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DragonFly BSD Announces 1.0RC1

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)"

24 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. BSD is dying!!!!112 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Hahaha, BSD IS DEAD. Cato er deilig, alle vil ligge med cato!

  2. LMAO by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    http://www.pentarou.org/files/bsd.jpg

  3. Re:Suffer fools gladly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    and its support like this that makes the newbs run away from bsd. talk about elitest.

  4. Beverly Hills 90210 by solitarian · · Score: -1, Troll

    Who would have thought that such a poor actor could help out the *nix community so well.

  5. Failure teaches a hard lesson by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    What We Can Learn From BSD
    By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

    Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

    Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

    These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

    As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

    Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

    The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

    1. Re:Failure teaches a hard lesson by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
      Let's get back to basics,
      Fact: *BSD is dying.
  6. Re:BSD insider confesses What Killed FreeBSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Heh, yeah, funny thing about that...
    Mike Smith now works for Apple, who's OS is based on BSD.
    Check it out: www.lemis.com/~grog/msmr.html

  7. Re:Suffer fools gladly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Of course this list is party-line baloney. The different BSDs exist primarily for political/personal reasons, and there is not a huge difference in Security or Portability.

    There is a huge difference in developer support, which is the main reason that FreeBSD is the only fork that has reasonably modern performance features.

    DragonFly BSD: a fairly radical rewrite of the kernel, bringing in message passing inspired by Amiga and a bunch of other goodies that is too radical for a more stability-focused FreeBSD.

    Just the opposite. Some developers felt that (still not stable) FreeBSD 5 was "too radical", and forked FreeBSD 4 off to DragonFly.

  8. Hard Times for *BSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    Why now? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personae?

    The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.

  9. Re: Welcome to the same hell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Duh, Linux does "W^X", aka non executable mappings in non-leet speak. It does randomized shared library loading, and this doesn't require toolchain support in Linux, probably because its design is cleaner than OpenBSD's.

    Linux can quite easily be built with propolice, and it has a very fine security infrastructure with SELinux. More advanced than what OpenBSD has.

    Lastly, Linux gets its code audited, by Linux distro companies, and by the likes of IBM, SGI, NEC, Intel, AMD, Sony, Toshiba, HP, Transmeta, CISCO, TI, Dell, Motorola, Nokia, Bosch, MIPS, Google, to name a few larger ones. Really audited, I mean. Not just "OpenBSD style audited", which amounts to no more than grepping for a few string functions. I mean properly audited.

    Oh, what's that you say? What is your incredible retort? Theo is a cock smoker? Yes, I already knew that, that doesn't change anything.

  10. WHO GIVES A STINKING FUCK? IT WAS BORN DEAD. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    I ditched FreeBSD when Jordan quit. That was it. That was the day when FreeBSD died. I don't give a stinking fuck about some dragonflybsd!

  11. Re: Welcome to the same hell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    I want to put my pee pee in your poo poo hole.

  12. Re:Suffer fools gladly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    I want to put my pee pee in your poo poo hole.

  13. Re:Suffer fools gladly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    I want to put my pee pee in your poo poo hole.

  14. Re:Suffer fools gladly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    I want to put my pee pee in your poo poo hole.

  15. BSD dead beatch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    Burial party
    1. spade
    2. mattock
    3. quicklime
    4. profit!!!
  16. Re:Suffer fools gladly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    I regularly go to NetBSD.org, and see the pathetic hodge-podge of ports they've managed to achieve. They've ported their OS to Dreamcast's and Amigas, and a whole host of obsolete boxes.

    But it makes me wonder why people would expend effort banging their heads against old obsolete junk that no one is ever going to run? Old VAXStations and VMEBus junk? What masochist would even bother trying to get that stuff to run?

    I wish these people would use their talents for productive things...they could be making their OS better, more stable and easier to use. Not to mention the fact that NetBSD, like the other BSD's is pretty thin on driver support for most modern hardware. Couldnt they be writing drivers for harware that matters?

    And the whole ease-of-use thing is not something you can dismiss either...NetBSD is harder to get installed than six-year-old Slackware. I'd really -LIKE- NetBSD and OpenBSD to be more popular among users and hackers, but people like that want to program and run apps, not solve a Rubik's cube!

    As for the Alpha hardware...well, Alpha has seen it's day come and go -- at least as far as hobbyist hardware is concerned.

