BSD & Darwin Archive

10 years with DragonFlyBSD network stack

Thom Holwerda 2017-03-15 BSD & Darwin 2 Comments

In this paper we are going to introduce the evolution of DragonFlyBSD's network stack in the past 10 years: what's the current state of its network stack, the important changes we did to it, why the important changes, and the lessons we learned. Finally, I'd like to list the areas that DragonFlyBSD's network stack can enjoy help hands.

A detailed look at DragonFlyBSD's network stack.

DragonFlyBSD 4.6 released

Thom Holwerda 2016-08-03 BSD & Darwin 7 Comments

DragonFly version 4.6 brings more updates to accelerated video for both i915 and radeon users, home-grown support for NVMe controllers, preliminary EFI support, improvements in SMP and networking performance under heavy load, and a full range of binary packages.

BSD for Linux users

Thom Holwerda 2016-07-05 BSD & Darwin 50 Comments

It's been my impression that the BSD communit{y,ies}, in general, understand Linux far better than the Linux communit{y,ies} understand BSD. I have a few theories on why that is, but that's not really relevant. I think a lot of Linux people get turned off BSD because they don't really understand how and why it's put together. Thus, this rant; as a BSD person, I want to try to explain how BSD works in a way that Linux people can absorb.

While there's overwhelming similarity between the operating systems in most cases, there are also a lot of differences. As you probe more into the differences, you find that they emerge from deep-seated disagreements. Some are disagreements over development methodology, some over deployment and usage, some about what's important, some about who's important, and some about which flavor of ice cream is superior. Just comparing the surface differences doesn't tell you anything; it's the deeper differences that both explain and justify why each group does things the way they do.

The article is undated, but I seem to recall it's actually quite old (2005-ish or so). Still, it's an interesting read.

Jordan Hubbard Discusses NextBSD at BAFUG

David Adams 2015-08-27 BSD & Darwin 15 Comments

Jordan Hubbard spoke recently at the Bay Area FreeBSD Users Group to discuss NextBSD, a "spork" of FreeBSD. He "covers why mach ports are extremely useful in some cases and no UNIX IPC primitive is an adequate substitute." There's a video of the BAFUG talk and copies of the original slide deck that goes into some detail about NextBSD.

DragonFly BSD 4.0 released

Guest post by jessesmith 2014-11-26 BSD & Darwin 17 Comments

The DragonFly BSD operating system is a server oriented project. Though originally forked from FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD is an independent operating system that carries a number of unique features, foremost among them is the HammerFS file system. DragonFly BSD 4.0 was released on November 25th and offers several new features.

Version 4 of DragonFly brings Haswell graphics support, 3D acceleration, and improved performance in extremely high-traffic networks. DragonFly now supports up to 256 CPUs, Haswell graphics (i915), concurrent pf operation.

The latest version of DragonFly BSD no longer supports 32-bit x86 machines and is designed to work exclusively on the 64-bit x86 architecture.

DragonFly BSD 3.8.0 released

Guest post by ddc_ 2014-06-05 BSD & Darwin 18 Comments

The new release includes new USB stack (USB4BSD), which supports USB3; updated video drivers for Intel and AMD cards (although latter are still disabled by default); binaries in /bin and /sbin are now dynamic, allowing for PAM and NSS. The HAMMER2 filesystem is also included, but not ready for general use just yet.

MidnightBSD 0.4 ships with new package management

Submitted by laffer1 2013-07-08 BSD & Darwin 15 Comments

MidnightBSD 0.4-RELEASE hit FTP servers today and the new version includes a custom package management tool, "mport", that was developed with sqlite3 and libarchive. The packing list and all metadata is stored in SQL and a tool is provided to query the package database directly. This allows scripts and third party tools to easily integrate with the package system.

2012: a BSD year in retrospective

Guest post by Julian Djamil Fagir 2013-02-14 BSD & Darwin 61 Comments

BSD (Berkely System Distribution) was a research operating system based on the original AT&T Unix, developed by the University of Berkeley, California. It has been Open Source right from the beginning, and after the university lost interest in developing it further, several community projects started up (the very first ones were NetBSD and FreeBSD in the early nineties) to continue developing BSD. Anyway, Linux was born roughly at the same time, but a pending lawsuit about copyright infringements prevented the BSD projects to become as successful as Linux (though you could argue about the exact reasons).

DragonFly BSD 3.2 released

Submitted by Beket_ 2012-11-07 BSD & Darwin 2 Comments

Version 3.2 has arrived. "Big-ticket items Performance improvements under database load Significant work has gone into the scheduler to improve performance, using postgres benchmarking as a measure. DragonFly should be now one of the best selections for Postgres and other databases. New USB stack USB4BSD has been incorporated into this release. More USB devices are compatible with DragonFly, and xhci (USB 3.0) users may be able to take full advantage of their newer hardware. Since this is a new feature, it is available in 3.2 but not built by default."

DragonFly BSD 3.0 released

Guest post by ddc_ 2012-02-22 BSD & Darwin 6 Comments

DragonFly BSD 3.0 was released today, bringing the improved performance on MP systems (MP kernel became the default one in ths release), TrueCrypt-compatible disk encryption, enhanced POSIX compatibility and other improvements. The next big thing for the project will be the major revision of the HAMMER file system (HAMMER2). The DragonFly founder Matthew Dillon said it to be the main focus of his effort for the whole yaer, though the full implementation is expected only in 2013.

