6 ms·

DragonFly BSD 4.0 released

189 points by fcambus 12y ago

mhd 12y ago
The graphics support sounds neat for (developer) workstation usage, hope it gets at least a basic suspend/hibernate support soon to complete the picture.
fcambus 12y ago
Also worth mentioning, BSDTalk has an interview with Matthew Dillon about the 4.0 release of DragonFly BSD : http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2014/11/bsdtalk248-dragonflybsd-with-matthew.html http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2014/11/bsdtalk248-dragonflybsd-...
- hestefisk 12y ago
  Just listened to this BSD Talk episode yesterday. Matt is doing some extremely interesting work, not only on the kernel and file system research side, but also in terms of their completely customised networking stack, which utilises multi-core non-blocking networking I/O to achieve really high speeds. I would like to see some of that incorporated back into the FreeBSD kernel (not sure if it has been done, but I doubt it).
datashovel 12y ago
This project has intrigued me for a long time. I seriously believe it could eventually become the premiere BSD-flavor OS. Although given all the low-level changes they've made it may not be easy to "label" it BSD in the future.
- estrabd 12y ago
  FreeBSD itself has diverged significantly from its own 4.x release, which is where DFBSD forked. I would still call DragonFlyBSD a "BSD" now and in the future since it still leverages a lot of work from FreeBSD (and other BSDs) to this day. It would be stupid to not continue to leverage the upstream work.
  - datashovel 12y ago
    Agreed. I think it's a fantastic ecosystem, and they should all continue to feed off one another. A great example was discussed in the interview. The decision to integrate FreeBSD ports will almost certainly make it easier for folks who are considering adopting / experimenting with it. (not a recent decision, but an important one)
- duaneb 12y ago
  I would say the primary identifier of BSD systems are their interface with the kernel, the userland, and the license. DragonflyBSD is a true BSD to the kernel; the implementation details may differ, but you can compile most freebsd code for dragonfly with no changes and have it run perfectly (or as well as dragonfly can swing it).
  - datashovel 12y ago
    Not disagreeing, but I found the following quote from the site interesting and helpful to understand where they're coming from: http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/howtos/howtonewkerneldeveloper/ http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/howtos/howtonewkerneldevelo... "While DragonFly was forked off FreeBSD and has generally quite a few similarities to other *BSD, you definitely cannot rely on understanding FreeBSD to understand what's going on here."
joshbaptiste 12y ago
Out of the BSDs, I would say DragonFly is the most innovative. Its implementation of virtual kernels, HammerFS, thread scheduling via message passing and it has been rock solid as an NFS file server, serving all my local media to other *nix nodes on my LAN. Wikipedia gives a great rundown on the innovations and why Matt decided to fork. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD
- duaneb 12y ago
  I would almost term it as a permanent research platform for FreeBSD. Never would I recommend someone run it in production, but if I'm looking for cutting-edge parallel OS techniques, Dragonfly is definitely on the short list. Come to think of it, it might be the only one on my short list—OS innovations seems to be driven by virtualization, container, filesystem, and network concerns more than anything these days.
  - joshbaptiste 12y ago
    Indeed.. although they are aiming for a production quality platform with the upcoming release of the HAMMER2 filesystem.
  - copx 12y ago
    >I would almost term it as a permanent research platform for FreeBSD DragonFly BSD was forked from FreeBSD because of fundamental design disagreements between Matthew Dillon and the rest of the FreeBSD developers. Thus I doubt that the characterization as "research platform for FreeBSD" fits. You might as well say OpenBSD is a research platform for NetBSD.
    - duaneb 12y ago
      Well, OpenBSD has goals beyond "trying out new shit" on NetBSD... That's not entirely clear with DragonflyBSD.
    - gonzo 12y ago
      DragonFly actually adopts a lot of tech from freebsd.
forkandwait 12y ago
Does anyone know if DragonFly's code gets merged inro the FreeBSD codebase?
- DanBC 12y ago
  > Despite this, the DragonFly BSD and FreeBSD projects still work together contributing bug fixes, driver updates, and other system improvements to each other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD
- feld 12y ago
  sometimes yes, like the new procctl(2)
- truncate 12y ago
  Seems like mostly drivers - http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/search?string=DragonFly http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/search?string=DragonFly
adventureloop 12y ago
This is great news, the DragonFly project keeps doing really interesting things. The interview linked elsewhere in the thread give a good overview of how the project is doing. Matthew Dillon mentions in the interview that DragonFly will be able to be much more than an experimental operating system.
justincormack 12y ago
The first OS to drop 32 bit support, thus eg fixing the year 2038 problem the easy way. Not sure if any others will though, at least not until arm64 is more widespread.
- currysausage 12y ago
  > The first OS to drop 32 bit support The first? What about Windows Server 2008 R2? Or PC-BSD 9.2?
  - gonzo 12y ago
    Or freenas or soon, pfSense.
  - sspiff 12y ago
