DragonFly At DragonFly 1.0-CURRENT 108
CoolVibe writes "For months, the DragonflyBSD fork of FreeBSD was maintaining compatibility with the existing FreeBSD-STABLE branch by using the 'FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE' name internally. In a few commits, Matt Dillon changed all the names, and DragonFly is finally sailing under its own banner. Things that DragonFlyBSD already has that FreeBSD-STABLE doesn't are, among others, application checkpointing, variant symlinks (not unlike Domain OS), Light-weight kernel threads, a more efficient slab-allocator, a multithreaded network stack, and the rcNG system."
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Informative)
Your Distributed.net client will Just Work Fine(tm). I'm still running that KDE 3.1.4 on my laptop that I compiled under 4.9-RCmumble, and that's still working quite spiffy.
Dragonfly is almost a drop-in replacement. You can just pull it over your existing 4.x-STABLE box, and all your apps should work fine (except for kernel modules). Oh, if you have an NVIDIA gfx card, I ported the binary kernel module to DFBSD, and it's sitting smugly in the override ports. (read dfly's UPDATING about dfports)
DragonFly as of current perfectly fills that niche where people want the latest and greatest, but don't want to run FreeBSD-CURRENT just yet. It's mostly production-safe. You can always revert back to your old FreeBSD-STABLE without much hassle.
So, if you're really curious, just give it a go!
Re:Variant symlinks are really cool (Score:5, Informative)
to help enable sharing the root file system. (I don't know the variable-reference syntax used in Dragonfly).
It's exactly the same. The variables for symlinks can be set with the varsym(1) tool, and of course the vfs.varsym_enable sysctl has to be set to '1'. You can set symlink variables in global, user and process context.
Re:Variant symlinks are really cool (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, varsym defaults to user context, which means that the var is only 'visible' to the user. With the -s flag, the var becomes system wide, and you can also restrict the view to the process.
There isn't much more to it. It's easy, clean and simple :)
I really wish I had a spare box right now... (Score:5, Informative)
a) install freebsd-stable
b) cvsup the dfbsd sources
c) recompile everthing
d) then have my system
Now that dfbsd has it's own ISO, I might have to find an old junk box somewhere to install it on (I actually like freebsd 4.x more than the 5.x series so far... MUCH faster, but I'm sure that'll change when it goes stable (no more debugging symbols, etc.)