DragonFly At DragonFly 1.0-CURRENT

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."

Comments

Variant symlinks are really cool

[Euphonious Coward]

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.

Re:I wonder

[merdark]

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. :)