    I'm not sure PC-BSD qualifies as an OS unto itself. Last time I checked, they were mostly a FreeBSD distribution with a bunch of user friendly sugar coating on top (an easier package manager, default installation includes a fully configured desktop environment, ...) I don't mean that as a bad thing - I used PC-BSD for a while and it was great. Not everyone needs to reinvent the wheel and reimplement drivers etc. But I see it more as a distribution of an OS than an OS.
- lflux 12y ago
  OpenBSD fixed it in 5.5 released in May.
- bch 12y ago
  Over 2 years ago NetBSD released[1] the 6th major version and introduced 64-bit time_t[2]. [1] http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-6/ http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-6/ [2] http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-6/NetBSD-6.0.html http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-6/NetBSD-6.0.html
  - justincormack 12y ago
    Yes, that was the more difficult way I was contrasting with just dropping 32 bit support...
jrobn 12y ago
Apple has a lot invested in Darwin, but DragonFly BSD would be a nice foundation for OS X.
- feld 12y ago
  I'd take HAMMER over HFS+
  - sigzero 12y ago
    I'd take just about any new filesystem over HFS+.
- truncate 12y ago
  Did a search on code, and seems like fairq in Darwin is taken from DragonFly BSD[0] [0] http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/search?v=xnu-2050.18.24&string=DragonFly http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/search?v=xnu-2050.18.24&string=Dra...
- justsid 12y ago
  True, but there are many issues that might not seem obvious at first. For starters, XNU is _not_ a FreeBSD kernel. It’s a hybrid kernel, there is a Mach 3 based kernel at the very bottom with a FreeBSD kernel ontop. Mach takes care of providing, well, Mach IPC, but also virtual memory, threads, processes, scheduling and all that kind of stuff. The FreeBSD part is, in a lot of ways, only a shim down into Mach land, but also brings its own systems like the VFS and networkstack and most of the other userland facing things. I feel like it would be very non-trivial to switch to DragonFly BSD, because then a lot of the shims have to be re-designed in order to still work, simply because of the highly different design of DragonFly BSD. Disclaimer: I haven’t studied the DragonFly BSD source code yet.
ash 12y ago
"The drm/i915 driver is now mostly based on the Linux 3.8.13 implementation and is no longer similar to the FreeBSD driver. Many Linux APIs and data structures have been implemented in the DragonFly kernel in order to reuse as many parts as possible of the Linux drm/i915 code without modifications." I was wondering how did they deal with licensing issue. I thought Linux drivers are all under GPL. And DragonFly is (obviously) under BSD. Then I've noticed gpu/drm/i915 has a permissive (MIT?) license. E.g.: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_drv.c https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/gpu/dr... Is it true for everything else under gpu/drm directory? What license does DRM have?
- ftigeot 12y ago
  The DRM code itself as well as most of the drm drivers is under a MIT/X11 license. It was only integrated in Linux in 2008 (not 100% sure of the date) and was maintained in a separate tree before that. It also had to be compatible with X11, hence the choice of license.
- glass- 12y ago
  > I thought Linux drivers are all under GPL. Nope, in fact some of Linux's drivers are licensed with the old-style BSD license with the advertising clause: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?q=%22advertising+materials%22&type=Code https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?q=%22advertising+ma...
tiffanyh 12y ago
What single feature/change caused this to be a major release as opposed to a minor release? In reading the OP link, nothing in particular stood out to me. (Please don't take offense to my statement. The changes are all great. I'm just typically use to major releases to be when something foundational has changed and I'm just not seeing that here)
- ftigeot 12y ago
  Dropping i386 can be considered a big feature.
  - ams6110 12y ago
    Certainly qualifies as a "breaking" change that could justify a major version bump.
- laumars 12y ago
  Version numbers are arbitrary. Sometimes an incriment denotes features, sometimes it is age. And sometimes version numbers get incremented just for publicity.
ams6110 12y ago
Really nice to see DragonFly is still alive and progressing. I tend to like OpenBSD but choices are good!
Nux 12y ago
Wow, nice set of features. It's time I checked Dragonfly BSD again! http://www.dragonflybsd.org/features/ http://www.dragonflybsd.org/features/
tiffanyh 12y ago
I'd love to see these 2.5 year old performance benchmarks re-ran. http://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/ http://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/ Does anyone know where I can gain the benchmark config/setup so that I can re-run myself?
- ftigeot 12y ago
  I ran the Postgres benchmarks again in March of this year and DragonFly was the fastest of all the operating system I tested. Look at page 20 of these PGCon slides: https://www.pgcon.org/2014/schedule/events/754.en.html https://www.pgcon.org/2014/schedule/events/754.en.html I also published the methodology along with results in the pdf files I originally posted to the DragonFly mailing-lists. Direct link to one of these: http://dl.wolfpond.org/benchs/Pg-benchmarks.2012-10.pdf http://dl.wolfpond.org/benchs/Pg-benchmarks.2012-10.pdf
  - tiffanyh 12y ago
    Is there any reason why the DBSD website isn't updated with your data? Nice report btw

