of RAM to support dedup, if I measure it correctly (because the simulation seems to only do active blocks, not snapshots, so I don't have a good idea of actual DDT RAM required).
  - gigatexal 8y ago
    Ahh yeah dedup is a ram hungry feature. I am hoping the devs find a way to fix that maybe with some novel use of data structures that make it less ram heavy. But it could be relate to the copy on write nature of ZFS and not be possible.
  - hestefisk 8y ago
    Dedup is indeed very memory hungry with ZFS. Likely cheaper / more cost effective to buy a bucket load of disk storage and extend your pool using raidz rather than adding ecc mem for ZFS.
awiesenhofer 8y ago
Does anyone here use DragonFly BSD in production? Would love to hear what people are using it for!
- gjs278 8y ago
  I run my website https://garyshood.com https://garyshood.com on it
  - xKingfisher 8y ago
    I'd be curious to hear more about your experience doing this. What hosting provider do you use? Most of the major ones don't seem particularly BSD-friendly. I've always been tempted to try running my website off a dragonfly instance vs managed hosting, but it's a pretty daunting switch.
    - shawn 8y ago
      We run https://laarc.io https://laarc.io off a $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet using FreeBSD. 30ms average page render time. It’s behind nginx + cloudflare, and I haven’t been able to DoS it yet. Very snappy, quite happy. It’s not Dragonfly, but it’s pretty neat running a BSD in the cloud.
    - gjs278 8y ago
      ramnode lets you do custom isos and since it is KVM they are pretty good for this. I run it on the smallest instance too with 1gb of ram and 2gb of swap.
azinman2 8y ago
Who uses dragonfly bsd in any kind of non-experimental setup?

114 points by stargrave 8y ago

I had no idea what dragonofly is, it looks to be an experimental BSD based OS https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release54/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release54/ DragonFly belongs to the same class of operating systems as other BSD-derived systems and Linux. It is based on the same UNIX ideals and APIs and shares ancestor code with other BSD operating systems. DragonFly provides an opportunity for the BSD base to grow in an entirely different direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD series. DragonFly includes many useful features that differentiate it from other operating systems in the same class.

keithpeter 8y ago
Google tells me that this is a fork of FreeBSD from some years ago, and that there is some desktop support and some degree of support for laptops, especially Thinkpads from a few years ago. Anyone else care to comment?
- xte 8y ago
  I'v tried it in the past because of Hammer storage (please do not call it fs), hw support at that time was far from good and desktop usability is reasonably low (though not much lower than {Open,Net}BSD) but without counting cluster's hammer by itself it's simply the storage we desperately need. Think of a zfs log-structured instead of offer only snapshots. This means a complete protection against any accidental delete/overwrite since any write on disk create a new "checkpoint" and with proper file manager integration this means you can "browse history" of your's files and trees like they came from a VCS software.
  - keithpeter 8y ago
    So I could recover previously saved versions of e.g. a word-processing file? Used to use that back per-millennium on a Novel network with shared drives and it was very useful indeed. I've always wondered why that feature wasn't available in later systems.
    - ams6110 8y ago
      I think in those days it was simple filename versioning (VMS had it in the 1980s) and not based on diffs or COW.
    - xte 8y ago
      Yes and not only, you can see file history, just like commit history in git&c, you can compute diff on-the-fly both for single file and entire trees, you can "undo" last write etc There is zero filemanager integration, so only manual CLI operation with a UI a bit less comfortable than zfs, encryption have few limitations, physical volume management does not offer "built-in raids implementation" of zfs (but you can create volume on top of any supported raid config), deduplication is a bit resource intensive, replication is not clustered even if you can "mirror" (incremental mirrors included) any volume locally or on a remote machine in a way similar to zfs one... Essentially is a zfs with a raw and a bit less intuitive UI with logfs and few nice extras.
      - loeg 8y ago
        > deduplication is a bit resource intensive That's true everywhere, outside specialized hardware offload.
        xte 8y ago
        Yep, I mean compared to zfs live dedup it use less ram but generate an I/O load similar to a full resilvering... In that sense from my point of view it's "intensive", however consider that I only play with it, I do not have a solid idea on how it can be in real world scenarios...
- loeg 8y ago
  This is all accurate. It's a FreeBSD 4 fork that targets amd64 exclusively. (The latest FreeBSD release is 12.0.) That's not to say it is stale or anything like that; the BSDs share quite a bit of code heavily thanks to the license. And DFBSD has some novel things that FreeBSD does not have: in particular the SMP model is still distinct; they have the novel HAMMER filesystem, which no other operating system has; and they lead FreeBSD on DRM graphics drivers porting from Linux and non-uniform NUMA support (i.e., Threadripper 2990WX). There are certainly other things I am forgetting or simply don't know about; I develop FreeBSD and don't use Dragonfly myself.
andrewl 8y ago
It may be experimental in that it's diverged significantly from FreeBSD, from which it was forked. But experimental does not mean new. Release 1.0 was in July 2004. Apparently the lead developer's experience with the Amiga OS influenced the project to some degree.
- loeg 8y ago
  Yeah, Dillon (lead developer) forked FreeBSD 4 over (at least) a dispute in how SMP should be implemented. (FreeBSD 5 was the first release to support SMP.) DragonFlyBSD => DFBSD => Dillon's FreeBSD.
  - tedunangst 8y ago
    FreeBSD 3 supported SMP. FreeBSD 5 had the "new" SMP.
    - loeg 8y ago
      Mea culpa. This all predates my involvement.
  - jabl 8y ago
    I recall back then Dillon had some unconventional ideas how to do SMP compared to the traditional approach of ever more fine-grained locking as done by FreeBSD and Linux. Is DragonFlyBSD still following this design, and if so, how well did it work out, or if not, did they revert to a more traditional approach?
    - loeg 8y ago
      I don't follow DFBSD development too closely, but it looks like they still have the somewhat novel lock tokens: https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/Locking_and_Synchronization/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/Locking_and_Sync... I don't know how well it works for them or if they've gone back to using more typical locking more recently.
walrus01 8y ago
https://www.dragonflybsd.org/history/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/history/

