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DragonFly BSD Announced
JoshRendlesham writes "Matt Dillon announced today on the freebsd-hackers mailing list the creation of the DragonFly BSD project. It seeks to build on the work of FreeBSD 4.x, including a rewrite of the packaging and distribution system, among other goals."
Brad Pitt announced a new fork from the -AC kernel tree.
This is great news. God knows we need another BSD, I don't think anyone is happy that currently we only have FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, TrustedBSD, XMach, Darwin, and Microsoft Windows.
Oh no! Who will pay the administrators the big bucks now?
There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it 2) The rest of us
Dragonfly BSD is dying...
--Life may have no meaning, or, even worse, it may have a meaning of which you disapprove.
...packages and ports system. They're part of the best things FreeBSD has above Linux right now!
That doesn't make sense to me. Thats like deciding there are too many car manufacturers and complaining to Ford that there should be fewer and better car manufacturers. In fact, it would be EASIER to do this in the car industry because you can probably get the major car manufacturers together. No one ever said this new BSD was going to be good, just that it was here. No one said you should support it, but then again maybe you should. Each distro of anything is subject to the people that make it. If you want one final all encompassing sent-from-God BSD then go and make it!
I liked it. I think it's time for a new BSD, maybe something with an easier setup like the newer linux distros would be nice. Manually partitioning a hard drive is scary stuff. But I'm not holding my breath. The thing I didn't like about the site was that it's not very well designed, and the navigation scheme is confusing. It needs work, but over all, very promising.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
POW!
All the various BSDs share code when one solution seems to fit more than just the distribution that developed it. If DragonFly is going to focus on something that the other four aren't, then more power to them. I'm sure the others will adopt any good ideas that come out.
Define "best"
I think the reason that there are different BSDs is that there is no "best" for everyone.
There's no need for a unified BSD because the source to all of them is free for use with almost no restrictions, so every flavor of BSD can benefit from the others.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
You're thinking of DeadBSD, which was a short-lived flavor.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
I'd like to see Gentoo's Portage move onto BSD, it was originally inspired by the BSD ports system, but has become very easy to use and refined. It's time for a BSD to try out Portage (Mac OS X is geting Portage soon!)
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I find this project exciting. Having tried gentoo's portage it has become clear to me that ports could be a lot better. While ports does work, it has a bunch of tools which make its use easier which arent included by default and could be integrated into ports.
Are they talking about replacing the ports system? I thought that that was one of those most revered parts of the original FreeBSD
I'm crossing my fingers that this comes out with Portage as the package manager...
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
-V
Insects and Grafitti Photos
What were they thinking when they named their project after a bug?
Oh well, it's probably about hurt egos again. :(
In a way it is. Matt Dillon got lost commit access to cvs a while ago because he was trying to get some stuff into 4.8 and got rebuffed. Looked like he violated their code of conduct a few too many times, got kicked out, and started a project where he made the rules. TdR in the house?
The problem with BSD is that there are too many Albert Einstein-like people involved with its development... and Matt Dillion is one of them. I don't mean that in a bad way. These guy are *smart* probably one in a billion kind of smart. The problem with that is they can't work together very well. Theo (Open BSD), Matt (FreeBSD) Both these guys forked over differences of opinion with other developers.
Imagine what these guys could actually *do* if they put aside their differences and worked together!! No unsolved CS problem would be safe.
Dragonflies live longer than 24 hours. See the British Dragonfly Society FAQ.
Ah, but the name's catchy. "Dragonfly BSD" just sounds so cool. However, the real legacy of this fork will come when the highly demanding porn industry gets a hold of its advanced SMP features and adds a few tweaks of its own to get "Spanish Fly BSD."
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
This isn't the actor, it's the lawman. Jeez, Slashdotters are so ignorant!
Wow. Matt Dillon. :) There's a name that brings back memories.
:)
Matt: if you're reading this, I loved DICE, and all your other work on the Amiga - your compiler is one of the reasons I'm a programmer today. I hadn't been keeping up with your work but it's good to see you're still out there doing stuff.
(seems a lot of the old Amiga 'big names' have gone on to do interesting stuff in the time since)
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Matt Dillon's early background as an Amiga programmer is really showing through here. He's basically proposing doing a piecewise conversion of BSD to an Amiga-style message-passing operating system.
He's basically doing the reverse of what so many folks (NeXT, HURD) have done or tried to do.. not taking a microkernal and putting a UNIX layer over it, but taking a UNIX and scooping out the inside to replace it with a message-passing microkernal.
This will definitely be a fun one to watch. Go, Matt, go.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
My first reaction was "oh, forking is bad, we don't need another". But in truth, this is no more remarkable than the fact that there are 100s if not 1000s of different flavors of GNU/Linux.
So there.
Define "best"
In terms of BSD? MacOS X.
