DragonFly version 4.8 brings EFI boot support in the installer, further speed improvements in the kernel, a new NVMe driver, a new eMMC driver, and Intel video driver updates.
A ton of changes in this release.
DragonFly version 4.8 brings EFI boot support in the installer, further speed improvements in the kernel, a new NVMe driver, a new eMMC driver, and Intel video driver updates.
A ton of changes in this release.
I can tell a huge amount of impressive work has gone into dragonfly bad.
But it’s not clear what the target use cases are dragonfly bsd. I’m assuming it’s not just a hobby.
The new filesystem … what’s the intended benefit in the age of laptop SSDs and hyper cloud storage?
Parallelism .. which workloads? Desktop dev? Why not distributed cloud instances for bigger job?
Is it meant to be a cloud/server OS .. being better at the basics like concurrency than say Linux or Freebsd? Is it about squeezing the last bit of performance out of your data centres?
The focus on modernising the graphics stack suggests a workstation use case..
#puzzled
project_2501,
Arguably everyone could get by with a global monoculture and nobody needs alternatives. Projects like this however are for people who oppose group think and prefer taking the road less taken. It’s not going to change the market any time soon, but they have their own vision and I say good on them for delivering on it!
Matt was really into clustering when he started the project and tends to focus on items with that goal. While many people do use dragonfly as a desktop os, that’s not the original intent of it. In fact, they only mention server and workstation loads on their homepage.
If you want a BSD focused on desktop use, you need to look at MidnightBSD (my project), or one of the various freebsd distros like TrueOS (PC-BSD), Desktop BSD or GhostBSD.
It’s pretty much a pure research OS. At one point about a decade ago there was going to be a focus on single-system-image clustering, but the computing world did an about-face and wanted to focus on orchestrating lots of little unices rather than one big unix for distributed workloads, so that got dropped.
The new filesystem is being considered by OpenBSD as an alternative to ZFS that is simpler to port and maintain. HAMMER2 is supposed to be more portable, offering a BSD-licensed alternative to ZFS (license confusion, not trivial to port, poor documentation for end users) and btrfs (dissapointing stability and adoption, less pronounced featureset, possibly not as portable?).
@project_2501
[quote]The new filesystem … what’s the intended benefit in the age of laptop SSDs and hyper cloud storage?[/quote]
Because not everyone wants SSD’s and what good is a SSD in a RAID system intended for secure storage?
Answer: None at all!
The diversity of operating systems is a good thing. Helps keep the NSA on their toes and it’s fun to explore different computing paradigms.
And Dragonfly was created by one of the smartest guy of the Amiga community (Dillon)… it has pretty interesting ideas, different than the rest at least.
IMHO it’s super cool to have small creative OSes because innovation happens there… big names like Linux or FreeBSD are pretty conservative I don’t see them innovating or doing things differently.
This is a monolithic POSIX system based on FreeBSD using BSD userland and running Unix programs – what different paradigm?