zandl 8y ago

Every time I read about DragonFly I’m never quite sure what it can do that’s different than other OSes that makes it interesting. The best I can tell it’s just that some of the subsystems are different and it’s more of an experiment for under the hood OS features.

Koshkin 8y ago
Looks like its goal is to provide a built-in support for implementing distributed systems (clustering, NUMA, etc.).
- philjohn 8y ago
  It started off when Dillon disagreed with the way FreeBSD was doing NUMA. He had his own ideas, so went off to ferment them.
  - loeg 8y ago
    SMP, not NUMA, but otherwise yes.
    - org3432 8y ago
      I vaguely recall this as well, do you remember what was better about his approach?
      - loeg 8y ago
        Hah, I wasn't around at that time. I believe FreeBSD 5 went ahead and did the same thing most other BSDs and Linux did initially, which was the so-called "Giant" lock scheme, where only one CPU could be in the kernel at a time. The plan being to gradually break things into smaller locks. That's more or less worked (for FreeBSD and maybe NetBSD — OpenBSD still has notoriously poor kernel concurrency in 2018), but didn't yield high concurrency up front, and there are still vestigial uses of Giant in FreeBSD. I think Dillon had some sort of lock token thing? It looks like they're described here, under "LWKT Serializing Tokens:" https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/Locking_and_Synchronization/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/Locking_and_Sync... . Looks somewhat easier to integrate but also some tradeoffs — proper restart when all your lock tokens get dropped seems like it might be fiddly.

tiffanyh 8y ago

I’m a big fan of DragonflyBSD and for all who don’t know DragonflyBSD well, here’s my summary of the OS when v5.0 was released [1] It really doesn’t get the recognition it desires. It’s has highly advanced features and performance and frankly more people should be using it. Given the recent ZFS/FreeBSD news - I’d love more people to adopt DragonflyBSD for its Hammer2 filesysten. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15484735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15484735

drewg123 8y ago
Why do you think the ZFS/FreeBSD news is bad? I run FreeBSD ZFS on my desktop and have for years, and we're thinking of using it (for the root fs) at work. I considered the ZOL integration to be good news. We'll get better CI, and we'll share features with ZOL faster. I don't really see the downside. I've also run ZOL for 7 years on my wife's desktops..
- Crontab 8y ago
  I personally don't like the idea of FreeBSD being downstream from a project that can't even be included with the OS it is being designed for.
  - equalunique 8y ago
    This. ZoL may have more development activity behind it, but due to licencing, it will never be a first-class citizen in Linux like it is on FreeBSD/Illumos. That limitation makes the decision to turn OpenZFS (essentially, ZoL) into the upstream seem unwise.
    - loeg 8y ago
      Honestly, due to the licensing it's not exactly a first-class citizen on FreeBSD either. It's a copyleft license that doesn't pollute other source files, but it's still copyleft for ZFS itself. That is contra to the BSD license.

xte 8y ago

My biggest interest in DragonFlyBSD is hammer storage, while I of course appreciate the general hard work hw support and general usage does not suite most of my needs, especially when I start using NixOS/GuixSD with the wonderful idea of having declarative/functional systems that's the future of ANY OS IMVHO but hammer by itself is fantastic. It deserve a future not different than SSH. On GNU/Linux I "mimic" it with a classic poor man's solution (mdraid+LUKS+LVM+nilfs2), in the past I've used zfs first on OpenSolaris (SXDE/CE/Indiana) and after even on GNU/Linux but while remain a fantastic pioneer hammer being a logged fs is far superior. Thanks so for the hard work!

