Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

DragonFly BSD Releases Version 2.0

Posted by timothy on from the beautiful-bugs dept.

An anonymous reader writes "DragonFly BSD 2.0 has been released! It includes HAMMER, DragonFly's brand-new file system supporting advanced features like history, snapshots and various other cool things. Will it become the new ZFS? Since it is BSD licensed it could also be integrated into various other operating systems."

43 comments

  1. Stop! by Daimanta · · Score: 4, Funny

    HAMMER-time!

    --
    Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
    1. Re:Stop! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I for one welcome our new hammer-wielding, dragon-fly overlords.

    2. Re:Stop! by red_dragon · · Score: 4, Funny

      HAMMER-time!

      Yes, but which HAMMER-time? HAMMER-atime, HAMMER-ctime, or HAMMER-mtime?

      --
      In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
    3. Re:Stop! by creepynut · · Score: 1

      What? Get with the times man!
      What about HAMMER-relatime?

    4. Re:Stop! by coren2000 · · Score: 2, Funny

      sounds like this BSD is to legit to quit!

    5. Re:Stop! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Trust me, I know what I'm doing.

  2. Another filesystem? by trimmer · · Score: 1

    Oh why? Don't we already have enough of them?

    --
    You can be twitter too!
    1. Re:Another filesystem? by immerohnegott · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's kind of like saying "ANOTHER linux distro?". One of the key ideas behind FOSS is the element of choice. If a dev-team thinks they can put out a better package manager or window manager or filesystem or , let 'em. If it turns out to be better, then everyone benefits from an improved user experience, or in some cases, an easier API to build on. If it turns out the software isn't so good, we may still benefit from it by learning from their mistakes, or even taking the good portions of the software and applying them to other projects. So long as someone is attempting to do something new, benefits will eventually come.

    2. Re:Another filesystem? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      No, because a bunch of douchebags keep making them all under licences which do not allow for proper intergration into other operating systems and because HAMMER is designed for distributed filesystem work, a field where there are limited existing systems.

    3. Re:Another filesystem? by Renegade88 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Are you talking about ZFS under the CDDL which is considered GPL-incompatible and thus can't be used by Linux?

      So whose fault is that? ZFS has been and continues to be adopted by other operating systems. The GPL is a manifestation of a polical agenda and the inability to incorporate ZFS is a consequence. That is Linux's problem, not the folks that release their open-source filesystems under the licenses of their choosing.

      Just because somebody doesn't buy into Stallman's agenda doesn't mean they are a douchebag.

    4. Re:Another filesystem? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      The other AC might be talking about filesystems which are licensed under the GPL which makes those developers douchebags.

      However, don't let that stop you from defending your pet project.

    5. Re:Another filesystem? by aliquis · · Score: 1

      No.

    6. Re:Another filesystem? by aliquis · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, he's probably talking about GPL licensed filesystems which can't work kind of anywhere.

      The guy above was probably pro-BSD license, so his point was probably that others can use hammer but they can't for instance get XFS.

    7. Re:Another filesystem? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, I was talking about HAMMER being BSD, while most other shite is being GPLed. But yes, the CDDL is just as bad, since it cannot be integrated anywhere either. ZFS has only been adopted by two operating systems, Solaris and Mac OS X, both are disgusting messes with a few open source bits. Integrating something like ZFS into them is not an issue, since the two companies involved can work out a deal, the open source world doesn't pay for special licences of code so they can do that.

      So, while I wasn't referring to the douchebags at Sun, I guess they could be included.

    8. Re:Another filesystem? by m.dillon · · Score: 3, Informative

      Ignoring the license for the moment, ZFS has a lot of desirable features. But it also tries to throw in the kitchen sink, far more then I personally believe a file-system should deal with. I haven't tried it myself so I don't know how well it performs.

