DragonFlyBSD 1.0 Released

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."

Comments

Serious question:

[Anonymous Coward]

What was the reason behind this fork?

Re:Serious question:

[RupertJ]

IIRC, the DF team wanted to implement SMP in a different way and weren't happy with the over-complicated approach in parts of FreeBSD. They're also ripping out a fair bit of the Perl dependent stuff too.

Check the DF interview article for more info.

Re:Serious question:

[Bloody Pulp]

DragonFlyBSD project is intended to take over development of the FreeBSD 4.X branch. Using a different method SMP and rewrite of packaging system.

Check out the original announcement of DragonFlyBSD on the FreeBSD stable list:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stabl e/ 2003-July/002183.html

Re:Serious question:

[bsd_usr]

They're dropping Perl from the base. Meaning that it won't be required in order to build the system. Also, it will be installed as a third party port (add-on software).

Actually, the 4.X branch still has Perl in the base system. The 4.X branch is where DFBSD forked from. The 5.X branch is where Perl was removed.

Before, there were quite a few "system" programs that were perl scripts. Those programs were rewritten as "C" programs in order to rid the dependency of Perl in the base system.

It's not a bad thing. A Unix OS really doesn't need Perl. And if you really do need it, you can easily install it via the ports system or via the package system. No biggie. Makes the base install smaller and neater.

Re:Serious question:

[m.dillon]

Well, price and power is also a downside, especially if you run the boxes 24x7. All of our dual-cpu boxes (primarily DELL-2550's and some old VALinux boxes [running FreeBSD or DragonFly]) eat power like there was no tomorrow. Our single-cpu AMD64 boxes, on the otherhand, are twice as fast (as both cpus in the dell put together) and eat half the power (or less).

In nearly all cases you will be paying a premium for a SMP box over a UP box, so much so that if space is not an issue for you, and you have no special requirements (e.g. big honking database app), it will be more cost and maintainance effective to buy two single-cpu boxes then one dual-cpu box.

What this means is that I, at least, am turning off the SMP boxes in my machines room as fast as I can migrate them to new, faster, and far cheaper UP boxes.

On the flip side, though, both Intel and AMD are moving to dual core (and power-pc has had quad cores for a long time), so a SMP-efficient kernel design is as important as ever. Within the next 5 years I believe that all consumer cpus will be dual-core at a minimum.

Now all one needs to be able to do is seemlessly cluster them together, which is precisely one of our long-term goals! (seemless != the current hacks you see on Linux currently).

-Matt

FreeBSD 5

[CaptainPinko]

They felt that the approach the FreeBSD was taking for FreeBSD 5 was going in the wrong direction. I believe they hada problem with all the Mutexs or something specific like that. The main focus of DragonflyBSD is scalability and clustering. The are hoping to have SIS (Single Image Systems) as a priority. It won't be hear anytime son but thats a long term goal. OSNews has had some stuff on them over that last while. Here is the thread http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=7660 and here is the torrent I used http://download.exodusmachine.net/torrents/dfly-1. 0REL.iso.gz.torrent . Let me be the first to say: I for one welcome our new Dragonflu overlords! http://www.dragonflybsd.org/main/mascot.cgi