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DragonFlyBSD 1.2 Released
vsarunas writes "The DragonFlyBSD Team is
pleased to announce
the official release of
DragonFly 1.2.0! Get it
here,
or here,
or as a torrent.
DragonFlyBSD is a continuation of the stable and high-performance FreeBSD
4 branch of FreeBSD with acpica5 and updated drivers so it runs on more
and newer machines. DragonFlyBSD can execute FreeBSD 4 and Linux binaries
and uses the FreeBSD ports collection. In addition, DragonFlyBSD is also
officially supported by pkgsrc. This release represents a significant milestone in efforts to improve
the kernel infrastructure. It features a standards-conformant
SACK implementation, improvements to the VFS layer, and a multithreaded
networking stack that utilizes the DragonFly lightweight message
passing system to communicate among processors. More information can
be found on Matt Dillon's journal and the
Status page
of the DragonFly wiki."
It outlived the Pope.
DragonFly doesn't stack up as a desktop box at the moment. Here's a post I made on osnews.com about it:
Go ahead, install Dfly, and cvsup the latest FreeBSD ports tree and DragonFly dfports tree. Now try to build some useful apps... Way too many apps won't build from the ports tree. If you're lucky enough, there's a dfports override. If you're even luckier, it'll be the same version as the ports tree. Let's assume you actually get those apps installed... A few weeks later you cvsup the ports tree again and try to do a portupgrade. Suddenly SDL in the ports tree is upgraded... By SDL in the dfports tree isn't. Great... Now you have apps that want the newer SDL that keep building SDL from dfports, which you already have installed and which isn't up-to-date...
You can always try pkgsrc, if you want.
First, you need to build and install the bootstrap code. Then you need to update bmake from the bmake package (the forget to tell you that on the gobsd.com site). Forget about getting enlightenment running, imlib2 fails to build. You currently need to patch the gtk2 port (assuming the patch hasn't been committed yet). Firefox won't build, nor will SDL. If you want to build Blender, it'll try to build nasm, which requires the gcc3-c package... Which won't build. (You can edit the nasm Makefile to remove the gcc3-c dependency).
Sorry folks, but DragonFly is really only suited for developers at the moment, IMHO.
It's my understanding that this is currently on-par with FreeBSD 4.x (which I believe is faster than 5.x). The real performance imporvements are (supposedly) to come after everything has been ported over to use the messaging infrastructure (mainly the buffer cache). If the design holds true to its promise, then it should be a good step faster than FreeBSD 4.x in a few years. Especially in the area of SMP.
"which BSD is the one to cut your teeth on?"
That implies he doesn't know much about BSD. Advocating Open as a first install then, might not be the best of ideas...
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
FreeBSD has not been the best FreeBSD release but it's *not* dead. 5.3 has been the *first* stable release of the 5.x series, and as expected is not as polished as it should be
I read the mailing lists (I'm not a FreeBSD user tough), and lots of work is happening. All those benchmarks you've seen where freebsd 5.3 loses were done with the 5.3 code which didn't incorported lots of performance work, just to get a stable 5.3 release
Expect 5.4 to be the real 5.x release ie: fast (LOTS of performance work is happening in the threading and VFS land) and stable (lots of critical bugs has been fixed, 5.3 was the first public release)
And no, FreeBSD 5 is not dying. RIght now FreeBSD is the BSD with better SMP support (and getting better), and dual core CPUs are starting to be sold this quarter. NetBSD and OpenBSD are not even near of the SMP support Freebsd has (oth of them detect several CPUs, but it will take all the year s it took to freebsd 5.x to use them efficiently, and most of the benchmarks done against NetBSD/OpenBSD are with only one CPU, which doesn't measure all the work done in the 5.x branch.
The common mantra has always been:
For security, choose OpenBSD.
For portability, choose NetBSD.
For usability, choose FreeBSD.
About the only thing keeping me from playing with BSD is the lack of a single "entry point".
That's also the biggest strength -- different (*cough*) "distros" have different strengths and weaknesses. (You said it yourself, Linux has become "beige".)
If you want to breathe new life into an old Alpha you picked up online, NetBSD is the way to go. (Or if you have a handful of different architectures you would like to keep synced to a common source tree.)
If you want a lean, mean, server machine, you should opt for OpenBSD. [My preference.]
If you're looking to build a box to use on your desktop and start "fiddling" with, go with FreeBSD -- this is the likely first choice for 80% of the BSD population, and it sounds like what you're looking for.
(My other criteria is "If you need to run X, run FreeBSD" because it supports the most graphics cards & monitors.)
Microkernel-like because they're going to a messaging / IPC based system instead of traditional syscall implementation maybe?
I support both DragonFly and FreeBSD. As an admin, I need FreeBSD to step up to the plate and offer scalable SMP support because I run 100% SMP boxes. I am willing to wait for FreeBSD 5.x to clean up and show the performance benefits.
However, I am highly interested in Matt's work on DragonFly because in my opinion, most of the popular "*nix" variants today stick too closely to the vanilla unix design which is why our socket code still uses select() and most I/O is done synchronously. I hope Matt expands his work to include super-scalable I/O systems like I/O Completion Ports. I heard there are Linux developers working on IOCP right now, so I'm hoping eventually this spawns a similar BSD effort.
DragonFly will probably work very nicely with multi-core systems down the road. I believe in the long run NetBSD will continue to destroy FreeBSD 5.x in single CPU benchmarks.
But there's the catch...
How many multi-core processors have to roll off the production line for everyone to realize that all of this anti-FreeBSD naysaying is going to turn into a huge crow eating contest because when everything is dual or quad core down the road and FreeBSD scales nicely to match, nobody will give a god damn that NetBSD is faster on a single CPU system.