189 points by fcambus 12y ago

mhd 12y ago

The graphics support sounds neat for (developer) workstation usage, hope it gets at least a basic suspend/hibernate support soon to complete the picture.

fcambus 12y ago

Also worth mentioning, BSDTalk has an interview with Matthew Dillon about the 4.0 release of DragonFly BSD : http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2014/11/bsdtalk248-dragonflybsd-with-matthew.html http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2014/11/bsdtalk248-dragonflybsd-...

hestefisk 12y ago
Just listened to this BSD Talk episode yesterday. Matt is doing some extremely interesting work, not only on the kernel and file system research side, but also in terms of their completely customised networking stack, which utilises multi-core non-blocking networking I/O to achieve really high speeds. I would like to see some of that incorporated back into the FreeBSD kernel (not sure if it has been done, but I doubt it).

datashovel 12y ago

This project has intrigued me for a long time. I seriously believe it could eventually become the premiere BSD-flavor OS. Although given all the low-level changes they've made it may not be easy to "label" it BSD in the future.

estrabd 12y ago
FreeBSD itself has diverged significantly from its own 4.x release, which is where DFBSD forked. I would still call DragonFlyBSD a "BSD" now and in the future since it still leverages a lot of work from FreeBSD (and other BSDs) to this day. It would be stupid to not continue to leverage the upstream work.
- datashovel 12y ago
  Agreed. I think it's a fantastic ecosystem, and they should all continue to feed off one another. A great example was discussed in the interview. The decision to integrate FreeBSD ports will almost certainly make it easier for folks who are considering adopting / experimenting with it. (not a recent decision, but an important one)
duaneb 12y ago
I would say the primary identifier of BSD systems are their interface with the kernel, the userland, and the license. DragonflyBSD is a true BSD to the kernel; the implementation details may differ, but you can compile most freebsd code for dragonfly with no changes and have it run perfectly (or as well as dragonfly can swing it).
- datashovel 12y ago
  Not disagreeing, but I found the following quote from the site interesting and helpful to understand where they're coming from: http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/howtos/howtonewkerneldeveloper/ http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/howtos/howtonewkerneldevelo... "While DragonFly was forked off FreeBSD and has generally quite a few similarities to other *BSD, you definitely cannot rely on understanding FreeBSD to understand what's going on here."

