
DragonFly BSD 5.4 - stargrave
https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release54/
======
xte
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
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
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...

~~~
loeg
> Well... for now it's only a classic, usable, stable fs ... nothing is there
> only a stable fs that seems no different than ext...

It's a CoW filesystem, which should provide some inherent crash/power-fail
safety that ext does not have (at least, as usually configured — and data
logging has huge overhead).

~~~
xte
Sorry my not-so-good English sometimes make me express concept in a
convoluted/wrong way, on my previous post s/no/not much/ (different) than ext,
it's an interesting project however today is only that IMO a thing to follow,
prize, support but not use regularly apart if you want to help it's
developments...

On logging overhead... Well, yes and no, the logfs I tried do have overhead at
garbage collection/cleaning but that overhead does not seems really important
in practical terms. It demand a bit of careful design of storage layout and
load prediction but nothing more than that.

I do not see practical advantage for most server usage however I see
significant advantage for _some_ server usage and certainly for desktop usage.
Also potential future development is certainly interested... Imaging a package
manager integrated with a logfs how effective can be only in terms of
"immutable servers/IaC" applications, imaging how NixOS/GuixSD generations can
easily and instantly switch, how can you deep and easily analyze datasets and
systems...

Also overhead is there, a bit, today, but tomorrow can be significantly
reduced if we have physical storage developed with logging in mind.

------
tiffanyh
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
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
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.

~~~
drewg123
Sadly, FreeBSD (and Illumos) are now defacto downstreams, since a lot of the
active ZFS work is now happening on Linux. That's a sad fact, but true, and
sticking our heads in the sand won't change it. (and may, in fact, make it
worse).

My understanding from the message, and from talking to the devs involved is
that integration with ZOL will make FreeBSD an equal partner. FreeBSD will be
included in the CI, so that ZOL changes that break FreeBSD cannot be merged.
Changes originating in FreeBSD will also be merged faster to Linux, and with
review from the original author to make sure they are merged correctly. Eg, it
is better for everybody (except perhaps the folks left on Illumos or other
Open Solaris forks).

~~~
solarengineer
During last month's openzfs call [0], one of the actions items that came up
for discussion was "How do we all work together?" There are scenarios where
issues on ZoL are still being investigated on Illumos. I don't know further
details on this, sorry.

At first came the interesting question of "what is OpenZFS"? A spec? A
reference implementation that everyone branches off? How do we exchange fixes
and ideas and updates?

Another topic that came up was "What should the defaults for a zpool be?" this
was for portable zpools.

Please note: the above were still open questions. We're going to have a few
follow up calls to understand and ideate better.

Source: I was on the call, and I'm an Illumos community member.

[0]
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w2jv2XVYFmBVvG1EGf-9A5HB...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w2jv2XVYFmBVvG1EGf-9A5HBVsjAYoLIFZAnWHhV-
BM/edit?ts=5bff343a#)

~~~
solarengineer
I just wanted to add: the real challenges are figuring out what it means to
have a shared code base across oppressing systems for a file system. This is
not like openssh. The porting, verification and feature parity checks are
unique and challenging to solve.

------
gigatexal
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
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).

~~~
hestefisk
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.

------
karmakaze
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/)

~~~
LeoPanthera
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.

~~~
krylon
Also, the developers' attitude.

First of all, when somebody reports a bug, they do not try to argue that it is
not really a bug or something like that, they _fix_ it. And then, they look
through their entire code base to see if that kind of bug shows up somewhere
else. It is a little sad, but even today, this attitude is not the norm. And
it does not matter if that bug is remote code execution in the IP stack or a
typo in one of the man pages. They fix it.

Furthermore, I like the approach to security the OpenBSD people take. As Theo
de Raadt one explained in a talk, if a security feature needs to be configured
before it works, people won't, and if it can be disabled, people will. So most
security features on OpenBSD Just Work(tm), out of the box. Some stuff (like
pf, their packet filter) obviously needs to be configured and can be disabled,
but for the most part, you do not need to do anything special to enjoy the
security OpenBSD offers.

Often, the OpenBSD people will do something akin to reinventing the wheel. As
one comment on German IT news site once said, with any other project, you
would accuse the developers of Not-Invented-Here-syndrome. But the OpenBSD
people get it right.

~~~
linsomniac
Dillon has been around for as long as I've been using computers, back to my
Amiga days of the '80s, and he's always been a shining star.

~~~
krylon
Did you maybe mean to reply to some other comment?

But just to be clear, I have nothing bad to say about Mister Dillon. I hope my
comment did not give you the impression I did.

~~~
linsomniac
I was agreeing with you. :-)

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

~~~
gjs278
I run my website [https://garyshood.com](https://garyshood.com) on it

~~~
xKingfisher
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.

~~~
gjs278
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
Who uses dragonfly bsd in any kind of non-experimental setup?

------
zandl
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.

~~~
cgag
Their filesystem is interesting but what I find impressive is they're at like
a linux level of performance despite having a team of like 10 people because
of the way they approached concurrency. I believe they spawned out of dillon
disagreeing with freebsd's approach, and it's beautiful to me that they're
competitive with linux despite not having a huge team of people polishing it.

I also want to say that Matthew Dillon is brilliant and a wonderful person. I
played with dragonflybsd on my laptop for a while and hung out in the IRC, and
he was always around and willing to help. I found a couple legitimate bugs and
he had non-trivial patches up for me in like an hour.

Their networking stuff is very cool too, I can't really remember the details
once, but I remember seeing an article about high performance networking that
explained why you wanted to avoid the linux kernel so that you could do x,y
and z yourself, and dillon explained that dragonfly kernel just does all that
stuff itself.

I wish it got more use because there's so much potential there, but it's quite
a chicken and the egg problem, and honestly I feel like the BSDs are kind of
doomed unless they add apis that support linux containers.

~~~
hestefisk
IIRC, Matt forked FreeBSD from v4 as he disagreed with the approach taken to
SMP (ie multi processor support) in v5. He forked v4 and wrote his own patch
set to deliver SMP support. That is a long time ago. I haven’t run Hammer /
Hammer2 so cannot comment on why it is awesome. To me my file system needs to
be properly battle tested and trusting my precious personal data to a one man
band feels a bit too esoteric.

I have always wondered how Matt makes a living from this given the somewhat
niche positioning of Dragonfly?

~~~
zandl
I think after Best Internet exited he likely did quite well, it’s possible
he’s just doing DragonFly as a full time hobby. But I have no idea.

------
reconbot
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
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
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
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.

~~~
xte
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
> deduplication is a bit resource intensive

That's true everywhere, outside specialized hardware offload.

~~~
xte
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...

------
w323898
How's the EFI support on this in comparison to other BSDs?