      HAMMER takes a different approach to redundancy. HAMMER is eventually intended to operate in a replicated multi-master clustered environment. The first release only has the beginnings of that work (aka single-master/multi-slave replication), but the basic principle that HAMMER follows is that no single copy of a file-system can ever be considered safe, no matter how much redundancy you throw into it. Software bugs are far more likely to corrupt a file-system then hardware issues.

      Up until now snapshots have always been fairly expensive affairs. They run the gauntlet from outright dangerous in UFS to fairly quick in ZFS, but of all the OSS offerings only HAMMER gives you a fine-grained (~30-60 second interval if you don't lift a finger) historical access to the entire filesystem. All you need is a transaction id and you cd directory@@transaction_id and, poof, you are looking at a file or the entire filesystem as of some point in the past. You have full administrative control over what historical data is kept and what is thrown away, independent for each of your mirrors, backup systems, whatever.

      After all, we need to justify getting those cheap, terrabyte+ drives coming out now!

      -Matt

    9. Re:Another filesystem? by Renegade88 · · Score: 1

      FreeBSD 7.0 has experimental support for ZFS ( http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.0R/announce.html ).

      That means CDDL doesn't give BSD-licensed systems any problems. Obviously ZFS also works on OpenSolaris which is fully open source as well.

    10. Re:Another filesystem? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The "political" agenda was dead on target with bitkeeper. Because Stallman can be considered a pragmatic man, only with broader horizons than Torvalds, or you.

    11. Re:Another filesystem? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, ZFS will never, ever be in FreeBSD. It's an experimental song-and-dance bullcrap mess that you people have to add on after the fact. You won't be able to boot a ZFS partition.

      As I've said, the whole CDDL bullshit is incompatible with everything but the CDDL. By definition, adding CDDL code into anything makes it a messy CDDL thing. That cannot happen with a BSD, or it's no longer a BSD.

      The GPL acts in the same way. They both eat BSD code, and then it's not BSD anymore.

    12. Re:Another filesystem? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      actually btrfs which has been around for quite some time now has fine grained, writable snapshots.

    13. Re:Another filesystem? by Renegade88 · · Score: 1

      There are a lot of things Stallman can be considered and the majority of them are not flattering.

      Bringing up Bitkeeper doesn't make any sense here. What if Bitkeeper was CDDL, BSD, or Mozilla licensed? There would have been no problem using it to track the Linux configuration. Stallman correctly predicted the final consequence of using Bitkeeper, but that had nothing to do with the GPL or his agency of 100% open source code. That's just keeping yourself outside the mercy of others which applies in all walks of life.

    14. Re:Another filesystem? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The point of ZFS isn't just to be a filesystem; it's to be 'the' filesystem. And not 'the' filesystem like Firefox is 'the' open-source browser, or even like the Tour de France is 'the' bike race; no ZFS's goal is quite literally to put reformat all the disks in the world and make them into one big 128-bit filesystem.

      And then boil the oceans by populating it with data.

  3. VirtualBox? by hansraj · · Score: 2, Informative

    Did anyone manage to get the live cd work on VirtualBox? On my Ubuntu box it seems to hang once I get to the screen with various options of booting DragonFly. :|

    1. Re:VirtualBox? by creepynut · · Score: 4, Informative

      VirtualBox has some issues with FreeBSD.

      I tried to install a recent release of FreeBSD which ended up in frequent hangs related to the network adapter.

      Changing the network adapter type seems to fix the problem.

    2. Re:VirtualBox? by hansraj · · Score: 1

      Well, in my case even disabling the network adapter altogether didn't change a thing. Hangs with a different network adapter type, hangs with no network adapter.

      Just to verify, the same virtual machine (with the same configuration) has DesktopBSD (another FreeBSD variant) already installed, and that boots up just fine. Even though the network in DesktopBSD doesn't work, it at least boots up without hanging. No such luck with DragonFly.

    3. Re:VirtualBox? by Nightlily · · Score: 1

      VirtualBox in general has a lot of issues with most BSD projects.

