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BSD Operating Systems

DragonFly BSD Introduces A 'Stable' CVS Tag 64

Posted by timothy from the steady-as-she-goes dept.
bsdman writes "The DragonFly BSD project have recently introduced a new 'stable' tag in their cvs. If you ever wanted to use DragonFly BSD but was scared of any instability - now is your chance!"
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DragonFly BSD Introduces A 'Stable' CVS Tag More

DragonFly BSD Introduces A 'Stable' CVS Tag

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  • What are it's advantages over other BSD's? I have a starange feeling that even if there isn't such a huge difference in required knowledge between linux and BSD, BSD is for more professional uses. I can clearly see the differences in linux distro's. But other than portability, and security, what other differences/uses are there? (Just in case, i'm referring to Open, Free, Net and Dragonfly BSD)

    • Re:Which one? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dan Ost ( 415913 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @12:01PM (#10384273)
      My understanding is that rather than continue to make incremental improvements
      to FreeBSD, the DragonFly BSD folks are ripping out entire subsystems and
      replacing them with new designs that they think will scale better, be easier
      to maintain, and, ultimately, make it much simpler to make incremental
      improvements on than the current FreeBSD design.

      Take a look at their website. They have some excellent explanations of their
      goals.
      • Anyone know if they'll change the VM subsystem?
        Pulling in NetBSD's UVM [wustl.edu] would be great.

        • Re:Which one? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Eivind Eklund ( 5161 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @04:06PM (#10387196) Journal
          Seems unlikely - the last rewrite of the FreeBSD VM system was done by Matt Dillon, the founder of DragonFlyBSD.

          And I don't know of any particular advantage of UVM in practice; as far as I've understood, the performance in practice is not as good with FreeBSD.

          If you've got information to the contrary, please share!

          Eivind.

          • I thought the deal was that it fitted better in with the NetBSD philosophy, that the code is simpler and therefor better in the long run for the project.

            Matt has the same goal, but not in code, but in concept. I could be wrong though, I have not done my homework on UVM.

        • Re:Which one? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by m.dillon ( 147925 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @08:34PM (#10400454) Homepage
          No, the VM subsystem... that is, the concept of using stackable VM Objects, is going to stay in. I do want to implement a copy-on-write mechanism for pages owned by in-progress I/O to avoid stall situations that still exist in FreeBSD (despite Kirk's filesystem bitmap hacks, which only really fixed the worst of the stalls). There are also some kernel memory subsystem interactions with the VM system that need cleaning up to make things more MP friendly, and vm_map's and a few other areas need some algorithmic cleanups... but it's just cleaning up, not a rewrite. Generally I believe the VM Object based VM subsystem used in FreeBSD and DragonFly to be superior to the mechanisms used in other BSDs and in Linux.

          -Matt

    • Re:Which one? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Santana ( 103744 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @12:02PM (#10384286)

      That's the main difference: goals.

      Goals make you take different decisions. They all write very good and consistent operating systems. All of them share code. OpenBSD takes drivers from Net and Free, and these have taken pf, OpenSSH and spamd; the list of shared code is huge (and that's the point of BSD).

      But every BSD has different policies. OpenBSD is the more pedantic about licenses and code quality. For some people it could seem absurd, but time has proven OpenBSD is right.

      It's my impression that OpenBSD is in the perfect balance between NetBSD (privileging portability) and FreeBSD (privileging efficiency and software availability).

      But I'm biased :>

      • Hmmm... licenses.. code quality... That's all great but now look at it from a sixteen year-old geek's point of view. My intention is to learn as much as I can about IT and to increase my knowledge about all this stuff (It's cool ;)). I've tried TONS of distro's and there are clear differences. Now I don't know about marketing and economics, but people would probably look at ease of use, support, and software-base (that's shared code probably, so that's out of question) among other superficial stuff like pre

        • Re:Which one? (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Santana ( 103744 )

          One shiny feature that might not be obvious the first time you see a BSD box is ease of administration. Which is a consequence of a clean and integrated system. OpenBSD specially has a proactive approach to security [openbsd.org], which is an important "feature".

          Maybe this doesn't seem like fancy features to a teenager geek, but they are so important if you want to take *nix administration seriously.

        • Re:Which one? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by sp0rk173 ( 609022 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @08:31PM (#10389792)
          FreeBSD, and BSD in general, is an OS that once you learn...you will love forever. It's an OS you can love without becoming a zealot. It's pragmatic, intelligently designed, and the code is very clean, relative to linux. You'll also be working in an OS that really just has one goal - to be as good an OS as it can. Not to overthrow microsoft, not to overthrow linux, not to fight against Mac OS as the primary underdog. That, in my opinion, is the main appeal of the BSDs. They're there just to be there, to represent different models and ideas in computer science, and show how these different ideas might work. Linux does this, too, but there are ulterior motives that sometimes draw away from the goal of being the best that it can be. Though, Linus does a damn good job of keeping things on track and focused.

          Now, BSD is mainly for servers, but i would venture to say that most BSD developers use it daily as their main workstation. It's a completely viable system to fill that role, and it does a damn good job. Also...nvidia puts out 3D drivers for FreeBSD, you can play almost all linux games in FreeBSD, usually as fast, if not faster, than under linux. I have no evidence of this...but it's what I hear...and people do play linux games on FreeBSD (think wolfenstein, 3D FPSes). So...it can be a platform for gaming. But yeah, to enter the BSD world you have to realize goals. If you want a firewall or a gateway, you can't go wrong with OpenBSD. If you want a nice fast workstation or a high-load network server Get yourself a copy of FreeBSD-STABLE (the 4.X series) or track DragonFly's development. If you want to see BSD die, get a copy of FreeBSD-RELEASE (the 5.X series). If you want to see somethign that will run on anything, and run pretty damn well, then it's all about NetBSD. If you want point and click prettiness with a terminal, OS X is BSD-based. I recommend trying all of them, because they all offer something different for the 16 year-old nerd to learn.
          • A bit unfair to the 5.X series, don't you think? Don't get me wrong, I have in the past stopped upgrading BSD (at 2.2.8 and 3.4, if I recall) because of shortcomings in a given release(3.[01] and 4.[012], also if I recall), but I don't think 5.2.1 is anywhere near as bad as you suggest.

