
DragonFly BSD 4.8 released - ceratopisan
https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release48/
======
tiffanyh
In case people are wondering what makes DBSD so interesting, DragonflyBSD is:

\- focused only on x64 architecture

\- has an extremely small but exceptionally talented team of developers (e.g.
Matt Dillon from DICE and Amiga fame)

\- has it's own unique filesystem called Hammer (and work is being down on
Hammer2 which is a complete rewrite)

\- Network performance is particularly good with Dragonfly and even better
than FreeBSD which is known as being the golf standard for network performance
[1]

[1]
[https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~sephe/perf_cmp.pdf](https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~sephe/perf_cmp.pdf)

Edit: formatting

Edit2: it should also be noted in the release notes, it refers to detailed
NVME disk performance testing the Dragonfly team performed. These results are
largely agnostic of what OS you run. Really interesting to see the Samsung
NVME device come out on top and Intel in last. This is a good read even if you
don't run Dragonfly.

[http://apollo.backplane.com/DFlyMisc/nvme_randread.txt](http://apollo.backplane.com/DFlyMisc/nvme_randread.txt)

~~~
eternalban
> \- has it's own unique filesystem called Hammer (and work is being down on
> Hammer2 which is a complete rewrite)

You said "interesting", but superficially "a complete rewrite" WIP doesn't
sound like a plus when choosing a production system OS.

If anyone is interested, this is what the DBSD man page says about hammer:

    
    
         HAMMER file systems are designed for large storage systems, up to 1
         Exabyte, and will not operate efficiently on small storage systems.  The
         minimum recommended file system size is 50GB.  HAMMER must reserve 512MB
         to 1GB of its storage for reblocking and UNDO/REDO FIFO.  In addition,
         HAMMER file systems operating normally, with full history retention and
         daily snapshots, do not immediately reclaim space when files are deleted.
         A regular system maintenance job runs once a day by periodic(8) to handle
         reclamation.
    
         HAMMER works best when the machine's normal workload would not otherwise
         fill the file system up in the course of 60 days of operation.  
    

And what appears to be the original design doc for Hammer by Dillon:
[https://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/hammer.pdf](https://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/hammer.pdf)

[& p.s.] Hammer2:
[http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/blob/b93cc2e081...](http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/blob/b93cc2e0815ec1ad6d6f8e60cc0becbdee247679:/sys/vfs/hammer2/DESIGN)

~~~
tiffanyh
In all fairness to Dragonfly, Apple themselves just _today_ released an
entirely new file systems that was a complete rewrite as well.

With the advent of SSD and NVME, how you achieve maximum performance and
ensure long term "disk" endurance has radically changed in recent years.
You're no long write data to a physical platter anymore. Which radically
changes huge fundamental assumptions in how legacy file systems were created
30-40 years ago.

So don't view a rewrite as a bad thing. It's Dragonfly being proactive and
keeping up with the times.

~~~
adekok
> Apple themselves just today released an entirely new file systems that was a
> complete rewrite as well.

Without CRCs or checksums on the blocks. Grr...

"Silent data corruption is real"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13851349](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13851349)

------
lwlml
I appreciate that there is so much operating system innovation coming from the
*BSD's like the Hammer file systems in DragonFly and security concepts like
the new pledge() system call from OpenBSD which informs the operating system
that an executing program pledges to never use certain system calls. (i.e. if
you say you'll never do something, the operating system will have the
privilege of killing your application should there be some kind of buffer
overflow/compromise.)

~~~
aduitsis
Re: pledge() in OpenBSD:

In FreeBSD for quite some time there is Capsicum and CloudABI has been
included in FreeBSD 11. Definitely worth a look, especially the second which
is also present in DragonFly.

[https://wiki.freebsd.org/Capsicum](https://wiki.freebsd.org/Capsicum)

[https://nuxi.nl/cloudabi/freebsd/](https://nuxi.nl/cloudabi/freebsd/)

------
geff82
Anyone using DragonFly BSD in production? Or as a desktop system? What is your
experience? I love the BSDs, but never used DragonFly.

~~~
ky738
I wanna know that too. Never heard of anyone using it in production.

~~~
ianai
The hammer FS might be its main improvement. I think it's, right now, an
exercise in maintaining options.

------
mozumder
Been looking for Skylake GPU support for BSD. Does it support Skylake OpenCL?

How compatible is this with FreeBSD? Can I test it alongside a FreeBSD
distribution with minimal changes? Does it use the same Ports/Packages system?
Do I need to recompile/reinstall all applications? Is there ZFS support?

~~~
tiffanyh
Yes, Skylake is supported.

See
[https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/supportedhardware/](https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/supportedhardware/)

Re: FreeBSD. Dragonfly forked from FreeBSD around 11 years ago (v4.x). So the
two have diverged quite a bit of the years. E.g. Different file systems.
Different kernel approaches to SMP. Etc.

The package management system is the same though.

~~~
cat199
to expand -

Shough package systems are based on the same code, syscall/binary level
compatibility has diverged, so it does entail a separate installation on
another partition/disk/etc and separate set of application packages, etc.

------
JdeBP
Checking the release notes, it does include the recent fix mentioned at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13882171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13882171)
.

------
arca_vorago
Awesome news, and props to the DBSD team for all the consistent hard work they
put into it, usually without much fanfare. I'm a pretty hardcore GNU/GPL guy,
but I have said before if I were starting an ISP I would probably be doing it
with DBSD. The networking stack alone is top-notch, and once HAMMER2 rolls out
I honestly expect it to get the momentum to compete with ZFS and BTRFS. (not
much traction now though, so as others have said, probably years down the
road).

------
bujarron
Strange that there is another dragonfly, a framework for newlisp.