joshbaptiste 12y ago

Out of the BSDs, I would say DragonFly is the most innovative. Its implementation of virtual kernels, HammerFS, thread scheduling via message passing and it has been rock solid as an NFS file server, serving all my local media to other *nix nodes on my LAN. Wikipedia gives a great rundown on the innovations and why Matt decided to fork. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD

duaneb 12y ago
I would almost term it as a permanent research platform for FreeBSD. Never would I recommend someone run it in production, but if I'm looking for cutting-edge parallel OS techniques, Dragonfly is definitely on the short list. Come to think of it, it might be the only one on my short list—OS innovations seems to be driven by virtualization, container, filesystem, and network concerns more than anything these days.
- joshbaptiste 12y ago
  Indeed.. although they are aiming for a production quality platform with the upcoming release of the HAMMER2 filesystem.
- copx 12y ago
  >I would almost term it as a permanent research platform for FreeBSD DragonFly BSD was forked from FreeBSD because of fundamental design disagreements between Matthew Dillon and the rest of the FreeBSD developers. Thus I doubt that the characterization as "research platform for FreeBSD" fits. You might as well say OpenBSD is a research platform for NetBSD.
  - duaneb 12y ago
    Well, OpenBSD has goals beyond "trying out new shit" on NetBSD... That's not entirely clear with DragonflyBSD.
  - gonzo 12y ago
    DragonFly actually adopts a lot of tech from freebsd.

forkandwait 12y ago

Does anyone know if DragonFly's code gets merged inro the FreeBSD codebase?

DanBC 12y ago
> Despite this, the DragonFly BSD and FreeBSD projects still work together contributing bug fixes, driver updates, and other system improvements to each other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD
feld 12y ago
sometimes yes, like the new procctl(2)
truncate 12y ago
Seems like mostly drivers - http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/search?string=DragonFly http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/search?string=DragonFly

adventureloop 12y ago

This is great news, the DragonFly project keeps doing really interesting things. The interview linked elsewhere in the thread give a good overview of how the project is doing. Matthew Dillon mentions in the interview that DragonFly will be able to be much more than an experimental operating system.

justincormack 12y ago

The first OS to drop 32 bit support, thus eg fixing the year 2038 problem the easy way. Not sure if any others will though, at least not until arm64 is more widespread.

currysausage 12y ago
> The first OS to drop 32 bit support The first? What about Windows Server 2008 R2? Or PC-BSD 9.2?
- gonzo 12y ago
  Or freenas or soon, pfSense.
- sspiff 12y ago
  I'm not sure PC-BSD qualifies as an OS unto itself. Last time I checked, they were mostly a FreeBSD distribution with a bunch of user friendly sugar coating on top (an easier package manager, default installation includes a fully configured desktop environment, ...) I don't mean that as a bad thing - I used PC-BSD for a while and it was great. Not everyone needs to reinvent the wheel and reimplement drivers etc. But I see it more as a distribution of an OS than an OS.
lflux 12y ago
OpenBSD fixed it in 5.5 released in May.
bch 12y ago
Over 2 years ago NetBSD released[1] the 6th major version and introduced 64-bit time_t[2]. [1] http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-6/ http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-6/ [2] http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-6/NetBSD-6.0.html http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-6/NetBSD-6.0.html
- justincormack 12y ago
  Yes, that was the more difficult way I was contrasting with just dropping 32 bit support...

jrobn 12y ago

Apple has a lot invested in Darwin, but DragonFly BSD would be a nice foundation for OS X.