equalunique 8y ago
A applaud your repertoire of OS experience. Perhaps because HAMMER (+HAMMER2) is BSD licenced, it might have better potential as a Linux kernel module. I also recommend trying out Bcachefs. It's developed on Debian so that's your best bet to give it a shot.
- xte 8y ago
  I tried out bcachefs in the recent past but... Well... for now it's only a classic, usable, stable fs... All the nice features are only promises in development, no snapshot, no replication, nothing is there only a stable fs that seems no different than ext... On license of course there is a problem but if we have zfs ported well... I think it can be circumvented, only I fear that in GNU/Linux land (especially -Linux part) there are too many people that do not consider at all modern needs, most of them are programmer's with no sysadmining background, they do not even understand why we desperately need new storage and "Big&Powerful" are absolutely happy because actual paleolithic storage solution means business opportunities... Remember Andrew Morton with it infamous "rampant layer violation" against zfs or NetApp that ask SUN "to unfree" zfs to avoid disrupting storage market... IMO we have lost after Ubuntu ditch desktop the opportunity of a generic end-users GNU/Linux desktop and due to hw&sw evolution commercial-side we desperately need to innovate again as a FOSS community, DragonflyBSD is a very little substantial single-man-show project but it innovate, GNU keep innovate a bit despite a super-slow evolution and GuixSD is IMO the future of any OS, like it's "father" NixOS, the first IaC-builtin OSes in the world, but we need more, and with more manpower instead of wasting energy in evanescent crappy web-derived tech from GnomeShell extensions to Electron-based (cr)apps. Storage in that sense is the basis since on storage we can design package managers and init systems, so in turn installers and in turn the rest of the OS. Having a modern, powerful storage, something like Plan9 propose years ago, something like Hammer, zfs, nilfs2, stratis etc are a thing that need to evolve and spread in GNU/Linux world or we can't really evolve...

karmakaze 8y ago

Just myself trying to fit the various *BSD's in my mind, I found this[0] which might be helpful: [...] each one has a specific purpose. OpenBSD security, FreeBSD more desktop/server, NetBSD “run on anything and everything”, DragonFlyBSD scaling and performance. [0] https://itsfoss.com/why-use-bsd/ https://itsfoss.com/why-use-bsd/

ajross 8y ago
That's sort of reconned, though. NetBSD split from FreeBSD because the former was a bunch of Unix hackers working on Unix hardware and the latter wanted to focus on the 386 port. Both OpenBSD and DragonFlyBSD stem, ultimately, from personality conflicts within the developer community in FreeBSD. They all found their purpose after the splits, not before.
- loeg 8y ago
  NetBSD and FreeBSD both forked 386BSD; NetBSD didn't fork/split from FreeBSD. OpenBSD forked NetBSD and Dragonfly forked FreeBSD. > Both OpenBSD and DragonFlyBSD stem, ultimately, from personality conflicts within the developer community in FreeBSD. > They all found their purpose after the splits, not before. Indeed. And both are still heavily influenced by the forking BDFL figures (Theo, Dillon).
- Crontab 8y ago
  NetBSD is older than FreeBSD.
  - hestefisk 8y ago
    NetBSD was forked from 386BSD and then repatched with Net/2 code.
LeoPanthera 8y ago
OpenBSD has a reputation for security but if you ask me its killer features are ease of use, documentation (the man pages are so good), and laptop compatibility.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

w323898 8y ago

How's the EFI support on this in comparison to other BSDs?

gigatexal 8y ago

Are there benchmarks that show Hammer2 faster than a decently configured ZFS setup? What’s it offer that ZFS and snapshots and the like doesn’t? I’m not trying to start a flame war just curious

linsomniac 8y ago
I keep looking at it because ZFS deduplication is unusable for me. In every instance I've tried using it, it has resulted in kernel panics likely due to out of memory. My current backup server, where I'd really like to use it, would need something like $1,500 of RAM to support dedup, if I measure it correctly (because the simulation seems to only do active blocks, not snapshots, so I don't have a good idea of actual DDT RAM required).
- gigatexal 8y ago
  Ahh yeah dedup is a ram hungry feature. I am hoping the devs find a way to fix that maybe with some novel use of data structures that make it less ram heavy. But it could be relate to the copy on write nature of ZFS and not be possible.
- hestefisk 8y ago
  Dedup is indeed very memory hungry with ZFS. Likely cheaper / more cost effective to buy a bucket load of disk storage and extend your pool using raidz rather than adding ecc mem for ZFS.

awiesenhofer 8y ago

Does anyone here use DragonFly BSD in production? Would love to hear what people are using it for!

gjs278 8y ago
I run my website https://garyshood.com https://garyshood.com on it
- xKingfisher 8y ago
  I'd be curious to hear more about your experience doing this. What hosting provider do you use? Most of the major ones don't seem particularly BSD-friendly. I've always been tempted to try running my website off a dragonfly instance vs managed hosting, but it's a pretty daunting switch.
  - shawn 8y ago
    We run https://laarc.io https://laarc.io off a $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet using FreeBSD. 30ms average page render time. It’s behind nginx + cloudflare, and I haven’t been able to DoS it yet. Very snappy, quite happy. It’s not Dragonfly, but it’s pretty neat running a BSD in the cloud.
  - gjs278 8y ago
    ramnode lets you do custom isos and since it is KVM they are pretty good for this. I run it on the smallest instance too with 1gb of ram and 2gb of swap.

azinman2 8y ago

Who uses dragonfly bsd in any kind of non-experimental setup?