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Dragonfly BSD 3.2 Released

Posted by timothy on from the with-wings-to-fly dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Dragonfly BSD recently announced the release of version 3.2 of their operating system. Improvements include: USB4BSD, a second-generation USB stack; merging of a GSoC project to provide CPU topology awareness to the scheduler, giving a nice boost for hyperthreading Intel CPUs; and last but not least, a new largely rewritten scheduler. Some background is in order for the last one. PostgreSQL 9.3 will move from SysV shared memory to mmap for its shared memory needs. It turned out that the switch much hurts its performance on the BSDs. Matthew Dillon was fast to respond with a search for bottlenecks and got the performance up to par with Linux."

6 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Too many dimwits by ArchieBunker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because this site is a giant linux circlejerk. I remember the good old days when FreeBSD ran linux binaries faster than linux itself.

    --
    Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
  2. my experience with dragonfly 3.0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    1) hammer is beyond awesome, it's inspired. you owe it to yourself to live with dragonfly for a week or two for this reason alone.
    2) the whole thing is pretty freaking snappy compared to freebsd (which itself is no slowpoke)
    3) hardware support is patchy, you might need to hang onto that old nic/sas/raid card
    4) linux emulation is not supported when running a 64-bit dragonfly system
    5) otherwise, it's just like any other sane BSD.

    my job forces me to run binary only linux crap so 4) rules out a wholesale move to dragonfly, but IMHO it is the BSD of choice for anyone with enough platform independence to seriously consider a BSD in the first place.

    1. Re:my experience with dragonfly 3.0 by aliquis · · Score: 2

      But the Linux people got btrfs so HAMMER and ZFS isn't all that much to long for any more.

    2. Re:my experience with dragonfly 3.0 by nikolas · · Score: 2

      while many features of ZFS (and Hammer) are included in btrfs too, Hammer (specifically Hammer 2) has design goals that go way beyond those of ZFS (I believe it is going to be a fully fledged cluster FS). So there is something to wait for.

      And I am still hoping that theiy will pursue their single-system-image design goal eventually.

    3. Re:my experience with dragonfly 3.0 by nikolas · · Score: 2

      SSI would be when multiple connected computer running an instance of, say, dragonfly bsd, can act like a single (multi-user and multi-tasking) computer. Tasks will migrate to any processor core in the cluster (and ideally factor in the cost of migration over network).

      Similar to what openmosix did for linux ages ago - and very different from the infamous beowulf cluster.

      By the way - Hammer does not only do simple snapshots but it does them automatically in intervals. So if you use it with samba or nfs you get sort of an instant apple time-machine workalike - albeit with deduplication and all. Only disappointment for me was that trying it in a VM was not really going well - you need a spare PC for that.

      Yeah, OSnews has mostly become a mobile website, but I still enjoy it more than Slashdot nowadays.

    4. Re:my experience with dragonfly 3.0 by blade8086 · · Score: 2

      Don't buy a shitty nic, and RTFM before buying hardware?

      You know - kind of like how Linux still is for some hardware, and definately used to be?