3 ms·

I wonder how Dragonfly BSD defaults compare. https://www.dragonflybsd.org/history/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/history/

snvzz 4y ago
Very favorably. Dragonfly has superior architecture, performance and security, despite its much smaller team. It is a textbook example of how a small team of focused competent engineers will deliver higher quality than an heterogeneous large body of developers with no focus. They are actually scaling in a manner competitive with Linux, unlike the other BSDs. When Matt left Freebsd, which was due to a conflict that spawned over bad technical decisions, many good developers followed him. What was left did implicitly support bad decisions. Fine-grained locks for SMP do explode complexity and makes writing quality code that much harder. It is also a problem in Linux, which compensates with sheer manpower. Freebsd has been a cesspool since then. Jesus, what a mess Freebsd has become.
- acoppora 4y ago
  Can you confirm that Dragonfly has all of the CPU vulnerability mitigations that Linux has, including Retbleed, Spectre V1, and Spectre-BHB? FreeBSD does not have those three. It would also be good to read about Dragonfly's exploit mitigations. Are these documented somewhere?
  - snvzz 4y ago
    The wikipedia article has a history[0] of releases. Meltdown and Spectre mitigation support are mentioned in 5.2. I know there have been new CPU vulnerabilities found past these, but I haven't been keeping track closely. It would help if they had an announce mailing list. Looking at older release notes seems to be a manner of digging through the users list, or guessing URLs based on the current release notes. They seem in dire need of a maintainer for the website. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD#Release_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD#Release_history

3 ms·

I wonder how Dragonfly BSD defaults compare. https://www.dragonflybsd.org/history/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/history/

by alberth 4y ago

snvzz 4y ago
Very favorably. Dragonfly has superior architecture, performance and security, despite its much smaller team. It is a textbook example of how a small team of focused competent engineers will deliver higher quality than an heterogeneous large body of developers with no focus. They are actually scaling in a manner competitive with Linux, unlike the other BSDs. When Matt left Freebsd, which was due to a conflict that spawned over bad technical decisions, many good developers followed him. What was left did implicitly support bad decisions. Fine-grained locks for SMP do explode complexity and makes writing quality code that much harder. It is also a problem in Linux, which compensates with sheer manpower. Freebsd has been a cesspool since then. Jesus, what a mess Freebsd has become.
- acoppora 4y ago
  Can you confirm that Dragonfly has all of the CPU vulnerability mitigations that Linux has, including Retbleed, Spectre V1, and Spectre-BHB? FreeBSD does not have those three. It would also be good to read about Dragonfly's exploit mitigations. Are these documented somewhere?
  - snvzz 4y ago
    The wikipedia article has a history[0] of releases. Meltdown and Spectre mitigation support are mentioned in 5.2. I know there have been new CPU vulnerabilities found past these, but I haven't been keeping track closely. It would help if they had an announce mailing list. Looking at older release notes seems to be a manner of digging through the users list, or guessing URLs based on the current release notes. They seem in dire need of a maintainer for the website. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD#Release_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD#Release_history