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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!"

4 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. 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
  2. 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.

  3. 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

  4. Re:Which one? by m.dillon · · Score: 5, Interesting
    No, the VM subsystem... that is, the concept of using stackable VM Objects, is going to stay in. I do want to implement a copy-on-write mechanism for pages owned by in-progress I/O to avoid stall situations that still exist in FreeBSD (despite Kirk's filesystem bitmap hacks, which only really fixed the worst of the stalls). There are also some kernel memory subsystem interactions with the VM system that need cleaning up to make things more MP friendly, and vm_map's and a few other areas need some algorithmic cleanups... but it's just cleaning up, not a rewrite. Generally I believe the VM Object based VM subsystem used in FreeBSD and DragonFly to be superior to the mechanisms used in other BSDs and in Linux.

    -Matt