feld 12y ago
I'd take HAMMER over HFS+
- sigzero 12y ago
  I'd take just about any new filesystem over HFS+.
truncate 12y ago
Did a search on code, and seems like fairq in Darwin is taken from DragonFly BSD[0] [0] http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/search?v=xnu-2050.18.24&string=DragonFly http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/search?v=xnu-2050.18.24&string=Dra...
justsid 12y ago
True, but there are many issues that might not seem obvious at first. For starters, XNU is _not_ a FreeBSD kernel. It’s a hybrid kernel, there is a Mach 3 based kernel at the very bottom with a FreeBSD kernel ontop. Mach takes care of providing, well, Mach IPC, but also virtual memory, threads, processes, scheduling and all that kind of stuff. The FreeBSD part is, in a lot of ways, only a shim down into Mach land, but also brings its own systems like the VFS and networkstack and most of the other userland facing things. I feel like it would be very non-trivial to switch to DragonFly BSD, because then a lot of the shims have to be re-designed in order to still work, simply because of the highly different design of DragonFly BSD. Disclaimer: I haven’t studied the DragonFly BSD source code yet.

ash 12y ago

"The drm/i915 driver is now mostly based on the Linux 3.8.13 implementation and is no longer similar to the FreeBSD driver. Many Linux APIs and data structures have been implemented in the DragonFly kernel in order to reuse as many parts as possible of the Linux drm/i915 code without modifications." I was wondering how did they deal with licensing issue. I thought Linux drivers are all under GPL. And DragonFly is (obviously) under BSD. Then I've noticed gpu/drm/i915 has a permissive (MIT?) license. E.g.: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_drv.c https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/gpu/dr... Is it true for everything else under gpu/drm directory? What license does DRM have?

ftigeot 12y ago
The DRM code itself as well as most of the drm drivers is under a MIT/X11 license. It was only integrated in Linux in 2008 (not 100% sure of the date) and was maintained in a separate tree before that. It also had to be compatible with X11, hence the choice of license.
glass- 12y ago
> I thought Linux drivers are all under GPL. Nope, in fact some of Linux's drivers are licensed with the old-style BSD license with the advertising clause: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?q=%22advertising+materials%22&type=Code https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?q=%22advertising+ma...

tiffanyh 12y ago

What single feature/change caused this to be a major release as opposed to a minor release? In reading the OP link, nothing in particular stood out to me. (Please don't take offense to my statement. The changes are all great. I'm just typically use to major releases to be when something foundational has changed and I'm just not seeing that here)

ftigeot 12y ago
Dropping i386 can be considered a big feature.
- ams6110 12y ago
  Certainly qualifies as a "breaking" change that could justify a major version bump.
laumars 12y ago
Version numbers are arbitrary. Sometimes an incriment denotes features, sometimes it is age. And sometimes version numbers get incremented just for publicity.

ams6110 12y ago

Really nice to see DragonFly is still alive and progressing. I tend to like OpenBSD but choices are good!

Nux 12y ago

Wow, nice set of features. It's time I checked Dragonfly BSD again! http://www.dragonflybsd.org/features/ http://www.dragonflybsd.org/features/

tiffanyh 12y ago

I'd love to see these 2.5 year old performance benchmarks re-ran. http://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/ http://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/ Does anyone know where I can gain the benchmark config/setup so that I can re-run myself?

ftigeot 12y ago
I ran the Postgres benchmarks again in March of this year and DragonFly was the fastest of all the operating system I tested. Look at page 20 of these PGCon slides: https://www.pgcon.org/2014/schedule/events/754.en.html https://www.pgcon.org/2014/schedule/events/754.en.html I also published the methodology along with results in the pdf files I originally posted to the DragonFly mailing-lists. Direct link to one of these: http://dl.wolfpond.org/benchs/Pg-benchmarks.2012-10.pdf http://dl.wolfpond.org/benchs/Pg-benchmarks.2012-10.pdf
- tiffanyh 12y ago
  Is there any reason why the DBSD website isn't updated with your data? Nice report btw