      MidnightBSD (which was forked from FreeBSD 6.1) worked with earlier versions of VirtualBox, but can't work with later versions.

    4. Re:VirtualBox? by m.dillon · · Score: 2, Informative

      As far as we can tell VirtualBox does not properly emulate the 8254, which we use for timer interrupts. We run it in a different mode then linux does and my guess is that VB doesn't emulate that mode.

      People have told me that DFly does run under VMWare and MS virtualization and QEmu. And natively, of course.

      -Matt

  4. But... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    this can't be!
    BSD was dying just the other day.
    And it was true, I read it on slashdot!

    1. Re:But... by xouumalperxe · · Score: 1

      And it was true, I read it on slashdot!

      There's your problem: you didn't assess truth based on Netcraft confirmation.

    2. Re:But... by MBGMorden · · Score: 1

      You know, just to counter that old joke they totally should have named this PhoenixBSD instead. BSD dieing? Been there, done that. Now I'se back.

      Of course, ZombieBSD has a nice ring too . . .

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
  5. Captain Hammer says by SwiftOne · · Score: 3, Funny

    The Hammer is my...filesystem

  6. Bilbo says.. by somersault · · Score: 1

    Hey baby, wanna take a ride on the dragon*coughflycough*?

    --
    which is totally what she said
    1. Re:Bilbo says.. by Nimey · · Score: 1

      Only if I can put on my robe and wizard hat.

      --
      Hail Eris, full of mischief...

      E pluribus sanguinem
  7. Cool! by gweihir · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Many good things came from BSD in tha past. Seems this trend continues!

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  8. bsdtalk interview with Matthew Dillon by stsp · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you want to know more about the hammer file system, check http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2008/07/bsdtalk154-matthew-dillon.html

  9. But will it run... by argent · · Score: 1

    But will it run AmigaOS?

    Seriously, I'm glad to see this. Matt Dillon is a brilliant programmer with much broader OS experience than most of the folks driving OS development these days, so I have no doubt that he's doing amazing things.

    1. Re:But will it run... by aliquis · · Score: 1

      Seems like the 2.0 packages aren't built yet, and not all sources seemed to be on the mirror google showed first, anyway there is a UAE package for DragonFly 1.12 so there probably is one for 2.0 as well.

      Not that you thought there wasn't one :)

  10. It's the patents, Rufus. by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

    That's the small problem. The bigger problem is nobody can make their own ZFS-compatible implementation on Linux because unless you're using the CDDL code, you don't get patent rights. And ZFS has several dozen patents on it. You have to use the CDDL code (or negotiate a separate patent license agreement with Sun, I suppose).

    Yeah, I know GRUB has rudimentary ZFS support under GPL, but that's not what people are interested in.

    I'm not sure why nobody is taking the FreeBSD route and making Solaris-compatibility API's for Linux such that end users could use the CDDL code.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    1. Re:It's the patents, Rufus. by larry+bagina · · Score: 1

      ZFS isn't just a filesystem, it's also a volume manager, disk manager, and RAID. IIRC, Linus and some other kernel bigwigs want to keep those things separate. Sun/Jonathan Schwartz has stated that they won't file lawsuits over ZFS implementations (not sure if that applies to MicroSoft :)

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  11. Description of Hammer by Per+Wigren · · Score: 2, Informative

    Matt has posted a very in-depth PDF whitepaper describing the Hammer filesystem. A very interesting read!

    --
    My other account has a 3-digit UID.
  12. A couple of concerns about Hammer by argent · · Score: 1

    1. Thus it takes two flush cycles to fully commit an operation to the media, since a crash which occurs just after the first flush cycle returns cannot guarantee that the META buffers had all gotten to the media, and upon remounting the UNDO
    buffers will be run to undo those changes.

    What does this mean for fsync() and databases?

    2. As seems to be standard for new file systems, there seems to be no fsck.

    I mislike this.