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)"

Comments

Mirrors

[CoolVibe]

Courtesy of the people in EFnet #dragonflybsd

• Devon O'Dell San Jose California, 100Mbit
• noskill: NYC, NY, 100mbit
• Devon O'Dell: Amsterdam Zuidoost Holland, 100Mbit
• vDong: Zeist The Netherlands, idespeed (5400rpm)
• jage: Stockholm Sweden, 100Mbit.
• Lukkie: AMS, NL, 10mbit

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

Re:Mirrors

[CoolVibe]

Another one:

• corecode: Germany, 100Mbps

Torrents and Links

[dodell]

Additionally, a torrent and list of mirrors are also available.

variant symbolic links

[Markus Registrada]

Support for variant symbolic links is exciting. That makes it really easy to support 64/32-bit modes on Opteron systems. Similarly, it makes it easy to support variant ABIs for (e.g.) C++ runtime environments without encoding ABI versions into library names, but do look out for combinatorial explosion...

Re:variant symbolic links

[CaptainPinko]

It makes it really easy to support 64/32-bit modes on Opteron systems. Care to explain how that would help? I fail to see what difference that would. Do you mean something like using lib /usr/lib/mathtrig$ARCH.so or something so that depending on mode (ie. 32 vs 64) it will the according lib?

Re:Variant symbolic links?

[CoolVibe]

Search slashdot, and you would have found this.

Exciting stuff

[Dan Ost]

I think this project is a good model for how large projects should be handled.
They published their design and a roadmap for implementing their design. This
makes it easier for a lurker who is watching the project to actually jump in
and contribute to it.

At least, it seems that way in theory. Anyone have any idea how responsive the
community has been to this project?

Re:Exciting stuff

[dodell]

Our developer community is rather small; and we have an active IRC community of about 40 people (which includes a good number of our developers). We generally keep in touch this way, and of course, through the mailing lists.

Anyway, I'll speak for myself here: If I've ever needed a project to work on, I've found the DragonFly community to be the most responsive and helpful community in both finding and completing a project. And from the lists, I see that many people do actually contribute patches and we do have a large community of ``lurkers'' as it were.

Suffer fools gladly

[greenhide]

Uh, anyone want to give an idiot like me a concise and clear reason why DragonFly BSD is superior to the other BSD variants? What specific applications is it more suited towards?

No, I'm not trolling, but thanks for asking.

Re:Suffer fools gladly

[dodell]

Not only did you not read anything in the links in the /. post, you appear to have not even read the post. Go do this. In short, we're about performance.

Secondly, you appear to be looking for a reason that we are ``superior'' to any other BSD variant. When you find clear reasons why one operating system is superior over another for any given application, please let me know.

Re:Suffer fools gladly

[dodell]

He didn't ask for support. He failed to read the features that were listed in the article, all of which are well explained on DragonFly BSD's site. If you have specific questions about what one feature offers over another, I'm certainly fine answering this (and, for the record, don't mean to come over with an elitist attitude), but really: if I said, ``Why should I choose Debian over SuSE'', I'm sure I'd get a million references to the websites of both products.

Granted, the differences between the BSDs are of a different nature than those of different Linux distributions, but I think my point was rather clear.

And really, the post itself lists a TON of features DragonFly has. I'm not going to list them all again.

Re:Suffer fools gladly

[dodell]

And, as stated BEFORE I said that, there's a clear and concise list at dragonflybsd.org. What more do you want?

Re:Suffer fools gladly

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

AT the highest level (remember that the BSDs share code very freely):

FreeBSD: stable, high performance on x86 and a couple other chips.
OpenBSD: Security, audited codebase.
NetBSD: Portability - if it runs 32 bits, it runs NetBSD.
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.

Not sure what you mean by "what apps is it suitable for". At current, DragonFly BSD hasn't even released version 1.0, so not suitable for production. And if you're not in production, choose anything you want.

Re:Suffer fools gladly

[greenhide]

I actually did read the features that were listed in the article, but many of them were over my head.

Like I said, treat me like an idiot. Kind of like if I were to go to an auto dealer, talking to me about pistons, catalytic converters, and the like would be of no help. I'd want to know about fuel efficiency, overall emissions, power when going up hills, how much you could fit in the trunk and the back seats, and its overall safety record.

So, in operating system terms, I'd want to know things like: this operating system is designed for highly secure environments, or environments where speed and system response is most crucial, or where stability is exceedingly important, or where you deal with extremely large file sizes. Would using this OS for a web server or firewall be overkill? Is the system designed to be easy to maintain -- it did look like it has a package system that they're going to make similar to Debian's, and that would be a nice feature.

I don't know hardly *anything* about SuSE or Debian, but if I were asked, I'd respond, "Well, I know that Debian has extremely easy-to-use package management. A great number of people swear by Debian as being extremely easy to install. Other people say it's slower. SuSE comes out of Germany, so it's especially popular there as a lot of the documentation is available in German. However, if you don't know German it may be difficult to find support, as it's possible a lot of the forums will be in German rather than English." If they were interested in specifics, I'd then say, "I'm sorry, I don't know enough. Check out Google for reviews/benchmarks."

