I run Postgres, MonetDB, Redis, and Disque on DragonFlyBSD for various hobby projects. It's been extremely stable, easy to administer¹, and fast².
Two of my favorite things:
1. HAMMER, and the upcoming HAMMER2, are very nice filesystems. HAMMER isn't a CoW fs like ZFS and btrfs; HAMMER2 is however. Also, somehow HAMMER2 is more stable than btrfs despite having about 3 developers.
2. Like Solaris, DragonFly isn't afraid to deviate from and advance traditional *nix design. vkernels, lightweight threads, a super cool message-passing API, NT-esque architecture of a decoupled microkernel-ish design running in one address space, etc.
It also has neat cluster features not unlike VMS and Plan9, but I haven't used them.
--
¹ I use FreeBSD as a desktop OS so my opinion here could be a bit skewed. But I think, like most BSDs, it's a very well-thought-out system.
² Disque³ on my DragonFly VPS is a bit faster than on my similar Arch Linux VPS; otherwise my workloads are too small to make a good comparison.
If one of those developers is Matt Dillon low numbers are rarely a hinderance. He turns out an awful lot of superb quality code, ever since the days of DICE on the Amiga. That ended up generating faster code than either of the "professional" offerings, including Lattice. Lattice C on MSDOS later became the first two versions of Microsoft C.
One of the people I respect most in this industry.
I think the same about Poul Henning Kamp. I feel I read his name in every module in FreeBSD. Jails, GEOM and so on. And Varnish is a fantastic well though product from him.
The architectural difference of how data is stored between Redis and Varnish is very interesting to read about. And I think it tells us why that Redis performs better on Linux and Varnish performs better on FreeBSD.
I'm more familiar with NT's internals than Amiga's, but I'm sure Amiga is what influenced the design.
Though Amiga was more of a true microkernel but without memory protection; NT and DragonFly have memory protection but the kernel is a single executable composed of multiple message-passing modules.
I'm fairly sure, around the time of the original fork, Matt announced the intention for DragonFly to take inspiration from the Amiga for some aspects of the new OS and kernel. Messaging was one of them. I forget the others.
I really like their HAMMER features like 'no fsck' and instant crash recovery. I hope to contribute this project :-)
https://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/
EDIT: I think it would be nice to compare hammer & btrfs.Any kernel/file-system expert here has any idea/thoughts on the same?
The only thing I currently use BSD for (specifically FreeBSD) is a local Minecraft server. It seems to run much better than vanilla Ubuntu. I hadn't heard of DragonFly before this but seeing as they boast about performance I wanted to give it a shot against FreeBSD. Unfortunately, my server is 32-bit and it looks like they just dropped support for it :/
They dropped support for 32-bit hardware ages ago (3.8 was the last release with 32-bit support). That message is just in the release notes every time.
I'd like to note that this release contains some virtio driver fixes that mean you should be able to run DragonflyBSD safely on a VPS that allows you to upload custom ISOs (vultr seems to be the most popular). Previously there would be rare hard lock ups, but that
should be fixed now.
>Everything at the GPUOpen portal will be open source and licensed under the highly permissive MIT license, allowing developers to not only see the code behind RTG’s tools and libraries, but to integrate that code into open and closed source projects as they see fit.
While the i915 driver nowadays lives in the Linux source tree, it is still released under a permissive license. Same goes for a lot of drm stuff. I'd assume similar for radeon.
There is a note on "SMP Performance", is anyone here knows about whether and how *BSD's support the 72-core/64-core Intel Knights Landing chip? I couldn't find any relevant information via google.
PS. I asked this question in an earlier post, but since this one is more popular, allow me to ask again.
PPS. Google gives me mentions of Linux and Windows server support, but nothing BSD.
Two of my favorite things:
1. HAMMER, and the upcoming HAMMER2, are very nice filesystems. HAMMER isn't a CoW fs like ZFS and btrfs; HAMMER2 is however. Also, somehow HAMMER2 is more stable than btrfs despite having about 3 developers.
2. Like Solaris, DragonFly isn't afraid to deviate from and advance traditional *nix design. vkernels, lightweight threads, a super cool message-passing API, NT-esque architecture of a decoupled microkernel-ish design running in one address space, etc.
It also has neat cluster features not unlike VMS and Plan9, but I haven't used them.
--
¹ I use FreeBSD as a desktop OS so my opinion here could be a bit skewed. But I think, like most BSDs, it's a very well-thought-out system.
² Disque³ on my DragonFly VPS is a bit faster than on my similar Arch Linux VPS; otherwise my workloads are too small to make a good comparison.
³ https://github.com/antirez/disque