Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

DragonFly BSD Announces 1.0RC1

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the so-close-to-release-it-hurts dept.

CoolVibe writes "Matt Dillon announced the availability of DragonFly BSD's 1.0 Release Candidate #1. Get it at Dragonfly BSD's site (please use a mirror or post mirrors as comments). Changes and features include: variant symbolic links, UDF support, lightweight kernel threads, message passing, GCC 3.4 in the tree, binutils 2.14, Kernighan's awk 2004-02-07, BIND 9.2.4 rc4, CVS 1.12.8, libpcap 0.8.3, tcpdump 3.8.3, less 381, MMX/XMM kernel optimizations are now on by default, greatly improving bcopy/bzero/copyin/copyout performance for large (>4K) buffers, XIO, acpica5, new AC'97 codec support, network stack revamping, long standing bug fixes for wide variety of support and stability issues, and way, way, way more. A new installer is also in the works that uses DragonFly's new CAPS IPC mechanism. The installer beta is available from LiveBSD. (Not updated to RC1 just yet, but it gives a nice idea of the progess made)"

3 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Mirrors by CoolVibe · · Score: 5, Informative
    Courtesy of the people in EFnet #dragonflybsd

    MD5sum: MD5 (dfly-1.0RC1.iso.gz) = 663bc0ce4c077c4eeb38792e846210ea

  2. DragonFly is a very cool OS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've been using it since february, and let me tell you, it's great! It's fast, and generally stable (between major changes, it is a prerelease OS don't forget!), and it runs legacy Linux and FreeBSD binaries at native speeds.

    And it is being redesigned at it's core to be a clustering capable operating system (although this is not in just yet). Soon it will be able to run user mode drivers, greatly enhancing the stability of the system to levels that no other current OSS project can boast (and still be telling the truth ;^)

    This truely is what a modern UNIX-like OS should be!

    Way to go Matt and the rest of the DragonFly team!

  3. Re:Suffer fools gladly by dodell · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hehe, okay. I guess I simply misunderstood the type of information you were looking for, so forgive what others apparently have called my ``hotheadedness.''

    As has been explained a gazillion times, DragonFly is a fork of the FreeBSD, which started with the FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE code.

    The kernel features listed in the original post attempt to utilize features of modern processors and take into account modern ideas and research when developing new features.

    One could say that our focus is on performance. A lot of the work that Matt, Hiten, Joerg and Jeffery Hsu are doing involve cranking up performance. This isn't to say that we aren't worried about stability or security, though.

    The ``apparent misguided path of FreeBSD-5'' is a long political story and is one which I really don't like to get into much (because each side can be stressed and turned into a war), but basically Matt Dillon thought that the way the FreeBSD 5 series was handling SMP was irrational. His main reasons were that:

    a) A mutex system would clutter up the kernel with tons of locks and obfuscate the code, effectively requiring experts in the area to continue further development,

    b) Future developers would have to make sure that they understand how the mutex API works so that they don't stumble into weird SMP problems later,

    c) It's heavyweight and isn't as fast as it could be.

    Our model also opens up the future for really neat things like SSI (single system image), which shouldn't be terribly hard to implement. Our TODO list is large, and it's going to take a while, but I think we all enjoy working together on the project. It's a nice friendly community. Come check it out sometime :)

    --
    www.sitetronics.com/wordpress