People raise "SuSE vs. Debian" type questions all the time -- it's a normal question, and it's often much easier to read responses that have been distilled from personal experience than poring through each distribution's website. I *did* go to the DragonFly website, read through the intro, but didn't understand it fully -- it was definitely written for people very familiar with BSD, and with the apparent misguided path of FreeBSD-5. I also read the FAQ. I didn't realize that I should check out the "Goals" section in order to realize what DragonFly offered differently, and then again "iomodel" is not necessarily the most appealing link name for a noob luser like myself.

Since this is one of the early appearances of DragonFly BSD, I think asking for a general explanation of what makes it so damn special is not out of the question.

Re:Suffer fools gladly

[Dan Farina]

So bleeding edge development, perhaps? I was pretty unawares of what DBSD was all about, although, to be fair, I didn't follow it. I think this is a good idea to breathe some new life into the BSDs...I'm sure successful features from DBSD will be borrowed by the others once they prove themselves useful and stable. Maybe even ease the linux troll's complaints about how slow development is in the BSD world.

Re:Suffer fools gladly

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Sorry, but that's bullshit. With people like Poul-Henning Kamp nuking stuff they don't consider useful (see the recent ibcs/sysv compat thread on freebsd-current) and doing damage to the team work others have put so much effort on, I see more and more people migrating to NetBSD (alpha support is almost EOL'd for FreeBSD too) and DragonFlyBSD.

NetBSD's scheduler activations already outperform FreeBSD's KSE, and work on most architectures (as opposed to FreeBSD's x86-only KSE)

Sorry, but NetBSD is already ahead of the game, sans the flamers like Poul-Henning and David O'Brien.

Maxim Hermione

Re:Suffer fools gladly

[ArbitraryConstant]

As I understand it, the point of lwkt is to maximize the benfit of CPU cache by keeping threads local to a given CPU. That's a slightly more batch oriented approach, and in SMP systems I think it will provide benefit for batch type jobs. But I think it will reduce the freedom of the kernel to run interactive stuff IMMEDIATELY, like Linux 2.6 and FreeBSD 5.x do now. They're both quite good at keeping interative tasks responsive.

I'm not an expert and it may actually increase performance because of the cache-- I don't know.

From what I've read though, I think that the overall DragonFlyBSD strategy has a credible chance of beating the performance of FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris on SMP systems, especially for stuff like dynamic content and databases. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, I'm just saying that I can think of a few possible negative side effects.

Re:Suffer fools gladly

[dodell]

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 :)

DragonFly is a very cool OS

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Good news, everyone!
Turns out that *BSD is stronger than ever!
According to an Inernetnews article, Netcraft has confirmed that *BSD has "dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
There has been a steady increase in *BSD developers over the past decade.
You can read more about FreeBSD here

If you would like to try out a BSD, you can download: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or DragonflyBSD
Enjoy!

Re: Welcome to the same hell

[Anonymous Coward]

W^X, ProPolice, randomized shared library loading. All of these happen to ANY program compiled from source, with or without code auditing, and make overflows pretty damn hard to exploit, probably impossible.

Re: Welcome to the same hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux doesn't do any of those, since it's just a kernel. Some distros might hack in something like PAX, but its nowhere near as pervasive and as well tested as on OpenBSD - it takes toolchain support for randomised shared libraries, and OpenBSD also fixed a lot of bugs in Propolice while integrating it, showing noone else has seriously tried it to use it before across multiple architectures.

Oh I didn't even mention stuff like StackGhost on sparc...

Re: Welcome to the same hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux does "W^X", aka non executable mappings in non-leet speak

No it doesn't. W^X ensures that there are no pages in a process's address space which are writable and executable and separates them. Not just a non-exec stack. For example on i386:


0250B000 24K read/exec /usr/libexec/ld.so
0280A000 4K read/exec [ uvm_aobj ]
06B04000 188K read/exec /usr/lib/libtermcap.so.9.0
0861F000 508K read/exec /usr/lib/libc.so.30.3
1C000000 348K read/exec /usr/local/bin/bash
2250B000 4K read /usr/libexec/ld.so
2250C000 4K read/write [ anon ]
(trim)
7EB90000 4K read/write [ anon ]
865FF000 12K read /var/run/ld.so.hints
CDBFE000 28672K [ stack ]
CF7FE000 4040K read/write [ stack ]


Notice how the exec mapping stop, and the write mapping begin. This means on i386 the segment registers can be used to enforce read/write/execute - you dont need a new processor with per-page NX (although that works as well of course).

It does randomized shared library loading, and this doesn't require toolchain support in Linux, probably because its design is cleaner than OpenBSD's

Vanilla Linux doesn't ... except via PAX, although I'll be glad to be corrected. Of course, not many major distros actually use PAX or Propolice, where OpenBSD delivers tested binary packages for 10 (or whatever the current number is) different architectures. I'm not interested in security where I have to patch and recompile my entire OS.

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

Very funny. The average sysadmin understands the UNIX security model. Not many understand the insanely complex SE Linux thing.

Linux does a lot of things better than OpenBSD, but really, security just isn't one of them. I always regret posting to Slashdot to try to correct some of the cluelessness here, so this will be my last post here for a while again.