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DragonFly BSD Introduces A 'Stable' CVS Tag

Posted by timothy on from the steady-as-she-goes dept.

bsdman writes "The DragonFly BSD project have recently introduced a new 'stable' tag in their cvs. If you ever wanted to use DragonFly BSD but was scared of any instability - now is your chance!"

6 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Which one? by Dan+Ost · · Score: 4, Informative

    My understanding is that rather than continue to make incremental improvements
    to FreeBSD, the DragonFly BSD folks are ripping out entire subsystems and
    replacing them with new designs that they think will scale better, be easier
    to maintain, and, ultimately, make it much simpler to make incremental
    improvements on than the current FreeBSD design.

    Take a look at their website. They have some excellent explanations of their
    goals.

    --

    *sigh* back to work...
  2. Re:Which one? by Santana · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's the main difference: goals.

    Goals make you take different decisions. They all write very good and consistent operating systems. All of them share code. OpenBSD takes drivers from Net and Free, and these have taken pf, OpenSSH and spamd; the list of shared code is huge (and that's the point of BSD).

    But every BSD has different policies. OpenBSD is the more pedantic about licenses and code quality. For some people it could seem absurd, but time has proven OpenBSD is right.

    It's my impression that OpenBSD is in the perfect balance between NetBSD (privileging portability) and FreeBSD (privileging efficiency and software availability).

    But I'm biased :>

    --
    The best way to predict the future is to invent it
  3. Re:ISO's only? by Holi · · Score: 4, Informative

    From the download section of their website:

    CD Images
    DragonFly CDs are 'live', meaning these CDs will boot your system and let you log in as root (no password). You can use this feature to check for hardware compatibility and play with DragonFly a little before actually installing it on your hard drive. The CD includes an installer that can be run at the console, or (experimentally) via a web browser. Make sure you read the README file for more information. To activate the installer, boot the CD and login as 'installer'. See the 'Download Site' list below for a list of download locations.

    --
    Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
  4. Re:Which one? by Eivind+Eklund · · Score: 4, Informative
    Seems unlikely - the last rewrite of the FreeBSD VM system was done by Matt Dillon, the founder of DragonFlyBSD.

    And I don't know of any particular advantage of UVM in practice; as far as I've understood, the performance in practice is not as good with FreeBSD.

    If you've got information to the contrary, please share!

    Eivind.

    --
    Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
  5. Re:Nice, but... by sp0rk173 · · Score: 5, Informative

    it's the OSI approved version of the license. Apparently some old files had the old 4-clause license hanging around.

    This is an improvement, and isn't making it any harder for Matt and other's ideas to get out. It's actually making the code MORE open, from the GNU/FSF/OSI standpoint. Nice attempt at a troll, though.

  6. Not that big a deal. by m.dillon · · Score: 5, Informative
    Oh for heaven's sake. It's not *that* big a deal! It's there so all the new VFS work, which is virtually guarenteed to create some destabilization despite our best efforts (because we are literally ripping out and replacing the entire VFS interface), doesn't screw up people trying to use DragonFly as a production platform.

    Wait a few months and there will really be some new cool things to brag about. The new VFS layering is going to allow us to implement a generic journaling interface (read: real time continuously streaming fs backups and other cool things).

    -Matt