DragonFly BSD 5.4

[xte]

My biggest interest in DragonFlyBSD is hammer storage, while I of course appreciate the general hard work hw support and general usage does not suite most of my needs, especially when I start using NixOS/GuixSD with the wonderful idea of having declarative/functional systems that's the future of ANY OS IMVHO but hammer by itself is fantastic.

It deserve a future not different than SSH.

On GNU/Linux I "mimic" it with a classic poor man's solution (mdraid+LUKS+LVM+nilfs2), in the past I've used zfs first on OpenSolaris (SXDE/CE/Indiana) and after even on GNU/Linux but while remain a fantastic pioneer hammer being a logged fs is far superior.

Thanks so for the hard work!

[hawski]

Could you expand upon poor man's solution (mdraid+LUKS+LVM+nilfs2)? I'm mainly interested in NILFS2 part. For the long time I intend to use it. I thought about /home for me and/or my father and lately just for an archive partition (a bit like Fossil from Plan 9). I heard that there is a disagreement on whether it needs fsck or not. It does not have it and theoretically does not need it. But I heard about unrecoverable errors that probably could be fixed by hypothetical fsck. I can't find it now, it was some kind of a blog post that summed up the disagreement.

[equalunique]

A applaud your repertoire of OS experience.

Perhaps because HAMMER (+HAMMER2) is BSD licenced, it might have better potential as a Linux kernel module.

I also recommend trying out Bcachefs. It's developed on Debian so that's your best bet to give it a shot.

[tiffanyh]

I’m a big fan of DragonflyBSD and for all who don’t know DragonflyBSD well, here’s my summary of the OS when v5.0 was released [1]

It really doesn’t get the recognition it desires. It’s has highly advanced features and performance and frankly more people should be using it.

Given the recent ZFS/FreeBSD news - I’d love more people to adopt DragonflyBSD for its Hammer2 filesysten.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15484735

[drewg123]

Why do you think the ZFS/FreeBSD news is bad?

I run FreeBSD ZFS on my desktop and have for years, and we're thinking of using it (for the root fs) at work. I considered the ZOL integration to be good news. We'll get better CI, and we'll share features with ZOL faster. I don't really see the downside.

I've also run ZOL for 7 years on my wife's desktops..

[gigatexal]

Are there benchmarks that show Hammer2 faster than a decently configured ZFS setup? What’s it offer that ZFS and snapshots and the like doesn’t? I’m not trying to start a flame war just curious

[linsomniac]

I keep looking at it because ZFS deduplication is unusable for me. In every instance I've tried using it, it has resulted in kernel panics likely due to out of memory. My current backup server, where I'd really like to use it, would need something like $1,500 of RAM to support dedup, if I measure it correctly (because the simulation seems to only do active blocks, not snapshots, so I don't have a good idea of actual DDT RAM required).

[karmakaze]

Just myself trying to fit the various *BSD's in my mind, I found this[0] which might be helpful:

  [...] each one has a specific purpose.
  OpenBSD security,
  FreeBSD more desktop/server,
  NetBSD “run on anything and everything”,
  DragonFlyBSD scaling and performance.

[0] https://itsfoss.com/why-use-bsd/

[LeoPanthera]

OpenBSD has a reputation for security but if you ask me its killer features are ease of use, documentation (the man pages are so good), and laptop compatibility.

[ajross]

That's sort of reconned, though. NetBSD split from FreeBSD because the former was a bunch of Unix hackers working on Unix hardware and the latter wanted to focus on the 386 port. Both OpenBSD and DragonFlyBSD stem, ultimately, from personality conflicts within the developer community in FreeBSD.

They all found their purpose after the splits, not before.

[awiesenhofer]

Does anyone here use DragonFly BSD in production? Would love to hear what people are using it for!

[gjs278]

I run my website https://garyshood.com on it

[azinman2]

Who uses dragonfly bsd in any kind of non-experimental setup?

[zandl]

Every time I read about DragonFly I’m never quite sure what it can do that’s different than other OSes that makes it interesting. The best I can tell it’s just that some of the subsystems are different and it’s more of an experiment for under the hood OS features.

[cgag]

Their filesystem is interesting but what I find impressive is they're at like a linux level of performance despite having a team of like 10 people because of the way they approached concurrency. I believe they spawned out of dillon disagreeing with freebsd's approach, and it's beautiful to me that they're competitive with linux despite not having a huge team of people polishing it.

I also want to say that Matthew Dillon is brilliant and a wonderful person. I played with dragonflybsd on my laptop for a while and hung out in the IRC, and he was always around and willing to help. I found a couple legitimate bugs and he had non-trivial patches up for me in like an hour.

Their networking stuff is very cool too, I can't really remember the details once, but I remember seeing an article about high performance networking that explained why you wanted to avoid the linux kernel so that you could do x,y and z yourself, and dillon explained that dragonfly kernel just does all that stuff itself.

I wish it got more use because there's so much potential there, but it's quite a chicken and the egg problem, and honestly I feel like the BSDs are kind of doomed unless they add apis that support linux containers.

[Koshkin]

Looks like its goal is to provide a built-in support for implementing distributed systems (clustering, NUMA, etc.).

[reconbot]

I had no idea what dragonofly is, it looks to be an experimental BSD based OS https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release54/

    DragonFly belongs to the same class of operating systems
    as other BSD-derived systems and Linux. It is based on the
    same UNIX ideals and APIs and shares ancestor code with
    other BSD operating systems. DragonFly provides an
    opportunity for the BSD base to grow in an entirely
    different direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD,
    NetBSD, and OpenBSD series.
    
    DragonFly includes many useful features that differentiate
    it from other operating systems in the same class.

[andrewl]

It may be experimental in that it's diverged significantly from FreeBSD, from which it was forked. But experimental does not mean new. Release 1.0 was in July 2004. Apparently the lead developer's experience with the Amiga OS influenced the project to some degree.

[walrus01]

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/history/

[keithpeter]

Google tells me that this is a fork of FreeBSD from some years ago, and that there is some desktop support and some degree of support for laptops, especially Thinkpads from a few years ago.

Anyone else care to comment?

[w323898]

How's the EFI support on this in comparison to other BSDs?