
DragonflyBSD 5.0 - joeschmoe3
https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release50/
======
tiffanyh
This is a big release for a few reasons:

* major new filesystem (Hammer2)[1]

* OpenBSD might even adopt Hammer2 has a replacement of it's legacy filesystem [2]

* huge work on network performance. DragonflyBSD is agrubably the fastest BSD for network intensive tasks [3]

* IPFW has been rewritten to be multi-threaded which has resulted in huge performance improvements [4]

[1]
[https://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/blob_plain/HEA...](https://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/blob_plain/HEAD:/sys/vfs/hammer2/DESIGN)

[2] [https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
tech&m=142755452428573](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=142755452428573)

[3]
[https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~sephe/perf_cmp.pdf](https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~sephe/perf_cmp.pdf)

[4]
[http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2017-Septemb...](http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2017-September/626329.html)

UPDATE:

To also give context as to what Dragonfly BSD is, DragonFly BSD was forked
from FreeBSD 4.8 in June of 2003, by Matthew Dillon over a differing of
opinion on how to handle SMP support in FreeBSD. Dragonfly is generally
consider as having a much simpler (and cleaning) implementation of SMP which
has allowed the core team to more easily maintain SMP support; yet without
sacrificing performance (numerous benchmarks demonstrate that Dragonfly is
even more performant than FreeBSD [5]).

The core team of Dragonfly developers is small but extremely talented (e.g.
they have frequently found hardware bugs in Intel/AMD that no one else has
found in the Linux/BSD community [6]). They strive for correctness of code,
ease of maintainability (e.g. only support x86 architecture, design decisions,
etc.) and performance as project goals.

If you haven't already looked at Dragonfly, I highly recommend you to do so.

[5]
[https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/](https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/)

[6] [http://www.zdnet.com/article/amd-owns-up-to-cpu-
bug/](http://www.zdnet.com/article/amd-owns-up-to-cpu-bug/)

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

Gotta love an undated presentation that compares DragonFlyBSD version
719bf70a37139bc3bedc84ab0975df7107155714 with FreeBSD version r314268. It
can't be super old because Linux 4.9 was released in Dec 2016, but still.

~~~
Arnavion
[https://github.com/DragonFlyBSD/DragonFlyBSD/commit/719bf70a...](https://github.com/DragonFlyBSD/DragonFlyBSD/commit/719bf70a37139bc3bedc84ab0975df7107155714)

[https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=31426...](https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=314268)

So around 2017-02-25

------
paulmd
Hammer has always looked cool on paper but it's a hard sell to switch away
from the battle-tested options like ZFS for a v1.0 codebase. Filesystems are
not really an area of the system that is amenable to flavor-of-the-month, and
the dustbins of history are littered with one-man-show filesystems that didn't
make the cut.

btrfs is fighting much the same battle for adoption and frankly has a much
better chance of seeing success since it's not tied to a niche OS like
DragonflyBSD. ZFS-on-Linux finally being available+stable was a massive
milestone in terms of adoption since it finally broke away from the tight ties
to the Solaris/BSD ecosystems.

So yeah, regardless of how amazing Hammer is, I do have to ask whether there's
really space for another filesystem out there. Kudos to Dillon for going ahead
and doing it anyway though ;)

~~~
tiffanyh

       Filesystems are not really an area of the system that is amenable to flavor-of-the-month and running v1.0 of a new codebase doesn't sound appealing.
    

Just as a counterpoint to running a v1.0 filesystem, Apple just rewrote from
scratch their entire filesystem (APFS) and force updated their entire userbase
of hundreds of millions of iOS devices and macOS to use a v1.0 of APFS.

They haven't seem to have any problems running a v1.0 filesystem and I have to
imagine way more people are now running APFS then ZFS ever.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System)

~~~
dmpk2k
Apple must have invested incredible resources on testing that internally,
because that was a very risky move, and well outside the norm for filesystem
development.

~~~
Tloewald
Apple did some pretty brilliant stuff with testing. E.g. they had it silently
test install itself on random user devices, verify everything was fine, and
revert for several versions prior to release (presumably they picked users
with sufficient spare room). The actual rollout was stunningly issue-free.

As an aside, this is one of the several unbelievably slick updates Apple has
pulled off in its history, including:

\- the switch to 32-bit clean addresses only (which was probably the most
painful switch Apple ever did!) in System 7.6

\- the switch to PowerPC (which caused fewer problems than the 32-bit clean
switch!)

\- the switch to Mac OS X

\- the switch to Intel

\- the switch to 64-bit on desktop

\- the switch to 64-bit on iOS

Microsoft, (in most cases rightly) vaunted for backwards compatibility has had
horrific snafus such as DOS 5 being the first version of DOS whose RESTORE
program could read BACKUP files from the previous version of DOS.

(It's also worth noting that NeXT itself managed to support four runtime
architectures with "quad fat binaries".)

~~~
riffraff
> they had it silently test install itself on random user devices

I suppose that meant doing a small install in some virtual disk? I can't think
apple put at risk anyone's data.

But then, that would not have been the same as actually testing the real
hardware interface, would it?

------
saghm
When installing with Hammer2 (EFI, encrypted root and swap), after rebooting
and decrypting the root I get an error saying `mount_hammer2` isn't found. Has
anyone else had this issue and figured out if there's a fix?

~~~
ceratopisan
What Elhana said - mount_hammer2 isn't included in /usr/share/initrd so it's
not copied into the image used there.

You can build a new initrd - cd into src/share/initrd/sbin, add it to the
makefile, type 'wmake install' I think, and you may be good. I am guessing
because I don't have an encrypted disk to test.

Otherwise, wait and there will be an updated 5.01 image soon, I'm sure - the
recent KRACK vulnerability will prompt that, if nothing else.

~~~
saghm
Thanks for the info! I'm fine with waiting for a 5.01; I just wasn't sure if I
had installed it wrong or something

------
ryanpcmcquen
How does DragonFlyBSD compare to OpenBSD in terms of security?

~~~
joeschmoe3
About the same as FreeBSD. IF you google youl find a few openbsd VS FreeBSD
comparisons

------
insulanian
Is anyone using DragonflyBSD in production due to its advantages?

Are these advantages so significant that it is worth it?

~~~
rurban
Those companies here
[https://www.dragonflybsd.org/commercial/](https://www.dragonflybsd.org/commercial/)
are providing commercial DragonflyBSD packaging or support.

Of course it's worth it. It's significantly faster and better

------
tyingq
Discussion from yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477482)

