
DragonFly BSD 2.6: towards a free clustering operating system - rohshall
http://lwn.net/Articles/384200/
======
jballanc
DragonFly has been a favorite of mine for a while now. It is easily the most
ambitious of the BSDs, without being so far ahead of the pack as Plan 9 (i.e.
it's still usable).

However, this article is from 2010 and DragonFly recently released v3.0.2.
They've also added significantly more features in the direction of a
clustering OS. You could probably get more (and more up to date) information
just from reading their "Features" page:
<http://www.dragonflybsd.org/features/>

~~~
sspiff
Came here to comment on the age of the article. Thanks for beating me to it.

Since you're a BSD user, can I ask you a few questions? I'm a Linux user with
limited BSD experience (mostly running NetBSD on old and/or embedded
hardware).

I mostly work on desktop/laptop systems in a workstation setting. Do you think
BSD is a good choice for such platforms, or is it strictly a server thing?

~~~
X-Istence
BSD on the desktop is possible, especially if you use something like FreeBSD
where the hardware support is generally ahead of NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD and
OpenBSD, and support for newer technologies is more available (binary drives
from NVIDIA are pretty important as well if you want 3D acceleration), sadly
though support is lacking for a lot of drivers. FreeBSD for example is just
getting around to implementing the parts required for Intel graphics [1].

However compared to Linux I wouldn't use BSD as a desktop/laptop system. Linux
is simply further along in supporting what is required for power saving, for
clocking the cpu up and down, newer technologies and even older technologies
if you are using older devices (in [1] for example, only gen4-6 graphics are
supported, so if you have older Intel it won't work, or not correctly).

The other major issue is that many of the projects such as Gnome, KDE, XFCE
and others have started using so many different Linux only interfaces for
which no good documentation exists to replicate the functionality in the BSD's
that you will find that certain features just don't work. See for example [2]
which is a post from a Xfce developer on why XFCE had to drop support for the
BSD's... on that same post you see a comment from Warner Losh the creator of
devd(8) on FreeBSD asking where he can find good documentation on udev in
Linux so that he can implement the compatibility stream on top of devd(8) [3].

No, I would not use BSD on the desktop unless it is by purchasing Mac OS X.
Personally I am a HUGE FreeBSD fan, I absolutely love it. I run FreeBSD almost
exclusively on my servers unless a specific piece of software very
specifically requires Linux. I build software for FreeBSD, I deliver to
clients FreeBSD installs and do consulting based on FreeBSD. FreeBSD on the
server is absolutely fantastic, it is rock solid, I've had machines running
for years on end without issues (no, not internet facing ones, yes they were
all patched for remote exploits, local exploits I cared less about in this
particular setting). Unfortunately I no longer run FreeBSD as my desktop, I
used to for the longest time but unfortunately that time has come and gone.

Personally I am currently using a MacBook Pro running OS X 10.8 for my
desktop/laptop needs, which provides me the same interfaces as FreeBSD does so
it makes programming fairly simple. If it compiles/builds on Mac OS X it is
almost guaranteed to compile/build on FreeBSD and run without issues.

[1]: <http://wiki.freebsd.org/Intel_GPU> [2]:
<http://gezeiten.org/post/2011/01/Xfce-4.8-on-BSD-flavors> [3]:
[http://gezeiten.org/post/2011/01/Xfce-4.8-on-BSD-
flavors#c14...](http://gezeiten.org/post/2011/01/Xfce-4.8-on-BSD-
flavors#c14587)

~~~
gizzlon
_See for example [2] which is a post from a Xfce developer on why XFCE had to
drop support for the BSD's._

It seems like you can run XFCE on BSD, but some features are not supported..
That said, their about page isn't entirely honest, it should mention what
features are Linux-only.

~~~
X-Istence
Absolutely, and I am sorry if I implied otherwise.

------
peterwwillis
_"The ultimate goal of DragonFly BSD is to allow programs to run across
multiple machines as if they are running on one system."_

Isn't this OpenMosix? <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMosix>
<http://linuxpmi.org/trac/>

The two features I miss about openMosix were the distributed filesystem and
process freezing. As nodes were auto-discovered, they would be populated in a
global filesystem, so you could access the root filesystem of any node from a
central tree. In addition there was a tool that would 'freeze' the state of a
running process and any files that were open and save it all to a file, so you
could 'thaw' it at any time and resume where it left off. This worked well if
you only used i/o with the distributed filesystem, so you could thaw it into
any system and it would just work. I guess this is an ok alternative:
<http://cryopid.berlios.de/>

~~~
kylek
This is called SSI. I believe SGI's larger systems do this aswell
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image>

------
rohshall
I would love to know how stable Dragonfly is and how its hardware support is.
I have read that they regularly pull changes from FreeBSD. So I expect it to
be almost on par with FreeBSD. But since they have significantly modified the
FreeBSD kernel and they use NetBSD packages, I can understand if they lag
behind given their limited resources. Ironically, I am running Linux on my
laptop and I am using FreeBSD on my netboot, which I may replace with
DragonFly.

~~~
matthiasr
In my experience (~1.5yrs on small servers and partially a laptop) it is very
stable, especially if you stick to the release branches, but even running
master everywhere I've rarely run into any problems on that end.

Using pkgsrc for software is actually a good thing as it is portability-
oriented to begin with and you get access to almost all of the packages in
there out of the box. DragonFly support in pkgsrc has very much improved over
the last year or so since one of the DF devs became a NetBSD/pkgsrc committer.

As for hardware support… YMMV. In my experience drivers tend to lag behind a
bit and may or may not work for you. Give it a try.

~~~
rohshall
Thank you. I tried it and could not get OpenJDK installed. Also, it did not
detect my wireless card. FOr now, I have postponed using it on my netbook. I
will try it again when it has more driver support.

------
rohshall
I would love to know how stable Dragonfly is and how its hardware support is.
I have read that they regularly pull changes from FreeBSD. So I expect it to
be almost on par with FreeBSD. But since they have significantly modified the
kernel and they use NetBSD packages, I can understand if they lag behind given
their limited resources. Ironically, I am running Linux on my laptop and I am
using FreeBSD on my netboot, which I may replace with DragonFly.

------
hobbyist
I think its the only BSD that uses git for its SCM :)

~~~
DArcMattr
There's a recent fork of OpenBSD, Bitrig [1] that does.

[1] <https://www.bitrig.org/index.php?title=Main_Page>