          • " If you want to see BSD die, get 5.X series " (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Ricin ( 236107 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @07:22PM (#10399957)
            Insightful, my rim!
          • How did this guy get modded insightful? By having proper grammar?

            If you want a firewall or a gateway, you can't go wrong with OpenBSD. If you want a nice fast workstation or a high-load network server Get yourself a copy of FreeBSD-STABLE (the 4.X series) or track DragonFly's development. If you want to see BSD die, get a copy of FreeBSD-RELEASE (the 5.X series)

            This poster is slinging poo, but has he even tried 5.X or does he just not like it's "goals"?

            The 5.1 gateway server I have running at my com

            • Sorry for the late reply. I do use 5.2.1 as my webserver at home. It runs, and it runs well. But I've read the technical flaws that Matt has with it, and I agree with them. I think Matt's fork is more than just a "disgruntled developer's fork." He's making major, major changes to the base, and the resulting API design is just much nicer, from a programmer's point of view. The theory behind his model also just makes sense to me. I recommend you put down your religious zealotry, put on a nice little "s
        • if goals aren't really your thing, there's a few other OSs out there with lots of "features" but short on goals. :)

        • Re:Which one? (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Every other OS out there pissed me off because of haphazard system layout, and pain-in-the-ass administration; and there was usually also some poor-quality code - which always seemed to exist in the distro's highly-touted admin tools and/or highly-touted upgrade mechanism.

          The ports system just plain WORKS, dammit!

          I think that the older geeks value the BSD's goals because they also remember being pissed off by OS's that only focused on the "shiny" factor.

          The shiny stuff is fun for a while, but someday you

      • Re:Which one? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Draco_es ( 628422 )

        It's my impression that OpenBSD is in the perfect balance between NetBSD (privileging portability) and FreeBSD (privileging efficiency and software availability).

        I think OpenBSD is the less performant and scalable of the three, has less ports and suffers at high loads much more than the others. But it has better security defaults and pf is great. Don't you agree?

      • > It's my impression that OpenBSD is in the perfect balance between NetBSD (privileging portability) and FreeBSD (privileging efficiency and software availability).

        I think that's a largely a question of what you want to do with the machine. For example I like linux because it works with all my hardware from TV tuner cards to my NVidia graphics card.

    • Re:Which one? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @03:10PM (#10386499) Homepage Journal
      I can clearly see the differences in linux distro's. But other than portability, and security, what other differences/uses are there?

      Frankly, who cares about the differences? The purpose of the BSDs isn't to be different.

      This is very different from the Linux community. Linux users, in general, tend to chase after the latest "hot" distro. Almost like flash mobs. The latest seems to be Ubuntu skyrocketing up the distrowatch charts. I can't understand why someone happy with their current distro would switch just because everyone's talking about something new. But apparently a lot of you do.

      • Re:Which one? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by JamesTRexx ( 675890 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @02:57AM (#10391847) Journal
        Maybe they don't want to admit they're not as happy with their distro as they say? Or maybe they're just the kind of poeple that want to "oohhh shiny!" kick from installing something new. (and maybe installing stuff is the only thing they do with it because they use their Windows box for games)
        And then there might still be people who want to try them all because they can.

        • Re:Which one? (Score:1, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Well, a linux user is used for ages to:

          * Pretend things work when they don't (90's USB, ext2, etc)
          * When busted, explain things were fucked but are really ready now (desktop environment, packages dependencies, robust filesystems, vm managment, etc)
          * Upgrade and break its system every other week (new kernel, new gnome, new X, new nvidia driver, etc, etc)
          * Ready to jump to whatever fad is current (live CD, rebuild everything from source including the base distribution because some asshole said it was better,
  • is there any other way to install other than ISO? i want to test it out, would be nice if there was another option, at least install from fat partition or something.

    • Re:ISO's only? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Holi ( 250190 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @03:37PM (#10386818)
      From the download section of their website:

      CD Images
      DragonFly CDs are 'live', meaning these CDs will boot your system and let you log in as root (no password). You can use this feature to check for hardware compatibility and play with DragonFly a little before actually installing it on your hard drive. The CD includes an installer that can be run at the console, or (experimentally) via a web browser. Make sure you read the README file for more information. To activate the installer, boot the CD and login as 'installer'. See the 'Download Site' list below for a list of download locations.

  • Great, but... (Score:4, Funny)

    by ArbitraryConstant ( 763964 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2004 @01:06PM (#10385117) Homepage
    "BSD
    4 more"

    When was the last time anyone saw that? It's like a creepy zombie movie. /hopes the mods can tell a joke from a troll

  • Not that big a deal. (Score:5, Informative)

    by m.dillon ( 147925 ) on Thursday September 30, 2004 @08:25PM (#10400397) Homepage
    Oh for heaven's sake. It's not *that* big a deal! It's there so all the new VFS work, which is virtually guarenteed to create some destabilization despite our best efforts (because we are literally ripping out and replacing the entire VFS interface), doesn't screw up people trying to use DragonFly as a production platform.

    Wait a few months and there will really be some new cool things to brag about. The new VFS layering is going to allow us to implement a generic journaling interface (read: real time continuously streaming fs backups and other cool things).

    -Matt

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