Ahhhhh interesting detective work . . . I suppose I usually ignore AC posts that seem inflamitory.
.but interesting to know that someone:
I probably will still do so . .
a) has a standard troll post like that
and
b) it is moderately interesting troll post
and
c) someone bothered to remember a previous troll
May be I don't have enough time on my hands...
robi
Perhaps the devil (no pun intended) is in the details. Certainly from the perspective of a end-user, who usually don't deal with packaging systems in the first place, this new OS doesn't make any difference.
A rolling stone is worth two in the bush!
Best desktop, sure. No arguments here. I'm posting this from an iMac running 10.2.
Best server? Highly debatable. OS X Server is a fine product, one I'd never disparage, but I'm very happy running a FreeBSD HTTP/IMAP/IRC/Loads of other stuff server and an OpenBSD firewall.
The "best" is always whatever works best for you.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
The proposed new messaging layer sounds really interesting and powerful. A little like Mach or QNX, perhaps? Many kernel methods and system calls will use messaging instead of traditional brittle techniques that often lead to API problems down the road. Also, multithreaded kernel design should be simplified as result. My only question is how much will this slow down FreeBSD?
... a place where the "BSD is dying" guy can post and be vaguely on-topic
http://virtuelvis.com/
Anonymous Howard, who made a career of proclaiming the demise of the *BSD Operating Systems, was found dead at his keyboard this afternoon. He had just turned 16. An unnamed police spokeswoman said it was an apparent case of "autoerotic asphyxiation gone haywire". [You know the rest of the story.]
What does an old gunslinger have to do with this announcement? Even more important... will Miss Kitty be involved?
Un-news
So is forking something that's dying anything like beating a dead horse? :-)
Having NetBSD/FreeBSD seperate was good in many ways because it kept mutually incompatable folks away from each others throats. Once things cooled down, technology began to flow in both directions between NetBSD and FreeBSD. Later on, OpenBSD came along. All sorts of good things came from that. Can you say OpenSSH?
It would be nice if DragonFlyBSD (gah, ENAMETOOLONG) was a similar deal. As a FreeBSD developer, I hope that there will be plenty of opportunities to take good stuff in both directions. If we can keep people away from each others throats and work on making the code better, then everybody wins.
Diversity is good. Developers fighting each other is bad. Forks can be a good way to relieve the stress. There is no need to make a Big Deal(TM) about it.
Insofar as performance goes, a higher version number does not mean higher performance. 4.x is a lot faster then 5.x for many types of tasks. DragonFly will be able to implement critical subsystems in MP, like the TCP stack, using an essentially mutexless design, which ultimately means that DragonFly will theoretically be able to perform better then 5.x in an MP environment once both are able to completely remove the MP lock. But that is down the road quite a bit and a lot can happen between then and now.
This one never gets old. I also laughed my ass off to the ones above. Here's my contribution, i've got spare Karma, *BSD, dead at 55.
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
I guess they need to look at
Debian FreeBSD
They've come quite a long way and have installable systems available
Glibc Based Debian Freebsd
Seems like this is what Dragon fly FreeBSD is trying to do
- Not Theo, but not Bill either
I'm a FreeBSD user, but not by religion. I use Linux on certain systems where some distro fits better.
However during daily usage FreeBSD simply turned to be superior to the big few Linux distro's as far as release engineering goes.
Matt branches, but let's take reasons and goals to be unimportant for now.
How is he going to sustain _any_ release engineering the quality FreeBSD (and the major Linux distro's) has/have?
Why not one *NIX them?
I'm mainly a BSD user (still like Slackware, my first Linux encounter of the first kind), but from a user perspective the various BSDs are more coherent than the avg Linux distro.
A different kernel is often irrelevant if you come above a certain level. A level below which an average user won't go anyway.
How do you think your proposed BSD model compares to something like RCU?>/p>
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
(should have used "preview"
Anyway. A lot of posters which whine about the fragmented BSD seem to forget that _any_ *nix OS fork will pick developpers from Linux too. While
there used to be a large gap between FreeBSD and Linux, this has been closed in the last few years. FreeBSD got more user (-hardware) friendly, Linux moved, and partially even topped FreeBSD in the advanced server range.
This might draw Linux developpers even in larger absolute numbers than from e.g. FreeBSD.
And while the Linux developper numbers might be large, the real useful people are scarce, and every loss is, uhh...., a loss, while the new BSD
won't be able to gain enough momentum to keep
up in release engineering and hardware support.
The era that *nix clones can enter the general purpose market is simply over, at least at this
moment.
I might consider my own distro. :) PL-BSD (Pathologic BSD).
Is it possible to cross-compile a BSD kernel from {DJGPP, MinGW32, Cygwin, Linux} ?
Is there a non-GNU ANSI compiler with a BSD license?