    Back in the days of the 21164 (and 21164PC, and the old Multias) there was a chance, a brief window, in which Alphas might have become mainstream hardware. But Digital committed corporate suicide, and now the Alpha line is completely out of sight, pricewise. You're not going to find anything comparable to the Sun Blade for under $1000 (which, admittedly, isnt a particularly power machine). Alpha 21264 EV67/EV68 machines are insanely expensive and the performance gap between them, and high-end PCs is now disturbingly narrow.

    Now we hear that Samsung seems to be moving away from Alpha Processors, Inc...and is seeking partnerships for AMD hardware?

    Some annoying old coot on Usenet keeps saying about how "PC's have out-evolved Unix workstations and RISC architectures in every way", and I'd take his bait and counter his arguments, but it's sounding truer all the time.

    RISC along with NetBSD, and for that matter, *BSDs in general, are dead.

  17. Unreleased Info about DragonFlyBSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Yet another sickening blow has struck what's left of the *BSD community, as a soon-to-be-released report by the independent Commision for Technology Management (CTM) after a year-long study has concluded: *BSD is already dead. Here are some of the commission's findings:

    Fact: DragonflyBSD, yet another offshoot of the beleaguered FreeBSD "project", is already collapsing under the weight of internal power struggles and in-fighting. "They haven't done a single decent release," notes Mark Baron, an industry watcher and columnist. "Their mailing lists read like an online version of a Jerry Springer episode, complete with food fights, swearing, name-calling, and chair-throwing." Netcraft reports that DragonflyBSD is run on exactly 0% of internet servers.

    Fact: the *BSDs have balkanized yet again. There are now no less than twelve separate, competing *BSD projects, each of which has introduced fundamental incompatibilities with the other *BSDs, and frequently with Unix standards. Average number of developers in each project: fewer than five. Average number of users per project: there are no definitive numbers, but reports show that all projects are on the decline.

    Fact: X.org will not include support *BSD. The newly formed group believes that the *BSDs have strayed too far from Unix standards and have become too difficult to support along with Linux and Solaris x86. "It's too much trouble," said one anonymous developer. "If they want to make their own standards, let them doing the porting for us."

    Fact: There are almost no FreeBSD developers left, and its use, according to Netcraft, is down to a sadly crippled .005% of internet servers. A recent attempt at a face-to-face summit in Boulder, Colorado culminated in an out-and-out fistfight between core developers, reportedly over code commenting formats (tabs vs. spaces). Hotel security guards broke up the melee and banned the participants from the hotel. Two of the developers were hospitalized, and one continues to have his jaw wired shut.

    Fact: NetBSD, which claims to focus on portability (whatever that is supposed to mean), is slow, and cannot take advantage of multiple CPUs. "That about drove the last nail in the coffin for BSD use here," said Michael Curry, CTO of Amazon.com. "We took our NetBSD boxes out to the backyard and shot them in the head. We're much happier running Linux."

    Fact: *BSD has no support from the media. Number of Linux magazines available at bookstores: 5 (Linux Journal, Linux World, Linux Developer, Linux Format, Linux User). Number of available *BSD magazines: 0. Current count of Linux-oriented technical books: 1071. Current count of *BSD books: 6.

    Fact: Many user-level applications will no longer work under *BSD, and no one is working to change this. The GIMP, a Photoshop-like application, has not worked at all under *BSD since version 1.1 (sorry, too much trouble for such a small base, developers have said). OpenOffice, a Microsoft Office clone, has never worked under *BSD and never will. ("Why would we bother?" said developer Steven Andrews, an OpenOffice team lead.)

    Fact: servers running OpenBSD, which claims to focus on security, are frequently compromised. According to Jim Markham, editor of the online security forum SecurityWatch, the few OpenBSD servers that exist on the internet have become a joke among the hacker community. "They make a game out of it," he says. "(OpenBSD leader) Theo [de Raadt] will scramble to make a new patch to fix one problem, and they've already compromised a bunch of boxes with a different exploit."

    With these incontroverible facts staring (what's left of) the *BSD community in the face, they can only draw one conclusion: *BSD is already dead.

  18. Whistling past the graveyard by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Elegy For *BSD


    I am a *BSD user,
    and I try hard to be brave
    That is a tall order
    *BSD's foot is in the grave.

    I tap at my toy keyboard
    and whistle a happy tune
    but keeping happy's so hard,
    *BSD died so soon.

    Each day I wake and softly sob
    Nightfall finds me crying
    Not only am I a zit faced slob
    but *BSD is dying.

