OSNews

"It's a fallacy to believe that just because an operating system is free software, it has to be a universal operating system for all systems and all purposes. Freedom implies the opportunity to challenge the prevailing notions and in the process, contribute exciting new ideas. We can benefit from each other's work without agreeing every step of the way, and DragonFly is a great example."

Good points and in general I agree with you.

"Just about everybody that speaks ill of DF fails to understand the goal of the project. Most UNIX-like operating systems are designed to support UP, SMP, and possibly NUMA systems. DF is designed to support clusters of such systems. It's designed under the premise that maintaining cache coherency across nodes in a cluster can be prohibitively expensive unless this issue is directly addressed in the OS architecture."

I also largely agree with you here.

"Personally, I feel that DF kind of misses the point. We have virtualization. Why do we need to port applications to a new OS in order to run them efficiently on a cluster?"

I am not however sure that I agree with you here. Although DragonFly's developers are doing much rearchitecting of the kernel core to natively support clustering, fact remains that it *is* in fact a general purpose OS, providing many third party apps (through NetBSDs PKGSRC), and provides a number of drivers to support hardware functionality that in many (if not most cases) would seem largely out of place in a system designed purely for clustering.

Also I am not convinced that the effort needed to port applications to DragonFly to efficiently support a largely distributed system would be any more involved than porting such apps to any other distributed system, and in some cases (due to the fact that much of the new functionality one will see from DF once the MP lock is gone, and the syslink stuff is finalized) is largely transparent to things in userland. Also when one takes into account binary compatability with Linux and FreeBSD, that would seem to lessen the headaches involved with porting even more, perhaps to the point of eliminating it in some cases.

"I think the goal should be a clustering hypervisor that exports SMP virtual machines on which most modern operating systems can run side-by-side."

Perhaps this could be useful, but I am not sure if this would end up being more than less effort than what is going into systems like DragonFly.

"If DF is what the IT industry wants, then Plan9 would be alive and kicking today, and DF wouldn't exist. They don't want a new UNIX for clusters."

I am also going to have to disagree with you here. There are certainly a number of places where clustering of various sorts is desired, and in many of those cases by people who are familiar with Unix-like systems, or more specifically have some manner of investment in Unix-like systems. Having a such a system that in addition to being useful as a general purpose OS which also has *native support* for clustering could well be a time and or money saver for those people.

"They want a mainframe for clusters, on which various industry-standard UNIX systems (and/or Windows) could be deployed."

Although I am sure that there are indeed a number of people/businesses that want or require such, I am equally sure that for others something like a future version of DragonFly running on commodity hardware would be an equally fine solution.

Final notes,

I am indeed a fan of the DragonFly project (despite my ocasional grumbling regarding the rate of progress in some non-core areas), and I would definately like to see it succede in the years to come.

With only a small group of developers, they've done many things that have taken other projects either longer or more people to do, and have (IMO) done so in a more generally thoughtful way.

I wouldn't bet money on it taking the world by storm anytime in the near future, but in addition to being an interesting OSS project, I can see it having a future no less bright than that of the other BSDs.