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It's been a long time, but IIRC the split was due to direction on SMP. From what I recall, the FreeBSD team made the right call at the time. https://people.fr
by tw04 3y ago
It's been a long time, but IIRC the split was due to direction on SMP. From what I recall, the FreeBSD team made the right call at the time.
https://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/dfly.html https://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/dfly.html
- loeg 3y agoIt was also a clash of personalities.
- darkhelmet 3y agoIt was all truly unfortunate. But sometimes there are no clear right answers - but you have to make a choice between multiple bad options. When doing nothing isn't an option either then you have to make a call as to what you think the least terrible outcome will be and history will be the judge as to whether you were right. Similar issues contributed to there being multiple *BSDs. It's never that simple of course, but it was certainly a part of it. Technical/ideology and Personality all play a part.
- pxc 3y agoIs there any (ideally charitable, historical) writing about this for the uninitiated?
- inferiorhuman 3y agoYou've gotta be careful giving vikings a commit bit. Your best bet for information is probably the mailing list archives. To be a bit reductive, Matt had strong opinions about SMP and threading and got his commit bit yanked. As a result he forked FreeBSD (4?) to create DragonFlyBSD. It's not so far off of how we ended up with OpenBSD really. Or as Linus put it, Theo is… difficult. Honestly, I think these forced forks are good. They're a a perfectly natural result of getting a bunch of smart, opinionated people in a group together. They've given some incredibly smart people a much bigger sandbox to play in. As a result we've got things like openssh and hammer.
- blodorn 3y ago20 years later, who made the right call?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tiffanyh 3y ago> “ From what I recall, the FreeBSD team made the right call at the time.” I’m not so sure. Given how unstable FreeBSD 5 (intro of new SMP) was, until it finally stabilized multiple years later at v8.0 - I’m not sure others would have that same sentiment. And seeing how DragonflyBSD performance is standing up to FreeBSD (and best’ing it times) even though they have a radically smaller developer community (and no corporate support) - it does challenge the topic of who was right. I do think objectively, people would state that DragonflyBSD chose a clean/simpler architecture that’s easier to understand https://www.phoronix.com/review/bsd-linux-eo2021 https://www.phoronix.com/review/bsd-linux-eo2021
- gonzo 3y agoFreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE was announced January 19, 2003. Matt Dillon announced DragonFly BSD nearly 20 years ago on July,16 2003 FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE was announced Nov 25, 2009 You’re talking about events that took place over 13.5 years ago. On the benchmarks: Where are the Apache, NginX, PostgreSQL and Redis benchmarks? Where are the measurements of network performance?
- IntelMiner 3y ago>Where are the Apache, NginX, PostgreSQL and Redis benchmarks? >Where are the measurements of network performance? You'd have to ask Larabel about that. But given that Dragonfly can seemingly trade blows with FreeBSD *18 years later* does seem to suggest there's some merits to their design
- agapon 3y agoDragonflyBSD design is definitely not without merits. But FreeBSD took the mainstream approach.
- sillywalk 3y agoHere are some benchmarks, https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/