  19. DragonFly is a very cool OS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Yet another sickening blow has struck what's left of the *BSD community, as a soon-to-be-released report by the independent Commision for Technology Management (CTM) after a year-long study has concluded: *BSD is already dead. Here are some of the commission's findings:

    Fact: DragonflyBSD, yet another offshoot of the beleaguered FreeBSD "project", is already collapsing under the weight of internal power struggles and in-fighting. "They haven't done a single decent release," notes Mark Baron, an industry watcher and columnist. "Their mailing lists read like an online version of a Jerry Springer episode, complete with food fights, swearing, name-calling, and chair-throwing." Netcraft reports that DragonflyBSD is run on exactly 0% of internet servers.

    Fact: the *BSDs have balkanized yet again. There are now no less than twelve separate, competing *BSD projects, each of which has introduced fundamental incompatibilities with the other *BSDs, and frequently with Unix standards. Average number of developers in each project: fewer than five. Average number of users per project: there are no definitive numbers, but reports show that all projects are on the decline.

    Fact: X.org will not include support *BSD. The newly formed group believes that the *BSDs have strayed too far from Unix standards and have become too difficult to support along with Linux and Solaris x86. "It's too much trouble," said one anonymous developer. "If they want to make their own standards, let them doing the porting for us."

    Fact: There are almost no FreeBSD developers left, and its use, according to Netcraft, is down to a sadly crippled .005% of internet servers. A recent attempt at a face-to-face summit in Boulder, Colorado culminated in an out-and-out fistfight between core developers, reportedly over code commenting formats (tabs vs. spaces). Hotel security guards broke up the melee and banned the participants from the hotel. Two of the developers were hospitalized, and one continues to have his jaw wired shut.


    Fact: NetBSD, which claims to focus on portability (whatever that is supposed to mean), is slow, and cannot take advantage of multiple CPUs. "That about drove the last nail in the coffin for BSD use here," said Michael Curry, CTO of Amazon.com. "We took our NetBSD boxes out to the backyard and shot them in the head. We're much happier running Linux."

    Fact: *BSD has no support from the media. Number of Linux magazines available at bookstores: 5 (Linux Journal, Linux World, Linux Developer, Linux Format, Linux User). Number of available *BSD magazines: 0. Current count of Linux-oriented technical books: 1071. Current count of *BSD books: 6.

    Fact: Many user-level applications will no longer work under *BSD, and no one is working to change this. The GIMP, a Photoshop-like application, has not worked at all under *BSD since version 1.1 (sorry, too much trouble for such a small base, developers have said). OpenOffice, a Microsoft Office clone, has never worked under *BSD and never will. ("Why would we bother?" said developer Steven Andrews, an OpenOffice team lead.)

    Fact: servers running OpenBSD, which claims to focus on security, are frequently compromised. According to Jim Markham, editor of the online security forum SecurityWatch, the few OpenBSD servers that exist on the internet have become a joke among the hacker community. "They make a game out of it," he says. "(OpenBSD leader) Theo [de Raadt] will scramble to make a new patch to fix one problem, and they've already compromised a bunch of boxes with a different exploit."

    With these incontroverible facts staring (what's left of) the *BSD community in the face, they can only draw one conclusion: *BSD is already dead.

  20. Object Lesson by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    What We Can Learn From BSD
    By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

    Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

    Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

    These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

    As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

    Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

    The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains more and more market share and as BSD sinks ever deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

  21. Re: "when it's done" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    I want to put my pee pee in your poo poo hole. Also, Mary-Kate Olsen makes one hot corpse.

  22. Re:Suffer fools gladly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    I heard that BSD is mostly dead. So I don't want to get involved with a dying system like BSD. Sorry.

  23. Re:My concern is longevity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    I'm afraid that quite frankly, I don't know how to convince you otherwise without you going out, spending a lot of time and effort building up what you want to do and then for you to wonder why BSD doesn't get the recognition you feel it deserves. I could send you a dozen books on the matter, but they're not light reading material, and I'm not paying the postage. Suffice it to say that in all fairness BSD really is failing. Miserably.

    Nevertheless, what I will do though, is take these notes made here, merge them into the requisite training stuff on hardware and so on, and see if that begins to make any sense. If it doesn't, no worries - the fault is with BSD, and I haven't explained what all this means properly. If it does, then maybe we can start to make something happen, although I doubt it. Cheers.