DragonFly BSD 3.0 Released

An anonymous reader writes with word of the release earlier this week, after eight months of development, of DragonFly BSD 3.0. The release includes improved scalability through finer-grained locking, improvements to the HAMMER file system in low-memory configurations, and a TrueCrypt-compatible disk encryption system. DragonFly is an installable system, but it can also be run live from CD, DVD, or USB key.

Comments

Not the big one

[laffer1]

This release is interesting, but the rest of the year is dedicated to HAMMER2 and that will be the real story with DragonFly next. Most of the work on this release was incremental. Some interesting benchmarks were posted against FreeBSD in the last few months for PostgreSQL. There was some coverage on OSNews on this

http://www.osnews.com/story/25334/DragonFly_BSD_MP_Performance_Significantly_Improved

Re:Not the big one

[laffer1]

If you're writing stories about DragonFly, then you want to cover all of it's distributed systems. The whole point of DragonFly is getting it ready for clustering. That's what Matt Dillon is into.

Some of the features of HAMMER & HAMMER2 are duplicated in other file systems, but most of them have much less friendly licenses. Even ZFS is under CDDL, which isn't terrible but precludes it from being used in Linux (the kernel). From my perspective, HAMMER could be the file system that everyone could use due to the license.

HAMMER is clearly the biggest feature of DragonFly that originated there. I think that constitutes coverage.

Re:Not the big one

[rgbrenner]

Your benchmark compares HAMMER, ZFS, UFS, and EXT, when really HAMMER is most similar to ZFS. And in the benchmark, those two are pretty similar. The difference between the two: ZFS expects virtually unlimited RAM and will consume GBs easily; HAMMER will work with as little as 256MB of RAM.

Re:Will Try it

[kestasjk]

No-one (very few) care about whether BSD is "genuine UNIX" or "genuinely free software".

I administer three UNIX servers, all FreeBSD, and here's what I can tell you about the differences between it and Linux and Windows Server (which are also decent server OSes):

• It's free
• BSD is really simple; the kernel and OS are maintained by the same group, so they go step by step.
• It doesn't change much; this is as much a great thing for servers as it is a terrible thing for everything else.
• The ports system. This is a really big plus for BSD; I've tried many *nix distros and none are quite as consistent and reliable (for servers) as the ports system
• pf. Although originally an OpenBSD thing this is a firewall which has a beautifully simple syntax. It's just so easy to express solid firewall rules, with queuing and everything. (Tbh iptables is probably at least as configurable, but last I checked pf definitely offered more power / learning-effort.)
• Good community: You'll almost always find the solution to your problem, and it'll almost always be tailored to your BSD installation, rather than this or that flavor of Linux.

YMMV, Im sure many people here maintain great Linux servers, but for my humble needs I really like my three FreeBSD servers.

Re:Will Try it

[rev0lt]

FreeBSD changes quite a lot between major releases, but usually doesn't break/remake what already exists. There are some few exceptions.
The ports system is also available on Linux; The pkgsrc system (that is used by DragonFly and NetBSD) is available for both Linux and Solaris.
PF is an awesome user-friendly firewall, but it has its limitations on high traffic systems (pf isn't multi-core friendly). Probably NPF will be an option soon.
The documentation is existing, up-to-date and usually accurate.
For servers, there are 4 key awesome technology components ATM - Jails (Linux has namespaces, but I don't know if it's funcional yet), CARP (pf-based redundancy), ZFS and HAST (somewhat equivalent do DRDB).

Re:good guy; bad choice

[rev0lt]

If I recall correctly, there were some major conflicts regarding the design decisions of FreeBSD 5.0 branch. If I recall correctly, Dillon wanted to continue the 4.X work and gradually remove the giant lock from kernel, and other developers wanted to rewrite/re-engineer the kernel torwards multiprocessor support.
Dillon left the team and started working on DragonFlyBSD.
It is interesting, all this years later, that it seems Dillon was right. According to the Dfly 2.13 benchmarks, FreeBSD and DFly are close enough to be considered equivalents, and with DFly taking a lead in some tests. AFAIK PostgreSQL isn't threaded so for at least process-based applications, both Dillon's vision and the FreeBSD team turned out to be equivalent. (But the "breaking of things" and funcionality that started with the 5.0 branch was a huge long-term benefit, as it forced the reimplementation of key infrastructure components - network, storage, etc).

Re:Will Try it

[unixisc]

The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, et al, would have to go through an official and formal certification w/ the Open Group in order to be certified as Unix. I don't doubt that they'd pass, but then, I don't doubt that Linux would pass either. That too, every version would have to be certified separately. I doubt that any distro would want to go thru the expense of doing it, and so the only certified Unixes out there are the ones like Solaris, HP/UX, AIX and OS-X.

The licensing issue is also somewhat tangential here - if a BSD has something that Linux hasn't, a customer will have no issues working w/ BSD, since BSD code can be incorporated in and released as a part of anything from proprietary to GPL3 software. If Linux has something that BSD hasn't, customers who need it will work around it, like Google did w/ Android. On the Linux side, I can see it getting confusing, since Linux is not going to become GPL3, but the things it uses - glibc, gcc, etc have become GPL3, which is a source for potential confusion.

Aside from that, I agree w/ the others like kestasjk below - few will care about whether it's genuine Unix or genuinely free software.

Re:Will Try it

[smash]

I tell you what, the BSDs would be a lot more likely to pass than Linux, as they're directly descended from the AT&T unix code base, and continue to do things the "Unix way". Mac OS X (largely FreeBSD userland) has been certified as Unix. Linux is a clusterfuck of NIH syndrome and GPL software that is often different for the sake of being different.

And the GPL is NOT free. It contains restrictions on what others can do with the code you release (i.e., they can't close it). Just because you might not like the possibility of code being closed, restricting people from doing that is not more free than allowing people to do anything with it.