DragonFlyBSD 1.0 Released

eeg3 writes "One year after starting the project as a fork of the FreeBSD-4.x tree, the DragonFly Team is pleased to announce its 1.0 release. Check out the project's diary for a list of the improvements the project has implemented. Also, be sure to grab it from one of the mirrors."

Re:Serious question:

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, FreeBSD 5.X also take over development of the FreeBSD 4.X branch. They just don't do it the same way.

Re:Serious question:

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not "trying to get away from FreeBSD". They think FreeBSD 5 has taken the wrong direction in some areas. They consider DFly to be the logical continuation of the FreeBSD 4 tree.

Because they're aware of how high quality FreeBSD is, they're very comfortable taking lots of code (drivers, etc) that would be impossible for such a small team to write/maintain. All they have to do is modify the code to work with their kernel modifications.

In addition to their kernel changes, they plan on (eventually) having a "better" ports system, with support for things like multiple versions installed concurrently, and selectable with variant symlinks.

Really, there's a lot more to Dfly than just improved SMP. Take the time to peruse the site and mailing list archives to learn more.

Re:Serious question:

[MavEtJu]

A Unix OS really doesn't need Perl.

That was not the reason. The reason is that there is more than one Perl version out right now (5.0, 5.6, 5.8) and that different people need different versions. So to get rid of this, Perl is removed from the base-system and if you need whatever-version of perl, install it via the ports system. Much more flexible.

Edwin

Re:Serious question:

[pyrrhonist]

Not a single one of them has a personal box with more than one CPU.

Does any of your friends have a CPU with Hyperthreading? That uses an SMP kernel, doesn't it?

Maybe others would like to chip in here.

Ha! I get it!

Re:*BSD is dying

[Senjaz]

You forgot the ugly duckling of the bunch: Darwin [apple.com]. Unfortunately it only becomes a swan in Mac OS X [apple.com].

Re:Serious question:

[LWATCDR]

"For the record, my purely anecdotal evidence follows. SMP machines are an order of magnitude better than a single UP"
I do not think that you mean an order of magnitude. An order of magnitude would mean that you think an SMP machine is 10x better than a UP machine.

It is an easy rule of thumb. You buy an SMP machine when you can not find an UP machine that is fast enough.

Re:Serious question:

[phoenix_rizzen]

Perl was removed from the source tree with the release of FreeBSD 5.0. The installer installs Perl from a package so that the installed system still has Perl. But, it can be removed with a simple "pkg_delete perl\*" or upgraded to whichever version the user wants/needs/requires. All the system administration scripts that were written in Perl have been rewritten in either C or sh.

DragonFlyBSD doesn't "want to get away from FreeBSD". They want to try out new directions, new technologies, new ways of doing things. There have been several dozen imports from FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x, as well as from NetBSD and OpenBSD. That's the nice thing about the BSDs: they are all separate projects, but the source code flows freely between them all.

Considering that SMP will soon become standard issue in the x86 world, I don't see how SMP can not be important. Both Intel and AMD are putting the finishing touched on their dual-core CPUs. In another year, two at the most, you'll be buying a system with one physical CPU "chip", but two physical CPUs on it, making every system an SMP system.

There are several different ways to make an SMP system. FreeBSD 4.x used a simple "Big Giant Lock" on the kernel. FreeBSD 5.x uses fine-grained, mutex-based locking and Kernel Scheduled Entities. DragonFly will use a lockless, message-passing system based on Lightweight Kernel Threads. Very different beasts, and it's not possible to use both LWKT and KSE in the same system. Why not fork off another project, see if it works or not, and either let it live as a separate OS or fold the tech back into FreeBSD as needed?? Forks are not inherently bad things.