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
The only reason I keep my Windows partition is so I can mount it like the bitch that it is.
It's still the child of a deamon though. In fact, much of UNIX was created by satan. I like heat myself, and just love the little deamon. ;)
Of course, if you really want to be free of satan's influence there is always Jesux!
Uh oh, Lucifer is gonna make me suffer for giving a link to the enemies operating system! *runs and hides*
Well, it's already being used - there's a Palm OS game, Space Trader, where one of the mission is destroying the renegade experimental craft 'DragonFly' armed with lightning shields :)
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
TenDRA
http://www.tendra.org/
the FreeBSD install couldn't be any more simple. (might could look nicer) It has an option to automatically assign slices for the /usr /var directories.. etc. The only complicated part of a FreeBSD install is picking what things you want to install. IMO
Does this mean that VoIP on Dragon Fly might put me in touch with my hero ELVIS, maybe even get him to sing?
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
holy cow a ghost post bsd can't be dead that anon dead idiot only took a matter of miniutes to reply.
Sounds like a political war between people with gig egos, and axes to grind.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Do non-alphanumeric characters count? Otherwise you might be happier with BSD/OS, even if it's not free.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Yeah, DragonFly was a horrible movie.
And it was Kevin Costner, not Matt Dillon.
"BSD is dying" is dying.
> You need to rsync quite often
:)
... under FreeBSD I can chose specific mirrors to specific packages.
" emerge somepackage
Only before updating everything. How often that is, is up to you.
> I noticed several broken ports.
It indeed happens! Is it, however, Portage's fault, or that of the package's maintainer?
>
> Try that with portage?
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://somewhere.somedomain.net
You're welcome.
Now don't take me wrong. BSD Ports are very good.
It's just that Portage is no less good.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
The problem with the GPL is that it doesn't trust its fate to human nature but instead tries to force an effect that tends to be against human nature. GPL is a license based on fear and uncertainty, at least from an idealogical standpoing. The BSD license recognizes human nature and works with it to far greater effect for the society as a whole. I prefer trust to fear. I'm just not the paranoid type and if one doesn't have commercial motives for using the GPL one really has to have a high level of paranoia to justify it. That is the reality of the GPL. I use it occassionally, but for commercial reasons only. Everything else I do under the BSD.
-Matt
>I'm just not the paranoid type and if one doesn't have commercial motives for using the GPL one really has to have a high level of paranoia to justify it.
Or maybe you are just not the socialist type.
Don't mind people getting paid to program and feel the BSD license helps society alot more than the GPL ever will.(Note to the trolls, I did not say some of the programs written under the GPL did not help society, just that the BSD license helps society more than the GPL).
...I wish Dillon luck. I have always admired his work, and thought the goals of his project I had heard of before interesting.
People should realize FreeBSD couldn't go both ways at the same time. We went one way, and Dillon will be going another way. If his project survives, and I hope it does, it should benefit everyone. Even if the source itself is never used elsewhere, we'll learn with the experience.
(8-DCS)
I'm still trying to figure why people chime so much against forks. Forks make Open Source go round, let people explore new directions, and avoid ultimate fighting-style fights :-)
Anyway, good luck to Dilon, especially on his ports/packages rewrite work.
Cesar Cardoso can be found at cesar at zyakannazio dot eti dot br (or at least I believe so)
I'd install stuff by hand. I just want to update my ports - I don't think that's too much to ask.
Yes, I've submitted that as a bug. Yes, it was rejected.
It never fails to impress me how much the majorty of /. readers/moderators have absolutely no concept of sarcasm....:p
Yeah, it's too bad because the work being done here looks very interesting. However, after using FreeBSD 5.x (following current except during major imports) for a while I've grown rather attached to some of the new things introduced in 5; devfs, newbus, ACPI, MUCH new hardware support, etc. etc.
While these, or suitable equivalents will probably make it into Dragonfly at some time, who knows when that will be with all the major work being done. Still, I'm fascinated by some of the concepts (especially working VFS layering) and will definately be playing with this on a spare machine when I get some time...
Sounds cool, maybe its a chance for *BSD to gain some mainstream appeal. An improved package system could make it useable for mere mortals... Ah, but I'll probably stick to FreeBSD for the time being, it seems good enough to me... Tim
Thats just silly. I use FreeBSD as my production workstation (that includes XWindows, Gnome 2.x, lots of bleeding edge stuff) and it works fine. *BSD isn't dead, and as long as its as FreeBSD is as well maintained as it is, I'm happy. Time to update my ports tree. :)
Tim
Follow the link guys. It's a link to a thread on a BSD mailing list complaining about a guy on slashdot posting the usual diatribe about BSD dying.
it's s-a-r-c-a-s-m folks! And a little bit of irony mixed in...
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius