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DragonFlyBSD 1.0 Released

Posted by timothy on from the made-by-a-famous-actor dept.

eeg3 writes "One year after starting the project as a fork of the FreeBSD-4.x tree, the DragonFly Team is pleased to announce its 1.0 release. Check out the project's diary for a list of the improvements the project has implemented. Also, be sure to grab it from one of the mirrors."

9 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Serious question: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What was the reason behind this fork?

    1. Re:Serious question: by RupertJ · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Totally agree on the SMP thing. I work with some seriously "into it" techies (including myself) who live and breathe Linux/OpenBSD/FreeBSD/Solaris/HP-UX/IRIX at both work and home. Not a single one of them has a personal box with more than one CPU. Maybe that's a European, or maybe even specifically UK trend for developer's own kit at home. Weird. Maybe others would like to chip in here.

      As for the "two imports" thing, the only OSS project that I was aware of a serious initial temporary code-freeze on was when Theo forked NetBSD into OpenBSD and audited the lot. But that said, they're now using NetBSD's SMP code as a starting point. Not that that is a bad thing, by any stretch of the imagination.

      With Perl being dropped from FreeBSD, what are they actually replacing it with? (I know very little about the FreeBSD project and it shows =).

      RJ

    2. Re:Serious question: by NanoGator · · Score: 3, Interesting

      "Only downside (and maybe this is good for the reason mentioned just now) is that most apps don't take advantage of multiple cpus yet."

      It's still useful even when you don't have SMP software. If you have an app that's burnin all of one CPU up, you still have the other CPU available to do just about anything else. For example, I have a plugin for Lightwave that is a 3D renderer. It's not multi-threaded yet, so I couldn't make it go faster with both processors. So while that was rendering, I played a game of Quake. Q3 ran great, and the rendering still happened on time. Pretty slick.

      --
      "Derp de derp."
  2. Packages? by RLiegh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What is the ports/packages situation look like for Dragonfly? Have they ported the old ones over, or is their selection severely limited?

  3. Re:Sounds cool by eeg3 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Although their team is small, it's compiled with very competent and capable developers such as Jeffrey Hsu and Matt Dillon, among others.

    Also, a small commit team helps get things done at a faster rate, whereas it's not so hard to get things added.

  4. Re:*BSD is dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
    There are currently 307 FreeBSD developers as of the 2004 core team election.
    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!

  5. Re:Does it run Linux? by kardar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    FreeBSD (I am using 4.10) has a Gentoo "stage 1" port, actually.

    There is a directory called /usr/compat/linux, under which you have all the usual /usr (that would be /usr/compat/linux/usr/, if you know what I mean) and /bin and /lib, and so on...

    so you... "chroot" into /usr/compat/linux and then you can "make system" or whatevever. It's not bad.

    The default is a Red Hat - I have what is essentially a basic Red Hat 9.0 system on my FreeBSD machine, there is also a port for Debian Stable.

    So you can do vmware for Linux, or you can do vmware for FreeBSD, just like you can do Mozilla for Linux, or any other app for Linux. I imagine you could install portage under /usr/compat/linux/usr/portage by chrooting into /usr/compat/linux and emerging sync, and then emerge whatever you want - as long as you are chrooted, it should work (I haven't tried it). So everything you emerge should be done while you are chrooted into /usr/compat/linux - if I understand this correctly -- however, the Gentoo port, the Gentoo FreeBSD port, under /usr/ports/emulators/, would be installed like any other FreeBSD port - and actually, there are many FreeBSD "Linux" ports that can be installed automatically from the FreeBSD ports system, no chrooting or anything required. The chrooting would be if you wanted to leave FreeBSD behind and enter into Linux land - apparently this works, but I haven't tried it. Everything I have needed to install that is a Linux binary has been available as a FreeBSD port.

    Another cool thing is that you can apparently upgrade from FreeBSD 4.9 and above to Dragonfly BSD, which is something I will probably be doing at some point in the future.

  6. future vs. now by r00t · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You're comparing future DragonflyBSD features
    with current Linux features.

    Hey, Linux has a future too. It isn't stagnant.
    There are a number of active projects to give
    seamless clustering to Linux. The filesystem
    will be shared, including coherent page cache
    and user-accesible (flock, etc.) locks. There
    are a couple SSI projects. This stuff now has
    a conference of it's own. Major developers care.

  7. Team Interview by No_Weak_Heart · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Here's a nice, in depth interview at ONLamp with the core developer team from just last week. Covers a lot of ground, I found it very informative.