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DragonFly At DragonFly 1.0-CURRENT

Posted by timothy on from the nomenclature dept.

CoolVibe writes "For months, the DragonflyBSD fork of FreeBSD was maintaining compatibility with the existing FreeBSD-STABLE branch by using the 'FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE' name internally. In a few commits, Matt Dillon changed all the names, and DragonFly is finally sailing under its own banner. Things that DragonFlyBSD already has that FreeBSD-STABLE doesn't are, among others, application checkpointing, variant symlinks (not unlike Domain OS), Light-weight kernel threads, a more efficient slab-allocator, a multithreaded network stack, and the rcNG system."

7 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. I wonder by Leroy_Brown242 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    One has to wonder if DFBSD will die due to lack of following, or if it will be the next awesome BSD. I am currently running FreeBSD 4.8 Release on my workstation. It might be worth it to grab a spare machine and install it to see what's up. Only if the distributed.net client will work on it though. ]:3}>

    --
    Pretty Pictures!
    1. Re:I wonder by merdark · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think this is one of the most promising new OS (or OS varient if you want to be picky). Personally, I can't wait for the package management system to get set up. Eventually, you will be able to run DBSD with binary only upgrades and installs. Should be cool.

      Ports are great, but damn does my p2 400 dislike hours and hours of compiling. :)

  2. Variant symlinks are really cool by Euphonious+Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Variant symlinks as found in Domain OS (nee Domainix, nee Apollo Aegis) are symlinks that refer to environment variables, e.g.
    ln -s '/etc-$(HOSTNAME)' /etc
    to help enable sharing the root file system. (I don't know the variable-reference syntax used in Dragonfly). This was one of the really cool things about Aegis, which was based on Multics, not Unix. Unix/Linux/BSD have still not caught up to the networking capabilities of Aegis, and what they do have is usually clunkier than the way it was done in Aegis.

    I thought about implementing variant symlinks on Linux. Probably it would need a new system call to tell the kernel where the process keeps its environment variables, to be run at each program startup, and a new process table entry field.

    1. Re:Variant symlinks are really cool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Variant symlinks as found in Domain OS (nee Domainix, nee Apollo Aegis) are symlinks that refer to environment variables, e.g.
      ln -s '/etc-$(HOSTNAME)' /etc

      That's neat ... kinda. But any idea when we're likely to see plan9 namespaces hit any of the free *nix distributions? There's only so much you can do with environment variables after all.

  3. MIDI support? by thanjee · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Doe DFBSD have *WORKING* Kernel MIDI support?

    The first BSD to have that will become my favourite. So far FreeBSD is in the lead :)

    --
    Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
  4. Re:What We Can Learn From BSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

    Witness Redhat keeping its CVS out of public access. At least the BSD's allow one to track changes to their kernels and back out mistakes made by the developers.

    Linux (as delivered by Redhat) is effectively a closed source operating system between releases.

  5. Re:Server Names by CoolVibe · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Might I refer you to RFC 2100? It explains why some hosts have such weird names sometimes. :)