PC-BSD 9.0 Released

Submitted by twitterfire 2012-01-16 BSD & Darwin 15 Comments

Hot on the heels of the release of FreeBSD 9, it's the ninth version of its desktop-oriented offspring to jump into the spotlight. "Based upon FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE, this is the first release of PC-BSD which offers users a variety of desktop environments to choose from, such as KDE, GNOME, XFCE, LXDE and more! Also available are pre-built VirtualBox and VMware images with integrated guest tools for rapid virtual system deployment, and native support for installing directly to OS X BootCamp partitions."

Interview with Adrian Chadd on 802.11n in FreeBSD

David Adams 2011-12-27 BSD & Darwin 4 Comments

Adrian Chadd is the current FreeBSD net80211/ath driver maintainer and developer. He's been working with a few others to get usable 802.11n support into FreeBSD. We thought we'd have a quick chat and ask how things are going.

DragonFly BSD MP Performance Significantly Improved

Guest post by evilsjg 2011-11-16 BSD & Darwin 18 Comments

The DragonFly BSD project has recently decided to hold off on the 2.12 release to address a couple of long-standing issues. Some of the disruptive work done to address these issues has also resulted in the MP Token (giant kernel lock) and other major contention points being finally pushed out of the way of all critical paths. The result?

FreeBSD Hypervisor: Call For Testers

Submitted by al 2011-11-14 BSD & Darwin 5 Comments

Via Ivan Voras' blog (yes a few days late....but this place needs more BSD news). Michael Dexter of CFT has published a tutorial on FreeBSD's upcoming type 2 hypervisor known as BHyVe. The article guides the reader through the procedures to configure, build & boot a hypervisor capable host and guest system. BHyVe currently only supports Intel's x86 virtualization hardware & the project itself is still currently under early development.

In Favor Of FreeBSD On The Desktop

Guest post by snydeq 2011-11-08 BSD & Darwin 69 Comments

Deep End's Paul Venezia wonders why more folks aren't using FreeBSD on the desktop. 'There used to be a saying -- at least I've said it many times -- that my workstations run Linux, my servers run FreeBSD. Sure, it's quicker to build a Linux box, do a "yum install x y z" and toss it out into the wild as a fully functional server, but the extra time required to really get a FreeBSD box tuned will come back in spades through performance and stability metrics. You'll get more out of the hardware, be that virtual or physical, than you will on a generic Linux binary installation.'

pfSense 2.0 Released

Guest post by Goyuix 2011-10-28 BSD & Darwin 4 Comments

After three years of hard work and many enhancements, pfSense 2.0 has been released. Of the more impressive stats, more than 108,000 unique IP addresses have downloaded the snapshots during 2011, resulting in some amazing testing, feedback and now reliability with the 2.0 release. Among the many notable features and enhancements: Based on FreeBSD 8.1, Enhancements to IP Aliases, dashboard and widgets, SMTP and growl alerts, new traffic shaper, Layer 7 protocol filtering, major improvements to NAT engine and configuration, certificate manager, VPN improvements, virtual wireless AP support and many others.

FreeBSD 9.0 Enters Beta

Submitted by vermaden 2011-08-03 BSD & Darwin 4 Comments

The first BETA build of the 9.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available. One of the many new features in 9.0 that needs thorough testing is the new installer, so fresh installs on test systems are being encouraged. Ivan Voras has taken the time to thoroughly document all the 9.0 changes at his web site.

Interview: FreeNAS 8’s Project Lead

Guest post by Rohan Pearce 2011-06-08 BSD & Darwin 24 Comments

"FreeNAS is an open source operating system based on FreeBSD and, as its name implies, designed for networked storage. The project recently celebrated the release of FreeNAS 8, which racked up some 43,000 downloads in the first 48 hours after its release. I caught up with Josh Paetzel, director of IT at iXsystems and project manager for FreeNAS 8, to talk about the current state of the OS, what lies ahead for it, and the relationship to FreeNAS 0.7."

libcxxrt C++ Runtime Available Under BSD License

Submitted by vermaden 2011-05-24 BSD & Darwin 3 Comments

"The FreeBSD Foundation and the NetBSD Foundation announced that they have acquired a non-exclusive copyright license to the libcxxrt C++ runtime software from PathScale. This software is an implementation of the C++ Application Binary Interface originally developed for Itanium and now used for the x86 family by BSD operating systems. Libcxxrt will be available under the 2-clause BSD license."

DragonflyBSD 2.10 Released

Submitted by foldingstock 2011-04-27 BSD & Darwin 10 Comments

This release supports a much larger variety of hardware and multiprocessor systems than previous releases, thanks to updates of ACPI and APIC and ACPI interrupt routing support. Hammer volumes can now deduplicate volumes overnight in a batch process and during live operation. The 'hammer dedup-simulate' command can be used to estimate space savings for existing data. DragonFly now uses gcc 4.4 as the default system compiler, and is the first BSD to take that step. DragonFly now offers significant performance gains over previous releases, especially for machines using AHCI or implementing swapcache(8).